Random

    Sticky Brands

    Steve Poppe -
    0

    Comfortable?

    Steve Poppe -
    0

    Best Buy Oops.

    Steve Poppe -
    0

    Brand Strategy

    The Golden Rule.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Branding with a brand strategy is simple. But it starts with having a brand strategy. At What’s The Idea? framework for brand strategy is one claim and three proof planks. The claim and planks never change; however, the proof points comprising the planks can, do and must. By finding new proofs for your claim you keep your brand fresh, relevant, topical and dare I say social.

    By way of example, I’ll share the brand strategy for a commercial maintenance client. The claim was “the navy seals of commercial maintenance.” The proof planks were “fast,” “fastidious” and “preemptive.” When marketing or content creating if the work did not support the claim and at least one element of the proof array, it didn’t get approved.

    Branding without a brand strategy and tight framework for same, is difficult. It lacks pragmatism. Branding without strategy is fluid, determined by the artist not the business person, and often ever-changing. Marketing directors come and go, campaigns come and go, agencies come and go, but a brand strategy should be indelible.

    To quote David Byrne, “This ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.” We’re trying to make money here. In good times and bad. The framework for successful marketing starts with brand strategy. Extensible, scalable, replicable and creative brand strategy.

    The golden rule. Peace.

     

    Marketing Communications Without Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    What business are we in as marketers? Most would say sales. Drill past that and ask how marketing gets to sales, the next up word is likely communications. Marketing communications is a term of art in the business of sales.

    I am in the branding business. Way back when, branding referred simply to identity. Brand a cask of olives. Brand cattle. Brand Chinese porcelain. Today the term is way overextended. Neophyte marketers misuse the term as a verb, all the time. But that’s a story for another day.

    Brand strategy — how you build a brand — is a means by which to organize communications and experiences to create a value (supported by a subset of other values) in consumer minds. Unorganized communications detract from this effort.

    Any person at a company or acting on behalf of a company, involved in communications, must know the brand strategy to operate effectively. To be a participant in brand building. It guides every blank sheet of paper, every empty computer screen. Hopefully, every creative thought.

    Truman Capote once wrote and pardon the translation, “That’s not writing; that’s typing.” This is how I feel about marketing communications sans brand strategy. It’s typing.

    Am I right Adrian Ho?

    Peace.

     

    Experiential Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Experiential branding is a thing. It’s a big thing. Any good K12 teacher will tell you that broadcasting a lesson at kids is not the best away to teach — let alone, sending them home with a few chapters to read. The best way to get kids to learn is to engage them with sight, sound and thought-provoking experience. In science they do experiments.

    Brand strategy is an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. But the main drivers of brand strategy spending today seem to be naming, packaging and messaging. Experience, more often than not, a still a second class citizen.

    Brand strategists doing discovery understand experience. It’s how we learn. Consume the product. Tag along with sales people. Observe consumers and users. Experience the experience. When Annie Proulx prepared to write The Shipping News, she spent weeks in diners drinking coffee and listening to the local patois of Newfoundlanders. It informed her analytical mind.

    In a recent biz/dev email sent to experiential company I noted how experiential companies market their services using email and websites rather than experiential modes. Experiential is the sharpest tool in the branding kit. We need to pay it better mind.

    Peace.

     

    What a brand is not.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    So you have a company or product. You have a name. You have a logo. You have some design parameters. Packaging. You may even have a marketing person or an agency. But do you have a brand? Most would say yes, I say until you have an organizing principle that brings together what the “company is good at” and what “consumers want,” you really don’t have a brand. The organizing principle to which I refer is a brand strategy. It must be built upon truth, aspiration and above all it must be sinewy. That’s the hardest part. A brand strategy must not be a big expensive blob boasting something for everyone.  

    If you would like to see a sample or two, please let me know. Steve at whatstheidea. Everyone needs a plan. Peace. 

    Deeds vs. Materials.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    The early Egyptians built with stone and what they built still stands. Shea Stadium was built in the 60s and had to be torn down. It was built with steel and cement. If you were to build a structure today that you wanted to last for 1,000 years what would you use? Perhaps someone will invent a new composite material for building construction that will last 500,000 years.

    The materials with which we construct products – sugar in carbonated soft drinks, salt in French fries, silicon in computer chips – are seen as building blocks of brands. Yet, when I develop brand strategy (1 claim, 3 proof planks) the materials are secondary, perhaps tertiary. What the materials deliver is way more important.

    During my exploration rigor I use a number of tools to mine insights as to “what customers want most” and what the product or service “does best.” Then with all the learning arrayed, I begin to boil down the elements into groups. The groups cluster and point to a common claim…of brand superiority or customer desire. So proof, in fact, comes before claim.

    Rarely are materials the sole heroes of the proof planks; deeds and experiences often are. It may sounds backwards but it works for me.

    Peace.          

                

     

    Diagnosing Brand Health.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    In healthcare, diagnosis is the second most important activity – next only to treatment. One without the other isn’t effective. That is not to say treatment always works. This we know.  But with proper diagnosis we are much more likely to have a positive treatment and outcome.

    Similarly, brand strategy requires a diagnosis (critical insight) and treatment (brand plan). The critical insight can be defined many ways and come from many areas yet in its simplest form it is the “identification of a business building or business detracting phenomenon.” It may come from any of the four marketing Ps (product, place, price or promotion) but rest assured the insight is a diagnosis.

    Extending the metaphor, the treatment lies in brand strategy — the way we remove the obstacles or magnify the positives. A brand strategy is one claim and three proof planks. This “one and three” framework organizes product, experience and messaging in a rich, memorable and provable way…so as to build sales conviction. It’s practice and regiment. 

    If you would like to see some examples of real-life claim and proof arrays and the diagnoses they address, write me at Steve@WhatsTheIdea.com

     

       

      

    Brand Claim.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    The claim for the TV show Soul Train was Black Joy is good TV.  How do I know that? Because I heard the statement on NPR and decided to make a blog post about it.  I’m in the claim business. I study these things.

    While most consultants are paid by the page, delivering hundred-page analyses of business strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats, I deliver a single page, boiled down from all that information. A page with one claim and three proof planks (three discrete, actualized behaviors that allow consumers to believe the claim.)

    In the case of Soul Train, conveying joy and using dance and music as the conduit was genius.

    “A bottle so distinct, it could be recognized by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground” was the brief written in 1915 to the designers of the Coke bottle. Pretty short, pretty sweet. Today I’m sure a marko-babbling brand manager could write a good 20-page brief on the topic.

    The work of the brand planner — for master brand strategy development at least — is to amass as much information about customer care-abouts and brand good-ats as one can, then boiling it all down into a single statement of value. Ava DuVernay recently said about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion “It came from a place of absence. Now it comes from a place of abundance.”  Well brand claims are all about coming from abundance and moving toward a place of absence… of singularity. A singular, powerful, endemic claim.

    Master brand strategy is the most important work in all of marketing.

    Peace.

     

    Take the Black Challenge.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

     

    I recently opened a piece of email from Marmot, an outdoor outfitter and clothing retailer, and found a picture of a black man and woman wearing Marmot parkas in a winter mountainscape. It surprised me. I can’t remember ever seeing a single black person in a hero shot in a Marmot promotion before. It’s 2020 people. We can do better.

    Here’s the Black Challenge.  I am asking advertisers to commit today to using only black people as models in their promotional work for one year. 365 days. Think of it as a reparations appeal to marketers who have been casting white people in ads for as long as anyone can remember.  If casting directors think this will affect sales, they may be right but they’re also not giving U.S. consumers enough credit.

    Perhaps it’s a goofy story but I used to play basketball at the East 54th street recreation center in NY and was the only white guy.  After a while I didn’t notice a skin color difference until I put my hands up in front of my face for a pass. 

    This is how you make change.  You don’t talk about it, or blog about it, you just change. Come on advertisers, take the challenge. If you do, I smell a Wall Street Journal cover story!

    Peace.

     

     

     

     

    The Fine Lines of Brand Strategy Consulting.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    When you are a consultant, you walk a fine line between telling customers and prospects what they are doing wrong while complimenting them on what they’re doing right.  You wouldn’t have a foot in the door were they doing everything right, yes?  But that’s no reason to tell them their baby is ugly.

    When a brand consultant, you walk an even finer line when interacting with prospects because you don’t really know the brand. You haven’t done discovery. You haven’t articulated the addressable business problems. You haven’t dug into the customer care-abouts or brand good-ats. Without those lines of reasoning anything you say can and will be shallow. So, you do the shallow spade work. Which often ends with discussions about process, procedures and practices. Not sexy.

    People like to talk about themselves and their frames of reference. Brands do too. Trust me, when I do brand discovery it’s fire hose time. But to get to discovery you have to a client to sign on. And even if they open up on a call or two, you can’t make any real judgements until the cake it out of the oven (Alex Bogusky).

    This is a conundrum I have yet to crack adequately. So I listen. I overlay some thoughts. I qualify my answers with a plea of brand ignorance. And I hope to build trust.

    As I said, a fine line.

    Peace.

     

    Paper the Walls.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Many years ago I learned a trick about advertising from Brendan Ryan, president of FCB/Leber Katz, in NYC. One day he asked the AT&T Network Systems account team to paper the walls with the current campaign. The headline for each as we “Are You Ready.” Network Systems sold the 5E switches to phone companies that powered American communications. So paper the walls we did.

    Mr. Ryan walked around the plush conference room reading sub-heads, looking at visual and dashing through copy here and there. He pointed to campaign outliers and confirmed what he thought to be the idea. Neat trick. Neat way to level-set the idea.

    Fast forward 25 years to an era when communications manifest across more channels than we ever perceived, some with control, many with none. If you were to paper the walls with the myriad comms we generate today, you’d have a messy, messy room. A walk around that room  would remind you why an “organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” is critical. Otherwise known as a brand strategy.

    So me droogies, paper your walls with your internal and external comms and see what-ith you spew-ith into the consumer realm.

    Peace.

     

    1...101112...34Page 11 of 34
    © Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv