Brand Planning

    Passion.

    0

    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!

    Total Immersion.

    0

    “You gotta be in it to win it, like Yserman” is a favorite quote of mine. From a Kid Rock song.  

    My business is set up for total immersion. I typically do a brand strategy in a condensed period of time; ideally one month. I’m all in during that month. Everything I read, watch on TV, see on a tee-shirt or bumper sticker informs my thinking about the brand, its targets and buying culture.

    Whenever I find an assignment dragging out over a “couple, two, tree” (sic) months – a little Brooklyn color – the immersion wanes. And I need to ramp up again. One time while working on a cool Microsoft project, I took on another assignment for a global supply chain thingie. It was crazy complex and I pooped the bed. My insights were worthy but the boil-down never happened. I didn’t charge for my time. Total immersion didn’t happen.

    Brand planning, at least my brand planning, is not a multitasking kind of pursuit. It’s full tilt boogie.  

    Peace.

     

     

    Noise cancelling.

    0

    noise cancelling headphonesWhen I was a stupid kid, I had a nice office on the 14th floor overlooking Park Avenue South in NYC.  Today, I know $200,000 a year executives who work in cubes on Lex and 47th. Ten feet from their admins.  I know kids tell you they can listen to music and do their math homework, but sometimes work just needs to be quiet. Quiet outbound and quiet inbound.  That’s why God, Allah, Krishna or whomever invented noise cancelling headphones. A new way of doing business. A new solution.

    We must continue to adapt, as we have with the cube vs. real estate cost scenario, though one thing is for certain: noise will never leave us. It’s a constant.  Many marketing bloggers, digital execs and analytic software salespeople love to talk about noise.  Me too.  Brand planning is a noise canceller. It provides the harmony a consumer hears that is memorable.  Like a good hook in a song, the selling ideas in a brand plan are ordered, complete, fulfilling and replicable.

    Hey marketers, hey c-levels, ask yourselves “What idea do you have that cuts through the noise?” Unless you have a good brand idea and brand plan, you are the noise.  Hee hee. Peace.

    Anthropology and Brand Planning.

    0

    Cultural anthro-pology is something I learned to love at Rollins College. Margaret Mead was a superhero of mine. Watching people, understanding their behaviors from a functional and symbolic standpoint and recording patterns is not easy. But it can be dull.  Hee hee. This college line of study helps me quite a bit in my current brand planning practice.

    When working with retailers with multiple SKUs (products), it’s not unusual for a client to try to wants to sell one piece more than another. Usually it has to do with higher margins. Sometimes it’s ease of production — as in, it used less materials, energy, manpower. Passion and ego also come into play. It’s important to know these things. But what is even more important to know is what “customers want to buy.”

    I call this pent-up demand or simply demand.

    The anthropologist in me says to study consumer desires and needs. Why they desire and/or need the product? How they manifest that desire? What role it fulfills in their lives, both functionally and symbolically.

    Marketers may like to sell product A but if consumers want to buy product B the marketer needs to readjust. Once the marketer understands the purchasing motivation, s/he can choose to evolve product A or back-burner it in favor of B.

    This is brand work. This is behavioral work. This is removing one’s self from the marketing equation…one of the first lessons of anthropological study.

    Peace.

     

     

    Learning From the Future.

    0

    Ah the future.  Every good brand planner takes it into consideration. And the best look mostly to the future.  I break down the 4 types of strategists this way: rearview mirror planners, sideview mirror planners, dashboard planners and beyond the dashboard planners. What is strategy if not about predicting the future? 

    But the future goes counter to the one thing strategists care most about: Science.  Science is about finding evidence that is replicable so that predictions aren’t predictions, they’re constant outcomes. The future in marketing doesn’t roll that way. Or role that way?? If this sounds a little chicken and egg, it is. That’s why the future is the brand planners’ nemesis. But we need to embrace it. Because that’s what marketing wants.

    I read recently that when the radio was invented, the three NY baseball teams refused to broadcast the play-by-play.  They thought it would cut into attendance revenue. Doh! Today, baseball games are interminable, most lasting three hours plus. So, the powers that be at MLB are considering a pitch clock to shorten the game. But what will happen to hospitality revenue when the games are shorter? There’s incentive for most owners to have longer games.

    A number of years ago I told the director of marketing of the New York Mets he should incorporate social media in home games somehow.  At the time 15% of attendees where head down in their phones during the game…especially the young women. “Nah,” was the answer.

    Those that fail to learn from the future are doomed to repeat it. And you can quote me on that.

    Peace.  

     

    Taglines as Word Grabs.

    0

    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!

    Brand Planning Bracketing.

    0

    Let’s face it, every account planner is different. No matter the mentor or the shop one comes from, each planning point of view has to be, like a snow flake, different. But one thing that might bring a cohort of planners together is age. I’m 66. I’ve seen a lot of stuff in marketing. My skin may be thicker than that of a 20 something planner. How could our worldviews not be different?

    I love the idea of putting brand planners of different ages on an assignment. Photographers call it bracketing: the process by which one takes the same shot with different exposures.

    Were I doing new business at a large ad agency with good resources, I’d love to put a 45 year old planner on an insight assignment at the same time as a Gen Z planner — independent of one another.  Not a race or competition, just a bit of bracketing.    

    Ad shops aren’t organized this way. They are organized by hierarchies. Senior to junior. Group director, director, associates. Let’s mix it up a bit. Age perspective might turn up some interesting discontinuities. Or continuities.

    Peace.

     

    Brand Planting, I mean Planning.

    0

    I’m an idea farmer.  A strategic farmer.  I assess the ground, rid it of things that will hinder growth, and then I plant.  I search for the right kind of idea, make sure it’s clean and healthy, and put it into an environment where it can grow strong.  This is what many strategic planners do and where they often stop. 

    Too often planners hand off the idea and let the elements take over.  But ideas need attention. And cultivation. Water and sunshine. They can handle some bad weather, it’s natural,  but this is not a “plant and go” business. There are ideas I have planted for corporations a decade ago that are still growing. Their root systems are strong. Long gone is my paper, but those roots are herculean.

    There are lots of consultants and freelance planners bouncing around who are in it for the invoice. They plant the seeds and go farm elsewhere. Me, I like to stick around and watch what flowers and bears fruit. I like to use those grown nutrients to sustain additional growth. Strategic planners who seed an idea but don’t get involved with the deliverables – aiding other departments to bring the idea to life — are either poorly managed or cowardly.  Life is not easy for an idea farmer.

    If you are in the business of redistributing marketing wealth, growing markets, you need someone who plants and cultivates. Peace!