Are you more responsible if you work in a ‘dirty’ business but work harder than your competitors to clean things up? Or is responsibility actually about making the decision to thrive in a less impactful industry in the first place? In other words is social responsibility an absolute or is it most true when it’s comparative? Acknowledgements Photo of “Dilemma” taken by zeeweez, sourced from Flickr
I’m always amazed by how one business closes and another one of an almost identical nature springs up in its place. Recently, another of the cafes near home closed. Strange thing is that the café that was there before them, on the same site, also closed. And the one before that. Clearly this is not a good site. It’s right on a corner. There’s no parking. And most of the competition is about a block away, so there’s no clustering effect. The closure itself is sad. The effects for those who had to close were probably huge. But what never fails to amaze me is how business owners believe they have what it takes to beat the odds without tilting the odds at all. There’s this extraordinary belief that, somehow, doing the same thing as the guy that just failed, is the recipe for success. Of course there are a thousand reasons why a business can fail, especially in a sector as unforgiving as hospitality, but if it were me, very big flags of misgiving …
I’ve always loved this quote from Dean Poole. Design, he says, is creating things for clients who “don’t know what they want until they have seen what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want and it’s not what you did.” So often, companies get design wrong. Designers frequently argue clients get the aesthetic wrong. That may be true, but I think it’s deeper than that. Actually, more than one party can get the function of design wrong. Design actually fails when people haven’t designed in human terms exactly how they want the recipient to act/react. Recently, Seth Godin observed that great design is about getting people to do what you want. “The goal,” he says, “is to create design that takes the user’s long-term needs and desires into account, and helps him focus his attention and goals on accomplishing something worthwhile.” I agree – and that changes the question that every brand owner should ask of their designer. The question is not so much “will they like what they see?” but “what will …
In a world of conversations, everyone has something to say. You can’t control that – nor should you, at least not in a democracy. Some people will agree with you. Others will not. You can’t control that either. Some will argue their case against what you are doing or suggest that you are not doing it correctly. They have the right to make their point within legal bounds. But where a lot of brands go wrong is that they take their cue for their own storytelling from the stories that others are telling about them. Their story, in other words, manifests itself in the form of reactions to other people’s stories rather than as actions built around their own narrative. Don’t get me right. Brands must respond to the assertions of others. But they cannot allow others to control the brand conversation to the point where their own share of voice is lost. They must know and advance their own viewpoints. Too many brands view challenges as criticism and react to them that way, instead …
As in most things in life, there’s a time to hold your ground when you’re a brand, a time to step back and reassess, and there are times when you should look to front-foot your position. Those calls should be based on pragmatism not impulse, because the resources required to up your game can be considerable and the consequences of failure can be significant. So when should a brand take on a competitor, directly or indirectly, and how should they behave when they do so? Let’s start with the circumstances in which an attack makes sense. 1. It’s the only way to expand your market share – if you have carefully thought through growth plans but are competing in a market with little or no organic growth, the only way to expand your presence is to take it off someone else. Be aware though that in many static markets, fluctuations in market share are small – so a concerted effort to grasp a bigger piece of the pie is likely to be costly, drawn out …
1. No scandal is as bad (or as good) as you think it is. 2. Criticism travels faster than attention. In this digital age, it’s as fast as light. 3. Scandal travels even faster than criticism. 4. Fallout makes the best news. It balloons scandal into incident. 5. If you handle anything perishable, you must be response-ready. If you’re not response-ready, you won’t catch up. 6. If your key people are off-camera, you’re off-brand. Acknowledgements Photo of “High Speed Lights” taken by Liam Swinney, sourced from Flickr
By Mark Di Somma Many of us who started in advertising did so I imagine because we saw an ad or a series of commercials that made us dream of creating something that good, something that a whole culture talked about. Recently, the people at Hubspot reached back, took five of the great campaigns and had them reimagined for today. It was an intriguing exercise. But while the creatives seemed to focus for the most part on how much the channels had changed in the time since the campaigns were forged and the implications of that for execution and campaign distribution, I thought it would be interesting to look at what some of these iconic ad campaigns did that made it possible for them to have such a deep cultural impact in the first place. What’s clear is that iconic status is not about the nobility of the product. As CNBC observed, AdAge refers to its selection of the top advertising campaigns of the 20th century as including: “two air polluters, nutritionless sugar water, one …
If you’re a cult brand looking to take on a scale player in an industry that favours significant footprint, how can you hope to win? Possibly by retaining everything that reinforces your cult brand kudos and plugging in to what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as the Collaborative Economy. According to research that he shares here, companies like Airbnb are now giving traditional hotel brands something of a run for their rooms. The model is effective, according to Thomas Friedman who wrote an article in the New York Times that Owyang references, because this collaborative approach is personal, local and based on a refreshing sense of trust. Friedman quotes Brian Chesky, the guy who started Airbnb, ““It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.” The fact that 140,000 people around the world are staying in Airbnb rooms on an given night proves that intimacy can indeed scale. That’s possible of …
It’s no news that the relationships between brands and their customers are changing. But the rise and rise of a new intermediary is something we should all ponder. Once we relied on frontline staff, advisors and others to help us glean the best choices. Increasingly, as the popularity of review sites like TripAdvisor can attest, buyers are getting the lowdown on what’s good and what’s not from people just like them – customers. The good people at Clear Returns spell out the changes in this nice summary: Research from Google says 84% of customers felt that online research and feedback helped influence their buying decisions and that site visitors who interact with reviews are 105% more likely to purchase; and An Econsultancy report revealed that 43% of shoppers now use their smartphones to compare prices and read customer reviews, up from just 19% the previous year. That’s not surprising. In a world brimming with choices, buyers want to know that they are making the right decision – and review sites and searches are a critical part of …
Anyone proposing something new in an organisation is likely to be hit by four questions that represent two contradictory lines of enquiry. They serve perhaps to highlight the ironies of trying to quantify demand. On the one hand: The search for precedent Question 1: Who else has done this? Wrong answer: If the real answer is that many others are doing it, you have signalled what should be a non-starter. That’s because if others are doing what you are suggesting, it is not an innovation. It is, at best, catch-up. If you present it as a competitive opportunity, then you are, as Michael Porter has pointed out, relying on the incompetence of your rivals and that is not the basis for a sustainable competitive position. Right answer: The idea is new for the sector, and a similar concept, using a parallel model, has worked well in other sectors with a similar competitive profile. Question 2: Is there a demand for it? Wrong answer: You think so, or there should be, or it’s a great idea …
