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    Brand Strategy

    Every Company Can Benefit From Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    It has been said, Margaret Mead when CEO of the American Museum of Natural History, required every employee to undergo psychiatric counseling. Her thinking was that all people can benefit from being in touch with their inner selves and that every wo/man can benefit from better mental health.  I love this woman.

    In my opinion, every brand can benefit from being more self-aware and having better brand strategy health. Marketers are hyper-sensitive about their products. As they should be.  In service industries they are sensitive about service delivery.  Large companies have big departments dedicated to product management and product marketing. These people eat, sleep and live the product — from supply chain, to legal, to distribution, competitive position and pricing. But few people are in charge of actual brand strategy. (Large consumer packaged goods companies like P&G are the exception.)

    AT&T Business Communications Services was the first service company I knew that actually managed the brand with a brand strategy. And it worked like crazy.  I have borrower their rigor for brand management and tweaked it a bit for use in my brand strategy practice. And though my clients don’t typically have the marketing budgets and data tracking of AT&T, the theory and practice is alive and well and still very effective.

    Brand strategy, or the “organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” as I like to call it, is every bit as important and predictive of success as is proper product management.

    Write Steve@WhatsTheIdea to begin a discussion of your brand strategy and a health-check of your brand.

    Peace.

     

     

    Imposter Syndrome.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    By definition strategy precedes action. I am not sure General Patton or Sun Tsu really knew their strategies would work. Were they imposters? The best we can do as brand planners is gather facts, array insights, organize and prioritize them then make decisions.

    Do I get butterflies before presenting a master brand strategy? Even after days of self-congratulations for “nailing it?” Sure I do. Doubt can creep in. Worrying about your craft makes you a good planner. Question yourself, it’s healthy. But don’t let it overwhelm you. No one can see the future. But we can be prepared for the future. We can project what we learned and surmised and expect of the future. Then we stick a pin in it and commit.

    All my brand presentations include a pros and cons section surrounding the main claim. Let your client know you’ve thought of all sides. And know your client’s business. Know how money is made so your pros aren’t touchy feelie, they are business-building.

    I’m not a fan of terms like imposter syndrome. But I am a fan of the word doubt. And doubt is universal.  Foundations are what we build on.

    “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow you house in…” if your foundation is weak.

    Peace.

     

    Strategy and Action.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Strategists sometimes get a bad rap for overthink. And overwrite. My brand briefs created to deliver master brand strategy are often 3 pages. That’s a lot of words. Brand briefs are not meant to provide by-the-pound insights and lovely writing. Nor are they to provide a circuitous narrative that makes a brand manager feel optimistic. They are designed to provide a serial story that builds a logic trail toward a business-winning claim about a product or service. That singular claim – yes, I said singular – is built upon customer care-abouts and brand good-ats.  That’s the strategy component… or the information and data boil-down for which I get paid the big bucks.

    But strategy without action is simply ink. The best laid plans don’t work unless they’re acted upon and to be acted upon they must be advocated from on high, shared throughout the company, and operationalized. You can’t convince consumers unless you convince your workforce. Many practitioners believe brand strategy to be the sole domain of the marketing department. These companies are most likely to fail with marketing – even with $50 million budgets.  Brand strategy must be encultured throughout a company.

    You can’t write an effective marketing plan without a brand strategy. And you can’t write an effective brand strategy without an effective marketing plan. And make no mistake a marketing plan is an action plan. Fully funded. Not piece meal funded. Measured and corrected.

    Strategy and action.

    Peace.                 

     

     

    Strategy and Training.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’m a fanboy of Julian Cole of Strategy Finishing School and also Mark Pollard of Sweathead. Julian came out of comms planning and has slid into brand planning. Mark has long been a brand planner. Both are sharers. That is, they post a good deal of social media – free media – in an effort to raise visibility. And both are at places in their careers where they are trying to monetize their wares. Like musicians who make most of their money now touring, Julian and Mark (sometimes together) are charging fees for webinars and in-person training sessions.

    Faris Yakob, a longtime acquaintance, is also in the marketing and branding space. He, too, works for himself and with wife Rosie monetize a business called Genius Steal through paid events, speeches and training.  But he also consults. Faris is a sharer and networker and has been for a long time.

    Giving away intellectual property in social media is a time-tested business builder. And it’s been going on for decades in the regular press and trade press.  Say something really smart to the reading/consuming public and they may reach out for advice. Paid advice. Start by giving it away, then sell it.

    My approach is different. I’ve stayed away from monetizing through paid speeches and training.  I continue to give away my IP. My revenue goal is 100% consulting. I prime the pump with content and do biz/dev to generate leads and engagements.

    One of my clients, Trail Of Bits, has built a crazy successful business giving away IP in the cyber security space.  They share code and tools for free on GitHub. They don’t train, they consult.  And they thrive.

    I’m not knocking trainers and speaker. And as a longtime blogger, I’m all about teaching and learning. But for me the excitement is in the trenches. The excitement is in the strategies themselves.

    Peace!

      

     

    Taglines and The Fruit Cocktail Effect.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Quality, commitment, character are qualities for which any company would be proud to be known.  Ironically, those three words as a tagline are a problem. I’ve ranted before about three unconnected word taglines and this morning listening to a radio spot was once again reminded.  

    MB Haines, an Asheville area heating, air conditioning and refrigeration contractor, has been serving area for over 100 years. Not a bad feat seeing as in 1925 only half of all homes in the U.S. had electricity.  They must be doing a lot right.  That said, if you were to ask all the businesses in the country if quality, commitment and character are business fundamentals, all would say yes.

    The problem is not that these are their values, the problem is they don’t work as a tagline. At What’s The Idea?, we advise clients to brand around one claim and three proof planks. MB Haines has the proof planks right, just not the claim. A claim — an overarching statement that covers the three values — is what’s lacking.  I’m not going to go on about information overload, but believe me it’s hard enough to own one brand position. Three is way, way too many.

    And frankly, lofty words like quality, commitment and character are so over-used in advertising that they have almost become commodities.  

    MB Haines, however, does a good job proving its three values. For instance, “100 years in business” shows commitment. An employee-owned company shows commitment. If I dug deeper I could find lots of examples of quality and character. This company is not built upon a tag cloud of copy and keywords. There’s here here.    

    Brand strategy locates a brand in one spot. A spot that meets customer care-abouts and brand good-ats. A tagline is best when it highlights that one spot.

    Brand strategy is hard work — often succumbing to the “Fruit Cocktail Effect.”  (Google it using quote marks.) It needn’t with a little brand planning.

    Peace.

     

     

    Taglines Gone Wild.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The tagline is a very misunderstood communications and branding device.  A tagline should be the de facto brand claim.  Beside the product itself, it is the single most important thing consumers should remember about your offering.  While a brand strategy is actually one claim and three proof planks, the claim element is the one indelible thought or value that motivates preference, consumption and repeat consumption.  I would say loyalty, but one can be loyal and not consume.

    Many marketers go wrong when they confuse branding with advertising. This happens when the advertising campaign line or tagline drives branding. KFC’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” is a great example an advertising tagline that brilliantly reflects the brand claim. “That’s My Mission,” the tagline for Mission Health, is way too ad driven — and not even close to a meaningful, powerful brand claim.

    Unless your tagline can reflect a coherent, endemic brand value, you are wasting branding dollars. And ad dollars.

    Brand strategy first then advertising. Not the other way around.

    Peace.

     

     

    Branding Is Multiplex.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Brand strategy is all about immersion in your product or service. Identifying problems and clarifying opportunities. You can spend scores of hours listening to consumers talk about your product and watching them use it. You can talk to the sellers of the product, the makers of the product, and the engineers. After many hours you begin to see patterns and reoccurrences of values. It helps form your plan. The plan to position your product.

    Don’t forget, though, that your brand isn’t an island. It operates in a competitive arena. And there are people loving, liking, using and recommending competitors. It’s not good enough to look at the competition’s website and come to conclusions about its value. You need to do immersion there as well.  You need to pry into the psyches of consumers you want to win over. You need to see how tightly consumers embrace your competitors. They have a job to do and they, presumably, are working hard every day to defend their share.

    So, it’s not just about finding the optimal spot to position your product, it’s also about examining consumer predilections for your competitors. Branding is not binary, it’s a multiplex.

    Peace.

     

     

    Brand Strategy Misnomer.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    If I ask a marketing person their ad strategy is, likely answers would be “Increase sales.” Or “increase customer base.” Maybe “generate customer activation.” And were I to ask that marketer to articulate their brand strategy, they’d probably also default to generic functional answers.  Say things like “maintain our graphic standards,” or “design signage, packaging and graphics to clearly convey a unified message.” Possibly “maintain a consistent voice in the marketplace.” When, actually, the question “What is your brand strategy” is not a structural question at all. It’s meant to elicit the idea or value that propels the brand to success – a business-winning claim in the minds of consumers.

    If I ask your name, you’d say Joann or Edward, not “It’s the descriptor people use to identify me.”  But many people either don’t think of a brand strategy as their specific claim for building business — or they just don’t have one.  In the latter case they probably rely on their ad campaigns for brand strategy.

    Either way marketers are not reaping the rewards of brand strategy. It’s a crying shame.

    Peace.

    PS. The definition of brand strategy, here at What’s The Idea? is an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.

     

     

    Cultural Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I was listening to the Fergus O’Carroll’s On Strategy podcast with Harvard professor Douglas Holt yesterday and heard some cool insights on brand planning. Mr. Holt has this thing he calls Cultural Strategy which as a student of anthropology interested me quite a bit. Brand planners have to be cultural anthropologists, as they try to nestle their selling schema into current culture — with an eye toward creating future culture. (An academic would blast me for the last part of that statement. Culture is organic, not man-made, they would caution.)

    (Pictured here, Franz Boas, father of cultural anthropolgy.)

    One of Douglas’s thoughts is worth dissecting: “Whoever is the symbol of the dominant ideology in the category, controls the category.” (Clearly a challenger mentality, evidenced by his follow-on point that you need to disrupt the category leader who can outspend and out-media all challengers.) 

    Two differing examples, the first supports Holt’s Cultural Strategy notion: when Oatly plays its save-the-planet card in oat milk messaging, that’s not an endemic product quality sell, it’s a culture sell. When I used the word “nestle” above, my point was one needs to nestle an endemic product value into the cultural lever — not use the cultural lever as your main value. With my client Handcraft, maker of the Potty Genius Potty training kit, we didn’t position around reducing disposable diapers in landfill, a cultural lever. We led with the “joys” inherent in the accomplishment.  The landfill claim was a support, albeit a very good one.  

    Douglas Holt is certainly onto something. Most planners agree culture (and category culture) are robust insight mines.  But don’t pray tell forget what is popping off the production line. Product always needs to be at the heart of any claim or proof plank.

    Peace.

     

     

     

     

    Positivity in Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Neil Young’s new album has a rather apocalyptic track called Human Race. Many of today’s social commentators seem obsessed with negative goings on. Climate. Politics. Covid.  The list rolls on. There are, indeed, lots of reasons to be negative. I get it. My friend Donald hasn’t tweeted a nice thing about American politics in years. The evening news is 92% bad stuff, one puff piece.

    There’s a miasma of negativity surrounding us. It’s deafening. Yet life goes on. We try to be healthy, tell jokes to lighten the moment, and search for light.

    One place positivity is quite important is branding. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you?) Planners should always be looking for the light. For the promise of goodness, success and perhaps a touch of elation. That’s how I run my brand strategy practice. Lot’s of planners look to solve problems. I get that too.  It’s easy lifting. Many marketers looking to branding solutions are trying to fix things. But positivity is my jam and I like to think it makes for the best brand planning.

    Find a positive brand objective. Seek out a positive consumer motivation. Bathe your discovery in warmth, consumer pride and satisfaction. We have lots of time to be solemn. Our job it to position brands around hope and positivity. Not the meh.

    Peace.

     

     

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