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Brand Strategy…Plan the House First.

By
Steve Poppe
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Most brand strategists are insight doctors. Insight detectives.  Consumer behavior and motivation are their daily gruel. It’s a wonderful living. It’s like being a psychotherapist but without all the focus on negatives. I am a brand strategist of a different color. Certainly I can find insights with the best of them. Also I can write actionable projects briefs but my real job is in casting the master brand strategy. I plan the house while most brand strategists decorate the rooms.

A large brand, on any given day, may have 20 assignments in play across 5 agencies. That’s a lot of briefs. It’s not effective to have so many re-inventors and it’s not cost-effective.

I don’t want to put anyone out of work here but with a good master brand brief (aka brand brief) the need for strategy soldiers across agencies is lessened. And the work becomes tighter.

I went to a Conagra meeting on the Banquet brand a few years ago and there were probably 6 different agency strategists in the room. Silly.

Peace.                      

 

 

Helly Hansen’s Impregnable Brand.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Some brands don’t have to work hard. Their product is their brand strategy — and deeply embedded in their DNA. It comes easy because employees know what the product is, what the product does (Is-Does) and why it’s needed.  When that happens consumers/buyers can’t help but parrot that value.

Helly Hansen is one such brand. For them, life is easy.

I’m not exactly sure what the Helly “claim” is, but I can certainly articulate its 3 “brand planks.” They are “warm,” “dry” and “protected.”  These good-ats and the customer care-abouts and both powerful and nicely aligned. A perfect fit.

So long as Helly Hanson spends its marketing money demonstrating warm, dry and protected, the brand can’t help but be strengthen.

This is a great example of product and marketing working closely together. All companies should aspire to this type of relationship.

Peace.    

 

Brand Strategy Metrics Trump Business Metrics.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Two days ago I promised to share some business metrics side-by-side with brand metrics, letting you decide which are more actionable?  I’ll make up a few business metrics and then use real life brand metrics from clients.

Business Metrics:

  • Increase percent of sales of services over hardware.
  • Reduce cost to acquire a customer.
  • Increase topline revenue by 6%.
  • Increase visitors to the website by 10%.

Brand Metrics:

  • Prove improved classroom design increases test scores.
  • Prove that digital security at the root level is more effective than the device level.
  • Prove global security is more effective when private and public sectors work together.
  • Prove commercial building maintenance is less costly when proactive rather than reactive.

Now you might argue that the business metrics seem like objectives and the brand metrics like strategies. But the simple fact is, these brand metrics are measurable. Brand strategy conflates obs and strats. Brand strategy drives the how. It’s a roadmap for the how. When you have a discrete how story (3 proof planks supporting one brand claim) you have clarity of business purpose.  

Brand strategy is not a color palette. Not a logo. Not a campaign. It’s a business winning organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.

Peace.

 

Whither go the brand strategist?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There are a number of brand strategy consultants out there I hold in high regard. They totally get insights and market conditions, are quick studies in business categories, have keen understanding of meaningful metrics, and possess indefatigable bullshit barometers. Sadly, I’m seeing a trend among this crew where they are reinventing and repositioning themselves away from pure brand work into other aligned areas. Customer experience. Team optimization. Digital transformation. Culture plotting.

Why is this?

Well, that’s what the market sparks to. Most marketers and business owners don’t think they need a brand strategy. They want measurable results on sales. Higher top line and lower bottom lines.  What they don’t understand is that those things are directly tied – or can be tied – to a smart brand strategy. When you define brand strategy as “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” you begin to understand how brand strategy can impact bottom lines. And top lines.

Tomorrow I’ll share some business metrics side-by-side with brand metrics. I encourage you to tell me which are more actionable.

Peace.

 

Favorite Places and Comms Planning

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was riding my bike yesterday and noticed the name on the handlebars grips, the same name as a sign I pass daily on the fence of a marine store: Yeti.  The signage got me thinking about media placement and how it might be supercharged by placing logos on things we love to do and places we love to go. This intuitively happen anyway to a degree. Smith sunglasses at the ski resorts. Bunger Surfboards near the beach.  We might call this point-of-use branding, as opposed to point-of sale, where one buys the goods.

But what about just putting your logo near favorite places?  Parlay the positive feelings one has for a place or situation and attach them to your brand. Placing Coke ads where a consumer might need refreshment is certainly smart and an example of point-of-use. But how about placing a Coke logo near Dominic’s restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx or atop the Jupiter Bowl in Park City, Utah?

Brand where your customers and prospects are positively Zenned out.  Peace.

   

 

The Best $17,500 You’ll Ever Spend.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

$17,500 is the number I use as my brand strategy fee. It covers one month of work and a brand strategy. A brand strategy is here defined as An organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.  The brand strategy itself comprises “One claim, three proof planks.” What’s a proof plank, you ask?  A homogeneous array of consumer value examples.  I’ve been using $17,500 as a fee for close to ten years; it’s time for rate increase.

Starting February, the monthly rate will climb to $20,000. Inquires fielded before February will hold old pricing.

Many small companies spend scores or thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing. Larger companies hundreds of thousands. And most do so without a brand strategy. Without an organizing principle. Those who invest in a brand strategy make the best one-time investment of their business lives.

A pittance in the total scheme of things.

Peace.  

 

 

Malicious Comment and Trolls.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Yesterday, for a friend at Reputation Management, I wrote about brands and reputation management. Today, I’m going to take a crack at “malicious comments and trolls.”  I was director of marketing at Zude back in 2006-08, a web start-up in the social computing space. We were a drag-and-drop web authoring tool — that the brand brief referred to as “the fastest easiest way to build a website.”  Zude earned Robert Scoble’s demo of the year and we had lots of big stories on Tech Crunch, Read Write Web, Giga Om, ZDNet and more. When you get that type of pub it brings out the trolls.

Dave Berlind a key blogger and confidant at the time, told us “Correct false information immediately, but don’t get dragged in to long harangues.”  Some people just love to type and argue. Don’t give them a forum. Another time, when director of marketing at an education company – and trust me educators like to type and argue – I was careful to allow different points of view, but never attempted to tit-for-tat them. Trolls bore easily and will find new people to pester.

In Social Media Guard Rails, is a key caution that applies to trolls and malicious comments, “Don’t anger the angry.”  It’s good advice.

Peace.

 

 

 

 

Managing Brand Reputation.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The company Reputation Management has asked me to comment on how a brand can bounce back from poor online reviews.

I believe it’s best to leave them up. As hard and painful as it is, it’s “real world” online commerce. Not everyone is a super model. Not everyone bats .400. To err is human.  How you overcome quality or service problems dictates how you improve. If a product has flaws, fix them. Or acknowledge why they happen. When Chipotle made people sick, it acknowledged “farm to table” is not easy. Healthier is not easy. And they changed.

When Marmot, known for quality in winter gear, gets a bad review, it isn’t defensive, it works even harder to make better product.

Today, if an e-commerce site doesn’t have poor reviews people know it’s been cleaned.

Also, a strong brand strategy (one claim, three proof planks) is also a good way to maintain reputation.  Using an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging feeds the market the information it needs to understand your product. When care-about and good-ats align, brands are hard to tear down. When you simplify and strengthen your value, a few disorganized comments won’t hurt. They just make you real.

Peace.

 

A Lesson in Brand Strategy from Meryl Streep.

By
Steve Poppe
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Meryl Streep closed her Golden Globe acceptance speech with “Take your broken heart, turn it into art,” a borrow from Carrie Fisher. As I dried my tears after watching Ms. Streep I thought about my craft and how important feelings are in brand strategy.  When writing a brand brief, I tend to go long form. Creatives say they don’t like this, but it’s how I work. As I work through it, if my brief is flaccid and too business heavy it goes in the trash.  I know when a brief is working because I start to feel something.  

There’s an old advertising axiom, “Make them feel something then do something.”  It works in strategy too.

Like all good writing a good brief evokes a response. When my blood pressure changes, when I go flush, giggle or smile, I know I’m onto something. In a zone. More importantly, I know my clients and content creators will feel it.

Meryl Streep is more than a great actor she a wonderful evoker.  Brand strategy is meant to package or direct how consumers evoke. Those who purchase while feeling are much more apt to remain loyal.

You feel me?                                                                

Peace.

 

Brand Engineering.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Many brand planners, by title, do the daily strategic work of advertising agencies: “Let’s write a brief for a new customer acquisition program,” for instance.  At What’s The Idea?, I concern myself with work at the root level.   I work on the master brand strategy; the brand “claim and proof planks” that drive all aspects of marketing.  Important as tactics are, they only support and bring to life the master strategy.

Master strategy is brand planning at is most scientific. Done right, it is measurable and predictive of results. But, I’ve just come to learn planning is just that – planning. Only when the plan is followed, activated and enculturated can it work. When not followed, when not complied with, it lays fallow.

Hence “Brand Engineering.”  Brand engineering goes beyond planning. It take a plan through to implementation.  Brand engineering rolls out the plan – insuring understanding and adherence.  When a brand strategy is understood it frees brand managers, agents and consumers alike to participate.

Smart brand consultants get this.  Landor and Interbrand make brand books about this – textbooks really — to explain how to live by the brand. But, sadly, they sit on selves more often than not.

Stay tuned from more thinking on brand engineering. It’s going to be a thing.

Peace.

 

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