Author: Mark Di Somma

What do you do?

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do? – I write. Doesn’t just about everyone? – What do you mean by that? If you can form a letter in any language, you can write. What do you really do? … Here’s where this goes. Writers don’t write. Writers give people reasons to read. That’s what distinguishes them from people who can put things in writing. Speakers don’t talk. They give people reasons to listen. That’s what distinguishes them from everyone with the gift of speech. And photographers don’t photograph. They frame a moment in the world. That’s what makes their work different from someone with a mobile phone. The differences have never been more important in a world where so many people have access to technology that allows them to design, publish, print, record, point, click, template … What do you do, when anyone looks like they can do what you do? So often we want to base those differences on techniques. We do it better. Or history. We’ve done it longer. Or experience. We know more. Or frequency. …

Plenty of ideas coming out of AG Ideas 2011

By Mark Di Somma

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the AG Ideas 2011 plenary yesterday morning via the simulcast into Wellington’s Te Papa museum. My highlights: Definitely the video of the kids workshop, with two stand-out examples of great design ideas by young minds that, as Ken Cato pointed out, do their creating with no preconceptions. The first design suggestion: a hot dog with legs, so that, in the words of its young inventor, overweight people, who love hot dogs, would have to chase them and thus burn calories. And then, the second suggestion, via this exchange: Ken Cato: What have you designed? Child: It’s a surfboard with flames. Ken Cato: How would that work? The flames in the water … Child (slightly impatiently): It’s a new design. Of course, the brief notes that follow cannot do justice to the presentations of the four featured speakers, but I thought I’d pick up on some of the thinking that particularly struck me, because it intersected with, and informed, the things that fascinate me – and, at …

What they see is what they brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Oh the irony. For years, many of us tried to get the people we worked with to broaden their understanding of what a brand was. It’s not just a logo, a product, a TV commercial – that conversation. We were fighting to make the definition of brand bigger. Now I’m wondering whether we have to start going back the other way. Suddenly, there are no people, countries, groups anymore. Instead, everywhere I look, everything’s a brand. Donald Trump is a brand, Charlie Sheen is a brand, so are Kate and Will, the President’s a brand, Greenpeace and just about any professional sports team or association you care to name. America’s a brand, so are the Tea Party, Survivor, Wikileaks, the Beckhams and Lady Gaga. That suggests to me that the media is in the process of redefining a “brand” as anything that gets or has our attention. In the new parlance, brand now is much more about profile. So I think Paula Lynn is right when she comments on this story in MediaPost that, “The …

It’s complicated

By Mark Di Somma

I really like this thought from Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, in an interview in the NY Times: Love order, hate bureaucracy, he says … “Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level. Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it.” I’m constantly intrigued at how systems take on a life of their own. Everybody witnesses it. Everyone agrees it happens. What starts out, innocently enough, as a way of checking something soon grows its own mandate. It invades other areas. Then it gets a righteous title or attaches itself to a critical area (compliance, operations, efficiency, policy, framework etc), spawns a budget, a project team and a management structure, and suddenly it’s part of the war on chaos. It stalks the organisation gathering strength and credibility with every meeting. Before long it’s part of the sign-off, and once legal and HR take it under their wing, it’s part of the furniture. The sign-off gets longer, harder, more involved. ‘How’ overtakes ‘what’ …

Never stop answering

By Mark Di Somma

Let’s return to two posts from April – because one actually answers the other. Last Friday, I discussed the paradox that while assumptions equalise our world, not all assumptions in that world are equal, and that the dilemma for any brand is to sift the assumptions it must make from those that it must break with. Efficiency vs distinction. My sense is that the way to do that is through what I’ve dubbed the Feynman principle – a nod to Sanjoy Mahajan’s post about Richard Feynman  mentioned earlier in the month. This principle – you should always question what you do know – focuses on methodically re-litigating assumptions in order to uncover anything that had been missed and thus to extract new value and new possibilities. But how do you stop this becoming an endless loop of making assumptions then questioning those assumptions? By introducing answers – but answers that are themselves subject to continuing reappraisal. In other words, the response to the Feynman principle of ‘never stop questioning’ has to be ‘never stop answering’. …

The assumption paradox

By Mark Di Somma

It’s easy to assume that your customers love your brand, that they are loyal, that they have every reason to continue doing business with you, that they want the next upgrade. It’s easy to assume that no-one noticed or cared about that little slip-up or that if they did, they understood. It’s easy to assume that your customers will continue to want what they have always wanted. Or that they will never want something back. It’s easy to assume that everything is fine – that privacy is beyond risk, that people don’t need to know that your phones could potentially track movements, that hackers can’t break into your online games, that people’s details are safely encrypted, that the takeover bid is too low, that your shareholders want to stay or that the market will continue to rise – or fall. If we each had to worry about the alternatives to each of these things all of time simultaneously, we’d go mad. So we assume. And it’s easy to do so because assumption is simply an …

Telling

By Mark Di Somma

What gives you the right to sell a product/service at margin today? It’s easy to assume you have a mandate. Or that you deserve one. But what is your brand doing to earn/retain the mandate it wants/has? Don’t tell me it’s because you opened. Because presence isn’t enough. Don’t tell me you worked hard to get here (past tense). Because then you’re relying on your history. Don’t tell me you’re doing a good job. Because most everyone’s doing a good job. Ditto service, people, methodologies, products, channels, technologies, systems, processes, efficiencies … for most companies anyway. Talk perhaps about the scarcity of what you offer, or the richness of the ideas that you encourage, or the loyalty you forge, or the need you are meeting that your competitors don’t, or the insights you’ve developed and applied that are truly valuable, or the excitement you generate, or the journey you’re taking people on, or how you are looking to generate the most wonderful change … Better yet talk about how you’re combining ideas and where that’s …

Mind games

By Mark Di Somma

Here’s another of those inconvenient questions: is it really worth our while for New Zealand to be involved in hosting global sporting events? Or more to the point is it worth our while, the way we go about it? Yes, I know … participation, competition, world stage, all that … but given that it’s actually costing us significantly more than we can expect to make to host the Rugby World Cup, for example, how do we intend to get a payback? And the $36 million for the America’s Cup – what are we projecting that will bring home? My sense is, it could be worth it – but it probably won’t be. I don’t get the sense that each of these initiatives is a calibrated and layered contributor to a defined and well-laid out New Zealand strategy designed to get the nation from point A to point B by lifting our competitiveness and our margins. In fact, I don’t get the sense that the Government has an economy-wide story right now that will gain us …

How real is the value of reality brands?

By Mark Di Somma

Last night I sat down and watched Inception. Today I spied this article on the Kardashians – and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the dream states of the film mirror the “reality” of the brand value of reality brands. The Kardashians appear to be a retail success story, for now, and we’re told they have raked in millions. What’s the business model? Their “real” lives? And those millions of followers – what are they following? The real Kardashians or three levels down? Does the Kardashians’ show and product portfolio add up to a brand, souvenir merchandise or fashion? Does that become stronger, or more real, when it diversifies? Why all the questions? Well, because if I was Sears, and I was looking at setting up a Kardashian shop within my shop, it might hugely influence my decision to know what exactly I was partnering with. Of all the celebrities in the world, why them? What’s the connection between what they are and what Sears represents? And, as I say, is what Sears are seeing …

Everyone expects to be rewarded

By Mark Di Somma

According to this post in the NY Times, Americans racked up about $48 billion of rewards via fly miles, hotel rewards, credit card points and other programmes in 2010. The average household it seems has 18 loyalty programmes and earns $622 a year in miles and points. So, roughly $35 value per programme per year. And yet nearly one-third of that amount will go unclaimed. You can read this as proof of the ubiquity of rewards systems, but what fascinates me is the clear expectation of consumers that they will now receive rewards in some form for so much of what they do, whether they cash them in or not. Once loyalty was. It existed out of convenience or preference, habit, range or relationships. Now, for many brands, loyalty costs. Sure, you get to keep the customer, but you keep them on retainer. You keep them by pumping incentives at them whenever they buy. And the irony of those incentives, looking at the stats above, is that such generosity doesn’t count for anything up to …