Jun 20, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The oldest market research technique in the world is to ask a group “imagine brand X is walking through the door, tell me about him/her”. This enables respondents to describe the brand with human terms, words that reflect the human characteristics to which we all relate, and understand.
Why is it then that we do not think about our brands presence in social media as the Social Life of the brand?
Wander around the net, Twitter, Google+, 4 square, YouTube, Pinterest, and all the rest, and you find a few sensible, brand relevant comments and posts amongst the inane updates and dross. It is understandable that brand owners want to appear human, so they often talk drivel on the social media, as this is what happens in life, but if the brand is worth anything, it will opt out of the rubbish and be relevant.
Think about it as a social gathering. When you meet someone who talks rubbish, you cannot wait to get away, by contrast meet someone who has something interesting to say, and you stick around.
Jun 19, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Strategy
The current Australian government has a marketing problem.
Their other problems, trouble with the hung parliament, zealous credit card expenditure by MP’s, inability to out-communicate the drivel of the opposition, a rebellious electorate, a failed “moral Imperative” and others, are just the symptoms.
Every useful marketer knows that success depends on a relentless focus on clearly articulated longer term goals. When focus is allowed to shift to the crisis of the day, from the “main-game”, whatever that may be in your circumstances, to responding to the day to day, the marketing effort fragments and stumbles for lack of a solid foundation.
The problem with this Government, and the Opposition as well, is a lack of any long term goal the electorate understands beyond their selfish objective of retaining/gaining power, and if the electorate cannot buy into the government of the day’s priorities for various reasons, they at least understand the “why”, as a process of explanation has occurred.
Generally the pundits say the Government has a communication problem, but it is much deeper than that, they have no idea of what it is they wish to communicate beyond the press release of the day that they hope will dose the fire started yesterday. They have a fundamental strategic marketing problem, not just a communication problem.
Jun 14, 2012 | Communication, Personal Rant, Social Media
Last week I was talking to a headhunter seeking to fill a senior contract management role for which I had been recommended. I had polished up the resume and sent it as requested, and he had browsed my blog and Linkedin profile, but the conversation was awkward, filling in and rehashing the detail of my long career to the exclusion of the bigger view.
Towards the end, I simply asked him what he was looking for, and the answer surprised. His response was “virtually everyone I see who I have not met before substantially embellishes if not outright lies on their resume, I am looking for the inconsistencies”.
What a conversation stopper!.
All I could say was “what you see is what you get”. No lies, no embellishments, no credit taken personally for successes of the teams I have led, no walking away from the blunders, no lipstick on the pig.
Jun 11, 2012 | Branding, Change, Communication, Management, Marketing
Today in Sydney has been about as miserable as it gets. Rainy, cold, grey, just plain shitty, and not fair for a public holiday.
What a relief it was to find a distracting way to spend the afternoon.
After watching the replay of the unfinished French Open final, assiduously avoiding any media when I “rose” so I did not know the score, I started to clean up the hard drive of my laptop, removing some of the stuff that had accumulated to clog it up.
Amongst the “random savings”, were quite a number of advertisements I had accumulated from various sites, all of which had the common element of having struck me at some time as being enormously creative, funny, engaging, delivering a serious message, or just sufficiently different to really cut through, when flogging stuff from cars and fashion to condoms and computers. They all, in one way or another, rang my creative bell.
It also struck me that we are in the middle of a huge confluence of two enormously powerful forces, technical development, and creativity, that is changing everything. Hardly an original insight.
The technical advances of the last 15 years have reduced the costs of technology, and the distribution of content to relatively miniscule proportions, which has opened up huge new opportunities for creativity to be seen. However, the digital media has become so clogged with content, from the great to the absolutely inane, that being seen is still the greatest challenge, so creativity remains an essential element of all successful communication. It has also offered up the opportunity to focus laser-like on a very small group of individuals, delivering a compelling message that they would have been unlikely to get in the old mass communication days.
I cannot finish without offering my pick as the best ad of all time, at least the best I have seen. Perhaps surprisingly, it comes from my childhood, so is a very old ad, but is a very simple execution delivering a powerful message in unequivocal terms. Pity the companies management was not up to same standard as their communications people.
May 23, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
The holy grail, the prime objective of billions of dollars of advertising, the wall behind which many campaigns that have failed to generate incremental sales have hidden, Brand Loyalty.
I cannot help but wonder if the label “Brand Loyalty” is sometimes just a metaphor for making the purchase choice easier. The environment we inhabit is now so absolutely over-run with messages information, and tactics to build “customer engagement”, that we all must have a serious case of cogitative overload, weather we know it or not, so we need a mechanism to sort the options.
In this context I am reminded of the old “KISS” principal, Keep It Simple Stupid.
Apple is often cited as the greatest marketing machine we have ever seen, an accolade I am comfortable with, but perhaps there is another dimension. Rather than building brand loyalty, perhaps they have just so simplified the purchase decision in an environment that is psychologically threatening by the number of alternatives, and the techno-speak that most use as communication , that they grab the sales almost by default.
Apple has successfully made buying a piece of tech few buyers understand simple, and attached a cache to that simplicity. This spoof makes the point, but mind the language.
Apr 27, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising.
When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming.
Therefore the task is to be sufficiently compelling to a targeted audience to bring a quality response, then the cost is not considered, because you get an outcome that (presumably) makes commercial sense.
My son recently sold a car on line, it was a good car, but not one that would be for everyone. He thought he would just put up an ad, and it would just sell, easy, because it was a good car, and the price offered good value.
Failure, this first ad got almost no response, and those that did respond were not interested in the car, just getting it at half the advertised price.
We had another shot at writing an ad, putting in much more detail, and then placed it more specifically to attract a specialised buyer, one to whom the particular characteristics of the car beyond the provision of a transport device would be of value.
It got a number of responses, several very good ones, and it sold very quickly at the full price.
The cost of the second ad was irrelevant, but he is still complaining about the first placement.
