Yearly Archives: 2014

Can Strategy Be Exciting?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I once thought it would be cool to open an ad agency, following in my father’s footsteps, and name it Foster, Bias and Sales. Foster attention, create bias, generate sales. As much as I love the ad business — and to me there is no greater business feat than creating a sale via creative means – it really is, more often than not, a dog of a business. Consulting on the other hand, though the hardest work of my life, really has crazy upside. Interestingly, my current business What’s The Idea? is not about foster, bias and sales but about: share, educate and excite.

Let’s start with educate. The goal of educating is learning. And learning is a marketing and branding staple. Frankly, learning is a human staple. When a consumer learns something positive, or as Bob Gilbreath would say “meaningful,” about a product. it is not only retained it is processed and categorized into the value volt. Everyone wants to learn. Sadly, not everyone wants to be taught. So be careful.

Sharing is a relatively new phenomenon is marketing. There are good shares and bad shares. Most advertising falls into the bad share category — that’s why consumers fast forward through commercials on TV. The online share (bedrock to much digital activity today) is really more about the sharer then the share. Search this site for Posters vs.Pasters for more on the topic. A personal heartfelt share (read giving) is one of the most powerful gifts in all of humanity.

Lastly, there is excite. Loyalty and comfort are qualities not always aligned with excite, but let’s face it when marketing in a commoditized, price-driven world a little excitement can go a long way. Excite can come on many shapes and sizes but it is certainly a goal of good strategy.

In my business Educate, Share and Excite are drivers of the strategy. They are foundational for the brand idea and the planks. It is a kinder and gentler approach and really works. Peace.

 

Experience More.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The University Medical Center of Princeton redesigned some hospital rooms so they were more friendly, accommodating, and less hospital-like. A funny thing happened. Patients asked for 30% less pain meds. Less pain meds resulted in more rehab, faster healing and reduced hospital time. Egro lower overall cost. I bet anyone in any country can draw a picture of a typical hospital room. They’re functional, spare with chairs that squeak as moved about the linoleum. Only now is room design a topic of the hospital experience. Someone mixed it up. Someone took a chance. And that’s a good thing.

Extend this thinking to your business, to your category. If you change the expected experience what might be the outcome? Imaging a gasoline station with really clean bathrooms. Imagine a deli line with a waitress taking orders and upselling. Think about a doctor’s waiting room with Netflix at every chair or a grocery store with a bag pre-packed with your weekly staples.

The experience is something not changed enough in marketing. It’s expensive. But when you and the category get stuck in a rut it becomes a topline money issue. Think experience and outcomes, think like a customer, think about refreshing how consumers see your product and category. Not everything will work, but that’s okay. You will still be a step ahead of your competitors. Peace.

 

The landing story.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Having worked in technology, marketing and branding for a while (a fairly unique combination) I have come to a conclusion about homepages. The best home pages are a lot like product labels. They sell at the point of contact. The worst ones are like tables of contents. They help visitors navigate through cluttered over-complicated environments. Environments where every dept. in the company gets a piece.

My new thing is the landing story. It’s strategic and it is a serial presentation of product, benefits, reasons to believe and value. It is told by brand managers and people with creative chops whose main goal is to sell. Not provide information. The more mature a product and, therefore, the more familiar consumers are with it, the easier it should be to tell the landing story. Coke doesn’t have to educate new visitors as to what a cola is. They just have to get them to buy or buy more. There are real correlations between engagement levels on a website and purchase, no doubt; but getting someone into the library and getting them to read a book isn’t one and the same. So engagement for engagement’s sake is not the way to do it. 

The home page, in my opinion, is one of the most misunderstood and misused marketing tools in the digital arsenal. Let’s try to fix this. Let’s bring home pages to life. Let’s storify them. Peace. 

4 Types of Brand Planner.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Conde Nast just announced its intention to sell its Fairchild Fashion Media to Penske Media for a $100M so it can focus on its core brands. References to core brands and core business is what you hear from companies under financial pressure or companies with slowed growth. There was a lot of talk about core during the recession. The opposite is growth into new tangential businesses. It is what really profitable companies do. Growth companies are looking for that next big business thing. They are investing in futures. Finding places to write down taxes. Google’s self-driving cars, energy initiatives and hardware escapades are non-core.

Brand planners love the core. It helps them see what a company does really, really well. It helps them articulate and cluster competencies. It allows the planner to plumb the depths of consumer resonance. Understanding the core is important groundwork for beyond the dashboard planners. Those who do planning that is future-based. Before Steve Jobs and team came up with the iPod and iPhone, they had to understand the core. Then translate it into futures.

There are rearview mirror planners, sideview mirror planners, dashboard planners and beyond the dashboard planners. The best are a combination of all 4 — but focus beyond the dash. Peace. 

 

Two Brand Brief Targets

By
Steve Poppe
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0

When doing a brand brief I often look at two primary target types: movements and independents. Movement targets are communities of people driven by a desire for an outcome. When doing a brief for an obesity product this was a movement target; see how it extends beyond the patient to the family.

Ill Fitting – The morbidly obese understand morbid obesity is a diagnosis not an adjective. We call them Ill Fitting because they are both ill and view themselves as not fitting in with the normal population. They look different and are treated differently. (Other than home, the only place with chairs built for them is the bariatric physician’s office.) The Ill Fitting are loved, liked and often conduct their lives in typical ways, but know they suffer discrimination. Just as is the case with those who are discriminated against for race, religion, and sexual preference, the Ill Fitting have their hypersensitivities. The Ill Fitting are quietly defensive about their condition but willing to accept help so long as it is nonjudgmental. Much of their learning about the diagnosis takes place online. The ability of the Ill-Fitting to actively participate in their wellness is welcome but extremely difficult.

The non-obese population, caregivers and loved one of the Ill Fitting are also Ill Fitting when it comes to the condition. It is a topic they find hard to broach.

The other type of target, the independent, appeals to the individuality in people. The opposite of community really. Sometimes people don’t want to follow the crowd. They want to be the trail blazer. It’s a natural phenomenon but for marketers a little more daring. When writing the brief for Zude, the web’s first drag and drop web publishing tool, I used a target called Webertarians – web libertarians — a construct that identified people tired of being governed by closed, proprietary software tools.

Both approaches are viable. Pick one, don’t waver.

 

Behind the Curtain Workshop, Part 3.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

So now that the business questions are out of the way and brand plan is set (the sausage making clients aren’t particularly fond of) we can begin to make “stuff.” The best way to make stuff is to present it in the form of a marketing communications plan. The plan recaps and toplines what was learned during the 24 Questions and organizes strategies, targets, messages and tactics based upon the brand plan. In the Behind the Curtain workshop I will share a marketing communications plan — key deliverable #3 for marketing consulting clients.

After the marcom plan review I will probably show a slide with 5 or 6 planning tools and let the room decide which they want to hear about. The Is-Does is a simple tool, kind of like an elevator speech, that helps explain what a brand is and what it does. Posters Vs. Pasters is a reductionist social media segmentation intended to improve virality and engagement. Twitch Point Planning is a digital age communications planning tool, the object of which is to move customers closer to a sale. Brand Spanking is qualitative research construct develop to knock market leaders down a peg. The Fruit Cocktail Effect is what happens when you lose focus. And ROS, or return on strategy, is a quant approach to proving value beyond tactics. I will leave 20 minutes for Q & A and the workshop will be done. Looking forward to it.

Peace.

 

 

Behind the Curtain, Part 2.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

For my upcoming workshop “A marketing consultancy, behind the curtain,” I suggested yesterday that the best way to undergird a brand strategy is by asking 24 Questions. With questions answered about business economics, processes and financials we move on to more of a customer focus, the brand strategy. Brand strategy (one claim, three support planks) is a coming together of what “a brand does exceedingly well and what customers want most.” An organizing principle, if you will.

Marketing and branding more specifically, are about claim and proof. Disorganized proof is not the answer. And claim, claim, claim without a reason to believe is what today we call “badvertising.” So once the claim is found the heavy lifting is finding the proof to support it.  Proof not platitude.

There’s a questionnaire I use to get to the brand brief, some of which I will share at the workshop. Questions are designed for customers, C-level execs and salespeople. I also like to do windshield time with salespeople. Watching them sell and buyers buy. If not a B2B brand, I turn windshield time into retail store time and customer observation.

For other workshop goodies tune in tomorrow. Peace

 

Behind the Curtain.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I am putting together a workshop for next month and have decided to title it “A marketing consultancy, behind the curtain.” The subtitle is something like, the tools and trick of a marketing consultant. The workshop needs to fill 3-4 hours and as David Bromberg likes to say, I have a “pocketful of funnies,” but need to figure out which ones and in what order to share them.

First off and foremost I will talk about the brand strategy. Most think brand strategy is the thing Landor writes before they charge you $250,000 for a logo and style book. At What’s the Idea? a brand strategy is way more (but less expensive). Here, a brand strategy is defined as an “organizing principle” for business success. Not communications success. In order to create an organizing principle for business success one must first understand business fundamentals. One tool to do so I call 24 Questions. With the 24 Questions answered I can speak the language of the CEO, CFO and CMO. When you use a company’s data and language you tend to not fall into the marko-babble trap – talking about transparency, operational excellence, customer centrism, and elevator speeches.

So explaining brand strategy and the 24 Questions are the first two tools I’ll address in “Behind the Curtain.” Stay tuned for more. Peace.

McDonalds Missed the Signs.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A lot of money is going to change hands very soon in the ad industry because of McDonalds rearview mirror planning. Lately, they’ been doing some sideview mirror planning and one could say, with the introduction of salads a few years ago, they were looking beyond the dashboard to the future, but mostly they have looked backwards. Laurels canyon.

Just as Coca-Cola knew a time would come when high-fructose corn syrupy drinks would be seen as unhealthy and share would decline, McDonalds knew a better-for-you-food offering was in the offing. So they introduced salads, made the deep fat fryer less toxic, extended revenue with coffee (an off-piste fix), and reduced the salt on the fries. The freight train was still coming though. All the Millennials you see running around the lake or the park? They are drinking cold pressed juices and Instragram-ing the pics. They’re wi-fing pics of their Mediterranean Veggie sandwiches at Panera. The new generation of fast food buyers is trying to eat better as are their parents.

So while McDonalds was not trying to create a healthier, tastier new burger (veggie?, soy?, buffalo?) or the next branded healthy fast food, other QSRs have taken .2% of same store sales.

The new CMO has done some smart things, no doubt: flattened the organization, faster service, brought in some new ad muscle, but it’s product innovation that is lacking. They will fix it. It is just too bad it took a smack in the nose to wake up. You gots to look beyond the dashboard. Peace.

 

 

Communication Breakdown.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was director of market at a company a couple of years ago and a smart dude in the education space was talking copy points. Copy inputs. He used a couple of well-worn marketing words like “what sets us apart is our ability to partner with schools.” There are certain words in marketing and copywriting, I said, that are “toxic.” And partnership is one.  The word partnership is like an algae and has grown so in marketing parlance that it has choked off all the oxygen it once contained. There are other toxic words and phrases in marketing, deadly sins if you will, which when used in copy not only don’t impart their intended meaning (due to rampant overuse) they turn people off. They shut us down. It’s like hearing a bad song on the radio…click.

If you need to make the point conveyed by a toxic word, use a story. Bury it in a narrative. Find an under-used synonym. Or use it in a very different, out-of-context way. Toxic words area lazy and bad trade craft. Peace.

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