The 2 faces of a brand

The 2 faces of a brand

Jun 15, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

Marketing and management generally, regularly find themselves actively promoting their branding credentials.

Often they would appear to have no idea beyond the mouthing of clichés why they are bothering.

The costs of building, maintaining and updating a brand is often a major item on the  P&L, and there is much written about the techniques and strategies that deliver a return. However, the core question of ‘Why bother” rarely gets a mention.

Until now.

A brand has two faces:

  1. For the brand owner, a successful brand delivers to its owner a stream of revenue and margin. There is no other reason for the investment necessary for building and maintaining a brand to be made.
  2.  To the customer, a brand offers some level of assurance about the performance, integrity, longevity,  and many other characteristics which to them are important. In other words, the value delivered by the brand, weather that be one defined by the physical performance and characteristics, or the emotional  dimensions of the brand.

“Branding” seems pretty simple, and in principal it is, but the optimisation of the investments made over the long term is the tricky part. This requires expertise and experence pretty hard to find in these days of instant digital gratification.

 

How to make a workshop work for you.

How to make a workshop work for you.

Jun 13, 2016 | Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy

Last week I ran a workshop that was designed to wrinkle out the options facing a community organisation. It has been successful for many years, but now faces the challenge of significantly changed competitive and social environments since its formation,  and the loss of a key person whose mission in life had become intimately tied up with the organisations success.

How was that volunteer passion to be replaced?

What did the future hold for this organisation?

How are they going to continue to win?

There was limited time available, certainly no time for chasing rabbits,  so the structure had to be pretty simple and lead to useful outcomes.  In reality is was bog standard ‘workshopping’

  • What is the current situation?
  • Assuming success for the next five years, what would the organisation look like? (I call this hindsight planning)
  • What had been the strategies, both  successful and unsuccessful that had been tried over the 5 years, leading to the success?
  • What resources and capabilities were now evidently required for the ‘success’ to be replicated in real time?

In starting to write up the workshop over the weekend, and necessarily reviewing my own performance as the exercise leader, I thought about the factors that in the past have made for a successful  workshop beyond the necessary structural elements.

Domain knowledge.

Workshops and so called ‘brainstorm’ efforts commonly fail because there is insufficient  domain knowledge and  expertise available that addresses the key questions central to the purpose of the workshop. Success in any activity requires the presence of some sort of plan, with objectives and metrics, combined with a factual assessment of the circumstances that led to the discussion. Without this level of immersion, the workshop will just be a conversation. ‘Think outside the box’ is often the instruction, but if that leads to random thoughts outside the relevant postcode, it will not add any value, and will be enormously distracting. Domain knowledge, and knowledge related to the domain in some relevant manner is essential.

Roadmap.

As the Mad hatter said to Alice ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’  you need a map of some sort that includes your starting point and an end point. Without these, you  will go around in aimless, unconnected circles. No workshop of any kind ever works without some sort of map or guidelines understood by everybody involved.

Inspiration.

Inspiration and ideas come from the friction created by differing and often opposing views presented by intelligent and informed people. Rarely is an idea complete at first blush, rarely can an idea not be improved by some level of refinement, and rarely does informed and creative debate not lead to creative solutions and ideas. It takes people prepared to accept that their idea is merely a contributor to a more complete picture, that it is a point in the road that contributes to a better outcome that leads to true inspiration.

Action plan

As with a workshop roadmap, any plan that evolves out of the workshop needs to have a plan, no different to the one that drove the workshop in its structure. As George Patton said on his drive towards berlin in 1945, ‘without a plan you are just a tourist‘.

Implementation.

An imperfect plan today, well implemented is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. Anther of the wise sayings of my old dad, ‘you get 1/10 for a plan, the other 9/10 are kept for the implementation’.

I have seen many workshops that come up with very useful stuff that is just lost or put aside once the participants get back to what they see as their ‘real jobs’ facing the urgency if the daily grind. It takes a good dose of leadership, and often outside  coaching to make the implementation part of a workshop actually part of the daily business of the enterprise.

Another run for a hobby horse

Another run for a hobby horse

Jun 3, 2016 | Change, Marketing, Sales

‘Account Based Marketing’ or ABM is rapidly becoming the latest three letter acronym to which all and sundry seem to be hooking their horses.

All sorts of learned crap is being published,  assuring me that ABM is the way forward, so I just googled it, 39.5 million responses.

I always thought that serving key and strategically important customers, the core of ABM, was what successful marketing and sales had always been about.

Must be deluded?

20 years ago as a newly minted consultant hanging out my shingle after a successful corporate career, one of my first products was what I called ‘SKAM’.

While it always got a laugh when I put it up, the acronym stood for “Strategic Key Account Management”.

Having now had a look at some of the ABM stuff coming out, they have done little beyond update the technology and call something that is core to sales and marketing success by another name. Then because they are calling it something new, try and flog it to unsuspecting and perhaps intellectually compromised people with too much money and perhaps not enough experience to understand what marketing really is all about.

Too snarky?

Perhaps, but it is this sort of nonsense that gives those of us who are thinking about this stuff, and have been for a long time, a bad name.

Those who read my musings regularly will know I have a corral full of hobby horses which I let out for a run occasionally. This is one of those occasions, so forgive my rant, but it is fun, and it is my blog!

The greatest failure of marketing management.

The greatest failure of marketing management.

Jun 2, 2016 | Change, Leadership, Lean, Marketing

 

The headline is a big call, competing as it does with some real doozies.

Remember “New Coke” or the Ford ‘Edsel‘ or perhaps Thomas Watsons declaration that there was a world market of no more than 5 for computers?

This one is a general observation on the nature of marketing people generally and their project management skills, at least in my experience.

They tend to spend too little time really defining a problem, but then jump effortlessly to a conclusion, leaving a pile of crap in their wake for others to clean up, and sub optimal outcomes from projects.

The explosion of marketing technology is not just making the shortcomings more obvious, it is delivering the means to measure it.

Holy cow Batman: Accountability!

The smoke and mirrors are being removed, leaving many self declared marketing gurus naked.

Leaving aside the question of individual capability, the root cause of this can usually be pinned down to a failure of project planning.

Specifically the failure to recognise the nature of critical activities that are sequential, building on the one before. For example, only a fool would lock into a creative approach and copy before the persona of the target market was absolutely crystal clear.

This notion is entirely different to the usual ‘critical path’ which can be a moveable feast as timetables move around.

Critical activities are just that, and they do not move around, at all. Project planning should always acknowledge the time necessary to complete each critical activity, and the specific sequence that is necessary.

Marketing project planning is no different to planning any other context, although the questions to be answered are usually less black and white, which simply means that the planning process needs to be rigorous and scientific if it is to be any good.

Marketers have a lot to learn from the manufacturing end of the lean movement.

To Social media or not, that is the question.

To Social media or not, that is the question.

May 25, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Social Media

Many of the small and medium sized businesses I interact with still struggle with the notion that they should be investing in social media as a marketing strategy. Creating and sharing content of value to their customers, potential customers, and competitors runs against their grain .

In addition, the operational challenges are technically confronting to many, and the notion of having to write and produce the content necessary is normally a hill too far.

B2B, B2C,  it makes little difference.

The immediate reaction of my B2B clients is that this social media stuff is for consumers, not serious businesses. However, it is the reality that those in businesses who make the purchase decisions  are usually engaging, anonymously at first with potential suppliers during the early phases of the purchase cycle, and coming to the supplier only for the transaction. Not being in on the ‘conversation’ early is clearly a mistake.

vanity metricsIt is becoming pretty clear that social media well used is a remarkably potent marketing tool, but challenging for those with modest resources, as this stuff is time consuming, technically challenging to measure properly as distinct from just measuring what is becoming known as ‘vanity measures’ just thinking they are measuring something useful.

 

 

There are a small number of very sensible strategies you can use.

Use it as a tool.

Social media is a marketing tool,  and like any tool, the effectiveness is best measured by the outcomes rather than the use, so set out to measure the effectiveness by identifying the cause and effect links between the SM and your corporate objectives.

Understand the tool.

When you have a nail to be driven, a screwdriver is of little use. Same with social media, they are tools that can be used very effectively in the right circumstances, but are useless in the wrong place. Understanding how the tool works, and where it’s characteristics are best deployed is a fundamental part of the game.

Identify your key customers, and what they want out of it.

You simply have to  be able to put yourself in the customers shoes, understand the value you can deliver from their perspective, and be prepared to be patient. My favourite  metaphor for social media is to humanise it in a way everyone understands. You walk into a bar, and spot someone who just overwhelms you. If you just walk up and ask them to marry you, your chances are pretty slim. By contrast, introduce yourself, find shared interests, spend some time together, and you never know where it can lead. Social media is no different. To have a chance of the desired outcome, you need to do the spadework up front.

Measure, test & improve.

Be creative but deeply interrogative about the measures. (is interrogative even a word?) continuously test options, so you can continuously improve. Social media and digital generally have absolutely changed the practise of marketing. It has made it measurable and accountable, but there are limits.  ‘Vanity measures’ such as number of friends, and likes  are very poor measures. They are superficial and misleading offering no clue as to which activity is likely to generate a commercial outcome, they just look good on a piece of paper to a boss who does not understand. Understanding the difference between cause and effect and correlation is critical, observing correlation is terrific, but do not make the mistake of thinking it is always cause and effect and therefore measurable. A metaphor used by Gary Vaynerchuk is particularly potent here. He observes that everyone understand the value of good parenting, over time it has great outcomes for both, but trying to measure it in a month  by month basis is stupid, it is a cumulative effect of many small things over a long period. There are some aspects of measuring digitally the return on SM that can really stuff us up.

 

Success with digital marketing, including the leveraging of the potential of social media is not easy, despite all the nonsense and get rich quick promises to the contrary.

Hopefully now you are at least a part way to answering the question.

Anatomy  of a successful email

Anatomy  of a successful email

May 23, 2016 | Communication, Marketing

Email is still the most widely used marketing tool out there, and that is for a good reason.

It works.

Like most, I receive many emails, and having subscribed to all sorts of sites over the years, to see what works and what doesn’t, as well as to get my hands on their stuff.

Every email whose purpose is marketing has, or should have a pretty common structure.

Subject line.

The subject line makes or breaks the opening rate of your email. It does not matter how great the content of the email, if it does not get opened, it will not be seen. Spending time on the subject line will be a great investment.

Good subject lines have at least one of c couple of common characteristics. They grab attention by appealing to our deep instincts for survival, they create an interruption of some sort, appeals to our curiosity, or promises to deliver a relevant benefit.

Opening sentence.

Having conjured an open, the first sentence of the email must reinforce whatever grabbed the attention of the reader and motivated them to open it. It is like a sub headline of a sensational headline you click on a news site, it delivers a bit more information, and draws you into the body of the email

Email body

As implied, this is where the message is delivered, where you are drawn into the description of the problem that got you this far, and then given the solution.

The Pitch.

Every email should have a pitch, it is the reason the email was written, it is the delivery vehicle for the pitch. In effect, ‘I have outlined the problem, here is the solution”.

Call to Action.

The CTA answers the question “what do I do now”, it may be buy here, or sign up to this webinar, or just go to this  site, whatever it is, the email must be clear on what they how the reader to do now, as a result of reading.

The power of the CTA is considerably enhanced by the use of some sort of ultimatum. ‘There are only 7 left in stock’ or ‘this price lasts only until Saturday’. Just directing someone to ‘click here for more information’ these days is pretty lame, there is insufficient motivation of FOMO (fear of missing out) as it implies they can come back at any time, and they rarely do.