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    Discovery, Fermentation, Boil Down.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The What’s The Idea? brand strategy development process can best be explained in three stages. They are quite serial in nature but can overlap. Discovery is discovery. Conduct category research, ask a lot of questions of stakeholders, customers and prospects and be in thorough learn mode. Learn language, customer care-abouts and brand good-ats. Part fact-finding exercise, part search for feelings and attitudes (pal Megan Kent counsels “Feelings trump reason”). discovery fills the brain and content receptacle with lots of stuff.

    Fermentation is just as it sounds. It’s the part of the process where there is active, unbridled growth. Action and reaction. Some bubbles. Lots of churn. It’s the most creative part of the process. Sometimes fermentation occurs during REM sleep, other times it takes place in the shower, or while mowing the lawn. It’s where ideas beget ideas. The fermentation process is nature and random. Serendipitous and planned.

    stock-pot

    Lastly we have the boil down. This is where everything from Discovery and Fermentation goes into a large metaphoric stock pot. Heat is applied and evaporation starts. Water and non-essential information, data, proof, care-abouts and good-ats are boiled away. This is where the tough decision are made and priorities established. What comes out of the boil down, with the help of a brand brief, is One Claim and 3 Proof Planks, AKA the brand strategy.

    And there, ladies and gentlefellows is how we make the sausage. Peace.

     

    Stale is Bad for Business.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Can brands get stale? B-school professors will tell you companies go through maturation stages: growth, mature, harvest. Investment spending is heaviest during the growth period while milking profits and low investment occurs in the harvest period. Mature is the middle period where all the hard decisions are made. Mature is where real money happens and success is fickle. This is the period where brands can get stale.

    (First off, let me acknowledge that brands aren’t companies and companies aren’t brands. Though sometimes they are. IBM is a company and also a brand. P&G is a company but not a brand. It’s complicated.) For this discussion let’s just say B2B companies are brands.

    I’m a big proponent of a brand strategy: Once claim and three proof planks. This framework provides an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. It works for tooth whitener, wholesale fish purveyors and billion dollar healthcare systems. Unlike a tagline, graphics style manual and ad campaign (the drivers of most brands), a brand strategy allows for freshness and flexibility. And it works in all the life stages of a brand. A brand strategy provides business winning strategy directives. It fights staleness when in the hands of smart brand managers.

    Brands can get stale. Business executives become most sensitive to it when sales are down. When the campaign becomes too familiar. If business fundies are without flaw, e.g., headcount, distribution, pricing, then I always suggest getting the brand strategy right. It’s how businesses and brands flourish. Peace.

     

    Big Moves.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Great marketers use big moves to get an unfair share of the market. Amazon Prime is one such. For $99 a year an Amazon Prime member gets free 2-day shipping in the U.S. During one week in December 3 million customers signed up for Prime. Do the math. That’s not fuzzy math, that’s Zuckerberg money. There are some projections that half of American households will have a Prime account by 2020. Is Amazon losing money with prime? Have you shipped a package across country lately? I suspect so. They’re buying share with this amazing big move but it is tilting the market even further toward them.

    Another big move was made by Hyundai a number of years ago. It was the 100,000 mile, 10 year power train (whatever that means) warranty. Smart consumers could hardly turn down an offer like that. My bet is it hit the coasts and Chicago as a quick win then seeped into other parts of the country. Especially young families. The price point was good, the 10 years unparalleled. Did it cost Hyundai a lot of money? Prob. Did it make them rely more heavily on quality? Def. Did it buy market share? Oh yeah. Big move.

    Big moves are not for the weak-kneed. Can you think of any big moves that went sour? Please share with Steve at WhatsTheIdea.

    Peace.

     

     

     

    The language. A brand planner tip.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    A critical component of brand planning is understanding the special language of the seller and buyer. In the tech sector, the language can be quite unique, with many words to learn. As a young strategist working with AT&T’s Business Communications Services, I developed an acronym dictionary I kept with me every day. One could sit in a technical marketing meeting at AT&T back then and hear 10 acronyms in 10 minutes. In other technical businesses, e.g., healthcare, finance, and insurance learning the seller language is equally important. On the buyer side it isn’t as critical because the technical stuff goes thought a translation filter before it hits a consumer. (But if language is dumbed down too much, it comes out as marko-babble.)

    When you learn the language of the seller, you hear things you couldn’t otherwise. Nuance. Emotion. It makes it so the sellers don’t have to teach, they can communicate. If you speak their language you also become more trusted.

    Consultants and freelancers who don’t have a lot of time to learn the language are handicapped. It’s the first thing one needs to do on a new assignment. You need a good ear. No foreign word is unimportant. Study the language by reading trades magazines. Learning the language makes the first few meetings a bit clunky, but it’s necessary.

    Peace.

     

    Brand strategy is business strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    A brand strategy done well encompasses the marketing strategy and is the business strategy. Why? Because it’s active. I define brand strategy as an “organizing principle that drives product, experience and messaging.” Messaging is last…because a message that doesn’t reflect product and experience is simply copy.

    Ask any successful business leader to identify their company’s “one claim” (consumer promise) and three “support planks,” and they’ll be hard-pressed to do it. That is why brand strategy is so tough. A single claim and three product or service values, many will tell you, is too limiting. Until you see it on paper. On business stationery. A good brand strategy is not filled with marko-babble, it contains business-winning evidence. Business-winning behaviors and business-winning strategy.

    I call it brand strategy and contrary to what some consultants will peddle, it is way more than a loose federation of tactics, metrics and tagline.

    For real life examples, please write Steve at WhatsTheIdea.

    Peace.               

     

    Chipotle Takes Another Hit.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Chipotle announced today another 5 people contacted E Coli at their restaurants in the Midwest. The PR agency and Communications Director for Chipotle should be embarrassed. Their “cry wolf” letters to customers the last few weeks, delivered via full-page ads, were rookie mistakes. It’s not that that they shouldn’t have apologized, it’s just that the timing sucked. They hadn’t fixed the problem. The letters made is sound as if they had.

    The news story suggested that because of Chipotle’s means of record keeping it was difficult to know which ingredient (of 60) was at fault. Fix the record keeping. Now.

    It’s not easy feeding a million people a day. Especially if you set the high food standards Chipotle does. Standards more companies should follow. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chipotle (chicken burrito, black beans, queso, corn salsa, todo, but no sour cream). But they have to get their data and record keeping right. Then get their crisis management shit together. They have a lot of equity in the brand bank; in 2015 a good deal is slipping away. 

    Peace.  

     

    Who’s Making the Ads Today?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The advertising business, for years, has been a content assembly line manned by people expert in creating and polishing ads — experts, who are typically white, college educated, in their 30s, and lived in big urban centers. Some have emigrated from the burbs. Not a particularly heterogeneous group.

    Brand planners and strategists suffer similar backgrounds, though suffer may be the wrong word. Unfortunately, these 5,000 or so well-paid people don’t really represent those to whom they’re selling. This group of ad men and women don’t look like the 300 million consumers targeted with doing the buying. These creators try to pretend they understand the targets, while really only understanding storytelling and ad production.

    It is my view that content creation can best be done, most effectively done, using more creators who are part of the demographic and psychographic. Think about the best blogs. They speak to their targets by being part of the target. Let’s get more ads into the hands of people who really understand those they’e talking to. Not into the hands of a small class of interpreters.

    Peace.

     

     

    Follow The Patent.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’ve done brand work on a number of start-ups and it’s hard. Hard, because there is often no product to evaluate pre-launch. No customers to interview. In the tech world you can work off user experience (UE) of the Beta or demo, but that’s not always real world. So how do you mine “care-abouts” and “good-ats”?

    You follow the patent.

    To receive a patent you must have a product or service that offers something appreciably different from what currently exists in the commercial world. Something worth defending. For most of my clients I like to follow the money but with start-ups, pre-product, it’s the patent. Start with qualitative, move to quantitative, maybe go back to quant, then get the founders to buy in. If they don’t buy in to the claim and proof planks, and I mean totally, you don’t have a brand strategy. Likely, you don’t have a business strategy.

    Peace.

     

     

     

    Affordable Marketing Act.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    As someone who has studied the Affordable Care Act and accountable care organizations (I’m hell a parties), I can say with certainty, that we can drive massive cost and fat out of healthcare. We’ve only taken a few steps at this point but we’ve started. A mentor of mine once said “The idea to have an idea is sometimes greater than the idea itself.” (Did I mention, he was the world’s first million dollar a year copywriter and bit of a tippler?)

    john wanamker

    The whole Medicare thing got me thinking about waste in marketing and advertising. Advertising, the business that celebrates the John Wanamaker quote, “I know half my advertising is working, the problem is, I don’t know which half.”

    The fact that marketing programs and advertising are so unscientific is disturbing. So why don’t we do something about it? Who will take up the cause? Not the government, that’s for sure. The AMA? The ANA? They try but their best practices seminars and booklets offer wan counsel. And the nature of the free enterprise business is that once you find a winner you want to keep it to yourself.

    So how do we drive cost and fat out of the ad marketing business? Consultants like me offer to do it, but charge for it. Other company’s failings are our opportunities.

    There needs to be a big study. And a beginning. It probably should be funded by the top 100 brands. It should take into consideration, digital, mobile, ecommerce, brick and mortar and data science. It should also be global.

    Lastly, this effort should have independent leadership. It may take 20 years for good findings, but what’s to lose? Marketers are already pizzling away half their budgets. The Affordable Marketing Act could save hundreds of billions. Peace.

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