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    Strategy for Content Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”  – Mahatma Gandhi

    “Brand success is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” – What’s the Idea?

    Brand success was more easily managed 10 years ago before many marketers ceded control of messaging to consumers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read and heard senior marketers say “We don’t own our brands anymore, consumers do.” Hell, Google the sentence (use quotes). And the sentiment is dead wrong. Imagine saying the same thing but substituting the words “produce” or “price” or “distribute.”

    And today the markobabble of the day is not authenticity or transparency, it’s content. Content marketing, more specifically. The Alitmeter Group just published some quantitative research with three key data points worth sharing. All of which don’t bode well for proper brand management in the age of social.

    1. 70% of marketers surveyed lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

    2. 10% of marketers say their content marketing technologies are “fully integrated across people process and platforms.”

    3. 40% of marketers surveyed say that the lack of interdepartmental coordination is leading to disparate tools used.

    I love social, but it needs to be brand-managed. Not tactically managed. Done well, it helps set expectation for the brand and reinforce brand experience. Done poorly, it can undue lots of good work.

    Peace.

     

    Down with the data.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    My blog and consulting company are named What’s The Idea? To creative people an idea is a campaign-able meme; something that binds creative executions together so consumers can play them back and talk about the product. Big creative ideas are what marketers are looking for and spend millions on. Mostly, marketers don’t look to digital agencies for these ideas. Friends at Razorfish once told me they didn’t get a seat at the big boy table when it came to the big idea. This is changing, but slowly. Where digital agencies are thought to operate is down with the data.

    As data collection tools grow and ROI tools refined, “down with the data” is not a bad place to be. Big ideas that appeal to the masses, however, are data supported not data driven. Too much data fogs the creative mind. There’s a trend among digital agencies to seek out traditional planners for idea stim. It’s a good first step to removing the sectarian approach practiced by agencies and marketers. I think removing the barriers between traditional and digital shops is the right thing to do. Granular and macro, used together, create better results. But the big, killer idea is still the center of gravity of great marketing.

    Peace.

     

    The curation economy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Question. Is Uber a software play or a curation play? I believe the latter. The end game is a ride from point A to point B. That’s what consumers want. Is it software enabled? Sure. But you are not getting to the airport or home from your pub crawl sitting on your iPhone.  So is it in the software business? Curation business? Or transportation business. (Many would say transportation but remember, Uber doesn’t own the cars or employ the drivers.)  Travis Kalanick, UberCEO, is right when he says he’s in the logistics business. His business is software-enabled and consumer-driven — but curation-based. Jeremiah Owyang calls this the sharing economy. Me thinks it’s closer to the curation economy.

    Amazon started out in the ecommerce book business. Then it moved into the mass retail business. It morphed into a curation business when it allowed other retailers to use its platform. Then there’s Google. Google loves to say it’s a technology company. Most think it’s a search company. If you ask their CFO, s/he might say Google is an advertising company – that’s where the bank deposits come from. Or is it a curation company? Hmmm. Curating access to information through the algo. As my Norwegian aunt might have said “Tink about it.”

    Peace. 

    Tchotchke Comms.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    An oft-mentioned Goodby Silverstein mission suggests they focus on “making stuff people care about.”  It’s not an uncommon mission these days, especially as more ad and marketing revenue is tied to buildables. For Goodby, this seems to be working as a mission. It’s fun and memorable. But the reality is, it’s the job of marketers to make stuff (products) people buy. Agencies, therefore, need to make stuff that encourage people to buy. Knowing Goodby Silverstein as I do, they get this. They get that caring is a first step toward buying. I’m not worried about them. But a cottage industry of shops has been allowed to grow up building tchotchke communications that get attention, likes and pass-alongs but are light on buy.

    cash register

    I love social media and digital marketing. Done well. I believe digital advertising has the potential to far outpace traditional, half duplex (one way) advertising because it puts at consumer fingertips the ability to experience all the steps to a sale in a minutes. This, thanks to devices, media twitches and mobile connectivity. But the main body of practitioners are not there yet. They are still focused on trying to make stuff people care about. And that’s a shallow view. Once they make stuff that make people buy – that’s when the whoosh is going to happen. Can’t wait. Peace.

     

    Born Again.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    T-Mobile and Sprint are in talks to merge. The two mobile carriers, each with 50 million U.S. subscribers, have well-established brands. What should the resulting brand be? Some might say T-Mobile has a little more cache, mostly due to smart, flashy CEO John Legere. Yet Sprint has been around for decades; America’s first all fiber optic network. Some brand and naming experts will suggest combining the two names into some clunky hybrid and go all “one plus one equals 3” on us. I say it time for a new name. A new mark. And a fresh start.

    AT&T and Verizon are really strong brands. Each is spending hundreds of millions in advertising. The work is likeable, but shallow and noisy. It’s either campaign-for-campaign-sake or product showcase. People don’t love selling or advertising, they love brands. And AT&T and Verizon are missing this point.

    The combined Sprint/T-Mobile brand has a chance to start from the ground up. Break the mold. Find the sweet spot customers care about and move the product and experience in that direction. Mr. Legere gets this with his moves to offer no contract mobile service. Sprint/T-Mobile should do a little brand spanking research – spank the AT&T and Verizon brands around and find some product and emotional weaknesses. Then write a killer brief and start with a new name.

    Rebirth opportunities don’t come along that often. Peace.

    Evidence and Story.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Yesterday’s brand planning piece was on the difference between technique and ingredients. Today I’m focusing on evidence and story. Evidence and story are inseparable in good brand strategy.

    Claim and Proof are key outputs of a brand plan. Once you get the claim right you need to use your marketing and sales dollars to prove it every day. And you prove with evidence. And just so you’re not a one-trick pony, we use three proof planks to support a brand claim. Proof, defined as deeds, experiences, and actions, are the bedrock of the strategy. In the brand planning rigor proof or evidence is actually mined first, giving form to the claim.

    But evidence is just artifacts. In my archaeology days, digging up things was easy — trying to figure out how they were used and the cultural context was hard. So an array of organized proof/evidence is not likely to inspire creative people or consumers without a nice narrative or story.

    Get good at evidence collecting and storytelling and you are well on your way to becoming a talented brand planner.  Peace.

    Templates Suck.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’m not a big template fan. They stifle natural creativity. A while back as director of marketing at Zude.com, a drag-and-drop web page building tool, I lobbied hard for no templates. The CTO and CEO understood where I was coming from but felt the masses when confronted with a blank white page would seize up. Better to give them some starter designs to build personal web pages. (So they could look like everybody else.) We were competing with Facebook when it had 18M users.

    Facebook and MySpace were both template based products – database fed. Zude was more freehand. But expressive. The people who took the time to build their own pages (no HTML code was needed) created pages that looked beautiful – way more so than Face and My. There were also a lot of homely pages, mine included. But on my pages you could feel me. On my Facebook page – not so much.

    In our jobs and lives we need to rely less on templates so we can experience new – experience more. Taking the annual marketing budget and shuffling the numbers is using a template. Revising the website using last year’s wire frame is templating. Sending out an email blast to a well-worn list? Templating. We all template but we need to do less of it. You smiling up there Mr. Jobs?

    Peace.

    Planning Tips for B2B

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I use a battery of static questions when doing discovery in my brand planning process. There are follow-the-money questions for C-level executives and follow-the-sales questions for sales people. I augment the latter with sales call tag-alongs with top and bottom sales earners.

    An interesting way to get information fast is to interview the head of HR. S/he should have a great understanding of heard-on-the-street market perceptions. The tough questions they field from candidates are great input and can provide competitive intell. Additionally, ask the HR head to recap the boiler plate they use to introduce the company.

    Another way to get to information fast is to sit in on new employee sales training. Succinct and compelling value props, key talking points, and product benefit highlights suggest an easier task for the planner. A fruit cocktail approach, not so much.

    If a company is smart enough to have an internal messaging service like Chatter, see if you can get access and peruse key topics. (At Nestle, the internal messaging community is very strong.) This is not Edward Snowden stuff, I’m talking about approved community threads and discussions. Read them, they can provide centers of gravity for planners.  

    Great planning is 80% listening. But when you don’t have the time to listen to everybody you need some shortcuts. Plan on. Peace!

    Maples on Pando Monthly.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Yesterday I watched an interview with Mike Maples, Jr. on Pando. I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Maples but am a big fan of one of his investments Chegg, run by Dan Rosensweig. Talk about content marketing? Pando CEO/Interviewer Sarah Lacy understands content marketing. This is no content factory stuff — filled with blather, key words and juvie likeability — it’s an interview with a person who not only wants to redistribute marketing wealth, he wants to grow the whole pie. Rather than watching The Voice or a cop show tonight, click up this bad boy.

    In one segment, Mr.Maples tommy guns why his competitor Sequoia Capital is so great.

    “They are killer. Their talent, focus, intensity, their ability to do generational transfer, their aggressiveness, their hustle, intelligence, organizational wisdom and knowledge, and the institutional frameworks that they have…”

    This stuff wasn’t from notes. He is crushing big time on Sequoia, but knows exactly what it takes to win. These qualities are success drivers at all companies, not just start-ups. The former traits are personnel/employee related; the latter are company culture and strategy based. Wisdom and knowledge are about learning and sharing – they are not static. Frameworks are about replicable processes and optimized outcomes.

    My boil down on branding is about claim and proof. Mr. Maples’ boil down on success is about talent and strategy. Learn from this dude. Peace.

     

    Marketing at Scale.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I once ran a promotion for ZDNet where we asked readers to write short essays as to why they were techies. The prize was a swim with porpoises in the Florida keys. We received over 35,000 responses. “Oh boy, now what are we gonna do?”  That’s a lot of reading. How would we scale? ZDNet had to hire temps to be judges. Unexpected expense there. I was talking to someone recently about a similar project and their approach was to build a reading/grading algorithm. At least to winnow the thousands to hundreds.

    I guess you teach the algo some rules (like what?) and let it do its thing. It’s sad actually. When we use social media monitoring to gauge sentiment, that’s also algo-driven. And frankly, that’s not social.

    I likes me some big data, no doubt. But when I drill into the big data I’m looking for humanity. The open ended question section of quantitative is a favorite. It’s where subjects, after checking boxes, get so fed up they want to blow out the important insights. It’s where they expect you to listen.

    Marketing at scale has to have its eye on the sea of humanity, not the statistics alone. Right Mr. Spock? Peace.

     

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