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    Brand Strategy

    Brand-Babble.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    David Ogilvy once said and I paraphrase, the advertising business is infected with people who have never sold a thing in their lives. Dude!

    To build on David’s thought, the branding business suffers from what I call the brand-babble syndrome. Incessant use of words – coin of the realm, if you will — that sound good but have nearly completely lost their meaning.

    I don’t know Scott Davis and I’m sorry to use the video featuring him but here is an example of brand-babble. Please note, Prophet is a smart and successful branding company (Hell, they hired Charlene Li) and I’m sure Mr. Campbell is a great guy. Let’s just say the video editor was an intern and approvers were on vacation. Click here to play.

    The only thing of substance here is the idea that brand is owned by everyone in the company.  However, he doesn’t say the word strategy, just brand, so the point is diluted.

    The brand strategy business is infected with words like “transparency,” “pivot,” “authenticity,” “transformation,” “voice” and “customer journey.” At the end of the day it’s words like these that cause many customers of brand strategy to not know what they’re getting. Or what they are signing up for. Brand-babble is the enemy.

    (For an example of a real brand strategy framework, sans brand-babble, email Steve@WhatsTheIdea.)

    Peace.     

     

     

    Words. Stuff. And Deeds.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Tesla’s solar business, which needs a name change by the way, is revising pricing in order to regain momentum.  They’re going to make less SKUs (packaged goods term referring to product sizes/flavors) while asking customers to do more to minimize the number of site visits Tesla has to make, e.g., photograph meters and circuit breaker boxes, etc. These actions will drive cost out of the business enabling the price reduction. These latter costs are called soft costs. The panels being the hard costs.

    What’s The Idea? is a brand consultancy that makes paper, ideas and strategy. All soft costs.  At the end of a business engagement my clients have in hand a brand brief, a claim and proof array (one pager) and if they go the full monty, a marketing plan. Soft goods.

    Problem is, marketers really like stuff: Hats with logos, ads, signs, website and package designs. Stuff. My stuff happens to be words. 

    As Mark Pollard, a really smart brand strategist says and will publish in his upcoming book Strategy is your Words, words make brands more effective. Words are strategy. Strategy leads to stuff. Strategy leads to deeds. Strategy leads to valuable, organized thinking.

    Can’t wait for the book to come out. It’s stuff about words.

    Peace.

     

     

     

     

     

    Health System Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The surfeit of bad advertising in America today can be directly tied to the lack of brand strategy.

    Here’s an example of what I mean. Mission Health, a huge and important health system in Western North Carolina, saves lives. They’re good people with masterful intentions. They also recently launched a new ad campaign.

    Mission: You.

    Without a brand strategy in place to drive communications, the work defaulted to a copywriter’s pen. Using age old tricks like putting the company name in the tagline, Mission was left with a claim, so undifferentiated, it’s become the penicillin of healthcare marketing. Patients first.

    The problem with a piece of marketing poetry as a defacto brand strategy is that the idea isn’t cognitive. In this cardiology ad,

    there is no claim. No proof.  (You might say “one of the nations’ top 50 cardiovascular hospitals, 12 times” is proof. But of what? Certainly not Mission: You.) When Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose brand claim is “More Science” runs an ad “Cancer reaches beyond the five boroughs, we do too,” that’s not more science.

    Health systems are notoriously bad advertisers and worse branders. This is beginning to change but not fast enough. Before a health system starts spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads, they need to get the paper strategy right. Don’t leave that to the ad agency – not unless they have a good brand planning team.

    Peace.

     

    Proof Well Told.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    We undertake certain roles in life from which there is no return. Being mother is one such. My wife always felt mothered by my mom, but today my wife has similarly stepped to.  She not only mothers our children, she mothers me as well. (Oh, it’s a good thing.) As I said, there are some roles from which there is no return.

    For brand planners these roles are fertile ground. 

    I wonder if you can actually ask a person to accurately share their most important life role?  I suspect you wouldn’t get the cleanest of answers.  “Work is my life.”  “I live to teach.” “Saving lives.”  “My family.” These answers are a bit generic. They even sound like taglines. The planner’s job is to dive in, past the macro, and find the proof. Find examples of the claim. Because this is where the realities lie. Where the behavioral pictures truly emerge.

    Lots of planners talk about truths. And those truths may fill in lines on a brief. But to really understand the truths you must uncovering proof.

    McCann-Erickson’s tagline is “Truth Well Told.” It’s the best agency line in the business. It should be “Proof Well Told.”

    Peace.

     

    Engineered Preference.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Campaigns come and go but a powerful brand strategy is indelible, is a line I wrote for a Gentiva Health Services pitch many moons ago. Gentiva is now owned by Kindred Health for those still counting. A powerful brand idea, is a difference-maker in marketing because it anoints a product or service with a value that only it can claim. Burger King owns “Flame Broiled.”  Coca-Cola owns “Refreshment.”  Google owns the “World’s information in one click.”

    Establishing and owning a brand idea is the job of the brand manager. Constantly and without pause, hammering home a key care-about or good-at, seeds the brand idea — building and reinforcing consumer preference. Preference is not the only job of the marketer but it’s an imperative job. I may prefer an Impossible Burger, but if it’s not in my store, no sale.

    The job of the brand strategist is to engineer preference. I choose to do it with a model based upon claim and proof. My approach is repeatable. Other’s do brand strategy differently.  Shades of right, I guess. Either way, preference is our goal. Preference makes the revenue.

    Peace.

     

    Brand Around The Love.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I choose to be a lover when it comes to brand strategy, searching for the love of product and service when interviewing consumers and marketers. One of my favorite discovery questions has to do with pride. One day while commuting to NYC on the Long Island Rail Road I noticed the amazingly shiny shoes of the conductors – all of whom were in uniforms. I asked the conductor about the shoes and he explained that sparking shoes was part of the uniform. It was a pride thing. Who knows what Nikes conductors are wearing today but a couple of decades ago it was a thing.

    Another question I like to ask in discovery is “What is the nicest thing someone has ever said to you about your job…or the job you’ve done?”  Brand building is best constructed on love.

    Marketing, on the other hand, often is about negatives. Competitor negatives. Take for instance the new Bud Light campaign against the ingredient corn syrup. All-in negative. Good marketing. Good advertising. But probably bad for the pasteurized beer market overall. Another classic negative marketing play was Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?”

    Brand strategy, when based upon love, can overcome any negative marketing tactics or campaign ploys. But the negs should be monitored because they can drag down the love. (Politics anyone?) Monitoring should be done via a longitudinal attitude study, something I recommend for all clients.

    Plan your brand about the good stuff and compete with the negatives, but don’t get carried away.

    Peace.

     

    Branding is not Colon Surgery.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    If there is a secret sharable sauce at What’s The Idea? brand consultancy, it’s proof. This business, this branding business, and all the brand strategies built for clients over the last 25 years, owe their being to proof.

    Proof is perhaps the most underrated element in advertising. And sadly, well-constructed advertising, if not built on proof, can become a branding element sending brands off the rails.  Flame broiled for Burger King is proof.  The King is not.  The effervescent bubbles coming off a sweating Coca-Cola bottle is proof. Happiness is not.  

    My approach to brand strategy is open source.  That is, I share my framework with all marketers: One claim, three proof planks. It’s simple and understandable. Google the words “brand strategy frameworks” and you get an assortment of marko-babble charts and circles that will make your head spin. Even the requisite boxes used in these frameworks are inexplicit. Brand Voice. Brand Personality. Mission. 

    This isn’t colon surgery people. It’s selling stuff through a simplified organizing principle. One that gives people proof of why they should purchase and continue to purchase.

    Find the proof and you can find your brand.

    Peace.

     

    Silly Billions.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Not sure I expect Apple Entertainment to be such a brand-positive venture. In fact the more I think about it, the more I expect it will not succeed. Maybe even close down in a couple of years. Entertainment is not in Apple’s wheelhouse. Devices are.  Best-on-earth designs are. Entertainment in the form of movies is a hit and miss business. And Apple is not in the business of creating failures.  B or even C+ movies or series will taint the brand.  They will make withdrawals from the brand bank.  You don’t see a lot of dog product designs being sold in the Apple stores.

    The entertainment business is about herding content creators. They aren’t like designed and coders. They are not engineers. Not a lot of on and off or ones and zeros in the making of The Color Purple. Or the Star Wars franchise.

    I wish Apple would stick to it’s knitting. In-home devices. Maybe medical telemetry devices.  Drones. Stuff.

    This event in Cupertino March 25th will be fun and newsworthy. It may even ding the Netflix stock for a few days. But the Apple brand is making a misstep in my opinion. Silly billions.

    Peace.

     

     

    Brand Strategy and Messaging.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Component three of the organizing principle that is brand strategy is messaging: What a brand or company says about itself. It starts with the Is-Does (what a brand IS and what a brand DOES), extends through employee communications and finishes with outside communications, such things as PR and advertising.

    Messaging is the component easiest to understand, yet hardest to corral.

    I worked for a company Teq that sold interactive whiteboards to K12 schools. They also offered professional development to help teachers use the technology. The company had about 250 people. On LinkedIn, some employees said they worked in education. Others said they worked for a software company. Some said computers and hardware. 

    Messaging starts at home.

    Zude, a startup I worked with in the social networking space, was even worse. The chief technology officer, built new features into the product weekly, which took it down unique and different functionality paths. (Google “Fruit Cocktail Effect” with quote marks.) Fail.

    Imaging bringing up a puppy, changing its name every week. Like that.

    The beauty of a brand strategy is it handles the Is-Does and sets the ground work for all messaging. Whether you are talking or typing about your brand you are either on or off brand message.

    One claim three proof planks sets the brand strategy. Simple to understand, simple to follow.  

    Peace.

     

     

    The Importance of Product In Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Yesterday I posted a definition of brand strategy: An organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. “Product” is the first component of brand strategy. It seems like a no-brainer but can be overlooked.

    Most companies aren’t thinking about brand strategy when developing a new product.  They are looking for differentiation and successful position in the marketplace.  Or price advantage.

    Brand strategists do most of their work on existing products; products with established manufacturing consistency and formulary, e.g. Coca-Cola, In-N-Out Burger. Where an organizing principle comes in handy is in cases of line extensions and reformulations.  White Castle, wouldn’t want to create a cat head size burger, for instance.

    Where an organizing principle for an existing company most comes in handy is in the service sector — where the product is people.  Sure you can dress them up in a uniform but if you don’t organize how they work and deliver service, it’s harder to brand.

    One of my favorite brand strategies in the service sector was for a commercial maintenance company. Their business is cleaning buildings at night and tending the grounds by day. Their brand staretgy became “The navy seals of commercial maintenance” (the claim), supported by “fast,” “fastidious” and “preemptive” (the proof planks). Think these employees didn’t know how to work? Or get a raise?

    Tomorrow Experience. 

     

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