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    Brand Planning

    Art in marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The minute I saw my first piece of Banksy’s graffiti art I knew it was art. Art is very personal.  I have used many Banksy pieces as Twitter backgrounds. (Much obliged, sir. Sir?)

    Many talk about the art of marketing, brand planning and advertising. But today l prefer to talk about the in.  Art has a very meaningful place in marketing.  Like the beautiful, style-happy person you pass on the street and can’t keep your eyes off, an artful photo, turn of phrase, or video edit captures the viewer’s imagination. And once the imagination is captured and the senses are a tingle – the door to the heat and mind are open.

    What the marketer does with that open door is the critical next step.  Sell too hard and the consumer loses the warmies. Sell without context and the viewer is confused. Opt not to sell at all and you become the disaffected artist in the SOHO gallery who cares not.

    citibank climber

    What the marketer does with that open door depends on the art itself and  the brand plan. It’s complicated.  When Citibank, in its lovely “cliff climber” TV spot, shares that amazing climbing sequence and the poetic card purchases that enabled the climb — “And what girl wouldn’t want new shoes?,” there is mad connection.  The art is visual. It’s athletic. Unseen. That’s art in marketing. Not of marketing. Peace!

    (The Citibank spot is by Publicis, I believe.)

    Taglines as Word Grabs.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I don’t know why colleges don’t get branding. At its most basic a brand starts with a tagline  — a 2 to 5 lyrical “word grab” of company or product intent or mission.  Tagline’s are often campaign ideas written by ad agencies, that are so well received they find their way under the logo. For years. Mostly misunderstood, taglines lock up with logos and lie like faded wallpaper in poorly lit hallways.

    Hofstra University has a new tagline: Pride and Purpose. It’s not 3/4s bad.  I’m pretty sure the word Pride refers to Hofstra’s mascot…a group of lions. Pride is a great motivating word in brand planning – one I chase all the time.  And Purpose is what all great university educations are supposed to engender in students.  The fact is though, when a good tagline does not support the advertising – and I mean every ad – someone is not doing their job.  You can’t tell the world you are all about Pride and Purpose then make a non-supportive, generic claim.  You just can’t do it.  And if you do, the tagline and strategy are either wrong or the leadership is.  Sorry to go all hard butt on Hofstra, but they just came off of 8 years of a campaign called “the edge” which was built around an art director design frame showing an arrow in all the print work.  It’s incredible to me that any academic institution would not know how to create a claim and prove it. And Hofstra is not alone.  The entire college and unversity body of work is abysmal. Peace!

    Love. It’s What Makes a Brand Plan a Brand Plan.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    On my website and bio I let everyone know about the high-profile brands I have worked on: Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, Abbott Nutrition, Northwell Health, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, ConAgra, Newsday and Sunkist.  But that’s me showing off. 

    A lot of the work I’ve done and enjoyed has been for lesser-known brands: Excel Commercial Maintenance, Sweet Loren’s, Biz2Credit, Trail of Bits, Handcraft Manufacturing, and pro-bono Appalachian Specialty Pharmacy to name a few.  I’ve written before that a brand planner has to fall in love with the brands s/he works on…and it’s true.

    You don’t set out to love them but it just comes naturally. The more you know the more you warm up.  Knowing you are searching for ways to shed them in the most positive light helps. That’s not to say you overlook any shortcomings or negatives but it’s our job to accentuate the positive. And that becomes easier as you grow more acclimated and more predisposed. Love may sound a little over-the-top, but it’s not. It comes with time and effort.

    Sometimes the smaller brands are easier to love. They come with less baggage. Less complication. It’s all good. They are all fun. Love is love.

    Peace.

     

     

    Spam Words.  

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The unsub button is set you to allow you to stop unwanted emails. The first options is

    __ Too many emails.  The second is

    __ Not relevant to me.  The third is

    __ Too promotional.   And the fourth is

    __ I don’t know why I’m receiving these emails.

    They put the first one in that position to increase the chances of it being elected. Then the email company can argue spam emails are not so bad there are just to many of them…and stay in the spam business. Just with a bit less frequency.

    Spam is to email what TV commercials are to broadcast TV. Unwanted intrusions.

    Brand planners are all about relevance. And salience. Advertisers are about attention. Email marketers are clicks. And marketers are all about selling…and all of the above. The problem with most of the above, is that it negatively impacts relevance and salience. Consumers are conditioned not to believe certain words.  Certain claims: better, faster, tastier, cheaper. These are spam words.

    Brand planners have to weed out the spam and identify new ways of conveying value. New strategies to garner interest, desire and action.

    I like Spam on sliders, not in my copy.

    Peace.

     

    Truth and Conspiracy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Brand planners pay close attention to popular culture in an attempt to massage their ideas and selling schema into it. One hugely impactful, popular cultural construct today is demand for disinformation, especially related to politics and conspiracy.

    Disinformation, it seems is much more interesting than typical truthful information. And when I say truthful information, I’m here talking about advertising. Nobody needs to hear me talk about advertising bombardment, it’s a given. And add to that, eighty percent of advertising is bad.

    Bad advertising shares commodity claims with little proof. “Fred Anderson Toyota offers the best customer service,” for instance. Is that misinformation? Prolly. Multiply that by 100,000 and you begin to see why consumers are not real believers in the craft. But in today’s environment, uncover a little conspiracy and you have a person’s attention.

    In a recent strategy written for a potty training company, I uncovered a conspiracy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Diaper companies were productizing and strategizing ways to keep children in diapers longer. And it worked. Fifty years ago kids were out of diapers by 18 months. Today it’s closer to 36 months.

    Manipulative, greedy marketing is the worst type. People don’t want to be pushed around.

    We are still up to our asses in diapers (hee hee), but this conspiracy has gotten more than a few mothers angry and we’re moving in the right direction. Truth Well Told.

    Not every advertising and market campaign can be a movement, but it won’t hurt planners to dig a little deeper and give the people the drama they crave.

    Peace.

     

    Labels.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I read someone’s bio on LinkedIn yesterday and it referred to them as “A strategic and creative thinker, adept at helping companies execute for growth and deploy brand effectively.” Who wouldn’t want to do business with someone like that? Well, as someone who grew up in the advertising business, this statement might be considered a straddle. Some would argue it takes different bones to build a strategic person than it does a creative person. Back in the day, you were either in the creative department or other less creative departments, e.g., media, account management, or research. So as much as I appreciate the straddle, muscle memory keeps me from believing creative and strategic can live in the same body. Oh, the scar tissue!

    Today rather than chose a label I prefer to identify via the process. I am a planner. A brand planner.

    In ad agencies, a brand planner’s job it to feed the creative people so the work can shine. Planners provide direction and insights that stimulate great work. Whether that stim is creative or strategic is unimportant so long as the work is effective. And effective for the right reasons. Yet when working directly with marketers who want help with their brands I find they don’t want a creative person at the table or a strategic person at the table, they want someone who understands them and their business. Someone who can deliver a plan for business improvement. A plan they can analyze. And approve. And implement.

    There goes another layer of scar tissue.

    Peace.

     

    War, Peace and Brand Planning.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    You don’t develop a peace plan unless there is war, yes?  Well for the most part, businesses don’t create brand plans unless there is marketing chaos. Or at the very least, marketing disorganization.

    First let’s state that brand plans are not marketing plans. They don’t include tactics. Brand plans are all about values. Values that when strengthened create sales and build loyalty. So, brand plan = strategy. And marketing plan = tactics.   

    Brand plans don’t have to be developed however only when things are going poorly. As triage. They are best created when things are going well. Organizing and prioritizing consumer care-abouts and brand good-ats when business is poppin’ is easier than doing the same when things are sliding downhill. In the latter situation there’s a taint. A pall.

    CMOs and CEOs who see lack of organization of key values during good times are the ones I love to do business with. They have vision. Those who only see it from the lens of chaos or downtrends are a bit twitchy. Brand planning should be a proactive pursuit.  

    Margaret Mead when running The Museum of Natural History asked all her employees to visit with a psychiatrist. Healthy or not. Her logic? Only good can come from being in closer touch with your feelings.

    Peace.

     

     

    Inciter or operational?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Who is more dangerous an inciter or someone who is operational (a doer, in other words)?  According to American anti-terrorism law, operational is more dangerous. In marketing it’s the opposite. Of course marketers aren’t really dangerous.  No one gets hurt. 

    People who create strategies to alter consumer demand are inciters. Those who develop the strategies through which consumers prefer one product over another are inciters. Inciting is what strategists do. Retail channel people — people at the point of sale — are operational. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important – they can be.  Creative people — the ones who write the copy, create the pictures and edit together the selling story–  they, too, are operational. Influential at the point of communication yes, but operational nonetheless.

    Good inciters touch consumers and operational people. Great creative product typically has powerful inciter behind it.  In brand planning, we often talk about insight. We should be talking about incite. Puh-zeace!

    Anthropology and Brand Planning.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Cultural anthro-pology is something I learned to love at Rollins College. Margaret Mead was a superhero of mine. Watching people, understanding their behaviors from a functional and symbolic standpoint and recording patterns is not easy. But it can be dull.  Hee hee. This college line of study helps me quite a bit in my current brand planning practice.

    When working with retailers with multiple SKUs (products), it’s not unusual for a client to try to wants to sell one piece more than another. Usually it has to do with higher margins. Sometimes it’s ease of production — as in, it used less materials, energy, manpower. Passion and ego also come into play. It’s important to know these things. But what is even more important to know is what “customers want to buy.”

    I call this pent-up demand or simply demand.

    The anthropologist in me says to study consumer desires and needs. Why they desire and/or need the product? How they manifest that desire? What role it fulfills in their lives, both functionally and symbolically.

    Marketers may like to sell product A but if consumers want to buy product B the marketer needs to readjust. Once the marketer understands the purchasing motivation, s/he can choose to evolve product A or back-burner it in favor of B.

    This is brand work. This is behavioral work. This is removing one’s self from the marketing equation…one of the first lessons of anthropological study.

    Peace.

     

     

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