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Creative. Ideas. Showmanship.

By
Steve Poppe
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The finals last night at the Griffin Farley “Beautiful Minds” brand planning competition came down to two ideas: “Bikes with Benefits” and “Don’t Take That Shit.”  The former selected for its cultural currency and energy, the latter for its create-a-movement potential.  The judges, looking at briefs on the CitiBikes program, made the right call giving the competition to the Bikes With Benefits team.  

Great ideas should be able to come from anywhere, yet Bikes With Benefits was a creative idea as well as a strategy — and that can be a problem for some creative teams. Don’t Take That shit was not so much creative as it was a spark for creative. It may have won the room but it didn’t win the judges.   

Another Farley, Jim Farley of Ford, once said great advertising makes you feel something then do something. Both ideas accomplished this. Both strategies were strong.  One idea showed better. Peace.

PS. Great job BBH, Sarah Watson and Angela Sun.  This event is a keeper.

 

Enculturation.

By
Steve Poppe
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Many think of marketing as acquisition. Or lead generation. Business leaders in that mode don’t really understand brand planning. What often drives leaders who think this way towards branding or rebranding are: old logos, mergers and acquisitions, and boredom. Brand planning though, is all about strategy.

At What’s The Idea? a brand plan is defined as one strategic idea (or claim) and the three support planks – planks that prove the claim and organize how business is done. A mark or logo is best if it supports that idea. Salespeople and operations people are optimized if they are guided by an organizing principle.  Those businesses who don’t get branding can’t ask employees to go out and “blue” for the company based on the color palette or “leader” for the company, based on a mission statement.  

A brand plan makes it so that when every employee leaves the building at night they can ask themselves a strategic question about their performance. And that is the litmus test.

I like to say “campaigns come and go, a powerful brand idea is indelible.”  Leads come and go. Customers come and go.  Brands strategy should not. If it’s not about building and maintaining business through strategy, it’s not a brand plan.

Employees come and go too, their understanding of the strategy should not. Executives talk all the time about company culture. At the best companies strategy is enculturated.  Peace.

Rose Color Your Glasses.

By
Steve Poppe
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I was judging at The Beautiful Minds Event last weekend, a wonderful BBH-sponsored celebration of the life of Griffin Farley, and was struck by how rose colored my glasses have become.  Not sure if it’s all the find the pain point pop marketing books the kids read in school or what the media hath wrought, but most of the young were wrapping their strats around problem solving. (Beautiful Minds, BTW, is a competition among tyro brand planners.)

The brief the competitors were chasing was about Citibikes. Imagery of sweat, commuter angst, cramped subway cars and ornery taxi drivers abounded.  Where was the happiness factory? Readers know I love Coke strategy and have been a little contrary when it comes to the happiness strategy. Growing up at McCann and seeing how “refreshment” can be optimized for Coke sales, I’ve not been “feeling” the happiness thing.  But then I watched the lovely “Small World Machine” video designed to bring closer together Pakistani and Indian youth. I cried then said to myself “that’s refreshing.” A different kind of refreshing.     

With all the negativity in the world, all the cop/killing TV shows, movies about aliens eating cities, religious wars and hate mongering, it’s not hard to stick out with some positivity. Let’s not just fix problems with our strategies, let’s surround and celebrate the good.  And let’s teach the youth to do so as well. Check all your briefs at the door people. Peace.

RIP Aunt Irma. The Poppe matriarch.

Bidirectional Learning.

By
Steve Poppe
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When the economy is bad often the first things businesses cut are advertising and training; line item entries that are not headcount. Sadly, lack of training is hard to compensate for when recovery comes. Training is teaching. And teaching done well is also learning.  Learning what’s what among the young. It’s bidirectional.

When developing a brand plan for a K12 educational technology company I noticed the young teachers were adept at teaching the not-so (how to use technology).  The natives teaching the immigrants, as it were.  

Corporate and business trainers also benefit from the teaching and learning bidirectional approach.  But they have to listen a bit. Everyone is looking for skills and in a changing world skills are not just top down. While working at a social networking start-up I learned how in Japan, kids and seniors are more agreeable to the mentor/mentee thing. There was bidirectional value for both.  In Bedford Stuyvesant, Bailey’s Café has a similarly focus and it is brining the community together.  

The best teachers understand leaning because they have their own learning switch on. Planners are learners first. Socializers second. Strategists third. Always be learning! Peace.

Opt-In

By
Steve Poppe
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As smart phone penetration increases (we are at 61% according to Nielsen), marketers and software developers are working hard to pierce the skins of those devices and turn them into selling machines. And cash registers. As someone who works in the business of selling and who proudly claims to be “always on” when it comes to consumer behavior, I am decidedly “off”  when it comes to intrusive sales pitches. I don’t like telemarketers. I cringe at the approach of door-to-door sales people. And long paper coupons on sales receipts revive my inner tree hugger.  

Using geo-tracking and store Wi-Fi many retailers are able to track our smarties, bounce to the database and enhance (their word not mine) our shopping experience.  Enhance meaning increase the ring or ticket value. Help me find something I really want and need and that’s great. Spa-zam me, not great.

There are going to be a number of ham-handed uses of this retail technology over the next few years. And it will taint the good practice. If it feels as if our privacy is being compromised, if it feels like an intrusion, it is a poor application. My recommendations to retailers is to let customers opt-in to these new services. The work real hard on the app and the delivery.  Make shoppers want to turn on the app. Make the apps killer and endemic to the store brand and everyone will want to participate.  That’s activation. Peace.    

 

Dachis, Altimeter and Brand.

By
Steve Poppe
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There are a couple of really smart consulting companies I’ve been following for a few years: The Altimeter Group and Dachis Group. The latter gave birth to a concept called “social business design” and the former more recently codified a similar practice they call “social business.”

Following Dachis Group from a far, it was my view that they should monetize by selling software.  Build it once, charge forever. Consult regarding the need for a new, more efficient way to do business then sell proprietary software that enables it. This approach is one with which Accenture’s has had great success.

Altimeter, on the other hand, is all about the consults and the hourlies. When you don’t have to push your own product, it appears cleaner to customers. Selling knowledge and providing the groundwork for companies to heal themselves is viable and healthy.

There is room for both approaches and each company has a long list of blue chip clients. Today in this very digital world there is enough pie to go around.

Because marketing is at the center of all things business and because brands are the drivers of what is marketed, there is big room at the table for brand planning. (You saw that one coming.)  In fact, social business without brand planning can sometimes be little more than a loose federation of processes, tools and measures.  Organizing everything with a principle that sells more, to more, for more, more often is the last mile of social business.  Peace.

Strategic Ideas with Flavor.

By
Steve Poppe
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Too many people, when they think strategy, think boring. Charge more for more. Faster customer care. Become the innovation leader.  Stuff like that. These ideas lack flavor.  If you are lucky enough to have a good creative person at the controls, you may get some good, flavorful work. “Where’s the beef” helped build the Wendy’s brand by celebrating a larger hamburger patty. Not a flavorful strategy, but terrific creative.

Strategy needn’t be without flavor. In fact, great strategies never are. A flavorful strategy can compensate for average creative work. And, more importantly, can stimulate spectacular work (creative and otherwise).

So look at your brand strategy and ask yourself: “Is it piquant?” “Does it make you feel something?  Does it give you pride?”  Or Google “whatstheidea+things we remember.” 

Peace in the Middle East!

We are not Tweakers, we are brand planners.

By
Steve Poppe
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In a presentation I wrote while with JWT during its tenure on Microsoft I came upon an insight I called the “logged and tagged society.”  It was intended to be a business insight identifying how employees at larger companies are somewhat interchangeable – with knowledge workers being replaced by armies of freelance soldiers with log-ons and access to tagged assets, information and data. But that was then…a couple of years ago.  It’s still true but logged and tagged now is also extends to consumer life.

Facebook yesterday launched a new search tool called Search Graph which does more than count likes, it attempts to get one to personal proclivities faster.  I tried to read the story but got a little tangled and bored and twitched away. That said, it is Facebook’s way of trying to improve search results keeping people on “the book” and making more of da monies.   Using my logged and tagged lens, it’s their way of fighting through the tags and searchables.

As the searchable words and tags grow in this exponentially data driven world (Can I read any more big data stories before breakfast???), search will continue to become less accurate and in need of improvement.  And as communications agents continue to spread the pop marketing fallacy that consumers own brands, this environment will create greater demand for brand planners. Brand planning is about returning control to marketing…not algorithm tweaking.

Peace! 

Wage an Idea.

By
Steve Poppe
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Blackberry is really taking a pasting. They waited and waited for the launch of the new Z10 and when it finally hit the street, initial reviews were pretty good — pundits liked the new email software, for instance. But while buying my new Lumia 928 recently I asked my Verizon dealer (R&K Trading Inc.) if the Z10 was moving and, sadly, he said they sold a bunch at first but half were returned.

Not what Blackberry needed.

Today in my paper paper is a Blackberry ad with side-by-side pics of a Z10 and a Q10, the latter being an updated BB with the keyboard taking up half the body. Wage Business is the headline. No copy, not humanity, no proof.

Blackberry, while putting energy and business protein behind losing the RIM name, should have waged some business of its own and gotten behind a brand plan. Wage Business is a great brand strategy and tagline. “Keep Moving” not so much. One could easily find 3 discrete planks to support Wage Business.

BB corporate would say that focusing on business would limit their consumer appeal. They would be right. But whither be the brand after despoiling it with a watered down, non-endemic idea.  Remember “love?”

Business isn’t just conducted by people in suits. Business is the money-end of life. It appeals to all. Wage Business with a brand plan. It will focus the product, the company, and stabilized the stock.  But do it today. Peace.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

fear

Sometimes the toughest brand planning assignments are the ones that offer levels of complexity that initially stagger you.  Understanding the Medicare playbook, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a financial prospectus come to mind.  It’s okay to be scared.  Lack of order is not how the brain works.  What planners try to do is understand and map category learning, so that they can make decisions about what is important. Only then can they begin to manipulate those “important” insights and findings into brand design. Into a brand plan.

As a tyro in the business, before I understood, I’d often posit.  For instance I might ask a healthcare insurance company a property and casualty insurance company question. They were an insurance company, after all.  McFail! I wasn’t afraid enough to listen.

When learning about a business as a brand planner, you need to learn…not teach. This is true whether you are talking to the CEO or a consumer.  Only after a suitable amount of learning time from your teacher (CEO or consumer) will they allow you out of learning mode. Only then will they allow you to ask important questions.  At this stage the questions still must be of the “grasshopper” (Mr. Miyagi) variety. This is how rapport builds. Be afraid. You are coaxing here. CEOs and consumer won’t open up unless they are allowed to teach. Thanks for listening.  Peace!

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