Brand Planning

    Blackberry Backing Up?

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    Blackberry’s current TV campaign built around the Beatles song “All you need is love” is goofy. Pretty to watch, great editing, hum it and smile – but it really has no inherent brand building value.  And in a slipping market for Research In Motion, manufacturer of the Blackberry, this is not good thing. Enter a print ad today on battery life.  The headline reads “Imagine falling in love with a battery?” Does anyone hear the “beep, beep, beep” of a truck backing up here?

    The Blackberry is a stud phone.  My son in college has one.  My friend’s high school daughter has one. As does his wife, for work.  Now we don’t live in “the valley” and I know that the kids might like an iPhone as an accessory, but they are sold on the Blackberry’s ability to get them on the net and text with grace and ease.  Why? Because it works. It delivers. Blackberry owns the word “work” — in its two dimensions. Get on mass transit and see who is using Blackberrys. Fill up a gym with kids – put the Blackberrys on one side, the iPhones on the other. What do you see?

    Research will tell you love is strong, but it’s not reason to buy a Blackberry. This is a difficult, difficult category for brand planners. I don’t have the inside track, but I will tell you this:  “Love” isn’t it.  Beep, beep, beep.  Peace!

    Image Goals and Brand Plans.

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    One of advertising’s roles is to change peoples’ attitudes.  Some might call this image or brand advertising, which is quite different from retail or transactional advertising.  General Motors is really bad at brand advertising.  They try hard and spend money but for some reason it rarely changes attitudes. 

    Samsung, using the work of the Arnell Group,  was one of the first corporations to strike me as getting it.  It was back in the 90s when the word Samsung conveyed second tier products, cheap electronics and dollar-store imagery.  Using Peter Arnell’s mind and, I believe, his camera, Samsung displayed its products around NYC on big black, white and gray outdoor posters, alongside sexy human images.  A ripped torso carrying a microwave may sound silly but is was artful.  It burnished then polished the Samsung image.  

    Bosch is doing the same today with a product-based image campaign showing off a number of its stylish household appliances. In my mind Bosch was famous for brake shoes and audio products, not refrigerators and dishwashers.  But the print ads I’ve been seeing over the last few months have made me notice how beautifully designed these appliance are.  The consistent advertising tells me they are here to stay and the engineering heritage borrowed from memory compliments the pictures and words.  I would definitely buy a Bosch appliance now. Image.

    Without an image transactions are fleeting.  Understand your brand — its past and present. Decide where you want to go and make that part of your brand plan.  Toss out overused words like “innovation” and “remarkable” and “engagement.” Get in touch with your image goal and build a brand plan.  Sales will follow. Peace.

    PS.  Image can be built using new digital media.  In fact, it can be build much faster. But it has to be “on plan” and focused.

    The Loyalty Store.

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    One of the 24 Questions I use in my deep dive brand planning rigor is “How much company revenue comes from existing or repeat customers?” When I compare this figure with lost customer and new customer revenue I get a sense of a company’s loyalty, loss and business development focus.

    If you look at marketing job boards today you will notice a great deal of acquisition activity.  The majority of marketers are absolutely smitten by new customers; it’s akin to generals in battle who need to take new territory. Loyalty marketers, on the other hand, know it is the back door, the door customers leave by, that is most critical. 

    chocolates

    Loyalty is engendered when customers are not overlooked. Everyone knows a broken family where mommy or daddy found s new partner because back at home they felt underappreciated. This behavior not only breaks up families, it drives wedges between parents and children. Loyalty, love, under-appreciation and inquisitiveness are human traits. Marketers try to build love through the AIDA principle: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action, often forgetting Loyalty until it’s too late. Until the back door has been open too long.

    Coupons (sorry honey flowers), shallow thank yous, and automated responses do not loyalty make. Understanding yourself and your customers through a well-principled brand plan, is the place to start. Otherwise, it’s off to the loyalty store for some quick fix tactics.  Peace.

     

    Percent of GDP Spent on Brand Planning.

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    I am on a quest to figure out what part of the US GDP is spent on marketing. The current US GDP according to the World Bank website is $15.6 trillion. Healthcare in America is estimated to be about 18% of the GDP and my gut is telling me dollars spent on market are probably in the same ballpark.

    GDP is defined as the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products” so one might say since marketing comprise all four Ps, product being one, that all of GDP is marketing, but let’s use What’s the Idea? math and remove the cost of producing goods from the equation.

    So what are we counting? Research and development of new products. Headcount of people in all marketing services; within the company and vendor.  All out of pocket for advertising, promotion, PR, research, sales, channel, web and service. Based on my seriously fuzzy math, let’s say we are spending $2.8 trillion in marketing sans production.  That’s some cheddar.

    Of that amount, what percent do you think is spent creating an organizing principle that guides marketing? That allows employees and consumers to learn the unique value of a brand…and articulate it with meaningful language. Not taglines like “Chase what matters.”

    The answer is not much. 

    Were we to take all the revenue of companies like Interbrand, Landor, Brand Union and Siegel+Gale and brand planning practices at agencies, we would find that it amounts to a milli-portion of the total. So we’re building brand with lots of people, lots of tools, lots of services and very, very little strategy. I’m having a brain freeze and not even eating ice cream. Peace.

    PS.  Getting to actual spending numbers would be a great econometric project for a business school student. 

     

    Enculturation.

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    Many think of marketing as acquisition. Or lead generation. Business leaders in that mode don’t really understand brand planning. What often drives leaders who think this way towards branding or rebranding are: old logos, mergers and acquisitions, and boredom. Brand planning though, is all about strategy.

    At What’s The Idea? a brand plan is defined as one strategic idea (or claim) and the three support planks – planks that prove the claim and organize how business is done. A mark or logo is best if it supports that idea. Salespeople and operations people are optimized if they are guided by an organizing principle.  Those businesses who don’t get branding can’t ask employees to go out and “blue” for the company based on the color palette or “leader” for the company, based on a mission statement.  

    A brand plan makes it so that when every employee leaves the building at night they can ask themselves a strategic question about their performance. And that is the litmus test.

    I like to say “campaigns come and go, a powerful brand idea is indelible.”  Leads come and go. Customers come and go.  Brands strategy should not. If it’s not about building and maintaining business through strategy, it’s not a brand plan.

    Employees come and go too, their understanding of the strategy should not. Executives talk all the time about company culture. At the best companies strategy is enculturated.  Peace.

    Focus Your Roll.

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    I went to a networking event last night called Mojo Connect. One of those speed dating deals where you sit and talk with people for 5 minutes before moving to the next station.  People aren’t brands but when a brand planner you tend to do discovery on them. Especially, if looking for talent, opportunity and/or to lend some assistance – all brand planning modus operandi.

    One person I met stated she was a travel writer.  Then she said she spent a good deal of her career in corporate communications. She added consultant to the list of good-ats. Business consultant. But also a lover of photography, which went nicely with travel writing.  Very nice women mind you. And I’m sure she was good at all these things. But focus was not her strongest suit. The net she cast was wide.

    This reminds me of a time when I was a pup in the ad business and asked by my dad to interview a soon-to-be college graduate who happened to be the son of our biggest client Youngs Drugs, makers of Trojan Condoms. Perhaps this foretold of my career in brand planning.  The young man said he was good with people (account). He also liked to write (creative). He added an aptitude for numbers (media) and the list went on. A fledgling myself, I offered up the supreme strategy of focus. Pick a spot.

    What goes around…

    Peace

     

     

    The Brand Planner’s Conundrum.

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    The problem with brand planning consultants is that we are not very good at talking about ourselves.  And, unless you have a full-time job in planning, you need to be selling to be making. It’s a conundrum.

    Some consultants are egocentric. Others wall flower-ish. And, of course, there are scads of variations in between. But one thing we share in common is the enjoyment resulting from digging in on other people’s brands. We love exploring.

    I am most comfortable talking to people about what I do when sharing observations and insights about brand good-ats and customer care-abouts.  (At its most basic level, distilling care-abouts and good-ats is what brand strategists do.)  Though, put us in a room with marketers and ask us to talk about ourselves and it gets ugly.

    Brand planning hither rather than thither is a problem. Especially for consultants. Don’t get me wrong, over time I’ve figured out a few sweet selling points. And I crafted a solid framework to deliver strategy. One that’s easy to understand. But that sausage-making is relatively boring. My cross to bear.

    So repeat after me, thither rather than hither.

    Peace.

                                    

     

     

    Brand Target vs. Tactical Target.

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    The target for a “brand brief” is very different from a target for a tactical brief. The target for a tactic is much more specific. Much more finite.  For a brand brief, everyone who comes into contact with the brand must be accounted for.  

    The rigor is this: Look at all the groups who may be influential in a brand decision. Let’s say we are selling a protein drink to an elderly consumer. One group would be the consumer himself. Then the consumer’s caregiver – usually a family member – and there are many flavors of caregiver, trust me. The physician is certainly an interested party as are paid caregivers like home nurses. Also payors are a target, such as insurance companies and govie groups like Medicare/Medicaid.

    Once you have all the targets, you need to understand what motivates them. Peter Kim, the author of this thought process, would say you must re-massify the target; searching out a commonality they all share. With the protein example, you can see that a consumer might have different motivation (taste) than a physician (grams of protein) or insurance company (cost). Which may be different from a caregiver (compliance). It’s a bit of a maze. The deeper you dig with each target the more likely you are to find the common ground.

    Brand building is bigger than a click or a sale. Branding building is not transactional. Brands live on. Brand planning must be an inclusive pursuit. Measure twice, cut once. Peace.

    Fear, Uncertainty and Dismal Doubt.

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    FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) drove billions of dollars of B2B marketing communications in the 90s and was the brainchild, so I’ve been told, of IBM.   “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” was the quiet mantra of IBM sales team and ad agencies.  With proper and subtle brand management, this notion was acculturated into the IT departments across American and beyond.  I’m not aware of any IBM ads ever mentioning FUD.

    Digital Equipment may have been the company IBM was trying to scare people from; Apple at that time certainly wasn’t a factor. The strangle hold IBM had on business during that period, thanks to FUD, was broken by Dell when Michael Dell opened up the computer and showed us it was a bunch of simple parts — worth a good deal less than the white shirts at IBM were offering. Plus Dell took advantage of a technological breakthrough – the US Postal Service – to change the game by selling direct to the IT dept. For those old enough to remember, Dell boxes were flying in and out of IT depts. across the country.  It was Christmas every day for techies.  The fear was gone. Fast forward a few years and IBM sells its PC business and does some serious brand retrenchment, tossing “the fear” in favor of a more positive “building good systems” approach. IBM is crazy back.

    Strategic planners need to understand fear, but they shouldn’t use it. Leave it to Disney and Comcast and CBS to deliver our required dose of fear. (NBC…Grimm? Really?) Plan strategy using the end-game of hope and deliverance and well-earned reward. Those are things in which it is worth investing. Peace!