Yearly Archives: 2016

Brand Strategy’s Slow Creep

By
Steve Poppe
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0

One of the coolest things I get to do as a brand planner is sit back and watch a company or product transform after a new brand strategy is presented. The word viral would be an overstatement, because “one claim and three proof planks” aren’t quickly acculturated into a company. When properly sold in, however, and that means well beyond the marketing department, a brand strategy can take hold fairly quickly. It will alter the work of the SEO team — all of a sudden new key words begin to pop in as traffic drivers. Company language in meetings tilts in a slightly new direction. And once a company language changes it’s not long before partner and consumers language follow.

The day after I present final brand strategy, I’m checking the website to see if anyone has made changes to the home page. Week two I’m checking new videos to see if the company Is-Does has morphed. I look to newly minteed press releases for changes to the first sentence and the “About” paragraph. My expectation is that things will change immediately. (Doe-eyed Poppe.)

Strategy work is a lot less requited than design work. When a new logo and tagline hits the street, it’s easily seen. It’s fast and obvious. But when a brand strategy hits, it’s often a slow creep. That doesn’t keep me from checking right away. Hee hee. 

Peace.

 

The Black Hole That is Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

black hole

According to the NYT today, the definition of black holes is “the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape.” Leave it to the Times to put something so complex into human terms. Einstein, when talking about the geometry of the universe likened it to a bed mattress, which only moves and reacts when a sleeper moves. It’s shape distorting with the movement of matter an energy. So basically, there are still some things that are quite hard to explain. And that’s brings me to branding.

Ask 100 people about branding and you’ll get 80 answers. From “branding is an empty vessel into which you pour meaning?,” a favorite of mine, to “”the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of generating segregation among competition and building loyalty among customers,” which is straight out of Wikipedia (did I say straight?).

Branding today is marketing’s black hole. Everyone is talking about is, everyone is doing it, everyone thinks they know what it is, but few can articulate it. For all the frameworks brand experts have developed and all the webinars and presentation on the topic, few have been able to boil it down. To a simple algorithm. Or formula.

The framework used by What’s The Idea? is one such…and it works. At the top of the framework is a brand claim. A claim of value; something customer wants and something the brand delivers. Every brand then needs proof for that claim. I use 3 proof planks for my framework. The theory of three.

If you have a claim and proof array and you demonstrate it every day, you are brand building. You are branding.

Mattress indeed.

Peace.

 

 

Bad Brand Magic.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

magic cauldron

Brands are meaningless without products. It used to be easy in the old days, before service companies came about. Everything was clean; you bought things that went thump on a table or desk. You bought stuff. Stuff had qualities to which you could associate value. Then along came services like insurance and banking — and value was derived from process and experience. In this world price became even more important.

Fast forward 30 years past the service economy to the information economy, fueled by integrated circuits and computers, business accelerants, and product have become a much smaller part of the economy. The science of marketing in this economy has become “magical.” And not in a good way. In a way where magic is unexplainable. Enter the overuse and obfuscation of the word brand. Brand has become the ephemera around which fees and silly ads are built… around which logos and taglines are traded.

But let me take a breath. Branding has evolved.

Service companies can be brands. They can establish muscle memory for the value of a process or experience. But it takes a framework. It takes, as I like to call it, an “organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”

I’ve done brand strategy this work for billion dollar organizations, service groups within billion dollar orgs and small businesses who sell to billion dollar orgs. And you know what? Every service is the same and every service is different. If you’d like to take the bad magic out of your marketing, write me (steve at whatstheidea) and I’ll share some examples of powerful service brand strategies. Peace.

 

Brand Strategy Makes the Marketing World Smaller.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

V__CEB9[1]

My uncle Al Heckel was a great sailor. Renowned along the south shore of Long Island for his sailing prowess, Al used to ask me as a kid to crew with him, something I wasn’t too keen on. Too slow for me. At his funeral, his grandson Hankie mentioned Al used to say “sailing makes the world big again.” Love that quote.

Brand strategy, at a place and time where there are more marketing tools, media options, technologies and measures than even before, does quite the opposite. It makes the world small again. Why? Because a brand’s value proposition is limited to the most essential things. What customers most care about and what the brand is absolutely good at. Care-abouts and Good-ats.

New products, line extensions, customer experience, marketing communications are all easier when following a brand strategy (1 claim, 3 proof planks). That white piece of paper a freelancers looks at when asked to create an ad or brochure is by many measures more quickly done and more powerful, when following a brand strategy. 

An investment in a brand strategy is an investment in business. Peace.

 

 

Learn This.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Learning is a topic I’ve written about before but today it’s the subject of the entire post.

I’ve been in the ad and marketing business since 1978 when a mail-slinger at my dad’s shop Poppe Tyson. It took me until 2011, while director of marketing at Teq, an educational development company, to understand the importance of learning in marketing. (Yeah, yeah, rabbit and hare thing.)

I’ve had lots of mentors over the years: a kid who ran the AT&T ad business with an iron fist and mind, a be-sotted ex-marine who was the country’s first million dollar a year copywriter, and a copy-contact, agency chief who built a powerful global brand that lived well beyond his years. None taught me the practice of learning in marketing.

To understand the role of learning in branding and marketing you have to understand teaching. Teaching is process. Learning the result. There are poor teachers, there are no poor learners. My stint in the education field helped me understand this. Learning why one product is better than another. Learning why one service has more value. The best learning is not forced but self-actualized. When someone comes to a learned moment on their own, it sticks. It’s important.

So you marketers out there. Focus on the learning first and the proper teaching technique will come to you. Most marketers are 85% teach and 15% learn. Flip it and your depth of success will change.

Peace.

 

On-demand. Logged and Tagged.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I had three meetings yesterday in the city (NYC) all of which touched upon the on-demand economy. My first was with a strategist leaving full-time employ for a freelance arrangement. Following a merger and reorg, this senior employee was thought to be more valuable as an on-demand or freelance employee. This planner also now has a business card from another agency, as chief planning officer, for use in on-demand situations. My picture, BTW, is on a couple of company websites as a brand strategist (stringer?), but these are just bits in the ether.

we work

My two other meetings were at We Work campuses. We Work offices are “rent ‘em when you need’em” places that provide full office services, on demand. It’s a wonderful business model if not a little “Just Mayo.” The upside of We Work facilities is they tend to be peopled by a younger generation of workers who are good fits for the agile on-demand economy. For start-ups and end-ups, We Work is a great solution. I suspect We Work’s will soon come in flavors and one day account for 40% of NYC rent, but that’s a tale for another day.

Suffice it to say, the on-demand nature of business today is an exciting response to the times. In a deck I did for JWT, Microsoft’s ad agency a few years ago, I called foretold of this phenomenon with a slide on the “Logged and Tagged Workplace.” A place where individual workers become less important and their work product and assets more. Another cool, if unsettling, concept.

Peace.

Is Creative a Beauty Pageant?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

BBDO has made a huge impact on advertising and consumerism with its call-to-arms “It’s all about the work.” a reference that explains its constantly superior creative product. There have been creative hot shops over the years, the flavor of the year if you will, but BBDO is always up there. This year it won the Gunn Report’s most creative network for the tenth straight time.

Most agency creative chiefs and executives will tell you it’s about the work. But is it?

In the marketing world there is only one litmus: sales. Sales leadership backed by market share and revenue power. Money creates scale and scope. And advertising. Can’t fund good work without money. Advertising can touch the hearts, minds and souls of consumers but so can a good movie. A great song. What it needs to do is move a consumer closer to a sale.

Advertising is also about being in the right place at the right time. Ask someone in sales. Sure sales surround helps, but nothing says cha-ching like a consumer ready to buy. When ready to buy a consumer who thinks about your brand, prefers your brand, and understands its value is a consumer that buys your brand.

Branding is about ideas that infuse the soul. Ideas that create preference. That’s the work marketers care about. Creating muscle memory for value. Not for an ad. Ads can contribute mightily, but it’s not the beauty pageant some make it out to be.

Peace.

PS. This post is not meant to suggest BBDO’s work is not effective. The post is about redefining what the work is.

 

Kola House.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I like PepsiCo’s idea to launch a new theme restaurant in NYC called Kola House. It’s daring and smart. Especially for a carbonated soft drink in second place, losing year-over-year volume. Not every marketing issue can be fixed by advertising and it looks like Pepsi is trying some new things. This multimillion dollar bet should energize the brand and, more importantly energize the marketing team — something Pepsi sorely needs.

Using the Kola nut as their north star and Chelsea in NYC as their launch pad, Pepsi has a shot at adding relevance to a brand for millions of typically uninterested people. It’s an unfair fight in what once was a cola war and is, now, no longer. The learning and outputs of Kola House may have great impact on the business. A new drink. A new snack. Perhaps a new line of clothing or even a new app.

We’ll find out. When you change the game good things can happen. Dialing down the Pepsi, celebrating the Kola and creating a new experience is an exciting marketing test lab. Dare I say, it’s refreshing?

Peace.

Persistence.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

One of the nicest compliments I’ve had while in the consulting business is I’m persistent. In business development, I reach out to prospects and provide them with little nuggets that might help their strategy and marketing. I do if for years. Sometimes I get a meeting, other times not. Timing is everything. “You surely are persistent,” I’ve been told. So long as I don’t get the sense that persistent equals annoying, I stay the course.

Brands need to be persistent. They need to provide a predictable and expected experience and constantly remind everyone of the fact. Though brand strategy. Brand strategy is an organized proof array, anchored to an idea.

Persistence is action. It’s not rote repetition. That’s why I’m always pushing clients to seek new proof. The new proof is what makes things fresh. New expressions of claim and proof. Exciting and memorable expressions.

That’s brand building. It’s not called brand stasis. Persistence in branding yields value and results. Always building.

Peace.

 

 

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