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Brands. Flags. And Design.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Is it possible to like design work, yet dislike the product? I believe it is. Case in point. I find the above variation of a civil Middle Eastern flag quite compelling. Attractive would not be the right word, but there is something about the palm tree and the swords that create muscle memory and power. Swords are cool as design elements even though murdering journalists taints the fuck out of the product. Abhorrently so. 

Speaking of palm trees, the South Carolina state flag uses a palmetto and crescent dropped out of an indigo background. It’s pert cool though monochromatic. I’ve seen some bastardizations of the flag characters with other colors that really enhance the design. A license plate with some setting sun colors are quite nice. A strong promotional tool, the flag and mark.

And lastly, and I almost hesitate to type this one, is the confederate flag. It’s an interesting, yet simple design. As a stupid kid who went to college in FL, I hung a confederate flag on my wall oblivious to the pain and suffering it denoted. I liked the design. I also hung some Amerind prints on my wall not knowing what they stood for. I liked the colors.

Design is personal. As a tool in branding, design can be powerful. It engenders feelings and symbolism. But is also can act as a magnet for negative actions and behaviors. That’s why brand management is so important.

Brands need to flag the “good.”

Peace.

 

Innovation and Sloppy Money.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Many business evolutions these days come from product or service improvement or product or service disruption. Disruption, as a term of art, began as a meme and book title in the ad business. It meant stop consumers in their tracks – challenge the messaging roll, if you will. Then disruption moved on to productization and product development. Charlene Li and Altimeter Group go on about how disruption helps develop and corner new markets.

Whether improving or disrupting, it’s likely you are looking to “innovation” to deliver the goods. Remember the term R&D? Research and development? That was a common business function; a year-over-year line item on the annual budget. Especially for larger companies. The mega companies still have R&D groups or facsimiles hereof but most companies these days find it more economical to seek “new ideas” from hired innovation companies: boutiques, workshop groups and consultants.

Innovation is being outsourced.

At the higher end, these innovation engagements can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What I call sloppy money. This ain’t agile. You can call Accenture Interactive in to solve your banking problem, but it’s not likely to be any different than the problem that existed in the 70s. Just with an interactive twist. If you must outsource your innovation, it’s best to start with a smaller outside team –a more manageable team. A team with more to gain with a business win. Not an army.

Problem identification is the first deliverable. Sloppy money makes for more problems, not less.

Peace.

 

Truth or Proof?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

According to Stewart Alter, a McCann-Erickson historian and one-time head of publicity, copy chief Ralph St. Hill, at predecessor company The H.K. McCann Company coined the term Truth Well Told. A brilliant, if simple, piece of poesy, the line illuminates McCann offices on every continent.

Talk to brand planners past and present and you are likely to hear the word “truth” many times. Words like transparency and authenticity are pop planning words, but truth has generational staying power. Truth in advertising makes lots of sense. If consumers sniff out even a hint of mistruth, they begin to shut down.

As a brand planner I’ve built a practice around proof. Proof is what delivers truth. Proof is a tangible. It’s dare I say “existential.” Branding and adverting are certainly cousins but branding is the chicken and advertising is the egg. The chicken keeps giving birth to eggs. Brand strategy, done well, keeps giving birth to ads.

The way to build a brand is to create an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging, the framework for which is one claim and three proof planks, and stick to it. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center may be the best cancer care anywhere (truth), but the fact that they get the toughest cases in the world is the why (proof).

Brand planner hard drives across the globe are filled with proofs and truths. Search out the former in order to build your brand strategies.

Peace.

 

Financial Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

“What would you like the power to do?” is the tagline of Bank of America. Oy. If not a tagline, then it’s a campaign line. I checked the website (I’m a custie, BTW) and it doesn’t appear on the home page and is not locked up with the logo. So let’s call it a campaign line. But honestly, campaign lines are de facto taglines.

No grammarian I, but it seems you shouldn’t end a sentence with the word “do.” Then there is the bigger problem of asking consumers a question. It suggests the brand doesn’t have the answer. It’s also a passive approach. It’s not a claim. Brands are best when they are staking claim to something.

Selling, on the other hand, is driven by listening so as to meet needs. Building a brand on listening, however, is not the smartest move – not unless you have been a brand that has never listen to its customers before. Then it’s news. Listening is the price of doing business. It’s a given.

Bank of America is doing some neat things in the world of banking. It has an amazing name. Lot’s of money. Lots of branches. But its brand is sorely undefined. Like most banks.

I find it hard to believe a gazillion dollar company, tasked with managing the money of millions of consumers, can’t find a claim and proof array to hang its hat on.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Can Humor Be a Brand Plank?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I wonder about this as I dive into the Aeroflow Breast Pump social media campaign. Aeroflow is a reseller of durable medical equipment in Western North Carolina, but has sectioned off a nice piece of business helping to provide new mothers with breast pumps. They assign a rep to each case and help moms through the paperwork associated with securing pumps and paying the insurance. They then walk moms through the nuances, hardships and solutions associated with pumping. This is one of those business meeting pent-up demand.

But can humor be an endemic plank that proves the brand’s claim? I go around and around on this but ultimately land on yes. If humor is a customer care-about or brand good-at, it can help brand value. The big but, however, is turning it into a good-at; not everyone is funny. And even through the Instagram account of Aeroflow Breast Pumps is always chortle-worth, even belly laugh worthy, that’s only one or two people at the social media controls.

Humor puts for nervous or worried moms at ease. It’s medicinal. It’s therapeutic. I really works for Aeroflow Breast Pumps. It wouldn’t work for the other Aeroflow businesses, per se. That’s why Aeroflow is smart to have made sequestered this business a bit.

Humor, done wrong, can be corny and an impingement on the brand, so Aeroflow has to be careful. “Two breast feeding women walk into a bar,” told by a 50 year old dude is not a good idea. But the way it is handled in social, is great. I’d love to see how humor could be introduced into other areas of the business. The beginning of a cool case, this.

Peace.

 

 

Entenmann’s and Bimbo.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There is a wonderful cake and confections brand in the U.S. called Entenmann’s. It began in Brooklyn, NY in 1898 and has festooned breakfast tables across America ever since. The logo, the white box and blue script lettering are known near and far. Entenmann’s introduced the clear, see-through box cover to let the product do the talking. The product is great, the packaging wonderful and the name fun to say.

After a couple of other owners, Entenmann’s was purchased by Mexican conglomerate Grupo Bimbo (pronounced beem-bo). Bimbo Bakeries USA’s holdings now also include Thomas’, Boboli, Arnold, Freihofer’s, and Stroehmann. Bimbo is the real deal.

It may seem ethnocentric but I’m betting Bimbo Bakeries USA would immediately increase its value by changing its name to Entenmann’s. I wouldn’t lose the Thomas’, Arnold and Boboli names, but I would master brand them under Entenmann’s.

Bimbo has cred among the growing U.S. population of consumers with South and Central American heritage but can’t begin to compete with this American heritage brand that makes the mouth water. A brand that causes people to get in their cars and drive to the store. 

Hey Bimbo USA, take this prized asset and ride. Hard. Blow it up and all your other brands will follow.

Peace.

 

White Room (No Black Curtains.)

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A cultural anthropologist, brand planner and journalist walk into a bar. Well maybe not the journalist. The bartender says what would you like. They all three say nothing. That sounds like a bad joke but it’s the topic of this post. When you come to a people, a consumer set or news story, you should aspire to bring nothing to the table.

One thing I’ve learned about brand planning is to go all tabula rasa or clean slate on an assignment. That is, I don’t bring any preconceived ideas with me about the people, the market or the selling environment. It’s so hard.

Many years ago, I was selling ads to the CEO of AT&T Microelectronics. In his spacious Berkley Heights, NJ office, standing right by the table was a cardboard cutout of a man. A customer, he explained. To always remind him of their importance.

If I ever leave the confines of my home office for a real office the first room I build will be a white room. There will be no adornments. No pictures. No stimuli. No nothing. A white table, white chairs and white walls. This will be a collective reminder that we (client too) must come at an assignment without bias.

(At another AT&T meeting, this one at AT&T Consumer Products, I was given a tour of a room in the R&D facility that had zero echo. The floor was suspended, the walls baffled. Total sound absorption. No echo. This might be my second conference room investment. Hee hee.)

Coming to an assignment clean is critical. It maxims freshness.

Peace.

 

Syllabus For Brand Planners.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A brand strategy is best delivered through a syllabus. A lesson plan for brand building by way of education.

Teachers know the most efficacious education revolves not around rote recitation of lesson, but participation and interaction.  

I was lucky enough to work as marketing director at an ed tech company that made most of its money selling interactive white boards. They brought me onboard to help flip the business model from hardware to professional development – that is, to teach teachers how to use technology more effectively to improve learning.  I dove into the science of teaching (pedagogy) with the goal of understanding learning. There is bad teaching but there is no bad learning.

This whole deep dive had a vigorous impact on my brand planning practice. In my brand brief, the keys to learning were improved “classroom design,” “better teacher-student relationship” and stronger “parental/guardian involvement.” With learning the goal and teaching the vehicle how I thought about marketing was recast.

Teaching had for too long been about broadcasting information at kids. And marketing the same. Using education as an analog for marketing, classroom design became the media or the experience (retail). The student-teacher relationship translated to consumer care-abouts and attitudes (a long-standing brand planner tool). And parental involvement aligned perfectly with marketing influencers.    

Now these three notions are not foreign to brand planners but they aren’t always part of the syllabus. To develop brand value faster and make it more everlasting, one needs to focus on consumer learning, not marketer teaching.  That takes a new syllabus.

Peace.  

 

Thought vs. Conveyance.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Faris (he’s like Cher) is an itinerant brand planner who has a nice relationship with WARC, a brand and marketing research org in Washington DC.  Yesterday Faris and Rosie, his partner, held a rather nice webinar on the broadening of media channels and what to do about it. His food pyramid metaphor was quite intriguing and worthy of study.

Towards the end of the preso Faris stated “Consistency of thought is more important than consistency of look and feel.” This, in the context of the integration of marketing work. As a kid growing up in the ad business I was a big fan of campaigns. They were an organizing principle.  But look and feel and even the much-touted “voice” are not thought. They’re dressing. They are envelopes.  If implemented in a way that conveys a consistent thought, they can work. But if they overwhelm the thought, they get in the way.

No one ever said “I love the taste of a red, white and blue beer can.”  

Another brand planner of note, Marc Pollard (pronounced Poh-lard), is on the verge of publishing a book called Strategy is Your Words. Mr. Pollard is all about the thought, the idea. First. Conveyance second.

Building brands based on thought and strategy rather than conveyance is the correct order of brand planning and, therefore, marketing.  The problem with 90% of marketing is that it is backwards. Conveyance is more important than thought. Show me the shiny. It’s silly.

Peace.

 

A Truth About Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

(This is not Logitech’s current logo, but it is one of the best tech logos ever.)

I met with Nigel Tribe, Atlanta’s top brand planner, a couple of weeks ago and he shared a story about the power of brand worth retelling.  Forgive any minor bits of false news but the tenor the truth about brand value remains.

A new marketing executive was brought in to Logitech, a massive computer peripherals company, to help improve business. He was a known branding advocate. His hiring executive asked what’s with all this talk about brands. And why should they invest in it. “Give me a week to answer your question” was the executive’s response.

He went off to conduct some qualitative research whereby he shared with consumers a pair of brand-less headphones, supposedly in development. He told consumers they were Apple headphones had asked what they would be willing to pay for them.  A second group of consumers were exposed to the same headphones and this time told they were made by Sony. Again, “What would you expect to pay for these?” Lastly, the same headphones were brought before another group with the manufacturer offered up as Logitech.

The research results were brought back to corporate and the brand budget approved.

Peace.

 

 

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