BrandKnew May 2015

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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05.15#37

Dear reader:

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The year seems to be galloping along and we are already onto the 5th issue of 2015. As ever, an issue packed with a lot of substance and style. For the true blue fans, understand how Levi’s is the brand with genuine staying power. For graphic design connoisseurs, the interview with graphic design legend Massimo Vignelli would be something to treasure. For all those looking at marketing as the go to panacea for all evils, pause, review, don’t rush. The feature on how organisations should be creating an agile marketing culture would interest both brand owners and brand practitioners. We have all heard about and adhered religiously to the marketing mix. Now, understand how the phone has become an integral cog in the marketing mix.

Amazon’s vision of branding your home will sweep people off their feet as the article would share. All this and lots more. Power packed issue. Happy Reading!

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Best always

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran linkd.in/1dsjYaW

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bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital/Social Media Marketing: Loknath Swain, Vishnu Nath Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

Every Brand Needs a Distinct Tone of Voice.

Here’s Why-and How to Create It 8 Top Tips for Mitigating a PR Disaster How Levi’s Became a Brand With Staying Power Don’t rush to spend on marketing Planning Your Marketing? Don’t Forget These Fundamentals A Rare Interview With Graphic Design Legend Massimo Vignelli Four Steps to Creating an Agile Marketing Culture The Giant Marketing Opportunity You’re Missing Inside Amazon’s Quest To Brand Your Home Five Things You Can Learn From the Most Authentic Brands in the World Three Ways to Make Your Phone Presence a Key Driver in Your Marketing Mix Interview. How Did Innocent Drinks Drive A 35% Engagement Rate On Their Twitter Ads? Kitchen table to £100m brand: 6 marketing lessons from Ella’s Kitchen 5 Worst Offenders That Drive Visitors Away From Your Website Book, Line & Sinker

Every Brand Needs a Distinct Tone of Voice.

Here’s Why-and How to Create It

By Anne Marie Kelly

Like people, companies make impressions. And good impressions pave the way for solid business relationships.

At the most substantive level, how an organization behaves can make all the difference. Think of the oft-cited Tylenol poisoning scare in the 1980s. Johnson & Johnson, the drug’s manufacturer, protected people first and its own brand second, halting all advertisements for the pain reliever and immediately recalling the product at a loss of more than $100 million dollars. Those were highly effective actions.

But how a company communicates, particularly in written form, is also key to the impression it makes. Does a hip, edgy fashion brand sound stuffy, flat, or—even worse—just plain stupid in its content? Does the promotional arm of a serious news organization sound glib, flighty, and uninformed?

Brand tone of voice is vital to expressing your brand identity.

The correct tone can help a company distinguish itself from competitors, reinforce the brand’s personality, and underpin the brand’s promise to its customers.

For instance, a toy company that focuses on educational products might want to adopt a somewhat formal tone, whereas one that focuses on novelty entertainment would benefit from a more casual, fun voice.

In addition to expressing your brand’s personality, your tone of voice needs to be consistent: Whether a customer hears your ad on the radio, scans the About Us page on your website, or reads your blog, the same recognizable voice

needs to come across loud and clear.

What Is Brand Tone of Voice?

A brand’s tone of voice encompasses the types of words used, the way sentences are constructed, and the way language flows. Tone of voice is used in all communications across all divisions, departments, and countries—so that everything your company writes sounds like the same brand language.

The way a company writes is one of the most powerful ways to communicate its vision. When organizations write in a distinctive and consistent tone, people want to start—and keep—working with them.

One consistent voice throughout all content helps build a strong brand. And, ultimately, everything a company does is about strengthening its brand to win business.

Which Companies Need Tone of Voice?

Every company should take a thoughtful approach to its tone.

Every company.

How often have you heard the phrase “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”? It’s a common saying because it’s true.

Global brands with business and employees around the world, in particular, need a coherent global tone that works in different languages. The same holds for companies that use a lot of outside writers and those with hard-to-explain technical services.

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Five Steps to Creating a Distinctive Tone of Voice These five steps appear reasonably simple, but each requires a well-thought-out plan. And the first unwritten step is to know what needs to be done for—and to plan how your organization will complete—each of the following five steps:

1. Know your brand’s DNA Identify your company’s values—the qualities that you and your colleagues hold dear and stick to, no matter what. They are the essence of who you are. And they are the qualities you want to imply or expressly state in all your communication and content.

Acting responsibly is an integral part of the Disney brand. IBM is about “making a new future for our clients, our industry and our company.” And Google’s mantra is “Don’t be Evil.”

All three companies reflect those values in the way they write.

2. Establish your tone of voice ‘characteristics’ Once you have identified your company’s values, determine two or three tone of voice characteristics that reflect those values and the personality you want to convey.

A leading-edge research company that prides itself on turning complicated research data into bold insights that customers can use to build their business, for instance, might stand for innovation, expertise, and trust... but they want to sound intelligent, energized, and relevant.

3. Conduct a content audit Look at the content and promotions your company has created.

Try to identify their tone of voice. Is it in keeping with the characteristics you’ve chosen to support your brand’s values?

Is the tone consistent across platforms, target audiences, and countries? In essence, are you pleasantly surprised or does the content’s tone make you cringe? If it’s the latter, you will have lots of examples of what not to do when writing your Tone of Voice Style Guide.

4. Create a style guide Once you have defined your tone of voice, it is vital to make sure it’s used in all written communication, consistently, across platforms and countries.

One way to help ensure that happens is to create an easyto-understand style guide for all employees and freelancers.

Explain what tone of voice is and why it’s important. Explain the details of your chosen tone of voice characteristics.

For example, if you want your tone to be “energized,” explain what that actually means when they sit down to write. Active, not passive, language? A conversational flow? However you define your chosen characteristics, make the definition clear and easy to follow. A good place to start is by providing before-and-after examples of writing. Use a “Write Like This” and “Not Like This” structure, for example.

Whenever possible, use examples of actual text from your content audit. Doing so helps anchor how you are asking employees to write in the real-life communication your company uses.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate Typically, lots of people write on behalf of a company. Creating content is not always limited to the marketing department.

Once you’ve completed your Style Guide, make sure it is read and understood. Conduct training sessions with all marketers, either in person or via a webinar. Create webcast or video for folks to access as needed. Make sure every freelancer writing for your company has a copy.

How to get the word out will be different for each company, but the guiding principle is this: Don’t let your style guide sit on a shelf, unread! *** Creating a brand tone of voice may initially seem a daunting task. But it’s not if you follow a structured process. And it is worth the effort.

If it’s done right, everyone who writes for your brand will have clear directions about how to write in a way that supports who you are, what you stand for, and why people should do business with you.

And it will simply become the way they write.

Anne Marie Kelly is a strategic marketing and business development executive and the founder of Kelly Marketing Solutions. She has held senior positions at GfK, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

8 Top Tips for Mitigating a PR Disaster

By Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC)

Marketing crises can -- and do -- happen to the best of us. To find out how best to handle even the toughest of situations, we asked eight entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) their top strategies.

1. Manage the Conversation If you find yourself in the middle of a PR disaster, it’s important to speak out as quickly as possible so you can help frame and shape the conversation. For better or worse, silence is often associated with guilt.

Don’t shirk responsibility or try to hide. State your position and offer statistics or information to support it so you’re an active participant rather than the subject of scrutiny. - Brittany Hodak, ZinePak

2. Test Your Messaging for Consistency With Your Brand’s Voice If you find yourself in the middle of a PR disaster, test your responses for consistency.

Sometimes the messaging crafted for you will sound like PR-speak and is not in line with your brand voice. Be true to the brand voice for written responses. If you’re delivering the messaging on camera, make sure you’re adequately media trained for the smoothest delivery of the information as possible. - Sydney Williams, Planet Green Socks

3. Be 100 Percent Transparent In the cover-ups I’ve seen in the news, companies either deny whatever scandal has befallen them or totally own up to their faults and take responsibility. I firmly believe that honesty is the best policy in any PRrelated situation because lies and cover-ups are simply not sustainable or ethical. - Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

4. Learn Your Lesson Instead of trying to manage the crisis, you must show that you understand why it was a crisis to begin with. Getting educated and engaging with focus groups on how they’d ideally want to see you move forward is a great way to start. But when all else fails, commit yourself to never repeating the same mistake and allow yourself to be held accountable. Don’t be defensive. - Cody McLain, WireFuseMedia LLC

5. Be Upfront The worst thing you can do after a major PR flop is avoid the issue entirely. Rather, look to take a proactive rather than reactive approach to the problem. Making yourself and your brand totally transparent will help restore trust to your company and show that you are more than willing to work through the issue. - Phil Laboon, Eyeflow Internet Marketing

6. Communicate Your Prevention Strategy Ensure that your stakeholders know what you have learned from the disaster and that you have taken clear steps to prevent the situation from arising again. Uber did a great job addressing this in India. When one of its drivers allegedly assaulted a woman, Uber immediately announced a series of new background checks to improve its verification standards. - Pratham Mittal, VenturePact

7. Stay Calm We’re all human, and sometimes our campaigns are bound to go wrong. Whenever I’ve been put in a stressful situation, the first thing I do is forgive myself and make sure I don’t panic. It’s important to keep a clear mind when navigating these types of situations. I inform all the internal parties of the current situation and present a quick, transparent plan that we can act upon quickly. Cassie Petrey, Crowd Surf

8. Take Your Medicine Early Many companies try to delay the response to see if the issue will ‘blow over.’ Most times, a real disaster will not and other resulting issues (i.e. employees looking to leave, competitors poaching clients) will occur. Thus, it makes sense to immediately acknowledge an issue and make the public mea culpa to help erase the inevitable secondary issues before they arise. - Kofi Kankam, Admit.me These answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

How Levi’s Became a Brand With Staying Power

By Denise Lee Yohn

In our consumer culture of shiny-new-object syndrome, it is increasingly unlikely that a brand will survive—much less thrive—for more than a few seasons. But for 162 years, Levi Strauss & Co. has done just that. The staying power of the Levi’s brand stands out boldly in this era of pop-up stores, Snapchat-style startups and fleeting loyalty.

For perspective, consider that when Levi Strauss emigrated in 1853 from Buttenheim, Bavaria, to the U.S. and founded his company, there were only 31 American states. Another 32 years would pass before the automobile was developed.

Among iconic U.S. brands, only Anheuser-Busch (founded in 1852) has been around longer than Levi’s. (Coca-Cola came about in 1892; Ford in 1903.)

And yet Levi’s remains a formidable brand today. Fiscal 2014 revenue increased 2 percent over the previous year to $4.68 billion, and the company commands the highest share of the global jeans market. Retailers credit Levi’s for having unique brand assets they can’t get from other lines. As Gary Oneil, former creative director for J.C. Penney, explains, “Levi’s has

become a brand titan that scales across lifestyle, gender … this allows retailers to cast a broad net that captures a diverse customer base.”

Moreover, Levi’s continues to be considered hip. Complex, a website devoted to twentysomething males, listed Levi’s among its “15 Brands Hipsters Love,” alongside Band of Outsiders and other indie designers. Sightings of Levi’s-clad celebrities fill the pages of style and pop-culture media.

Shawn Parr, head of San Diego-based brand and innovation consultancy Bulldog Drummond, whose clients include adidas, American Eagle Outfitters and Nike, observes, “Levi’s is like the Rolling Stones or Johnny Cash. They’re one of the all-time greats who defy and define the category, and without them, the genre wouldn’t be the same.”

The secret to the longevity of Levi’s actually isn’t a secret at all. The company uses classic brand-building principles to maintain and grow its brand equity. These are fundamental ideals that remain the keys to building a brand with staying power.

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Commit and stay committed.

Above all else, Levi’s is authentic—and fiercely committed to maintaining and reinforcing that authenticity.

The company got its start by selling built-to-last pants to miners during the California gold rush. Demand spread across the nation, and as pioneering gave way to manufacturing in the economic landscape of the early 1900s, Levi’s became the clothing of choice for the working class.

During the midcentury deindustrialization period, the company’s denim became popular among rebellious youth subcultures. Its proposition as a genuine, original brand resonated with greasers and hippies alike.

observe, helps fuel success in today’s markets as consumers search for greater meaning and sincerity from the brands they choose. People desire to connect with products that feel safe and certain. Levi’s clearly identifies its core purpose, attributes and value—and then uses them as a compass for everything it does. This resonates particularly with today’s influential young consumers.

“Brands that create purpose win Millennials’ hearts, and brands that are different and authentic win their minds,” says Jeff Fromm, co-author of Marketing to Millennials.

Go for an emotional response.

The quality and integrity of Levi’s products is unquestionable.

The rivets on the jeans have become a standard around the world, and the signature red-stitched selvage and double-needle stitching are superior design details. But the company’s brand messages have made a more culturally significant appeal.

Starting in the 1950s with print ads featuring celebrity bad boys like Marlon Brando, and continuing into the late ’60s with counterculture radio spots set to psychedelic music from Jefferson Airplane, Levi’s sought to make a powerful emotional connection with its audience. In the ’70s and ’80s, Levi’s turned to TV, capturing consumer attention with vignettes that were risqué at the time, including a commercial starring model Nick Kamen stripping down to his boxers in a laundromat. The spots inspired a visceral response.

In the mid-1980s, Levi’s launched a campaign promoting its classic 501s, which rekindled excitement and demand for the five-pocket jean originally introduced more than 100 years earlier. The company returned to the effort again in the late 2000s.

“People love the original 501 because it is timeless,” comments Levi’s CMO Jennifer Sey. “As a brand that’s been around for more than 160 years, we have clothed a lot of people and been a part of many great, pivotal storytelling moments.”

These days, authenticity is one of the most common business buzzwords and desired brand traits—and with good reason.

The Authentic Brand Index (ABI) has shown that the stronger a brand’s perceived authenticity, the more likely people are to become advocates for it. Authenticity, ABI’s analysts

More recently, in 2009 Levi’s stirred viewers with an expertly crafted and beautifully shot campaign titled “Go Forth.” The series of mini-films sets black-and-white images of a Hurricane

Katrina-ravaged New Orleans against a soundtrack of Walt Whitman poetry. By celebrating the “brand for pioneers who are in the process of building a new America,” Levi’s once again managed to capture and convey a unique spirit.

In each of these campaigns, Levi’s stoked passion for its brand without describing its wares or promoting product features. In fact, it could be said that Levi’s advertising has systematically avoided selling its products—aiming instead for an emotional connection with consumers.

“We’ve been there with people for many of their great and defining life experiences—big and small,” Sey explains. “From first dates to the first day of school … our job as marketers is to facilitate and amplify that great storytelling to drive deep engagement.”

Defy the trends.

All brands need to evolve to remain relevant. Levi’s, despite the powerful brand equity it has established, is no exception.

But the company favors maintaining its brand integrity over jumping onto the latest trends.

“What has kept Levi’s in the forefront of the ever-changing jean world is their market research— how they test product with a variety of diverse retailers and use that feedback to address various fits, washes and fashion elements to stay current,” says Billy Rudnick, general merchandising manager for New York retailer Dr. Jays. “But they never go too far into the gimmicks that have misled many good companies.”

At times, this stance caused the company to fall behind. In the early 2000s, for example, the design team was late to move into popular new fashion directions like colored denim for women and tailored jeans for men. As a result, sales plummeted.

to extend medical benefits to employees’ domestic partners and one of the earliest corporate executives to champion funding for HIV/AIDS research.

Adds Sey: “We invented the blue jean, provided the first-ever women’s jean, and continue to innovate today based on consumer need with greener products, including the Water While most companies search for ways to modernize, innovations at Levi’s often invoke the brand’s history. For example, the latest version of its visual identity features an updated logo based on the original batwing designed for the company nearly 50 years ago by Walter Landor. Other elements of the “new” identity include the shape of the stitching that has been on the back pockets for more than a century, a modernized rendition of the two-horse mark and the message “Patented 1873.”

Marketing strategies also tie strongly to the brand’s history and values. In 2013 Levi’s held a series of concerts along the oldest U.S. railway route, with stops in small towns. Social media marketing communications, meanwhile, serve to educate consumers about issues such as water conservation, or to support social justice leaders, as much as to promote products.

Levi’s recognizes that trend-following may be the simplest way to attract attention and raise short-term revenue, but following someone else’s lead usually causes a company to stray from its own brand identity. At times in Levi’s history, its managers learned this lesson the hard way. Branding consultant Parr says Levi’s has “always got to watch that they’re not trying too hard or to be something they’re not.

They’ve been at their best when they are comfortable being Levi’s, leaning on the past, but being risk-takers.”

But in many other instances, Levi’s was ahead of its time, especially in areas of social responsibility. Way back in the 1890s, Levi Strauss established scholarships for students at the University of California, Berkeley, and ever since, the company has pursued a mission that executives call “profits through principles.”

A look at Levi’s offers insight into the commitment, courage and consistency that goes into making a great brand. One of the nation’s longest-standing companies, it thrives on its identity as an original American brand in an increasingly global marketplace. It represents individuality and rebelliousness while appealing broadly, and it offers accessibility in an industry that thrives on exclusivity.

Strauss’ great-great-grand-nephew Robert Haas, CEO from 1984 to 1999, launched a manufacturing code of conduct for overseas suppliers. He was also the first Fortune 500 CEO

The cultural resonance of Levi’s has withstood the ups and downs of the economy, fashion trends and the business itself.

Even more than its products, the Levi’s brand was built to last.

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Don’t rush to spend on marketing

By Maynard Webb

When it comes to whether or not you should spend money marketing your startup, it all comes down to timing. There has to be harmony with where you are and what you do to bring awareness to your product or service. Simply put, if you have a product ready (or one that will be ready soon) you should think about strategies to create market awareness. If you don’t, it’s too soon to invest in marketing.

We all remember the infamous sock puppet from pets.com.

Too often, companies spend too much money before they are ready. I’ve seen this firsthand as well. In the late 1990s I was on the board of a high-flying startup in the mobile space that raised hundreds of millions of dollars. One day at a board meeting the CEO announced, “We are going to advertise on TV!” I found this so curious; at eBay, where I was the President of Technology, we had never gone on TV and we were a public company. The spend this CEO was proposing was more than the entire annual marketing budget at eBay. Executives from the advertising agency were in the meeting and there was no stopping them. The company spent millions of dollars even though the target market was very small and not the audience that would be reached on television ads — the company was selling to telcos, not consumers.

Unsurprisingly, the ads did not result in anything good.

I’ve learned the best way to market is to find the most effective opportunities that are as cheap as possible. At eBay, we used PR and viral marketing and bought ads to bring traffic to the site. One of our most successful efforts was a “free listing day,” where we eliminated all fees to list products. The community was so excited; they stayed up 24 hours to list everything they could. That increased traffic killed me as the tech guy, but it resulted in great awareness and a massive increase in products being sold on our site. When we started Everwise we were able to tie it to my book launch, and my co-founder and I did fireside chats with audiences that were precisely in our target market. This effort cost nothing more than a plane ticket, and we were able to reach the exact audience we desired.

As an investor, I tend to see that most of the founders I work with serve as head of marketing (as well as head of recruiting, product, HR, their own administrative tasks and more). We regularly have conversations with founders to help them determine whether or not they are ready to invest in

marketing. We ask them to consider:

What: In 30 seconds or less, can you tell someone what my product does? Can they repeat that to someone else without information being lost?

Why: What is the problem you’re solving? Why is it important?

Who: Who specifically should be really excited about your business?

How: How can customers/users know that your product does what it says it will? (This could be signed customers, metrics, successful stories, etc.)

Until a CEO has good answers for these questions, we discourage spending marketing dollars in the traditional sense (getting press, running massive ad campaigns, buying booths at conferences, buying billboards), and instead advocate focusing on ensuring the company is delighting its first few users or customers. Let those early adopters be the evangelists — then listen to how they message what it is you do to other users.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. When it comes to crowdfunding campaigns, for example, PR expertise can be extremely helpful to ensure that your launch goes well.

But even then, you should come in having validated your product before putting up a public-facing campaign. You may also find that running small, experimental campaigns may be a good way to build an early funnel of test users, which can help you to hone your product and messaging.

The problem with doing something too early is that you risk spending a bunch of bullets too soon. You’ve leveraged the network and the product is not ready. And this is especially important, because when it comes to launching your company you don’t get another chance. Spend your bullets, and your dollars, wisely.

Founder, Webb Investment Network; Co-Founder, Everwise; Author, Rebooting Work. Chairman at Yahoo!, Board member at http://Salesforce.com , Visa and Everwise

Planning Your Marketing?

Don’t Forget These Fundamentals

By Susan Solomon

It’s the body of work you carry with you for at least 12 months.

It defines everything you do on the job. And, if you do it right, it’s your golden ticket to successful marketing.

It goes without saying: A marketing plan and budget must

Of course, I’m referring to your marketing plan and accompanying budget.

think through and fully strategize your marketing efforts.

If you’re on the July-June fiscal year cycle, you’re most likely gearing up for your next pièce de résistance, so here are some tips to keep in mind; and if you’re on another cycle, keep these tips for your next annual planning.

follow the company’s strategic plan. Hopefully, the company’s strategies are determined within a timeline that allows you to

I always divide my planning into three essential “buckets” when setting a course for the year: market growth, market retention, and brand. Since I’m also responsible for communications, I build a communications plan as well.

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Dividing efforts into those categories seems to work for our team, and it hasn’t varied much, even with transforming company strategies.

If you can develop these materials in-house, great. If not, hire a branding specialist to get them completed. They’re that important.

Brand is typically the bucket eliciting the most discussion, especially when determining key metrics for success. As a marketer, it’s important that you ensure everyone is aligned on the importance of brand and that you establish agreedupon metrics to measure brand strength. Another important component of your annual planning is ensuring you have the right resources and tools for a strong marketing function.

3. Communications Fundamentals

Here’s a round-up of foundational elements for your marketing effort that, if you don’t already have, should be budgeted for in the coming year.

Editorial Calendar With the mountains of content that communicators need to develop, keeping it all on track and using it efficiently are key. An editorial calendar system is critical for planning your content strategy, assigning stories, managing version control, and helping everyone on your team know who’s developing what.

1. Marketing Fundamentals

A good system also assists with determining how to repurpose content more effectively and provides a “parking lot” for great ideas that may become great copy in the future.

Marketing Automation and CRM (for growth and retention)

4. People: The Fundamental Fundamentals

The precise tools you need depend on many factors, including the size of your company, stakeholder audiences, industry, and, of course, budget. However, every marketing team has a need for using data to better understand its customers, for automating certain repetitive tasks, for improving lead generation and nurturing and managing the demands of existing customers.

Of course, the people you hire are what really makes your marketing department run. From time to time, it makes sense to inventory your team’s skillsets. Generally, you should be ticking the box for people with one or more of these skills:

Marketing automation tools and a solid CRM database management system can support those efforts; they are essential for effective marketing.

• Project management

All the Basics I know this list will spark many more suggestions, but these are basics for a marketing department: Google Analytics, Google Adwords, the Adobe suite, SurveyMonkey, GoogleAlerts or Hootsuite, and simple film editing software. Some are nocost and others offer upgrades that you may consider an investment worth making.

2. Branding Fundamentals A Solid Narrative and Brand Guidelines As the company’s marketer, you may know what the brand stands for, but do your employees and customers?

A brand narrative details who you are and why anyone should care. It connects the brand with your customer’s needs and establishes the values of your company.

Brand guidelines are the guideposts for implementing the brand; they detail logo usage, color palette, typeface, and imagery. Some guidelines also include acceptable word use and acronyms. They are essential for preserving that brand you’re working so hard to build.

• Setting vision and strategy • Creative development

• Writing and editing • Data reporting and analysis • Technical expertise in digital marketing Make sure you’re providing enough assistance to your team to help them become the best they can be in those areas.

If you don’t have at least one person with any of those skills already, it’s time to start budgeting some training or recruitment dollars.

Again, those are some of the most basic elements of building a solid contemporary marketing department. The specific needs of your industry may require other tools and skills. *** If your company is serious about marketing, it will want to ensure all the fundamental are accounted for when you’re doing the planning for the growth and nurturing of a successful marketing effort for the year ahead.

Susan Solomon is a healthcare marketing vice-president in Southern California and a marketing instructor at four universities. She was a Fulbright scholar and she has written extensively on marketing, branding, and social media for more than a decade.

A Rare Interview With Graphic Design Legend Massimo Vignelli

By Gary Hustwit

FROM 2006, THE LATE DESIGNER SHARES THE STORY BEHIND HIS INFAMOUS NEW YORK SUBWAY MAP AND WHY TYPOGRAPHIC ELEGANCE WILL PREVAIL. Gary Hustwit: Can you talk about the map you designed for the New York subway system in the ‘70s?

Such a controversial thing. It’s funny, but I realized the other day the mistake I made. So this is really the clearest kind of map I have ever seen in terms of information for the subway.

It’s very simple. Every subway line on the map has a color, and in reality they already have one. And every station has a dot, you know. Every stop is a dot—no dot, no stop. It couldn’t be easier than that. There is nothing to fragment the legibility of this. Instead, if you look at today’s map, it’s a total disaster, with fragmentation all over the place. I can show it to you. And this is what we tried to avoid.

Now, 75 years ago, in London, they did the first map with a 90- and 45-degree grid like this one here, and it’s been working fine in London for all this time. But New York is a different kind of a city. And now I just realized that maybe, possibly, I made a mistake by indicating, even in a deformed way, the areas—Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, et cetera. I probably should have done what they’ve done in London— not have any indication of the geography. It’s a completely blank, white background so that there is no suggestion of geography whatsoever.

One of the problems they had in New York is that the people, they couldn’t relate the geography with the station, with the lines, and they were confused by that. But it’s just THE COMPUTER because they shouldn’t. There were ALLOWS YOU TO DO neighborhood maps in the subway stations, so really there’s no reason THE BEST TYPOGRAPHY why this map had to be literal—it EVER, BUT IT ALSO could be completely abstract. But ALLOWS YOU TO DO I think that it would’ve been even better if I had pushed the envelope THE WORST EVER. even further and not had anything, just the lines and the stops. Maybe that would have been better. Otherwise, it’s perfect—I think it’s the most beautiful spaghetti work ever done. It’s terrific. And it’s so clear, it’s unbelievable.

Now, the reality is that 50% of humanity is visually oriented, and 50% of humanity is verbally oriented. The visually oriented people have no problem reading any kind of map, and the verbal people, they can never read a map. But the verbal people have one great advantage over the visual people: they can be heard. And that’s why they changed this map! They started to complain, these people, opening

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their mouths, until this beautiful map was substituted with the junky one that you can see now by going into the subway station. It is a map that is so loaded with information, which is so difficult to retrieve, that it makes the whole point of the map useless. If I made a mistake, it was not making the geography abstract—making the water beige and the parks gray instead of green—it was just the fact that we indicated these things when we shouldn’t have. We should have just made it blank. It would have been better.

study. Then eventually it turned into Helvetica.

The second thing was to standardize the CONSISTENCY supports for the signs. Prior to this the IS EXTREMELY signs were made according to the amount of space that they had available in each IMPORTANT IN instance—they were all done custom. In DESIGN. order to extend the signage throughout the whole system of 485 stations, we devised a system of supports and signs that were standardized. There were three categories of signage, and each one had its own appropriate size, which happened to be twice the size of the previous one.

Everything had a relationship. This is not ‘one time like this, one time like that,’ you know?

The approach was consistent throughout, because consistency is extremely important in design. This is forgotten most of the time by people designing books, magazines, signs, packaging, whatever it is. The fewer number of typefaces you use, the better, and the fewer number of type sizes is even better. It all stems, naturally, from that good Swiss approach.

The Swiss, maybe because they make watches, they are so precise.

Your subway signage manual is still in use, right?

How did you get involved doing New York subway system signage [in addition to the map, Vignelli created a standards manual for the NYC subway] and what were the challenges?

Back in 1966 the Transit Authority realized that the signage they had was kind of poor for the job it had to do. So they went to MoMA, and asked them if they could suggest who would be the best designer to do that. And I had just arrived over here, so they told them, ‘Oh, you’re lucky because Vignelli can do these things very well, and he’s in New York.’

They got in touch with us. At that time we had a company that was called Unimark International. They came to Unimark, and we got the assignment.

They first asked us to study four stations, as a test, you know.

Times Square was one of them; Grand Central, I think, was another one, and then another station in Queens, and then Broadway-Nassau, if I recall. We did the studies on these four stations, the traffic flow and all the analysis needed to determine where the points of decision were—because the whole thing in signage, the number one rule, is to give information at the point of decision. Never before and never after. When you drive, you find out most of the time that this rule is not followed—you’re getting information too early, so by the time you get to the fork, you miss it. Or it’s given too late, even after the fork, so you miss it. It’s very typical to make this kind of mistake in terms of signage. So to determine where the signs had to be was the first part of the study. Then, of course, it was, for us, obvious to use Helvetica. It was the perfect type, and legible. I must say that at the time it was not even around here, so we used Standard at the time of the

I’s still in use. This was 1966, so it’s over 40 years. I mean, the background changed from white to black when they had the graffiti explosion, and somebody had the idea of doing the signs in black with white type. That’s okay; it’s fine. Not a big difference. I like the white background better, but that’s okay. I’m glad the signage was not changed. The map is an easy thing to change—it’s fast and inexpensive. The signage is a very expensive thing to change, so it’s going to be there for a long time.

What’s your opinion of the impact of the computer on typography?

In the ‘60s, we were taking Standard and cutting the sides of the letters in order to get the type tighter. A good typographer always has sensitivity about the distance between letters.

It makes a tremendous amount of difference. We think typography is black and white. Typography is really white, you know. It’s not even black, in a sense. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In a sense, it’s like music—it’s not the notes; it’s the space you put between the notes that makes the music. It’s very much the same situation.

The spacing between letters is important, and the spacing between the lines is important, too. And what typographers do, what we do all the time, is continuously work with those two elements, kerning and leading. Now, in the old times we were all doing this with a blade and cutting type and cutting our fingers all the time. But eventually, thank God, the Apple computer came about. Apple made the right kind of computer for the communication field. IBM made the PC, and the PC was no good for communication. The PC was great for numbers, and they probably made studies that there were more people involved with numbers—banks, insurance companies, businesses of all kinds. But they made a tremendous mistake at the same time by not considering the size of the communications world. That community is enormous, you know—newspapers, television, anything that is printed. It’s enormous. Advertising, design, you name it.

Anyhow, Apple, thank God, got the intuition of going after that market, and so in 1990 they came out with a computer that we designers could use. Now, let’s face it: the computer is a great thing, but it’s just a tool, just like a pencil is a tool. The computer has much more memory, the pencil has no memory whatsoever, and I have even less. But it is a fantastic tool which allowed the best typography ever done in the history of typography, because you can do the kerning perfectly for the situation. You can do the leading perfectly for whatever you’re encountering. Not only that, but you see it right away; you can print it right away. It brings immediacy to your thoughts, and that is something that never happened before in the history of mankind.

desire to be satisfied by a certain THERE IS VERY LITTLE kind of type rather than another.

AWARENESS OF I was just watching the other day a funny mini-documentary, GRAPHIC DESIGN AND whatever they call them, on TV. GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. And they were saying that ABC, EVEN WITH CLIENTS. the television channel, has done all kinds of programs over the last 25 years. They have done documentaries about everything that you can imagine, but they’ve never once done something on graphic design, which is unbelievable. Their logo was designed by Paul Rand, who was the greatest American graphic designer of the century, and nobody knows him!

It allows you to do the best typography ever, but it also allows you to do the worst ever. So we have seen, particularly at the beginning when the computer came about, people taking type and doing all kinds of things. Everybody became a designer.

They were taking type and squeezing it in, stretching it. It was unbelievable what they were doing. All of a sudden we were facing the greatest amount of vulgarity, or what I call visual pollution, that had ever been done before. But at the same time, we also had some of the best work ever done.

Of course, the best work you never see, but vulgarity is very ubiquitous, so it’s everywhere.

Everybody knows about singers, they know about architects, they know about painters, they know about writers, they know about good doctors, but very few people know about graphic designers. So maybe graphic design doesn’t have the right kind of exposure. They know sometimes, maybe, about somebody doing posters; I think more people are aware, for instance, of Milton Glaser, because he’s a terrific designer, an artist, and he does fabulous posters. People were aware of Peter Max back 30 years ago. But generally speaking, there is very little awareness of graphic design and graphic designers. Even with clients. Do they care about type, what kind of typeface we use, and so on and so forth? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and maybe it’s better that way.

This is another incentive for us. It gives us another reason to fight. The life of a designer is a life of fight, to fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, visual disease is what we have all around, and what we try to do is to cure it somehow with design, by eliminating, as much as possible, the people who make it. Not physically, but at least limiting their possibility of polluting the world. It’s a mission. Is it arrogant? Perhaps. Is it pretension? Perhaps.

But so is every other field. You find the same attitude in music; you find the same attitude in literature; you find it in any kind of art, and in architecture. There’s a continuous fight against ugliness, a continuous fight against noise instead of music.

It doesn’t surprise me that a great tool like the computer can allow this explosion of visual pollution. But in good hands, it’s the best thing that ever came about.

What’s the future of typography and graphic design?

It’s hard to say. I don’t think that there are going to be drastic changes until the printed word is no longer around—it has to be done with typefaces. And the sensibilities come and go; newer technology comes and goes; the computer brings the use of certain type that is more appropriate for the computer, et cetera. So there might be new technology that changes it.

There are people who think that the type should be expressive—they have a different point of view from mine.

I don’t think type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface, and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people who, when they write ‘dog’ think it should bark, you know? So there are all kinds of people, and therefore, there will always people who will find work designing funky type, and it could be that all of a sudden a funky typeface takes the world by storm, but I doubt it. I’m a strong believer in intellect and intelligence, and I’m a strong believer in intellectual elegance, so that, I think, will prevent vulgarity from really taking over the world more than it has already.

Some defenses need to be put up, and I think, actually, that the more culture spreads out and the more refined education becomes, the more refined the sensibility about type becomes, too. The more uneducated the person is who you talk to, the more he likes horrible typefaces.

What are your thoughts about people’s awareness of type? Do you think the average person in New York notices the differences, consciously or unconsciously?

One of the interesting questions is, do people really care about type? Do they care about typography? Do they know anything? They don’t know about Helvetica, Bodoni, and Garamond, and Cooper Black, or things like that, you know.

It’s funny, but you’d be surprised how much people respond to typefaces, and even if they don’t know the names, they say, “I like something like that.” So they have some kind of

Look at comics like The Hulk, things like that. It’s not even type. Look at anything which is elegant and refined; you find elegant and refined typefaces. The more culture is refined in the future—this might take a long time, but eventually education might prevail over ignorance—the more you’ll find good typography. I’m convinced of that.

This interview was condensed and edited with the author’s permission.

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker and photographer based in New York and London.

Four Steps to Creating an Agile Marketing Culture

By Barre Hardy

Achieving marketing agility starts with your company’s culture, which is where the rubber hits the road.

However, companies often put in place a process, or a set of processes, to address agility instead of taking the time to work on building the culture required to achieve agility and sustain it—to really change the organizations operational habits from what they are today to a much more fluid, flexible, and iterative approach to doing work.

Although processes can help you make small gains in agility, the big gains are going to happen because of your culture and your people.

What does an agile culture look like?

• People work across functions and silos to collaborate in self-organizing teams.

• Decision-making is empowered, and it happens as close to the work as possible.

• Teams are trusted to experiment, to take initiative, and to even fail as long as they learn.

• Work is done in short, active cycles of prioritize-test-learn, prioritize-test-learn, and so on.

• The customer is at the center of decision-making.

The following four steps to an agile culture are a guide for companies that are making the transition from traditional to agile marketing.

Step 1: Be a committed leader “Your customer and process are important, but if you don’t have a culture where your people feel empowered to be adaptable, to learn and communicate, you won’t be able to serve the rest of the business.” —Leslie Snavely, VP of marketing and corporate sales, CHG Healthcare Services Put simply, leadership can make or break the agile culture.

Leadership drives the mindset and embraces the methodology that brings agile marketing to life. Leaders empower their teams to test and adapt as needed without traditional rounds of approvals. That means support for taking risks and making mistakes because they will teach you something new.

Successful agile leaders get buy-in from the C-suite and their staff to undertake a completely new approach to marketing strategy, planning, testing, and measurement. By flattening their team and allowing decision-making by the role closest to the work, they cut red tape and eliminate delays caused by internal hierarchies. These leaders welcome change, encourage flexible solutions, and embrace learning that can be exploited for continual improvement.

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Tips: • Be clear about goals with those inside and outside Marketing.

• Expect and reward experimentation and creativity as a way of work.

• Put in place the processes that support data-driven and customer-focused decision-making.

Step 2: Define a shared purpose “One major thing that slows a company down is a lack of a shared purpose.... If you want to move fast, you have to know where you are going. That’s why our goal is to join people together around a shared purpose. This is the essence of what we want to accomplish.” —Allen Olivo, in his former role as VP of global brand and marketing communications, PayPal; currently, VP of global brand and communications at Brocade Setting a culture of agility requires communicating where you are heading and how you are going to get there, and reinforcing that purpose along the way.

Lisa Arthur, CMO of marketing applications for Teradata, used a vivid analogy to create a shared purpose among her team. Showing the view from the top of Mt. Everest, she’d repeat her mantra: “We are going to be the best B2B marketers on the planet.” She’d reinforce her message at team meetings by showing a view from the top of the world’s highest mountain.

Arthur used this metaphor for inspiration as well as coaching, sharing what it would take to reach the top: “I talked about base camps [along the way] as a scorecard for how we are doing. These are things like success for sales and customers.

The base camp methodology created a scorecard for how we were doing.” Frequent check-ins on progress to your shared goals also allow for adjustments at shorter intervals so campaigns will continually improve and garner better results in the end.

Tips: • Break down silos and bring together teams that fit the goal, not the org chart.

• Be transparent about goals, progress, and support for your agile teams’ projects.

Agile marketing means you anticipate results based on early insights and data, respond to results based on measurement, and adjust often to get the best result—even if that means shutting down the effort.

Another crucial aspect of agile marketing is that you are transparent about your methods with the rest of your company. Many of the marketers we have interviewed use “show times” to showcase not just what marketing is doing but also why, with whom, and how it worked (or why it didn’t and what they learned).

An agile approach tears down the walls among and between traditionally disparate groups (just as we’ve seen lately with the advent of Big Data and the resulting need for CMOs and CIOs to work together).

Tips: • Use short planning cycles to quickly course-correct based on market or customer feedback.

• Offer your organization real-time visibility into Marketing performance.

• Share “show times” that celebrate and broadcast marketing milestones and results.

Step 4: Encourage characteristics that enhance agility “Finding people who have that right cultural fit and who are going to work effectively in an agile environment is one of the most important things that you can do as a manager.” —Tom Vogl, in his former role as CMO of The Clymb; currently, chief operating officer at Barn2Door After transforming your organization and earning some wins, agile marketing will become the air that you breathe.

A crucial way to keep it that way is to fill your organization with people who thrive in an agile culture and who contribute beyond a narrow skillset.

Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer at SAP, has a compensation system that encourages employees to move away from “being a really great ‘product marketer’ or a really great ‘Web marketer’ to being a really great marketer, period.” The best people for agile teams are called “T-shaped” because they have a vertical specialty but they also contribute horizontally with enthusiasm, ideas, and support.

Tips:

• Define governance for, and empower decision-making to encourage, quick action.

• Identify valued behaviors and build a measurement system around them.

Step 3: Act with speed and transparency

• Develop a system with built-in rewards that reinforce agility and a job well done.

“Adopting a way more Agile approach, we probably pulled off in 5-1⁄2 to 6 months what most organizations would do in 12.” —Lisa Arthur, CMO of marketing applications, Teradata Making big changes to become agile can be hard for marketers who are attached to traditional cycles and current ways of operating. However, today’s consumers frequently change their behaviors or provide instant feedback, and you as a marketer need to respond accordingly.

• Be an example by being curious, learning continually, and sharing new insights.

Barre Hardy is senior director and agile marketing research lead with CMG Partners, a consultancy helping businesses grow through marketing strategy.

The Giant Marketing Opportunity You’re Missing

By Kelsey Humphreys

As the attention span of your target customer shrinks, it becomes increasingly difficult to get your message to them.

Even if they happen to visit your site, they may not stay for long.

A poorly designed homepage could end your relationship on the spot -- which is why this one marketing trick can make all the difference. You can quickly create a behavior flow on your site that leads viewers right to your brand story, just by adding a prominent link to your “Frequently Asked Questions” page.

In my consulting work with businesses of all sizes, this trick never fails. You may have thought the FAQ page was just for customer-service departments, consumer products or ecommerce stores. And while it definitely can be, it can also serve as a simple way to direct visitors directly to selling points you want to highlight for them.

The FAQ link is like a big red flashing light that says click me. Why? It’s like a cheat sheet for the consumer or potential client. Putting the FAQ link in your main navigation -- or clearly linked somewhere on the homepage -- nudges them toward the story you want to tell, no matter your product or services.

Here are a few tips to make sure your FAQ page is ready for all that new traffic:

Go beyond answering questions Most brands see the FAQ page as a place to answer questions but instead think of it as a place to start your conversation, make your points and expand on your mission.

For example, a recent client had a question on her page that read “Which product has the lowest number of calories?” My client is a former engineer-turned-entrepreneur. She’s not a marketer, so she answered plainly: “The watermelon flavor is only 34 calories.” She definitely missed an opportunity to tell her brand story. Instead, she could have said: “One of the great things about our products is that all of the flavors have barely any added sugars and NO fillers! Every flavor is much lower in calories than almost ANY other dessert in the marketplace today. To answer your question, the watermelon flavor is only 34 calories.

Answer the questions you WANT people to ask Yes, you need to actually answer things that are frequently asked and should be completely honestly. After that, you can also add questions that help sell your selling points or repeat your main brand position. Add questions that allow you to write out what makes you different than your competitors.

Add anything you think you can answer that will take them from a maybe to a yes. Also carefully consider the order in which you list the questions. Decide which questions will grab their attention first, which ones will keep them on the page and which ones are the best opportunities to tell a story.

Lead them to other pages on your site Linking to other pages within your answers is not only good for SEO, it keeps them on your site longer. Use phrasing in your answers that will guide them to product purchases specific to their needs or keep them engaged in your story.

For example, you could add the question “Do you have any testimonials?” and answer “Why yes, we love our clients and we are grateful that they love us too! Read what they have said here” and link the word “here” to your testimonials page.

Demonstrate that you are the leader or expert This may be more applicable to consultants and writers, but the FAQ page is a place where you can write detailed information about your industry, while also positioning yourself as an expert. Consider starting at the very beginning, explaining the ins and outs of your entire industry and why your product is the best on the market. You can link to blog posts that show your vast knowledge of your space or any awards you, or your company has received.

Kelsey Humphreys is the host of entrepreneurship talk show The Pursuit, an entrepreneur, speaker, and author of the Amazon bestseller Go Solo.

Inside Amazon’s Quest To Brand Your Home

By Mark Wilson

AMAZON’S DASH BUTTON LETS YOU ORDER MORE STUFF WITH THE PRESS OF A FINGER. THE COST? YOUR HOME’S SOUL. Anytime you run out of anything in your home, Amazon wants to be there when you want to order more. We’ve seen the groundwork for that retail domestic utopia in the Dash barcode-reading wand, its Echo voice system, and even the Fire smartphone that had a whole button dedicated to scanning products.

Now, Amazon has released its easiest solution yet: a onetouch button to order more Tide laundry pods, Cottonelle toilet paper, or a long list of other items.

The Dash Button is a bite-sized plastic module that you can

stick anywhere you might want to impulse-restock a particular product (presumably in your home). It connects to Wi-Fi. You push it. Goods are shipped to your door. The buttons will be free for Prime members to order, so that they can use them to order more stuff from Amazon.

But this sets up an interesting quandary. While Amazon’s previous solutions were invisible, unobtrusive ways to order more stuff, each Dash Button is branded with the logo of its respective product. It’s a mini billboard lurking in your home, a bit of free advertising space given in exchange for mindless ordering.

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But when I ask Douglas Van Praet—behaviorist, Fast Company contributor, and author of the book Unconscious Branding—if all these logos in our home are going to make us more likely to buy Tide or Gatorade, he’s doubtful, since people who install these buttons are a self-selecting group.

“You’re already a loyal Tide buyer. This logo is just another reminder of your affinity for a brand. It’s mostly going to be reinforcing people already using the product,” he says.

“Except when you walk a guest through your house and it’s, ‘Look at these new badass front-load washers!’ and they see the Tide button on it, and it becomes, ‘so-and-so uses Tide!’”

Indeed, take a look around your home now without rummaging through your cabinets for the Glad trash bags, and very few things are actually branded in your normal line of sight. Your furniture doesn’t have any obvious labeling, and neither do the pictures on the wall, nor the plants on your window sills. And while TVs, kitchen appliances, and bathroom fixtures do, they likely aren’t sporting the same bright, full-color logos Amazon’s buttons will feature. With Amazon Dash, the company is enabling retail partners to place the equivalent of banner ads in our homes—that is, assuming we hang them places more overt than the inside of our cabinets.

As Van Praet explains, Amazon has introduced a tantalizing trade—let the branding wash over you in your own home, and have a less taxing experience on your brain. It’s a taste of the future, the precursor to a world where our dishwasher orders detergent automatically, subsidized by a prominent logo.

“The problem with the Internet is, our conscious decision [energy] is so limited, we don’t want to engage with the Internet every time we have a transaction,” says Van Praet.

Looking over Amazon’s proposal for the Dash Button, he saw a lot of merit in the physical aspect of an order button—a user experience that was more mindless than digging through the Amazon app. “This gives you something in your physical environment to obviate you going online to actually order this

stuff—which I could see as a tangible benefit.”

The app here allows you to change the exact package you’re ordering, but it’s not needed long-term to use the button.

So the question becomes: What exactly is the benefit of having all those logos around? Branding researcher Dr. Patrali Chatterjee, of Montclair State University, agrees with Van Praet that retailers are probably preaching to their own choir by hanging these logos in the homes of brand loyalists.

However, she’s quick to point out that not all people buy all products loyally. A lot of people are what she calls “switchers.”

“I may be a Raisin Bran Crunch loyalist when it comes to cereal,” she explains. “I buy it every time I go out. But when I go to detergents, I may be someone who buys just whatever brand is at the lowest price.”

Amazon has offered a convenient solution to the “switchers” of the world, wrapped in a branded button that sits in your periphery of vision, in an environment where you’re very relaxed. Chatterjee’s research has found that brand experience, even in the corner of your eye, can create positive feelings toward a brand in as few as 23 exposures. So any brand whose market is largely switchers gains a potent onetwo punch with an Amazon Dash Button.

Where does this leave us, the consumers? If we give in to this mindless consumer utopia Amazon is attempting to construct, we can save the mental energy for the things that matter more than saving 20 cents on a bottle of detergent.

“The question ‘Are we starting to explore the model of display advertising into the environment of our sacred home?’ is kind of interesting,” Van Praet says. “But it could be a fair-value exchange. Maybe the convenience of not having to think [is worth it].”

Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.

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Things You Can Learn From the Most Authentic Brands in the World

Which brands do consumers consider the most authentic?

What does it mean to be authentic in today’s market? And can companies remain authentic even when they grow?

Authenticity is a word readily bandied about in marketing, and more and more businesses are striving to align with this increasingly valued concept.

At one time, authenticity meant having a strong set of brand values, goals, and mission in place before starting a business. Now, however, it’s about more than that, as brands that expand and grow can lose sight of their initial purpose.

The World’s Most Authentic Brands A 2014 study by Cohn & Wolfe revealed which brands customers perceive to be the most “authentic.” The study covered 12 countries and asked customers about which factors engender enough trust in a company for it to be considered authentic.

In the UK, supermarkets and department stores led, with M&S, Tesco, and John Lewis ranking as most trusted.

Globally, however, the leaders varied, ranging from fast food chains (McDonald’s, KFC, and Starbucks), to tech pioneers

By Adele Halsall

(Samsung and Apple) and household stores (Wal-Mart and Carrefour).

What Authentic Companies Are Doing Right According to 91% of customers surveyed, communicating honestly about products was the most highly valued factor contributing to a company’s authenticity.

Clearly, that is a strong starting point for any brand, with more and more consumers wanting to know what goes into our products and what they can expect from them.

Among other factors were the following: • Being open about one’s environmental impact and sustainability measures (87%) • Innovation (72%) • Product utility (61%) • Brand appeal (60%) • Popularity among peers (30%) Those findings dispute much of what we have read about the relationship between customers and brands.

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People don’t, in fact, value innovation and new products as the main way to measure a brand’s uniqueness or genuineness. Rather, they are much more concerned with what’s happening on the inside, and keeping customers in the dark about certain facts can only serve to drive a wedge between them and brands.

What Can We Learn?

McDonald’s, Samsung, and Apple were ranked highest on the scale of the world’s most authentic global brands. So what can other business leaders learn from them in the quest to achieve authenticity?

1. Be clear from the start about your business practices Transparency is often underrated; yet, if businesses employ this practice from the start, they’re much less likely to have problems later on.

Being transparent means letting your customers know exactly how you make your products, including what goes into them and where you source your materials.

If you have a squeaky-clean approach to the manufacturing process already, it’s a chance to show off about the things you’re most proud of. If there are things you still believe you can work on, don’t forget to share those, too. Be forthcoming about the kinks, and show how you are working to iron those out. (Mexican-American food outlet Chipotle does this pretty well.)

You can reserve a special place on your website for letting customers know all about your humble practices, but why not use it as something to shout about on social media?

Many brands are using platforms such as Tumblr and Instagram to give behind-the-scenes glimpses at their products and the people who make them, strengthening their content and their relationship with followers.

2. Stick to what you know Many of the biggest companies—Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Starbucks—knew what they were good at and stuck to it.

That doesn’t mean they haven’t since diversified into other markets, but they spent a great deal of time perfecting the thing they did best before expanding into other areas.

According to John Furguson of Brand Insight Blog, every time a company diversifies or tackles a new audience, it risks alienating itself from its existing customers. Go slowly; stick to what you know; build customer trust; make customers love you. Everything else will follow naturally.

it pledged to answer any customer question about its food, no matter how grim or demanding.

The program is still running, and it has attracted questions such as “Is there nicotine in your food?” and “Are your fries made from real potatoes?” Although the chain has managed to put to bed many of the fear-mongering rumors about its food, it has also been open about the not-so-perfect aspects, such as beef from cows that are fed additional hormones.

The brave move resulted in not only renewed respect for the brand but also a refreshed perception of its products.

By taking steps to remove particular fears and uncertainties, McDonald’s has been able to clean up its image and convince customers to give it a second chance. And its sourcing practices continue to be a key part of its marketing to this day.

4. Learn to turn PR disasters into opportunities Acting with integrity is especially important when a crisis hits, and nobody knows this better than McDonald’s. The brand has a history of turning fear into opportunity, using it as a vehicle to keep a check on its existing business strategies and looking at how it can improve.

One such example was when Greenpeace attacked the company in 2008 for its agricultural practices harming the Amazon. McDonald’s immediately admitted there was a problem and joined forces with Greenpeace to put a moratorium on damaging soy farming practices in Brazil.

That gutsy move earned the company some major credibility and helped it to engage with a new crowd of eco-conscious customers.

5. Be consistent To make all of this hard work stick, it has to be consistent.

The practices that help to establish your brand’s authentic mark on the world will have to be lived day in, day out, and enforced over time, before your customers can slowly start to regard you as authentic.

This approach worked for Apple, which had to suffer a major slump in 1997 before it could start to climb its way back to global success.

When one aspect of your business strategy changes, it must be reflected across all of your platforms—and anywhere a customer comes into contact with your brand—to make your mission absolutely watertight.

There’s nothing worse than a company taking steps to look authentic and appearing ingenuous in the process.

3. Give customers a voice Following the famous Supersize Me documentary film in 2003, which had the potential to ruin the McDonald’s brand forever, the company’s Canada division took immediate action. With the program named Our Food, Your Questions,

Adele Halsall is a writer and researcher for Customer Service Guru. She is passionate about retail and consumer trends, and how they are shaped by advertising and social marketing.

Three Ways to Make Your Phone Presence a Key Driver in Your Marketing Mix

By Tristan Barnum

As marketers, we read, think, and talk a lot about Web presence—whether social media, content marketing, search, or other digital medium—and we put a lot of time and effort into perfecting our brand’s image, messaging, and positioning. As we should. However, when was the last time you considered “phone presence” during your branding refresh exercises and marketing brainstorms?

Traditional telephony may not be one of the first agenda items that come to mind in a content planning meeting, but perhaps it should be. More than half of consumers still prefer to pick up the phone and talk to a person when they decide to interact with a business, according to Actionable Research’s June 2014 survey of consumers in the US and seven other countries. That’s huge!

Also, although soaring smartphone penetration makes apps a viable channel, many consumers still find it more convenient to use their mobile phone to talk with an agent than to peck

out their contact information and questions on screen, the Actionable Research survey finds.

So, why is it that so many marketers tend to overlook the branding opportunities in voice communications? Is it simply because telephony is not the hot, new craze that gets all the buzz these days? Are traditional voice communications lacking PR to advocate for this older channel?

Regardless of the reason, phone presence can be as important as a business’s Web and mobile presence for expressing a brand and attracting customers.

Phone presence can be particularly critical for small businesses that are just getting established and forming a brand identity.

Marketers should have the following three considerations in mind when they’re developing their communications strategy for the voice channel.

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1. Pick the right phone numbers for your business At first glance, you might think this is a no-brainer: You’ll find a catchy vanity number—such as (800) TECH DOC—to make it easy for current and potential customers to remember your number when they need it.

But be aware of the downsides. Vanity numbers cost significantly more, and the chronic short supply is making it more and more difficult to find one that matches your brand or value proposition.

Standard-issue numbers can be highly effective, particularly if you know how to wring the most value from them. For example, consider getting multiple numbers so each one can be assigned to a separate campaign; that makes it easy to track each campaign’s reach and effectiveness—and thus its ROI. If you’re targeting a large geographic area—such as an entire state or multiple states—consider getting a local number for each market within that area. Those can help attract consumers and businesses that prefer to work with a company that has a local presence, or those who have phone plans that charge extra for long-distance or international calls.

The reverse also can apply. By choosing one or more toll-free numbers, a small business can create the impression that it’s larger than it is. That perception can help attract customers who believe that larger businesses are better able to meet their needs.

2. Align every touch point in your phone presence to your brand Two-thirds of small businesses (66%) consider phone calls the most valuable source of incoming leads, according to BIA/ Kelsey. So, what first impression and business image are you conveying to those prospects when they make their phone call?

First, there are the basic best-practices. For example, the greeting should be concise enough so callers don’t feel as if it’s standing in the way of getting what they want. Your automated phone system also could include the ability for callers to dial a particular salesperson’s extension, directly or by his or her last name, so they don’t have to sit on hold.

An alternative is to give each salesperson, or group of salespeople, their own phone number that goes through the cloud and rings their mobile phone.

Then there are the key image considerations in your greeting and automated phone system prompts: They should reflect your corporate voice and branding goals as much as possible. So although an accountant’s greeting could be formal to make callers feel confident that they can trust that firm with their money, a marketing consultancy or design firm

might come up with a catchy message that shows creativity, and a dentist might choose a soothing message to pacify callers who are fearful or in pain.

Also consider the voice you select for your greeting: The depth, tone, and gender can say different things about your brand, as well as resonate with callers differently. Think about whether hiring voice talent to record those messages may make sense for your brand. You can even consult with your telephony provider to see whether they’ve worked with one and can recommend voice talent.

Finally, consider using hold messages to educate callers about offers, products, and services, or to reinforce your branding in a way that’s helpful (as opposed to irritating).

Sometimes less repetition and more creativity is a direction to go—a great topic for the marketing team to discuss in the context of the business’s marketing and branding goals.

3. Be prepared to scale up to maintain a professional image Mobile search will generate 73 billion calls to businesses by 2018, up from 30 billion in 2013, BIA/Kelsey estimates.

That’s just one example of why it’s important to ensure your IVR, trunks, and other phone systems can scale up to meet the demand that a successful campaign can generate.

Hosted phone solutions could provide the additional flexibility and cost-savings when a calling campaign ensues or there’s rapid employee growth. With on-premise PBXs and other systems, businesses risk overpaying for too much capacity or buying an undersized system that can’t keep up when a campaign lights up the phones more than expected. With hosted solutions, they pay for only what they need, when they need it. And when money isn’t wasted on unneeded phone capacity, it can mean a bigger budget for marketing. *** Your phone presence remains a regular touchpoint for your brand, so it’s important to plan your voice communications content, style, and customer experience a way that reflects your image and marketing goals.

To maximize that effectiveness, make sure to include your phone presence in your ongoing branding reviews and brainstorming exercises, and update accordingly.

The traditional voice channel is not going away any time soon, so spend time considering your options and planning, and be strategic about the branding and marketing opportunities your phone presence affords.

Tristan Barnum is the CMO of Voxox, a provider of unified cloud communication solutions for consumers and businesses.

INTERVIEW

How Did Innocent Drinks Drive A 35% Engagement Rate On Their Twitter Ads?

By Andy Vale

Are you ever worried that your social presence is a little dry and could do with being a little juicier? Well, orange you glad to see SocialBro and Innocent pear up to help your Twitter profile become the apple of your customer’s eye?

UK beverage giant Innocent Drinks began life in 1999 and is now valued at over £320m, employing over 300 people across Europe. Coined Innocent for their pure and natural approach to fruit smoothies, the company built its brand on honesty, an active willingness to engage with their customers, and a totally bananas style of communication that is reflected in their marketing activities. These traits meant that they were able to adapt quickly and successfully to Twitter when they joined in 2008, and to other social networks as they emerged, building a personality and following that would be the envy of the FMCG market.

They now post consistently engaging content with staggering engagement rates from their 730,000+ fans on social media, that brings serious benefits that they were keen to elaborate on. We spoke to Joe McEwan, Head Of Digital & Communities, and Helena Langdon, Communities Manager, about why this level of interaction is so important to Innocent Drinks, how they have started full marketing campaigns on

Twitter, and how to build up a loyal, vocal customer fanbase like theirs:

SocialBro: What are the social media strategies and objectives for Innocent Drinks?

Joe McEwan: “As an FMCG brand, primarily our aim is to engage people and spread brand awareness. We look to do this by producing conversation-starting content, and delivering brilliant customer service.

Helena Langdon: “We want to tell people about us in the most engaging way we can. It’s our goal to make our pages a place on social media where people want to visit and enjoy seeing in their timelines, then people won’t mind when we try to sell them drinks every now and again.”

McEwan: “All of our social activities are an extension of what we’ve always done. Right from day one we talked to people on our packaging and used it to invite people to get in touch.

In the early days we had no money for TV or print ads so we used our packaging to talk to people, to start conversations.

And we’ve always talked like human beings. No jargon, no

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technical mumbo jumbo. Just normal words, written in an honest, engaging way. People really connected with that. It helped to set us apart, and it got people talking about us. It’s completely ingrained in the company that we should look to talk to people wherever they might be.”

How do you keep the characteristic Innocent tone of voice consistent across social media?

What type of sign-off process do you use for the social media content?

McEwan: “A very quick, almost non-existent one. When someone new joins the team, I’ll spend a couple of months looking over all of their posts before they’re published, but once I’m happy the writer is ‘getting’ it, and they’re producing more good stuff than bad then I’m happy to let them post when they want. I feel really sorry for community managers who have content dictated to them by CEOs or brand managers who don’t really understand how social media, or one-on-one interactions work. If you hire the right person, give them decent guidance at the beginning, and then give them the space to learn for themselves, they’ll learn so much quicker, and ultimately produce better content, than if you prescribe everything to them.”

Langdon: “It’s a mistake-driven culture, which can be frustrating at times. But if you’re honest with the evaluation of what you’re writing, given helpful feedback when you start out, and the freedom to try things out without fear of getting fired over one small mistake, then you’ll find so many more things that work than under a more rigid structure. From that early process of working closely with the team I now have that autonomy which means we can turn things around really quickly. For example, if I’m live-Tweeting the Brit Awards and

Langdon: “The normal way that we talk to each other is generally how we Tweet, how we write on the packaging, and how we do as much of our copy as possible. It should feel like a human being talking to other human beings. Hopefully an interesting human being. We expect people to have a grasp of this general tone of voice when we hire them. In the interview process I had to do quite a few writing challenges to show I ‘got’ our tone of voice. Other than a few basic guidelines (don’t swear, don’t be mean) there’s no specific rule book on how to write for us though, it’s more of a gut feeling based around a few brand principles.”

McEwan: “We keep records of everything we’ve ever posted on social. So when someone starts we give them a pool of “Grade A” posts that performed well and “Grade B” posts that didn’t do quite so well, that way they can hopefully develop those ideas or learn from them to build “Grade A+” content.

You can’t beat real examples when it comes to best practise.

It’s been really useful at helping us carve a consistent social presence in international markets – we’ve got a full library of content that we can send to the team over there to help get them clued up on what has worked well for our brand and what hasn’t.”

I’m spending all my time getting sign off from Joe for every tweet then I’m not spending my time doing what I should be doing – coming up with great content ideas.”

How important is real time marketing on Twitter for the brand?

McEwan: “Our most shared posts are often reactive ones – ideas that have been turned around in half-an-hour. If people are talking about an event, and we produce a bit of genuinely great, intelligent content that ties into that, people will share it. We can generate mass brand awareness for next to no cost. Which is why it’s worth doing.”

Langdon: “Brands are good at picking specific moments, but if everyone is trying to jump on the same specific moment,

there’s a lot of noise that your one post has to cut through.

Whereas if you find an event, such as the Brits or Great British Bake Off – which is perfect for our audience -, and provide a running commentary throughout the event you can have multiple opportunities to connect with your audience with less competition for their attention from other big brands.”

wanted one. Back in the day, all of our drinks had banana in and loads of people were asking for ones without. We passed all the comments on to our products team, they took them on board, made a new recipe, and then we used our social channels to let people know we’d heard and acted on what they’d said.”

How do you decide whether a real time topic is right for your brand?

Langdon: “You need to look for things that are a natural brand fit, we can’t just force something out for the sake of it because it’s trending. Nobody wants to see that. Over time we’ve learned that if we can’t find a hook for something after five minutes of looking for one, then it’s usually best to leave it. If we’ve got nothing to say about, move on. Just because everyone else is talking about something doesn’t mean we have to too. Content for the sake of content is not good content.”

How does this strategy tie in with selling smoothies?

McEwan: “It’s not a separate strategy, in my eyes, as we can use reactive content to drive awareness of our products. The challenge is always to find interesting, creative ways to talk about our products. The more interesting our product posts are, the more people will engage with them and the further they will travel.”

In what ways does Twitter influence your wider marketing strategy?

McEwan: “It’s a great testing ground for content. We can take some of our successes and give ten ideas to our marketing team to see what we could try elsewhere. We created a spoof iPhone 6 ad for Twitter to tie in with Apple’s iPhone 6 launch announcement last year. It did really well, so two weeks later, on the day the phone launched in store in we took that exact same content and put it into an ad in the Metro. We also turned it into a sampling campaign, handing out bottles of our apple juice to the queues of people waiting to buy the phone in central London. Photos of the Metro ad ended up online on hugely popular sites like imgur and The Lad Bible.

Even Alan Sugar retweeted it!”

“So this was a full reactive marketing campaign with our product at the heart of it, that reached millions and millions of people, and it all started off with a Tweet.”

Post by The LAD Bible.

Do your Twitter followers influence other parts of your business?

McEwan: “We want the gap between our drinkers and the people making the decisions to be as small as possible. We resource the team so that we can read every single comment on social media, and every email we receive, and the company trusts us to highlight the things that are mattering most to our audience.”

“For example we only started making banana-free smoothies because enough people got in touch to let us know they

What are some of your favourite aspects of Twitter?

McEwan: “I’m keen on the really interesting conversations you can have with people on Twitter. We regularly have up to 500 conversations with people on social media every week.

So over a year we have around about 25,000 one one one conversations with people. That’s a lot of people we can win over and turn into innocent advocates if we look after them well enough.”

“A challenge for us is making our 140 character reply to someone so good that they want to show it to their friends.

People are used to brand conversations being a bit generic, or not getting a response at all, so it’s a golden opportunity to surprise people with a top quality, highly personalised response. I think more and more brands are waking up to the importance of being human, helpful, and amusing in those conversations and getting top writers on board to deliver them for you.”

Langdon: “And we get some of our best ideas from those one on one conversations. We only started writing our weekly newsletter because someone emailed us suggesting we write one. And now on Twitter, we’ve built up this hub of funny, creative, interesting followers who are always giving us fresh, weird content ideas in those one-on-one conversations. An idea could come out of one of those conversations, which we

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36 then use as public facing content. We’re proud supporters of Penguin Awareness Day because a nice chap called Paul told us that the day existed.”

What led to that level of engagement on your promoted content?

Langdon: “We experiment. Over the years we’ve put out so much different content that we’ve now got a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t. We’re not interested in putting stuff out there that you wouldn’t want to tap your mate on the shoulder to show to them. If we strictly stick to delivering that kind of content regularly, we’ll continue to get good engagement on our promoted content. We know people aren’t going on Twitter to see ads from brands, so if we’re really respectful of that, and keep that in our heads when we come up with ideas, it stops us putting out stuff that no one wants to see.”

Innocent Drinks help their customers to get their five-a-day. So here’s five smooth social secrets to help you get a more refreshing social brand:

Are these conversations always with people who have specifically tagged your brand, or do you use social media tools to seek out conversations?

McEwan: “We use social listening tools to see what people are saying about our brand indirectly. There’s been some confusion around the sugar in our smoothies, and we noticed people mistakenly thought we were adding sugar to our drinks, which we’ve never done. So we use social listening to try to educate the misinformed.”

Is this something you need to constantly keep on top of?

McEwan: “Yeah, I think so. If you bother to respond to people who have an issue with you, you have a chance of winning them over. And if you win over enough people you reach a point where those people will respond to naysayers on your behalf, so it saves the team time in the long run.”

Where does promoted social content fit into your marketing plan?

McEwan: “Promoted content is becoming a bigger and bigger part of what we do. On Facebook, we have to do it. We spent years building up this really cultivated, engaged fanbase that we now struggle to reach organically. So if we want to reach people with content that isn’t immediately engaging, then we’ve got to invest. Our organic reach on Twitter is still really strong but when we’ve got a message we want to get out there at scale, it makes sense to put some money behind it.

Our promotion performance is really strong and way ahead of the FMCG industry’s average. Some of our promoted Tweets are getting a 35+% engagement rate, which is fairly unheard of for the majority of sponsored posts.”

• Talk to people Tweeting about you: People will talk about you whether you are active on social media or not.

By addressing concerns you can control the conversation, educate people if they are misinformed, and make your positioning clear. Use tools to identify the most influential people talking about you to pinpoint key conversations that you need to be involved in. These people could be turned into loyal customers and powerful brand ambassadors.

• Source product feedback via your social channels: Your customers won’t be shy about telling you what they think of your product, they could be giving you ideas that change your business. By listening to them, and letting them know they’ve been heard, you encourage them to interact with your brand in the future.

• Test messages on Twitter that could be used elsewhere: If a Tweet fails to connect with your audience, that’s a shame but you’ve only spent a couple of seconds on it. This means it’s a fertile arena for testing what works, what attracts an audience, and you can also get data on who those people are. This insight can then be transferred to your paid offline channels, where the pitfalls of a misfiring campaign are greater.

• Put out promoted content that people will enjoy: Nobody logs in to any social media account purely to see the ads, so work out ways of serving them Promoted Tweets that tie in with your brand voice, while also being entertaining, interesting, or helpful.

• Analyse what worked and what didn’t, and keep a record: This will help you to train people joining your team in future, as well as help you to evaluate what posts in future are likely to light a spark with your audience.

Andy Vale is a Content Manager for SocialBro, freelance music journalist+presenter, and a giant of a man. He tweets about Social Media, Culture, and life.

Kitchen table to £100m brand: 6 marketing lessons from Ella’s Kitchen

By Nicola Kemp

Paul Lindley, founder of Ella’s Kitchen, successfully took the brand from his kitchen table to become the biggest baby food brand in the UK.

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Paul Lindley is a trained accountant, has no traditional marketing experience, yet has successfully built the UK’s best-selling baby food brand, with an annual turnover of over £100m. In our household, ruled by a willful, exuberant and supremely energetic toddler, Paul Lindley is something of a rock god, particularly as the creator of ‘The Red One’, the healthy smoothie that can be consumed on the go. But you don’t need to be a fan of his products to admire the trajectory of the brand.

Ella’s Kitchen also takes a slightly unconventional view of reaching it’s intended target audience. Instead of joining the hoards of brands marketing to mums Lindley set its sights firmly on toddlers. “Learn to think like a toddler,” he advises “they are the most creative, they are honest and most of all they have fun.”

Having successfully conquered the nation’s Kitchen’s Lindley is now turning his attention to our bathrooms with the launch of ‘Paddy’s Bathroom’. The toiletries brand for toddlers will have a strong social ethos, with the brand donating a drop of clean water to children in Rwanda for every drop of water used by people washing with its products.

an attack of extreme honesty). He believes this approach can drive a small business through the good times and the bad.

Here are the six marketing lessons from the phenomenal rise of the Ella’s Kitchen brand

1. Build a brand on value “If you build a brand based on values then you can articulate why you are doing what your doing. It allows you to have a clear message and employ people with lots of passion. Values allow you to have consistency in everything from recruitment to marketing,” explains Lindley.

2. Great brands grow from the inside out The advertising industry loves nothing more than waxing lyrical about the art of storytelling. Yet, while Ella’s Kitchen is indeed built on a great story (Lindley’s daughter Ella was a fussy eater and the recipies were made for her) the story is completely true. “Your brand is the way you live as a business not just how you communicate,” explains Lindley.

In an age where agencies are heavily promoting a content marketing agenda, marketers need to stop and ask themselves is this storytelling venturing into the realms of fairytales or based on fundamental brand truths?

3. Be consumer obsessed You won’t hear Paul Lindley advocating the power of big data.”We didn’t have the budgets for lots of data so we had to understand mums from a human perspective,” explains Lindley.

Whilst he acknowledges this approach is harder to implement as a brand manager at a major company. (Much as many would love nothing than to indulge in a total meltdown or

Indeed Ella’s Kitchen’s most successful brand the smoothie called ‘The Red One’ was the result not of an army of consultants, or a myriad of advertising agencies on heartstopping retainers, but the thoughts of his then 4 year-old son.

4. Actively find something to stand for While there is no doubt that the recession has had a significant impact on consumers’ purchasing habits Lindley believes that ethics are just as much a selling point as brand or price.

“Good business makes for a better world but also makes business sense,” he explains.

5. Never stand still Having sold the Ella’s Kitchen brand to US food giant Hain Celestial in 2013 Lindley continues to expand the brand. In addition he has his sights set on the toddler toiletries market with the launch of Paddy’s Bathroom. Again he is taking on the market leaders Johnson & Johnson and L’Oreal and hoping to have the same disruptive impact.

6. You are never too small to make a difference In the face of fierce competition, ever-decreasing budgets and the complexities of media fragmentation it is all to easy for marketers to feel they can’t make a difference. Lindley cites the late Anita Roddick who famously declared; “If you think you are too small to have an impact try going to bed with a mosquito.

Paul Lindley was speaking at this week’s Mumstock conference in London.

5 Worst Offenders That Drive Visitors Away From Your Website

By Deborah Mitchell

You jumped on the digital bandwagon and created a website for your business and created a profile on every social platform known to man, yet your business is not attracting more customers. Does this scenario sound familiar? There’s a big chance that it’s not your brand that’s the problem, but the way you present it online. Your website could need a facelift.

“Visitors judge a website within a few seconds, and react based on elements such as the time it takes to load, the visual aspect and the ease of navigation,” says Nay Ayache, my company’s in-house WordPress expert.

Take another look at your website and check if it has these five elements that drive audiences away.

1. Chaotic homepages The homepage is the most important and most valuable piece of real estate on your website. A cluttered page will drive an audience away or confuse them. A website should be organized, with a clear focal point that allows the visitor to feel visually comfortable to explore all the pages. The navigation bar should be easy to find.

When it comes to pages, speed matters. Having a fast, responsive website that resizes to accommodate mobile devices helps visitors view not only the homepage, but the rest of the pages as well.

Worst offenders: Website sliders that rotate at lightning speed, do not have a header and animated GIFs that kill the visitor’s concentration.

2. Cryptic navigation Ideally, the website navigation bar should be placed at the top of the page and always contain a link back to the homepage.

The contents should be clearly represented in the menu, and pages should be titled in a way that speaks to visitors’ logic, not their imagination.

Worst offenders: Navigation bars with incoherent item hierarchy that leave primary pages hidden in sub-menus, broken links and a hard-to-find contact page.

3. Elusive social media buttons Burying your social media buttons on the site makes them

hard to find. A brand that prides itself on being social should make it obvious to its audience. Engage your audience by making sure that every page on the website contains a link to social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc). Remember, these social media links are visually different from post-sharing buttons.

Worst offenders: Websites where social media buttons are buried in the footer or the contact page, broken buttons that do not link to the proper page, and links to one social platform when the brand is active on several others.

4. No calls-to-action Visitors are flocking to your website, and yet, your bounce rate -- the percentage of people who leave the site after visiting only one page -- is high. Why aren’t visitors going beyond glancing at your homepage? Are you sure your visitors know what to do? Guide your audience with calls to action and simple instructions such as “call us,” “click here” or “subscribe to our newsletter.” As a brand, you want people to know how to make the best out of your website and, ultimately, your services.

Worst offenders: Content made of aimless descriptions instead of reflecting a clear marketing strategy, wording that makes assumptions as to visitors’ concentration levels, and links that generously lead them to other websites.

5. Unoriginal photos A website solely filled with stock photography does not reflect the individuality of the brand. Authenticity goes a long a way with potential customers, so invest in professional photos or shoot your own personal photos to tell your brand’s story. In a digital world where users are given endless options, the key to engagement and return on investment is to offer a unique value proposition in form as well as content.

Worst offenders: Websites that use rehashed icons from the ‘90s, ubiquitous handshake pictures and the 20-year-old CEO in a conference room.

Emmy-nominated network television producer Deborah Mitchell is a veteran of ABC and CBS News, a member of the Producers Guild of America, and a board member of the James Beard Broadcast and Media Awards Committee.

Book,

&

Line

Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future

By Rohit Bhargava

Sinker Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

In this edition, discover what more than half a million others already have: how to use the power of non-obvious thinking to grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world.

Non-Obvious is filled with entertaining insights like how a pioneering comedy club charging audiences per laugh may forecast the future of consumption...

By W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans.

Branding Basics for Small Business

The Step-By-Step Guide to Build Your Brand

By Maria Ross

By Sheralyn Pratt

The popular guide used by entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses and non-profits everywhere to build an irresistible brand on any budget is now updated! Branding Basics for Small Business, 2nd Edition includes fresh content around social media, content marketing and networking trends and additional real-world case studies of small business and entrepreneurial success.

If you’re looking for straight talk on branding— what it is, what it isn’t, and how it’s done—this book is for you.

Branding your company takes more than adding a logo. This book walks you through how to: • Build a memorable brand identity • Create strong messaging that connects with customers • Identify and communicate your differentiators • Attract customers who share your vision

Heavyweight Marketing: Knockout Strategies for Building Champion Brands

Hooked: How to Build HabitForming Products

By Nikolas Allen

Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.

Step in the ring with Heavyweight Marketing and discover potent, practical strategies that will help you build a distinctive brand bold enough to knock out your customers - and your competitors!

The book is filled with rich stories, examples, anecdotes and case studies directly from author Nikolas Allen’s recent 3-year stint running marketing consulting company, BAM! Small Biz Consulting.

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention

By Ben Parr In Captivology, award-winning journalist and entrepreneur Ben Parr explains how and why the mind pays attention to some events or people— and not others—and presents seven captivation triggers—techniques guaranteed to help you capture and retain the attention of friends, colleagues, customers, fans, and even strangers.

By Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover

Brand Famous: How to get everyone talking about your business

By Linzi Boyd Written by Linzi Boyd, a savvy entrepreneurial brand guru whose glamorous communications agency has helped elevate some of the country’s most famous high-street, consumer brands, this book outlines a winning formula for success, from idea to execution, along with hidden branding secrets, practical tips and real life examples. Linzi maps out five stages to work through from discovering the true essence of your brand to nailing that all-important recognition.

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C/ID: Visual Identity and Branding for the Arts

By Angus Hyland, Emily King Following the explosion of identity design in the arts and the reinvention of the art gallery/ museum as a brand, this book provides a survey of recent and current design work for cultural clients, including galleries, museums, theaters and auditoriums. Thirty international case studies clearly express what good design can do to improve the fortunes and/or images of an institution.

Please Don’t Brand My Public Space

By Ruedi Baur, Sébastien Thiery This book is a critical investigation of the visual strategies employed to identify and brand political spaces. Isn’t it about time to look at their often banal images as part of a crisis of political representation? In the context of a revival of xenophobic propaganda on the one hand and the degradation of places into pure marketing products on the other, it is possible to recognize an increasingly theatrical, unquestioned production of public signs and symbols.

How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding

By D. B. Holt Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America’s most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create “identity myths” that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change.

Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity

By Melissa Aronczyk The first book-length, critical account of the nation-branding industry. National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers and strategic communications experts to help them “brand” their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate more coherent and cohesive identities...

Brand Bible: The Complete Guide to Building, Designing, and Sustaining Brands

Brand Spaces: Branded Architecture and the Future of Retail Design

By Debbie Millman

By Sven Ehmann. Sofia Borges

Brand Bible is a comprehensive resource on brand design fundamentals. It looks at the influences of modern design going back through time, delivering a short anatomical overview and examines brand treatments and movements in design. You’ll learn the steps necessary to develop a successful brand system from defining the brand attributes and assessing the competition, to working with materials and vendors, and all the steps in between.

Brand Spaces showcases cutting-edge interior concepts and locations with character that effectively communicate brands in several dimensions at the same time. Decision-makers from leading brands such as Audi, Camper, Aesop, Freitag, Gaggenau, Nike, Nokia, and Starbucks share concepts and strategies that communicate overall brand identity while respecting local specifications.

Designing B2B Brands: Lessons from Deloitte and 195,000 Brand Managers

Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits

By CARLOS MARTINEZ ONAINDIA

This book elevates the discussion to the level of revelation. Each chapter is an extensive dialogue between Debbie Millman, herself a design visionary, and a different leader in the field. By asking questions deeply informed by her own expertise, Millman coaxes lucid, prescient answers from twenty-two interview subjects, among them Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and godfather of modern branding Wally Olins.

Get tactical insight from the top business-tobusiness branding experts and gain a global presence This comprehensive manual lays out the steps necessary for creating an iconic global identity. It uses the lessons and inside knowledge of Deloitte, the world’s largest professional services organization, to help other business-to-business operations deliver a high-impact, value-added brand experience.

By Debbie Millman, Rob Walker (Foreword)