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Behind the Curtain Workshop, Part 3.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

So now that the business questions are out of the way and brand plan is set (the sausage making clients aren’t particularly fond of) we can begin to make “stuff.” The best way to make stuff is to present it in the form of a marketing communications plan. The plan recaps and toplines what was learned during the 24 Questions and organizes strategies, targets, messages and tactics based upon the brand plan. In the Behind the Curtain workshop I will share a marketing communications plan — key deliverable #3 for marketing consulting clients.

After the marcom plan review I will probably show a slide with 5 or 6 planning tools and let the room decide which they want to hear about. The Is-Does is a simple tool, kind of like an elevator speech, that helps explain what a brand is and what it does. Posters Vs. Pasters is a reductionist social media segmentation intended to improve virality and engagement. Twitch Point Planning is a digital age communications planning tool, the object of which is to move customers closer to a sale. Brand Spanking is qualitative research construct develop to knock market leaders down a peg. The Fruit Cocktail Effect is what happens when you lose focus. And ROS, or return on strategy, is a quant approach to proving value beyond tactics. I will leave 20 minutes for Q & A and the workshop will be done. Looking forward to it.

Peace.

 

 

Behind the Curtain, Part 2.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

For my upcoming workshop “A marketing consultancy, behind the curtain,” I suggested yesterday that the best way to undergird a brand strategy is by asking 24 Questions. With questions answered about business economics, processes and financials we move on to more of a customer focus, the brand strategy. Brand strategy (one claim, three support planks) is a coming together of what “a brand does exceedingly well and what customers want most.” An organizing principle, if you will.

Marketing and branding more specifically, are about claim and proof. Disorganized proof is not the answer. And claim, claim, claim without a reason to believe is what today we call “badvertising.” So once the claim is found the heavy lifting is finding the proof to support it.  Proof not platitude.

There’s a questionnaire I use to get to the brand brief, some of which I will share at the workshop. Questions are designed for customers, C-level execs and salespeople. I also like to do windshield time with salespeople. Watching them sell and buyers buy. If not a B2B brand, I turn windshield time into retail store time and customer observation.

For other workshop goodies tune in tomorrow. Peace

 

Behind the Curtain.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I am putting together a workshop for next month and have decided to title it “A marketing consultancy, behind the curtain.” The subtitle is something like, the tools and trick of a marketing consultant. The workshop needs to fill 3-4 hours and as David Bromberg likes to say, I have a “pocketful of funnies,” but need to figure out which ones and in what order to share them.

First off and foremost I will talk about the brand strategy. Most think brand strategy is the thing Landor writes before they charge you $250,000 for a logo and style book. At What’s the Idea? a brand strategy is way more (but less expensive). Here, a brand strategy is defined as an “organizing principle” for business success. Not communications success. In order to create an organizing principle for business success one must first understand business fundamentals. One tool to do so I call 24 Questions. With the 24 Questions answered I can speak the language of the CEO, CFO and CMO. When you use a company’s data and language you tend to not fall into the marko-babble trap – talking about transparency, operational excellence, customer centrism, and elevator speeches.

So explaining brand strategy and the 24 Questions are the first two tools I’ll address in “Behind the Curtain.” Stay tuned for more. Peace.

McDonalds Missed the Signs.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A lot of money is going to change hands very soon in the ad industry because of McDonalds rearview mirror planning. Lately, they’ been doing some sideview mirror planning and one could say, with the introduction of salads a few years ago, they were looking beyond the dashboard to the future, but mostly they have looked backwards. Laurels canyon.

Just as Coca-Cola knew a time would come when high-fructose corn syrupy drinks would be seen as unhealthy and share would decline, McDonalds knew a better-for-you-food offering was in the offing. So they introduced salads, made the deep fat fryer less toxic, extended revenue with coffee (an off-piste fix), and reduced the salt on the fries. The freight train was still coming though. All the Millennials you see running around the lake or the park? They are drinking cold pressed juices and Instragram-ing the pics. They’re wi-fing pics of their Mediterranean Veggie sandwiches at Panera. The new generation of fast food buyers is trying to eat better as are their parents.

So while McDonalds was not trying to create a healthier, tastier new burger (veggie?, soy?, buffalo?) or the next branded healthy fast food, other QSRs have taken .2% of same store sales.

The new CMO has done some smart things, no doubt: flattened the organization, faster service, brought in some new ad muscle, but it’s product innovation that is lacking. They will fix it. It is just too bad it took a smack in the nose to wake up. You gots to look beyond the dashboard. Peace.

 

 

Communication Breakdown.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was director of market at a company a couple of years ago and a smart dude in the education space was talking copy points. Copy inputs. He used a couple of well-worn marketing words like “what sets us apart is our ability to partner with schools.” There are certain words in marketing and copywriting, I said, that are “toxic.” And partnership is one.  The word partnership is like an algae and has grown so in marketing parlance that it has choked off all the oxygen it once contained. There are other toxic words and phrases in marketing, deadly sins if you will, which when used in copy not only don’t impart their intended meaning (due to rampant overuse) they turn people off. They shut us down. It’s like hearing a bad song on the radio…click.

If you need to make the point conveyed by a toxic word, use a story. Bury it in a narrative. Find an under-used synonym. Or use it in a very different, out-of-context way. Toxic words area lazy and bad trade craft. Peace.

Brand Planning Tips

By
Steve Poppe
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0

merle haggard

So I was listening to Merle Haggard yesterday and the old coot was doing a duet with Jewel and, by God, he changed his vocal treatment – his voice — on the song. It was Merle but he was trying to impress her, trying to woo her. Men! There was a gentleness to his voice that you won’t hear in most of his tunes. The tone send a message. So I’m thinking if he can change his tone and impart different meaning, sub rasa meaning, so can the rest of us. Why not use it as a brand planning tool?  So I’m playing around with an interview technique that will prompt interviewees to answer questions in various voice types. You know the voice you use when someone is confiding tragic personal news to you? Or the voice used to encourage a child who needs support? Have you a sexy voice? The key is to get the interviewee to use a topic-appropriate voice in an interview to impart greater meaning.  To do so you have to put them in a zone; coach them like an acting coach. Get them to a place where they are feeling an emotion then get them to answer your question, truthfully, but that particular voice.

Try it, I certainly will. Peace.

 

The Art of Keywords.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

keywords

There isn’t any. There is very little art in keyword infested content. Writers who pepper their digital work with keywords so the algo can find it, aren’t writing they are data processing. Recruiters will tell you to make sure you have a list of keyword skills in your resume so the algo, at first pass (Who can read 200 resumes?) finds you.  Similarly, web developers and SEO jockeys want lots of keywords on the homepage and primary layers to make sure your site rises to the top on Google. And content marketing writers, as grammatically correct as they are, know they’re being paid by the search not the word. So, where’s the art? Where’s the poetry? Where is that heart-felt, emotive story? In many cases it’s not even copy anymore, it’s search palaver.

Great writing, persuasive writing is an art. Look at all the best columnists, bloggers and vloggers — they didn’t rise to the top because of keywords. Their content was the marketing. What’s next, musical notes the tones of which are searchable? I loves me some G minor.

Peace.

 

The New P?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The 4 Ps of marketing have always been sacrosanct. If you don’t take care of the Product, Price, Place and Promotion, you aren’t paying attention to the total marketing mix. You can certainly be successful without attending to all 4, but it won’t sustain. For the last 10 years I’ve had this gnawing feeling that the web has altered the 4Ps, but haven’t been able to put my finger on in. I’ve written how the web has collapsed the steps to a sale (awareness, interest, desire and action) into a single one-experience process — certainly a big change — but has it really changed the 4 Ps?

I was reading a Slideshare by Translation’s John Greene today on disruption in the music business and landed on a point about “transaction”…which gave me pause. Readers who know my “Twitch Point Planning” thesis, know twitches used properly, can lead to or be transactions. Communications planners know the value of the transaction. Is it possible that transaction can replace the Place P? Place being the channel, e.g., the retail store, mail order, ecomm website, mobile device? Or should transaction be added to the 4Ps?

As technology plays with place and pricing and makes purchases as convenient as a swipe, scan or click, the transaction may trump all other Ps. Are we as brand planners and comms planners thinking enough about the transaction? Thoughts me droogies?

Peace!

 

 

Solution Selling Vs. Brand Plan Selling.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A brand plan is an organizing principle for selling. The plan has a claim and three proof-of-claim planks. The claim, the heart of the plan, is something a product or company does well – a synopsis. It is also something the consumer wants or needs. Hopefully, the claim is pregnant with meaning and contextual. (At the Griffin Farley Beautiful Minds event last year, a claim developed by a team of tyro brand planners for CitiBikes was “bicycles with benefits,” a lovely pregnant claim.) Planks, on the other hand, are the proof areas that give consumers reasons to believe the claim. Also, they give employees and marketers content for their little elevator speeches. (Have you ever wondered why we need elevator speeches?)

B2B companies use salesforces to move their products and over the past decade there has been a proliferation of something called “solution selling.” Salesforces are trained to sell only after they’ve engaged prospects about their pain. Once the pain points are found, the seller can put his/her sales spiel together. (I like nothing more than to share my pain with complete strangers.) 80% plus of U.S. sales teams are solution selling these days. They believe it differentiates them. Hee hee.

With a brand plan “what the customer needs” has already been articulated. With a brand plan “what the product is good at” is already understood and provable. With a brand plan and the proper marketing and promotion, “consumers already are predisposed toward the claim and proof” because it has been advertised and promoted. Sales training that is based upon a strategy endemic to the product or service and based upon a consumer need is much stronger than solution selling out of a book. A sales trainer from one company that moves to another company can change the logo at the top of the presentation and make a nice living. That should tell you something.

Powerful, organized selling is based upon a brand plan — not someone’s pain. Peace.

PS. To see examples of brand plans mail steve@whatstheidea.com

Brand Brief Formats

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I joke around that I make paper for a living. Paper strategies. To the creative people fall the exciting deliverables: the TV spots, magazine ads, websites and iPhone apps. Me? I just make the idea starters and the idea guard rails.

Good strategists, with their briefs, provide thought-provoking stim, context, and imagery to help the makers and doers create motivating selling schema. The paper containing said stim is two dimensional. Brand planners are great at bringing those two dimensions to life, yet there are still only two.  I came across a new file format today called .STL.  It stands for stereolithography or Standard Tessellation Language. It’s a format for 3D printing and one which, no doubt, we will be seeing a lot more of in the future.

This new format is one brand planners should use as inspiration. A format with an additional axis. I dimensionalize my paper strategies with a little playacting, voices, miming — anything to help the creative process along — but at the end of the day the paper is the paper and it sits on a desk or inside a Mac. We need a new format. Any idea?

Peace. 

 

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