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Rage Against The Alphabet.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Google has built its enormous search business by creating “ads that are helpful.” The advertising industry, on the other hand, creates ads meant to sell. One business is shrinking, the other growing. Many consumers would agree they prefer to be helped rather than sold.

If you add machine learning to Google’s laser focus on marketing as evidenced at yesterday’s Google Marketing Live Conference, you might place career bets on Google rather than Droga 5 or RGA. But wait!

At the nexus of “helping” and “selling” is brand planning. Advertising agents more often than not sell. Clients make them. But advertising agencies, both digital and traditional, guided by proper brand strategy can’t avoid being helpful — because a brand strategy is built upon customer care-abouts. (Balanced by brand good-ats.) With a brand strategy as your guide, the advertising work can’t help but be helpful. It’s hard to be self-serving when being helpful.

So let’s all learn from Google and capture the essence of helpfulness, then wrap it in powerful product and consumer insights and beat the machine. Zack de la Rocha had it right.

Peace.

 

 

Brand-Babble.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

David Ogilvy once said and I paraphrase, the advertising business is infected with people who have never sold a thing in their lives. Dude!

To build on David’s thought, the branding business suffers from what I call the brand-babble syndrome. Incessant use of words – coin of the realm, if you will — that sound good but have nearly completely lost their meaning.

I don’t know Scott Davis and I’m sorry to use the video featuring him but here is an example of brand-babble. Please note, Prophet is a smart and successful branding company (Hell, they hired Charlene Li) and I’m sure Mr. Campbell is a great guy. Let’s just say the video editor was an intern and approvers were on vacation. Click here to play.

The only thing of substance here is the idea that brand is owned by everyone in the company.  However, he doesn’t say the word strategy, just brand, so the point is diluted.

The brand strategy business is infected with words like “transparency,” “pivot,” “authenticity,” “transformation,” “voice” and “customer journey.” At the end of the day it’s words like these that cause many customers of brand strategy to not know what they’re getting. Or what they are signing up for. Brand-babble is the enemy.

(For an example of a real brand strategy framework, sans brand-babble, email Steve@WhatsTheIdea.)

Peace.     

 

 

A Screed On Personal Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Someone asked the question last week on Quora “What’s the most important action to take for personal branding?” Here was my answer:

Don’t do it. Branding is about strategy — an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging — don’t live your life that way.  If you try to live a strategy you are limiting the development of “self.”

Why do people want to be brands? Why not just be people? Will it help gain more friends and followers online? Get a better job? Or be more superficial and have something to blame when it doesn’t work out?

Not everyone defines a brand as I do, I get it. But it’s clear you can’t build a brand without a strategy (the above mentioned organizing principle). The Kardashian and Jenner kids are not brands. They are people. They are a television show. People who sell stuff.  

Please don’t confuse yourself with a brand. Just go out an live a fine, helpful and caring life.  That’s the hard part. It’s existential, not strategic.

Peace.

 

 

 

Brand Planning Interview Starters.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Yesterday I wrote about the need to understand the language or dialect of the customer.  

Marketers thoroughly understand the language of the product and speak it exhaustively in their building but it’s only when they get into the field that they’re able to know if it syncs with the language of the customer.

Companies that want to learn the language or dialect of the customer hire a brand planner.

When attempting to learn language in a new category I start by breaking out one of my trusty questionnaires. But those question sets don’t always help me learn the category, which is prerequisite of learning the language. Hence some customization has to take place,

 

A tip.

On a recent technical engagement, I popped out this little discussion starter, “Write the headline that captures the most important news in the ____ business today.” The headline (and it must be a headline, not a run on) set up the next question or six. Another clarifying question I used was “In what segments of the _____ business would you say (company name) operates?” And I riff on that.

Learning starts every brand planning party.

Peace.

 

 

Consumer Dialect.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Every business category has its own language. It’s especially so in technical and B2B fields. Maybe not so much in mayonnaise or hotel rooms but trust me there are keywords there as well.

Interviewing people in a category is the best way to learn the language. The shorthand. The jargon. The colloquial care-abouts and good-ats. It’s hard to brand plan when you don’t know the language. You come off sounding like detached brochure copy.  

When interviewing stakeholders, subject matter experts and consumers in a category, I approach it las a mentee, setting it up so the interviewee is the mentor and I treat them as such.  The key is to not come off as a data collector or researcher; rather a truly concerned and interested party.  I’d say listener because that’s always good yet in order to show real interest you have to make it a discussion. Story them back, so long as it’s personal. And hopefully interesting or funny. (Either works.)  The more the interview becomes a discussion, the easier it will be for the mentor to slip into the “language” you need.

Small and mid-size business marketers live the category language but often suffer from a tin ear when it comes to talking to their consumers — speaking over their heads. Or they may overcompensate and go generic and sound like lazy copy.

Learn the language.

Peace.

 

 

Outside Baseball.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Get a bunch of brand planners in a room, say at one of Faris Yakob’s beer drinking meetups, and they’ll likemind the shit out of each other.  Similarly, create an event among Mark Pollard’s Sweathead listeners and everyone will speak the brand planner patois. Brand planners will share tools, stories, cases and tricks at the drop of a hat, yet to most business people it’s all inside baseball.

The primary problem for freelancers and consultant brand planners is no one outside our sphere really gets what we do. (We are partly to blame, due to lack of intelligible frameworks.) More to the point, there is not a lot of pend-up demand for what we do. In small and mid-size businesses nobody is talking brand strategy. Brand maybe, but not strategy. And at Fortune 2000s only a shot-glass full of people understand brand strategy – and the CEO typically isn’t one of them.

So we are selling something that is not easily understood and not in demand – not prerequisites for VC funding if you ask me. So how do we respond?  We continue to talk to each other.

No more. This blog has been about talking inside baseball to believers. I am now going to start targeting and contenting (word?) non-believers. Once I explain to small and mid-size companies how brand strategy (claim and proof array) will improve company efficiency, reduce wasted time, make marketing more productive and accountable, I’m likely to gain their ear.

My new goal. Outside baseball.

Peace.

 

 

Love What You Do.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I went to see Tom Morello last night at the Orange Peel in Asheville – his third visit. By the evening’s end I was 8 feet from the stage.  I’d seen Tom at Jones Beach, the Garden, Randall’s Island and the City Winery – the latter from maybe 30 yards away.

The man can play guitar. At one point he pulled the amplifier jack out, held it over his head and banged it against his hand. Didn’t know you could make music that way. Every song was amazing but The Ghost of Tom Joad may have delivered the night in terms of tone.

Tom has always been an angry advocate for the working class. He hates racism. Jeers the 1%. And cheers equality at every level. Tom sees these things as his mission. And music is his vehicle. Up close you can see Tom, at this age, loves what he does. You can see it on his face.  I’m on record as believing “A musician is never more in touch with his/her art then when standing in front of an audience.” This goes both ways with Tom Morello.  Audiences are never more in touch with their humanity then when in front of The Nightwatchman.

If you do what you love for a living, you are giving back. I love brand planning and I’m using it to give back. Changing minds for the positive, one lyric at a time. Do what you love, if you can.

Peace.

 

Words. Stuff. And Deeds.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Tesla’s solar business, which needs a name change by the way, is revising pricing in order to regain momentum.  They’re going to make less SKUs (packaged goods term referring to product sizes/flavors) while asking customers to do more to minimize the number of site visits Tesla has to make, e.g., photograph meters and circuit breaker boxes, etc. These actions will drive cost out of the business enabling the price reduction. These latter costs are called soft costs. The panels being the hard costs.

What’s The Idea? is a brand consultancy that makes paper, ideas and strategy. All soft costs.  At the end of a business engagement my clients have in hand a brand brief, a claim and proof array (one pager) and if they go the full monty, a marketing plan. Soft goods.

Problem is, marketers really like stuff: Hats with logos, ads, signs, website and package designs. Stuff. My stuff happens to be words. 

As Mark Pollard, a really smart brand strategist says and will publish in his upcoming book Strategy is your Words, words make brands more effective. Words are strategy. Strategy leads to stuff. Strategy leads to deeds. Strategy leads to valuable, organized thinking.

Can’t wait for the book to come out. It’s stuff about words.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

 

What’s Above the Fold?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s the thing about the internet. Here’s the thing about marketing. People need to know what your product or service is before they buy it. In a real world retail setting if your jar of white stuff is next to the mayo, you are probably selling mayo. If your light bulb is on a shelf in an auto parts store, it’s probably a for the car.

For new or establishing brands on the web there is no such context. Your name is context. Your picture is context, as long as you meet accessibility requirements. I learned all this at a startup that was too many things to too many people…and it sunk us.

Take a look at this screen grab from Strasmore and tell me what they do. ‘Xactly. What do you think the bounce rate is for someone who doesn’t know the company?  Dig a little and you may get they offer cloud services and back up and consulting but, hell, that could be anyone.

I have a little trick I call the Is-Does. What a brand Is and what a brand Does. If you don’t nail the Is-Does above the fold on your homepage, you are awash in the ether.

Imagine if you were someone who changed their name every week. Kinda like that.

Peace.

 

 

 

Health System Brand Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The surfeit of bad advertising in America today can be directly tied to the lack of brand strategy.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Mission Health, a huge and important health system in Western North Carolina, saves lives. They’re good people with masterful intentions. They also recently launched a new ad campaign.

Mission: You.

Without a brand strategy in place to drive communications, the work defaulted to a copywriter’s pen. Using age old tricks like putting the company name in the tagline, Mission was left with a claim, so undifferentiated, it’s become the penicillin of healthcare marketing. Patients first.

The problem with a piece of marketing poetry as a defacto brand strategy is that the idea isn’t cognitive. In this cardiology ad,

there is no claim. No proof.  (You might say “one of the nations’ top 50 cardiovascular hospitals, 12 times” is proof. But of what? Certainly not Mission: You.) When Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose brand claim is “More Science” runs an ad “Cancer reaches beyond the five boroughs, we do too,” that’s not more science.

Health systems are notoriously bad advertisers and worse branders. This is beginning to change but not fast enough. Before a health system starts spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads, they need to get the paper strategy right. Don’t leave that to the ad agency – not unless they have a good brand planning team.

Peace.

 

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