Mr. Brand Hammer.

    The B word.

    brand planning tips

    The Recipe for Behavior Change.

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    I’ve had some time to think about my post from yesterday asking whether brand planners should focus on behavior change or attitude change and I have decided upon attitude change. Behavior change unbacked by a set of values is simply a transaction. A default to ease-of-use. A reflex. These can and do drive a lot of commerce, don’t get me wrong. Habit is something to be sought in marketing.  But brand planning is about ingrained habits. Emotional habits. Cognitive habits. And those come from thoughtful cognition.

    I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of brand strategies. My framework uses one claim and three proof planks. Claim without proof is not branding, it’s advertising. I’d venture to say 95% of my proof planks are attitude based. One A Day Vitamins, named after a behavior still needs to support the behavior with a why. Got Milk still has to support the behavior with a why.

    Trust me, changing behavior is a critical goal in marketing. But changing attitudes is the brand planner’s job. It’s the recipe for behavior change.

    Peace.

     

    How the Web Affects Marketing.

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    I am old enough to know what marketing was like before the advent of the internet. Before Google. When the telephone and printed business directories were the consumer research tools of the day. I speak to tons of marketing newbies and for most of them the “go to” tactic is search. Paid and organic.  It’s what they know, what they were weaned on.  But the web is a giant ocean with bays and tides and marshes and an array of currents that make successful search complicated and difficult.

    So-called search experts, who are mostly coders and analytics nerds, some with a bit of design sense, are the primary vendors of choice for small businesses today. These experts position themselves as search scientists but are really website developers.  Certainly, not marketers. Go to their websites and sniff around. Very little marketing finesse.

    Before the web, marketers had to be more strategic. People were their customers, not the algorithm, not search terms. The product and its inherent value were the foundation of marketing. Not the ebb and flow of the internet. I’m not advocating old school shit. I love the web. (It’s the only way one can collapse all the steps to a sale into a single transaction.) But it’s best used downstream as one arrow in the quiver. It’s not the quiver.

    Product. Place. Price and Promotion should still rule the day. (Positioning, the key to brand planning, is a function of all four.)

    Peace.

     

    The B word.

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    Bravery is big these days. A lot of agencies and marketers have tied their brand promises to the word, including David and Goliath and Mondelez – a couple of forerunners. And why not? Who doesn’t want to be brave? It’s as American as apple pie. I, too, rely on the word in my practice. A boast I proudly share with clients (after signing them) is that there will likely be one word in the brand strategy they may find objectionable. They’ll love the sentiment. Feel the strategy. Know in their bones I get them. They’ll proudly nod at the defensible claim. Yet often, they will sheepishly ask “Do we have to use that one word?”

    A $5B health care system asked “Do we have to use the word systematized?”

    The world’s largest tech portal asked “Do we have to call consumers browsers?”

    The country’s 10th largest daily newspaper asked “Do we have to say ‘We know where you live?’”

    The list goes on.

    The point is, brand strategy needs to be brave.  If it’s not, is it really strategic? If your brand strategy is not bold, it will be a long, expensive build toward effectiveness. And may weaken your brand planks. (Three planks support your claim.) This brave approach takes brand strategy out of insight land and into claim land. Out of observation mode, into prideful attack mode.

    Oh, and the answer to my clients one-word objection? “No, you don’t have to use the word. The creative people will create the words. But you must use the strategy.” And everybody, myself included, bobble-head in relief. Peace.

    An Exercise.

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    Boilerplate in the marketing world is the copy used on press releases at the end of a press announcement. It usually is preceded by the word About (insert name of company.) Boiler plate is almost always unimaginative. It usually contains a rote overview of company history, highlights, accomplishments and scale.

    The exercise I am suggesting for brand planners is to ask company stakeholders, during discovery, to cobble together some boilerplate for their place of business or brand.  As an exercise, it will probably be best to have the stakeholder do it before the interview, as it will really bring the session to its knees. It’s hard work.  It might also be good to have the writer limit the boilerplate to three sentences. Last week I posted about what makes a brand or company “famous.” Crafting boilerplate is an extension of that idea.

    Most people go through this exercise when creating their personal LinkedIn presence. It’s a boiled down overview of one’s self for the profile.

    Doing boiler plate for a person is harder than doing boiler plate for a company. In both cases it’s an exercise in concision…and an exercise in branding.

    Peace.

     

    Brand Planning Technique.

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    Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy an online educational video tutoring site, began his business by uploading math instruction videos to YouTube. Part of his secret sauce was making math instruction interesting.  If instruction lacks vocal intonation (drone, drone) it didn’t connect.  Been there.  If it was overly flourished, same thing. His approach, like that of other good teachers, was to be in the middle. Connect. Watch what students tuned in to and package that using good pedagogy.

    As a brand planner, I sometimes go into situations where the topic is less than exciting.  Healthcare and banking come to mind. When interviewing SMEs (subject matter experts) or consumers using Salman’s approach is important. The interviewer needs to show interest; not academic interest but true category interest.  The interviewer needs to find ways to bring the subject to life. To be engaged and earn trust. Personal stories are a good way to prime the pump. Hearing them. Telling them.  Some will say interrupting people when they talk is not polite, however in this case it shows energy and interest. (Do it carefully however.)

    Be a good listener, a careful watcher of body language, and most of all be human. React, respond, find emotional attachments. Joy and happy endings are also nice, though may not in all cases be appropriate.

    Once again, good teaching and learning practices come into play in brand planning. Peace.

    Hunt For Heroes.

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    If you haven’t yet guessed, I’m a big fan of brand planning. It’s a fundy (as Keith Hernandez would say) for proper marketing.  One of my favorite brand discovery pastimes is hunting for heroes.

    My enthusiasm for heroes goes way back. While working at McCann-Erickson one of my favorite interview questions was “Tell me about one of your heroes.”  A fairly opened-ended question, it helped me discern a candidate’s social and/or professional proclivities. And the depth of those proclivities.

    Today, in brand discovery, I’m always looking for category heroes. When social media first came along, I hunted up Posters. Original content creators.  Finding heroes was easy then. They had big audiences and important ideas to share. Heroes, shared for the betterment of the public. It started with people like Kandee Johnson, Melting Mama and dana boyd. But then the social web begat “influencers” whose intentions were more personal and skin deep. Less heroic. Posters also begat Pasters — people who curated others’ thoughts — also making it harder to finding category heroes.

    Heroes tend to be selfless. Their agendas are the agenda of the people. (Not unlike Native American chiefs.) Heroes, like the tide, lifts all boats. Finding heroes helps me through my thought process. It quickens the blood. Makes my insights tighter. More real.

    One of my contemporary category heroes is Aisha Adams.  She works in the area of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. She’s consumed by the topic. She shares to a fault, has an amazing sensitivity, and is most definitely part of the solution.  Heroes are out there — it just takes a little more work to find them.

    Wake up every morning during your brand planning assignment and hunt up some heroes. It’s sooo worth it.

    Peace.

     

    The Commodity Promise.

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    The brand promise or in my lexicon “claim” is often a very common promise. The common or commodity promise is a blight on the branding world. Let’s look at healthcare or hospitals as an example – a place where doctors do medical procedures.  Docs and hospitals often share the promise “making patients well.”  If you were to wrangle all the healthcare promises in the country, 90% will be the same.  A commodity promise.

    Getting past the commodity promise is hard work. And work not easily done by marketing staffers; it requires a specialist. A deep-digging brand planner.

    A big hospital in the northeast had a marketing director who fancied himself a creative person. He decided he wanted the hospital tagline to be (and I will paraphrase a bit) “Your wellness means the world.”  Say it enough times in radio and TV ads and people might just believe it. That’s adverting not branding.

    After having done some a little bit of discovery on the brand, I came up with a competing promise “Where every bed is precision.” It’s not a tagline, but a brand strategy.  With this as the claim, supported by three proof planks, the hospital would have had a brand strategy. See the difference? Not a commodity promise.

    Peace.

     

     

    Brand Discovery Advice.

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    Robert Eichner a successful marketer and cohort here in Asheville shared something his dad Arthur told him many years ago “When you ask for advice you get money, when you ask for money you get advice.”

    This is some sound counsel. In fact, I’ve lived by it for decades. The money I have made at What’s The Idea? is directly attributable to the interviews I conduct through my brand planning rigor. Until the machines take over it is people who buy stuff. So, it is people who fuel the strategy.  Of course, market data, trends, competition and culture factor in, but it’s the words and deeds people share that form the brand claim and proof array.

    I’ve never had to pay people to ask them a few questions about brands, markets and buying behaviors. Never. In fact, once you pay for advice, it’s probably tainted.

    Ask questions, ask advice as Arthur Eichner suggests, and you’ll get a wealth of information.  Brand planners are interested by nature. They are not data collectors — they are learners. And organizers. Data only supports and proves our learning.

    Ask and you shall receive.

    Peace.

     

     

    White Room (No Black Curtains.)

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    A cultural anthropologist, brand planner and journalist walk into a bar. Well maybe not the journalist. The bartender says what would you like. They all three say nothing. That sounds like a bad joke but it’s the topic of this post. When you come to a people, a consumer set or news story, you should aspire to bring nothing to the table.

    One thing I’ve learned about brand planning is to go all tabula rasa or clean slate on an assignment. That is, I don’t bring any preconceived ideas with me about the people, the market or the selling environment. It’s so hard.

    Many years ago, I was selling ads to the CEO of AT&T Microelectronics. In his spacious Berkley Heights, NJ office, standing right by the table was a cardboard cutout of a man. A customer, he explained. To always remind him of their importance.

    If I ever leave the confines of my home office for a real office the first room I build will be a white room. There will be no adornments. No pictures. No stimuli. No nothing. A white table, white chairs and white walls. This will be a collective reminder that we (client too) must come at an assignment without bias.

    (At another AT&T meeting, this one at AT&T Consumer Products, I was given a tour of a room in the R&D facility that had zero echo. The floor was suspended, the walls baffled. Total sound absorption. No echo. This might be my second conference room investment. Hee hee.)

    Coming to an assignment clean is critical. It maxims freshness.

    Peace.

     

    Apocryphal Brand Craft

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    I was reading some marko-babble on a research company website the other day and my bullshit meter went off. The sentence that woke it was “Turn your brand into a religion.”  Yeah, no.  

    Most marketers would warm up to a sentence like this. Who doesn’t want a fealty to their brand that sticks to the soul? But face it, it’s an overpromise. When we are talking this type affinity we are talking about a product or service, not a brand.  I’ve brought Hellman’s Mayonnaise all my life. The New York Times is my only life-long newspaper subscription, my tents and ski jackets are all Marmot. Not because of the brand managers, but because of the product. Read: product preference.

    It’s aspirational to want an almost religious attachment to a brand, that I get. But when you put brand before product, it’s because you don’t have a really good product. Once you remove the brand from the product and promote the former, thinking it’s some ethereal and malleable construct, you’re kidding yourself. You are storytelling.

    Brand management is hard work. It’s scientific. Measurable. Rules-based. But religion? Yeah, no!

    Peace.