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Brand Strategy Misnomer.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

If I ask a marketing person their ad strategy is, likely answers would be “Increase sales.” Or “increase customer base.” Maybe “generate customer activation.” And were I to ask that marketer to articulate their brand strategy, they’d probably also default to generic functional answers.  Say things like “maintain our graphic standards,” or “design signage, packaging and graphics to clearly convey a unified message.” Possibly “maintain a consistent voice in the marketplace.” When, actually, the question “What is your brand strategy” is not a structural question at all. It’s meant to elicit the idea or value that propels the brand to success – a business-winning claim in the minds of consumers.

If I ask your name, you’d say Joann or Edward, not “It’s the descriptor people use to identify me.”  But many people either don’t think of a brand strategy as their specific claim for building business — or they just don’t have one.  In the latter case they probably rely on their ad campaigns for brand strategy.

Either way marketers are not reaping the rewards of brand strategy. It’s a crying shame.

Peace.

PS. The definition of brand strategy, here at What’s The Idea? is an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.

 

 

Is-Does Then Why.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I’ve written a great deal about a simple but important brand component: the Is-Does.  What a product “is” and what a product “does.”  (For the purposes of this post I’ll use product to also mean service.) Having come into the branding world with a concentration in technology I know that understanding what a product “is” is foundational. Is it hardware? Software? Platform? Or an app?  It may seem simple but sometimes it really takes some digging to get that answer. (Just read a few About page on tech company websites.) What, for instance, Is a video game? Or LinkedIn?

After the Is is out of the way brand strategists need to establish the “does.” What does the product accomplish for the user.  What is its function. This requires creating context and usage for the product. Is the iPhone a phone for instance? Or a communications device? A recorder of content. All the above? The iPhone broke the mold for the Is-Does and screwed up branding for many technology companies. Swiss Army knife anyone?

Earlier in the week I was reading a Mike Troiano blog post where he discussed what he believes to be most important brand component, the “why.”

Can’t argue the “why” is important, but I can disagree with the hierarchy. If you share the Why but not the Is and the Does, you are wasting a consumer’s gray matter. (I’m talking technology and emerging services here, not mature categories.) There are only a few whys in the marketing world: improved productivity, better price, make money, improve efficiency, more sustainable and more equitable. Without the Is-Does, these end-benefits or whys are just commodities.

When brand people just straight to the why in their claim they are missing steps, especially in nascent categories. Brand strategy is strengthened by a narrative, as Mike says in his post. Completely agree. But brand strategy is nuts and bolts. It’s measurable and quantifiable.  Narratives and stories on the Why are best left to ad agencies.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Brand Planner’s Prayer

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Things we remember.

We remember beauty.

We remember new.

We remember rich.

We remember melody.

We remember funny.

We remember nature.

We remember poetry.

We remember pain.

We remember educators.

We remember warmth.

We remember charity.

We remember happy.

We remember love.

We remember triumph.

These are the things we remember.

(I post this brand planners prayer once a year as a reminder.)

Land of No.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

Advertising is a young person’s game.  If you are really, really good at it you might keep your job until you are 50.  That said, I’ll go on record here and say there is an advantage to being older and experienced. You have lived in and learned from, a career of a thousand “nos.”  If you hear no a thousand times you develop a special king of savvy armor.

When younger in the business I rarely had a chance to have a boss, client or researcher say no to my work. And I learned very little. But as you move on and up, your decisions and insights are judged. And the more you hear no, the more you learn.

Fast forward to today. Like The Beatles who practiced in nightclubs in Italy for 10,000 hours before doing anything meaningful, an experienced practitioner starts to hear less nos. Advertising is not always scientific. A lot of yeses fail. But nos are the true impediments.

When you are mindful of all your past nos. When you understand their logic. When you are not paralyzed by them. You are experienced.

There is a little enclave on Fire Island, NY called Ocean Beach. AKA the “Land of No.” It’s quite a fun spot once you learn its navigation.

Peace.

 

Zoom and Brand Research.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Brand strategists are always on the lookout for trends and cultural developments. One such trend, resulting from the pandemic, is the growth of Zoom meetings. In my last post I discussed how less meetings and more independent work are not the most productive ways to work in today’s world – though there are certainly positives.  But recently I was on a Zoom call and noticed a neat strong positive to working remotely, albeit it was a bit embarrassing.

Last week I was on a Zoom webinar sponsored my alma mater Rollins College on the topic of diversity, inclusion and equity; a topic on which I need mas training. For a change most of the postage stamp heads were black. (Is it me or do other white people look at rooms filled with white heads and feel uncomfortable? White much? is a meme I like to use.) Anyway, the webinar guest, activist Sophie Williams from London, was explaining that decades ago the gov’t tried to recruit blacks to live in the U.K. by running ads in the West Indies, highlighting all the wonderments of UK life. Sophie went on to say it was effective advertising though it never mentioned that life for blacks in the UK was going to be “shit.” I giggled at her expletive. No one else did. Zoom allowed me to see that. Big ass faux pas. Insensitive me. Had, in real life, I been in a row of students looking at the back of heads I would never have known my mistake.

While working at Zude, a social media startup, years ago and attempting to recruit musical acts, I uncovered an important planning insight: “never are musical artists more in touch with their art than when looking into the eyes of the audience.”  Zoom lets you do that. Used properly it can be a great research tool.  

Peace.  

 

New Future of Work.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I did an insight piece on the “Future of Work” while working with ad agency JWT on their Microsoft 365 business — it was a blast.  At the time, who other than some epidemiologists would have predicted COVID 19 and its rampage across the globe. Covid changed everything. Two key outcomes for the working world were less meetings and working from home. The cry for less meetings is not new but has certainly grown thanks to Covid. The work from home phenomenon, however is new and here to stay. Ish.  

If you combine these two workplace developments the result is a lot of individual work product. And for me, that’s a bad trend.  Most people work best with fellow employees. As sounding boards. Lunch partners. Idea generators. Creative recombinators as Faris Yakob would say.  

The future of work is not isolation. Hell yeah we can do it. And it might even make us more self-reliant and resourceful short term.  But working like pod people is not good for anyone. We are a gregarious species. Whistling while you work is no substitute for communicating while you work. I get the head-down thing, I do. But we all need to come up for air frequently. It’s healthy and it’s productive.

Peace.

 

 

Cultural Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was listening to the Fergus O’Carroll’s On Strategy podcast with Harvard professor Douglas Holt yesterday and heard some cool insights on brand planning. Mr. Holt has this thing he calls Cultural Strategy which as a student of anthropology interested me quite a bit. Brand planners have to be cultural anthropologists, as they try to nestle their selling schema into current culture — with an eye toward creating future culture. (An academic would blast me for the last part of that statement. Culture is organic, not man-made, they would caution.)

(Pictured here, Franz Boas, father of cultural anthropolgy.)

One of Douglas’s thoughts is worth dissecting: “Whoever is the symbol of the dominant ideology in the category, controls the category.” (Clearly a challenger mentality, evidenced by his follow-on point that you need to disrupt the category leader who can outspend and out-media all challengers.) 

Two differing examples, the first supports Holt’s Cultural Strategy notion: when Oatly plays its save-the-planet card in oat milk messaging, that’s not an endemic product quality sell, it’s a culture sell. When I used the word “nestle” above, my point was one needs to nestle an endemic product value into the cultural lever — not use the cultural lever as your main value. With my client Handcraft, maker of the Potty Genius Potty training kit, we didn’t position around reducing disposable diapers in landfill, a cultural lever. We led with the “joys” inherent in the accomplishment.  The landfill claim was a support, albeit a very good one.  

Douglas Holt is certainly onto something. Most planners agree culture (and category culture) are robust insight mines.  But don’t pray tell forget what is popping off the production line. Product always needs to be at the heart of any claim or proof plank.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

What Comes First the Brand Strategy or the Product?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

My definition of brand strategy is “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”  Most practitioners get the “messaging” part. And a growing number understand the “experience,” especially those with branded storefronts. How a customer experiences the brand at retail is more than a passing fancy.  Dunkin is a very different experience than Starbucks.  But when it comes to an organizing principle guiding “product,” many underdeliver — which is quite odd since the product almost always precedes brand work.

So why does one create an organizing principle for a product that already exists? Well, it’s useful when making changes to the product. When creating product extensions.  When franchising the product. When dealing with supply chain issues. How about when dealing with quality control. Or hiring people who design the product. Apple certainly gets this. No Evil Foods understands. Marmot subscribes. 

Marketers who fully understand their product’s, provenance, heritage, DNA, differentiators and UPS (unique selling proposition), have the easiest ways forward. And the most organized. And most principled.

Peace.

 

Positivity in Brand Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Neil Young’s new album has a rather apocalyptic track called Human Race. Many of today’s social commentators seem obsessed with negative goings on. Climate. Politics. Covid.  The list rolls on. There are, indeed, lots of reasons to be negative. I get it. My friend Donald hasn’t tweeted a nice thing about American politics in years. The evening news is 92% bad stuff, one puff piece.

There’s a miasma of negativity surrounding us. It’s deafening. Yet life goes on. We try to be healthy, tell jokes to lighten the moment, and search for light.

One place positivity is quite important is branding. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you?) Planners should always be looking for the light. For the promise of goodness, success and perhaps a touch of elation. That’s how I run my brand strategy practice. Lot’s of planners look to solve problems. I get that too.  It’s easy lifting. Many marketers looking to branding solutions are trying to fix things. But positivity is my jam and I like to think it makes for the best brand planning.

Find a positive brand objective. Seek out a positive consumer motivation. Bathe your discovery in warmth, consumer pride and satisfaction. We have lots of time to be solemn. Our job it to position brands around hope and positivity. Not the meh.

Peace.

 

 

Can Brand Strategy Enculturation Cause Disruption?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A not so new marketing buzz word is Disruption.  It’s been around the advertising business for decades and thought-leader Charlene Li has made quite a business out of it.  I’ve been thinking about the word and my business, brand strategy, and wondering if brand strategy can actually be a disruptor. My answer is a big fat “yes.”  Brand strategy, as “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” has the ability to govern the decision-making of employees and cohorts. 

When decision-making is in lockstep within a company, consumer attitudes cannot be far behind. And consumer behavior quickly thereafter.  Early in my career I leaned the fastest way to change consumer attitudes was through TV advertising. Smack TV watchers in the face with a message and demonstration enough times and they tend to believe. But advertising has been so watered down and the web has collapsed many of the steps-to-a-sale so as to make advertising way less powerful.

Brand strategy however, brought forth through all channels and contact points can disrupt business as usual. But it must be tight. Compelling. And category-meaningful.  When products and services live the life of the brand strategy, and don’t just talk about it, change can happen. And fairly quickly. That’s disruptive.

Enculturating your brand strategy is the ideal. First within the brand company, then within the buying public.

Peace.

 

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