Yearly Archives: 2019

You Can’t Argue With Proof.

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I spend a good amount of time preading crumbs around the web on the topic of brand strategy. It’s a topic surrounded by lots of babble and very little real framework. 

But here’s the real deal: Brand strategy needs to be codified to be followed. It has to be practicable, so managers and agents have a way to see if the work in on or off strategy. At What’s The Idea?, clients are provided with a framework called a Claim and Proof Array: One claim and three proof planks.

Most advertising is heavy on claim and light on proof. Ask any med-student about proof or evidence and you’ll get the same answer. It undergirds their profession. Why doesn’t branding? Because we’re creative?

I discovery I deal in customer care-abouts and brand good-ats. But often care-abouts and good-ats aren’t evidence. “I like my food hot at a restaurant,” is a care-about. But not a proof. “My ginger beer uses the freshest ginger” is a good-at, not a proof.

When I sit in my chair surrounded by piles of research and interview notes, preparing to boil down findings into a salient compelling claim and proof array, I look for proof. And nothing but the proof.

It’s how brand strategy works at What’s The Idea? It’s why the success rate selling brand strategy (first draft) is flawless. You can’t argue with proof. Ask a doctor.

Peace.

 

 

Care-Abouts, Good-Ats and Culture.

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Sometimes I am so up in my brands, prioritizing the good-ats and care-abouts, that I lose sight of external drivers of brand value. Keeping from doing this is a secret sauce of brand planning. Brands don’t live in vacuums. They also don’t live at corporate headquarters or the retail store — they live in the minds of customers. They may be managed by corporations but they live with the people. Where they live, that place in the mind – what my colleagues at Brandtuitive call “the movie of the mind” – is where brand preference lies.  

Care-abouts and good-ats are a great place to start for brand planners, but big cultural, non-endemic values can overpower them. A diaper customer, for instance, may care about the convenience of a Pull-Up, yet may be more motivated by the millions of tons of slow-to-degrade diapers in a landfill. Sustainability over convenience in other words.

Strawberry Frog talks about creating movements; they get the social hive mind.

The slippery slope when playing to culture is that it can change. Embrace and adopt cultural for your brands, however always remember who pays the bills. Brand strategy is defined as an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. An organizing principle with preference as its goal and bank as its success measure.

Peace.

 

 

Deepening Brand Insights;

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JOHN SCHOEN

I was just reading that of all the forests in the USA, only4-6% are considered old growth. That means when Europeans landed we’ve cut down 95% of the trees — many of which have regrown over the last 3-4 hundred years. (We’re lucky to have some old growth forests in the Smokies Mountains.)

Ever in search of metaphors for my branding practice, today I’ll turn to old growth forests. AKA origins. Many brand planners — especially those who learned the craft since the advent of the web, search technology and ecommerce — are doing brand strategy using new growth forests. Sure, they look at brand heritage, founders, and naming. And sure, they delve into the company brand archives. But they’re really only evaluating yellowing artifacts. Rarely strategy. Were they to be dealing with old growth evidence, they’d be planning and strategizing using the people, culture and psychology of the day.

Let’s face it, in America most products and services aren’t (themselves) old growth. If your product has been around 50 years plus you are in the micro-minority. Even so, planners need to be aware of the brands they study over time. Rather than mine physical artifacts, they should be thinking about the people, their motivations, and existential desires longitudinally. This is how we get to insights. This is how we understand and change behavior.

Ask yourself when planning, what are the old growth factors, the functional/behavioral factors the brand will fulfill. And deepen your insights.

Peace.

 

The Problem With Brand Planning Tools.

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The world of branding is much like the real world in that there is science and everything else. What does that mean? Science undergirds the physical world, predicting the result of actions. Science repeats itself. Science predicts outcomes. Mathematics, physics, biology are all means to codify the physical world.

A recent engineering client of mine taught me that tools fix things that are broken, but science precludes what’s broken. Cancer can be cured, we just haven’t figured out the science yet. Global warming can be dealt with, we just haven’t been able to muster the science and will.

Many brand planners are tool-centric. I am pleading for us to be more science-centric. And that means starting way upstream of any tactical deliverable. Upstream of any buildable. In fact, it may be upstream of addressing a business problem. Because problems beget tools.

Upstream means planning the master brand strategy. The organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. So many brand planners write briefs in support of a tactic. That’s downstream. Better to begin at the base level. At the foundation. Where the science is set.

As you move your way up the stack (technology reference) or upstream toward the purchase, toward the tactic, you lose the science.

Why is this a good approach? Because science is predictable. And predicting marketing outcomes is what is sorely lacking in our business.

Peace.

 

Waffle Club.

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President Trump is often quoted, when talking about policy, as saying “We’ll see what happens.” If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a hundred times. It’s the executive waffle. Corporate executive don’t have the luxury of this waffle. They’d be fired. From a dude who came out of the business worlds he should know better.

Many people who (so-called) work in branding take this approach, as do people working in advertising. When I was in advertising the work never came with a “It will work” guarantee. We knew a percentage of people would see it. And a percentage would recall it. But we only guessed as to how many would actually buy.

In brand strategy, we establish an organizing principle for products, experience and messaging. That organizing principle, done properly, must guarantee consumers will purchase the product. Maybe not all consumers — but a targeted group of consumers. Yes, I said guarantee. Brand strategy creates a value proposition using an evidence claim and proof array that delivers sales. Brand strategy is not pictures, and templates and “brand voice.”

A paper brand strategy is the most important component of commerce.

If the product doesn’t deliver, something has to change. If the ad agents don’t deliver, the same. The formula must be right. It’s science. Experimenters need not apply.

Before you hire a naming company, art director, copywriter or media person – all potential contributors to the waffle club — get your paper strategy right. It will save you time and money.

Peace.

 

Mr. Brand Hammer.

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Yesterday I coined the term Mr. Brand Hammer – a reference to the axiom “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Mr. Brand Hammer (that’s me) smells a new business name.

It’s a curse being Mr. Brand Hammer, surfing the ether, watching commercials, reading the paper, with an always-on need to make sense of brands and their strategy. It’s like living in a world of generic, plain yogurt. Colorless. Tasteless. Sluggish. Mr. Brand Hammer constantly evaluates how marketers are differentiating their product and services. Asking what’s the plan? When watching Geico commercials everything is humor and call-to-action. Buy us, get a quote from us. But where’s the why? Mr. Brand Hammer understands it’s not easy creating thousands and thousands of pieces of selling content…you run out of ideas. But you should never run out of strategy.

What’s The Idea? is a business consultancy built around brand strategy. What’s the brand claim? What are the brand proof planks (evidence of the claim)?  The lack thereof in marketing drives me crazy. And you can tell it also drives marketers crazy. More often than not there is no discernable plan for selling. For building a brand.

More cowbell. More gecko.

Peace.

 

Entrepreneurs Need to Aim Low.

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3d render of multiple arrows missing target

I met with a local entrepreneur yesterday who began our conversation wondering how Amazon became such a global retailing force. No stores. No in-the-black earnings. A stock price in the stratosphere. Not exactly smoke and mirrors but Amazon’s arc does seem magical. Mr. Brand Hammer (That’s me. To a hammer everything looks like a nail) posited, perhaps it’s just the creation, care and feeding of a great brand??? That’s magical.

When I worked as director of marketing at Zude the web’s first true drag-and-drop web development tool, I recall standing on the back step of my home telling the CTO that we were about to make a billion dollar decision. It had to do with product focus. Was I tripping? Sniffing too many company fumes? Probably.

Today, thanks to the internet, ecommerce, and lack of proper marketing training, many entrepreneurs aim too high. They are looking at Amazon. And Facebook. And Uber. What they need to do is aim low. One customer, one prospect, one channel partner at a time. By aiming low, at ground level where the people are, we learn from real consumers. We use our senses to understand likes, dislikes, energies and needs. Spreadsheets and market universes are macros, entrepreneurs need to dig into the micros. They need to dump the cache and originate. Aim low me droogies, aim low.

Peace.

 

Love is Not a Brand Strategy.

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I just bought a Subaru. It’s a cool and powerful brand but much of the heavy lifting has been done by the product.

Back in 1991 I read a book entitled: Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign. Written by Randall Rothenberg, it told the story about a celebrated Subaru pitch by some hot ad agencies. I learned a good deal about the brand and, since then, things haven’t really changed that much from a product standpoint. The cars are still highly reliable, they stay on the road a long time, and perform well in the outdoors. The product is good, the brandcraft is disorganize.

Everyone with a television knows the line “Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” It’s sing- songy. Uses the brand name twice. And who doesn’t like love? Should work, right? But it doesn’t. It’s an okay retention idea, which is probably why it’s been around so long but let’s face it it’s impossible to qualify. Whose love makes a Subaru? The manufacturer? The owner? Everybody? And what is it that people love? For a diffuse love explanation, visit the love promise here.

There is a tagline I’ve seen locked-up in some of my recent communications “Confidence in Motion.” I Googled it and it seems to date back to 2016, but who knows. It could also be an international tagline. The line is the opposite of Love. Very unkempt.

Subaru is a wonderful product for the times. For millennials. The product has outperformed the branding and certainly the advertising. Love is not what makes a Subaru a Subaru. If it was, they’d have a better brand strategy. Peace.

 

Local News Revisited.

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The What’s The Idea? blog began in 2007, a little over 2,600 posts ago. At the time I was up in the grill of The New York Times for being slow to catch on to digital media. As the world’s premier news organization, how could it not innovate in the digital space? When the financial crash happened and the NYT paper-paper couldn’t sell full page ad to save its life — and the sections were shrinking in size — someone finally got their shit together and tazed the online property. (In retrospect, putting Martin Sorrell, an ad guy, in charge was probably not the smartest idea.)

The old gray lady took a couple of shots to the nose, but finally emerged with a strong digital property. Today, the digital NYT is delivering healthy revenue to the bottom line, with paywall subscribers from around the world consuming podcasts, video and other endemic assets – all state of the art. Interestingly, the national edition of the NYT distributed in NC carried not a single (paid) full page ad in the A section today. Guess who is carrying that water?

Gannett merged with New Media yesterday in the hopes of creating better capital positions by moving toward a more digital future. Printing plants will consolidate creating savings and the strategy is to create new revenue by providing local value with a, hopefully, efficient national land grab. The problem is, local is not scalable. My local Asheville-Citizen Times, a Gannett property, is so thin birdcages owners are looking elsewhere. Gannett/New Media can succeed, but not by becoming Angie’s List. Where’s the tazer? Where are the Millennials and Gen Zers geniuses?

Imma put some more thought to this and report back. Local is a positive word in today’s sustainability minded business environment. Digital news should be a solution.

Peace.

 

 

Kylie Jenner’s Coty Deal.

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International Cosmetics Company Coty Inc. is paying spokesowner Kylie Jenner 600 million dollars for 51% of her company. Not a bad day at the office for Ms. Jenner. Does that mean Coty is the “boss of her” now? I think so. Not that they would want to piss her off. Easy come easy go… Kylie could mic drop the company (unless contractually obligated) if she feels mistreated.

Kylie is smart. Coty is just one percent smarter. Kylie, in effect, has just signed a deal to be Coty spokesperson for life. It may seem like a Bobby Bonilla deal (Google it), but fast forward a couple of decades when spokespeople are paid even crazier money for their marketability (read, media magnetism) and this one-time payout may seem low. Argentina’s Lionel Messi earned $127 million this year. Ms. Jenner is only 22 years old but at age 42 she may regret today’s rate.

Coty’s main reason for the purchase seems to be Ms. Jenner’s social media following. She has 270 million followers. All In the right demographic…today.

Is this smart business? My guess is it will be for a few years, but without the right business blocking and tackling this move will water down both brands.

C’est la vie.