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    Business Strategy Vs. Brand Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    On prompt, many company executive will tell you their business strategy is “Make more money.”  Some invest to make more money others reduce the cost of goods. There are many ways to invest or cost-cut: alter the product, play with pricing, change distribution, promote in a new way.  All are business decisions. 

    Ask that same company executive what their brand strategy is, though, and you may get a quizzical look. Or the quick parry “To provide customers with the best product, at the best price, with uncompromising service.” But that’s not a brand strategy, that’s the brand marketing equivalent of pasteurized cheese.

    A brand strategy is created at a product’s molecular level.  It is inherently product-based.  A brand strategy grows from the product then gives back over time. And I’m not just talking “deposits in the brand bank,” I’m talking about informing product innovation, brand extension, expansion, even M&A activity.

    A brand strategy is deeply rooted in the consumer — the consumer’s environment (physical and emotional) and needs (known and subconscious). Brand strategy is about growth and growth doesn’t happen without nourishment, environment and caring.

    A brand strategy is a living thing. Not a business thing.  

    Business strategies are logical. They are easy to articulate.  Brand strategies are psychophysiological.  They are harder to articulate but have a pulse.  And when right — they quicken the pulse.  Peace!

    Two Cs

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Two business trends are happening today, both accelerated due to the web — one is good, one not so. They are collaboration and crowdsourcing.  Their shared intention is the production of good, efficient work.

    In the case of collaboration the work is done by more than one party and web tools are used which put more information at the fingertips of participants. Many minds work together toward a goal, feeding off of one another.  Smart companies like the Dachis Group in Austin are playing here; they call their product Social Business Design. Collaborative software has been around since the 90s but it was more about cursor sharing and application sharing than a delve into the culture of collaboration. The new view is about changing the tools and the process.

    Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, is a project jump ball where participants compete against one another for a cash prize.  It is often the antithesis of collaboration.  The pay is poor (but not always) and the work product quite variable. In the case of a crowdsourced logo design, for instance, a number of art directors are briefed and the winning logo designer is awarded some Benjamins. (A good professional logo goes for thousands.) The losers click home. Crowdsourcing is leading to crowdsouring, but it still is a growing practice. In defense of crowdsourcing, at the high-end, with really talented players and a fair remuneration, it can work effectively.

    Two trends to watch. Peace!

    Cadillac and BBH. Hitting the Mark?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The new advertising coming out of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) for General Motors Cadillac Division is quite nice to look at and listen to. It begins and ends with the Cadillac grille emblem, which may or may not have been redesigned for the TV spots. The tagline beneath the emblem at the end of the work read “Mark of Leadership.”

    I often snap to judge but since a big fan of BBH I’ll hold off until seeing more of the body of work before I go long form.  That said, anyone who reads What’s The Idea knows I’m an idea guy.   “Mark of Leadership” is an idea. Leadership is an overused marketing concept but it’s rich and doable – if you are a leader. Cadillac is and has been a leader, but the demonstrations will most definitely need to deliver, otherwise it’s just cheese. 

    I’ve seen the first three TV spots and must admit the car designs don’t look so hot. The station wagon looking model, the coolest of the bunch, is nice on the eyes but the other two models are best shot at night. 

    BBH needs to find its voice, its idea and then not fall into the Detroit compromise trap.  I’m not saying don’t show the boxy angular cars, but just focus on their best body parts. Create an allure for the mark that a parent has for newborn. “Isn’t she beautiful.”

    Nice film, nice music, energetic editing – BBH.  Now find an idea with ballast and load it up! Peace!

    JetBlue and the Wounded Traveler.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    An article in yesterday’s New York Times, the headline for which read “JetBlue  Asks Fliers To Keep Spreading The Word,” discusses JetBlue’s brand new social media campaign – a core component of its marketing strategy.  From Firstborn (agency) in NYC, the work offers video snippets of real customers talking, unscripted, of their great experiences. Unscripted is better. The goal is for people to see these videos and weigh in about their positive experiences. 

    Here’s an experience a friend of mine had yesterday on JetBlue, flying from NY to California.  Here are his unscripted words:

    “I had a 22 hour trip to California.  Ask me about sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it in great detail (as I usually do).   Murphy’s Law is officially renamed as M***h’s Law (name redacted).  Oh, by the way, if you happen to find my luggage, please let JetBlue know where it is, since they don’t know where it is.”

    This gentleman sent the email to 21 friends.  That’s word of mouth. Sounds like he might be pissed, no?  Do you think JetBlue wants to give him a social platform to share his experience?  While his wound is still raw?  Doubt it.  They’d be better off giving him a coupon for a companion ticket and a hearty apology.

     

    There’s nothing more ornery than a wounded travel passenger.  This is one business where giving a mouthpiece to a customer may do more harm than good. Pick your creative tactics carefully people.  Peace! 

    Travel Marketing Application.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Being a marketing consultant is fun.  Sometimes companies call you in to solve their problems, other times you come up with ideas and schemes that solve problems they may not know they have. 

    Travel

    I met with a friend the other day at an online travel company.  His company has some smart technology that allows travelers to search the travel search engines for the best rates. (Search the search? Yep.)  Beyond the algorithm, this company’s stable of writers and curators create the added-value; their ability to impart good destination knowledge, advice and tips is a differentiator.

    Gaming

    Separately, I read today that some schools are using video games to teach students about business.  Students create their own personas and play the game of “business life.”  Their decisions result in real consequences and learning, e.g., don’t wear jeans to an interview.  Handfuls of smart marketers have been using games in training and sales for a while now, but we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. 

    The Marketing Mashup

    Combining the travel company business insight (good content build loyalty) with the gaming/training phenomenon yields an idea that can provide the travel site with improved traffic, loyalty, advertising value and engagement.  Build a simple game tailored to first time visitors to specific countries. Rather than a just creating a FAQs page, bring the country to life using decisions made on the virtual ground.  Experience is a great teacher…and good teachers are remembered. Peace!

    The Diffusion of Advertising

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Advertising ain’t what is used to was (a little Southernism I made up). Creation of big selling ideas by highly paid creatives and marketing people, broadcast to millions via TV, radio and print was the ad business.  Today, thanks to technology, the ad business is undergoing a diffusion like never before. Digital agencies, though not yet offered a seat at the big table, are new and important players.  Google is the most profitable advertising agency in the world and Facebook is hot on their trail.  And when I say “mobile advertising” does any one company come to mind?  That one is going to be huge…but it’s still to play out.

    Buy or Build?

    Big traditional ad agencies clearly see the need to offer digital, social and mobile but are asking themselves “Do we buy or build?” Right now they’re doing both: hiring someone smart in each discipline and using them to select cottage industry players who are truly immersed.  Better than last year, which was all “Go out and get me a subservient chicken.”  Or “Find me those nerds who built the US Weekly Facebook poll.”

    I’ve long thought that mid-size agencies were poised to win in this diffuse advertising world, but now I’m not so sure. True, they can more quickly parlay a powerful branding idea into a market-moving integrated campaign but the model may not be extensible.

    Bud Cadell is right when he says the old ad agency model is broken. It will take open minds, forward thinking, experience, software, an understanding of brand building, and lots of money to fix the process. I’m of the mind that the successful model is more likely to come out of MDC Partners than WPP.  It will be fun to watch though. Peace!

    Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA).  There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about. 

    Intent.

    Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008.  Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style. 

    Unanonymous

    I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation.  Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations.  And surprisingly, it’s not that scary.  They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall.  All the rest were spot on. 

    Facebook

    Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal.  There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to.  It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.   

    Others

    Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success. 

     Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

    The Ascent of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

    Television

    The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

    The Web

    Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

    Social Media

    Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

    A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

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