Yearly Archives: 2015

What Does A Brand Brief Cost?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

At What’s The Idea? a brand brief costs $17,500. List price. The people willing to spend that type of money know it’s s steal. Having an “organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” makes every act of marketing easier. Compare $17,500 to the cost of a newspaper ad, website take-over, or a radio flight. It’s peanuts. Sadly, the word brief, in advertising and marketing has been reduced to an instructive piece of paper telling creative people what not to do. Ish.  They are often poorly written, almost all interchangeable, and not given much heed. But brand briefs – they are different story.

For a robust brand brief I need weeks. A month actually. A good brand brief requires interviews, fieldwork, research and brain steep. If we’re talking about a brand brief for a billion dollar company there may be lots of qualitative and quantitative testing as well. Up goes the price. And money well spent.

Done well, a brand brief informs all areas of business. If CRM is marketing template, the brand brief is its architecture. If PR is a communication template, a brand brief is its measure of success. If customer journey is a template, the brand brief is the bread crumb trail.

If you are in the business of selling things, raise your hand. If you don’t have a brand brief you are a simple fisherman.

For examples of brand briefs, showing claim and proof (brand tangibles), please write me at Steve at whatstheidea.

Peace.

 

 

From Whence Comes Poor Marketing?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

When I first went to work in the advertising business on the AT&T account, word was, the huge company didn’t know how to market. Prior to the breakup of the Baby Bells, AT&T was one big monopoly. You either used their service or you didn’t. Deregulation came along and competitors (MCI, Sprint) raised their heads. The initial spanking AT&T took was quite a wake-up call.

Then I moved into the healthcare industry. Word was, they didn’t know how to market either. Healthcare systems and big hospitals were physician-driven, physician run. They knew nothing about brand as a marketing principles, though they did understand the power of brand. Participating in an era when large healthcare companies began acting more like consumer packaged goods companies was exciting. And the fur flew.

One of the last bastions of poor marketing these days is the area of education. That is changing somewhat thanks to the introduction of technology products, services and devices to the class room. Education orgs. suffer from a similar fate of the healthcare industry; they tend to be run by academicians and teachers. Not a marketing hot bed for sure. Thumb through the pages of education newspapers or teaching and learning magazines and the level of creativity and salesmanship you see is juvenile. That said, education company Amplify is beginning to do some nice work. So hopefully .edu is pointing in the right direction. Oops, and there’s the Bell.

Peace.

 

The Biggest Problem For SMBs.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Small businesses need to think small but they don’t. Retail businesses tend to focus more, though not all of them. (A friend started up a deli and hedged his bet by putting in pizza oven.) Business-to-business organizations are notorious for lacking focus. The easiest way to see this is to visit their websites. Sometimes you can read the home page and the About Section and still can’t tell what they do. What the hell does a “collaboration company” sell? How about a “communications company?” These descriptors suffer from broad taxonomy.

The opposite of the too-broad-to-be-meaningful approach is the “10 pound bag” approach. Rather than focus, these SMBs over-focus, over-explain. So a benefits company also becomes a financial services, wealth management, property and casualty coverage and retirement and executive plan company.

The anecdote to this is what I call the Is-Does. What a company Is and what it Does. One simple statement of product and benefit. If you can’t get your Is-Does right, you need to find someone who can. And don’t expect a web development company to do it. Or an SEO company. They get paid by the pixel. They make more money the less articulate you are.

Focus and articulation is a small or mid-size company’s best friend. Especially on the web. Insert your Yogi Berra quote hear. Get the Is-Does right and you have a great beginning.

Peace.        

 

 

 

Why I like brand planners.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Brand planners are always observing. Always willing to learn. They crave learning. Part anthropologists – students of mankind – brand planners are also creative; it rubs off on them being around art directors, writers and creative directors. In addition to learning about consumers they must learn how to eroticize ideas for creative people.

margaret meadBrand planners are always on. They can’t afford to be depressed. They love brands, the lifeblood of commerce. They are always friendly, even in the face of haters. There are lessons to be learned from hating. (Brand Spanking, in fact, enables negative discussions.) Brand planners are good lovers. They’re exocentric – caring about others. They are not academics. They are humanists, realizing it’s not always about being right…more about being. Environments are of great interest to planners. Stim in any form.

Brand planners are paid to make money (for others) but are not motivated by money.

I didn’t know it at the time, but seeing Margaret Mead speak at the American Anthropology convention as a college kid, cast the die.

When was the die cast for you? Peace.

SEO, SEM and Stem Cells.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

stem cells

In my Pollyanna-ish view of healthcare I look forward to the day when we can “slap some stem cells” on a diseased area and healthy tissue will grow anew. Friends are used to hearing me say slap some stem cells on it. It’s a personal meme. Well, with all props and deference to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines, I’m afraid many marketers view search marketing similarly. Got a marketing problem? Slap some SEO on it.

SEO and SEM are the most amazing marketing tools of the 21st century.  I know a billion dollar company that sells thousands of SKUs of products to businesses (e.g., paper towels, chairs, etc.) that happily mails Google a $30 million check each year for paid search. This was a company that back in the day probably spent $750,000 in advertising. Google says thanks. Good algo!

I love SEO and SEM, don’t get me wrong. It is stem cells for marketing…to a degree. But it shouldn’t be used as a crutch. Companies still need to get the product right. Same with delivery, pricing and brand. I’m seeing too many mid-size companies hiring 30 year old search jockeys at the expense of marketing quarterbacks and it is having a disastrous effect.

Slap some SEO on it. It’s a quick fix. Not!

Peace.

 

 

The Pedagogy of Marketing.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

teacher in class

A couple of years ago I worked with an education company. Travelling elementary, middle and high schools in the northeast, interviewing teachers, administrators and observing kids, I was amazed by how K12 education is changing. And, in many cases, not. The tools and pedagogy are there, we just have to use them.

What became most clear to me after my time in education was a simple observation about teaching and learning. The latter is the result of the former. But only if done well. You see, there is bad teaching but there is no bad learning. Understanding the linkage is important.

This observation powered an insight that changed my approach to branding and marketing. Most marketing is about teaching. While the best marketing is about learning. The old days of reach and frequency –smother consumers with repetition– akin to learning ABCs or months of the year, is not how we need to market in the 21st century. Not with the constant bombardment of media and messages. And messy messages at that.

With a rich “organizing principle for your product, experience and messaging” (a brand strategy), brought to life through learning moments and learning demonstrations, you can connect with and motivate consumers. Stand at the front of the class and recite benefits (teach) and you will fail. Peace.

 

Movements.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Early on ad agency Strawberry Frog jumped on the smart positioning of creating cultural movements. As someone steeped in the strategy business, I understand how powerful movement ethos can be. Movements are easy to talk about and aspire to, not so easy to create. 

Sales of flat bottled water grew last year by 11% according to Beverage Digest. Sales of sparkling water, sans sweeteners, grew 20%. If you are in the carbonated soft drink (CSD) market, you are smart to see that double digit growth as a movement. A healthier-for-you consumer push. Look at year-over-year store register receipts at McDonalds for further evidence.

Scott Goodson, founder of Strawberry Frog was prescient, with his movement positioning. He knew advertising, done well, can spark a movement. But he really understood it is not the best way to do it and he saw social media coming.

One of my Social Media Guard Rails is “Don’t Sell.” Advertising can’t help itself. It has to sell. Social media, done poorly, also asks for the order. But social media with a consumer-biased motivation — with an organized, well-plotted field of persuasion is a movement waiting for a place to happen. And if you support the movement with not too heavy handed advertising – making it easier for consumers to participate – you have a win. And a new agency revenue model. Peace!

 

 

 

Yahoo! Stuff-Makers.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I want Marissa Mayer to succeed. I want Yahoo! to succeed. What’s the Idea? posts over the years have perhaps been unkind to Yahoo! but only because I care.

Ms. Mayer’s strategy a year ago, to be consumers “daily habit,” was a good one. It was certainly measurable, certainly grounded in consumer behavior and most importantly aspirational. Habits can be ritualistic and mechanical, but they can also be born of the need for education, stimulation and positivity.

Ms. Mayer’s latest “follow-the-money” foray, however, into mobile technology is off center. And in the tech world she is not alone. Inviting a 1,000 mobile developer s to a Yahoo! campfire rally, to energize them to use new analytic tools and advertising plug-ins is goofy. Mobile app developers are no better at finding the next new habit than anyone else. In fact, they are probably less so.

Innovative daily habits are more likely to come from visionaries. Students of people. Behaviorists. Social scientists who like punk. Comedians. Artists. Creative directors. As Ms. Mayer looked out in the audience at her mobile app developer meeting last week, what do you think she saw? Did they laugh at her humor? Did they look up from their devices?

If she goes to SXSW, Ms. Mayer is more apt to find habit formers at South By Music than at South By Interactive. Trust me.

Ms. Mayer – please know, Katie Couric, David Poque and some mobile developers are not the future. They are stuff-makers. You need to hire visionaries. Peace.

 

 

Rebranding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I met a midsize business owner last year who spent a great deal of time and money refreshing his brand. The catalyst for a rebrand is often a creaky website. When your website looks like a brochure, hasn’t been updated in 3 years and has more stock photos than an art director’s attic, it’s time for a new site. This is often when small marketing companies or agencies try to sell you a new logo and tagline. Voila!

A logo and website — a new set of clothes — make you look sharp. A tagline energizes and organizes you, but after that “Has anything else really changed?” Has your strategy changed? 95% of the time the answer is a resounding no.

In the case of my friend, he worked with some smart people who knew a thing about marketing. The tagline, a de facto brand strategy, was alliterative making it memorable by design and, more importantly, was based upon something customers wanted dearly. But did the company do its part to deliver on the strategy? Did it operationalize the strategy? Did the company work hard to prove the strategy or the claim? Not yet. The story is still to unfold.

Rebranding is not a paint job. It’s a business-building. Brand strategy is an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.  

Peace!

 

Brand Strategy is Business Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There is a dissonance in my business. And it’s my own fault. I am attempting to redefine what a brand strategy is. I grew up in the advertising and marketing business thinking that goal of both is to make more money; or, as Sergio Zyman says “sell more, to more, more often, at higher prices.” But when I say I’m a brand planner or brand strategist, people think logo, packaging, taglines and style guides.

logo art The hardest task in advertising, also the most expensive, is educating consumers about a product they think they don’t need. Reeducating consumers about something they think to be true, but isn’t, is also heavy lifting.

So when I tell prospects brand strategy is business strategy, they go all “Huh?”

Most brand planners are about using strategy to enable tactical selling. Sow a nice fertile bed for flowering tactics, e.g., ads, content marketing, promotions. Me? I like my brand strategies to have direct measurable impact on sales. The brand plan must convey business-winning credential. Not culture. Not tone. Not likeability.

If your brand strategy cannot be tied directly to sales gain, it’s probably marketing art.

Find out what customers want, what your brand is good at, and create a strategy that offers bankable returns. Peace.

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