Monthly Archives: May 2017

Brands as Customers.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

At What’s The Idea? clients pay the bills. They do the hiring, provide the homegrown insights and share business data. Without clients there would be no brand consultancy.  But clients are not my customer. My customer is the brand. It is the brand to which I pay allegiance. It is the brand that is the object of my strategic desire. By being so focused it helps remediate politics from the equation.  

By putting the brand first and the people and clients second, it cleanses the process. Brands have no egos.  They just sit at the nexus of good-ats and care-abouts.  A brand doesn’t look to be promoted or aspire to Ad Age Marketer Of The Year. You can’t artificial intelligence your way around a brand. It’s a thing or service.

Don’t get me wrong, I need people to help navigate insight work. The stories, the human impact of purchase and use, the role of the product, can never be ably understood without people — be they brand and product manager or consumer and influencer.

But when all is said and done the brand must be the customer. At What’s The Idea? that pays the bills and provides the dividends.

Peace.

 

Salesforce Ad Ouch (Like “fail” but different.)

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Salesforce, a spectacular online business, ran an ad today in the NYT paper paper using a tried and true ad tactic “the testimonial.”  Amazon Web Service was the customer. Both are great companies, but the ad was so weak. It’s what my dad Fred Poppe might have called the “doggy’s dinner.”

Central to the idea is something called the (initial caps) Customer Success Platform. Oy. Luckily, the Customer Service Platform is powered by (initial cap) Einstein artificial intelligence. A skootch better.  It “qualifies leads, predicts when customers are ready to buy, and helps them close more deals.”  This is actually stuff a real copywriter could work with — but as written it’s all claim, no proof.   

To make matters worse the ad ends with “What if you had a way to help your business take flight?” followed by the Salesforcrce logo (When did they lose the .com in the logo?) and tagline “Blaze new trails.”  Flight? Trails? Talk about mixing your metaphors.

It’s as if someone used an ad-by-numbers kit.

For a company as successful and powerful as Salesforce, you’d think they could put together a cogent, well-craft print ad.  Maybe they should download a Hubspot template. JKJK.  

Peace.

 

 

Brand Strategy and the Question.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Fred Wilson is a blogger (www.avc.com) and businessman I admire greatly. He blogs daily and share his knowledge without second thought.  He’s probably the most prominent VC on the east coast if not the county.  In a recent speech given at MIT, he mentioned that on his first ever test there he had gotten a zero.  About MIT he said, and I paraphrase, “When you go to MIT to go from being the smartest kid at your school to being the dumbest.” Anyway when asked about his nil test score his professor the response was “You didn’t understand the question.”

Here’s the thing about brand planning. The ones who get it right aren’t the ones with the best methodology or framework. They are the ones who understand the question. The problem is that question always changes. Yesterday I posted brand strategy is not Chaos Theory.  But if the question changes for every brand strategy, isn’t that a bit chaotic?

A generic question for all brands might be “What value or behavior does the brand provide that best meets the needs of the customer?”  Doesn’t seem like a bad question. But, per Fred Wilson’s professor, it’s the wrong one. Only when you are waist deep in a brand, customer care-abouts and brand good-ats can one ask the real question. It will be a business question, tempered by consumer insight, and help you pass that first and last test.

Happy hunting!

Peace.

Brand Strategy is Not Chaos Theory.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Wikipedia defines deterministic system this way:

“In mathematics and physics, a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system. A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state.”

I am here to argue that brand strategy is s deterministic system. Most would argue it’s chaos theory.  Frankly, most people would be right. Brand strategy is chaotic. It is random,

Ninety percent of marketing organizations are set up to deal with brand strategy as a communications consequence. “We need order in our messaging, ergo we need a brand strategy.” Tasked with spending money mainly on ads and events, these orgs spend hundreds of millions each year on naming, logo development, style manuals and ad templates. Landor says, “Thank you very much.”

A smaller number of marketing orgs take it to the next level plotting out consumer experience; mainly in retail or online settings. What does t a Dunkin’ Donuts store look like? Where do we put the seasonal stuff at Costco? How do we offer online professional development at Teq?

And lastly, in the smallest percentage of marketing organizations, are those who actually think about the product. What do we do to the product to improve it to meet customer needs? Or with what do we replace our product to better deliver our value promise?

A tight brand strategy leaves nothing to chance. It speaks to all three marketing organizational models.  One claim and three proof planks drive all measures of business success. It starts at the brand level and IS accountable. I used to call it Return On Strategy (ROS), I now call it Return On Brand Strategy (ROBS.) Stay tuned.

Peace.           

 

 

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