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Brand Planning Interview Techniques.

By
Steve Poppe
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Learning is at the center of everything good.  Teaching doesn’t always get the same rap.  Where would we be without teachers?  Not in a good place. There must be teachers.

I worked for a company that enlightened me about learning. My job was to organize the selling of leaning tools, be they technological or pedagogical, and it really warmed me to the difference between teaching and learning – how they are perfectly and imperfectly intertwined. 

Brand planners are attuned to learning. They take to it like ants to peanut butter and jelly samiches. Interviewing SMEs (subject matter experts), company captains and consumers in true learning mode really lights up the exchange.  Note taking and quiet keyboard clicking makes for a short, dull interview. Smiles, thoughtful questions, stories, and engagement make the time fly. Even when you ask a goofy or counterintuitive question — if done as an eager learner, it can enhance the experience. And try not to teach the teacher. Be Socratic in your method. You can challenge observations or highlight contradictions, but do so with that dog-like “Where’s the ball?” gaze.

Brand planners who are devout learners, who don’t enter a room with answers, are the ones who turn on the lights. The ones who create illumination. It may be steady, sporadic or rocky, but it is illumination. Puh-eace!   

 

Sub-Standard Mea Cupla?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

McGraw-Hill and Standard and Poor’s have been around for a long time. The former is best known as a publishing company, the latter a credit rating company. McGraw-Hill owns Standard and Poor’s. For those not in-the-know about the financial world S&P isn’t a company you think about often.

Today I read a fairly benign ad by S&P in which it touted its people, purpose, practices and progress.  Depicting young to middle aged people, so we get the company is not run by 60 and 70 year olds (not that there’s anything wrong with it), the ad is quite unremarkable. The headline reads: “4 things you should know about Standard and Poors ratings.”    Why, why, why would anyone stop and read such an ad? Except me.

I read the whole thing and the last para said “We’ve taken to heart the lessons learned during the financial crisis, improving the methodologies behind our ratings.”  Hard stop. No more copy. It got me thinking —Who was behind the wheel in this ratings company when banks, mortgage companies, car companies and other goobers were turning the country on its ear with bad debt?  Were these poorly run, insolvent companies receiving triple D or E or Z ratings? What kind of watchdog let this happen?

If this ad is a mea culpa, it doesn’t work. Not with one sentence hidden at the end of the ad.  What happened? Do tell. If you want to help your brand strap on a pair of editorials and let us know.

Peace!

Up in the Brand Planning Future.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

At the end of the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (now poorly named) has gone up, journalists and pundits are quick to say why.  Good earnings reports. Better unemployment numbers.  And when the Dow is down, there too, is always an explanation. Concerns about interest rates.  Poor weather in the spring.  This seems revisionist theory. Once the day is over someone decides what historical event made it so.  If the weather was reported like this, we’d skewer that profession less.

Two Approached to Planning
There are two approaches to brand planning: forecasting and reporting.  In my brand planning practice I often talk about rearview mirror planners and side view mirror planners. I’ve even begun to talk about dashboard planners. All three classifications operate in reporting mode. But it is the “beyond the dashboard planner” that I enjoy and choose to learn from. Those who see and look into the future.  Be you one?  It’s scary. You may pizzle yourself if big money is involved.  The best planners are about the future.  They are not bound to repeat the future. They are create it.

A lot of ad agencies like to talk about culture.  Creating culture. Many people in the business scoff that the notion. Not me. I’m all up in it. It’s daring, exciting and fulfilling.  Creating a selling and buying culture is more than infusing new language into the lexicon. Where’s the beef? It goes deeper than that. That’s where anthropology meets brand planning. Where the past informs the future.

Peace.

PS. Is Weiner becoming more of a weiner or is it me?

1%ers.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Strategy is foreplay.  It’s the upfront work that prepares the way for the big event. In brand planning, though, it’s about many big events. As they say in the technology business, a strategy is extensible.

Marketers who get branding understand the role of the brand plan. (Noah Brier –name drop– once asked me “How do you define a brand plan?”)  Creating a brand plan is the most important work a marketer can do, yet ironically less than 1% of all money spent in marketing goes to it.  Go to ConAgra, Microsoft or Heineken or, or, or.  They’ll provide project plans and briefs containing lots of paper and digits on sales and targets. And one page on message.  This most important page is often not message-restrictive…it’s about tonality, goals and insights. You can drive trucks through these pages.  A good brand plan has a tight message strategy. You either hit the claim and support planks or you don’t.  If you don’t, go back to work.

Creative people who hate strategy don’t really hate strategy, they hate bad strategy. Mealy mouthed strategy. Strategy is not about making creative people color between the lines, it’s about using a brand language that helps them speak to consumers through a brand-positive, business-building organizing principle.

Tomorrow, marketers will go off and spend the 99% of their budgets on ads, agencies, video and interactive.  (Cannes rewards the beautiful and funny.) But the Jay Chiat Awards is where the 1%ers are headed. Peace. 

Searching for Dlugacz.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Yosef D. Dlugacz, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief of Clinical Quality, Education and Research at the North Shore-LIJ Health System was the person I met when working on the North Shore brand brief who had the greatest influence on the strategy.

My first discussion with Yosef was on the phone and didn’t go very well. He offered up a lot of quality-speak. It was hard work getting to interesting truths about Yosef’s work. What he did for a living. His day. Outputs. Influence.  But once I got it, once I was able to wend myself around the quality jargon and statistical answers, a very instructive insight emerged.  When writing a brand brief you are telling (yourself and others) a serial story. If it doesn’t hang together it’s not done. There are gravity points in the brief that are important and create pathways for the strategy.  Sometimes the gravity points come from consumers, other times from the product or service. They can really come from anywhere in the information gathering experience. Gravity points help with the “boil down” – the decisions about what to not focus on.     

What separates great from the good planners are the boil down and the gravity points. With these in hand the story almost tells itself — finishing off with a big ending (claim) and moral (support planks). The moral, BTW, is always influenced by selling more, to more, for more, more times. 

Searching for Dlugacz (pronounced Dlu-Gotch) is how to start. Peace.

Helpful or Private?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

On the web the most helpful people win – not always the smartest. Social app makers have created lots of online social media plays that reward people for providing good information. They get badges, status, followers, elevations in cred and klout.  It’s how the web roles – remuneration for helpfulness. I follow David Brooks, with whom I do not necessarily share political views because he makes me smarter. He’s helpful.

Enter Edward Snowden, Verizon and the govies. And privacy (in this post pronounced priv-ah-cee). Everybody wants privacy.  I don’t want to be served ads for a product I’m doing brand research on. It shows someone’s watching.  Yet I look at Google Analytics every day, hoping for spikes in traffic. I try being helpful online to build readers. So I don’t always want privacy.  Am I a walking conundrum?  Nope, just a human.

I also happen to be one of those people who has never seen a grisly body part. I was nervous riding the railroad under the river to NYC post 9/11. I sign off every blog post with “Peace.”

I’m reading Ben Franklin’s bio and wonder what he would say. Hell, what would I say? I say let’s debate. That’s what American’s do. Let’s compromise. That’s what Americans do. Let’s be helpful.  That’s what Americans should do.  Peace.  

 

Interviews and Brands

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Christine Draeger, VP global marketing at Safeguard World Intenational is a pal and she asked to me to post on how a brand plan can help in recruiting.  

Here goes.  If you are involved in recruiting good people to your company (and who isn’t?), then you know what it’s like to interview someone without a clean presentation of their career arc, career goals, strengths and weaknesses and personality. (As my ad guy father Fred Poppe used to say about the latter, “If you don’t have one, don’t apply.”) When you finish conducting such an interview, the candidate has likely answered all your questions yet the presentation was jumbled — and you don’t have a sense of the person. It would be hard for you to talk about the candidate, save for an accomplishment, previous jobs, age, etc.

This is why a proper brand plan is important for a company. Because people interview brands every day… and they are looking for a clean picture. So when people are introduced to your brand, they understand what it does, how, and why.  A simple organizing principle, codified, shared within the company and lived by employees helps this.  Some call it culture – it’s not culture. Though culture can be derived from the brand plan. A brand plan is an organizing principle, based in product strength and customer need that showcases and leverages both.  Brands without a plan are ingredients and packaging surrounded by dissociated advertising. A plan brings it all together.

Next time you go into an interview and you are meeting with a higher up, ask them to discuss the key elements of the company brand plan. If they look at you funny be weary. Peace.

Brand Ageism.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I saw a picture of Claire Danes in the paper today and realized I’ve grown older with her. From her first role on “My So-called Life” to “Little Women” to “Homeland,” Ms. Danes has had a nice career arc. She has not necessarily reinvented herself — she has just moved along doing the right acting thing at the right time. Patti Smith has aged in her art quite well.

But what about brands? I know they are inanimate and don’t grow up or old, but is that truly the case? Business schoolies will tell you products have life cycles. Growth, maintain, harvest. But brands?

Brands don’t grow old, consumers do…beside them.  Sure a brands may change formulas, packaging or distribution but they don’t degrade. What does degrade is consumers tolerance and affinity. As we get older we like refreshes and newness. Stasis is our enemy. It gives rise to brand ageism.     

Do you remember the first time you heard the word “delicious?” Me either.  But I’m sure it was  pretty meaningful. Today the word is meaningless. Brand managers can deal with brand ageism so long as they have a plan. A brand plan to guide the refresh.  As Inga (my Norwegian aunt, RIP) would say “tink about it.” Peace.

Lens of Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s an interesting brand planning question. 

“How complicated is your brand?”  I’ll bet 8 out of 10 C-level execs would answer “Not very complicated at all.” 

“We are a network of doctors.

We sell interactive white boards to schools.

We are an ad agency.

We are a tool used to build websites.

We are a consulting company.”

These uncomplicated answers typically focus on the Is of the Is-Does.  The question begs for simple answers. And it asks the C-level to pass judgment.  No one except for coders and surgeons likes to celebrate complexity.

Yet when I get into marketing departments and do a little deep dive, complexity always rears its head.  It is where we get into the Does of the Is-Does.  What the product does for consumers. Rationally and emotionally. We look at targets and segments. Most valued customers. Highest sales customers. Biggest referring custies. We break out the Excel charts. And because marketing is not just about making brochures and ads (though some would argue otherwise), we focus on product experience and price and line extensions and the pulsing of the bank account.

Brands are complicated without a plan. With a plan, not so much. With a plan we look at the complicated things through a lens of strategy. Always through the lens.

So, back to the original question. How does a brand go from “It’s not very complicated” to a mish mash of tactics, spreadsheets, sales reports, channel problems and lax sales. Poor planning. Peace!

Purple ads.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

langone edit

Growing up in the ad business and knowing how hard it is to do well, I often harp on poorly conceived advertising. Especially that of the print variety.  This adverting is done by a good mid-sized agency in New York City, but either the planner or the creative director doesn’t care because week in and week out the execution – the whole campaign, in fact – is just sad. The hospital likes the ads I’ve heard, so at the agency the only one digging this work must be the CFO.

A great litmus for an ad is the idea.  The idea as played back a day after it has been seen.  This ad is “one of those purple hospital ads.”  “The ones with the one word headline.”

I read this ad stem to stern as I have many of the others in the campaign and still haven’t a clue as to the strategy. Or what the brand stands for.

If you spend enough money, people will see your ads. It you buy the right media people will see your ads. If you don’t have an idea, people will see your ads. They just won’t be able to form an opinion about you – other than you have enough money to advertise. You have a name. And in this case, you like the unique color purple. Peace!

PS. I’m sure the women and men at NYU Langone are terrific and save lots of lives. I applaud you, but it’s time to find a brand and brand idea.  

 

 

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