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    Marketing

    Optimum WiFi — A Huge Idea!

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Cablevision is one of America’s largest cable television companies.  Also a provider of broadband internet and phone service, it has made a lot of money for the Dolan family. Charles Dolan was instrumental in the founding of HBO and is quite the entrepreneurial stud.  The Dolan’s — Charles has a son, James — have a somewhat weird and spotty diversification history, but I must admit I admire their moxie.


    One investment decision they’ve recently made, which is brilliant, is to make their service area wireless for all Optimum customers – for free. Cablevision operates on Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut and though the total footprint is not completely covered, they have a good start. It is currently the largest wireless network in the country.  


    Cablevision has long been viewed negatively by consumers; I remember once pitching a cancer care awareness program to them through the North Shore-LIJ Health Care System to which they responded “How is this going to help us sell more product?”  Today, years later, they are sponsoring a cancer care program.  And today, they are being good local citizen by wiring (or is it wirelessing) our communities. The frown is beginning to break around here when you mention Cablevision.  Brilliant investment. Peace!

    Evidence and Story.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Yesterday’s brand planning piece was on the difference between technique and ingredients. Today I’m focusing on evidence and story. Evidence and story are inseparable in good brand strategy.

    Claim and Proof are key outputs of a brand plan. Once you get the claim right you need to use your marketing and sales dollars to prove it every day. And you prove with evidence. And just so you’re not a one-trick pony, we use three proof planks to support a brand claim. Proof, defined as deeds, experiences, and actions, are the bedrock of the strategy. In the brand planning rigor proof or evidence is actually mined first, giving form to the claim.

    But evidence is just artifacts. In my archaeology days, digging up things was easy — trying to figure out how they were used and the cultural context was hard. So an array of organized proof/evidence is not likely to inspire creative people or consumers without a nice narrative or story.

    Get good at evidence collecting and storytelling and you are well on your way to becoming a talented brand planner.  Peace.

    Apple

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Remember when it used to be cool to say you worked at Google? That was so yesterday. Apple is the place to work. Apple doesn’t sell out, trying to be all things to all people. Apple takes chances. They maintain their vision and don’t change because a competitor is making more money or has more market share. Apple takes care of its customers. It sees the future and creates cult brands as David Atkins might say.
     
    With the daring introduction of the iPhone, on the heels of iTunes, Apple has really come into its own. Before the fact, old school brand planners might have said about these moves that moving away from its computer franchise was not smart for Apple. But Apple saw the future, it evolved – watching closely what people were putting on their iBooks. Then they moved into telephony. Positioning the iPhone as a phone was a huge strategic decision. (Everybody already knew what Apple did and stood for.)  Wouldn’t you have liked to be in the marketing planning meeting, though, when management was deciding what to call the iPhone. “Jesus, it’s not a phone! It’s something completely knew. It’s a media integrator. It’s, it’s, it’s an iLife.  No, an iVerything!”
     
    Thanks to Steve Job’s incendiary vision, the Apple brand has transcended the products. Consumers trust Apple’s ingenuity and design. Mac sales this quarter are higher than ever before. That’s brand pull.
     
    This is the type of brand pull Sony had not too long ago (before they got into the movie business.)

    America has Voted. Finally.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Yesterday I wrote about the next big thing. Well, here’s an even bigger thing. America woke up last month and started buying smaller cars en masse. Out with the Tahoes, out with the F-Series, out with the Rams. Twenty percent of all new car sales in April ’08 were compacts. All the size-queen car buyers are beginning to see the light. But that’s not the next big thing.
     
    The business you want to be in is SUV and heavy duty pick-up truck disposal. In one year’s time, our country streets will begin to look less like Lubbock and more like Milan. So long as our cars don’t go meep-meep when we honk, I’m cool with it. JK.  In my minds eye, we’ll need a state the size of Delaware to dispose of all the SUVs and truck being traded in.  These big honkin’ machines have to go somewhere. I suspect they will be melted down for metal – a good thing – but what will we do with all the plastic?
     
    The business to be in is SUV and Truck recycling. And the day hasn’t come too soon. Take a deep breath.
     
     
     
     

    Brand Strategy San Serif.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I’m not much of a cook but I’m certainly a student. What’s The Idea? uses a number of cooking metaphors in its daily operation. Many of the tenets of good cooking are also valuable in brand strategy. One such tenet is “Don’t use too many ingredients.”  The more ingredients used, the more likely the main component of the dish becomes obscured.

    My uncle Carl taught me the best baked clams are the ones with the least amount of flavor enhancers. See the clam. The same for chicken parmesan. No sauce, just a brilliant tomato slice or two atop the golden brown cutlet.

    Brand strategy development is about evaluating customer care-abouts and brand good-ats and selecting only the top three — the three with the most flavor (or most complementary flavors).  Most importantly, these three brand planks must support the brand claim, or, following the metaphor, the main protein.

    Brand strategy is best served with one claim and three proof planks. It’s not over-complicated. It’s easy on the senses. And the consumer palate is very understanding.

    Leave Michelin stars for the true chefs. Complexity in brand strategy rarely works.

    Peace.

     

     

    New Product Launch and the Suit Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Having worked the last couple of years for an internet start-up and a consumer product launch I can tell you how important the “idea” is when it comes to bringing something new to market.  

     

    The web start up was not easy to explain. It was part social network, part web development tool, part web portal. Try ‘spaining that one Ricky. The consumer product was a nutrition and protein drink, boasting the highest form of pure, drinkable protein – highly desirable qualities among the infirm who cannot stomach lactose, sugar and thickness of the shakes currently dominating the market.

     

    When a new product is released to market it needs to be easily defined.  The definition needs to resonate with consumer, the media and the product’s sellers.  It requires a single statement of product, value and benefit.  To get to that simple statement requires many decisions about what not to include.  This is the “boil down” process. You boil away the extraneous, and what is left is the most powerful, flavorful truth about the product.    

     

    This statement is the “suit strategy” and it is the most critical part of the brand launch. It galvanizes the company, informs the markets and gives creative people the direction for the creative. Once fed and cared for over time, the suit strategy morphs into the “branding idea.” Campaigns come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible.

     

    Promise Versus Claim.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Any brand planner worth his or her salt uses the word promise. I use it all the time. That said, as I codify and package my practice–trying to explain to business owners and marketing people what brand planning is–I gravitate toward the word “claim.” Branding is all about “claim and proof.”

    The word promise is so much nicer it seems. Softer. More forgiving. Claim, on the other hand, feels boastful. Perhaps full of itself. The fact that most advertising is claim-based rather than promise-based is not a trivial obstacle either, when it comes to defending claim vs. promise. I am undaunted; it’s still all about the claim. Why? Because consumers want value they can count on. If consumers are let down by the claim and they really care, they will say so. They will rebel. Sales will take a hit. With a promise the whole position and sales thing is more nebulous.

    A brand with a claim needs to prove it every day. A brand with a promise has leeway. Less urgency. I won a huge piece of business once by telling a multi-billion dollar company they had a great claim, but weren’t proving it. The fastest way to return on strategy (ROS) is to have a claim.

    When your brand lacks real proof of value, it’s time to trot out the promise. Which is about as satisfying as bad margarine. Peace.

    Too much advertising.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The movie John Carter cost a couple of hundred million to make and netted only $30 million its first weekend. Come se dog?  Disney made it and, I suspect, allowed it lots of free advertising on ABC-TV.  Promos for the movie were everywhere.  It was so overexposed most people felt they’d already seen the movie. Way too much advertising.

    I’m not the demographic for the movie and roving 10 ton gorilla-dogs are not my thing but even so this movie would have done better at the box office had every person in America not seen an hour of promotional video. They out-Geicoed Geico this month.

    Peace! 

    The Future. G.E. G.M. Healthcare.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    No dopes G.E.  Jeffrey R. Immelt announced to shareholders Tuesday his strategy to focus on two business sectors: healthcare and energy. By divesting of NBC Entertainment and paring back G.E. Capital, he’s amassing a war chest of $26B for 2010 (I love saying twenty ten) so that G.E. can put some serious Benjamins against Energy 2.0. 

    Had Mr. Immelt done this 20 months ago, G.E. would have been in a much better place today but shareholders would have balked and he may have been ousted.  Even if you can see the future, it’s still the future.  The American car industry needed to make a bold move – focusing on more energy efficient gasless cars – 4 years ago but didn’t have the nerve. You just know there were nerds and young engineer types (without vesting) walking the halls of corporate car companies pleading for carbon neutral, low energy cars back then. But the car guys didn’t want to be first to push the plug.  So now we have to wait for the Chevy Volt and when it does arrive, it won’t be available in great numbers. (Mistake.)

    The future isn’t going anywhere.  It can be predicted.  Humans and human behavior, short of a mutation or two, are pretty easy to understand. Maslow was right.  What’s holding up healthcare reform right now is capitalism, a touch of greed, and the inability to see the future. It will get done, but there will be bandages along the way.

    An insight about brand planner insights.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    “Insight” might be the most used word in the lexicon of the brand planner. If art directors and writers work in “creative,” planners practice the craft of insights. We may write briefs, manifestos and decks – but insights are the brand planner’s money shot.

    I recently came across a chart outlining nine type of insights: consumer, cultural, future, product, brand, market, purchase, usage, and owner. To this I immediately thought of 3 others: jealously, success and re-use (and that without giving it much thought). So it’s safe to say insight work is rich. But here’s the thing, the best strategies are singular. Planners play in all of the listed insight areas, then chose one. One. The one at the nexus of what consumers want most and what the brand does best. The insight must “feel” organic, not forced. It must provide massive stimulus to the creative department (the makers of the messages, deeds and experiences). Because remember, an insight is not an ad. It’s not even a brief. It’s bedrock for the idea.

    Really good planners wade through insights, be they 9, 12 or more, and land on one. Then they milk it until it flows free, clean and rich with protein. It is then turned into a strategic idea (claim) and proof array, before being handed off to the makers, business owners and the managers.

    Remember, campaigns come and go, a powerful brand idea is indelible. And insight powered.

    Peace.

     

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