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    brand planning tips

    Searching for Dlugacz.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Yosef D. Dlugacz, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief of Clinical Quality, Education and Research at the North Shore-LIJ Health System was the person I met when working on the North Shore brand brief who had the greatest influence on the strategy.

    My first discussion with Yosef was on the phone and didn’t go very well. He offered up a lot of quality-speak. It was hard work getting to interesting truths about Yosef’s work. What he did for a living. His day. Outputs. Influence.  But once I got it, once I was able to wend myself around the quality jargon and statistical answers, a very instructive insight emerged.  When writing a brand brief you are telling (yourself and others) a serial story. If it doesn’t hang together it’s not done. There are gravity points in the brief that are important and create pathways for the strategy.  Sometimes the gravity points come from consumers, other times from the product or service. They can really come from anywhere in the information gathering experience. Gravity points help with the “boil down” – the decisions about what to not focus on.     

    What separates great from the good planners are the boil down and the gravity points. With these in hand the story almost tells itself — finishing off with a big ending (claim) and moral (support planks). The moral, BTW, is always influenced by selling more, to more, for more, more times. 

    Searching for Dlugacz (pronounced Dlu-Gotch) is how to start. Peace.

    New $ or old $?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I favor the poetry inherent in good brand planning, so in various places on the web you may have seen some of my references to “redistributing marketing wealth.” Redistributing marketing wealth is a great calling if you can do it. It is one goal of great strategy. The only thing that trumps it is “creating new wealth.”  The most exciting work in marketing is not taking a market that currently exists, say a $2.4B market for nutrition drinks, and rejiggering it to get more share – though that is fun.  It’s taking a static market and growing it. Finding new uses, new custies, and new (I can’t think of a third thing)…  

    That’s not redistributing marketing wealth, that’s creating new wealth. A smart boss at McCann once asked me, “Where will the money to pay for this product come from?” In other words what will someone not buy to pay for this product? Carbonated soft drink dollars are flowing into waters. So Coke owns both. Now Coke is getting into protein – another reapportionment. But what if Coke took money away from the gyms?  Or created a product that took consumer budget from the gas budget?

    Rational consumers only have so much money to spend.  Figuring out how to get them to spend it with you is a planners MO. New money?  Or old money? That is a big planning  question.

    Peace be upon you this Friday!     

    Teaching and Learning.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Those who follow the What’s The idea? blog know how I view education. Having worked at a K12 Ed Tech company I realized there is a big difference between “teaching” and “learning.” One is the means, the other the end. After scores and scores of teacher interviews, I understood there can be poor teaching, but no poor learning. Learning is always positive.

    So, I took that learning to heart and incorporated it into my business model. Consumers are more apt to favor a brand they learn from than a brand that sells them. Great marketing helps consumers learn about brand value in other words. Learning they can articulate themselves and, perhaps, even conclude.

    So just as learning is a touchstone for consumers in terms of product preference, it should be so for marketers. A new question I’ve decided to use in brand discovery with marketing stakeholders is “Tell me something you still need to learn about your business or consumers?” Implied with the question is that this learning will help business.

    There’s another learning question in my brand discovery battery but it’s slightly different. Not to give away too many secrets — but we are in the middle of a pandemic. The question is “Walk me through your education at the company. What was your top “aha” learning moment?”

    Okay enough learning for the day.

    Peace.

     

    An Exercise.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Boilerplate in the marketing world is the copy used on press releases at the end of a press announcement. It usually is preceded by the word About (insert name of company.) Boiler plate is almost always unimaginative. It usually contains a rote overview of company history, highlights, accomplishments and scale.

    The exercise I am suggesting for brand planners is to ask company stakeholders, during discovery, to cobble together some boilerplate for their place of business or brand.  As an exercise, it will probably be best to have the stakeholder do it before the interview, as it will really bring the session to its knees. It’s hard work.  It might also be good to have the writer limit the boilerplate to three sentences. Last week I posted about what makes a brand or company “famous.” Crafting boilerplate is an extension of that idea.

    Most people go through this exercise when creating their personal LinkedIn presence. It’s a boiled down overview of one’s self for the profile.

    Doing boiler plate for a person is harder than doing boiler plate for a company. In both cases it’s an exercise in concision…and an exercise in branding.

    Peace.

     

    Aspire. Don’t Dispire.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    As a group, I think brand planners are pretty good at delving into feelings and psyches. Reading people. Especially excitements, highs, lows and anxieties.

    The best of our questions when doing brand planning interviews hit personal hot buttons. Not just likes and dislikes but prides and prejudices, favorites and heroes. I personally like to inject my excitement into an interview to trigger others’ enjoyments.  Downer or negative interviews are the wrong footing for good brand planning. We aspire, we don’t dispire (new word). Brand planners do best when shining light.

    Brand strategy done right creates muscle memory around positive attitudes. Attitudes that create brand predisposition.  That’s my secret.  Don’t pass it on.  Hee hee.

    Peace.

     

     

     

    Zoom and Brand Research.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Brand strategists are always on the lookout for trends and cultural developments. One such trend, resulting from the pandemic, is the growth of Zoom meetings. In my last post I discussed how less meetings and more independent work are not the most productive ways to work in today’s world – though there are certainly positives.  But recently I was on a Zoom call and noticed a neat strong positive to working remotely, albeit it was a bit embarrassing.

    Last week I was on a Zoom webinar sponsored my alma mater Rollins College on the topic of diversity, inclusion and equity; a topic on which I need mas training. For a change most of the postage stamp heads were black. (Is it me or do other white people look at rooms filled with white heads and feel uncomfortable? White much? is a meme I like to use.) Anyway, the webinar guest, activist Sophie Williams from London, was explaining that decades ago the gov’t tried to recruit blacks to live in the U.K. by running ads in the West Indies, highlighting all the wonderments of UK life. Sophie went on to say it was effective advertising though it never mentioned that life for blacks in the UK was going to be “shit.” I giggled at her expletive. No one else did. Zoom allowed me to see that. Big ass faux pas. Insensitive me. Had, in real life, I been in a row of students looking at the back of heads I would never have known my mistake.

    While working at Zude, a social media startup, years ago and attempting to recruit musical acts, I uncovered an important planning insight: “never are musical artists more in touch with their art than when looking into the eyes of the audience.”  Zoom lets you do that. Used properly it can be a great research tool.  

    Peace.  

     

    Hunt For Heroes.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    If you haven’t yet guessed, I’m a big fan of brand planning. It’s a fundy (as Keith Hernandez would say) for proper marketing.  One of my favorite brand discovery pastimes is hunting for heroes.

    My enthusiasm for heroes goes way back. While working at McCann-Erickson one of my favorite interview questions was “Tell me about one of your heroes.”  A fairly opened-ended question, it helped me discern a candidate’s social and/or professional proclivities. And the depth of those proclivities.

    Today, in brand discovery, I’m always looking for category heroes. When social media first came along, I hunted up Posters. Original content creators.  Finding heroes was easy then. They had big audiences and important ideas to share. Heroes, shared for the betterment of the public. It started with people like Kandee Johnson, Melting Mama and dana boyd. But then the social web begat “influencers” whose intentions were more personal and skin deep. Less heroic. Posters also begat Pasters — people who curated others’ thoughts — also making it harder to finding category heroes.

    Heroes tend to be selfless. Their agendas are the agenda of the people. (Not unlike Native American chiefs.) Heroes, like the tide, lifts all boats. Finding heroes helps me through my thought process. It quickens the blood. Makes my insights tighter. More real.

    One of my contemporary category heroes is Aisha Adams.  She works in the area of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. She’s consumed by the topic. She shares to a fault, has an amazing sensitivity, and is most definitely part of the solution.  Heroes are out there — it just takes a little more work to find them.

    Wake up every morning during your brand planning assignment and hunt up some heroes. It’s sooo worth it.

    Peace.

     

    Don’t Worry, Be Positive.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    One of the big centers of gravity in brand planning these days is articulation of the brand problem.  When you articulate a problem so the thinking goes everything thereafter can be construed as a solution.

    (Caveat: In my brand strategy practice I’m only concerned with master brand strategy — the organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. Master brand strategy makes all marketing tactics easy. They’re easy because they toe the strategic line. Lots of brand planners are tasked with project or tactical efforts. One offs, e.g., generate leads, increase loyalty, engagement, etc.)

    At What’s The Idea? the word problem is viewed as temporal. Problems change. There’s always another problem. So, rather than look for a big honkin’ problem to solve I look at positive values for which there is pent-up demand.  I look for values and endemic product characteristics that are so loud, so bright they overshadow any current and future negatives. You can’t go changing your brand strategy every time a new problem comes about. That’s what tactics are for.

    Good master brand strategy makes your brand future proof. Save your tactics for defense. Use your brand strategy for offense.

    Peace.  

     

     

    Jeweler or Speweler.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    A friend of mine is a jeweler.  Part of his job is working the bench — where the action is.  Jewelers work, in some ways, is like that of the brand planner.  It’s detail work. Focus on small things. Magnification. 

    When a jeweler opens a watch for repair s/he needs to diagnose the problem and deal with it. Isolate the parts that don’t work and fix them. All the other parts of the watch, though important, are outside of the focus of the repair.  A lay person looking at all the moving parts might be overwhelmed.

    When I open the metaphoric watch in a brand planning assignment, I must familiarize myself with the parts. The first time I looked into the brand of a infosec boutique in NYC, I was faklempt. But then I started asking questions, learned a little bit of language and like a visitor in a foreign land was treated with kindness to match my kindness.  You see, I was more interested in them than in me and my craft. This approach allowed me to understand enough to focus on the problem without asking “What’s The Problem.”  The jeweler in me could then see around the watch parts to the mechanism in need of repair.

    So, my advice?  More jeweler, less brandbabble spew-eler.

    Peace.

     

     

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