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A Note to Twitter’s New CEO.

By
Steve Poppe
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I love Twitter. It is what it is. As with human lovers the attraction is different for everyone. Chris Sacca, an early investor and dude who is away smarter than me. Okay, way way smarter, suggests the way forward for Twitter and soon to be new CEO is to focus on live events. Farhad Manjoo a NYT tech correspondent agrees. If that happens, I’m afraid the app will revolve around a behaviors that are no doubt powerful and bursty but that will remove the serendipity of Twitter. 300M people are using Twitter just fine thank you. Learn to live with it. Allow it to mature and follow user instincts. Don’t gorge on what I once called the Google’s “culture of technological obesity.”

For me what is so special about Twitter – and this is just me – is that the app truly reflects an individual’s complete personality. It’s not about friends. It’s not all business. It’s not a public picture book. It’s life from every corner.

As a brand planner, when I do homework on a consumer, I’d study his/her Twitter feed. I may look at original posts first rather than retweets and curated OPC (other people’s content). For users with more than 1000 tweets this is a wonderful visage – a view into their soul. It’s a look at the total person. You get to see happy tweets, sad tweets, angry tweets. Indignant tweets.

If we follow Mr. Sacca and Mr. Manjoo’s advice, that visage will be stunted. Please don’t try to fix Twitter. Let it fix itself. It’s alive.

Learn to be happy with who you are. Live within your means. You are changing the world. Peace!

 

HP and the B Team.

By
Steve Poppe
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I don’t mean to pick on HP or its advertising and marketing again. But I must.  The company is using arguably the world’s best advertising agency (BBDO) and can’t get out of its own way.  They can’t come up with a sustainable brand idea; an idea that marries what they do best with what customers want most. Today’s new idea, as seen in an ad in the NYT, revolves around the notion of “further faster.”  It is all claim, exposition and pedantic nothingness – not a single sign of proof in the copy. Do HP and Meg Whitman really think IT executives and Fortune 2000 leaders don’t know they have to be faster and more informed in their business decisions? OMG. If “further faster” is the idea — at least it is better than “make it matter,” their last strategic foray. You wouldn’t know it from this ad however.

HP has bigger fish to fry than a tagline and brand idea. They are splitting the company and losing small cities worth of money. That said, someone at the top in the marketing dept. should be trying much harder to deliver a clear, meaningful idea.

BBDO is great at selling consumer goods but perhaps doesn’t truly get B2B. (B team?) This whole mess is really hard to believe. If HP wants to get to the future faster, they had better learn a lot more about claim and proof…and find the organizing principle that helps make more money. Peace.

 

 

Houzz, Brand Planners and Ample Asses.

By
Steve Poppe
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houzz homepage

Came across a cool new website called Houzz. It’s also an app on the iPhone. Someone showed me the app on the iPhone (my first user experience or FUE) where it displayed a picture of a kitchen with lots of scroll over call-outs. You scrolled over a countertop and lots of little bubbles (way too many) popped up – I assumed they were prices, or comments. For the life of me I couldn’t figure the app out. I later went to the website and subscribed and started receiving emails, which I didn’t open. Until today.

It’s a real nice website. Lots of bleed pictures, little text on the homepage, the way I like it. But I still couldn’t tell what the site was about other than home stuff so I dug in and visited the About Page. Here’s what they say:

“We are a platform for home remodeling and design, bringing homeowners and home professionals together in a uniquely visual community.”

Now that made sense. My FUE with the app did not.

The Houzz site (not the app) is an awesome resource. Power kitchen and remodeling users (people with leisure time?) spend a nice amount of energy here. This is exactly the kind of place a brand planner wants to do research. It’s the kind of place where thoughtful helpers, info seekers, and smart sellers spend time sharing. All in one location. Brand planners with ample asses (impolitic, I know) can learn a lot – sans fieldwork – on a site like this. I love finding gems like this in every category.  It’s where Posters go. (Google “Posters versus Pasters”.) Peace.

 

Celebrate and Inebriate the Biz.

By
Steve Poppe
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Poor poor advertising. Woe is Advertising. It really doesn’t get much respect. As a kid growing up in the business (before Cable TV and Mad Men), ad agency peeps listed just above car salesmen in term of trustworthyness and job stature. God knows where they stand today. Advertising needs a PR company to remold its image.

Where do you think Google gets its bank? Its campus? Its engineers and PHDs? And, and, and. From ad dollars. Sure AdWords are McAwful. Not creative and mostly DIY. But its advertising. Advertising is a gazillon dollar business.

Advertising needs a boost. It needs a strategy. It needs an event. An event to end all events? How about something that makes South By look like child’s play? How about we fill NYC or Brooklyn with the top creative people in the world? Not an awards show like Cannes, but a celebration of creativity like never before. “Banksy, would you mind lighting the opening bond fire?” “Pearl Jam, could you play at the closing event?” “Steven Colbert, might you emcee a live stream art face-off from McCarren Park?”

I’m not talking Advertising Week where we parade the Jolly Green Giant and Clara Peller? I’m not talking Lee Clow in a duel of words with Rich Silverstein? I’d love to celebrate and inebriate the city with the biggest creative names, people, brands and sponsors of the day. (That day being tomorrow…not yesterday.)

We need a strategy. I smell money.

The Two Most Important Brand Fundamentals.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Two recent clients of What’s The Idea? have provided great strength to my views regarding branding. They affirmed things I’ve learned over time but now provide wonderful analogs for my practice. The first client is a premier geotechnical engineering firm. These men and women create the foundational plans for large buildings, bridges and other load-bearing structures. They keep rivers where they belong and 100 story buildings from settling. They are perhaps the most important, yet unseen, engineers in the world. Genius scientists and creative thinkers walk the halls of this company. It is from this company that I learned about solid foundation. A brand strategy (defined as an organizing principle for product, messaging and experience) requires a solid foundation.

The second client is an arm of a large business consulting firm paid to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Pandemics. Natural disasters. Huge security threats. This company is paid to create strategy. Articulation of problem. Proof of concept. Solution design. Measures of success. In a word: strategy. They don’t sell stuff. Were this company brought in to help the Red Cross after the Haiti earthquake, more than 6 houses would be built today. Strategy saves time and creates efficiency. Brand strategy, does that same. I joke about making paper. But brand strategy is a paper sale. A PPT sale. When I leave an engagement, clients have a claim and three proof planks to govern marketing. I don’t sell stuff. As the old Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for lifetime.” Peace.

 

A Tale of Two City Websites.

By
Steve Poppe
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Some projects should never get off the ground. Last year NYC closed down a schools website called ARIS (Achievement Reporting and Innovation System). Parents, by and large, were not logging on to get their kids’ grades and test comments. Amplify, a usually smart education company, was paid $95M over 7 years (development by IBM) to build and maintain this well-intended, but flawed site. In fairness, they stepped in after the project was underway. Someone up front – at the strategy level – should have stopped this project before it started. Once the RFP goes out in instances like this, that’s not likely to happen. Before the RFP goes out — that’s when a business concept need to be vetted. Usually at a price of $1M for a project this size.

Next week a replacement site is launching called NYC Schools. According to the New York Times, the cost was $2M. And note the brand name. If a name needs an acronym, it is probably IBM-friendly not Main Street-friendly. Achievement Reporting and Innovation System? Oy.

Strategy before build. Strategy before investment. Strategy before hiring are all signs of good business acumen. Had Amplify not taken the job in its, then, current state, it would have saved the city time, money and improved educational outcomes. Had it said, “this won’t work” at the beginning, kids in college (or not) would be better off today.

Strategy, be it business or brand, is how smart business works. Invest in it. Peace.

 

 

The Ontogeny of Technology.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Back to the future – here we go. Here’s a thought on the evolution of technol-oyee, as my old friend Tom Wan used to call it when he first came to the states: hardware begets software, begets devices, apps and now, drum roll, chips.

ontogeny recapituates phylogenyThere’s a scientific theory of evolution called ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It means that the entire evolution of mankind can be seen in the development of a two cells coming together to eventually form a baby. One cell, two cell, reptile, bird, mammal, man. Pert cool. Anyway, if you follow the hardware, software, device, app and chip advances serially, it takes you to the Internet of Things (IoT). And the IoT is going to need lots of chips. Back in the 90s, chips were also the haps. They had names like The Hobbit and made by important companies like IBM, AT&T, Qualcomm and Intel. The latter kicked some earnings ass until it missed the boat on the ontogeny of tech. Yesterday Intel announced it is buying their way back back by agreeing to buy Altera. IBM is getting back in the chip biz as well having also made a recent purchase. Will Google, Apple and Verizon be far behind?

Chips fab plants are not inexpensive to develop. Start-ups beware.  They require lots of energy and water. Feel me? These plants, at some point, will need to be in the states (don’t ask) so for the IoT to happen, the last of big business moves in chips have not happened…by a long shot. Invest a shekel, make a few.

Peace!

 

Marketing is Politics.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Just talking to my son Derek who works for a political consulting firm about canvasing efforts this past weekend on behalf of a group trying to get a bill passed to ban toxic chemicals locally. The group pays canvassers a nice amount per hour (over the minimum age) to ring door bells and get people to call their representatives. The program supervisors know if people break out their cell phones while the canvasser is there, the calls get made. A couple of hundred call to the local rep. in a weekend are often enough to make an impression in a local pol’s vote.

As someone who grew up in the advertising and marketing world, I know that the best selling outcomes occur when you get someone to “feel something, then do something.” That’s what the canvassers are all about. If the call to the local representative is the “do” then the learning exercise for the canvasser is the “feel.” When it comes to toxic chemicals in the environment the feel shouldn’t be too hard. But how about getting a homeowner to sign a petition for an unknown candidate? Or to vote for a bill that goes against one’s personal politics?  

Dig in and find the feeling you’re looking to tickle…then back out what stimulus is needed to engender that feeling. Heady work. Smart work.

Marketing is politics and politics is marketing.

Peace.

 

Positioning Replacement?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I’m a big Al Ries fan. His and Jack Trout’s book on Positioning changed my career. I have memories of reading it on a Long Island Rail Road. It’s a great thought piece.

Today however, I take issue with the idea of positioning in branding. 

Positioning is the act of finding a competitive and defensible place for your brand in the consumers’ mind. The search for a position — a position being a noun. Position is defined as “a place occupied or to be occupied; site.”

In my brand consultancy branding is defined as “an organizing principle” for product, message and experience. This approach is much more fluid and alive. It allows for branding as a series of behavioral acts. Ongoing. Making ads, customer care, retail design, and web experience all fall into activities that define the brand and its promise. That prove its promise.

With branding as an organizing principle everything is viewed as an active, a non-machine related sales opportunities.  Built and enforced by people. Not a destination or compass point in the mind of a consumer.

Positioning was way better than anything before it. And barring any real brand strategy (one idea, three planks) it is the next best approach. But I think we can do a little better.

Peace.

 

 

Got a business problem? Me too.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

business problem

Here’s my business problem. When I tell people I’m a brand planner and run a brand consultancy they immediately think I’m trying to sell them a new logo. New design and packaging. They think brand consultants are needed only for repositioning or brand extension.

The big ass fact is most of my work is done on behalf of marketers with existing brands and logos – not in the market for a design makeover. My clients tend to be making okay or good money but are adrift strategically. If they were hemorrhaging they wouldn’t be talking to brand peeps, they’d be engaging blocking and tackling business consultants.

My brand planning rigor is actually closer to that of a business consultancy than a design firm. The work is all about articulating a business winning strategy and the three planks that further that strategy. My “one idea, three planks” approach puts into English an action plan – a decision plan, really – that lets companies and employees know how to sell. From product, message and experience points of view.

Make more money is not a strategy. Make higher margin is not a strategy. Make customers happier is not a strategy. For an example or six of business winning brand strategies, please write steve@whatstheidea.com. And help solve my business problem.

Peace.

 

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