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Finding an obsession

By Mark Di Somma

When you apply the concept of provenance to brands, it becomes a concept centred on systematically and competitively ‘localising’ what you’re about rather than diversifying to try and meet the generalised needs of the wider world.

So it’s about having a narrowcast brand: one focused to the point of obsession on a specific area of passion. Provenance is also about those other valuable ideas that the word in its original meaning conjures: focus; love; purity of thinking; authenticity; deep knowledge. That obsession can then be marbled through every aspect of the brand: language; environment; innovation; strategy …

People may worry that such devotion to a single idea will stifle adaptability, but my experience is that brands that see the world through the lens of an idea they subscribe to passionately are also able to find latitude and opportunity within that idea whilst growing a strong and devoted following. Far from being restrictive, being obsessive provides a framework for creative approaches.

The way I see it, brands increasingly have three powerful emotive strategies going forward: they can rule the world (scale); they can seek to change the world (activist or cult); or they can kiss the world (obsession).

And all of that drives what you then ask your people and your customers to do. They can get on the motorway. They can get in the bunker. Or they can get in the tent …

Of course there are crossovers. Whole Foods for example combines scale with obsession. So does Red Bull. And BMW. Apple, one could argue, combines all three. And it would be very hard to be a cult or activist brand without obsession. But an obsessive brand can differ from a cult or activist brand because it’s not necessarily fighting anything. It just loves what it’s about to bits. And that optimism and sense of celebration, combined with a just-on-the-verge-of-unhealthy commitment, is what makes such a brand magnetic. That’s what draws the hunters and collectors.

When sales go wrong: the real cost to brands of bad sales

By Mark Di Somma

A car salesroom should be like Disneyland – a place of magic, where life smells wonderful and dreams really do come true. So much resource goes into making that possible. The warm environment, the sparkly cars, the people, the music, the freshly brewed coffee … Everything should be an unapologetic charm offensive designed to inject reassurance and a sense of joy. When it’s done properly, it’s a show stopper.

But over the weekend, my trip to start searching for a replacement to my very tidy but ageing Peugeot turned into something closer to Nightmare on Elm Street: a clipped salesperson talking to me in a patronising tone and treating my spouse with disrespect. No charm. Just offensive.

Which meant in effect that all the hard work and huge money that the car brands had invested for all those years to entice me to consider them was decimated in less than ten minutes.

No introduction, no familiarisation questions, no needs assessment, no scenario setting, no credentials, no storylines … This guy needed a skills upgrade and a serious attitude transplant. Perhaps he wasn’t quite losing potential money on a per-minute rate as fast as the trader at UBS, but he seemed to be giving it a damn good go. There was goodwill all over the floor.

Here’s why it matters – from both a brand and a bottom line perspective.

Let’s start with the money. I’ve been doing some work with Feedback ASAP and their research shows that top sales people (those who consistently deliver customer satisfaction scores of 70 -90%) are generating 24% higher sales per hour on average than those achieving satisfaction scores of 50 – 69%.

The guy I dealt with over the weekend delivered an experience that would have been well down the bottom quartile by my estimation. If that happened consistently, that would make him a very low-yielding resource.

As for the brand, three distinct lessons for me from the experience:

1. Investing in sales is investing in your brand – because if the delivery staggers, the promise falls.

2. There is no stop-loss on a bad seller. The damage is done in minutes and not just for that sale. In fact, the cost to the brand keeps accumulating long after the disgruntled customer leaves the showroom. And there is nothing you can do about that. Mystery shop every touchpoint for all you’re worth – because, whether you’re the brand or the distributor, that’s exactly what could be at stake.

3. Look for the leaks because no brand is unsinkable. People who can’t sell or who can’t retain customers are like icebergs on a still night. They may not get your attention, until it’s too late. Run all the numbers, particularly the ones that scare most brand owners. Don’t just run top line analyses, run cost-benefit analyses on all aspects of sales. What are you investing as a brand vs what are your representatives returning in total sales – and by that, I mean in direct sales, in referees, in return sales, in retained business? There’s no point in having great per month income if you’re promptly losing customers or potential customers out the other side via reputational damage and/or churn.

Lessons from a great party

By Mark Di Somma

After some time away travelling, last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to a fantastic event on the Wellington waterfront. The place was packed with the renowned and the influential alike. I understand why it is regarded as the party of the year in the city.

The event itself served to remind me of two things.

Firstly, that networking complements talent and profile, and that if you are not out and about working your brand with key influencers, you are essentially neglecting your marketing – an observation that’s as true for how consumer brands need to network and engage with their supply chains and customers as it is for individuals. Affinity increases through dialogue. It’s not good enough to be good at what you do. You don’t grow your reputation by looking in the mirror.

Secondly, there are at least two distinct networking strategies – wide and open, or focused and intense – and they seem to permeate every aspect of how we choose to make and retain contact.

I follow very much the second approach. Whilst there were many people at the event last night who I knew by name, most of them didn’t immediately know me. The same goes for my LinkedIn contacts, my Facebook Likes and so much more. I’m not particularly popular numerically. But, as per last night, those people I do know, I know well and often have deep and trusting relationships with. We seek each other out.

That same premise applies to brands – you can either scale or cult. Both work, but in very different ways. Each has its limitations and its strengths. Only you know which works for you – and whether this is the approach you conciously choose to have, or the approach you are landed with by default.

To my hosts … thank you so much. Last night, it was very nice indeed to be considered a friend.

Measure for measure

By Mark Di Somma

Economist Brian Easton’s statement – “don’t talk about the intangibles when there is nothing else” – is a timely reminder to all of us in the ‘fuzzy’ areas of business that if there is no demonstrable bottom-line return for all the reputation enhancement, profile building, credibility, authenticity, loyalty and goodwill that has supposedly been generated by or at a particular event or activity, then it essentially carries no value. It may not be worthless, but the cost that has been incurred has subsequently made no tangible economic contribution. Therefore there is no actual return on the investment.

In that context, what brands are often getting, and paying for, is an impression – or at the very most, a contribution – towards an abstract sense of progress. A best guess.

That’s as true for those pouring money into the Rugby World Cup (Easton’s specific gripe) as it is for social media or advertising. If you’re putting money in and you can’t or won’t measure what you’re getting back on your bottom line over the medium and longer term, you are not actually getting back anything. You are throwing money at hope, which has probably been conveniently repackaged as “brand awareness”.

Awareness alone counts for little. You can build awareness anywhere – it doesn’t mean though that your brand benefits. The fact that 30,000 people watch a TV programme does not instantly give that programme value for your brand if you advertise there – particularly if the audience is 30,000 people who don’t buy what you sell. It simply means that there are 30,000 people out there with their TVs on at a given moment. If you advertise, then they’re aware you’ve advertised. That’s it. We know that about media. Everyone gets it. And yet when it comes to things like sponsorships or events, the logic often goes west.

The temptation, and indeed the preponderance of opinion, seems to be that being there will be enough: there’s a tendency to smooth over concerns with reassurances that efforts that can’t be measured must be ‘doing some good’, it’s just that no-one can say what or how much. Or else, particularly in the case of social media, to install and religiously reference metrics, such as likes, clicks and follows, that are themselves intangible, as a means of monitoring intangible effectiveness.

Having a measure may give you a number that you can add to your next brand report or board presentation. It may put another line on the flow chart. But, as Easton reminds us, that does not automatically mean you are quantifying anything, if the measure itself cannot be concretely and meaningfully defined and aligned with what really counts.

Getting your social approach right: protecting your brand from critics

By Mark Di Somma

A number of people have asked me this week about how they should prepare their brand for attacks from activist groups who criticise them in the media. I’ll leave the mechanics of crisis management to the legal and PR people who specialise at it – but here are some thoughts on simple things you can do as a brand to make sure you are as ready as you can be.

1. Don’t view advocates for another opinion or worldview as enemies. You may not like what they say, or the manner in which they say it, but, unless they are physically attacking your business, essentially they are competitors (and on occasions even potential allies) – and the reason why they are more like competitors is that they have the potential to take attention, influence and market share away from your brand. So treat them like you would any other competitor: get to know them, get to know what they believe in and the opinions they compete against you on. Draw up a watch list. Keep an eye on their social media. Understand what they stand for in the marketplace. What you can’t do is pretend they’re not there or start engaging with them, either directly or indirectly, once they have done something to get your attention. If you do that, you will always be in catch-up.

2. Draw up a strong and simple set of principles that state what you believe in and link those principles directly to your brand, values and reputation. Those principles should be directly related to the things that you affect and that affect you as a brand socially. Use the “Because … then” connection to establish why you believe what you believe rather than just making apple-pie statements. (See my last post on social responsibility for more details on this.) State those principles openly on your website – and make your principles and worldview a critical part of your induction process, so that your own people understand from the get-go what you stand for. If someone draws attention to something you don’t have a principle on, make a decision quickly about where you stand on that point as it relates to your brand and values, and state that clearly for the record. If you don’t have a position, but you understand you need one, then say so and explain why you haven’t had such a principle up until now. Undertake to establish a principle, put a timeframe round it, and go public once you’ve decided.

3. Once you have a set of principles in place, establish clear measures for how you will ensure you comply with and progress those principles. These measures should be objective, credible, widely recognised and potentially monitored by another party. They show that as a brand you are committed to what you believe and that you operate within a clear metric framework. For example, if you are a beer brand, and one of your principles is that you will be a responsible and sustainable consumer of water, then you need to have measures in place that show what you mean by responsible and sustainable. They could be a globally recognised standard for water purity or a specific group’s recommendation on the amount of water you recycle. They should clearly show where you have purposefully set the bar and on what authority.

4. You need to set in place actions that contribute to you achieving your measures and that correlate directly with the measures you have put in place. These show how you are systematically working to achieve clearly defined and articulated goals. Those measures could include things you do as well as organisations or initiatives you support, research you have underway and aspects of your operations that you are monitoring and/or changing to reach the measures you have set. Such actions are a great way to involve your people internally and can deliver real bottom-line benefits in the way of untapped efficiencies. They also make sure that you continue to operate as a principle-centric organisation.

5. Report succinctly but clearly on what you believe, the frameworks you are using and the progress you are making with actions. It doesn’t have to be a huge CSR report. It could be a page on your website or part of your marketing.

Most of these ideas seem self-evident on reflection but it’s remarkable how many brands do not have a social approach like this in place. What that means is that when they are criticised in the media by an activist brand, they don’t know enough about who they’re dealing with, they don’t have a set of principles they can refer to, there are few or no measures that they can cite and there’s a mad scramble to find the facts as the phone starts ringing and Twitter goes mad.

Everything then comes down to a fight over actions, and a discussion conducted purely at that level is very difficult to win because it quickly becomes ‘they say … we say’ and your brand inevitably comes across as defensive.

You can use a similar Principles – Measures – Actions – Report process for other key aspects of your social brand too, such as your sponsorships. Let’s come back to that …

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

By Mark Di Somma

Almost every brand I work with has a community policy, an environmental policy, a sustainability policy … as they should. And everyone seems to acknowledge that the policy or policies they have form an important part of their reputation and their stakeholder relations … as they should. And yet precious few brands have actively connected those social responsibility activities with their brand. Read More

Are you indecisive? I’m not sure …

By Mark Di Somma

Edward Boches pointed me in the direction of this thought-provoking article by John Tierney on “decision fatigue”. Decision fatigue happens when ordinary people are asked to make decision after decision after decision. Such processes run down the mental batteries that power our self control. Eventually it seems, we start looking for shortcuts – either by acting impulsively or by opting to do nothing.

Research on what tires us out the most shows that people would rather compare and contrast options (without making a decision) or verify a decision that has already been made by someone else than make the decision themselves. Once consumers reach a certain level of mental tiredness they stop negotiating. Instead, they make decisions based on the thing that is most important to them. Decision fatigue, it seems, breaks down our reluctance to explore or commit. People soon opt for default settings or suggestions. And the more tough choices there are early in the process, the quicker people opt for the path of least resistance.

All of this has major implications for the ways that brands think about their ranges and their sales processes – specifically, the intensity of choices, timing of those choices, frequency of choices; types of choices (defaults vs calculations) and simplicity of choices.

There are also important compromises to consider. For example, whilst it might be easy to fatigue someone into making a one-off sale by wearing them out with decisions, what will their experience be in retrospect and will that sale engender loyalty and repeat business and/or WOM? Probably not.

For brands ranging from consultancies to retail, there are important way-finding opportunities in these findings: revealing the complexity/scope of what’s available, for example, needs to be tempered by actions that lead people directly to the things they are most enthusiastic to consider and feel in control of.

My clear take-out from this article is that choice can be a complicator not a liberator, that not all decisions matter enough to involve the consumer (but the secret lies in knowing which ones do), and that speed of transit through the sales process needs to be interlaced with feelings of control, excitement and reassurance.

In other words, the sales process for most brands should change gears to become easier the closer one gets to purchase, with the hard decisions timed to be far enough in for people to feel involved, but not so far in that they feel exhausted.

It’s certainly something to consider the next time you’re looking to change your sales process. Are we asking consumers to make the right decisions about our brands at times that are right for them – or are we pushing them to conform with a way of selling that suits our own energy levels?

The opportunity of dull

By Mark Di Somma

There are days when Alex really makes me laugh. I grinned merrily at her observation recently that if you really want to make significant changes as a brand, you should go all out and look for something … dull. That’s right, find something uneventful, even pedestrian – and poke it for opportunities.

And the reasons, on reflection, are simple. Chances are people do whatever it is often. So it comes with scale and frequency. And secondly, if it’s that tedious, frankly the only way is up. High energy, exciting activities already have high EQ by their very nature. And they attract the most interest from brands. So the chances of doing anything breakthrough are so much harder. Dull stuff is out of the limelight. It’s dull and it stays dull for most people until someone does something to change that.

So it’s actually a lot less difficult to make the boring better: to take something that people don’t want to do or don’t enjoy doing, and to inject new elements and ideas that surprise and delight. Wii made exercising at home fun by combining it with gaming. Obvious on reflection – but it sure the hell works. Apple makes shopping appealing (even for men) by giving even those who aren’t into IT something physical, fashionable and beautiful to fidget with. They understood that many people were completely turned off by computer stores – so they went out of their way to make shopping for their stuff feel as ungeeky (and yet as clubby) as possible.

What brands should be looking for, according to Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, is not so much the big pain points as what he terms “tension points”: those things that are annoying or less than perfect but not big enough to be considered problems. He cites the example of Dutch Boy Paint which introduced a Twist & Pour container featuring an easy twist-off lid and a neat-pour spout. It did away with the need to pry open the lid with a screwdriver and reduced spilling and dripping. Read the article. It’s very good.

But often brands can take this further than answering problems. They can develop ways of thinking about what they do that challenge disinterest at every level – because that’s the real issue. That’s the brand-killer.

And the systemic question that gets you there is this: “What’s the most boring thing we do?”

Fix that. Find ways, using techniques such as those that Williams has suggested, to make whatever it is more interesting – for you, for others and most importantly for customers.

Then ask the same question again. And fix the next thing the same way.
It could be the way the phone is answered, or the state of toilets. It could be the fact that there are no plants in reception. Or the forms people need to fill in. Little things that everyone does that are boring but deemed necessary. Because dull is usually small. And the great thing about little is that it makes things do-able. Quickly.

Your goal as a brand is to be fascinating at every level for the people you are trying to reach. That won’t make you Apple or Diesel of Chanel necessarily – but it will make you a lot more attractive and compelling than your competitors. It will enable you to ‘brand’ an activity, however menial, your way.

So often companies look to achieve competitive advantage by building better things and making efficiency gains. But from a brand perspective, you don’t become more interesting or likeable through continual improvement. You can if you commit to becoming more exciting.

Is Google mad?

By Mark Di Somma

No-one can accuse Google of resting on its laurels. But having sought to shape-shift the social universe with Google+, what to make of the decision to acquire Motorola? Are patents the latest tech bubble? This post on Business Insider certainly raises some doubts about the prudence of Google’s decision, saying basically that unless they’re in it to strip the intellectual goodness of the patents and run, this is a Time Warner-AOL re-run in the making.

The key concerns are:

The discrepancy in margins and profit ceilings between the two companies, with Google in a league of its own in online advertising and Motorola an also-ran in the low-margin frenzy of hardware manufacture. The common descriptor of “technology” is not enough to hold together two companies that are so disparate in their outlooks, priorities, philosophies and outputs.

Motorola will distract resources, time and attention. Without that, Motorola’s returns will quickly drag on the Google balance sheet.

And my own question – How does much of the rest of the mobile world which uses Android react to such a move? Isn’t there a real risk of cannibalisation here?

All of these points speak to a lingering disquiet on my part, which echoes the “diversification” strategies of the late 80s. Back then, the way to make money, common wisdom declared, was to broaden your revenue streams and/or asset strip and hock off the parts. All sorts of businesses poked their noses into sectors that were quite literally none of their business – often with disastrous results. My concern is that the “war of the worlds” will send tech companies down a similar route – delving into areas of the sector that they are not equipped, physically or psychologically, to maximise in the bid to land-grab whatever seems valuable.

If that happens, expect wreckage. Because one brand’s assets can rapidly become another brand’s liabilities if the set-ups and systems are calibrated incorrectly. Marrying a high-touch, high margin business with a low-touch, low margin business looks like a conflict of interests waiting to happen.

The question for Google is: do you really know what you’re looking for in this, and, ironically, will you find it?

Critical mass: understanding what drives fluctuations in likeability for brands

By Mark Di Somma

Whilst I continue to question the financial returns from social media for brands, there is no denying their ability to galvanise. In fact, social media is the driving force behind “critical mass” – the ability to bring together consumers from many places to form a significant mass of opinion, in support or against, based around an issue they consider critically important to them.

For brands, critical mass can be a powerful forum for advocacy, feedback, testing, support and, perhaps most importantly, a way to stay directly attuned to what Mr and Mrs Consumer are feeling. But a critical mass also makes for a powerful enemy: as we’ve seen this past week, a group of people united by a single idea can turn on a brand with extraordinary ferocity.

Critical masses flock and disperse in response to ideas. People join, leave and link at whim. So these groupings are constantly forming, dissolving and reforming on a global scale. They are not one constituency. And the density of the mass and its duration derives directly from the galvanising strength of the idea, the momentum it gathers, and the response of the brand. These are instant opinion communities that can choose to express themselves as pages, groups, in the wider media or directly through a blizzard of tweets.

Social markets, just like their financial counterparts, are driven by sentiment and the interactions of many. And it is that participation that generates volatility. But unlike the sharemarket, critical mass drives partiality rather than actual value. It helps decide whose on your side and whose not – at any given moment.

For scaled brands, then, the sentiment of critical mass represents your likeability in real time.

Some days your partiality will be up – meaning people generally feel good about you. At other times, the mass of opinion will be negative, impartial or absent. Same for your competitors.

Understanding that, quantifying it and responding to it is significant for its importance and yet it can only be momentary in its interpretation.