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Diplomacy in Brand Planning.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

diplomat

Branding is not life or death. Unless you are talking about the life and death of products.

Branding is about developing a claim and proof array that brand managers use to organize product, experience, deeds and messaging. Once a brand plan is designed, brand managers are paid to manage adherence. Here’s the big tip: There is no room for diplomacy in brand planning. Diplomacy may be great when dealing with the Russians over Ukraine, but there is no room to “make everybody half happy through compromise” in branding. You are either putting deposits in the brand bank or you are making withdrawals (AT&T’s Marilyn Laurie coined this wonderful metaphor).

Brand managers are going to have to say “no” a lot as they manage their brands. And that’s a good thing. People are going to crawl out of the wood pile with requests for projects to be funded, with promotional ideas, PR events and more – many of which will be nobly intended. But if they’re not “on plan,” not making a deposit in the brand bank, they are a disservice to brand development. Even if a lost kitty farm.

If you are a brand manager and you don’t know how to say “no” or why to say “yes,” it is likely you don’t have a brand plan. If you do have a brand plan but the rest of the company can’t articulate it and use it to make daily decisions in their respective jobs, shame on you as well. Peace.

 

Brand Strategy Metrics.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

If I keep writing about ROS or return on strategy it may become a brand planning meme. First, brand planning has to become a meme (hot web topic) which may be wishful thinking. Hee hee. Anyway, Return On Strategy suggests there is something to measure. Upper case DUH.  The problem with most brand design and redesigns is that much of the money and thinking is tied up in the mark. And tagline. The mark should be the last mile of brand strategy and brand design. It’s about the paper strategy first. The idea.

If Newsday’s brand strategy is “We know where you live” (Newsday is a top 10-15 daily newspaper in the U.S.), then the value of that claim must be measureable. To do that you need support planks – planks that are of value to readers. e.g., a great source of “local entertainment” or “events and legislation affecting local taxes.” The ability to measure attitudes, actions and perceptions against these planks is the heavy lifting of brand strategy.

The Interbrands and Landors of the world don’t spend real time here. They design and deliver logos, taglines and style manuals. You may be able to measure adherence to a style manual but that’s not likely to drive revenue.

Start with your paper brand strategy and you start at the beginning. Peace!  

One Dimensional Creatives.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Creative people, sadly, tend to be really creative in one dimension. Some are great writers, others wonderful designers, some skilled idea people. There are creative people who are wonderful storytellers, musicians and artists. But it’s a rare rarity that you find someone who is crazy skilled in all dimensions.

Check out this video – the Look Up video. Wonderful poetry, average video.

In marketing the most sought after spenders of big budgets are what I call “producers.” Producers bring together strong single dimensional creative experts and choreograph the output. Not an easy job. The reason ad agencies still exist is because this choreography is what they do best. Ad agencies do it using top talent. DIYers rely on single dimensional creative people alone and it shows. And today with everyone clamoring for digital help, the tendency is to hire creative programmers, further diminishing the good work gene pool.

Great brand managers are also great producers. They are not curators – curators are plentiful – they produce selling materials and buildables that exude multi-discipline craftsmanship. And for this I say thank you hey-suess! Peace.

ROS and Price Elasticity.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Chipotle raised prices last year on its beef burrito 4-6% and consumers didn’t blink. They happily paid. Why is that? The Bain and Boston Consulting nerds might say Chipotle has great price elasticity. I say Chipotle offers great ROS, return on strategy. One of the best ways to measure return on strategy is to poll current customers about price. “Would you continue to buy Hoegaarden if the price were raised 5%?” a market question might read. If the answer is yes, one might follow up with “Why” or “What is it about Hoegaarden that makes you such a fan?” The answers to the questions are influenced by marketing. And brand strategy – defined as an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.

When a brand has a codified organizing principle, marrying what the product does well with what consumers want most, it has a strategy. Only then can return on that strategy be measured. In market share. In dollars. And in sense (sic).

As you market your products and services, please don’t forget to measure return on your strategy — not just the return on your tactical investments. Peace!

Wazzup with the state of selling.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The democratization of selling has befallen marketing. That, and search engine marketing. Was a time when outside of belly-to-belly selling, companies large and small needed agents to help them sell: ad agencies, PR firms, media companies. All made a nice livings creating and placing ads and messages paid for with money from a line on the expense ledger. Then technology introduced us to the interwebs and that expense line sprung a leak. Crazy money was sent to Google and its SEO/SEM minions as companies found the mother of all yellow pages and decided they could do it themselves.

Bad creative, good data analysis and the algorithm moved billions from Madison Avenue onto the web. Into wireframes and searchables. Pretending it didn’t hurt the business, ad agency CFO’s moved executives to long family style desks in old cheap buildings with uneven floors. Cool. And the Googleplexes multiplied.

budweiser puppy

There once was an ad agency axiom “Pictures of a puppies and babies get great readership.” Well, guess which ad won the Super Bowl people’s choice awards? Yep. The Budweiser puppy rescue. Oy.

The democratization of selling is shit-ifying selling. It’s killing innovation. With everyone owning tools to make videos, podcasts, newsletters and PDF ads (to save a buck) there’s a virus of poor selling going on. Search and DIY (do it yourself) are not helping the vision. Puppies anyone? Peace.

 

Theorists and fieldworkers.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There are two kinds of brand planner: theorists and doers. The theorists have done a great deal of research and brief writing, but tend to spend much time writing papers, slideshares and posts about the process of creating strategy. The language they use is peppered with words like “transformation,” “disruption,” “authenticity” and “culture.” Theorists speak before groups, hold webinars and index high for sharing. But when their night job (theory) becomes their day job (actual brand planning), the luster can come off.

“Doer” brand planners live in front of theory. They are often theory breakers. Always on, they constantly dig into products and consumer behaviors – attempting to see them as no one else does. Dissecting product context, use, role and behavior. Seeing products in situ.

It’s a curse really. Wives, husbands, boy and girlfriends, children and pals suffer through it as doers observe all the live-long-day. Temperance for the doers planner is important. Shhh. But the electrical charge for the doer planner comes from the act of exploration, from insights, from “the decision” and closure (as if). And then, as Eddie Vedder sings, “He’s off again.”

Theorists have done the fieldwork and earned their stripes. The doer’s life is the fieldwork. Is an empty piece of paper. Peace!

Function and Desire in Brand Planning.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Apple’s success can be boiled down to two guiding product development principles: functionality and desire. Steve Job’s was a big fan of design as you know. Creating products that perform valuable, needed functions was his first hurdle and he did it well. That by itself can create desire. But doing so with beauty, grace and artistry? Well, that warms the heart. And fires up the brain’s feelings sensors.

When I explain brand planning to people I say it’s the marriage of “what a product does well” and “what a consumer wants most.” In a sense, this mirrors Apple’s function and desire approach.

Many brand people like to talk about the culture of the company and the culture of the brand. As someone who studied anthropology for a number of years, I’m a big fan of functionalism; where institutions and cultures develop to meet the physical needs of the population. In brief, culture is an adaptation to reality. So rather than spend brand planning time over-analyzing symbols and cues, I prefer to spend time on product function. Things like status may be a desire, but they are certainly not functions. As you do discovery in your brand planning ops, make sure you don’t look past function and go straight to desire. It’s a fundamental part of the product story. Peace.

Grading Mid-Size Businesses.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

If you are paying any attention to what’s going on in K12 education you’ll know many teachers are up in arms about the Common Core curriculum; a standardization of what and how students are taught. Teachers are particularly nervous about being graded on their performance against Common Core standards. Imagine — teachers upset by being graded.

Grading performance is as old as performance itself. It’s especially hard in marketing; the same place where it is especially lax. Just as teachers say, “It’s not my fault Dick and Jane aren’t performing, they come from difficult home situations” marketers say “It’s not my fault sales are down, the product isn’t great.”

Huge businesses have a hard time grading their marketing because there are so many moving parts. Small businesses have an easier time grading marketing but there is not much to grade; beyond the product, service and bottom line there is not a lot of spending or investing going on.

Mid-size business, on the other hand, is where grading marketing practices really falls apart. Marketing can have positive impact in mid-size businesses but $20,000 checks are hard to write.  Mid-size businesses are actually the ones most likely to benefit from grades but there has to be something to grade. In my work, I grade brand strategy. Why? It is strategic not tactical. A cume grade not lots of little grades.

I can go into a mid-size company, snoop around, review sales and selling materials, speak to 10 customers and know right away if there is a strategy. 70% don’t have one.

Mid-size companies are the ones who benefit most from marketing and brand strategy. Mid-size companies who grade themselves on sales alone are likely to stall. Return on Strategy is where they need to be. Peace.

 

Brand Strategy in Action.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Critical to the success of social media or content marketing strategy is the concept of “motivation.” Borrowed from the acting world where a good actor uses a motivation to bring his or her character to life, motivation in social is meant to drive all that is posted and pasted.

Social media motivation is not random – it’s a direct outgrowth of brand strategy. Motivation must illuminate and demonstrate the claim and proof array that are a product’s brand strategy. This opens up and speeds up consumer understanding of brand strategy. It brings brand strategy out of paper mode and theory mode and into experience and action – creating muscle memory.

A customer care person on the phone who understands a company’s brand strategy can decide on the fly how to act. How to deliver. How to behave. This is where acting can turn into reality. And reality into culture.

Strategy is brilliant but until it turns into product, deeds and experiences it’s just ink on a screen. Peace.

 

 

Constraints, planks and money.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I attended Google Firestarters last night in NYC (thanks Ben Malbon), the topic of which was “constraints” and how they can fuel business and marketing improvements. Speakers included Adam Morgan (Eat Big Fish) and Mark Barden (ex-Guinness) co-authors of the smart new book A Beautiful Constraint. Firestarter panel 012215 In the morning I spoke at a great small business panel sponsored by Teacher Federal Credit Union on the topic of “Return on Strategy.”  One of my business constraints is that I’m a self-taught brand planner. Ada Alpert and other brand planning recruiters won’t touch me because I don’t come out of a traditional brand planning shop. I’ve also not been schooled by a member of the British Mafia. To overcome this constraint I’ve had to study hard from afar, creating my own syllabus and curriculum.

Return on Strategy is one of my self-taught tools. Here’s how it works: Measure your brand strategy (not tactics) and see if adherence puts more money in the bank. Period.

An example: Years ago, AT&T Business Communications Services knew if consumers 1. felt price was within 10% of its closest competitor, 2. believed they had a more reliable network and 3. provided innovative tools to help businesses grow, market share would grow. These became the 3 legs of the strategy. Perception of these things is what we measured through tracking research. So long as we maintained advantage in all three areas AT&T added customers. If we slipped in one area, we started losing customers. Gotta love science.

For my clients the search is all about finding the three key business-building strategies that help grow business. I call them proof planks. When I find the planks I help clients build and manage them. I also make sure they measure adherence and tie it to business gains. You have now attended What’s the Idea? 101. Peace.

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