Brand strategy is business strategy.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 23, 2015

0

A brand strategy done well encompasses the marketing strategy and is the business strategy. Why? Because it’s active. I define brand strategy as an “organizing principle that drives product, experience and messaging.” Messaging is last…because a message that doesn’t reflect product and experience is simply copy.

Ask any successful business leader to identify their company’s “one claim” (consumer promise) and three “support planks,” and they’ll be hard-pressed to do it. That is why brand strategy is so tough. A single claim and three product or service values, many will tell you, is too limiting. Until you see it on paper. On business stationery. A good brand strategy is not filled with marko-babble, it contains business-winning evidence. Business-winning behaviors and business-winning strategy.

I call it brand strategy and contrary to what some consultants will peddle, it is way more than a loose federation of tactics, metrics and tagline.

For real life examples, please write Steve at WhatsTheIdea.

Peace.

Chipotle Takes Another Hit.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 22, 2015

0

Chipotle announced today another 5 people contacted E Coli at their restaurants in the Midwest. The PR agency and Communications Director for Chipotle should be embarrassed. Their “cry wolf” letters to customers the last few weeks, delivered via full-page ads, were rookie mistakes. It’s not that that they shouldn’t have apologized, it’s just that the timing sucked. They hadn’t fixed the problem. The letters made is sound as if they had.

The news story suggested that because of Chipotle’s means of record keeping it was difficult to know which ingredient (of 60) was at fault. Fix the record keeping. Now.

It’s not easy feeding a million people a day. Especially if you set the high food standards Chipotle does. Standards more companies should follow. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chipotle (chicken burrito, black beans, queso, corn salsa, todo, but no sour cream). But they have to get their data and record keeping right. Then get their crisis management shit together. They have a lot of equity in the brand bank; in 2015 a good deal is slipping away.

Peace.

Who’s Making the Ads Today?

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 21, 2015

0

The advertising business, for years, has been a content assembly line manned by people expert in creating and polishing ads — experts, who are typically white, college educated, in their 30s, and lived in big urban centers. Some have emigrated from the burbs. Not a particularly heterogeneous group.

Brand planners and strategists suffer similar backgrounds, though suffer may be the wrong word. Unfortunately, these 5,000 or so well-paid people don’t really represent those to whom they’re selling. This group of ad men and women don’t look like the 300 million consumers targeted with doing the buying. These creators try to pretend they understand the targets, while really only understanding storytelling and ad production.

It is my view that content creation can best be done, most effectively done, using more creators who are part of the demographic and psychographic. Think about the best blogs. They speak to their targets by being part of the target. Let’s get more ads into the hands of people who really understand those they’e talking to. Not into the hands of a small class of interpreters.

Peace.

Follow The Patent.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 18, 2015

0

I’ve done brand work on a number of start-ups and it’s hard. Hard, because there is often no product to evaluate pre-launch. No customers to interview. In the tech world you can work off user experience (UE) of the Beta or demo, but that’s not always real world. So how do you mine “care-abouts” and “good-ats”?

You follow the patent.

To receive a patent you must have a product or service that offers something appreciably different from what currently exists in the commercial world. Something worth defending. For most of my clients I like to follow the money but with start-ups, pre-product, it’s the patent. Start with qualitative, move to quantitative, maybe go back to quant, then get the founders to buy in. If they don’t buy in to the claim and proof planks, and I mean totally, you don’t have a brand strategy. Likely, you don’t have a business strategy.

Peace.

A Social Media DON’T.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 17, 2015

0

So I was followed on Twitter yesterday by a nice gentlemen from the Southwest. He’s the CEO of a social media platform company. Looks like a big one. As I do before adding anyone I checked out his above-the-fold Tweets to see if they were his own. If all retweets I may go below the fold. I prefer to follow Posters not Pasters. His feed was heavy on the RTs.

Then I checked out his company website. Nice client list. Good organization of content. Back on the Twitter stream I noted that everything was about the company. Then I went on to the company branded Twitter feed and it was the same kind of content as the CEO’s. I decided not to add the gentleman.

You see, I use Twitter as a view into the person. For me, and I understand it may be only me, Twitter is the social platform for one’s personality. If you want a business account, name it so. Many people are consumed by their business and go heavy on those details. I get it. But Twitter is best when it’s personal. When a reflection of everything that makes up the user. It’s an amalgam of all the platforms. Twitter is and should be the fastest way of getting to know someone you don’t know.

(Disclosure: I don’t eat my buttered popcorn until the movie actually starts. I’m quirky. Doesn’t mean I’m not right. Hee hee.)

Peace.

Affordable Marketing Act.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 15, 2015

0

As someone who has studied the Affordable Care Act and accountable care organizations (I’m hell a parties), I can say with certainty, that we can drive massive cost and fat out of healthcare. We’ve only taken a few steps at this point but we’ve started. A mentor of mine once said “The idea to have an idea is sometimes greater than the idea itself.” (Did I mention, he was the world’s first million dollar a year copywriter and bit of a tippler?)

The whole Medicare thing got me thinking about waste in marketing and advertising. Advertising, the business that celebrates the John Wanamaker quote, “I know half my advertising is working, the problem is, I don’t know which half.”

The fact that marketing programs and advertising are so unscientific is disturbing. So why don’t we do something about it? Who will take up the cause? Not the government, that’s for sure. The AMA? The ANA? They try but their best practices seminars and booklets offer wan counsel. And the nature of the free enterprise business is that once you find a winner you want to keep it to yourself.

So how do we drive cost and fat out of the ad marketing business? Consultants like me offer to do it, but charge for it. Other company’s failings are our opportunities.

There needs to be a big study. And a beginning. It probably should be funded by the top 100 brands. It should take into consideration, digital, mobile, ecommerce, brick and mortar and data science. It should also be global.

Lastly, this effort should have independent leadership. It may take 20 years for good findings, but what’s to lose? Marketers are already pizzling away half their budgets. The Affordable Marketing Act could save hundreds of billions. Peace.

Nfinity’s Tate Chalk on Social Media.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 12, 2015

0

Tate Chalk, the founder of footwear and apparel company Nfinity, has built a brand on par with Nike in the minds of teenage girls in the cheer community. He did so by understanding the morphology of women, i.e., feet, long bones, knees and hips, differs from that of boys. He and his designers built cheer shoes accordingly. “Shrink ‘em and pink ‘em” is what competitors did to sell girls footwear; not Mr. Chalk. His business has grown beyond cheer, using the same guiding principle.

I interviewed Mr. Chalk this week because I wanted a look inside his amazing social media program. He has done everything right. There were few surprises, but there was one left hook. It floored me.

Much of my brand planning work deals with the distillation of customer “care-abouts” and brand “good-ats.” Nfinity has a good handle on those. It has constructed its social media program around 7 core values. I can’t tip his hand, but “Rocky Balboa-ness” is one.

Nfinity takes its deep, deep understanding of its target group, girls age 10-20, and celebrates it every day. Warts and all. The brand knows which buttons to push and which not to – making the brand real. Nfinity understands the highs and lows of the target as well as the drama. Nfinity also never forgets these kids are hardcore athletes.

Nfinity gets communications planning really well. Better than most big agency comms planners. Time-of-day, location, event, family time, hormones – all are drivers. Moreover, the social media program managers get the “digital two-step,” the mobile lifestyle that takes place 2 feet in front of the target’s noses. And a big plus, Nfinity spends money on production: new video technology, lighting, music, and well-heeled post production. Everyone talks about blocking and tackling in social media, few execute this well.

The Left Hook.

Mr. Chalk and the team of millennials running Nfinity’s program do not go to battle the same way across all social vehicles. They stay true to their core values but treat each platform as a different theater of brand expression. Without going too deeply into his approach, he explained:

“I might be a son, a father, a brother. I am one person but must use different voices in different situations.” While What’s The Idea? uses a framework of 1 claim and 3 proof planks and hits all these notes across touch points, Mr. Chalk gerrymanders his strategy by social media channel, letting the aggregate story convey the Nfinity value. This is nuance. This is smart. This is a company with serious social media chops. His followers agree.

Peace.

Mo-Pay.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 10, 2015

1

Mobile payment, do do do do, the next frontier. Walmart Pay is scheduled to go national early next year. Walmart decided to bypass M.C.X. the mobile pay consortium it entered with Target, CVS and 7-11, in favor of its own offering — presumably because of too many cooks. Apple Pay is having some hiccups. Google wants a piece. PayPal, debit cards, credit cards and even gift card companies are all looking to find the holy grail that will put Fort Knox and the printing arm of the U.S. Treasury on notice.

You just know this is the future; you can feel it.

Technological solutions for digital payment and tracking are our future. Ever wait on a long line at Costco or BJs to have a human check your basket against the paper receipt? Know how many minutes that adds to the shopping experience a year? Know how many purloined goods are missed? That experience is going to soon be like EZ-Pass. All UPC codes will have a tenth of a cent piece of “price and inventory” silica a reader will register as you walk by.

Moreover, when the processing fees of banks, credit cards and other money handling companies are cut from 2-3% down to less than a quarter of a cent, the market will really tip. And more people will be replaced by non-people.

Shopping lines will be no more. Theft and loss will be minimized. Big box stores and their little cousins will be more efficient. Analytics will be off the charts. It’s a winner. We’ll just need to redeploy workers in a smart way. It is the next frontier…and it will be exciting.

Could it be that Walmart will make more money on mo-pay systems than merch? Could be.

Peace.

An interview question never asked.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 9, 2015

0

A job interview question I like to ask is “What is your art?” It’s an open ended question that should not require clarification. When I first started posing it, I found the need to explain it. More recently I just let the person interpret it. If they have no answer, I move on. If the answer is ponderous and all over the place, it suggests a poor self-awareness. No one has ever been asked this question in an interview before so it’s a good way to see how they are on their feet. It’s also a focus test. It’s an interpretive test. What is art to you? Is it work? Is it skill? Philosophy?

Try it out. It’s a blast.

Peace.

Deeds Are Key To Brand Strategy.

Marketing

By

Steve Poppe

-

December 8, 2015

0

I was reading an ad this morning with the headline “Deeds not words.” If any words define What’s The Idea?, they are these. Alas, it is “words” that I sell. I sell brand briefs. I sell strategic plans. Words on paper. But…

My brand planning due diligence is all about “deeds.” Deeds are the actions that yield outcomes. Outcomes are where many planners spend their time. “We’re number 1. Low cost provider. In business for 35 years.” Outcomes are fine but they are the result of deeds. Once I’ve collected enough deeds, the claim (brand promise) begins to emerge.

I’ve written before about getting to the claim by first finding the proof. Or assembling proof clusters first. But proof can be a step removed from a deed. Proof can be an outcome or a result. It’s better to start with deeds. Nothing in marketing (or life) starts without deeds. Physical actions, investments, actualized promises from a brand put money and psychic investment in play. It’s existential.

This is where words stop and how brands are built. Peace.