Home Blog Page 115

Mobile Nourishment.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

I was reading some data points about mobile usage this morning (source Yahoo’s Simon Khalaf) and learned that 280 million people worldwide check their mobile phones over 60 times a day?  Did you also know the average American spends 4 hours and 11 minutes on his or her phone daily?

Of all that time, how much of it is nourishing to the body and soul, I wonder? If I were to guess 10%, would I be in the ballpark?

Health and fitness apps are nourishing one can presume. News and analysis also good. Thoughtful and heartfelt communications qualify. Music can be nourishing and certainly educational podcasts. But goofy videos, comedic cartoons, flaccid Facebook posts and hours of Candy Crush? I don’t think so.

Was I an investor in start-ups, I’d be on the lookout for mobile nourishment apps.  Once we flip the percentages from 90% fluff to 10% fluff we may actually reduce overall time on phones, too.  Bad news for the mobile carriers. Good news for people.

Peace.

 

IBM to Googleplex Health Care.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Data is the new content. With IBM’s $2.6B investment in Truven Health Analytics, we are seeing the beginnings of a massive bet on the data business.  IBM has always made its paycheck with data processing hardware and consulting. Sure they’ve sold software but in this age of cloud computing, where software will kinda go away, IBM seems to be appreciating that data ownership is the ticket. Watson Health (into which Truven will be folded) is more than big iron and a log-in, it will be a repository of data that will make a manifold improvement in the quality of health worldwide.

The Obama administration has pushed for EMRs (electronic medical records), which was a brilliant first step. But as is the way in free enterprise societies there are now 70-ish EMRs available, most of which don’t talk to one another.  Where’s the big data “learn” from that?  Truven Heatlh Analytics owns treatment data from 200 million patients. Data. Not sequestered software records. This is an analytics mother lode. This is Google scale stuff — but with a mission that goes way beyond Ad Words revenue. We’re talking “saving lives and transforming care” here.

IBM and Watson are not washing their hands of big iron and consulting, but they are def getting into the data business — in a low hanging fruit sector. Watch out Google. Watch out.

Peace.  

Tim Cook or Farhad Manjoo?

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

“Apple’s emerging global brand is privacy,” is a statement Farhad Manjoo made in his cover story in today’s New York Times. As someone with access to Tim Cook, Mr. Manjoo has a leg up on me when it comes to statements like this about brand, but this one caught me by surprise. There is an interesting video I watched recently by NYU’s Scott Galloway, in which he shares brand ideas of the top tech brands in the land (Google, Amazon, and Facebook). He smartly pointed out that it’s hard to articulate the Apple brand idea. Using my framework for brand strategy, which is “one idea, three proof planks,” I have to agree with Mr. Galloway. In all my studies and hypotheses of and about the Apple brand I can tell you privacy isn’t a plank I would come up with.  That’s not to say it’s not possible, it just feels a little off-piste. A little “of the moment.”

So when Farhah Manjoo, bandies about the “p” word in a branding context, in the midst of Apple’s kerfuffle with the U.S. government, I think he’s either taking some license or Mr. Cook is playing fast and loose with the brand.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

Brand Planner’s Prayer

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Things we remember.

We remember beauty.

We remember new.

We remember rich.

We remember melody.

We remember funny.

We remember nature.

We remember poetry.

We remember pain.

We remember educators.

We remember warmth.

We remember charity.

We remember happy.

We remember love.

We remember triumph.

These are the things we remember.

These are the things consumers remember.

(I post this planner’s prayer once a year as a reminder.)

Brand Strategy’s Slow Creep

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

One of the coolest things I get to do as a brand planner is sit back and watch a company or product transform after a new brand strategy is presented. The word viral would be an overstatement, because “one claim and three proof planks” aren’t quickly acculturated into a company. When properly sold in, however, and that means well beyond the marketing department, a brand strategy can take hold fairly quickly. It will alter the work of the SEO team — all of a sudden new key words begin to pop in as traffic drivers. Company language in meetings tilts in a slightly new direction. And once a company language changes it’s not long before partner and consumers language follow.

The day after I present final brand strategy, I’m checking the website to see if anyone has made changes to the home page. Week two I’m checking new videos to see if the company Is-Does has morphed. I look to newly minteed press releases for changes to the first sentence and the “About” paragraph. My expectation is that things will change immediately. (Doe-eyed Poppe.)

Strategy work is a lot less requited than design work. When a new logo and tagline hits the street, it’s easily seen. It’s fast and obvious. But when a brand strategy hits, it’s often a slow creep. That doesn’t keep me from checking right away. Hee hee. 

Peace.

 

The Black Hole That is Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

black hole

According to the NYT today, the definition of black holes is “the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape.” Leave it to the Times to put something so complex into human terms. Einstein, when talking about the geometry of the universe likened it to a bed mattress, which only moves and reacts when a sleeper moves. It’s shape distorting with the movement of matter an energy. So basically, there are still some things that are quite hard to explain. And that’s brings me to branding.

Ask 100 people about branding and you’ll get 80 answers. From “branding is an empty vessel into which you pour meaning?,” a favorite of mine, to “”the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of generating segregation among competition and building loyalty among customers,” which is straight out of Wikipedia (did I say straight?).

Branding today is marketing’s black hole. Everyone is talking about is, everyone is doing it, everyone thinks they know what it is, but few can articulate it. For all the frameworks brand experts have developed and all the webinars and presentation on the topic, few have been able to boil it down. To a simple algorithm. Or formula.

The framework used by What’s The Idea? is one such…and it works. At the top of the framework is a brand claim. A claim of value; something customer wants and something the brand delivers. Every brand then needs proof for that claim. I use 3 proof planks for my framework. The theory of three.

If you have a claim and proof array and you demonstrate it every day, you are brand building. You are branding.

Mattress indeed.

Peace.

 

 

Bad Brand Magic.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

magic cauldron

Brands are meaningless without products. It used to be easy in the old days, before service companies came about. Everything was clean; you bought things that went thump on a table or desk. You bought stuff. Stuff had qualities to which you could associate value. Then along came services like insurance and banking — and value was derived from process and experience. In this world price became even more important.

Fast forward 30 years past the service economy to the information economy, fueled by integrated circuits and computers, business accelerants, and product have become a much smaller part of the economy. The science of marketing in this economy has become “magical.” And not in a good way. In a way where magic is unexplainable. Enter the overuse and obfuscation of the word brand. Brand has become the ephemera around which fees and silly ads are built… around which logos and taglines are traded.

But let me take a breath. Branding has evolved.

Service companies can be brands. They can establish muscle memory for the value of a process or experience. But it takes a framework. It takes, as I like to call it, an “organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”

I’ve done brand strategy this work for billion dollar organizations, service groups within billion dollar orgs and small businesses who sell to billion dollar orgs. And you know what? Every service is the same and every service is different. If you’d like to take the bad magic out of your marketing, write me (steve at whatstheidea) and I’ll share some examples of powerful service brand strategies. Peace.

 

Brand Strategy Makes the Marketing World Smaller.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

V__CEB9[1]

My uncle Al Heckel was a great sailor. Renowned along the south shore of Long Island for his sailing prowess, Al used to ask me as a kid to crew with him, something I wasn’t too keen on. Too slow for me. At his funeral, his grandson Hankie mentioned Al used to say “sailing makes the world big again.” Love that quote.

Brand strategy, at a place and time where there are more marketing tools, media options, technologies and measures than even before, does quite the opposite. It makes the world small again. Why? Because a brand’s value proposition is limited to the most essential things. What customers most care about and what the brand is absolutely good at. Care-abouts and Good-ats.

New products, line extensions, customer experience, marketing communications are all easier when following a brand strategy (1 claim, 3 proof planks). That white piece of paper a freelancers looks at when asked to create an ad or brochure is by many measures more quickly done and more powerful, when following a brand strategy. 

An investment in a brand strategy is an investment in business. Peace.

 

 

Learn This.

By
Steve Poppe
-
0

Learning is a topic I’ve written about before but today it’s the subject of the entire post.

I’ve been in the ad and marketing business since 1978 when a mail-slinger at my dad’s shop Poppe Tyson. It took me until 2011, while director of marketing at Teq, an educational development company, to understand the importance of learning in marketing. (Yeah, yeah, rabbit and hare thing.)

I’ve had lots of mentors over the years: a kid who ran the AT&T ad business with an iron fist and mind, a be-sotted ex-marine who was the country’s first million dollar a year copywriter, and a copy-contact, agency chief who built a powerful global brand that lived well beyond his years. None taught me the practice of learning in marketing.

To understand the role of learning in branding and marketing you have to understand teaching. Teaching is process. Learning the result. There are poor teachers, there are no poor learners. My stint in the education field helped me understand this. Learning why one product is better than another. Learning why one service has more value. The best learning is not forced but self-actualized. When someone comes to a learned moment on their own, it sticks. It’s important.

So you marketers out there. Focus on the learning first and the proper teaching technique will come to you. Most marketers are 85% teach and 15% learn. Flip it and your depth of success will change.

Peace.

 

1...114115116...314Page 115 of 314
© Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv