Monthly Archives: June 2014

A sad sales secret.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was recently talking with a marketing friend from a company with $3+ billion in sales, who shared an interesting dilemma. The company is growing like a dookie yet not necessarily outperforming the category. A huge online competitor is about to unleash the wrath of its sales engine and though it is acknowledged it’s not overly concerning. (Como se dice MySpace?) When asked about brand strategy my friend defaulted to logo land and said it was not a priority. But s/he did share something that was quite interesting, saying the company salesforce was a bunch of freelancers (my words), designing their pitches to the companies upon which they were calling. “We have no value proposition. Our guys just go out and sell.”

That is something my friend acknowledged needing help with.

So where to sales people learn how to position the brand for selling? In sales training of course. Sales training without brand strategy, though, is like college without a major. You are tactically trained by not strategically trained. One can read all the Malcolm Gladwell books in the world but without an understanding of the “organizing principle” that ties what the brand does well to what consumers want most, you’re in the generic aisle.

The two most important places to share a brand strategy – providing your company has one – are: new employee orientation and sales training. Sadly, most brand strategy stays within the walls of the market dept. and is rarely shared.  A sad but dirty little secret.

Peace.

 

Hain Celestial’s Tasty Recipe.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

hain celestial

I was listening to Irwin D. Simon the CEO of Hain Celestial on a webcast yesterday and he mentioned a consumer insight that was both true and funny. Mr. Simon’s company is the largest natural organic food producer in the U.S. Not too long ago, said Simon, people would prefer to eat the bag over the food. Add that to the fact that natural organic products typically cost 15-20% more and you have some serious roadblocks.

Hain Celestial is doing so well these days because it is focusing on taste. For many people, when you say “nature bars” or “grain and oat cookies” the mental response is cotton-mouth. The reason obesity is pandemic in the U.S. is because sugar, salt and fat taste good.  Changing the taste profile of natural food is why Hain Celestial is growing a 3 times the pace of traditional foods. 

Hain Celestial’s product portfolio is growing. Their products are 99% GMO free (Genetically Modified Organisms.)  And though I wouldn’t exactly put them in the craft economy category, they are getting there. BluePrint, their cold pressed juice brand, is definitely a craft product.

Keep an eye on Hain Celstial. The CEO gets consumers, product, and marketing. And that’s a tasty recipe.

Peace.

Strategy for Content Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”  – Mahatma Gandhi

“Brand success is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” – What’s the Idea?

Brand success was more easily managed 10 years ago before many marketers ceded control of messaging to consumers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read and heard senior marketers say “We don’t own our brands anymore, consumers do.” Hell, Google the sentence (use quotes). And the sentiment is dead wrong. Imagine saying the same thing but substituting the words “produce” or “price” or “distribute.”

And today the markobabble of the day is not authenticity or transparency, it’s content. Content marketing, more specifically. The Alitmeter Group just published some quantitative research with three key data points worth sharing. All of which don’t bode well for proper brand management in the age of social.

1. 70% of marketers surveyed lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

2. 10% of marketers say their content marketing technologies are “fully integrated across people process and platforms.”

3. 40% of marketers surveyed say that the lack of interdepartmental coordination is leading to disparate tools used.

I love social, but it needs to be brand-managed. Not tactically managed. Done well, it helps set expectation for the brand and reinforce brand experience. Done poorly, it can undue lots of good work.

Peace.

 

Down with the data.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

My blog and consulting company are named What’s The Idea? To creative people an idea is a campaign-able meme; something that binds creative executions together so consumers can play them back and talk about the product. Big creative ideas are what marketers are looking for and spend millions on. Mostly, marketers don’t look to digital agencies for these ideas. Friends at Razorfish once told me they didn’t get a seat at the big boy table when it came to the big idea. This is changing, but slowly. Where digital agencies are thought to operate is down with the data.

As data collection tools grow and ROI tools refined, “down with the data” is not a bad place to be. Big ideas that appeal to the masses, however, are data supported not data driven. Too much data fogs the creative mind. There’s a trend among digital agencies to seek out traditional planners for idea stim. It’s a good first step to removing the sectarian approach practiced by agencies and marketers. I think removing the barriers between traditional and digital shops is the right thing to do. Granular and macro, used together, create better results. But the big, killer idea is still the center of gravity of great marketing.

Peace.

 

The curation economy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Question. Is Uber a software play or a curation play? I believe the latter. The end game is a ride from point A to point B. That’s what consumers want. Is it software enabled? Sure. But you are not getting to the airport or home from your pub crawl sitting on your iPhone.  So is it in the software business? Curation business? Or transportation business. (Many would say transportation but remember, Uber doesn’t own the cars or employ the drivers.)  Travis Kalanick, UberCEO, is right when he says he’s in the logistics business. His business is software-enabled and consumer-driven — but curation-based. Jeremiah Owyang calls this the sharing economy. Me thinks it’s closer to the curation economy.

Amazon started out in the ecommerce book business. Then it moved into the mass retail business. It morphed into a curation business when it allowed other retailers to use its platform. Then there’s Google. Google loves to say it’s a technology company. Most think it’s a search company. If you ask their CFO, s/he might say Google is an advertising company – that’s where the bank deposits come from. Or is it a curation company? Hmmm. Curating access to information through the algo. As my Norwegian aunt might have said “Tink about it.”

Peace. 

Tchotchke Comms.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

An oft-mentioned Goodby Silverstein mission suggests they focus on “making stuff people care about.”  It’s not an uncommon mission these days, especially as more ad and marketing revenue is tied to buildables. For Goodby, this seems to be working as a mission. It’s fun and memorable. But the reality is, it’s the job of marketers to make stuff (products) people buy. Agencies, therefore, need to make stuff that encourage people to buy. Knowing Goodby Silverstein as I do, they get this. They get that caring is a first step toward buying. I’m not worried about them. But a cottage industry of shops has been allowed to grow up building tchotchke communications that get attention, likes and pass-alongs but are light on buy.

cash register

I love social media and digital marketing. Done well. I believe digital advertising has the potential to far outpace traditional, half duplex (one way) advertising because it puts at consumer fingertips the ability to experience all the steps to a sale in a minutes. This, thanks to devices, media twitches and mobile connectivity. But the main body of practitioners are not there yet. They are still focused on trying to make stuff people care about. And that’s a shallow view. Once they make stuff that make people buy – that’s when the whoosh is going to happen. Can’t wait. Peace.

 

Born Again.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

T-Mobile and Sprint are in talks to merge. The two mobile carriers, each with 50 million U.S. subscribers, have well-established brands. What should the resulting brand be? Some might say T-Mobile has a little more cache, mostly due to smart, flashy CEO John Legere. Yet Sprint has been around for decades; America’s first all fiber optic network. Some brand and naming experts will suggest combining the two names into some clunky hybrid and go all “one plus one equals 3” on us. I say it time for a new name. A new mark. And a fresh start.

AT&T and Verizon are really strong brands. Each is spending hundreds of millions in advertising. The work is likeable, but shallow and noisy. It’s either campaign-for-campaign-sake or product showcase. People don’t love selling or advertising, they love brands. And AT&T and Verizon are missing this point.

The combined Sprint/T-Mobile brand has a chance to start from the ground up. Break the mold. Find the sweet spot customers care about and move the product and experience in that direction. Mr. Legere gets this with his moves to offer no contract mobile service. Sprint/T-Mobile should do a little brand spanking research – spank the AT&T and Verizon brands around and find some product and emotional weaknesses. Then write a killer brief and start with a new name.

Rebirth opportunities don’t come along that often. Peace.

Evidence and Story.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

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.

Brand Planning Technique.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was on the We Are Slightly Mad website yesterday and noticed a quote from Sun Tzu worth repeating. “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victor. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” This little gem went ink to parchment around 500 BC. In brand planning and marketing some are actually getting away with a tactics-first approach.  But only the few that course-correct around a strategy live on. Social media, let’s not forget, is a tactic; a tactic that has garnered close to a billion in annual revenue I’d guess.  Yet those are not marketing positive dollars for the most part, they are more like R&D dollars. The social media programs used to support strategy are the ones paying off.cooking technique

Metaphors and examples are the key to inspiring brand planning so I’ll drop a metaphor here. In great cooking there is technique and there are ingredients. As with the Sun Tzu quote both are needed, yet technique is most akin to strategy. My cooking gets better as I understand the various heating methods, preparation skills, complementary flavors and seasonings. As these techniques become more intuitive, creativity and possibility become more apparent. In brand planning, understating how and when to listen is technique. As Sherlock might say “hearing” can trump “listening,” so that, too, is technique. Redirecting, building trust, connecting with the interviewee – all technique. Also seeing patterns in data and behavior and the ability to predict behavior — technique.

When searching for good strategic planning people, talk about technique not ingredients. It’s even more important than the final product…the idea. (Did I just say that?) Peace.

 

Templates Suck.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I’m not a big template fan. They stifle natural creativity. A while back as director of marketing at Zude.com, a drag-and-drop web page building tool, I lobbied hard for no templates. The CTO and CEO understood where I was coming from but felt the masses when confronted with a blank white page would seize up. Better to give them some starter designs to build personal web pages. (So they could look like everybody else.) We were competing with Facebook when it had 18M users.

Facebook and MySpace were both template based products – database fed. Zude was more freehand. But expressive. The people who took the time to build their own pages (no HTML code was needed) created pages that looked beautiful – way more so than Face and My. There were also a lot of homely pages, mine included. But on my pages you could feel me. On my Facebook page – not so much.

In our jobs and lives we need to rely less on templates so we can experience new – experience more. Taking the annual marketing budget and shuffling the numbers is using a template. Revising the website using last year’s wire frame is templating. Sending out an email blast to a well-worn list? Templating. We all template but we need to do less of it. You smiling up there Mr. Jobs?

Peace.

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