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On-demand. Logged and Tagged.

By
Steve Poppe
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I had three meetings yesterday in the city (NYC) all of which touched upon the on-demand economy. My first was with a strategist leaving full-time employ for a freelance arrangement. Following a merger and reorg, this senior employee was thought to be more valuable as an on-demand or freelance employee. This planner also now has a business card from another agency, as chief planning officer, for use in on-demand situations. My picture, BTW, is on a couple of company websites as a brand strategist (stringer?), but these are just bits in the ether.

we work

My two other meetings were at We Work campuses. We Work offices are “rent ‘em when you need’em” places that provide full office services, on demand. It’s a wonderful business model if not a little “Just Mayo.” The upside of We Work facilities is they tend to be peopled by a younger generation of workers who are good fits for the agile on-demand economy. For start-ups and end-ups, We Work is a great solution. I suspect We Work’s will soon come in flavors and one day account for 40% of NYC rent, but that’s a tale for another day.

Suffice it to say, the on-demand nature of business today is an exciting response to the times. In a deck I did for JWT, Microsoft’s ad agency a few years ago, I called foretold of this phenomenon with a slide on the “Logged and Tagged Workplace.” A place where individual workers become less important and their work product and assets more. Another cool, if unsettling, concept.

Peace.

Is Creative a Beauty Pageant?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

BBDO has made a huge impact on advertising and consumerism with its call-to-arms “It’s all about the work.” a reference that explains its constantly superior creative product. There have been creative hot shops over the years, the flavor of the year if you will, but BBDO is always up there. This year it won the Gunn Report’s most creative network for the tenth straight time.

Most agency creative chiefs and executives will tell you it’s about the work. But is it?

In the marketing world there is only one litmus: sales. Sales leadership backed by market share and revenue power. Money creates scale and scope. And advertising. Can’t fund good work without money. Advertising can touch the hearts, minds and souls of consumers but so can a good movie. A great song. What it needs to do is move a consumer closer to a sale.

Advertising is also about being in the right place at the right time. Ask someone in sales. Sure sales surround helps, but nothing says cha-ching like a consumer ready to buy. When ready to buy a consumer who thinks about your brand, prefers your brand, and understands its value is a consumer that buys your brand.

Branding is about ideas that infuse the soul. Ideas that create preference. That’s the work marketers care about. Creating muscle memory for value. Not for an ad. Ads can contribute mightily, but it’s not the beauty pageant some make it out to be.

Peace.

PS. This post is not meant to suggest BBDO’s work is not effective. The post is about redefining what the work is.

 

Kola House.

By
Steve Poppe
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I like PepsiCo’s idea to launch a new theme restaurant in NYC called Kola House. It’s daring and smart. Especially for a carbonated soft drink in second place, losing year-over-year volume. Not every marketing issue can be fixed by advertising and it looks like Pepsi is trying some new things. This multimillion dollar bet should energize the brand and, more importantly energize the marketing team — something Pepsi sorely needs.

Using the Kola nut as their north star and Chelsea in NYC as their launch pad, Pepsi has a shot at adding relevance to a brand for millions of typically uninterested people. It’s an unfair fight in what once was a cola war and is, now, no longer. The learning and outputs of Kola House may have great impact on the business. A new drink. A new snack. Perhaps a new line of clothing or even a new app.

We’ll find out. When you change the game good things can happen. Dialing down the Pepsi, celebrating the Kola and creating a new experience is an exciting marketing test lab. Dare I say, it’s refreshing?

Peace.

Persistence.

By
Steve Poppe
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One of the nicest compliments I’ve had while in the consulting business is I’m persistent. In business development, I reach out to prospects and provide them with little nuggets that might help their strategy and marketing. I do if for years. Sometimes I get a meeting, other times not. Timing is everything. “You surely are persistent,” I’ve been told. So long as I don’t get the sense that persistent equals annoying, I stay the course.

Brands need to be persistent. They need to provide a predictable and expected experience and constantly remind everyone of the fact. Though brand strategy. Brand strategy is an organized proof array, anchored to an idea.

Persistence is action. It’s not rote repetition. That’s why I’m always pushing clients to seek new proof. The new proof is what makes things fresh. New expressions of claim and proof. Exciting and memorable expressions.

That’s brand building. It’s not called brand stasis. Persistence in branding yields value and results. Always building.

Peace.

 

 

Brand Strategy Enculturation.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Brand strategies are first and foremost internal documents. Ninety percent of marketers think they are external; ideas to be foisted upon the consuming public. That’s called advertising.

Brand strategy comes way before advertising. It’s an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging. It needs to be sold in at the top levels of a company and enculturated through to the lowest levels of the company. When so handled there are few things more powerful in the land of marketing.

I’ve written before that one of my regrets has been the inability to sell brand strategy throughout the client company. If the strategy is sold only on the executive floor, but doesn’t make it down the elevator, it is less likely to provide the shareholder/stakeholder/business value it needs to.

The heavy lifting of adopting a brand strategy is found in training. And internal communications. PR needs to buy in as well. Once approved, brand strategy is not a democratic pursuit. It needs to be shared, understood, operationalized, practiced and incentivized.

Great brand strategy becomes culture.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

Brand Strategy Tip #12. Email Threads.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I’m always looking for new ways to get smart in my clients’ businesses. I use some old war horse tactics but am ever on the lookout for new stuff. People who follow What’s The Idea? know I’m a fan of “proof.” There’s talk, platitude and proof. On the old stuff side of the proof ledger is “windshield time” — time I spend riding around with salespeople watching them sell and buyers buy. The time in the car between sales calls is valuable learning time. However today, there’s a new flavor of windshield time. It’s called email. Lots of selling takes place in email.

Ask a client executive or senior sales person to send you an email thread of the back and forth with a prospect. Once you weed out the “let’s grab a coffees,” “clients worked with,” and “competitive positioning,” you get to some serious selling grist. It’s also interesting to see how tone in the email thread can change over time. You can almost feel the pulse.

Ask the client for email threads that resulted in business won and also some where they did not gain the business. See if you can understand the differences.

Email threads may be private so you have to be careful. Most selling conversations in email form aren’t identified as private. Just use your head.

Peace.

 

Taglines and Brand Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was presenting my strategy framework earlier this week and as part of my preso used examples of actual brand strategies (claim and proof planks). One of the claims presented ended up being a tagline for the company. When I shared this brand claim/tagline with the group a couple of people reacted by saying “That doesn’t sound so differentiated. That feels like other marketing claims.” And they were right.

The reality of brand claims and taglines is they just lie there unless you prove them. Every day. With the brand claim in question, the purchasing CEO and work team loved it because it reflected their key value like nothing they’d ever heard before. Plus it was aligned with a key customer care-about. The 3 proof planks supporting the claim were so business-winning, so strategic, that the claim/tagline struck them like a lightning bolt. They were willing to go to war based on this organizing principle. Were the three words below the logo people have never seen before? Nope. Were they poetic to the masses? Nope. But they struck a chord among the senior team. And motivated that team to new levels of marketing awareness.

We have become inured to marketing lyrics and taglines for tagline’s sake. When taglines are the craft of the ad agency they often fall short. When they come from a deep-dish brand strategy, they can last and last. Peace.

 

 

Coke. Good Ad Craft, Poor Idea Craft.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

coke taste the feeling

Coke, at the behest of new CMO Marcos de Quinto, has jettisoned “Open Happiness.” It’s a move I applaud. What’s The Idea? readers familiar with my battle cry “Campaigns come and go…a powerful brand idea is indelible” have heard me say ad nauseam that “happiness” is not an endemic, ownable brand idea.

Mr. de Quinto’s new marketing strategy is quite good. Much of his justification for the new campaign is smart. Read the Ad Age story here. The “One Coke” strategy is brilliant in fact. “Sell Cokes not Coke.” Lots of good rationale. Where he goes off track is when it comes to advertising — as is often the case. He bought great advertising. His anthem spot gives one goosebumps; it’s what great anthem ads do. Problem is, it’s “Open Happiness” all over again. This time the line is “Taste The Feeling.” Sure we get a little product feature in there, but taste, even as a verb, is a generic descriptor. And Coke isn’t the best tasting soft drink anyway.

The Coke brand strategy is and ever shall be “refreshment.” I could write great refreshment copy and place it over the anthem spot and sell more Cokes. The marketing framework for the new campaign is strong. The campaign is good ad craft, but it’s built upon the wrong idea.

Coke will have killer numbers this year, thanks to big ad spending and the Rio Summer Olympics – a huge showcase for the campaign. But Mr. de Quinto and his peeps will feel the stasis that comes from good ad craft and poor idea-craft in about a year and a half.

Speak to you then. Peace.

PS. Using 6 ad agencies is also a good accounting ploy, but bad for the idea.

 

 

 

 

Brand Psychotherapy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was a psychology minor in college. Almost became a clinical psychologist. But it wasn’t until I spent some time under the care of a Freudian psychotherapist that I really learned a little something-something about the brain, psychophysiological responses, and the role of therapy in healing oneself. Anyway, I was recently interviewing a client for a brand consultancy job and at one point began to feel like therapist. Just a hint. What I realized was I was nearing some important truths about the business. Some uncomfortable truths. It was cathartic moment from the storyteller and brand’s point of view. I was in a good place with the interview.

It also helped me realize how unique a place it was and how infrequent was the feeling. Most interviews with business execs feel smart, real, but somewhat canned. Like I’m being treated like a reporter or a board member. I’m always evolving my question set but the last couple of years I’ve gone a little deep dish on successes and failures. I’m not trying to make an executive feel uncomfortable, but it’s important to recognize when I’m in that “truth” zone and use it.

Interviewees will either go down that hole with you or they’ll turtle shell up. The key is to encourage the former. “It must be hard to…”. “Give me an example of how you dealt with…”. “What did you learn from…?”

This learning may be too personal to alter the brand idea but it is likely to help get it approved. That said, if done ham-handedly, it could quietly get you the boot. Hee hee.

Peace.

 

Chipotle Tables the Spin.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Chipotle is on the verge of turning its PR fiasco around. I’ve written before how Chipotle mishandled things related to food poisoning at its restaurant, but now they seem to be on the right track. They’re explaining and turning a negative outcome into a learning moment. For themselves and the public. Farm-to-table is not as easy to monitor as is the use of pasteurized products from huge mega-providers. Food prepared in stores is not as easily monitored as is food send forth pre-prepped and pre-cooked at regional hubs.

Educating the populace about this business model – and its challenges – is good business. A CEO letter to the public filled with platitudes about “never more vigilant” and the like is Business 101…and very un-Chipotle-like.  But learning and teaching moments are how smart companies do PR.

Stop the spin. Learn and teach. That’s easier. Bravo Chipotle.

Peace.

 

 

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