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    Doing Social Media Right

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    When talking about social media programs to clients I tell them “be interested in what your customers are  interested in.”  Of course, these interests have to align with their brand strategy (1 claim, 3 planks). Yesterday I was looking at some Instagram photos of Love Grace cold pressed juices and admired how they pointed to a blogger sharing a number of yoga poses.  I haven’t written a brand strat for Love Grace, but feel what they are doing. And I’m sensing the neighborhood they’re living in. 

    When a company owns a space, owns an idea in the customer’s mind, and they choose to not always sell product, customers relax around them.  This constant need to sell reminds me of going to a party and talking to a car salesman who is always “on.”

    I’ve been trying to get close to PC Richard and Sons, a huge retailer in NY, who knows a thing about selling.  They have a marketing dept. and a dedicated social media group. They’ve even hired a social media agency, I suspect. But they don’t have a visible brand strategy they follow when it comes to social. Their’s is a tactics-palooza plan. Unlike Love Grace, PC Richards & Sons talks about promo, price and service. That’s not a plan. That’s the category.

    If you understand what your customers care about and use social media to prove you also care about those things – and if those things put deposits in your brand bank, you are using social the correct way. Peace.

    Brand Planks

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Brand planks are business-building supports for the brand claim. (A brand strategy contains one claim, three supports.) With a brand claim in hand, in order for it to become real, remembered and practiced it needs to be proved. All claim and no proof is what befalls most poor marketing and advertising programs today. That’s where the planks come in. Combined, the 3 planks create an impenetrable barrier for brand success.

    You can do all the quantitative research in the world to find out what consumers want in your product or service — but changing your business to deliver those things does not translate into success.   This is a perspective difference between a marketing strategy and a brand strategy. The brand strategy also factors in what the company is good at and famous for.

    Brand planks don’t always fall into nice little containers either.  They can be features, benefits, qualities, behaviors, or functions. For an all-natural cookie, I once used “moisture” as a plank.  For a health system “community integration.”  For a commercial maintenance company “preemptive.”  

    When I talk with clients about brand plan as an organizing principle, the claim gets all the glory but the planks do the work. Peace.

     

    Probe and Listen in the C-Suite.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I use a brand planning rigor called the 24 Questions.  It help me understand business fundamentals or lack thereof. Sales, unit sales, sales by channel, purchase process and lots of other things are covered. It helps inform the brand plan work – the work that is a little more positioning focused. More emotional.

    Reading about new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella got me thinking about what I would do on my first day on the job as a CEO.  My guess is I would probably meet with my top c-suite officers and have them topline for me what they were most excited and concerned about related to current operations. As a good CEO, this would be all probe and all listen. If these meetings were 30-45 minutes, I’m sure only the important stuff would come out.

    Typically in my role as a brand planner I do the same thing; but I don’t always meet with all the c-level execs. So it’s not a 360 degree view then, is it?  We learn every day.  This is my learning for February 7, 2014. Peace. 

    Off to Whiteface. A miraculous place. Wish me freshies.

     

    The Pedagogy of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    One of the hardest jobs in the world, I suspect, is teaching special needs children. Spec Ed, insiders call it. I am no expert but I do know there are certain stimuli that get through to special needs kids. They like to touch. They like the color purple. Certain sounds and instruments are soothing. Special needs children learn better when distractions are minimized and their individual leaning sweet spot found.  This individualized learning modus extends to non-special needs children. Children learn at different paces because they are like snowflakes.

    In marketing, there are some similarities. Predisposing a consumer to your product and pitch does not benefit from a cookie cutter approach. Brand planners who understand buying behavior, context and psychology have a leg up when avoiding the cookie cutter approach. This deeper understanding can give form to the organizing principle that is the brand plan (here defined as 1 Claim, 3 Support Planks). This organizing principle offers flexibility to teach consumers in different learning places, yet enough control for brand managers to stay focused.

    Consumers are so overwhelmed by marketing, unsupported claims, imagery, song and marko-babble, they can’t concentrate. We need to create a distraction-less, replicable selling schemes that are indelible. With a tight brand plan we can impact product, experience, benefit set, and most importantly muscle memory. Marketing is about creating behavior or changing behavior. The pedagogy of marketing. Peace.

    The Story of Uncle Carl.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I grew up in an area that produced 80% of the world’s hard shell clams.  The clams had great names like cherry stone, little necksand top neck.  To the uninformed or visitor to the Great South Bay, an opened clam was and is quite a sight. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a little neck has some purple and crimson on the shell, pink on the muscle, rich caramels and tans on the meat and a little pocket of black (don’t ask) –a bit like a nursery school drawing.  The clam is nestled in a cool saline broth that to some appears like what my father might have called “the doggie’s dinner.”  

    uncle carlEnter Uncle Carl. A transplant to Los Angeles, Uncle Carl had two reasons to come back East. One, to visit family.  Two, to eat clams. And eat he did. Voraciously.  To watch his face, to hear the smile-affected slurp, to listen to his appraisal of each morsel (at my young age I wasn’t always sure of all the metaphors) was to know consumer love.  Without telling me I needed to try them, Uncle Carl was the hard shell clams’ best salesman. He didn’t entertain, he didn’t story tell, he didn’t need a spokesperson – he just shared the experience. Experiential marketing, modeling marketing are two of the best sales tools in the kit.  

    Though hard shell clams are not that common here today on the Great South Bay, they are still among for most wonderful treasures on the planet. Treasures I may never have tried had it not been for Uncle Carl Alf. What a salesman, what a teacher. Peace.

    Dogging it.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Venables Bell and Partners, an ad agency I admire, pooped the bed last night with a spot produced for Audi that combined oversized Doberman Pincer heads on Chihuahua bodies.  I once wrote a piece for Adweek as a kid (never sent in) suggesting that every element of an ad should sell the product. Even deconstructed elements. The room in which I watched the game last night was loud during this dog spot so I have no idea what the spot was about.  But I can tell you. visually, the little/big dogs skeeved me out. The Lotto guy with the little body and big head from a couple of years ago (Little bit of luck) was similarly retching but at least his voice and the story made it a little easier to bear. Compare the Audi spot to the Kia spot by David and Goliath with the dude from Matrix. Even with the sound off, I came away associating luxury with that particular Kia model. An unexpected association. 

    Ugly dogs or luxuary car?  Which value prop would you like America to take away. Xactly. Peace.

    Super Bowl Ad Strategy Awards.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Introducing the First Annual What’s the Idea? Super Bowl Ad Strategy Contest. There will be prizes (not really), gifts, kudos and giggles. Here’s how it will work. The day after the Super Bowl, please write me (steve@whatstheidea.com) and tell me your two favorite TV spots from the game.  

    If you can’t remember the brand, just describe the spot. “You know, the one with the guy who jumped off the cliff with the helmet cam and landed in a kids birthday party.”   But the kicker for this competition is — in your email, please include what you believe the ad strategy to be. Something like “Sell more Planters peanuts by positioning them as healthier than potato chips.” Or “Budweiser tastes better because Clydesdales, are nice to puppies.”  That sort of thing.

    The person who comes closest to outlining a real and compelling selling strategy wins. It may just be a congratulatory blog post, it may be a bag of Doritos – depends on my winnings in the pool. Go Hawks. Peace!    

    Full Duplex Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    There was a great piece in Contagious about how ad agencies are still overly concerned with the money maker that is outbound messaging. The article supports my boiled down thesis that “Branding is about claim and proof. Proof and deeds. Deeds and experiences. Strategically organized and soundly managed.”

    The article’s writer Laurence Green, founding partner of 101 London, believes that outbound alone is old school and slowly being replaced by a more complete, informed, productized and bidirectional selling rigor; one where technology, media, product and creative come together to make people buy more, for more, more times.

    One point in the article with which I might take issue is that the strategist and the coders should  play together for the optimal output. I need to think about this one. Digital strategist perhaps, but I’m not so sure about brand strategist. I’m not sure coders need more than the brand plan to mash up their digits. But hey, this is pioneer stuff and smart shops, whose buildables are steeped in full duplex marketing are still learning. Exciting stuff. Peace. 

     

    Boil This!

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    The secret sauce of the brand planner is their ability to take all the information at hand and boil it down into a compelling argument that leads to a sale…or predisition to a sale. (We are not always buying, you see.)

    I was with a bunch of IT guys yesterday and the technical fur was flying. Back in the day it would have been enough to make me feel light-header and inadequate. Yesterday it reminded me of times at Bell Labs and AT&T’s Microelectronics listening to English-as-a-second-language engineers talk technical gibberish (to me) about their digital signaling processors. My job at the time was to be polite and make a good ad. Actually, be polite and come home with a strategy to give to creative people to make a good ad. These trips, it turns out, are where I cut my planning teeth.

    Information gathering is an art, but taking that “stock pot” of information and boiling it down to insights, then a single selling argument is da monies. Packaging that argument with a little evocative poetry is the Richard Sherman monies.  Thank you AT&T Microelectronics. Peace.

    How to Find the Best Interns.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    A start-up prospect of mine accidently sent me an email, the topic of which was an internship program at a local university. (I did not open it, good boy that I am.) But it got me thinking. The top interns gravitate toward startup companies who do the best job of ‘splaining what the company is and what the company does –startups that can articulate their Is-Does in other word. And that doesn’t just apply to  startups. Many small and mid-size companies lack the Is-Does ability. The smartest interns go to the companies who can easily and clearly define their product and its value. In 140 characters. Not a breathy 6 minute meander. 

    How does one create a tight Is-Does? Yep, from a brand strategy. 

    A brand strategy is not a tagline.  It is an organizing principle anchored to an idea. It is the result of lots of work, insights, customer care-abouts and product strengths boiled down into a tight easy to articulate, easy to remember explanation.    

    If you are a company fishing in the intern pond, you know there will be lots of resumes coming your way.  A tight Is-Does will makes sure the right resumes are coming your way.  The resumes of then next generation of leaders. Peace.  

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