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Apocryphal Brand Craft

By
Steve Poppe
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0


I was reading some marko-babble on a research company website the other day and my bullshit meter went off. The sentence that woke it was “Turn your brand into a religion.”  Yeah, no.  

Most marketers would warm up to a sentence like this. Who doesn’t want a fealty to their brand that sticks to the soul? But face it, it’s an overpromise. When we are talking this type affinity we are talking about a product or service, not a brand.  I’ve brought Hellman’s Mayonnaise all my life. The New York Times is my only life-long newspaper subscription, my tents and ski jackets are all Marmot. Not because of the brand managers, but because of the product. Read: product preference.

It’s aspirational to want an almost religious attachment to a brand, that I get. But when you put brand before product, it’s because you don’t have a really good product. Once you remove the brand from the product and promote the former, thinking it’s some ethereal and malleable construct, you’re kidding yourself. You are storytelling.

Brand management is hard work. It’s scientific. Measurable. Rules-based. But religion? Yeah, no!

Peace.

 

How to measure brand effectiveness.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I am not in the brand awareness business. I am in the brand association business. And to take it one step further I am really in the brand benefit business.

Brand awareness is simply recall of a name, logo and/or package. Marketing begins with awareness. It’s the price of admission.

Brand association takes awareness a step further in that consumers are asked to play back certain context and associations with that recall. It might be category association, e.g., Coke is a cola, Cowboys are a football team, or perhaps the association may extend beyond what a brand “is” to a quality, Apple offers product innovation, for instance.

But the third level, the one I refer to as Brand Benefits walks consumers beyond rote awareness and context features to benefits they need, desire or cherish. I’m not talking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I’m talking endemic product or service needs. But importantly, these brand benefits must be few (three to be precise) and constant. They are brand planks. 

To measure the success of a brand, you must track awareness of brand benefits. If consumers can play back your planks in unaided recall testing you are winning the branding war.

Peace.

 

 

Apple Lethargy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Apple needs a shot in the arm.  I’m not talking a Lee Clow/Steve Jobs image campaign, I’m talking a new breakthrough product. Actually, maybe a Lee Clow ad campaign directed internally at employees wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Something to get designers and engineers jazzed up.  Where the innovation at? Where’s “What’s next?”

Tim (O’Brien?), no Cook…that’s right, needs to stir up his people and get them looking beyond the dashboard. When lagging Chinese sales of your flagship product is the news of the day, the luster is off the Apple. Come on girls and boys, design shit. Shit that will change the clothes we wear. (Things we carry? Hee hee.) The furniture we buy. The mobility we employ.

Apple is not known for reacting. It is known for acting. Let’s boogie Tim Cook. Dark side of the moon stuff.  Apple TV ain’t it. Apple cars ain’t it.

This is the earth’s brand. More Musk, less tusk (as in elephant).

Peace.

 

 

Stuff Isn’t Software.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Pent-up demand is a marketer’s dream.  But it can be disruptive. The fact that Tesla Inc. did not manage it well for its automotive business is no secret. When Elon Musk, in order to get his cars to buyers around the country, began manufacturing his own auto-hauling trailers and subsequently purchased three trucking companies, you had a clue planning was incomplete. It doesn’t bode well for his space travel or subterranean tunnel companies, either if you ask me.  You can’t do logistics 90% of the way; manufacturing isn’t the software business.

As a brand strategist, production logistics are on my radar, but only when a problem.  A key to marketing is creating demand after manufacturing logistics are in place and future proof. If you can’t scale your supply with the demand, start smaller. Do a regional launch. Tesla in California and a couple of close by states would have made more sense. In the 70s, people drove cross country with cases of Coors because it was a regional brand, making it that much more desirable. A well-designed marketing plan.

(As software and Internet entrepreneurs venture into the “stuff” business, they often learn some retro lessons.)

Peace.

 

Endemia. Root word endemic.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I’m a NY Jets fan and wonder how the franchise can be so mediocre for so long. We often look at the quarterbacks, coaches, general managers for our answers. But rarely does the average fan look at ownership. The last couple of owners of the Jets, Leon Hess and Woody Johnson, are magnates who built empires upon gasoline and Band-Aids.

It is a rare business indeed where someone from outside the industry can come in and have massive success; Robert Kraft being an exception in the football world. But Mr. Kraft sans Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, would look, I suppose, quite average as an owner.  

Brand planners understand how important it is to deeply understand a business — even if only engaged with a brand for a month or two. It is a work imperative to speak the language of the business. It’s critical to understand fiscal drivers, consumer motivations, and operational strengths and foibles. Brand planners cannot set master brand strategy as an outsider.

Jets ownership, as smart as they may be, are just not football people. They are business people. A restaurant owner can’t be the chief of police. A history teacher cannot be a construction engineer. A cable TV CEO can’t build a basketball team. My drift.

Peace.

 

Cleaning My Memes

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I write frequently about Care-abouts and Good-ats, two fundamentals of my brand strategy practice. (Type the words into this blog search bar for more info.)  I’ve been working hard to create web memes out of the phrases but realize the bouncing these words around the ether is a little inside baseball. Even when I share them with brand people.

Care-abouts is actually shorthand for Consumer Care-abouts. And Good-ats refers to Brand Good-ats. Without those qualifying words the meanings are diluted. Or worse.  If Care-abouts are misunderstood to mean brand care-abouts, that’s certainly not good at all.  What brands cares about is making money. Making margin. Gaining share. Branding works best when it focused on consumer needs.  As for Good-ats, they are meant to refer to what a brand is good at. If construed as what the consumer is good at, that suggests a pandering brand strategy – one that blows smoke. Never a good idea.

Hence forth, I’ll be using the full terms of art: Consumer Care-abouts and Brand Good-ats. To do otherwise might sound nice, but confuse.

Peace.  

 

 

Brand Strategy for Complex Businesses.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I worked on an assignment recently where a tech company came back to me 3 years after having me develop their initial brand strategy. A strategy they loved.  It was for a complex business, which in three years’ time grew even more complicated. The service offerings got broader – and they entered into a white-hot new tech sector.  A sector with mixed reviews as to its viability, albeit one boasting tons of VC money.

The CEO wondered if a reposition was in order. As someone who always tries to future-proof his brand strategies, I was a tad reluctant but willing to give it a try.

Fast forward a few weeks, a couple of dozen interviews, some financials and a bevy of care-abouts and good-ats and the new brand strategy was complete. It changed. The brand claim evolved, broadening the scope of the business. It was a modest but significant change.  The proof planks stayed the same, though slightly nuanced.  

The way to handle complex problems in branding is to render them not complex. Once you remove most complications, once you figure out the most important business and attitude drivers, you can lay down the track.

Peace.        

 

Content Creation Advice-ory.

By
Steve Poppe
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0


Nicholas Kristof wrote today about his biggest Op-Ed flops of the year.  Columns people started reading then left before completion. Readers and consumers are fickle when it comes to things that hold their interest. They move on.  The job of content creators is to capture the interest and imagination of readers.  It’s the litmus of good communications.

Though marketing communications professionals, especially their ad agents, understand this, they are not so good at it. Why? Because they are selling.  They are asked to load the content up with product features and benefits and, perhaps, festoon it with a pretty bow to keep interest high.  It’s not easy.

The web, much like the yellow pages of yore, is a utility in some regards. It’s brings buyer and seller together by way of search. So online ads and content don’t need to be so hot either. And they aren’t.

Nick Kristoff writes about important things. He’s not going to change his topics, though he can learn from them. He can perfect his craft to keep readers on the page. He’s a content creating sponge. And so must be marketers.  Every word is important. Let’s light up those amygdalas.

Peace.

 

All Claim, No Proof.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Marketing communications is 80 claim and 20 percent proof. Read a print ad. Watch a TV commercial. Listen to a radio spot. The lion’s share of the communication tells consumers what the seller wants them to believe. If you just learned the claims by rote the marketer would be happy. The reason to believe the claims — or the logic — is often absent. Maybe a crumb here and there. Hence, consumers lack the ability to explain the claim. All claim, no proof.

By some accounts North Shore University Hospital is the best hospital on Long Island, a large land mass next to NYC with 3.5 million residents.  Many believe the best hospital claim. Ask them why it’s the best and they are likely tongue-tied. Umm. Well. Because.

Branding is about Claim and Proof. Find a claim consumers truly want and need. Then find proof of that claim and promote it every day.  If you do so in an organized way – with three proof planks – you will succeed faster.

When Coors Light spends millions on TV advertising telling young adults it offers the coldest beer on the market (claim), how do they prove it? With a picture of the Rockies? It’s a Trumpian claim. It’s foolish and silly. But they still claim it.  

Branding is about conviction. It’s about evidence.

Get your paper strategy right and every arrow in the marketing quiver shoots toward the target.

Peace.

 

Advertising is not a task for the lazy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Google ran an ad today in The New York Times using an age-old communication device, listing a number of great user-benefits for which people use the service — a nicely bracketed list of searches Google has allowed us over the years. All true. All fairly amazing, were it not for the fact that we’ve been using Google now for 15-20 years.  In a sense it’s what I call “We’re here” advertising – not much more than a simple logo on a page, conveying no new information. A billboard reminder, if you will.

Advertising that doesn’t engage a reader with something new, something learned, something blue (sexy), is merely “We’re here” advertising. Repetition and/or frequency is a foundational tool for brand building the old school saying goes. According to the logic, consumers won’t remember your message until they see it a minimum of three times. Not a fan. It worked before we were saturated with ads. Not today.

If the messaging is compelling, if it teaches, if it stimulates – it’s off to a good start.  Then it needs to make you do something. Act. And lastly, it must make a deposit in the brand bank. Alter your attitude in a way that predisposes you to purchase the next time — for reasons brand managers decide. Advertising is not a ask for the lazy.

Peace.

 

 

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