Monthly Archives: December 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.