DON’T GET BURIED BY THE COMPETITION Have your brand rise above
ISSUE #17 The Marketing Bubble Is About To Pop, Agile Can Soften The Landing CxOs, Can You Survive (And Thrive) In The Reputation Economy? Is Your Brand Making Promises Your Experience Can’t Deliver? The Anatomy Of A Great Content Marketer Matching Language And Motivation ...and much more inside.
Also Featured In This Issue:
4 CxOs, Can You Survive (And Thrive) In The Reputation Economy?
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Building A Culture Of Responsiveness
Reach Is Much More Than An Impression
Andy Paul
Matt Gentile
Michael Fertik
20 The Marketing Bubble Is About To Pop, Agile Can Soften The Landing
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The Media Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Search And Social: Mobile Integration
Jeff Barrett
Cynthia Johnson
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
34 The Anatomy Of A Great Content Marketer Ann Handley
39 Nominate Your Top Marketing Thought Leaders Over 50
46 What Is Luxury‌ In The Age Of You? Rebecca Robins
Is Your Brand Putting Its Best Face Forward? Andrew Vesey
52 Leverage Purpose To Build Matching Language Brand Reputation, Employee And Motivation Advocacy And Sales Art Markman, PhD Simon Mainwaring
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60 Is Your Brand Making Promises Your Experience Can’t Deliver?
64 Your Brand Makes All The Difference
Use This Simple Button To Come Back Here Anytime
Ryan T. Sauers
At the top right of page spreads
Colin Shaw
From The Editor Don’t get buried by the competition. Rise above the rest, with a little help from our expert contributors in this, the 17th issue of Brand Quarterly. Writing this from sunny Barcelona has me thinking of this issue a bit like tapas… there’s a little something for everyone. Lessons in reputation management from a pioneer in the field, content marketing insights from one of the best in the business, brand management from our own Chief Brandman, agile marketing, customer experience, sales, social, mobile - CMOs, Professors, LinkedIn Influencers, award winning authors… wow! I better stop myself there or I’ll run out of room. But as you can tell, I’m super excited by the lineup we have for you, and honoured that each of our contributors have chosen to take part and make this issue what it is - just awesome. Speaking of awesome - check out page 51 for a special deal we have arranged with the Brand2Global conference in London for their event at the end of September. If you’re responsible for global branding and marketing in your company (or looking to upgrade your knowledge, to get to that position), Brand2Global should definitely be on your must-do list. Also, don’t forget: Nominations for our 2015, ‘50 Marketing Thought Leaders Over 50’ list are open, with nominations already exceeding last year’s tally - it’s going to be a tough selection process! Have you nominated someone that you consider a marketing thought leader (who’s over 50)? - If not find out more on page 39. Well, looks like I did run out of space... Enjoy, share and see you next time. Adiós,
Brand Quarterly Magazine ISSUE #17 - Published AUG 2015 www.BrandQuarterly.com Publisher/Design: Vesey Creative Ltd brandquarterly@veseycreative.com
As the publishers of Brand Quarterly, we take every care in the production of each issue. We are however, not liable for any editorial error, omission, mistake or typographical error. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of their respective companies or the publisher.
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Copyright: This magazine and the content published within are subject to copyright held by the publisher, with individual articles remaining copyright to the named contributor. Express written permission of the publisher and contributor must be acquired for reproduction.
CxOs, Can You Survive (And Thrive) In The Reputation Economy? Michael Fertik
As a leader, you know how to evaluate the health of a business – whether it’s your own or a target for acquisition. It’s a fairly standard checklist we all understand – from assessing outstanding debt to evaluating the strength of the management team. But do you know how to assess yourself as a senior executive leader? And are you adept at the strategies that will strengthen your reputation and increase your value, whether it’s to your current organization or for future opportunities? Call it management by reputation. Companies are getting bigger – in size and influence. At the same time, the power of social media platforms is accelerating, turning everyone into a publisher, and forcing businesses to pay attention in ways they were never required to before. We’re in an era where an errant tweet can take over news cycles and tank stock prices, an age when one picture without context can derail a projected leadership path, a time when an off-color remark or ill-considered 4
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joke is enough for a brutally swift dismissal. Conversely, a CEO or COO with a distinctive personality and point of view can be hugely beneficial: think the brash warmth of Richard Branson or the cool but approachable intelligence of Sheryl Sandberg.
In this new Reputation Economy – where who you are matters more than even the traditional markers of power – the onus is on you to deliver that cocktail of clout.
Make Smart Use Of Data This peculiar confluence of factors means that CEOs and other C-suite executives are increasingly called upon to demonstrate not only leadership, but personality, interest and accountability – to customers, employees, investors, and the public alike. The result is a powerful new breed of super executives – strong individual characters, who manage their companies as much through their own personal reputations, as through their skills and expertise.
Leadership is the first and most fundamental of characteristics you’ll need to maintain to strengthen your reputation – whether you’re comfortable in the position you have or eyeing the possibility of ascension. Smart business strategy and operational knowhow are always going to be core to your reputational currency. You’ll be judged on your ability to make sound decisions and there’s nothing so central to driving those than data.
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Fortunately, we now live in a time where information is flowing at an astonishing rate: in 2014, the amount of data in the world totaled up to 2.1 zettabytes. And data storage – as you likely already know – is very nearly without cost, so you can continue amassing and keeping information ad infinitum.
you can reserve resources to secure the talent that will make the best impact on your business – before they’re snatched up by the competition. You’ll both look and be brilliant as a result.
But it’s really the company that knows how to use Big Analysis to create accurate predictive capability that will be ahead of the curve. Imagine if, as the CEO of an airline company, you were able to properly identify current and future customers who would be both loyal and lucrative, all through an automated scoring algorithm that parsed the data and correctly determined the members of this elite group. Perhaps you’re the CMO of a leading grocery store brand and you could confer specialized benefits automatically to customers as they walked into your stores – further cementing their loyalty – all thanks to your scoring algorithm.
Carefully Curate Your Public Brand
That’s the power of Big Analysis – and it’s where your legacy begins.
Get Better At Hiring – Quickly It’s terribly cliché to say that intelligent leaders surround themselves with good people. Yet it’s still very much true. When it comes to hiring, take a leaf from the National Football League. During draft season, NFL teams use data on past performance to evaluate and predict a player’s potential and fit. In this way, the teams can use the most lucrative sign-on bonuses to secure the true standouts and reward other recruits using amounts more appropriate to their predicted playing power. Such predictive analysis isn’t reserved for multimillion-dollar football franchises. If you’re wise, you’ll underscore your leadership acumen by implementing similar hiring practices that effectively identify, lure and retain those candidates most likely to excel from among thousands of applicants. If you use data to accurately score applicants, 6
In the Reputation Economy, no one is immune from the machine – those computers scoring and evaluating each of us based on endless sources of data, from social media profiles to online purchases. For you, the pressure is even greater. The keen eye of public opinion means you must help shape a proactive narrative about you, using the machine’s own tools against it.
In the Reputation Economy, no one is immune from the machine How do you beat the machine? Feed it with the information you want it to know – always truthful but also neutral or positive in tone. Tangible achievements are low-hanging fruit because, unsurprisingly, computers like numbers. Think increasing sales by a certain percentage, decreasing employee turnover, survey feedback that shows your (stellar) approval rating as a leader. Be proactive with your social accounts – sticking carefully to the kind of posts that enhance your reputation (like achievements or new projects) versus those that can detract (something political, for instance). Endorse key connections for skills on LinkedIn – an almost surefire way to receive endorsements in return. Tweet sincere kudos to colleagues who have done an exemplary job. Make sure you have and update a personal website that will help you rank highly in Google search results. Share press hits. Write industry-relevant posts on LinkedIn.
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Get Disruptive Sometimes CEOs are faced with cleaning up a gigantic mess – think Hyundai in the early 90s, then a frequent punch line for its cheaply made cars that fell apart quickly. The automaker made a gutsy move: it tripled its own warranty and more than doubled that of its closest competitor. No one else had ever done something quite like that. Suddenly Hyundai wasn’t in the news for fraying seats or declining sales – and people were talking about the warranty that sounded too good to be true. The lesson for you? Disrupt the conversation. A big, bold move that changes the tenor and substance of the discussion can pay huge dividends for your business – and for you as a leader. As a bonus, the resulting coverage will often push down the negative news that dominated search results before.
Ready Yourself For The Worst Whether real or manufactured, crises are a fact of corporate life. Steering your company through them using calm judgment and levelheaded assessment is crucial to your reputation as a leader. Like most things, it’s quite straightforward in the abstract – but extraordinarily difficult in practice.
Whether real or manufactured, crises are a fact of corporate life
Consider though the type of situation you’re dealing with. Are you experiencing a manufactured crisis, as Shell did in 2012, when Greenpeace created a tone-deaf, offensive and utterly fake ad campaign and attributed it to the oil and gas giant? Greenpeace then manufactured an alltoo-believable response from Shell’s legal department – and, of course, jumping into the fray by threatening bloggers on the dangers of disseminating defamatory material is a guarantee for several rounds of international news coverage. Is your crisis real in nature, like when Progressive Insurance made it hard for a family who lost their daughter to recover uninsured motorist coverage? The company made a major misstep by falling back on rational argument – “We followed the law” – as a cold counterpoint to an emotionally charged and sympathyinducing family. Remember that every story has a hero, villain and victim – and in somee cases, the facts simply won’t matter in the court of public opinion. Build and strengthen your reputational currency now – even if you initially adopt just a few of the simple steps above. It’s a reasonably light investment in yourself that – in the Reputation Economy – will likely be the best you’ve ever made.
Michael Fertik Founder And CEO | Reputation.Com A TechAmerica Entrepreneur of the Year recipient, Michael Fertik is the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, and is credited with pioneering the field of online reputation management. One of the world’s leading cyberthinkers on digital privacy and online reputation issues, Fertik is regularly called upon as an industry commentator and guest columnist for the Harvard Business Review, Reuters, and range of other media publications. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Agenda Council on the Future of the Internet and the author of two books, Wild West 2.0 (2010), and New York Times best-seller, The Reputation Economy (2015).
www.michaelfertik.com
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Building A Culture Of Responsiveness Andy Paul
“Are you helping me or not?” There is an epidemic of poor responsiveness in sales and service. Consider the case of IBM, a global behemoth with over $100 Billion in annual revenues. An article in the April 25, 2013 issue of the Wall Street Journal reported the existence an internal IBM video, that was sent to all 430,000 of its employees by CEO Virgina Rometty. In her 5-minute long missive, Rometty decried the absence of a sense of urgency among her legions in responding to prospects and customers. She stated that IBM has been guilty of not being sufficiently proactive in engaging with prospects and customers, to get them the information they need and to answer their questions. As described in the WSJ article, the solution was to change IBM’s process in hopes of changing its culture: “The CEO then unleashed a new rule. If a client has a request or question, IBM must respond within 24 hours, she said.”
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By their CEO’s reckoning, IBM was a company that had a responsiveness problem. Even a giant company with some of the most welltrained and well-managed sales and support people in the tech industry, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, who design, sell, manufacture, integrate and deploy some of the most complex IT systems in the world, was visibly failing its prospects and customers in this most basic of sales (and service) skills. And, as a result, becoming vulnerable to their competitors with some of their biggest customers. IBM is an example of an enterprise with the self-awareness and insight to make a change to a culture of what I call laissez-faire responsiveness, which was sapping their ability to compete.
How Can You Build A Culture Of Responsiveness At Your Company? The first step is to develop a clear understanding of why it is so important to integrate responsiveness, into every aspect of your sales efforts. Consider responsiveness from the perspective of your prospects and customers. Like everyone else in this world, they are short on time. Every hour of the their time that they invest in evaluating products and services for purchase, is an hour that is taken away from more important activities that could increase top-line revenues or bottom-line profits. If you can use responsiveness to reduce the amount of time the prospect requires to move through their buying process, then that will accrue to their benefit - and yours. Unfortunately, customers have become conditioned not to expect responsiveness from salespeople and the companies they work for. Salespeople and their managers often don’t recognize, how essential responsiveness is to their efforts to build trust and credibility with prospects. Most
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importantly, they fail to understand how responsiveness, at all stages of the customer’s buying process, creates the foundation for true seller differentiation, which leads to a tangible and sustainable competitive advantage. Chances are good that you compete in a market where it is extremely expensive to create and maintain any meaningful product differentiation. Innovative products and services are quickly copied and commoditized in a rush to market by a myriad of competitors. As a result, the product(s) that you sell, as well as those your direct competitors sell, are often perceived to be largely the same in the eyes of your customers. In this environment, how then do you stand out? How can you reliably distinguish yourself from everybody else? The answer is responsiveness. What does responsiveness mean? Responsiveness has a specific definition in sales. It’s the combination of two inseparable elements: value and speed. Take away one of those two elements and you’re no longer responsive.
Value and speed. Take away one of those two elements and you’re no longer responsive The easiest way to remember the formulation for complete responsiveness is to see it as an equation: Responsiveness = Value + Speed. Value is any information (in the form of questions, data, insights, research, context, case studies and so on) that you, as a seller can provide, that enables your buyer to move at least one step closer to making a decision. Speed, obviously, is the time it takes to provide the requested information to a customer.
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Being first to respond is not the same as being responsive. For instance, if you’re fast to respond to a prospects’ inquiry but don’t provide any data or information of value that the prospect can use to move forward in their buying process, then you’re not being responsive. Being fast is good for gold medals, but in the absence of value, speed is not a virtue in sales. It’s all too common for salespeople to feel good about themselves, when they receive a question from a customer in an e-mail and provide a response the next business day. But what if your primary competitor satisfactorily answers that same question within 30 minutes? What has happened to your competitive position? Has it (a) worsened, (b) improved, or (c) stayed the same? The only realistic answer is (a) - worsened.
How can you instill a culture of absolute responsiveness, which ensures a positive perception of you and your company? You have to take deliberate and concrete steps, like those outlined below, to define your own standard and process of responsiveness and create metrics, which enable you to measure your performance and improve your process.
Step 1. Make Responsiveness A Priority - Starting At The Top
So flip that last question on its head. What will happen to your sales results when you commit to being absolutely and completely responsive, to every customer inquiry and request? What will happen to your competitive posture on every deal you work on, when your competitors have to struggle to keep pace with your responsiveness? The mistake sellers make is in assuming that customers don’t place a value on responsiveness. They do. Witness the message from Ms. Rometty to her 430,000 employees. She hadn’t unilaterally decided out of a misplaced sense of sales altruism, to fix a problem that didn’t exist. To the contrary, she was responding to concerns expressed by their customers. And it was these customers who were clearly stating that it wasn’t up to IBM to dictate how fast they could do business - If IBM couldn’t keep up, tough luck. In sales, responsiveness becomes one of the primary tools you can use to demonstrate to your customer, that the experience of working with you and your company is different from
the others. And in the process, develop a level of credibility and trust that will result in winning orders. If you value responsiveness then it will quickly become apparent to your prospect through your actions. And it will set you apart from your competitors.
There are no good reasons for not prioritizing responsiveness - just bad excuses. Every individual, from top level management to each salesperson, is in complete control of their own ability to be responsive. It doesn’t take any prep work. It doesn’t require support from anyone else - just a personal commitment to do it. Managers need to establish expectations for responsiveness. Like IBM, specific standards for responsiveness need to be created and everyone who engages with customers - as well as employees who support those who do - have to be trained on how to be responsive. Lastly, here is a key point to remember: responsiveness requires a personal response. Don’t fool yourself into believing that an auto-generated email to a customer request is responsive. It isn’t (because it only contains one of the two required elements of responsiveness). Create sustainable sales-based differentiation by incorporating personal responsiveness into every step of your selling process.
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Step 2. Define Responsiveness Metrics For All Customer-Facing Sales Processes If you aren’t measuring it, your responsiveness is not measuring up. You need to define responsiveness metrics for all customer facing sales activities. How long should it take to follow up a sales lead? How long should it take to respond to a customer email? How long should it take to provide a quote to a prospect?
You need to define responsiveness metrics for all customer facing sales activities Before you can define a metric you need to understand your sales processes. Use a flow-charting or mind-mapping application to document all of your existing sales processes. Be sure to include all of the steps that are required to make them happen. For instance, what is your sales lead follow up process? From the time you receive a lead, to the time it is in the hands of a sales rep who will make a follow up call, how many hands does it pass through and how long does it take at each step along the way? Once you’ve mapped out your processes, then you can establish metrics for how long they should take. You can capture tracking data in your CRM system and use that to review individual performance against your metrics (and you should do so daily). Lastly, it is a requirement that you share your metrics, and your performance against them, with your management and employees (and customers as well). You need that additional accountability that comes from sharing and publicly committing to a specific standard of performance.
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Step 3. Sell With The Sharp End Of The Stick This is a term from my first book, Zero-Time Selling. Selling with the sharp end of the stick means placing your people with the deepest product knowledge and customer expertise, closest to the prospect. Your front line salespeople need to be able to be completely responsive to their buyers. When your front line salespeople can quickly deliver the value the prospect requires to move quicker through their buying process, your absolute responsiveness skyrockets and you’ll win a higher percentage of the sales opportunities in your pipeline.
Your front line salespeople need to be able to be completely responsive to their buyers Think about it this way. Has a customer ever called you to complain that the salesperson you assigned to their account was not “salesy” enough? “We like John well enough, but he’s just not salesy enough.” No, that’s never happened. However, in my career, I’ve received calls from prospects who’ve complained that the salesperson on their account didn’t know enough about the solution they were selling and could I please send over someone else, if I was still interested in winning their business.
Step 4. Exceed Customer Expectations Think about it this way. If you were a customer of your own company, what would your expectations be for the sales experience? That is the minimum standard of responsiveness that you should deliver. You should attempt to exceed that expectation with every sales interaction with a customer.
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In my business I try to respond to every lead or question I receive within thirty minutes of receiving it. I am still surprised every time I rapidly respond to a customer inquiry and the person I’m talking with says that they are shocked that I called them back at all, let alone so quickly. Here is a helpful tip: When you follow-up with a customer, always begin by apologizing for taking so long to respond - even if you’ve responded within five
minutes. It makes the point. And raises the bar for all your competitors. Responsiveness is a quick, easy and cost-effective way to create true sales differentiation, in the eyes of your prospects and existing customers. Instill a culture of responsiveness, to maximize the value you deliver to your prospects and you’ll see an immediate improvement in your sales performance.
Andy Paul Founder | Zero-Time Selling, Inc. Andy Paul is a leading sales acceleration expert, speaker, coach and author of the Amazon best-seller “Amp Up Your Sales: Powerful Strategies That Move Customers To Make Fast, Favorable Decisions”, (one of HubSpot’s 20 highest-rated sales books of all time); and, the award-winning “Zero-Time Selling: 10 Essential Steps to Accelerate Every Company’s Sales” - recognized by Top Sales World as one of the Top 3 Sales & Marketing books of 2011. He’s also ranked #7 on the Forbes Top 30 global experts on social selling. Founder of Zero-Time Selling, Inc., Andy works with CEOs and senior managers to develop strategies, structures and processes for rapid and sustainable sales growth.
www.andypaul.com
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Reach Is Much More Than An Impression Matt Gentile
Working in marketing over the last 20 years I have seen the meaning of an “impression” change a lot. Ad Age1 references an impression as “…a term used for online advertising metrics. It refers to an ad delivered onto a web page in a place that could be seen by the user… …The Media Ratings Council’s standard for a viewable display impression is a minimum of 50% of pixels in view for a minimum of one second.”
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The definition clearly outlines what most people in the marketing / media business consider an impression - and the success of most marketing campaigns are judged by the number of impressions, delivered either through paid or earned media efforts. However, I posit the true value of an impression must be based on the audiences’ reaction to the media, not simply whether or not it passed by them, on the constant stream of content flowing through their newsfeed. The non-media professional’s definition of the word impression is one that the vast majority of us think of when we hear it. im·pres·sion2 - noun an idea, feeling, or opinion about something or someone, especially one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence. I always like to say that content is not about filling the channel; it is about filling the void. As the global director of social media for CENTURY 21®, I have the privilege of managing multiple social networks for one of the largest real estate brands. The one thing I learned early on, was that the most important aspect influencing any campaign’s success, is the impact its content has on the audience. In 2008, when I begin my role with the brand, the type of content that I was disseminating via Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin was mostly real estate industry news and information. As a public relations professional, hard news was always the most attractive content to share with an audience who followed that industry. One day I posted about the Kardashians moving into or out of a new home somewhere near Los Angeles. The result was an increase in engagement and
Content is not about filling the channel; it is about filling the void 16
share-ability by approximately 400% over the average post volume. It was an epiphany that has influenced my content strategy decisions ever since.
Social Media Is About Them, Not You... In providing best practices for how to leverage social media for business to our affiliated real estate professionals, we focus on three core areas; building up followers or social sphere, fostering those relationships via a consistent content strategy that provides value, and follow up, follow up, follow up. It is called the BFF (Business Friends Forever) strategy and it is designed to help our system members make new BFFs every day. It all starts with building up a following. There is a strong impulse to want to have more followers than your competition. It is human nature to want to be the best, and the higher number of followers you have is an easy benchmark for businesses to hang their hat on. A lot has been written dismissing this goal. While the evidence that more followers equals more business is scant, perception is often times reality and when a Facebook page or Twitter account looks like a ghost town, it definitely leaves a negative impression. More importantly, especially in a sales environment, more contacts improve your chances of generating more business opportunities.
When a Facebook page or Twitter account looks like a ghost town, it definitely leaves a negative impression There are only so many ways to achieve rapid increases in followers. Advertising is the most powerful and efficient method to increase followers. A small amount
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of Facebook advertising goes a long way and with Twitter and other networks now becoming more affordable for the masses, the trend toward increased digital (social / mobile) advertising3 will continue to grow. As noted by Pew Research:
online conversation with their social sphere. Combined with locally relevant content about the community, real estate, and personal hobbies, our affiliated real estate professionals have a game plan for long-term success via social selling.
In 2014, $50.7 billion was spent on digital ads, including mobile, up 18% from $43.1 billion in 2013. That is on par with the 17% increase a year earlier. Digital advertising has also grown as a percentage of total media advertising across all platforms: 28% in 2014, up from 25% in 2013. The next tactic that may boost a business’ social sphere is a consistent content distribution strategy. It is becoming more common for brands to employ inbound marketing strategies. According to Hubspot4, “The number of marketers who state they are practicing inbound rose to 85% this year from 60% last year.” However, just because you are posting regularly, does not mean that more consumers will find your page - or want to keep coming back for that matter. To keep customers coming back, you must offer something that they cannot get anywhere else. You must make them feel something. The best marketing inspires emotion in its target. Whether it is happy or sad, it connects with you on a deeper, subconscious level and drives a reaction. The fostering relationships part of our BFF strategy is designed to provide a consistent drumbeat of digital content, which creates an emotional response from its audience and enables an opportunity to drive the
You must make them feel something. The best marketing inspires emotion in its target
Recently, the brand released two video series that provide excellent examples of content that connects with consumers on an emotional level. The #EmptyNesters campaign was released right in the heart of graduation season. The three-part digital ad campaign takes a light-hearted look at how parents are coping with their little ones “leaving the nest,” literally, in the ads. The ads appeal to anyone who has collegeage children and who may be considering downsizing or investing in a second home. The next, #WorldsWorstGarageBand was released just in time for the summer concert season. Four of the world’s worst garage bands were featured in this short video series that showcases their special talents. Each of the videos ends with a simple message, “If You Live Within Earshot, We’ll Help You Move Immediately.” While not everyone lives next to a garage band, the emotional impact these videos have on anyone who watched and listened to them is obvious, painful, seems to be the most apt description. Besides the emotional appeal of these campaigns’ messaging, the brand paid particular attention to how the videos were distributed. To drive engagement and share-ability, Century 21 released the videos as it normally does via Facebook, Google+, Linkedin Groups, and YouTube. However, to ensure it optimized the campaign’s reach, the brand released the videos natively on Facebook and also cut the videos down to 15 seconds to enable distribution via Instagram. “Facebook and Instagram are the top social apps among U.S. mobile users5”
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Using micro-video to create timely content that increases media engagement, reaches mobile consumers, and includes a strong call to action has proved to be an effective digital marketing strategy. Empowering Century 21 affiliated real estate professionals with short, fun, sharable content through the C21® Social for Business platform has enhanced our brand value proposition. While increasing reach by posting video natively via Facebook and optimizing for mobile are tactics that drive impressions and reach, in the opinion of this author, the success of future digital campaigns will be judged based on social insights. Today, we may evaluate the true value of a campaign based on data that just was not available five years ago.
No surprise, none of the aforementioned reasons people share content was about the brand or company who shared it. They were almost exclusively about the audience and a personal benefit accrued by sharing the content. Today’s online consumer doesn’t have time to engage deeply with the constant stream of content that passes in front of their eyes on countless digital streams. The content must have an emotional hook, be visually impactful, and answer the question WIFM (What’s In It For Me?) within three seconds. In fact, it has been reported that just one-half of one percent of those who see a Facebook post share it7. These statistics support the premise that share-ability is a key metric for the success of digital campaigns.
Share-Ability Is More Important Than Media Impressions The emotional value of a brand’s content - its ability to connect - is the new digital currency. In Mark Schaefer’s book, “The Content Code6,” he references six key reasons why people chose to share content. •• It made you look cooler, smarter. Funnier, or more relevant – providing you with personal psychological benefit. •• The content struck some strong emotional chord. It made you laugh, cry, or otherwise feel something so profound it deserved to be shared with others. •• It’s practical or timely. Sharing the content will help and inform your friends. •• You found a new idea and can’t wait to be the first to share it. •• You feel deeply connected to the author and you want to support them. •• It represents an achievement. Maybe you or your company was mentioned in the content and it makes you feel good to show this representation of your status. 18
Just one-half of one percent of those who see a Facebook post share it
How Do You Optimize For Share-Ability? As noted earlier, optimize video for today’s leading social apps and networks. To be more precise, optimize for mobile and produce more short “micro-video” segments. One of the things that the brand has done to drive shares among its followers is to cut down on the size of its videos. Five years ago 1-2 minute corporate videos were considered the norm. Whether these were classic “how to” videos or internal events, 1-2 minutes seemed like a reasonable expectation from followers of the brand; however, the advent of short-form video features on Instagram and new social video sharing networks like Vine have laid-waste to that notion.
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To counter this movement toward ever decreasing attention spans, the brand has produced a series of micro-videos, which are 6 seconds. Obviously this form of video marketing requires a supremely creative mind to develop sharable content in such a limited time frame. It is the opinion of this author that short form video, 15-seconds or less, will continue to be in high-demand by brands seeking to reach and connect with the Millennial generation. Among the top 15 apps for millennials (as determined by monthly unique visitors), Facebook also operates the fastest-growing one: Facebook Messenger. Facebook’s messaging app had over 30 million unique millennial visitors in October, up 145 percent compared to October 2013. That gives it the fourth-largest millennial user base, behind YouTube (43 million) and Pandora Radio (36 million)8. It is important to recognize that just because you have identified the networks where the majority of your target audience is spending time doesn’t mean that you or your content will connect with them. When I posted about the Kardashians, the content engagement increased over 400%, but all that did was tell me that if I wanted to reach the 25-34 yearold female audience via social, then I better identify someone in that peer group who was culturally relevant to this demographic or post content that was relevant to them.
Whatever path you choose, it is imperative to be honest and transparent in your efforts. Today’s consumer values the genuine article. Remember, it is impossible to be all things to all people, so take the time to understand who your core demographic audience is for your content and maintain focus on building that following, fostering those relationships and following up. It is not about you or your company. It is about the connection. Reach is more than an impression and the company / brand / sales professional with the most BFFs wins!
References: 1. http://adage.com/article/glossary-data-defined/definingviewable-impression/293935/ 2. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/ american_english/impression 3. http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/digital-newsrevenue-fact-sheet/ 4. http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/inbound-marketingstats-charts 5. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/05/13/ facebook-instagram-top-apps-among-us-mobileusers/27245011/ 6. Mark W. Schaefer, The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business, Schaefer Marketing Solutions, 2015 7. Facebook research cited in Marketo report, “Contagious Content: http://www.marketo.com/ebooks/contagiouscontent-what-people-share-on-facebook-and-why-theyshare-it/ 8. http://digiday.com/brands/2014-year-millennial-mediaconsumption/
Matt Gentile Global Director, Social Media | Century 21 Real Estate LLC Matt Gentile is an award-winning marketing executive with extensive experience in developing national and international campaigns. He leads social media marketing initiatives on behalf of the CENTURY 21® brand. He directed the contracting process with Hootsuite Enterprise and developed the customized C21® Social for Business platform. In conjunction with agency partners, he developed and leads the brand’s Digital DrumbeatSM content strategy. Matt speaks frequently at national and international conferences and beyond marketing, he is involved in several charities including Habitat for Humanity and Easter Seals. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he is also a die-hard Steelers fan.
www.century21.com
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The Marketing Bubble Is About To Pop, Agile Can Soften The Landing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
Marketers now know more than just consumer age, education level, and geographic area. Marketers know what people like, what they looked at online, what they ordered, what they returned, what they sent as a gift, what they Tweeted, posted, linked to, ‘liked’ and all that unbelievable amount of Web and mobile detail. 20
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But beyond digital data, marketers also have to consider CRM data, retail sales data, overall economic data, employee performance data, stock performance data, the data that tells you how well you’re collecting data, and how much of it is worthwhile. While the technology and systems have evolved over the past several years, the ‘old school’ mentality of how we work hasn’t. Marketers have three choices: Ignore the data and perish. Consider only some of it and get lucky. Embrace it all (and probably realize it’s not going to hurt you) and thrive.
Military Style Traditional top down marketing processes work well for day-to-day operations. What they are very poor at doing, however, is identifying threats and opportunities early enough to act on strategic initiatives. They tend to cling to habits, fear loss of power and stature, crave stability and default to what they know best: the hierarchy.
This common dilemma begs the question: How can your company capitalize on today’s rapid-fire strategic challenges while still meeting short-term and long-term financial numbers? I believe the answer is to use agile practices, which involve many small, measured, exploratory steps - not one large, expensive, chiseled-in-stone strategy. In other words, agile is the anti-Mad Men approach.
Agile is the anti-Mad Men approach Agile provides the opportunity to explore unknown ideas within a stable process, that provides innovation with reliable levels of efficiency and I’m bringing those practices to Mozilla.
Top Down + Bottom Up The solution to top-down hierarchical, self-referential, cycles is to develop a complementary agile management practice alongside it - or, as Dr. John Kotter calls it, two systems operating in concert: 1. A Structural System
We Don’t Have Time For That! Let’s be honest. Whether it’s due to real or cultural constraints, most businesses feel they don’t have the time or the money to experiment - and probably never will. But without experimentation, status quo businesses eventually lose out to disruptive businesses. Mozilla has pioneered experiments with many of the technologies that are now standard on the Web, but we too continually face these constraints.
Run by the traditional hierarchy, managing daily demands, doing the things that are necessary to keep the lights on. 2. An Exploratory System Run as a connection of networks, agile in its experimentation, continually questioning the business, the industry, and the organization. These two are complementary opposites.
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Marketing Teams Need To Operate Like A Brain, Not A Machine In one of my favorite business books Switch, Chip and Dan Heath discuss the ‘elephant and rider’ problem that’s highly relevant here. In their analogy, the rider is the rational mind. The rider decides where he wants to go and presents a logical, reasonable idea about how and why to get there. But the elephant is emotional and doesn’t respond to well-reasoned arguments. The elephant wants an emotional reason to charge, but the rational rider can’t seem to give him one. The rider treats the elephant like a machine, and the elephant isn’t a machine. So what happens? The rider gets frustrated, the elephant doesn’t move - and nothing gets done. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
8 Steps For Establishing An Agile Complement To Marketing’s Hierarchy
3. Have a vision through the development of initiatives, questions to find answers to, tests to try Whatever the opportunity, develop an idea of what your explorations might turn up. Even if they are wrong, they should serve to motivate the natural urge to know. 4. Communicate the vision for buy-in from the rest of the agile group and the company as a whole State your hypotheses clearly. They don’t have to be spot on, but they do have to be interesting. Give everyone an idea of why you chose some initiative to explore and choose a good writer who can express it in plain, simple language. 5. Empower broad-based action
Kotter lists the eight necessary elements required for traditional business to begin to develop an exploratory culture. In marketing, these same elements are required to move toward agility. 1. Urgency is critical The business opportunity or threat must be urgent enough to prompt action. Remember the elephant. He runs on emotion. Find a threat he can get into. 2. Establish a guiding coalition Those who want to be part of the new agile network, must come from various departments and have broad levels of responsibility and authority within the hierarchy. And, members of the coalition should be volunteers. As this article is being published our team will be
experimenting with agile systems and our approach has been to develop an agile council of volunteers to start the process.
The power of the hierarchy is also its biggest weakness. All the decision making is relegated to the top. In the agile network, ideas and expertise can come from anyone. Although there is a guiding coalition, the object is to remove barriers. 6. Celebrate small, visible, short-term wins Your agile network won’t last long unless you show value fairly quickly. Do something small. Pick an attainable initiative. Do it well. Practice the agile process. That will build momentum. 7. Don’t let up Agile is about learning from mistakes and readjusting. Keep pushing forward, because when you take your foot off the gas, that’s when cultural and political resistance will arise.
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3. This agile group must function with people who work within the hierarchy, but must be flexible and agile
Agile is about learning from mistakes and readjusting. Keep pushing forward
The network is like a solar system with a guiding coalition at the center and initiatives and sub-initiatives that come together and disband as needed. The network cannot be viewed as a “rogue operation” or the hierarchy will inevitably crush it.
8. Incorporate the changes and the lessons learned into the culture of the business as a whole This is how the agile network can inform the hierarchy. When you find better ways to do something or new opportunities to pursue, work them into the “other” side.
The network cannot be viewed as a “rogue operation” or the hierarchy will inevitably crush it
The Rule Of Threes Kotter also gives three guiding principles to keep in mind. And threes work well in marketing. 1. The eight steps are non-sequential These steps are a model - not an orderly progression. Don’t lose steam worrying too much about order. 2. The agile network must be made up of a volunteer army About 10% of the workforce will suffice, as long as the people in the network want to be there. Don’t be exclusive or closed to participation, but also don’t try to recruit people who are 100% structurally minded, because they won’t see the value of being there.
Speed Is Not The Enemy Of Quality This entire exercise takes a certain level of comfort and trust developed over time. But every modern marketing organization must carry out this exercise soon or find an alternative. That big bubble of data gathered from every direction will paralyze decision making if we don’t learn how to use it promptly to set the pace of the market and not just react to it.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff Chief Marketing Officer | Mozilla As Chief Marketing Officer, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff leads Mozilla’s global marketing strategy and organization. Jascha believes in finding opportunities where no one else is looking and never failing the same way twice. It’s a methodology centered around Agile marketing practices and marketing technology. Prior to Mozilla, Jascha served as CMO for BitTorrent, CMO for Mindjet, senior vice president of marketing and customer success at Involver and he previously headed Global Marketing for Webtrends. He also worked at Microsoft and Yahoo! Jascha is a passionate volunteer and mentor with TheLastMile.org. He published ‘Growing Up Fast’ with Kevin Fann in August 2014.
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THE FUTURE OF MARKETING IS AGILE Turn the technology explosion into your competitive advantage - with the help of the BrandMaker Marketing Efficiency Cloud.
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The Media Revolution Will Not Be Televised Jeff Barrett
I’m staring at the page thinking where to start with this article. I check Twitter. Oh good, they are making another Space Jam movie. Now I’m on YouTube watching videos and feeling nostalgic. I post a Space Jam clip to Facebook. I see that two celebrities have “Bad Blood” on Twitter. Well, of course I’m back on Twitter. One of them decided to “Shake It Off” and post something cute on Instagram? Tell me more. Wait! I feel like there was something I was supposed to do.
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Ten minutes later and I’m back to the page. My non-existent attention span should not be celebrated. However, it is more the norm than an anomaly. Not once did I leave social media. Not once did I turn on a television. Maybe it was playing in the background. I have no idea. I can’t remember. And that… is exactly the point. The media revolution is not being televised. The way we consume media has swiftly changed - no one can pinpoint the exact day it happened, but we all know it has.
The way we consume media has swiftly changed - no one can pinpoint the exact day it happened, but we all know it has We don’t get our news from one source, we get it from millions. We consume information, tailored to us, from people we trust all over the globe. These people, these influencers now carry as much value as major news outlets and celebrities. You don’t need Michael Jordan to sell trainers anymore. Find 20 great sneaker blogs in America and have them rave about your trainers. Have a couple of influential people on Vine and Instagram create unique content. Periscope a live event. Motivate 1,000 people to send a tweet per minute and you’re trending on Twitter. All of this can be done at a fraction of the cost. Sorry LeBron James. You’re great in Trainwreck. You have a bright career ahead.
We don’t get our news from one source, we get it from millions 28
Why People Share Content If you’re leveraging social media for brands, you need to understand why people share content and why they are interacting with certain kinds of content more. The channels don’t matter. Their motivation, the psychological motivator is everything. The “why” is infinitely more important than the ”how”.
The channels don’t matter. Their motivation, the psychological motivator is everything There has to be a motivation behind why someone shares content. Find it. People share content to show agreement, show intelligence, make a friend laugh, make something go viral, get a gagillion retweets and more. Your content needs to allow someone to do one of these things with it. To be honest, there are no accidents in how content goes viral, just like there are no accidents in how Sherlock Holmes solves a case. This is perhaps my most overused statement, but it never loses relevance. Plus I added a Sherlock reference for good measure. I’m anxiously awaiting Season 4.
There are no accidents in how content goes viral Understand why your audience shares content, who they find influential, where they get their news and you’ll win every time. And… with simple analytics it’s now possible to determine all of that with a couple keystrokes. And… with that you can create a campaign driven by the absolutely perfect social influencers, on the right channels.
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It’s the difference between seeing something on a billboard once or having a friend tell you to go buy something because it’s amazing, they have it and they love it. Even if something doesn’t make complete sense at first glance, there is a reason. We live in a world where 20-somethings get paid millions to play video games and comment on them while subscribers watch. If you grew up playing Pac-Man, or even Golden Eye and Mario Kart, this is hard to explain. But I’ll try and do my best.
We live in a world where 20-somethings get paid millions to play video games Why would someone want to watch someone play a video game? Video games are hard. They can be frustrating. It has never been difficult for younger millennials to find content. That’s not a bad thing, simply a cultural difference. They are native to social media and have access to more information than they will ever need.
would rather watch someone in Sweden play Call of Duty. It’s like watching the Director’s Cut of a movie with the commentary. You don’t need to learn what Kappa means. All you need to know is why it’s important to these potential consumers. Technology changes how we interact with content. That change never happens immediately but when we look back it’s amazing to notice how much change has actually occurred. If you want to reach a consumer in 2015, create peer-to-peer recommendations between social media influencers and their followings. The value is there. The trust is there. In February, General Sentiment valued my Twitter account at $809,000 against a standard $5 CPM. Humble brag but no one would ever pay me $800,000 for my tweets about Drake and kittens. Still, there is an influence there and I’m just one example of many. As a media buy, I’m a bargain. So is every other person with a large audience. Find us. Say hello.
When I was a kid, if I wanted to know the score of a football game, I had to wait for an update on the local news or read about it the next day. Now there’s an app for that. They can get that info in five seconds. With that, I understand why a kid In Omaha, Nebraska
Create peer-to-peer recommendations between social media influencers and their followings
Jeff Barrett Director of Strategy | Hello World Jeff Barrett is Director of Strategy for HelloWorld Inc., delivering marketing solutions for the world’s best brands. Among his many accolades he is Business Insider’s #1 Ad Executive on Twitter, a Forbes Top 50 Social Media Influencer, PRNewswire Earnie Award winner for Best Use of Video In Social Media and a 2015 Shorty Award winner. With his brand of humor and insight in demand, Jeff has written The Washington Times, Technorati, Mashable, The Detroit Free Press and more. He also owns multiple cats.
www.helloworld.com
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Search And Social: Mobile Integration Cynthia Johnson
Over the past couple of years, we have seen the merger of social media and search engine optimization unfold. How will social media impact SEO? Is SEO dead? The answers to these questions have been debated, tested and changed many times and by many different people. So, whom should we believe? We should believe the data and only the data, and in order to have a data set that can give us correct answers, we must keep testing. There are a few facts to keep in mind as we begin to collect and measure data that can assess impact. We must ask ourselves, “who’s in bed with who?” Forgive me for the analogy, but I feel that is in the only way to truly convey this message. Here are some examples based on facts: •• Google is working with Twitter and has started to index tweets. This article from Search Engine Land will give you a fantastic explanation on “Everything You Need to Know About the Google-Twitter Partnership.”
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•• Facebook owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR. Microsoft owns Xbox and Windows. Xbox has recently partnered with Oculus VR and the first-generation of Rift will require Windows 7sp1 or higher, this completely excludes Apple users. •• Google is currently the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser. •• Facebook released its own search function and dropped Bing search results. Then Microsoft transfers display ads business to Verizon-owned AOL. In return, AOL ends its search relationship with Google. According to an article in adexchanger, “The deal gives AOL responsibility for both hand-sold and programmatic ads in nine of Microsoft’s largest markets, and across its entire media portfolio including display, mobile and video ads on MSN, Windows, Outlook. com, Skype and Xbox.” •• Yahoo (which owns Flickr and Tumblr) recently renegotiated a deal with Bing. Bing will serve 51% of Yahoo’s search results and the remaining 49% are left for Yahoo to do with as they please. Why does all of this matter? When dealing with mobile search, advertising and purchasing this all matters. Time spent on mobile digital media is now greater than desktop and other media use. Mobile media holds 51% of digital media time in the United States and continues to grow. The really important fact about mobile media consumption, however, is that 89% of time spent on mobile media is spent on applications, not search. That is why these major partnerships are beginning to emerge. Search needs to partner with social applications, because that is where the majority of people spend their time. Not to
89% of time spent on mobile media is spent on applications, not search 32
mention that the emerging markets are Smart TV’s and Game Consoles (remember the Xbox-Oculus partnership from earlier?). The latest battle between companies is between Pinterest, Google, and Facebook. All three companies are trying to deploy the “Buy” button function to their applications to capitalize on the emerging mobile e-commerce markets (which now represents 50.3% of all e-commerce traffic). Pinterest is adding “Buy” buttons to pins, Facebook is adding them to Instagram and Facebook posts, and Google is adding them to search results and YouTube ads (Google owns YouTube). We have also seen that Twitter now allows users to purchase via their platform as well. Now let’s take this all back to SEO and social media. Search engines are partnering with social media platforms to integrate, share and use each other’s data. As we use mobile more and leave our mobile applications open, we are helping to better inform search engines and ad platforms on what we are influenced by. The better they can judge influence, the better they can judge authority, and in SEO authority is what matters most.
In SEO authority is what matters most
On the other side of the coin, we should start thinking about search algorithms within social media platforms. What are they? How do they work? Is there or will there be a benefit as we move into a mobile app dominated world? I think so. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter have all recently released new search functions within their applications and platforms. Google is now indexing tweets and we have seen social media posts appear in search results for a couple of years now.
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To sum it all up as much as possible, does social media impact your websites authority? Local pages on Google+ and Facebook can have a negative impact on local search if your location is incorrect, or contact information inaccurate. Pinterest only allows one website to be verified to one Pinterest page, which automatically adds validation and can add authority. Google is currently only indexing tweets based on authority and influence. Lastly, if you spam your YouTube page you risk your Google+ business page being removed as well, which impacts local search.
Google is currently only indexing tweets based on authority and influence
So yes, I believe based on the facts that social media impacts SEO and that as we become more mobile, the trend will only increase. Oh, and SEO is NOT dead. What are your thoughts?
Cynthia Johnson Director of Social Media Marketing | RankLab Cynthia Johnson is Managing Partner & Director of Marketing for RankLab. She is the Editorial Director and a member on the Global Board of Directors for Social Media Club. Cynthia is a contributing columnist at Entrepreneur, Search Engine Journal, Startup Grind and SheKnows, as well as public speaker. She has experience in both corporate companies as well as small tech startups. She has been involved on social media and viral campaigns for Levi’s, Vans, Chevy, Susan G. Komen, Peta2 and Maker Studios. She has also consulted on campaigns for Here Media, West Management Group and several other startup ecommerce brands.
www.cynthialive.com
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The Anatomy Of A Great Content Marketer Ann Handley
What’s the profile of a modern, best-in-class content marketer? By modern I mean someone who is using new tools and resources (social media, video, and data) in concert with traditional marketing programs. And by best-in-class I mean someone who is driving real results. So what does that look like? What might great content marketers know that you don’t? And more importantly: What can you steal from them in order to replicate their successes at your own company? MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute wanted to find out. So in our fifth annual study, “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends - North America”, we looked at more than 5,000 marketers in 109 countries. Here are some key points that emerged. 34
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1. Great Content Marketers Have A Documented Strategy And Follow It Closely Just 35 percent of content marketers actually have a documented strategy (48 percent say they have one, but it’s not documented), according to our research. Sixty percent of those who have a documented strategy rate themselves as being effective content marketers, vs just 7 percent of those who have no strategy, written or otherwise. Idea you can steal: Define a content marketing strategy for yourself, record it and refer back to it frequently. Don’t leave it on a metaphorical shelf gathering dust. Start by answering some basic questions about your company and your audience: Who do you want to reach? What value can you provide? How are you going to deliver that information? Who is going to manage the process? How will you measure success and refine your efforts?
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2. Great Marketers Have A Dedicated Content Team Fewer than half of marketers have a dedicated content marketing group. But 69 percent of those who are most effective at content are likely to have a structured group. These structures may vary - some companies have a content marketing team that functions independently; in other cases, marketing team members are assigned responsibility for content functions horizontally across a company’s departments. Idea you can steal: Empower a dedicated team (or, in the case of smaller companies, a key person) that’s responsible and accountable for the success of your content marketing program.
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Just 35 percent of content marketers actually have a documented strategy
3. Great Marketers Use An Array Of Tactics And Social Media Platforms
4. Great Content Marketers Publish Regularly
The best modern marketers don’t rely on just one or two approaches to reach and engage their audiences. In fact, the most effective marketers use an average of 14 tactics and seven social media platforms. Tactics for B2B marketers include in-person events, webinars or webcasts, videos, blogs, case studies, white papers or e-books, research reports, e-newsletters and microsites. The most effective social channels for B2B marketers are (in descending order) LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and SlideShare.
The most effective content marketers publish new content daily, or at least several times per week. They set expectations with their audience, and they fulfill them. They show up on a predictable schedule, in other words. Idea you can steal: Create an editorial calendar with at least three months (or, ideally, six months) mapped out. Having a plan for what you are going to publish and when you are going to publish it, makes it far more likely you’ll actually do so.
Idea you can steal: Create a broad variety of content—and don’t rely just on those tried-and-true blog posts or case studies. Have a varied social media engagement/distribution plan so that you cast a wider net online.
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All statistical graphics sourced from “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends - North America” Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs.
5. Great Content Marketers Spend More On Content
Idea you can steal:
processes, and to improve and refine what they are already doing. The most successful ones work on more than a dozen initiatives at any one time - including creating better quality content, improving conversion rates and overall content effectiveness, creating more visual content, reimagining or repurposing content, measuring ROI and becoming better storytellers.
I suppose it’s an easy directive for me to give: Find more money! At the very least, consider allocating some percentage of your 2015-16 budget to a pilot content program (if you don’t already have one).
The good news is that the least effective content marketers are ambitious: They plan to work on more initiatives in 2015 than their already-competent peers - an average of nine vs six.
This is a big duh: More budget equals more effective marketing. The most effective marketers allocate, on average, 37 percent of their marketing budgets to content programs.
Idea you can steal:
6. Great Content Marketers Iterate And Experiment The more effective content marketers are always scheming to uncover new ideas and
Choose a few things to improve his year, in marketing (and, I suppose, in life). Small changes can yield big results.
Ann Handley Chief Content Officer | MarketingProfs Ann Handley is an author, speaker, and the world’s first Chief Content Officer. Her latest book, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content, is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Her company, MarketingProfs, trains businesses on how to be better marketers. Sign up to hear more from Ann at her website.
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Nominate Your Top Marketing Thought Leaders Over 50 Celebrating And Learning From Experience - Nominations Are Now Open For Brand Quarterly’s 2015 ’50 Marketing Leaders Over 50’ List!
Nominations Close 15th September 2015 Do You Know Someone Who Fits The Bill? Help give them the recognition they deserve:
www.BrandQuarterly.com/nominate Nomination Criteria: ••
The nominee MUST be aged 50 years + as of 1st November 2015.
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You consider the nominee to be a Marketing Thought Leader due to their work / actions – be that as authors, academics, executives, business owners, etc.
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To be a Thought Leader, they must actively share their experience and knowledge with others.
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The nominee should be new media savvy, with a social media presence on a personal level (i.e: they have social media accounts in their own name, not just their company name).
2015
Is Your Brand Putting Its Best Face Forward? Andrew Vesey
Whilst how your brand is perceived is up to each individual person, how your brand is presented to those people is completely in your hands. In an age where brands are evermore losing control of their overall image, it’s critical to maintain a complete, effective and cohesive brand identity. It is one of the few constants left. … well, it should be a constant. But for so many companies today, a strong, consistent brand identity seems to be elusive. Why? Chalk it up to lack of oversight, inexperience, constant churn in the marketing department (with everyone having their own idea), starting with a minimal identity and adding to it over time, the list could go on for a while – but let’s not bore you with it. Let’s talk about more interesting stuff instead.
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A strong brand identity sets the tone - consistency amplifies the volume I was talking with a client the other day, when they told me that they really admired a certain company’s branding. The reason for this? It was because everyone in their industry knew a piece of content or marketing collateral was from that company – even before seeing a name or logo. That’s powerful stuff, and should be the goal for all brands. They have a brand image that works wonderfully with their target audience and it’s so consistent, that you could remove brand names and logos, and still receive a high level of recognition. Strength and consistency, consistency and strength – whichever way you prefer to look at it, this is where success is created. As an avid listener of rock music, I like to think of it like this: A strong brand identity sets the tone - consistency amplifies the volume (all the way to eleven, if done right). Take a good look at your own brand. Ask your customers (heck, go and ask your potential customers). If you removed your name and logo from all of your marketing collateral, would your brand still be recognisable? If your brand no longer had a face, could the rest of your identity still stand out as YOU?
If your brand no longer had a face, could the rest of your identity still stand out as YOU? The colours you use, the fonts you use, the shapes, the types of images, the tone of voice, the spatial design, the volume of content, print finishes, app and web user interfaces – they’re all important pieces of the puzzle. 42
Now, this isn’t to say your logo itself isn’t very important. After all, it is the core visual representation of your brand, and strength and consistency are just as important here. You of course want it to be strong enough to stand on it’s own, so working to ensure it clearly represents you in a consistent fashion, across all media and uses, is vitally important. Doing this with your logo, in conjunction with your overall identity, unlocks a wonderful bonus that will be surprising to many – Flexibility. Say what? Didn’t you just tell us that consistency is key – vital even – to branding success?? Why, yes I did. Let me explain. A lot of variations won’t build a strong brand, but a strong brand allows you to use variations – in the right way. One of the most well known examples of this has to be Google. You know what I’m talking about – all those super funky doodle logos that have become somewhat pop culture icons. Let’s be honest, you can’t even read the name Google in half of them. Yet, through consistency and strength in colour choices, design element ordering and spatial structuring, your mind tells you it’s Google. “You know it’s Google because you typed it into the browser silly.” That just strengthens my point – They only go crazy on variations in the one specific place. It’s actually part of their brand image now. Everywhere else you look, you’ll find the clean, clear and consistent Google branding. So consistent that they can change their logo daily, on some of the most visited web pages in the world, and not weaken their brand through doing it. OK, say you’re not trying to be like Google. How does this help you? This will vary from brand to brand, but here’s the basic concept to get you started. Consistency and strength allow for greater recognition and flexibility in an extended brand family.
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Consistency and strength allow for greater recognition and flexibility in an extended brand family If you have your niche and are looking for added competitiveness, use consistency and strength to bolster your clout. Be the first brand in the room people recognise, be the one they remember easiest, put up a united front and a ‘one-voice’ brand image. Do you have multiple offerings or sectors you are trying to fit under one brand? A strong and consistent logo, together with consistently delivered variations can give you the perfect blend of one brand – many parts. Take real estate as a simple example: with a solid brand, you can easily and effectively, change either your base or main complimentary colour (depending on your overall design) to highlight different market sectors. Red for residential, green for rural, yellow for beach/holiday homes, blue for commercial, silver for luxury, you get the idea. Or, to take things in the complete opposite direction. Let’s imagine you have a brand new widget that needs its own product branding. Great. But you still want it to be part of your overall brand family. A solid overall identity (and your new widget logo designed with your current brand in mind) can give you the recognition level required to quite literally just switch from your main to your widget logo and run with it. People will easily make the connection, and your parent brand’s
reputation and emotional connection will be passed on to your new widget. Another important variation option available to you is that of localisation. While in Dubai a couple of years ago, I found it interesting which brands I still instantly recognised. Walking through a crowded Dubai mall, into the food court, certain familiar brands just jumped out. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Subway, Coke, Pepsi, all brands we’re used to seeing – the thing is, most of it was in Arabic (even the brand names), but they still stood out. The shapes, the colours, store designs, brand graphical elements – all these things have been so consistently been presented, that I can walk off a plane in a land where everything is different than I’m used to, and these things still offer instant recognition. So yes. I did say consistency is key to success. And it becomes even more critical if you utilise business and / or marketing strategies that require flexibility and variation. Varying your brand identity is a useful tool - if it’s consistent and each variant a clear part of the family. Whether you aspire to have your own logo doodle collection; are looking to be globally recognizable yet locally relevant like McDonald’s and Coke; or are trying to carve out your home as the leader in your market niche; taking the time to ensure the strength of your brand identity and focusing on a super consistent delivery will put you on the path to success.
Andrew Vesey Chief BrandMan, Founder | Vesey Creative & Brand Quarterly Andrew is an experienced brand and marketing professional with over 15 years in the industry - a majority of those have been as the Chief BrandMan at Vesey Creative, which he co-founded in 2003. In 2011, driven by his passion for branding, business and education, Andrew made the move into publishing by launching Brand Quarterly - this very magazine and in 2014 Brand Quarterly Online. When not writing or developing partnerships and new initiatives for Brand Quarterly, Andrew works with a select number of clients - spanning the globe, from New Zealand through to the United Kingdom and the United States - developing, refreshing and implementing brands for both products and companies.
www.veseycreative.com
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More Popular Articles On BrandQuarterly.com The Human API John Watton The human application programming interface (API) – a marketer’s nirvana, enigma or simply too dangerous to even talk about? Wouldn’t you love to know what an individual is reading and reacting to online? The irony lies in putting our resources into developing marketing technology that is more human-like and perceptive, when we already have the technology to tap into...
Double Down On The Brand Experience To Win The Customer Lifecycle Gregory Butz Blame selfies, social media, fast food or any myriad of factors that have shaped our modern instant gratification lifestyles, but consumer expectations are higher now than ever. Life in the age of rapid customer feedback – from Yelp reviews, to trending topics, to shared recommendations – has led brands to recognize that, on a...
Ten Rebranding Do’s And Don’ts Rachel Klein Building and maintaining a strong brand requires constant monitoring and nurturing, and on occasion, the need to rebrand. Regardless of how successful a brand strategy may have been in the past, businesses are dynamic in nature, and brand messaging may lose its relevance over time, especially if the company has evolved into new markets or demographic...
Avoid Google SEO Update Hell With A Solid Digital Strategy Eric Ingrand Are you hitting the panic button with every new Google update? Failing to prepare is preparing to fail; find out how to take back control with a solid digital strategy as your new mantra.
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Viewability Vs Engagement: Advertising’s New Measure Of Accountability Stephen Molloy Viewability has always been a standard of the advertising world. In this digital era, Engagement must become our new measure of success. Moving past who ‘sees’ and focusing on who actually interacts with your brand.
Embracing The DIY Economy: How To Win Big By Thinking Small Jeff Shore Today’s businesses will find fierce competition from hobby rooms in suburban dwellings across the globe. The competitive advantage in the future will go not to companies that provide the best products, but to those that provide the best experiences.
Mobile Consumers Who Opt Out: They’re Just Not That Into You Ramsey Masri Effective mobile marketing strategies should focus primarily on the 15%-20% of consumers who have already opted in to receive mobile communications. It’s a far more successful, profitable approach than throttling mobile communications out of concerns over consumers who might opt out.
Do The New gTLD’s Pose A Danger To Established Brand Reputation? Michelle Ward Over the past few months we have seen the gradual launch of a range of new gTLD’s (generic Top Level Domains). Some are industry or geographic specific, but others are creating more concern.
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What Is Luxury‌ In The Age Of You? Rebecca Robins
What is luxury? So posed the question, quite literally, by the V&A Museum in a recent exhibition. On the bright Spring day that day I visited, it was both telling and unsurprising to be entranced by the expectant queue for the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty snaking around the foyer, while visitors slipped slowly in and out of the What is luxury? exhibition. Telling, perhaps, of the magnetic power of a brand to drive demand and desire‌ Back to our question: What is luxury?
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When a branded t-shirt and a unique, one-of-a-kind supercar, crafted to the highest specification and bearing the mark of the craftsman can both be called ‘luxury’, clearly we have a problem.
Luxury has always defied single definition Luxury has always defied single definition. If we think back to early examples of luxury creation and consumption in ancient Classical civilization, already a polarisation around luxury was evident. On the one hand, luxury was a concept that was vehemently denied and rejected by the Spartans, on the other it was demonstrably embraced and celebrated (to excess) by the Macedonians. As classicist and historian Dr. Michael Scott explained in an exclusive interview, these different behaviours towards luxury were playing out in the emergence of new words (truphe; poluteles; habrosune) to express different sentiments towards luxury. A new vocabulary of luxury was already in contention. Today, ‘luxury’ remains one of the most problematised terms in business language. Conversations around what luxury means will range from the external to the internal, from statements of status to a deeper sense of discovery and learning, from the superficial and superfluous, to truly unique products and experiences that will be treasured for a lifetime. The world still has a love-hate relationship with luxury.
As we explored brands through the lens of a culture of excellence, we asked how many brands actually represent a unique achievement? How many of them are based on distinctive knowledge of some kind? How many are interested in their place in history? Through the concept of Unique Achievement and the drivers of demand of Craftsmanship, Focus, History and Rarity, meta-luxury is a business model that reflects the culture of excellence, drawing a clear line between luxury as a convention and excellence as an authentic conviction. Three years on from Meta-luxury entering the public domain, it is an interesting point of reflection and prediction to look at what those drivers of Craftsmanship, Focus, History and Rarity mean today. And crucially what they mean for the luxury consumers of tomorrow.
Today, ‘luxury’ remains one of the most problematised terms in business language
What is consistent through the ages, is that we understand luxury differently dependent upon culture. This was our starting point when we undertook our research to examine the meaning of luxury, culminating in the publication of Meta-luxury: brands and the culture of excellence in 2012. 48
In the research that we undertook, seeking to understand the true heart of luxury and the implications for brand and business management, the conclusion that we arrived at was excellence and specifically a culture of excellence. Leading luxury brands have always set the standard. They have led the way. In their pursuit of perfection, in their quest for excellence, they break the rules, they challenge the norm, they test the limits of innovation. To the consumer, the creations and experiences afforded by these brands represent an ultimate in desire and fulfilment.
Perhaps the real question to be asked and engaged with is what does luxury mean for a consumer in the Age of You?
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What does luxury mean for a consumer in the Age of You? If we take a step back and consider how brands have evolved over the years, we can begin to chart a fascinating series of dynamics that have played out, the current culmination of which will have considerable ramifications for everyone in the privileged position of guardians of luxury brands around the world. Brands have evolved and emerged through a series of what we might term as different ‘Ages’: The Age of Identity: Where brand acted as a tool to identify and differentiate, and where brand messaging was articulated primarily via one-way communication.
The Age of Experience: Where brand became the higher purpose, that inspired a connected ecosystem.
The Age of You: Where brand is becoming the consumer’s partner. Brand experiences will be unique to the individual and highly customised based on personal information, and brand performance is measured in its ability to capture and leverage data and engender participation.
In the Age of You, enabled by intelligent infrastructure and powered by big data, the leading brands will develop integrated ecosystems of experiences and reshape the world around us. As people and devices become more connected and everything becomes “smarter,” businesses are recognising the need to reorganize themselves around ‘you’. As a result, each of us will become our own marketplace or “mecosystem.” As “intelligent everything” meets the “mecosystems” of the future, brands will have unprecedented opportunity to create context, creative possibilities, and meaning for individuals - and value for all. And therein lies the challenge.
The Age of Value: Where brand was used to inform and improve decision-making, and where brand performance was measured in its ability to deliver financial returns to the business.
And ultimately, we arrive at the cusp and emergence of:
Across those eras, the role of brand has shifted, from brand as a monologue, to brand as a dialogue, to brand as a communal experience, and now, to brand as a truly personalized and curated experience created around each and every one of us.
We see the first surge of this debate rippling through the luxury industry. Condé Nast hosted their first luxury conference this Spring, with Suzy Menkes leading the debate on ‘Hard Luxury’ and how the concept of luxury is evolving. The FT Business of luxury discussed ‘Technology, Legacy and the New Consumer’. The forthcoming International New York Times Luxury Conference will look at ‘Luxury beyond product’ and connecting with consumer value systems. The consistent thread is around what we value and why. Why, how and in what form does luxury fit into the “mecosystems” of individuals?
Why, how and in what form does luxury fit into the “mecosystems” of individuals?
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Fundamentally, luxury brands are arguably more uniquely placed to thrive in The Age of You, as the very concept of personalisation, of the unique and bespoke has been the beating heart of these brands for centuries. And as we reflect on the manifestation of metaluxury as a culture and business model in The Age of You, we see this already resonating in a number of indicators. Craftsmanship derives from the very premise of demand and desire of something created by an individual for an individual. And we’re seeing a distinct gravitation towards quality of product and an enhanced role of the aesthetic. As we look at the purchase behaviour of affluents, it is telling to see greater primacy towards the understated aesthetic and towards brands such as Céline and Bottega Veneta. The inimitable words of Bottega Veneta seem to encapsulate it beautifully: “When your own initials are enough.” History as a driver in meta-luxury is about the creative tension of tradition and innovation. It is about how brands carry forward their origins into the future, staying true to their DNA and making it relevant for new generations. Never before has this been more vital or valuable for brands.
There is a value in a brand that has opened up a window onto its world that is not available to others One of the most powerful dynamics in the Age of You is the knowledge economy. The assertion of the self is on an inexorable rise, and concomitant with that is the desire to demonstrate one’s own knowledge capital. There is a value to the personal economy of being ‘in the know’ about brands that remain otherwise off the radar to others. There is a value in Focus, in a depth of specialisation, in the exacting lens of a brand which commands aspiration and desire above others. There is a value in a brand that has opened up a window onto its world that is not available to others. In The Age of You, the fine line between what luxury brands reveal and conceal, as they engage with the transparency demanded of consumers and the element of mystery that is endemic to their very being, will be fascinating to watch.
History as a driver in meta-luxury is about the creative tension of tradition and innovation
Rebecca Robins Regional Director, EMA LatAM | Interbrand Rebecca Robins is Regional Director at Interbrand for EMEA LatAm and co-author of the book Meta-luxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence. Rebecca has extensive experience in branding, having consulted a diverse range of clients across a number of industries. She is a regular conference speaker and lecturer and has been featured in publications including Bloomberg, The Economist, FT, Monocle, NY Times and Wall St Journal. She has particular expertise in luxury brand management and was recently named in the global list of Luxury Women to Watch. Rebecca is a graduate and postgraduate of Cambridge University.
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Leverage Purpose To Build Brand Reputation, Employee Advocacy And Sales Simon Mainwaring
There is no shortage of reasons to rise to the challenge of leveraging your brand’s resources and reach, to address the many social challenges we face - from climate change, to environmental degradation, to loss of biodiversity, and beyond. But any sober assessment of whether this is likely to happen must account for the realities that businesses face - whether it’s pressure from Wall Street, a crowded competitive landscape with incumbents and newcomers, or the significant challenge of simply surviving in an increasingly complex and fast-changing marketing landscape.
Fortunately, the intersection of shifts in culture, technology, and demographics now means that business is truly incentivized to lead with purpose, and to build brands by making a positive impact on the world. Here are eight key reasons why:
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1. Socially Responsible Brands Outperform Others As consumers become ever more aware of the compounding social crises our societies and planet face, they are looking to brands to make a difference that is relevant to their lives. According to the 2015 ‘Meaningful Brands Report’ from Havas Media, a meaningful brand has a 46% higher “share of wallet” – defined as how much a person spends on a particular product – than less meaningful brands. Additionally, the top 25 meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 133%. Unilever is just one of the many global brands now reporting the accelerated growth of socially responsible brands. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, went so far as to assert that such brands in their portfolio “accounted for half of our growth in 2014 and grew at twice the rate as all of the rest of the business,” according to Reuters.
2. Socially Responsible Brands Are Top Of Mind According to this year’s ‘Good Must Grow’ Survey, when consumers are asked to provide the name of a socially responsible organization, they are now more likely to name for-profit companies rather than nonprofit organizations. The top three companies indicated in this survey were TOMS, Whole Foods, and Microsoft, revealing the growing importance of purpose in driving the brand awareness of for-profit organizations.
3. Your Employees Aren’t That Into Your Company According to Gallup’s, ‘State of the American Workforce Report,’ over 70% of American employees are not engaged at work. Gallup goes on to explain the root of the problem being that employees are not emotionally 54
connected to their companies - this is where purpose can play a powerful role in aligning company and employee values.
4. Purpose Builds Brand Trust According to Edelman’s 2015 ‘Trust Barometer Report’ the contribution of a brand towards the greater good plays a defining role in whether that company is trusted more or less. Further, brand trust has a direct impact on consumer purchasing decisions that ultimately influence company profitability and growth.
Brand trust has a direct impact on consumer purchasing decisions
5. Purpose Elevates Category Leadership As we have seen with well-known CEO’s such as Elon Musk of Tesla, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Paul Polman of Unilever, the purpose of a brand serves as a powerful platform from which leadership can speak to cultural issues that transcend the products, services, or category of their company. Howard Schultz’s dialogue around issues as far ranging as gridlock in Congress, boycotting political campaign donations, same-sex marriage, post-traumatic stress disorder, online employee education, and most recently racism, have kept the Starbucks brand top of mind and allowed it to become a force that shapes culture, in line with its core values and vision.
6. Purpose Drives Timely Innovation CVS is just one of many companies that have allowed their appreciation of new business drivers to inform the role that purpose plays
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in their future. By banning tobacco products, renaming themselves CVS health, and relaunching the brand’s marketing around ‘Health is everything,’ they have positioned themselves to lead the future of healthcare.
7. Purpose Expands Brand Awareness When brands fully leverage their purpose, they collaborate with for-profit and nonprofit organizations that are mission-aligned to scale impact. In doing so, brands accelerate awareness of their own values and mission and inspire greater loyalty from all stakeholders. The recent Consumer Goods Forum partnership between Unilever, PepsiCo and General Mills around minimizing waste, is a great example of a partnership that benefits all members.
8. Brands Cannot Survive In Societies That Fail Arguments based solely on the bottom-line pale by comparison to considerations of the toll we are exacting on the planet on which we all depend. There is no shortage of data on the urgency for action, but perhaps there is no more compelling way to communicate the need for accelerated and purposeful efforts by business than this gallery of Earth Day images.
Elevate the role of purpose within your company making it central to your business and communications strategies
If you’d like to build your brand’s reputation, unlock the power of employee advocacy, and inspire consumers to build your business, you must take three critical steps: •• First, you must elevate the role of purpose within your company making it central to your business and communications strategies. •• Second, you must communicate that purpose clearly to your employees and give them roles to play in creating and executing the solution. •• Third, you must collaborate with customers, communities and partners to accelerate and scale your impact, so that you can make a meaningful difference more quickly. Done correctly, integrating purpose into your core brand strategy will prove to not only drive sustainable business growth but also contribute to the development of a more sustainable future.
Simon Mainwaring Founder and CEO | We First Simon Mainwaring is the founder and CEO of We First, a leading brand consultancy that provides purpose-driven strategy, content, and training to top brands and non-profits. As a New York Times bestselling author, Simon delivers keynotes and corporate workshops around the world and hosts the annual We First Brand Leadership Summit that trains F500 brands in social storytelling. As an influential blogger, he contributes to The Guardian, Fast Company and Huffington Post and has been featured in numerous business magazines including TIME, The Guardian and Inc. Magazine. Simon lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.
www.WeFirstBranding.com
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Matching Language And Motivation Art Markman, PhD
People need motivation to engage with your brand. If you want to affect your customers’ motivation, it would be helpful to know a bit more about the way the brain’s motivational system works. There are two core aspects to motivation: goals and energy. Goals are the things people are trying to achieve. For example, a customer buying sunglasses might want eye protection or a stylish accessory to her summer wardrobe. At any given moment, people have lots of goals, but the ones they pursue are the ones that are energized. One of the goals of brand messages is to energize those goals. Constructing the right message, though, requires matching the language you use to talk about your brand to the goals of your customers. In particular, there are two flavors of goals that people have: approach goals and avoidance goals. Approach goals refer to desirable states of the world that people want to achieve. A customer looking for an attractive pair of sunglasses is focused on an approach goal. Avoidance goals are focused on undesirable states of the world that people want to prevent. A customer looking for sunglasses for eye protection is focused on an avoidance goal, because she wants to avoid damage to her eyes.
There are two flavors of goals that people have: approach goals and avoidance goals You need to know what kinds of goals customers have about your brand, so that you can ensure that the messages you present are consistent with those goals.
You need to know what kinds of goals customers have about your brand When customers have approach goals, you want your messages to be focused on the desirable aspects of people’s lives that your brand can enhance. BMW does a great job of keeping drivers focused on the joy of driving with their “Ultimate Driving Machine” messages. They recognize that their customers want to experience the pleasure of driving a fast car that handles well, and so they match their language to this desirable outcome. Their campaigns focus on pleasurable images like speed, beauty, and enjoyment. Avoidance concerns like safety are mentioned on occasion, but they are not a central focus of their advertising. When customers have avoidance goals, then you want your message to be consistent with helping them to avoid negative outcomes. Vicks advertises Nyquil by focusing on ensuring a good night’s rest to return to health. This message wraps the brand in the language of avoiding negative outcomes, like staying up all night because you feel sick.
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Although brand managers often match messages to goals intuitively, it is important to be explicit about the core goals surrounding a brand. Campaigns that clash significantly with a customer’s goals can backfire.
Campaigns that clash significantly with a customer’s goals can backfire As one example, Charmin toilet tissue created a lot of negative buzz with their “Enjoy the Go” campaign. The problem with this message was that consumers have an avoidance goal related to toilet tissue. They want a comfortable and clean experience that avoids pain and dirt. The message “Enjoy the Go” uses language associated with approach goals. Consumers reacted negatively to this campaign, because it simply did not fit with their goals. Similarly, the Always brand of feminine protection had a campaign focused on “Have a happy period.” This campaign failed, because women do not generally have approach goals associated with their monthly period. The messaging in this campaign suggested that the makers of Always did not understand women’s motivation. Even when messages about brands are not as blatantly mismatched as these examples, it is possible to create mixed messages that undermine the effectiveness of a campaign.
Volvo often has this problem. Their core message is focused on avoidance concerns related to driving. They promote the safety and comfort of their cars in most advertising messages. However, after redesigning some of their models, Volvo also wanted to promote the style and beauty of the cars. The problem is that ads that target safety and then beauty are diluting the core message, by spreading it across approach and avoidance goals relating to cars. There are two key lessons to take away from this discussion. First, for some types of products, customers have an orientation that will be hard to change. Feminine protection, toilet paper, and medications are all products for which people have strong avoidance goals. Messages that clash with that orientation will not succeed, because customers will react to the mismatch between their motivational orientation and the brand communication. Second, some products have more flexibility. Cars, for example, have both approach and avoidance components. A brand can choose its orientation. However, once that orientation is set, it is difficult for a brand to cross from approach to avoidance. Instead, customers will react best when the messages stay consistently within a single mode. Approachoriented brands need to focus on desirable and pleasurable experiences. Avoidanceoriented brands need to focus on safety and minimizing negative outcomes.
Art Markman, PhD Author, Professor of Psychology and Marketing | University of Texas at Austin Art is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. The HDO program brings the humanities and the social behavioral sciences to people in business. Along with Bob Duke, Art hosts the radio show Two Guys on Your Head for KUT Radio in Austin. Two Guys on Your Head is available as a podcast on iTunes and Soundcloud. He is also the author of Smart Thinking, Habits of Leadership, and Smart Change.
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Is Your Brand Making Promises Your Experience Can’t Deliver? Colin Shaw
A brand makes a promise to its customers, your customer experience keeps that promise - but the issue is many times it doesn’t, as the branding team and the operations team are in different silo’s. Brand managers know that making promises is easy; delivering on them is where the work begins. As such, it is critical for every brand to design a customer experience for their customers that is aligned with their brand promise. So how do you do this?
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First you look at your current customer experience as if you were a customer; then you design it to deliver on the values you propose in your brand promise. Many companies think they achieve this with journey mapping but they only look at the rational experience of a customer, or they make the mistake of seeing a process as an experience. Experiences are very different from processes. Processes are what the organizations would like the customer to do, in a logical sequence of events. They are internal. Customers, on the other hand, have experiences. Customers are also not always logical! Experiences are external.
Most brands recognize the need to evoke emotions in a customer, so why is this ignored when designing a customer experience? For me there are two parts of a customer experience, the rational experience and the emotional experience.
There are two parts of a customer experience, the rational experience and the emotional experience
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Most brand experts are aware of the rational experience. This may be focused on the speed or ease of dealing with the brand. Organizations have been working on and perfecting these parts of the customer experience for the majority of their careers. This is the ‘what’. What is ignored by most organizations is the emotional experience, or how your customer experience makes people feel. Research for my book the DNA of Customer Experience: How emotions drive value (Palgrave McMillian 2007), shows that emotions account for over 50% of a customer experience. It is here in this emotional part of the customer experience, where the real difference between experiences happens - where some organizations outshine their competition. When you create an emotionally engaging experience, you deliver on the brand promise - and create brand loyalty and customer retention. This is the ‘how’.
Emotions account for over 50% of a customer experience So what does all this have to do with journey mapping? The answer is… Everything. Most journey mapping looks at the rational parts of the experience. If you only design the way things process within your organization, such as how fast you answer the phone or whether you provide free shipping and don’t address the emotions, you are leaving the majority of your experience up to chance. This is why organizations with a great experience designed solely using journey mapping should buy a lottery ticket - luck played a great part in their success. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my customer experience design success to have odds. My goal is to make it a sure thing. The good news is you can make it a sure thing if you are willing to look at it the right way. 62
Designing The Emotional Experience Helps Keep the Brand Promise Making your customer experience design emotionally engaging is a key factor in creating a design that keeps your brand promise. To do this, one must examine their customer journey from an emotional perspective. The emotional part of a customer’s journey begins before they enter your experience. Customers feel a certain way before they interact with your organization. For example, if you are a car recovery service, chances are the person calling you will be both stressed and anxious because their car isn’t running. Another example would be that customers calling a wedding organizer might be happy and excited, because they or someone they love just got engaged. These emotional states of the customer entering the experience, will affect how the customer begins his or her interaction with your organization.
The emotional part of a customer’s journey begins before they enter your experience Brands with a great customer experience design, recognize that they need to address the emotional state of a customer right from the beginning. Ask yourself this. What emotion are you trying to evoke? Do you know? If you went to your customer facing people and asked them what emotion they are trying to evoke in their customers, would they know? Would they have designed their experience to achieve this? Are they being measured on this? If a customer enters the experience feeling frustrated, have they been trained to convert customers from feeling frustrated to feeling the desired emotions. I am sure most of you will answer no to most of these questions.
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By taking into account the customer’s feelings coming into the experience, an organization can begin to manage their emotional state, to one that delivers the values presented in the brand promise. Most organizations don’t do this, however. Instead, they make the mistake of thinking the customer journey begins at their first interaction with their organization. Another key to designing the emotional experience for the customer is to see your experience through a customer’s eyes. What I mean by that is, you have look at your experience as if you were a customer, you walk the experience in a customer’s shoes. Having a customer’s perspective on your experience helps you see how the interactions make you feel - from each moment in the journey.
customer. Maybe it’s that they start their response to the call with empathy for the customer’s plight. Perhaps there is a return call service, that allows the customer to record a message a roadside specialist can respond to via phone or text in the next five minutes, so the customer knows help is on the way. The possibilities are endless, but the goal should be the same: to make the customer feel “cared for.”
Your brand makes a promise to your customers, but it is a promise that the brand cannot keep on its own
At Beyond Philosophy, we call this ‘Moment Mapping’ and find it to be an effective way of identifying where and when, you can create a deliberate emotional experience in your design. This approach provides a perspective not obtained with a typical journey mapping approach. Once you understand theemotional journey you currently have and what moments evoke emotions, you now have the tools to design an emotional experience that delivers on your brand promise. For example, let’s say your brand promise is that you ‘care’ for your customers. If you are the car recovery company brand manager and you know that your customer is stressed when they call for service, you can design a way for your team to show they care for the
Your brand makes a promise to your customers, but it is a promise that the brand cannot keep on its own. It requires a deliberate design that addresses both the rational part of an experience and the irrational part of the experience - or the emotional experience. Understanding the difference between the two parts of your current experience will help you identify how to deliver not only a good process for your brand but also a good emotional experience for your customer. When you do these things, and commit to creating an emotional outcome that supports your brand promise, you will create the brand loyalty and customer retention every brand seeks.
Colin Shaw CEO and Founder | Beyond Philosophy Colin Shaw enjoys recognition by LinkedIn as one of the world’s top 150 business influencers. He has 193,000 followers of his work. Colin is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, the first consultancy & training organization devoted to Customer Experience. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker. Colin’s new book released in January 2015, “Unlocking the Hidden Customer Experience: Short Stories of Remarkable Practices that Ensure Success” is designed to help organizations take their Customer Experience to the next level. Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX
www.beyondphilosophy.com
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Your Brand Makes All The Difference Ryan T. Sauers
How can we lead if we are looking down? We cannot. Leaders must look up. Leading individuals and organizations who look up and ahead almost always have a strong brand. So, let us focus on the word brand and how it positions us as a leader in the marketplace. We communicate a message in everything we do, especially when we use the term brand. We often discuss brands, whether we prefer them or not, because brands stand out in an emotional way. Think about our instant recognition of Nike when we hear “Just Do It” or see the image of Walt Disney World when you hear the phrase “the happiest place on earth.” These messages effectively connect customers with the brand and position us as market leaders. Perception is reality when it comes to a brand. Thus, the goal is to make such brand experiences personal. For example, are you a Coke or Pepsi person? Mac or PC? Your brand is the one thing about you or your organization that people cannot replicate. They can try to duplicate what you do, but they cannot be you, and they cannot be your brand. Your brand is the unique value that only you bring to the table. Price is the cost of something. In contrast, value = price + goods/services + YOU.
Perception is reality when it comes to a brand. Thus, the goal is to make such brand experiences personal
Without the value of you (your brand), you are nothing more than a commodity where low price wins. This is not good. A brand can be defined as the sum total of key ideas, emotions, and perceptions that are communicated to your audience and associated with you or your organization’s work. When your stakeholders reflect upon their experiences with you or your organization, the brand is the “shorthand” way of summing up those characteristics and feelings. A brand can be thought of as your distinguishing characteristics that could be considered your own unique fingerprint (no two are the same). To simplify, I developed a newly revised acronym, BRAND, which is the Baseline of our Reputation, Attributes, Name, and Distinctiveness. Baseline is a “starting point” used for comparison. Reputation is all you or your organization stands for; Attributes are the characteristics others use when describing you; your name suggests something (good, bad, or indifferent) when a person hears it; and your Distinctiveness answers the question, “So what? Why you? What makes you different or unique?”
Brand Quarterly
Price is the cost of something. In contrast, Value = Price + Goods/Services + YOU 65
Our brand is not defined by what we say it is, but is characterized by what others say it is So the question is not whether we have a brand or not, because all individuals and organizations have a brand. Instead, the question is, what do we do with our brand? Our brand is not defined by what we say it is, but is characterized by what others say it is. To that end, successful individuals and organizations work hard to develop their brands through effective communications. Always remember that building a strong, recognizable, and reliable brand takes time, effort, and commitment. It requires a deliberate, purposeful, and intentional leadership strategy. Such consistency in strategic branding pays off with brand loyalty – one of the most valuable assets any person or organization can have. To review your brand, obtain feedback from those around you as a first step. Be sure to obtain this 360-degree feedback (all directions) from those close to you as well as those who are more removed from you. Moreover, develop a PACT mindset (P = Passion; A = Authenticity; C = Creativity; T = Trust) as it pertains to your brand. Merriam-Webster defines pact as “a formal agreement between two people or groups.” We want to focus on the word “agreement.”
A person buys from another when he or she feels authentic passion fueled with creativity that is built on trust. Any strong brand is built upon mutual trust. Thus, our brand must be built upon some of these key criteria. When a person has tremendous passion, he or she has energy, dedication, and enthusiasm. When a person is authentic, he or she is consistent in behavior no matter the circumstances. And when a person is creative, life is approached in a different and unique manner, operated with an “as if” mindset. This means the person operates “as if” this could be done, or “why can’t this be done?” The person finds a way and never settles for less than the best. This is what the best individual and organizational brands are all about. Remember leaders look up. This means they are looking forward and ahead. Such leadership ability is essential to growing our brand. It makes all the difference for those individuals and organizations seeking to lead the way now and in the future. Finally, once you can better define what your own brand is about and what you want it to be about, you can determine the ways you want to purposefully grow, change, re-frame, promote, and/or strengthen your current brand position. So, does our brand make a difference? Yes. Does it matter? You bet it does. Your brand makes ALL the difference.
Ryan T. Sauers President and CMO | Sauers Consulting Strategies Ryan is President/CMO of Sauers Consulting Strategies. The firm consults with the front end of organizations across North America in sales growth, brand positioning, organizational strategy, and strategic marketing (focus on social media). Ryan speaks at events across the United States and writes many feature articles in global publications. He is an adjunct university professor teaching leadership, communication, and entrepreneurship. Ryan is working on his Doctoral degree in Organizational Leadership and is the author of the best-selling books Everyone is in Sales and the recently released Would You Buy from You? Your Brand Makes the Difference. Follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanSauers
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