A discussion on branding on BlogTalk Radio
Yesterday I participated in a round table discussion with some great people talking about brands and branding. It took place on BlogTalkRadio; the people involved were:
Wayne Hulbert, from blogbusinessworld who hosted the show, Mike Wagner - ownyourbrand, Valeria Maltoni - conversationagent, Derrick Daye - brandingstrategyinsider, John Moore - brandautopsy, Drew McLellan - drewsmarketingminute and Mike Sansone - converstations
I've never personally met any of the contributors, but I know them from their blogs. Here we are, having a round table discussion with people from the US, Canada and Australia, people who have never met (well, some may have) broadcasting a radio show globally. I'm still amazed how we do things now that you wouldn't have imagined possible ten years ago.
To spice things up, we probably needed a little more controversy, but there was a lot of agreement on some of the key aspects of building brands in todays environment. In particular:
Don't confuse your brand with the brand image - a logo is not a brand, nor is a name. I think it was Drew who said (loosely) a brand name is an empy vessel; you give it meaning by what you do for your customers. Same goes for a logo.
Be brave and make choices about who it is you develop the brand around - choose a niche and really understand what makes that niche tick; the greatest mistake is to be all things to all people. The world is simply too competitive for "me-too" brands.
Take the time to understand your competition - you can't differentiate without looking at competitors
Words matter - What you say and how you say it have a great impact on the perception that people have of your brand, so it's worth taking the time to articulate it carefully.
If you like to listen to it,here it is: BlogTalkRadio
When more is less
I recently had a chat with the CEO of an industry association who showed a great understanding of brand value. Traditionally, membership organisations like this rely on subscription revenue to grow, so it would be logical to simply flog as many memberships as you can.
The problem is that the key value of this brand is that membership represents a higher quality, offering an automatic "seal of approval" to buyers. That is the core value of the membership and of the brand. So what did this guy do to grow?
Is this the greatest challenge in modern marketing?
Do you remember when you had to choose a home loan? Or car insurance? Or a printer? Did you go online? How many choices did you have? Did it make you happy having those choices? Barry Schwartz says it didn't.
How “permission marketing” got hijacked
Seth Godin published his book "Permission Marketing" in 1999 and challenged the way we think about gaining and keeping customers. In a nutshell, it argues that the traditional ways of marketing and advertising are not sustainable; we are exposed to so many messages every day (up to 3,000 a day, from magazines, televisions, radio, email, billboards, telephone, etc, etc) that we simply switch off.
90% of these messages are irrelevant to our needs or interests. We didn't ask to be interrupted when we are watching a TV show, surf a website or flick through a magazine. We find it intrusive, anoying, boring.
So our response is to switch off. To filter out. To avoid anything that even smells like a "sales" message. The information age and technology means that we can quite literally do this: filter email, screening telephone calls and even television through services like TIVO. And if we can't phyically switch it off, we do it mentally anyway. In essence, the power is shifting from the marketer to the consumer.
The alternative is to put the focus (and therefore money and time) into building relationships with highly targeted groups of people; anticipated, relevant and personal communication. It's about building relationships on your customers terms, not yours.
So what happens when you ask about "permission marketing" to someone involved in marketing now?
I bet they will only talk about email. About "opt-in" lists and buttons on websites. The meaning has been hijacked by "old school" direct marketers who, under pressure from SPAM legislation, were forced to put a facility on their email or website that gives customers some legal protection against pestering.
Not because they think it is good for business, but because it is required by law.
It's a shame, because the idea is a lot bigger than that.
Tweaking a website rather than re-building
It wasn't my idea, but I am happy to promote it. We need people who can "tweak" websites in this world. The idea is that many websites could significantly improve their performance without being re-built from scratch. Small changes to design, layout, content that can improve the websites performance. In the same way cars can be tuned. read the post on it here
Why stop at websites? Why shouldn't we have a "tweaking" service for other marketing activities?
- You have a lead generation program. What if you had someone come in who didn't want to take the lead generation project over, but who simply tweaked it. Got another 10% performance out of the program.
- A sales pitch that has been used for years, got reviewed and tweaked to get another 10% performance.
- Tweak an email newsletter (content, layout, call to action) and get another 10% performance.
Have you got some more "tweak" ideas?
Who’s in charge of “Marketing”?
The confusion of what marketing is, should be, or should do is never going to stop. We'll need a new word. Seth Godin wrote about "The myth of the CMO" (Chief Marketing Officer) on his blog, the myth being the fact that they are in charge of marketing.
I feel sorry for Judy Verses. She's the Chief Marketing Officer of
Verizon, a brand that is justifiably reviled by millions of people.Is Verizon disdained, mistrusted and avoided because Judy's not doing a great job? Of course not. She's doing a great job.
The reason we hate Verizon is they act like a monopoly, have ridiculous policies, a lousy call center, a bad attitude, plenty of outbound phone spam and crazy pricing.
We hate Verizon because of all the things Judy doesn't get to influence or control.
The myth of the CMO is the C part. They don't get to be the chief of the stuff that is really what marketing is all about today. CAO, maybe (Chief Advertising Officer) but not CMO.
He is right of course. The real issue is probably that "marketing" the way it should be covers the entire organisation, from the frontdesk to the person who sends out the invoices, to the engineer in product development. Now who is in charge of those people? The CEO. Is he or she a marketer? Sometimes, but not very often.
The best change marketers with the ambition to influence real outcomes has is to become the "trusted advisor" to the whole team on anything to do with customers.
If old style "advertising" is going to be replaced by an increased focus on word of mouth, driven by customer experience than this paradigm will have to shift. There's no option.
Too busy to think
Seth Godin wrote about "Marketing potholes" we all tend to fall into. My take on this article is that marketers (or the people in an organisation charged with marketing) spend most of their time on the tactical side of the fence (doing budgets, promotions, meet and greets) and far too little time on big ideas that can truly set a firm apart.
For small and medium business this problem is even more accute.
- They often don't have a senior marketing person; the role is carved up between the CEO and the Sales Manager who are flat out trying to keep up with the day-to-day responsibilities.
- Marketing is not seen as "everything a company does" as Seth defines it (and I agree with) but as "promotions". So if any "marketing" work is done, it is about promotions (the new brochure ware, the new website)
- If they do set time aside to take a good hard look at what their real potential differentiation is, they often don't have the skills inhouse to evaluate what is a workable and what isn't.
As a result, they either don't do anything or go for the "gut feel" approach with all the associated risks.
So unless the folks running a business agree what "marketing" is in their organisation, how important it is to their success and how they will resource it, great ideas are not very likely to get beyond the brainstorm phase.
But what an opportunity for those who do.
“Our product is so unique that it has no competition.”
Guy Kawasaki wrote this in his top 10 marketing mistakes and although there are a number of other good ones, this one I have heard in different disguises in the market place;
"Our product is so unique that it has no competition." (Maura Welch). It has no competition for two possible reasons: (a) You're clueless and don't know how to use Google; (b) there's no market for it so no one else is dumb enough to do the same thing."
For some reason engineers are particularly prone to this bit of self delusion.
The issue about competition is that most people look for anyone that does the exact same thing. What you really want to look for is for anyone solving the same customer problem. Now if you can demonstrate that your solution to the problem is more marketable than theirs, it starts to become interesting.
How is technology changing marketing?
- - How we manage our relationships
- - How we communicate with our customers, partners and prospects
- - How we develop new ideas for products and services
- - How our customers look for us
- - How we look for our customers
- - How we monitor our competitors
- - How we monitor customer satisfaction
- - How we source our products
- - How we sell to our customers
- - How we check our pricing strategy
- - How we present our company
- - How we analyse our performance
- What have I missed?
Why advertising agencies don’t advertise
Re:Focus: Why Don't Ad Agencies Advertise?
I love this; it really is a good question. Seth Godin highlighted this article from April 17, 2006 issue of BrandWeek written by SinekPartners CEO, Simon Sinek.
So why don't they advertise? The article notes that advertising agencies find PR much more effective than simply advertising. Why don't they practice what they preach?
Maybe because they know that just advertising your brand is ineffective and inefficient.
Because starting an advertising campaign in isolation is not marketing. the real question is not if you should advertise, but how you should advertise.
My question is how many advertising agencies actually have a marketing strategy. If they did, they would use a mix of media in a coordinated campaign, not just an advertising campaign using the most expensive media available.
Imagine this; advertising agency wants to gain customers in IT industry, determine that an online, interactive presentation of their work is a great way to communicate with this tech savvy audience. They use a combination of offline and online media to drive traffic to this dedicated website through curiosity inspiring creative. The online presentation is so good that it starts buzz in blogs which is in turn picked up on by their PR people...and so on.
The problem in the marketing services industry is that everyone is trying to sell their solution as the answer to clients marketing needs. And that simply doesn't make sense.
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