Mr. Brand Hammer.

    Hunt For Heroes.

    brand planning tips

    Zoom and Brand Research.

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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.  

     

    Houzz, Brand Planners and Ample Asses.

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    houzz homepage

    Came across a cool new website called Houzz. It’s also an app on the iPhone. Someone showed me the app on the iPhone (my first user experience or FUE) where it displayed a picture of a kitchen with lots of scroll over call-outs. You scrolled over a countertop and lots of little bubbles (way too many) popped up – I assumed they were prices, or comments. For the life of me I couldn’t figure the app out. I later went to the website and subscribed and started receiving emails, which I didn’t open. Until today.

    It’s a real nice website. Lots of bleed pictures, little text on the homepage, the way I like it. But I still couldn’t tell what the site was about other than home stuff so I dug in and visited the About Page. Here’s what they say:

    “We are a platform for home remodeling and design, bringing homeowners and home professionals together in a uniquely visual community.”

    Now that made sense. My FUE with the app did not.

    The Houzz site (not the app) is an awesome resource. Power kitchen and remodeling users (people with leisure time?) spend a nice amount of energy here. This is exactly the kind of place a brand planner wants to do research. It’s the kind of place where thoughtful helpers, info seekers, and smart sellers spend time sharing. All in one location. Brand planners with ample asses (impolitic, I know) can learn a lot – sans fieldwork – on a site like this. I love finding gems like this in every category.  It’s where Posters go. (Google “Posters versus Pasters”.) Peace.

     

    The Commodity Promise.

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    The brand promise or in my lexicon “claim” is often a very common promise. The common or commodity promise is a blight on the branding world. Let’s look at healthcare or hospitals as an example – a place where doctors do medical procedures.  Docs and hospitals often share the promise “making patients well.”  If you were to wrangle all the healthcare promises in the country, 90% will be the same.  A commodity promise.

    Getting past the commodity promise is hard work. And work not easily done by marketing staffers; it requires a specialist. A deep-digging brand planner.

    A big hospital in the northeast had a marketing director who fancied himself a creative person. He decided he wanted the hospital tagline to be (and I will paraphrase a bit) “Your wellness means the world.”  Say it enough times in radio and TV ads and people might just believe it. That’s adverting not branding.

    After having done some a little bit of discovery on the brand, I came up with a competing promise “Where every bed is precision.” It’s not a tagline, but a brand strategy.  With this as the claim, supported by three proof planks, the hospital would have had a brand strategy. See the difference? Not a commodity promise.

    Peace.

     

     

    Apocryphal Brand Craft

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    I was reading some marko-babble on a research company website the other day and my bullshit meter went off. The sentence that woke it was “Turn your brand into a religion.”  Yeah, no.  

    Most marketers would warm up to a sentence like this. Who doesn’t want a fealty to their brand that sticks to the soul? But face it, it’s an overpromise. When we are talking this type affinity we are talking about a product or service, not a brand.  I’ve brought Hellman’s Mayonnaise all my life. The New York Times is my only life-long newspaper subscription, my tents and ski jackets are all Marmot. Not because of the brand managers, but because of the product. Read: product preference.

    It’s aspirational to want an almost religious attachment to a brand, that I get. But when you put brand before product, it’s because you don’t have a really good product. Once you remove the brand from the product and promote the former, thinking it’s some ethereal and malleable construct, you’re kidding yourself. You are storytelling.

    Brand management is hard work. It’s scientific. Measurable. Rules-based. But religion? Yeah, no!

    Peace.

     

    Mr. Brand Hammer.

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    Yesterday I coined the term Mr. Brand Hammer – a reference to the axiom “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Mr. Brand Hammer (that’s me) smells a new business name.

    It’s a curse being Mr. Brand Hammer, surfing the ether, watching commercials, reading the paper, with an always-on need to make sense of brands and their strategy. It’s like living in a world of generic, plain yogurt. Colorless. Tasteless. Sluggish. Mr. Brand Hammer constantly evaluates how marketers are differentiating their product and services. Asking what’s the plan? When watching Geico commercials everything is humor and call-to-action. Buy us, get a quote from us. But where’s the why? Mr. Brand Hammer understands it’s not easy creating thousands and thousands of pieces of selling content…you run out of ideas. But you should never run out of strategy.

    What’s The Idea? is a business consultancy built around brand strategy. What’s the brand claim? What are the brand proof planks (evidence of the claim)?  The lack thereof in marketing drives me crazy. And you can tell it also drives marketers crazy. More often than not there is no discernable plan for selling. For building a brand.

    More cowbell. More gecko.

    Peace.

     

    Ego.

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    freud

    Ego is the root of all brand planning evil. Okay, will maybe not evil but it can still screw up a good insight. (For returning readers, it can also screw up a good incite.)

    When you read your briefs and decks and find this nuggets that sounds and feel motivating you must ask “Is this me talking?”   Is this my point of view?  Or is it a fair and unbiased observation – supported by fact.  NY ad agencies have often been ridiculed for making ads that don’t sell between the wickets, the wickets being the east and west coasts. Are we including everyone when we observer trends, when we ideate?  That’s why testing and researching outside of the big metropolitans areas is important.  

    Good planners are paid to think beyond the ego. To think beyond the subject before them. Planners catalog a lifetime of experiences and observations and use them when sorting through their day jobs and assignments at hand. They drop the ego. They drop the leash (Pearl Jam reference).

    Remove the ego, the self-projection and you can begin to truly see. (It’s hard.) Peace!

     

    Brand Strategy Boil-Down.

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    My wife suggested reusing an Amazon bag for shipping something to my mom. The wifus is a smart lady. There was a lot of noise on the outside of the bag including printed bar codes, markings, and UPS truck soot.  Her idea was to put a new label over the old Amazon label and let it fly. Save a tree, use a proven vessel, a good idea.

    I suggested turning the bag inside out, which I did. The inside was pristine gray.

    This story is a bit metaphoric (sophomoric?) for my approach to brand planning. When doing discovery, you want to look at all sides. Inverse. Obverse. I’m sure there’s another verse.  The point being, and this is certainly true for creative problem solving, more perspectives are energizing.  Sometimes typos can be informative. Especially so for me.  Sort of like the 3M person who spilled mixatives and created the Post-It note. (Is mixative even a word?)

    Brand planners know their own process. Amass information then do the boil-down. Everyone should boil from a bigger pot. Let the fun begin.

    Peace.

     

    The B word.

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    Bravery is big these days. A lot of agencies and marketers have tied their brand promises to the word, including David and Goliath and Mondelez – a couple of forerunners. And why not? Who doesn’t want to be brave? It’s as American as apple pie. I, too, rely on the word in my practice. A boast I proudly share with clients (after signing them) is that there will likely be one word in the brand strategy they may find objectionable. They’ll love the sentiment. Feel the strategy. Know in their bones I get them. They’ll proudly nod at the defensible claim. Yet often, they will sheepishly ask “Do we have to use that one word?”

    A $5B health care system asked “Do we have to use the word systematized?”

    The world’s largest tech portal asked “Do we have to call consumers browsers?”

    The country’s 10th largest daily newspaper asked “Do we have to say ‘We know where you live?’”

    The list goes on.

    The point is, brand strategy needs to be brave.  If it’s not, is it really strategic? If your brand strategy is not bold, it will be a long, expensive build toward effectiveness. And may weaken your brand planks. (Three planks support your claim.) This brave approach takes brand strategy out of insight land and into claim land. Out of observation mode, into prideful attack mode.

    Oh, and the answer to my clients one-word objection? “No, you don’t have to use the word. The creative people will create the words. But you must use the strategy.” And everybody, myself included, bobble-head in relief. Peace.

    Jeweler or Speweler.

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    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.

     

     

    White Room (No Black Curtains.)

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    A cultural anthropologist, brand planner and journalist walk into a bar. Well maybe not the journalist. The bartender says what would you like. They all three say nothing. That sounds like a bad joke but it’s the topic of this post. When you come to a people, a consumer set or news story, you should aspire to bring nothing to the table.

    One thing I’ve learned about brand planning is to go all tabula rasa or clean slate on an assignment. That is, I don’t bring any preconceived ideas with me about the people, the market or the selling environment. It’s so hard.

    Many years ago, I was selling ads to the CEO of AT&T Microelectronics. In his spacious Berkley Heights, NJ office, standing right by the table was a cardboard cutout of a man. A customer, he explained. To always remind him of their importance.

    If I ever leave the confines of my home office for a real office the first room I build will be a white room. There will be no adornments. No pictures. No stimuli. No nothing. A white table, white chairs and white walls. This will be a collective reminder that we (client too) must come at an assignment without bias.

    (At another AT&T meeting, this one at AT&T Consumer Products, I was given a tour of a room in the R&D facility that had zero echo. The floor was suspended, the walls baffled. Total sound absorption. No echo. This might be my second conference room investment. Hee hee.)

    Coming to an assignment clean is critical. It maxims freshness.

    Peace.