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Brand eXperience.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

X. Where Experience Meets Design is Brian Solis’s new book, one I suspect will be a big seller. Why? Because product and brand experience are critical customer care-abouts. Another reason? Advertising and marketing agencies can bill for it; it’s a business. Brand experience was a smart business the first time I ran into it at Megan Kent and David Kessler’s Starfish Brand Design. They were, and are, big fans of what Mr. Solis is now branding X.

Dare I say brand experience will become the pop marketing term of the 20 teens? Maybe not a whirlwind term such as “transparency” or “authenticity,” but it’ll be a thing. Bet on it.

That said, anyone can talk experience. Anyone can even build an experience. But for it to be meaningful and make deposits in the brand bank, it cannot be random. A brand experience needs to be on brand strategy – defined as an “organizing principle containing a claim and three support planks.”

Experience in brick and mortar and online are manageable, but certainly not easy. Without a brand strategy it will not only be messy — it may be counterproductive. Let’s see where Mr. Solis takes us. Off to order the book.

Peace.

Wal-Mart Blasts Past Amazon…in 2027.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Fast forward 12 years to a time when Amazon is an online geezer and Wal-Mart is the young, hip tech retailer.  Am I tripping? Nope. How can it happen? Through strategy. Only through strategy.

What can Wal-Mart do to trump world-beater Amazon in online retail? First, it must look at customer care-abouts. Customers want fair prices. They want good value — products that will last. They want product accessibility: same day, same hour, delivered to any address. They’d like to be rewarded for loyalty. Predictive refills would be nice. Lastly, they’d love to remove some carbons from the earth’s footprint.

If Wal-Mart wants to out-Amazon Amazon, it needs to start thinking about these strategies. While Mr. Bezos is playing media mogul, cloud jockey and Steve Jobs, Wal-Mart should focus on the above care-abouts and blaze a new retail trail. Create a new retail equation.

The future is up for grabs. For everybody. Always has been.

Peace.

 

Value-Loading.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The human mind does the work of the brand planner on a daily basis. We experience people, places and things, a multiplicity of experiences, and boil them down to their essence — retaining a fairly single minded impression. Or we don’t, because we are confused and no single quality sticks out. I refer to this inability to land on an impression as the “fruit cocktail effect.”

Great brand managers understand this. They get how the “cull” of product and service values is one of the most important parts of their job. They understand you can’t be all things to all people. Sadly, many marketers don’t get it. They “value-load” to the point where consumers don’t know what to think.

Yesterday I was reading a point of purchase display for a remodeling company and they listed 10 different values or claims.  All were good claims but created quite a cacophony. What about this display would the consumer remember in day after recall testing? Probably the main picture used.  If really lucky they might remember the value most important dear to them, buried among the others…their key care-about. Most likely they’ll remember fruit cocktail.

Peace.

 

Brand Strategy Secret.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Not every product or service is perfect. Some have warts. Better alternatives are often available. So how do imperfect marketers move on? Well, they can and should try to improve the product; that said, Pepsi will never learn Coke’s secret formula. So what do they do?

When called in as a brand strategist in these imperfect product cases, I dive in looking for all that is good. My framework is about customer “care-abouts” and brand “good-ats.” When the two are aligned, we have a plan. When not we have work to do.

Have you ever walked past a person on the street with a magnetic sense of style? Attractive but not pretty or handsome? They are accentuating the positives. They’re not hiding unattractive qualities, they’re celebrating what they have. With panache. That’s what brand planners do. They find an organizing principle for product or service that is loveable and admirable. And they help find ways to celebrate it. Experience it.

As a child, I was not a fan of clams. My west coast uncle came to town and with a few slurps, some facial expressions and a excited description or two, changed my whole perception. His love came through.

This is how we do-oo it!

Peace.

 

 

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Brand Idea.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The new brand strategy for Memorial Sloan Kettering is “More Science. Less Fear.” I’ve written before that more science would be a fine claim (with less fear a good support plank), but my problem with the MSKCC advertising is it rarely uses proof to support its claim. They rarely do ads that show or explain “more science.” As with most marketers they make the claim, sing the claim, storify the claim, but don’t prove it. Wasted Benjamins.

This weekend’s MSKCC ad started out like it was going to provide proof. “When Suzanne wanted a baby after cervical cancer, science delivered” was the ad headline. A tremor of excitement. Then I read the copy. Suzanne received chemo, radiation and surgery prior to having eggs preserved for surrogate gestation. Everything worked out well thankfully and it was a great story. But MORE science? I don’t think so.

Mount Sinai had an ad this weekend in which it explained how a bionic exoskeleton strapped to the leg of a trauma patient allowed him to walk again. There’s an example of more science.

Claim and proof. Peace.    

 

 

Full Frontal Selling. Meh.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Why are we so attracted to nudity? Is it a prurient interest? Are we sex crazed? I think not. It has to do with the fact that we’re always clothed. Others’ nudity is uncommon. It peaks our interest. It fascinates.

Advertising is the total opposite. Advertising leaves nothing to the imagination. Claim, claim, claim. No warts, wrinkles or negatives. In advertising nothing is really left to the imagination. Full frontal selling. Most of it, anyway.

A more powerful approach to ad creation would be to learn what stimulus you need to get someone to want your product or service. It’s the “feel something, do something” approach. Full frontal ads implore consumer to do something. They go straight to the do.  Good ads accomplish both.  “Feel and do” ads like Corona, showing wonderful beach imagery, use both steps.

Don’t tell consumers what to do…make them ready to do. Create an environment where they want to see more, experience more. Tease consumers into purchasing.

Peace.

 

Wither Yahoo?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

When was the last time you actually typed dub dub dub yahoo.com on your keyboard? Thought so. How about thumbed those keys on your mobile? Thought so. Yahoo needs a big shot in the ass. A story to break. A reason to visit. Now that it’s football season, I actually do spend some time on the Yahoo — on the Fantasy Football site. And I love their streaming Fantasy Football Live program Sunday mornings – but even that has been dinged by some silly heavy handed gimmicks called Daily Fantasy Price, moving them into the gambling business. But at least it’s a try. It’s something.  As for the rest of Yahoo: “ugotz.”  An Italian idiomatic phrase meaning nothing.

It’s hard to innovate when you don’t innovate. It’s hard to create best in class web content (which is just content now) when you don’t innovate. It seems that Yahoo if just putting its toys in a vessel and shaking them up.  It needs new toys. Yahoo needs to make news by making interesting new technology than becomes content. Look at the home page. What do you see?  I see the ’90s.

Peace.

 

 

Logos and Brand Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was at a meeting yesterday with someone who used to work in marketing at neurosurgical practice in the NY area. She told how this band of brain surgeons decided they needed a new logo and spent $350,000 for it – using a smart boutique in NYC. For years, I’ve been saying that new logos and names cost about $250,000 from the big guys. The Landors. The Interbrands. The Brand Unions. I guess I’ll have to revise my data upward. The storyteller was flabbergasted that a new mark could cost so much.

Naming and design are big business. Especially for companies with deep pockets. A large health system in the midst of a name change recently explained the new name this way “It’s a beacon of our future. It’s unique, simple and approachable and better defines who we are and where we are going.”

New logo design and naming need to have a marketing objective. A measurable objective. If you are going to change your name or your mark, start with a brand brief. Something that gives direction to designers and creative people. Something that gives approvers a reason to approve. Strategy starts with words on paper. I’ll trade you two simples and one approachable for a brand strategy with a measureable objective.

Peace.          

 

Podcasts and Care-Abouts.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

WNYC, a NYC public radio station, just announced it will open a new $14 million facility to create and distribute podcasts. It’s a brilliant marketing idea. I’ve always had a soft spot for radio and podcasts feel like a smart new media content play. The brilliant investigative series “Serial” by Sarah Koenig last year sparked the podcast movement.

Podcasts are also a good content play in the marketing arsenal. Companies create lots of words and video to hanging off their websites to drive traffic, action and sales — a tactic mostly born to feed the Google Algorithm. And lately content has been championed by ad agencies looking to make more creative buildables. Podcasts have been overlooked.

Smart companies will begin to delve into podcasts. What’s the Idea? has been recommending podcast creation to clients for years.  Here’s how it works. The brand planning rigor at What’s The Idea? drives clients to care about what their customer’s care about. The nexus of customer care abouts and brand “good ats” (Thanks Robin Hafitz, for the wordsmithing) drives the organizing principle that is the brand plan. And the care abouts are where we mine for podcast development.

When you create content people find interesting (versus content about yourself), you connect. People found “Serial” interesting. If you are in the tooth whitening business how do you decide what consumers are interested in? How do you keep it fresh? How do you make deposits in the brand bank? These are good, tough questions. Questions with answers. Questions for a new medium.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

Charlene the Meme-alist.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Charlene Li, a great business mind, recently sold Altimeter Group to Prophet, a long standing brand and marketing concern. Charlene is, and has been, a great meme-alist. She comes up with big business ideas and memes them. These memes helped put the Altimeter Group on the map. Each meme, a mini brand, constitutes a “proof” of her innovative business approach.

Now at Prophet, however, she seems to be doing things a bit differently. Next week she is hosting a webinar on improving employee engagement. No doubt it will be a good one, because engagement has become big business these days. (Back in the early 80s my dad Fred Poppe used the word in a number of Ad Age thought pieces, giving him national cred.) That said, engagement has become a pop-marketing term and the title of Ms. Li’s talk feels a bit “early majority,” perhaps even a little “late majority” to use Geoffrey A. Moore’s framework.

What I love about Ms. Li is her “beyond the dashboard” approach. She needs to settle into her new office before mad redecorating. I suspect she will be back on her game shortly. Then watch out!

Peace.

 

 

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