Comfortable?

    Brand Claim Efficacy.

    brand claim

    Callous Is the New Black.

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    When in the ad business I always wanted to have my own agency.  My dad had an agency, I guess I wanted to walk in his shoes. I was going to name that agency “Foster, Bias and Sales.”  As in, foster consumer attention, create bias toward the product and generate sales for the client.  Even then I was all about the bag, about the balance sheet. At some point advertising became less a creative art and more about brand growth.  

    Today in my branding practice, I feel the same way.  But I’m leave much of the foster and bias to the agencies while spending time focusing on positioning and organizing brands for sales.

    Many brand planners have a positioning angle.  “Brand transformation for the experience economy” is one I came across today.  “Amygdala branding” is another one (not really, I didn’t want to offend). On my Twitter account I say “Redistributing business wealth through brand strategy.” It’s like you can insert almost any word before or after the word “brand” and jump into the strategist arena.   

    Well, let’s cut the art and try a new approach: How about “Callous Branding.”  A straight up sales focus. What does it take to “sell more, to more, more often, at higher prices?” (Thanks Sergio Zyman.)  Why not a callous declaration of customer value and brand value?  One driven by the kind of claim every employee can measure themselves against. And every sales director, CFO and CEO can really, really lay into.

    Callous is the new black.

    Peace.

     

     

    Comfortable?

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    In my business I have clients. And many people would agree the first order of business in a service industry is to make the client happy – make them comfortable. When companies need brand strategy help, it’s typically because they’re experiencing some chaos in their marketing. So, to a degree, they are already uncomfortable. The question is, is it my job to make them comfortable? Well, yes. Certainly. But only comfortable in their decisions about the brand plan. Comfort resides in the decisions they make that will improve business.

    But getting to those decisions can be discomforting. And that, too, is my job.

    I’ve written a number of times in this blog how some of my brand claims contain a single word clients find awkward. They approve of the strategy but the mention of one word unsettles them. It’s like if you have a big nose, you don’t like to talk about noses. My response to these clients is “we don’t have to use the word” – my claims are not taglines – “but we do have to follow the idea.” With that explanation, I almost always get agreement. “Leave it to the agency to deliver the word.”

    Sometimes I wonder if my job it to make clients comfortable to uncomfortable. I am not in the gladhanding business, I’m in the improving business business. And you can’t do that without breaking a few eggs.

    So long as you are honest. So long as you are truthful. So long as you are being true to the product and the consumer, a little discomfort is healthy.

    Peace.   

     

     

    Brand Claims Need Proof Planks.

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    An accountant and consulting company I know announced a brand overhaul yesterday. They redesigned the logo and changed the company description. The descriptor used to say “Accountants and Success Consultants,” today it reads “Advisors and Accountants.” The new descriptor beats the old in so far as specificity goes.

    The company’s new tagline is “Strength In Certainty.” Effectively, it is the brand claim. Everyone wants an accountant that is certain. One who knows the tax code and can give optimal advice. So certainty works here. It’s binary. Black or white.

    But every brand claim needs support planks or as I call them brand planks; the evidentiary principles that allows consumers to believe the claim. In everything I read about the brand claim, I found no organized support planks. Without support, a claim is just a claim. It’s just advertising.

    Many brand consultants or so-called brand advisor/experts, fall short when it comes to proof planks. And without proof in your brand strategy, you are missing the most important component.

    Peace.    

     

    Pandering Palaver.

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    I’ve been thinking a lot about brand strategy claims lately. A brand strategy claim is a brief, almost poetic, statement of value which predisposes a customer to buy. At my brand house, it boils down a brand’s top good-ats with customer care-abouts. Endemic care-abouts.  (I may care about being a good father, but UBS investments aren’t going me make me such.)  

    When you borrow non-endemic brand values for your claim, it’s disingenuous.  There are a lot of brand planners who think they will win hearts and minds using a pandering palaver of claims.  But when you promise to fix a person’s (or planet’s) weakness with a product that has nothing to do with it, it’s cheating.

    Some brand planners, during discovery want to dig into company values.  But they define values in woo-woo terms. My definition of values is closer to benefits.  Having great social values is the price of doing business; it’s not brand position. For instance, Patagonia positions around sustainability, but I would venture to say product durability is a stronger position and brand claim. Imply sustainability. Let the creative teams color the work with it, but position around product durability.

    Brand strategy claims have a responsibility to move customers closer to a sale – not make them better people.

    Peace.

    PS. I’m about as woo woo as you are going to find. I live in Asheville. I haven’t taken a paper bag from a deli or bagel store in decades. Woo-woo R Us. Just not in my brand claims.

     

    Stake Your Claim. Your Brand Claim.

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    I used to think 3 proof planks was the way to go for my brand strategy framework. You know, the theory of three – three being, the number of things humans can readily remember.  It was a construct borrowed from the political arena. The more I read the political news though, the more I am beginning to think three is too many. With weeks to go before the elections, political platforms are rampant: Inflation, Migration and Crime.  Or, Abortion, Guns and Infrastructure.  Wait a month and the platforms will all be different.  Three is only good if they remain the same. And that is the discipline of the brand planner. Find the 3 key care-abouts and good-ats and stick with them. Through thick and thin. (Politicians don’t think that way.  They change platforms like underwear.)

    Brand strategy at What’s The Idea? is “one claim and three proof planks.”  The claim binds the brand together. ZDNet is for doers not browsers.   Northwell Health is a systematized approach to improving healthcare. Sweet Loren’s is craft cookies au naturel.  These are strategies, not taglines.  Ad agencies can come up with their own campaign memes so long as they deliver the claim. But a claim without proof planks — immovable proof planks — is advertising. Or pell-mell, tactical marketing.

    Research your consumers, boil down the key values, stake your claim, and build your brand through proof. Easy.

    Peace.

     

    Fast and Easy….Bad.

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    I asked a cohort with an aspiring web business what s/he wanted consumers to take away from the web experience – the brand experience – and the answer was it’s “fast and easy” for the user and “a traffic source and stress free” for the vendors who pay to be on the site.   

    Consumers and vendors want these things, I know.  I worked at a web start up that wasn’t easy to use. And when something is not easy it’s not apt to be fast.  But today, my friends, fast and easy are the price of entry in a web site or app. (The only time you want to push fast and easy is when the functionality of the product or service is expected to be plodding and complicated — read: trips to the DMV or reading a financial disclosure statement.) Most of the time brand strategy should not be about price of entry values.

    The values you need to position around should be human and endemic to the category. The more emotional, the better. Emotions are flypaper to consumers.

    I watch Hallmark movies with my wife to balance the bang, bang, bang stuff I favor.  The movies are all the same story-wise but never fail to get me to tear up at the end. It’s a formula. When planners are mining the brand claim, they need to think emotional and endemic. Not just in a passage in the brief but in the claim itself.

    Heavy lifting admittedly. But your creative team will appreciate it.

    Peace.   

     

     

    Taglines and Brand Claims.

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    Brand strategy claims, developed independent of an ad campaign are the way to go.  Taking a copywriter’s last sentence and turning it into a tagline is, forgive me, lazy. I can see why people do it, but its not very thoughtful. Or strategic.

    I’m in the brand strategy business. The deliverable I provide to clients is a brand claim plus three brand planks, also referred to as support planks.  The claim by itself is nothing more than advertising…telling people what you are (to them).  It’s the planks that carry the water — that make believers out of consumers.  

    The brand claim is strategic, not creative. That’s to give creative teams the ability to connect with culture in a timely fashion. To make ads that are more motivating and lively. Perhaps more fun and memorable.  But I’ve had a run lately of brand claims that have become taglines. Partly because they are short. Maybe offering a bit of poesy. (Not my words a colleague’s.)

    While on this roll I seem to have settled on shorter claims. More pregnant claims. Even two word efforts.  And I think is may be bleeding into the area of creative, which is not my day job.

    Sometimes longer and more explicit is better. So long as it is not a compound sentence or filled with conjunctions. One idea yes.  Explicit yeser.

    Peace.