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Reddit As It Used To Was.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Reddit’s new blocking feature, intended to keep the angry in check on certain threads is likely to cause a problem long term for the site’s viability. Reddit has a reputation for some nasty-bad shit when it comes to threads and discussions in the community. There are certainly trolls in the weeds. If you are someone with thin skin (like me), Reddit may not be a good place for you. Early Reddit hire Chris Slowe was quoted as saying, a recent infusion of VC capital will allow Reddit to deal with “…fundamental product problems such as this.”  I’m not sure this is a product problem; it’s more a people problem. And it’s a problem that gives Reddit its biting community credential.

The misogynist and racial stuff is shit. That stuff has no place anywhere. But some of the nastygrams are just people trying to be funny. It’s hard to be funny for some people without being an asshole. And that’s okay. Been there. My fear is, if Reddit becomes too sanitized, with an intention of becoming a third the size of Facebook, it will lose its identity and become boring kudzu in the online fields.

Let Reddit evolve. Let it stay smaller but more powerful. Its tight community will police itself and evolve. Says me. Peace.

 

Sunkist, the brand.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

One of the greatest brands in the world is Sunkist. Why, you ask? Well — because that’s all Sunkist is. A brand. Sunkist doesn’t make anything or own anything really. It’s just a brand name licensed to number of producers who make everything from Sunkist oranges and juices to sodas and candies. All over the world. Sunkist does not manufacture a thing.

What they do manufacture are marketing programs, brand use rules, and lots of money. At one point around 1910, a Sunkist loyalty program designed to fend off competing merchants by awarding buyers a free spoon for every 12 oranges purchased, made Sunkist the country’s largest purchaser of cutlery.

From a simple organization of orange growers, using great brand management and smart advertising agents has grown a brand that brings a tingle to the mouth and a smile to billions of faces around the world.

Peace.

 

A Tale of Two Launches.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Ain’t technology grand?  A new drone delivery company, Zipline, is getting ready to use drones to deliver cold blood supplies and pharmaceuticals to hospitals and docs in need, in Rwanda. It’s genius. Life-saving genius. If you want to lauch a new technology or business, it helps to save lives.  Rwanda makes sense because they need just in time, refrigerated delivery and the red tape is easily cut through. The gub-ment in Rwanda is malleable enough to make smart things happen. Drone delivery in the US has a ways to go. We have enough stuff flying around overhead. Combine that with all our misters of transportation, refrigeration, taxes and such and it will be like waiting in line at the DMV before action. Probably a good thing.

I was lucky enough to be involved with a healthcare start-up, Ketofast, that wanted to launch in the US a couple of years ago. It was a doctor supervised weight loss modality that helped morbidly obese people lose 9% of their body fat in 10 days. It was not particularly invasive, had been tested with over 50,000 people in Italy, and offered a lower recidivism rates, by 3 times, than other weight loss alternatives – including surgery.

Problem was 50 state insurance orgs. needed to approve the modality. Insurance and Medicaid had to get on board. Red tape upon red tape. In a country where just about one in three are considered obese, and diabetes is rampant, this product could have been a revolution. But for complicated governance. Sad, but true. Maybe we should have some members of the Rwandan government come on by and give a speech about health urgency.

Peace.

The Rending of HP.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Meg Whitman, who is the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, it seems to me, doesn’t have a marketing bone in her body. She is amazingly successful and a brand unto herself, but marketing is not a major care-about for her. If she cared she would have fought harder to keep HP together and invest into the PC and printer businesses. (Are you reading this on a PC? Is it 6 feet from your HP printer?)  Instead she split the company and took control of something called Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a huge battleship of a company with a stodgy, clunky brand, positioned around an idea “Accelerating Next.” Como se 1990s?

Of the two diverged companies I’m kind of liking the PC and printer business, branded HP Inc. Its new CEO Dion Weisler seems a marketeer. He understands it all starts with a product and has smartly dialed up R&D resulting in some laptop forms that are beginning to create excitement. His printers are offering up consumer care-abouts like lower cost ink and faster printing. It also appears he’s a bit of a showman — introducing some laptops inside one another, as with nested Russian dolls.   

When you think about it, Mr. Whitman got the business brands and Mr. Weisler got the consumer brands which was probably a good plan.

That said, I always bet on a business person with marketing chops.  Let’s see what the future of these two brands bring.

Peace.

 

Mining for Proof.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A foundational element of my branding practice is “proof.”  When I start out, sans strategy, I am seeking proof.  Proof of what? I do not then know. I’m also on the lookout for deeds – the things people do in pursuit of commerce advantage. I filter out all the flah flah, adjectives and marko-babble about quality and people, and I mine for evidence.

In Lucent Technologies first ad after breaking off from AT&T, it claimed “Invented the Transistor.” Now there’s a pregnant piece of proof. An example of a question I might ask executives during discovery is “What business practice is uniquely yours?” Hunting for deeds.  

Today it was reported in the NYT that a Viking site may have been found in Newfoundland by archaeologists. A site that could help re-write North American history. They used input from oral Viking history but it is proof that will seal the deal: Smelting evidence, fire broken boulders, wall remnants.

If you are doing a branding project and your brand strategist curls your hair with talk of symbolism, authenticity, and customer journey you are likely in for a long ride.  But if you can tell the brand planner is on the hunt for proof, deeds and evidence, you’re know they are mining in the right place.

Peace. 

 

 

New York Presbyterian’s Poor Brand Craft.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

One of the foibles common in advertising is lack of adherence to brand strategy; more specifically to brand strategy claim.  A claim is only as good as its proof — and ads today are often bereft of proof. Here’s an example torn from the pages of The New York Times.  It has been a while since I priced a page in The Times but it wouldn’t be misleading to say the ad cost north of $75.

New York Presbyterian’s claim is “Amazing Things Are Happening Here.” It’s a wonderful and powerful brand idea developed by Munn Rabot. (They no longer do NYP’s ads.)  In an ad celebrating National Doctors Day the headline is the above stated claim.  Here is the copy. (See if you can find any proof.)

Every day, our doctors combine knowledge, curiosity, intuition and compassion in amazing ways.

They change patients’ lives. They advance the frontiers of medicine. And they ready the next generation of physicians to do the same.

On behalf of our patients, families, and everyone else whose lives you touch, thank you.

Advertising has two jobs. Accomplish the tactical objective which in this case is thank the docs. And second, advance the brand strategy “amazing things.”  This is another example of all claim, no proof.

Poor ad craft. Poorer brand craft. Peace.

 

Is your brand strategic?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Can a brand be strategic or must strategy be left to the brand managers? Save for machines, inanimate things can’t do animate things.  However, by recasting the What’s The Idea? tagline, to include “Brand managers come and go…a powerful brand strategy is indelible,” I offer that a brand can be strategic.

In Kansas City many moons ago while exposing ads to consumers for the launch of WorldWorx videoconferencing service, a focus group participant claimed “That’s not an AT&T ad.  AT&T would never speak to me that way.” Ad dead.  Brand strategy alive and well.

People are the best administers of brand strategy yet they are fallible. Only when brand strategy is truly codified and attached to a product does it begin to grow in brand value. One claim and three proofs planks is how one builds a brand strategy. It’s how a brand sustains — in deeds, actions, messaging and, even, offering itself.

If your brand cannot be articulated via this simple claim and proof array, it’s not strategic. The people are. Bad berries.

Peace.

 

Binge Marketing.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Binge watching TV series is a relatively new phenomenon. One Christmas I watched a season of Homeland in a weekend. Bam! Lately I’ve been binging on mystery writers. Finding an author, say Henning Mankell, and reading all his Kurt Wallander books in a year is a form of binging.

But what happens to the art as a result of binging?  Does it loose some of its power? Or allure? Where the real time water cooler discussion? Serial story telling goes way back. Weekly radio programs, stories by Charles Dickens in old England monthlies, the list goes on.

Today’s on-demand digital culture removes a little bit of anticipation, I’m afraid. It removes some emersion. It can also upset the feng shui.

Marketers and brand managers in particular must be mindful of this behavior. As we storytell our brands to life – meting out our best, most convincing and fresh narratives, – we have to recognize they won’t always be experienced as the serial stories we hope.  I can be partially controlled, but not fully.

Stay Tuned.

 

Yahoo 2016.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A couple of decades ago when the Internet was young I would go to Yahoo daily and check out the list of new websites publishing that day.  Every new website was listed on Yahoo (I can’t remember where) and as the number grew they were indexed by category. It was a raw way of seeing what was new on the web. Very wild west.

Then Yahoo became more of a portal, with a home page, news and other information utilities, e.g,. weather, stocks, etc.  Where Yahoo and Google diverged was in content.  Google kept to search and developed a wonderful advertising model while Yahoo meandered into news, entertainment, video and the like. Yahoo, in other words, tried to be an online newspaper, radio station, TV network and perhaps the world first amalgam of those things. Como se expensive? Advertising revenue grew and the company liked being in the content business but the business model was muddy. Not extensible. And expensive. What did Google do? Cleaner search and smarter ads.

Any hedge find worth its salt will tell you to focus. They look at trends and business fundies then pare, pare pare.  Starboard Value, pushing for dissolution of the Yahoo board, is no different. Starboard is the “stick” that will probably help Yahoo live on. I would counsel them, however, to bring in a brand strategist who can provide some depth to the decision they make. Yahoo is a powerful brand. It owns much space in the minds of consumers.  Don’t toss out that value, use it.

Peace.

 

 

 

Microsoft Mission.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

satya nadella

In a recent Microsoft speech in NY, Satya Nadella shared the latest company mission. I know this because following are his words. (Frankly, at America companies missions are a dime a dozen — as oft changed as ad campaigns — but when Microsoft speaks we must listen.

The mission:

“Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” Mr. Nadella added that the mission will act as “a guide to inform the choices we make every day, whether it’s a customer interaction or a product design decision.”

Whether you like the “empower achievement” words or not, you have to give credit to Mr. Nadella for boiling down what his company does.  Personally, I would call this a brand claim, but either way I like how Mr. Nadella suggests this is a guiding principle for people and product. By enculturated a brand claim throughout Microsoft, he is tightening the reins and empowering his people.

Missions are broad, brand strategies are tight.  Where brand strategies put real money in the bank, though, are via the brand planks: the three key proof or support areas that prop up the claim. This is what I haven’t heard yet. Right now we have a claim…I’m eager to hear the proof planks.

Peace.                 

 

 

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