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    Website Organization

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’ve worked on a number of brands at different stages of their lifecycle. And depending on the stage, they need a different type of web site organization. Marketing is about moving a consumer closer to a sale.

    A fairly common definition of steps to a sale is covered by the acronym AIDA: awareness, interest, desire, action. For an unknown brand you don’t achieve awareness just by having someone on your website; they must know what the company does. Does the brand pass the Is-Does test?

    Once there and aware how does one create interest? Typically with some context about a product’s usefulness or a unique function that captures the imagination. A website home page must pass the interest test, if none exists.

    Third, if a brand has met the A and the I, we must tackle the D, desire. Often ads and websites load up on benefits to achieve desire. This can border on bragging and quite often diminishes the Interest factor. Be wary of shallow, common benefits. Also beware of pile on.

    Action is where the money is. The best action is click to buy. Or go to store to buy. But some actions are brand positive and moving closer to a sale, say, like a prove comparison or a feature comparison. That’s action.  Feel something thane do something.

    Knowing what stage you’re in and not covering tread upon ground is key.  Coke doesn’t need to work on awareness. Know where you are — and design your web home page experience accordingly and you are doing your visitors a service.  Otherwise you are bombarding them with the kitchen sink and ceding the experience to search and whim. Peace.

     

    Soup Isn’t Good Food.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Campbell’s Soup, once a high flier, has hit a snag. Condensed soup sales are as down 3%, while ready-to-eat soups fell 1%. So what should they do? Here’s uncle Steve’s take. Go deep into R&D and make the product healthier. Find some salt substitute and flavor enhancer that makes soups more desirable. Help retrain our palates. Soup should then be re-positioned as a healthier-for-you meal alternative. Filled with good stuff, low in bad stuff – including calories.

    Soup is convenience food until it’s time to eat. And that’s a good thing. I, for one, eat way too quickly. Maybe it’s a savannah holdover from millennial ancestors but scarfing is not healthy. Soup has to be eaten slowly. Leverage the spoon and bowl, sitting at a table, the common sense approach to eating. Throw in a little family, some civilized soup eating etiquette and you may create a new trend a la ramen-for-the-hipsters. A friend of mine with a blood pressure and weight issue was told by his doctor to eat light at dinner. Healthy soup would be perfect.

    There was a tagline for Campell’s a while ago, “Soup is good food.” Not a bad tagline. If soup was good food — but for the most part it’s not. Certainly not processed soup.  Campbell’s needs to fix that. Then they need to not just claim it, they need to prove it.

    In 5 years if 80% of consumers agree that soup is a healthier-for-you dinner alternative, sales of Campbell’s should be up double digits. Peace.

     

    The soul of the target.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I get major brand planning wood when landing on a cool target insight. Not a transplanted insight from my experience imposed on the target, but something from his or her very soul. Target transference besets all planners. How could it not? Young planners, planners in a hurry, planners without data and depth of consumer experience take from their own frame of reference. From reading. Past research. Input. But if it feels “safe” and “done” it probably is.

    And let’s not forget that when doing brand planning, not project planning, there are often many targets to consider. For instance, a brand plan for a toothpaste needs to appeal to the brusher, household goods purchaser, and even the dentist. All targets count. So the target insight can have a tendency to get watered down. Don’t let it.

    Be selfless. Remove yourself from the equation. Close your eyes and listen. Every word matters. Find the special words. If you are not getting special words, plants some and see where they go.  Some words have many meanings to your target. Plumb their depths.

    Peace.

    Good Bias.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Eric Keshin, a friend for whom I worked at McCann Erickson, liked to use the word bias when describing good advertising strategy. Creating bias toward your product resulted in sales increases the logic went. In my younger years I always wanted to start and ad agency and name it “Foster, Bias and Sales.” Foster attention. Create bias. Generate sales.

    I received an email this morning about an upcoming board of education election in town. A current board member endorsed a candidate, with the candidate’s introductory email attached. The note included paragraph after paragraph about years of service, kids in the district, the challenges we face, yada yada… all the good brochure ware you’d expect. Idiot that I am and in an attempt at humor, I debated hitting “rely all” and asking “Elizabeth _____ , what type of name is that?” Of course I’d have been run out of town, but it is very Steven Colbert. And certainly raises questions about bad bias a la something you might have heard in the 60s. 

    Bias is a powerful. When it takes 276 kidnapped girls in Nigeria to get the women of the senate to cross the aisle and unite, that’s bias. But bias “toward” not bias “against” can be a positive marketing strategy.

    Brand planners who favor strategies attempting to build preference are on the right track. Those who work harder to create bias toward a brand — where consumers become defensive about their choice – are the true winners. Tink about it, as my Norwegian aunt might have said.

     

    Social Media Leakage

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    An interesting piece of research conducted by The Altimeter Group and published in Technorati suggests marketing departments handle only 51% of all corporate social media activity. (Here’s the link.) That’s not good. I understand marketing can’t control word of mouth, but the internet isn’t word of mouth. Didn’t your momma teach you that? What you say or show online stays there.

    If 49% of corporate outbound social media is potentially random then the company is leaking. Even if benign, these leaks aren’t putting deposits in the brand bank as they might.

    Here’s how to fix it. The marketing dept. needs to share the brand strategy (idea and planks) with all employees. It must emphasize that all outbound messages, pictures, videos etc. toe the brand strategy line. Employee creativity, on message, can be a wonderful thing. Off message, not so much. And I’m not talking about getting your people to parrot the latest ad campaign, I’m suggesting let them express the strategy in their own words, actions and deeds. The fact is, marketing oversight of all social media is optimal, but giving employees the guidance to share what the company s good at and what consumers want can provide wonderful learning, field testing and brand personality.

    Peace!

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Insights are the New Hops.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    hopsIn craft brewing hops are the “it” thing. We’ve been hearing about them for years in beer ads, they are not new. But they have favored status these days in craft brewing. (Did you know Upstate NY was once the hops capital of the U.S.?) Some craft brewers are too heavy-handed with hops and the industry has gone a little hops crazy but we will get over it.

    In brand planning, insights are the it thing. Insights never get old to the brand planner…they are just so tasty. A personal example: For a web start-up in the art gallery space, I presented an insight deck called the “thirteen conundrums.” Number 2 was:

    “#2 Art is personal and subjective, yet having people around with opinions (and credentials) adds value and a level of comfort.

    We presented 8 conundrum/insights to the client but in the end we had lots of insights, no idea. To get to the idea we had boil down the insights. Insights are ingredients. Just like hops. You have to do something smart with them. You need to seek out a brand strategy both product-based and consumer desired. Something poetic, memorable and that which predisposes a consumer to buy.

    I recently read a deck on SlideShare containing 30 or so planner definitions of the word insight. All were correct. Here’s mine: And insight is not a behavior, it is the observation of the cause of a behavior. Senior or director-level planners are the ones who look at 13 insights and see the operative one. The one to be spun into a brand strategy. Finishing off the metaphor, where the beer gets the credit not the ingredient. Peace.

    Cloudy Branding.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    In January IBM decided to sell its server business to Lenovo, China. Today about 15% of IBM’s revenue comes from hardware. Cloud computing and services are the ways to a smarter planet it seems. IBM has a well-established consulting business and a wonderful brand so this new approach will be an easy evolution for customers to understand.

    The leader in cloud computing is, and will probably continue to be, AWS (Amazon Web Services.) They were the first big player in on-demand cloud services. Microsoft is doing cloud, as are Verizon, Google and lots of others.

    One player doing a great job for a while but who lacks some brand strength is Rackspace. They’re not your average by-the-pound cloud provider. Sadly, their name suggests so. You’ve heard the term value-added-reseller? Well, the name Rackspace is about as far from value-added as possible. They may as well have called the company Cloud Vacancy. Hee hee.

    Rackspace doesn’t need to change its name (though it wouldn’t hurt). What it needs is a plan to embed some serious meaning into the brand.  It could use an organizing principle that embodies all the smart people, processes and hardware/software advantages this company bestows upon users.

    Brands are not empty vessels into which one pours meaning. They are full vessels — overflowing often — mostly in need of organization, an idea, and discipline. Peace.

     

     

    Something to think about.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    If there is one word that symbolized the U.S.A. it is freedom. It’s our brand, if you will. Do focus groups, quantitative…interview Nigerians or Oklahomans. You will get the same one word answer. It’s a little bit of a complicated answer, so you may not hear it if interviewing young children, but they will probably offer stories about schools, pizza, skinny jeans, music and other embodiments of freedom.

    The internet has introduced the world to freedom – freedom of information. And it has had wonderful yet drastic changes. Many people and cultures are uncomfortable with the influx of ideas, ideology and real-time communication the web and its apps offer. And why? Because governments are being pressured and replaced, thanks to freedom of information. A story today in the NYT outlines many of the countries curtailing web access — now including Russia. Yes Russia.

    As the planet gains increased freedom of information and therefore freedom, there will be growing tumult and restrictions. And America, with all its freedoms, will grow in stature as the bellwether of freedom. The rest of the world will bleed, but then come kicking and screaming closer.  All will be well, but there will be blood and seismic bumps. Peace.

     

    Viva le diff…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    There are a couple of places great brand ideas come from according to Robin Hafitz, CEO of Open Mind Strategies. The product or service is an obvious one. Predominant features or functions. Differences. Form factor, taste, speed, etc.  Brand ideas may also reside in consumer need. The using consumer or influencing consumer. S/he wants to be liked, pretty, rich, fit, loved. And lastly, brand ideas may emanate from the category…and by category, for non-marketers, that means the business class of product or service, e.g. healthcare, soda, hospitality. An understanding of consumer’s expectations of a category (all competing products) sometimes can create the context for a good brand idea or position. For instance, banks only care about lending.

    But a brand idea is best when it is singular. (“Tastes great, less filling” being an exception in the new lite beer category back in the ‘80s.)  And when the idea is singular it should come from one of the three places mentioned above. That said, I dig hard to make sure the idea comes out of the product. Coke’s idea of refreshment is an interesting example. It is product based but also user experienced. Bonus. Coke’s current brand idea “happiness” is only the latter. And for me, one of the reasons Coke consumption has lessened. Though the advertising is often wonderful (Wieden and Kennedy.)

    The word commodity is the enemy of good product and branding. So dig hard. Dig deep. And find an important difference. It will be worth it. Peace.

     

    Facebook Nail No. 1.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Apple sales growth has slowed while Facebook has risen. He has risen!. And according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has only just scratched the surface. Facebook has finally found out how to make money and I’m sad to report it is nail one in the coffin. Maybe. When the money starts to pour in, and that money is from advertising please take note, it becomes intoxicating. Even a hoody wearing start-up savant can lose his way. According to today’s NYT earning report, most all of the innovation coming out of Facebook today is tied to advertising. New mobile ad formats, new in-stream video ads, image ads in Instagram and some new targeting platform gobbledygook. The good news is Mr. Zuckerberg is not going ad crazy on Instagram, What’s App and Oculus at this time – deciding to understand and allow those ideas to grow first.

    But this advertising revenue intoxicant is turning Facebook’s head and focusing too much intellectual capital on the wrong type of innovation. This leaves product and application innovation to the start-ups, who Facebook will buy for scads of money — thereby turning up the heat on the advertising engine. Nail 2.

    Apple is not an advertising company. It’s a product company. It will have ebbs and flows which are natural. Good leadership will ease that pain. So long as they stay out of the ad business. Peace.

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