Yearly Archives: 2016

Always-Always Land.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

The SWOT Analysis is an age-old business planning tool. Mapping out Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats sets businesses up to self-evaluate and make better decisions.  Google the words business, marketing or brand consultant and you will prob find 50% of the websites referring to SWOT.

garden of eden

Well, I am a brand planner. I don’t do SWOT.  I look primarily at positives. My brand strategy discovery gravitates towards “Good-ats” and “Care-abouts.”  Brand strategy is all about positivity. Aspiration. Likes. Sure, some of these overcome negatives but branding, at its very core, is about identification and positive reputation. So why, why spend time in negative land.

If I turned my framework on its head, I’d be asking about “bad-ats” and what consumers don’t “care about.” As a single shingle brand planner, one who needs to be nimble and cost=effective, I choose to live in always-always land. Where goodness lives and happens — and where brands are built to serve people in positive ways.

And I’m sticking to it. Peace.  

 

 

Peeps in The Creative Selling Arts.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

SXSW is a cool show in a cool town. One of the things that’s neat about South By is its three parts: Interactive, Film and Music.  Interactive is where a lot of the heat is today.  POTUS spoke there this year for instance.  Some articles hit the wire suggesting Interactive may have jumped the shark, but I don’t think so. Tech is a huge commercial force and it’s only going to grow. But for my money, SXSW Music is the place to be. As someone who helps companies sell shit for a living and who is informed by trends and futures, I look to the independent American musician for what’s next.

The kids arriving in vans and sleeping on floors for South By Music are so much more in touch with what’s up in America than are the smarty flotsam from Stanford, Silicon Valley and other tech havens.  I loves me some techies, don’t get me wrong, but grass roots Americana trends are arriving 5 to a car, packed with Amps and warm local beer.

Sundance, Park City’s independent  movie festival, used to be like SXSW Music, before turning crazy bougie. But you can still find inspiration there.

For marketers and people in the creative selling arts, spend some time at South By Music and if you have time, do a drive by at Sundance.

Peace.  

 

A Thought About Suspensions.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

I’ve been a student of educational marketing for a couple of years. K through 12 specifically. A recent study was published suggesting Charter Schools have a rate of suspension comparable to that of public schools and in both cases black students are 4X as likely to be suspended as white. Suspension is one of the disciplinary tools available to schools but like yelling at your children for yelling or the death penalty for murder, it doesn’t seem very effective.

I’d love to see a charter school go on record as taking suspension off the board as a disciplinary option. Pulling kids out of class as punishment makes sense, but how can you create an environment where kids learn and feel some remorse for their transgressions? What if the school were to put them in a classroom with a teacher or administration to supervise lessons, but also include some of their parents to aid in supervision. Say for every 20 suspended kids, at least 5 of their parents must be there for half a day. Don’t make it feel punitive for the parents – make it a supervisory, learning moment. Get parents more involved. For younger students, many parents have to stay home anyway.

Making parents more involved in schooling is a goal of successful pedagogy. Involving them in discipline, for their own kids and community kids, may be worth testing. At least it’s not the same old same old.

Thoughts?                                                

Peace.    

 

A Twitch Point By Any other Name.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

A couple of years ago I posted a presentation on SlideShare on something I called Twitch Point Planning. My first presentation of Twitch Point Planning was to Karen Kovacs, publisher of People Magazine.  One of my last presentations was to Joshua Spanier, Google’s Marketing Director of Global Media. These meetings sandwiched a number of others with business titans, one of which, George Gallate, suggested “Get the URL.”

Twitch Point Planning is a comms planning rigor that takes advantage of media “twitches,” moments in time when a person moves from one medium to another in search of information or clarification. By “understanding, mapping and manipulating people closer to a sale” via these twitches, we  create new levels of accountability, learning and success…the theory goes. 

Here’s is a quote from today’s New York Times, by Google’s Paul Muret, VP for Display, Video and Analytics:

“Mobile is about moments, shorter and more fragmented. It’s important we string these together. We need to understand the desires of consumers in each point in time to understand their context and intent.”   

Google rang up $19B in the 4th quarter and now is looking to expand that number by launching a new product called Analytics 360 — a tool that looks to take advantage of cross screen media twitching.  I suspect they’ll make more billions and do so by automating the process.  But me thinks the human element is still a necessary component of this process. Let’s see.

All aboard!!!!

Peace.

24 Questions Plus 2.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

There’s a business planning tool I’ve relied on for 20 years called the 24 Questions. It came from an AT&T/McCann-Erickson task force I was appointed to.  We used the questions to help determine what it would cost to properly fund a number of new and emerging business lines, one of which was AT&T’s business internet offering.  I’ve morphed some of the questions over the years to better help me understand a business’s fundies and to grow with the times.

Always on the lookout for new questions, today I think I’ve come up with one or two.  I may also use them in my other battery of questions  — the one used with executive management and sales people to help with the brand brief.

“If given the task of reorganizing the company into a smaller more profitable entity, what would you do?” 

If this questions doesn’t land well, you are either interviewing the wrong person, or that person is too politically correct. If that’s the case, try:

“If given the task of improving company performance through the purchase of another company, who would you buy and why?”

I haven’t used these questions yet but I promise to do so. And when I do, I’ll report in.

Peace.

 

 

Why Some Brand Strategy Is Left At The Altar.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

No early stage venture capital investor worth her salt would put millions into a company without feeling the focus of the founders.  If there’s a good Is-Does, unfettered by objective sprawl and feature-phoria, early stage investors act quickly.  It is focus that makes the investment attractive.   Focus makes naming easy. Hiring easy. Patent search easy. It is focus that makes code more elegant.

The reason What’s The Idea? is in business is because many mature companies lack focus. It’s hard to have a restaurant when you can’t figure out your cuisine.

Brand strategy starts with an assessment of business strategy then it slides into marketing and positioning strategy. Not marketing and positioning strategies – strategy, singular. Many mature companies have meandered in their growth and attempt at growth. 

When mature companies come to me for brand strategy, they’re admitting they need more focus (We’re like a cat in a marble hallway.”). The paper solution, oddly, is the easiest part. Mustering the fortitude to actuate that focus is hard.  It’s why some brand strategy is left at the altar.

Peace.                                    

 

Patagonia’s Real Passion.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Patagonia is a clothing company with one of the biggest hearts on the planet. It certainly wears its heart on its sleeve. But the issues about which it cares most, the health of the planet, are perhaps not best served by making jackets, parkas and anoraks. This company’s passion might be best served by getting into the business of manufacturing products, services and technologies that actually save the planet: solar panels, transportation devises that aren’t fossil fuel powered, water bottles that dissipate in months, not decades, etc.  If anyone can create Silicon Valley of sustainable planetary practices, it’s these guys.

Style is cultural and ephemeral. Planetary health is epochal.

This is what they loves. This is where Patagonia’s heads are. This type of passion and love provide the best nesting ground for innovation.  Come on Patagonia, get out of the schmatta business and get into the planet health business.

Peace.                                                                

 

 

Brand Strategy Uptake.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

I have reading a lot of articles lately about U.S. Military being used in an “advisory” role with allies.  In Syria, in Africa… it is a good way to keep our men and women out of harm’s way and improve the chances of ally success. Yesterday American soldiers accompanied Somalian solders on a raid but did not participate. They stayed on or by the helicopters, no doubt providing logistical, intelligence and strategic assistance.

Implementing brand strategy — affecting an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging – requires similar advisory support before truly turned over the plan to the owner. Brand strategy is never a total culture change for a product, it’s more a refinement, but the refinement requires strong commitment and oversight.  Brand strategy in the marketing department alone, is only a start. It is not until every employee gets the “claim and proof” strategy can true change occur.

The first year is the roughest. It is a learning year. It is a teaching year. It is the year of “no.” Training is key. Advisors are key. This is how you affect brand strategy uptake. And, dare I say, win marketing wars.

Peace.

 

Marketing Commodity Products.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

The three most important words in marketing are “pent up demand.”  Not “supply and demand.”  Pent up demand comes about when there is not enough supply — so the two concepts are linked. When there’s great demand for a product or service, it’s easy to sell. When there is over-supply, not so much. In the case of an over-supply situation, good marketers will find a feature or quality of the product that is under supplied and use it as a differentiation. Advertising alone is not a differentiator. Good ads help in a commodity business but real differentiation makes for better sales.

Marketing in a commodity world is the toughest form. It requires lots of research, data and anthropological study. When you find a feature for which there is pent-up demand, pound it. These features are typically found in the brand strategy under the headings “care abouts” and good-ats.”

Peace.

 

Brand Riffs Are Important.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Here’s the unbridled truth about brand strategy.  Brand strategy is not easy to implement. And oddly, many marketing directors don’t know how to do it.  Brand strategies are more apt to be employed by CEOs. They get strategy.  

My framework for brand strategy — one claim and three proof planks — is brain dead simple to employ. But it has to be shared and enculturated throughout the company. When well crafted there are already major hints of the strategy within the company. But there are also hints of many other things – too many things. Brand strategy culls out the non-essentials.

If brand strategy is hard to operationalize at a large company, what’s the point?  Here’s the point: Think of the output of brand strategy as a song – a song made up of notes, phrases and riffs.  Brand strategy, even at less than 100% compliance, still offers riffs that can improve company performance. Elements of the brand brief, understood and implemented can make a huge difference.  

I developed a target in a brand brief for a high-end Northwell Health home care company. I called the target “Kings of the Castle.” These so-called kings were rich males who used to be captains of industry, but now were infirm of body…not mind. They were actually still owners of the family purse strings.  This one element of the strategy, by itself, was enough to propel powerful “product, experience and messaging.” It was not the full strategy, just a few notes. A riff.

The best brand strategies are all or nothing. But this is the real world. So every riff matters.

Peace.

 

1...151617...20Page 16 of 20
© Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv