Author: Mark Di Somma

Be happy

By Mark Di Somma

Not the best of days yesterday. Put my back out, and retired to a lie-flat position. Brain racing, body stopped … Aaaargh. To pass the time, I mused on getting my understanding of the purposes of business and branding down to their most basic forms. It led me here: What if the purpose of business, particularly a service business, is as simple as this: to make people happy. Imagine if that was the metric for your product design, your standards, your customer service, your innovation programme, your culture, your brand, your competitiveness. And what if the purpose of branding is to let people know how you intend to make them happy. Here come the objections: most of them variations of ‘we do that already’. No you probably don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have effective competitors, you wouldn’t struggle to maintain market share, you wouldn’t find yourself locked in a pricing war. Perhaps you think they’re happy or hope they’re happy, or you word your customer satisfaction surveys so that you can tell yourself they’re …

Well, well, well

By Mark Di Somma

When place branding specialist Simon Anholt explains in a podcast why nations need a carefully thought through brand strategy to which all players in the economy subscribe, he quotes the legendary David Ogilvy who once said, “If all you want to do is attract attention, then you put a gorilla in a jockstrap”. As Ogilvy himself explained it, if you want to get recall, you then put the brand on the jockstrap itself. You will certainly get buzz, and people will remember the stunt. But will anything meaningful, in commercial terms, happen beyond that? Doubtful. And the reason is that having got people’s attention, you need to do something with that energy. You need to direct it somewhere. You must provide a meaningful story and experience that links what people have seen with what they do. It’s not enough just to give them something to look at. It’s as meaningless in branding terms as a carrot, a jumping trout or just another pretty logo. Badges aren’t brands. Of course Wellington’s already done a lot more …

What will be, will be

What will be, will be?

By Mark Di Somma

We’d all like to think we have a greater understanding of what’s ahead than we do. And while some ideas may seem more credible than others, the fact is that people make predictions and indeed projections every day that may, or may not, be right. In fact, markets depend on it. Without opinion, emotion and uncertainty, they’d be no derivatives market for example, because they’d be no motive for volatility, which is, after all, the lifeblood of trading. We want our brands to be predictable too. We want to know where they’re heading. And yet, at the same time, we need them to be refreshing and interesting. A strange alliance To me, the art of branding is pinpointing what must change versus what must stay still. It’s a strange alliance of familiarity, response and initiative. Familiarity – enough of what we know about a brand needs to remain consistent enough for long enough for us to recognise it and treasure it. This is the bedrock. Change at this level happens very infrequently. Response – markets …

Taking it personally

By Mark Di Somma

There are days when the commercial creative process really does feel like blinding optimism in the face of unrelenting stupidity. And that’s the problem – it’s so easy to adopt an ‘us and them’ mentality, to slip into ‘right and wrong’, ‘enlightened and ignorant ‘… The working environment for marketers and branders is such a strange mix when you think about it. The need to give so much of yourself and yet not take the inevitable backlashes, compromises, negative feedback, rejections, legal insertions, snipping and blandishments to heart. In a discipline where getting people to feel something for what you sell is everything, the temptation to become detached can be great indeed. Sustaining a great brand though relies on believing in people, both inside your walls and beyond. Once care leaves the room, everything that makes a brand compelling soon follows: passion; commitment; excitement … Branding is personal and commercial. Hard as that can be sometimes, in the B2C world particularly, it has to be that way.

What will LinkedIn link into?

By Mark Di Somma

LinkedIn finally goes public today. This is going to be fascinating – not just to see what this IPO for a name social media company gets, but also to see what investors themselves are buying into. Are they riding a media wave, as is suggested here, or do investors see real and continuing value in B2B networking? My suspicion is the former, and that’s not good. Long after the hype and the bullish sentiment of launch, it’s the latter that is going to platform LinkedIn’s growth. After all, being a social media company is LinkedIn’s channel, not their strategy. And we all know what happens when investors plumb for a channel at the expense of a viable way forward. Nothing I’m seeing in the press suggests a worked out plan to meet Wall Street’s expectations in that regard. In fact, quite the opposite. LinkedIn does not expect to be profitable in 2011 and its financial performance to date hasn’t exactly been inspiring. I raised this point last week about the Skype purchase and I’ll raise …

Portion control

By Mark Di Somma

Often we don’t leave a favourite brand because of anything dramatic. In fact, quite the opposite: the experiences we have quietly fade to the point where there’s less reasons to stay than to go. One day the food isn’t quite as good as it was, the movies on the flight haven’t been changed in a while, the person we spoke with just now was that little bit less warm, the changes in the insurance policy are more inflexible and the biscuits in the pack are smaller and taste different. Brands make these changes with the best of intentions for the business. They do it to save money, to introduce a shortcut, to be more efficient. It’s just a little change right, a little reduction – think of it as portion control. No-one will notice. And most people don’t. Unfortunately, the people who do notice are the people who have been loyal to the brand. They know where this is heading. Not today perhaps. Not tomorrow. But at some point, this is going to be yet …

Now playing

By Mark Di Somma

Slowly it seems everyone is coming round to the idea that content owners and developers and a new generation of distributors need to start working together. What interests me is how those content developers increasingly see social media as a valid outlet. YouTube has announced that it’s going to start renting more than 3,000 mainstream movies for as little as 99 cents each. That marks a real opportunity for quality shift for YouTube, from home videos to slick studio-quality product. But it also shows another move towards smarter monetisation of the social media model for both parties. The term ‘market share’ takes on new meaning in this context, in that it combines the marketable product of the studios with the massive sharing networks of the big social media outlets. One thing that YouTube, the film studios and Facebook share that I think offers real opportunities for these various emerging alliances to work: they absolutely understand the need to keep people involved and interested. Their presence and growth is predicated on that – even if they …

How to win

By Mark Di Somma

I’m always interested to see how successful people think and to learn how they go about building competitive marques. In 2009 – 2010, in the course of working alongside Alex and the crew at Milk on Will to Win, a history of the Pryde Group and its brands, I spoke with Neil Pryde many times. On a number of occasions, he talked about how he approaches running a global business. I thought I’d take a moment this morning and share with you the philosophies Neil shares in the book: 1. Strike the right balance between measured risks and natural optimism. 2. If you look back at your career and you’ve made more good choices than bad, you’re ahead. 3. Love what you do – but not too much. Too many businesses are wrecked by emotional decisions. 4. Be paranoid. Recognise that nothing is static. React quickly. 5. Never forget that sport is the business, and the business is a sport – always, play to win. 6. Always be prepared to walk away. If you’re going …

The power of interesting

By Mark Di Somma

I think we’ve all seen the movie about the ad agency that starts telling the truth only to find that business booms. Funny then how fiction turns to fact with news that in 2010, Domino’s US same-store sales rose 9.9% in a market where 1%-to-3% growth is closer to what’s generally expected. And the way they did it, according to Time, was by publicly trashing their old product, and encouraging consumers to check out the improvements they had made. That, it seems, got people back into the shop, intrigued by the admission and keen to taste what had changed. On the face of it, as I’ve said, this looks like a case for more truth in advertising, and of course to some extent it is. But I’m not certain that’s why the campaign actually succeeded – and I certainly don’t think it’s an approach that Domino’s could use again to such marked effect. What this story shows me, and what Susan Bonds’ speech reinforced last week, is that a generation notorious for its inattention will …