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    Brand Planning

    Passion.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Is there a word more used these days in marketing meetings than “passion?” I write and speak about marko-babble a lot — marko-babble defined as words so often used and watered down, they become meaningless. It’s like they come out of a handbook. Authenticity, transparency, ROI all come to mind. I’m not saying “passion” is marko-babble, it’s a price of entry, a means of staying  truly alive in your business category, but in brand planning, it is actually a negative word.

    For less than a day, I changed my LinkedIn profile to read: “I am a passionless brand planner.  That’s right passionless.”  Passion can cloud the judgment. Parents are passionate about love of their children. Is that why many miss teenage maladaptive behaviors?  Company officers are passionate about their product and services.  Does that put a gauze over their ability to see market realities?  Brand planners must be ever-energetic in their search for insights, patterns and cultural observations surrounding commerce and purchase behavior, but passion should not enter into it. Peace!

    Where is the music?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I was driving home from hiking yesterday and happen to be listening to Taylor Swift on a country music station. There’s a reason Ms. Swift is a superstar.  She has a great voice, fun lyrics and her music has great hooks.   It is not like she’s singing about things we haven’t heard before – she is.  High school loves, growing pains and simple little life hurdles and lessons.  But because these stories are put to music and surrounded by wholesome Americana packaging, they  jump to life. Her school bleachers are your school bleachers.

    And this got me thinking about brand planning.  Plans of the brand variety need a little music in them. The great ones do. What does that mean?  Well, they can’t just be cool, rational, business-winning directives. Readers of WTI know my brand plans consist of “one idea, supported by three planks” And the best brand plans tug at some heart strings.  They need a little art next to the science.

    Kevin Allen, in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, talks about “Generosity of Spirit” as a guiding principle his company perscribes when thinking about corporate language and direction, and I agree.  Though music come in many forms, it has an emotional wrapper that takes simple ideas and elevates them. As you look at your brand plan — the guiding principle for your brand — ask yourself “Where is the music?” Peace!

     

     

     

    Don’t F with nature.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I apologize for the potty word, not the invective.  At Rollins College I studied anthropology and a piece of learning that has carried forward quite well in my career is the idea of “functionalism.” It suggests that every cultural phenomenon is the result of some function in the community. This theory along with the Darwin’s natural selection (which suggests positive physical and morphological traits are selected for for future generations), comprise the two key rules I use when brand planning – trying to find an idea and organizing principle under which to conduct brand commerce.

    If you are going to grow crops as a farmer, it’s important to know what type of soil you have. What the minerals are. What annual rainfall is? How much sun the field gets. Predation too. In other words, you understand the natural order? It’s a key pursuit in brand planning too.

    The natural order in brand planning is not found by asking “How do I make more money?” then working backwards.  Yet that’s how many commercial enterprises roll. They start with the money and deconstruct. The converse is often true when it comes to start-ups. They construct. And as Facebook and Twitter will tell you, not always with monetization as a starting point.  The most successful start-ups follow nature then build. The least successful start-ups lose sight of nature and are governed by instant cash. Companies that lose sight of nature, spend time genetically engineering results and upset the natural order.

    If you know what’s natural in your category, you can better predict what will be natural for consumers. Peace!

    Doing Good’s Work.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Doing good’s work is the brand idea I wrote not too long ago for a not-for-profit called Bailey’s Café, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.  A noble, noble women by the name of Stefanie Siegel allowed me to participate and attempt to organize her brand. Check out the site. Jay Leno, is a fan.

    For about 7 months, I’ve been working at a for-profit in the education space.  The goal of that company and brand, not dissimilar from the goals of all educational companies, is to improve student achievement. Again, noble, noble work.

    For 5 years I did strategic planning and marketing in healthcare, the objective of which was to convey a systematized approach to improving patient outcomes in the communities it served. Noble.   Today I read about how HCA hospital corporation’s profitability is spawning purchases of a number of other hospitals across the country by private equity firms, hoping to cash in on certain margins that can be squeezedand others that can be expanded.  

    Somewhere between selflessness and profit is where America ethos lies. Brands that see this, be they for-profit or not, are the brands that win.  They are also the brands I would like to plan for. Even Doctors Without Borders needs someone with a sharp pencil watching over them. Let’s all try to do good’s work. Peace!

    Brand Planning and the Natural Order.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    For the first time in over a century the Elwha River in Washington state is running free.  Dammed up for reasons that made sense a long time ago, the gub-ment has decided to tear down those mud walls. And the salmon and others, with mud in their eyes, are starting to reclaim the river that made them flourish. So we found a work around for the original function of the dams and are making ecological and planetary progress by letting the natural order reestablish itself.  In a few years, when we screw up, we’ll simply “stick a few stem cells on it” and all will be right – that’s not a good future.   

    Why talk about the Elwha? Because good brand planning is a bit like understanding the natural order.  If a planner truly gets the organic flow of a product and service, then s/he havs a great foundation.  Many planners, marketers, ad agency campaign makers don’t get that flow, they just get the flow of money. They manage the flow of money and mortgage the brand. This approach builds dams. And culverts.  I believed Steve Jobs when he said he wants to market things consumers will need. You can buy the market, but that’s despotism and doesn’t create good brand will. Create product consumers will need, by understating the flow.

    Brand planners need to get the natural order of their category and product before they attempt to benefit. Peace!

     

    An important brand planning question.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The secret sauce of the What’s the idea? brand planning rigor (WTI is my blog, but also a brand consultancy I had for 3 years prior to coming on board at Teq) is the battery of questions I use when interviewing company stakeholders. Finding out what a company does best and matching it with what the market wants most is the goal.  I may have just found a new question.  The inspiration was an amazing story today in The New York Times of Lonnie G. Thompson, a man in search of proof that global temperatures are rising.

    The secret sauce question is most powerful when asked of an individual, yet it can be altered to apply to a company. Let’s stay with the individual, for simplicity’s sake:  

    What is your life’s work?

    Not an easy question to answer.  Or is it? Most will probably say something like “Be a good parent.”  Or “Be a good spouse.”  Maybe “Leave the world a little better place.” Perhaps “Be a better person.”  Following up these answers with probes will get you to the meat of the discussion. Using the question with a company, however, may get bogged down in “mission statement miasma,” but don’t let it.  A “life’s work” has to have import. If a company has a hard time answering, it likely will have a have a hard time branding it.

    As my Norwegian aunt Inga might have said “Tink about it.” Peace.       

    Hierarchy of Likes.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I was in the Bronx Friday night at the Met Yankee game. Don’t ask.  And for all the falderal it was quite civil. I didn’t fly my Met colors, nor did I instigate.  I just did the late 1960s Fillmore West clap and watched me some hardball.  One thing I took away from the game, though, was an insight that for all of people’s preferences, divides and loyalties – if you find a point of common ground more important, you can create dialog. 

    At one point during the national anthem I felt a 9/11 moment resulting from the video.  It brought the entire stadium together as one (in my mind). It pointed to something bigger than a baseball rivalry. And on two other occasions during the game I spoke with a couple of guys  who noticed my Pearl Jam shirt.  We connected on something that was perhaps even more important to us than a baseball game. As I walked along River Avenue leaving the game, a guy quietly said in passing “Yellow Ledbetter.”  I only half heard it until it registered, then I looked back and “peaced” him with a knowing smile. A brother.

    The insight is this: You can always ladder up common ground or affinity with someone you don’t necessarily agree with. It takes work, and thought, and open-mindedness.  It’s a hunt worth pursuing. So marketers and planner dig in.  Peace!     

    Taglines as Word Grabs.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I don’t know why colleges don’t get branding. At its most basic a brand starts with a tagline  — a 2 to 5 lyrical “word grab” of company or product intent or mission.  Tagline’s are often campaign ideas written by ad agencies, that are so well received they find their way under the logo. For years. Mostly misunderstood, taglines lock up with logos and lie like faded wallpaper in poorly lit hallways.

    Hofstra University has a new tagline: Pride and Purpose. It’s not 3/4s bad.  I’m pretty sure the word Pride refers to Hofstra’s mascot…a group of lions. Pride is a great motivating word in brand planning – one I chase all the time.  And Purpose is what all great university educations are supposed to engender in students.  The fact is though, when a good tagline does not support the advertising – and I mean every ad – someone is not doing their job.  You can’t tell the world you are all about Pride and Purpose then make a non-supportive, generic claim.  You just can’t do it.  And if you do, the tagline and strategy are either wrong or the leadership is.  Sorry to go all hard butt on Hofstra, but they just came off of 8 years of a campaign called “the edge” which was built around an art director design frame showing an arrow in all the print work.  It’s incredible to me that any academic institution would not know how to create a claim and prove it. And Hofstra is not alone.  The entire college and unversity body of work is abysmal. Peace!

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