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Shapeshifting how your customers feel

By Mark Di Somma

I was at a speakers’ function once when the conversation turned to those who make the big dollars on the podium. Referring to one particular keynoter who charges around $100K for an address, one of the people in the group observed, “That’s $1700 every minute they’re onstage.”

Are they worth it?

It would be an interesting exercise wouldn’t it to pause a video of such a presentation every 60 seconds and ask ‘was that worth $1700?’ because I suspect that not every minute is worth the same amount. I suspect there’s some variation of a flight of stairs of value, with relatively little ‘value’ at the beginning while everyone settles in and the speaker introduces themselves, a building and paced period of value-delivery in the middle as they extrapolate a story, and then a sustained and high value end-game where they leave the audience inspired before exiting.

Skilled speakers are experts at pacing their presentations to deliver that shape of experience. With so much at stake over such a condensed period of time, they have to. It’s a lesson more brands could learn from – pacing the delivery of their experience to offer critical value at critical moments.

So many brands don’t of course. They flat-line. Or they climb and dive. Or they fish-line (quick spike up, followed by long slow decline over an extended period. Draw it, you’ll see what I mean.) And the reason is that they don’t put conscious thought into their brand experiences. They don’t design them to deliver emotive out-takes. If they design them at all, they do so logistically to deliver a product or service which they hope will produce an emotive out-take.

Try this simple exercise some time.
1. Plot the shape and duration of how you want customers to feel over the course of an interaction. In particular, what moments of the transaction need to be real highs.
2. Ask your frontline staff to map the shape that they believe summarises how customers react across that timeframe now.
3. Work through what you would need to deliver your customer at each point of that experience in order to lift how they feel at critical moments.

It’s a revealing process. One man, asked to draw steps 1 and 2, drew two parallel lines right across the whiteboard.

“See the top line,” he said with a smirk, “that’s what we want to deliver.”

And the bottom?

“That’s what we actually deliver. It’s a parallel universe.”

How to create strong signals

By Mark Di Somma

Spotted this article in The Economist on the growing cost of thought leadership. In an escalating battle for top-of-mind, the top consultancy brands it seems are prepared to spend large amounts – up to 5% of gross revenues by one estimate – to produce thinking they then give away for free.

The activity shows no sign of slowing down in these recessionary times, with spending on such papers up by 500% according to one estimate, yet ironically the very consultancies that hammer their clients on the need for accountability can ascribe very little hard data – at least publicly – on the return on the investment.

So why do it?

My sense is that this really is a battle fought around something my friend and colleague Alex calls “strength of signal”. Much of the thinking about that is fairly obvious in a B2C market, but how do you generate ‘strong signals’ in the B2B market where the big consultancies are competing? I subscribe to more than my fair share of such papers. So what follows are the ten components that I think create the strongest signals in a B2B market crowded with corridor walkers.

The ten things that make thought pieces worth reading (and therefore help build professional brands):

1. Authenticity – they reveal a genuine interest in, and knowledge of, the area, its importance and its implications. In an era where so many consultancies seem to run revenue drag nets hoping to snare billings in every area imaginable, this is a great way to exhibit genuine expertise

2. Innovation – they show a consultancy looking to break new ground or at the very least champion a broader awareness than the conventional viewpoints. That aligns not just with senior decision makers’ search for new competitive opportunities, it also sends a subliminal message of a consultancy committed to, and capable of, looking beyond the ordinary.

3. Authority – by taking a prominent position in the thinking around the subject, the consultancy establishes credibility and at least looks to make the ‘go-to’ shortlist for that issue, and problems that appear, or feel, similar. A business that lives by its brains must be prepared to preview its brains in action.

4. Familiarity – they reveal a working knowledge not just a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the industry/sector. This is critical, because it implies all-important experience.

5. Consistency – there should be clear line of sight between what the consultancy talks about and what it espouses philosophically. In other words, anyone reading such material should see it as a natural space for the consultancy to be in.

6. Leadership – because of all the above, the consultancy should feel like the natural leader for initiatives in this area – not just the company that people come to by chance, but the one they look to for assertions of change and measures of success

7. Urgency – the business case for considering or acting upon this in a shortened timeframe is vital. In a world where distractions loom large and agendas loom larger, getting an idea on the mind-map of senior teams is never easy. Strong signals make for a compelling business case. They provide a reason to pick up a phone, clear a hole in the calendar and say ‘we should talk’.

8. Distinction – the thinking must be new. I counselled a consultancy recently that wanted to release a paper based on everything they had searched. There was nothing wrong with what they had found, it’s just that it completely lacked authorship, and therefore ownership. It told me what everyone else was thinking, which, actually, diminished the role of the consultancy. They literally couldn’t put their name to it. I asked them to bring me back a point of view.

9. Objectivity – it can’t just feel like another pitch, and in that sense many of the dynamics that apply to social media (giving generously in order to drive up fans and followers) absolutely apply. At the same time though, it can’t be so divorced from the consultancy paying for it that the alignment is lost.

10. Name – the thinking should be framed to a term that the consultancy wants to take ownership of. This needs to be a snappy but credible name that sits easily with the consultancy brand.

What’s new about what your customers already know?

By Mark Di Somma

Most brands get launch. They understand how to make a splash for a product on a day. But what do you do between splashes? How do you keep front-of-mind? And more importantly, how do you stop the inevitable awareness fade as the ripples from your big splash die away? If you’re Walt Disney, you start introducing shorts between your new features, just to keep up awareness of your most popular and lucrative characters. And you do so knowing that such a cue will reactivate interest and re-kick merchandise sales.

Cross-referencing in order to cross-sell. Nothing new in that – except that here it’s happening at a launch. When Disney releases Cars 2 later this month, audiences will be reintroduced to the key characters from Toy Story in a six-minute short. As Albie Hecht observes in this article in BusinessWeek, “It’s a way to extend the characters and the brand without its fans waiting two or three years for a new movie.”

There’s a lesson here.

It’s tempting for brands to think of their products as separate offerings within an overall branding portfolio. They co-ordinate launches to work alongside one another. But what Disney’s strategy shows is how simple and cost-effective it is to provide customers with added-value experiences based on other brands in the stable that they already know and to use these to maintain relevance and top-of-mind between launches without cannibalising on new offers. All Disney have essentially done is take a format that everyone knows – the movie short – and to elaborate it into an enter-mercial (my new term for a short-movie length commercial that entertains).

Just as interesting is where this development might point other brands.

Increasingly, my sense is that brands will need to look at running longer storylines; stories that they interweave throughout their portfolios at varying degrees of emphasis and that they reintroduce to customers at opportune moments. Cross-referencing and in-jokes pull people in, get them engaged and generate a very real sense of inclusion that heightens the experience. The secret, as Disney have seen, is to make the ‘guest appearance’ significant enough for people to notice without it overshadowing the main event. Six minutes is long enough to do that.

I perceive such appearances as powerful by-the-way opportunities – with the major advantage of course being that they already come pre-packed with familiarity, loyalty and intrigue. New can be exciting. But sometimes, learning what’s new about something customers think they already know can be mighty effective.

Perhaps the new question as you plan your next brand launch is ‘what can we leverage?’

Reaching the limits of conversation

By Mark Di Somma

Reach is one thing. Notice, and more particularly trust, are quite another. Yesterday Alex gently challenged me over my assertion that six degrees of separation will soon be replaced by six clicks. Her point – and it’s a very important one – is that there is a marked difference in loyalty between degrees and clicks of separation because we generally build stronger bonds face to face than we do online, and the strength of those bonds will extend further into our networks.

Six clicks, she believes, is just too many. Alex’s view is that much after two clicks, the network is already so wide and the bonds of engagement so unsupported that people simply drop off our radar. We don’t take it any further. There is a limit to the familiarity we can, and probably choose to, leverage, and it occurs at a much earlier point than in the physical world.

In the physical world, knowing someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone is intriguing and bonding. It spurs conversation. It forges links and connection. There is an element of discovery. We have centuries-old social signals that we can rely on to probe for sincerity and credibility.

But the fact that anyone can seem to reach us from anywhere is heightened online. We trust more slowly and rely on greater familiarity to let people in – which is ironical in itself. In a world where accessibility has never been greater, we have a flat earth approach to contacts – we will only venture so far from who we know before we fear, or refuse to acknowledge, what may lie ahead.

This thought implies there is, ultimately, a finite settling point for a social network – a point where the network itself is saturated and further introductions are not welcome, even though theoretically they could go a lot further. No-one’s suggesting we’re anywhere near that point yet, but it would make an interesting anthropological study would it not?

How far does your trust extend in the real world vs the online world? How many clicks would it take for you to reach your discomfort zone?

Would you be a fan?

By Mark Di Somma

What would you do with your company’s mission statement? Would you tweet it?, Brian Solis asks in this article. Just as importantly – would you retweet it?

In other words, does it carry enough meaning for you, and is it personal enough to what you strive in life for that you would literally want to put your name to it and circulate it?

I love this thought because it’s a great reminder to all of us that purpose isn’t about what you’re told to do, or believe or say. It’s about what you choose to share with others. Or at least it should be.

The “BBQ script”, “elevator speech”, “picket fence précis” whatever you want to call it can’t just be a set of words that you roll out on cue. It can’t just be marketing. Not if you really want people to believe you, and therefore the brand you represent.

Speaking of belief, let me ask you this. How much of what you talked about, thought about, met over, reviewed, presented, rationalised, advocated, defended, instructed, created, delegated yesterday … would you “Like” if you were given the chance? How much of it would you be proud to say you were proud of?

Or did it just get done?

Because if you’re not a fan of what you do, if you wouldn’t like it – why should anyone else?

9 lessons planking can teach brands

By Mark Di Somma

1. Sometimes, there’s just no way of knowing why something becomes a phenomenon. But momentum is addictive – once an idea takes hold, it assumes a life of its own. After a time, it is because it is. The power of an idea is not in actually in the creation, it’s in the radiation and the subsequent take-up.

2. Remember though that a global idea can still be an idea going nowhere. It can be just one more thing to wile away a moment. The numbers can be impressive, but they don’t always point to something meaningful. A million downloads is often a million free clicks. That’s not the basis for a business model.

3. Life is most powerful, and perhaps becomes most alive, when it is visual. Powerful images move us to laugh, share and try. Give people amazing things to look at, and they will literally stop and do so.

4. Posts are the new fingerprints. Give people a simple but fun way to participate in something, especially one they can easily record and share on their social networks, and they will take to the idea with gusto. It’s their chance to put their mark on the world in the moment.

5. In the right setting, weird is a competitive dynamic. People can, and will, seek to outdo each other over the strangest things. One person’s extreme is another person’s starting point. Up the ante, but please, do it responsibly.

6. Andy Warhol was right – and wrong. Everyone will be famous, potentially – but probably for seconds rather than minutes. Shorten the time to get to your story. As the social network continues to expand, I have no doubt that the six degrees of separation will be replaced by six clicks.

7. The thirst for the new can be cynical – people can push the ridiculous just for the sake of it, just to see what happens. Equally, they can promote an opinion or take a swipe, just for the hell of it. Understand your reputation management in that light.

8. Official disapproval is a huge incentive, especially when it’s accompanied by media coverage laced with enticing terms like danger, stupidity and recklessness. Sometimes you want the politicians and the authorities tutting what you do. It might just make you more credible.

9. The search for excitement is unrelenting. Equally, in a word beset by pressures, there can be something unrealistically interesting about the inane. People say they have no time to pay attention to anything, but they are always on the hunt for something interesting to do, however fleeting, that allows them to escape the daily grind. Look for the contrast opportunities.

Every brand must dream

By Mark Di Somma

Positivity comes with benefits if this article on the optimism bias is anything to go by. While, collectively, our view of the future can swing in synch with the news, the budget or the crime stats, a 2007 study found that 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future for their own family. According to the author, “Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.”

It gives rise to phenomenon like talk of ‘green shoots’ in the midst of terrible financial depression because, it seems, we are compelled to find them.

The take-out for brands is obvious. Clearly, there is merit in espousing a clear and positive view of the way forward. It’s not enough to just inform. Brands need to inspire, because that optimistic prognosis of what lies ahead holds real opportunities in terms of engaging and involving people. It humanises brands.

Optimism, I surmise, also aligns directly with our worldview. In other words, what we look forward to is a world that is most like the world we believe in and want to live in. Politicians of course understand this instinctively. So, it’s interesting isn’t it, that so many brands deal in the present, without building a clear bridge to that tomorrow. They do so because their commercial imperatives tell them such containment is realistic – but in point of fact, perhaps articulating an optimistic future is an underpinning opportunity to cementing long-term loyalty.

To strategise, you must first dream. You must be prepared to go where your logical mind says you can’t, and, once you have, where your heart begs to stay. You must identify a brighter, stronger, clearer, competitively different tomorrow, and you must be prepared to brave the cynics to state what people secretly want to hear.

To do that, you need to know where that tomorrow needs to be – even before they do.

As one of my favourite observations goes – imagine where history might have taken us if Martin Luther King had stood in front of all those people in Washington and announced “I have a Powerpoint”.

Waiting for the uplift

By Mark Di Somma

I once had a flatmate who was a pilot. He used to fly these ridiculously small planes in and out of crazy airstrips throughout Papua New Guinea. Every take-off, he used to tell me, was almost literally a leap of faith. You barrelled down a ramshackle runway in the middle of the mountains, literally fell off the end and waited for the winds to pick you up.

He used to come home from an assignment, throw his bags on the couch, and announce, “So far, so good”.

For some reason, I thought about Simon today as I read this article about the fall of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO). What a long way down. In 2005, Martha Stewart’s publicly listed company was worth north of $1.8 billion. Since then, the stock has plummeted a whopping 88%. Now it looks like it may be up for sale – maybe even revert to private ownership – at a fraction of its peak worth. Sure, they’ve been some contributing factors to that – conviction for Stewart herself and of course the small inconvenience we all know as the GFC – still, that’s one hell of a fall from grace. A fall that, according to one analyst quoted in this article has left the company “undersized, underfollowed and undervalued”.

Moral of the story? There are probably several. But let’s focus on one: the myth of the sustainable brand. Sustainable in the sense that it is perceived as self-perpetuating and self-sufficient. Capable of continuing to run on its own. Endlessly.

But strategy, as the great Vijay Govindarajan reminds us, is not a set-and-forget exercise. On the contrary, as the Professor has tenaciously and convincingly argued, your strategy starts dying in terms of its effectiveness the moment it is created. The initial lift-off does not last.

Observes Malcolm Polley, chief investment officer at Stewart Capital, “Martha Stewart is a textbook example of what can go wrong with an entrepreneurial company … Martha Stewart’s company is undergoing a slow death that is a result of management failing to make a transition to the next generation.”

The article seems to imply that the company has been hamstrung at least to some extent by having a key investor who holds more than 90% of the voting power but who is expressly prohibited from joining the board until the third quarter this year. Perhaps the company has had no choice but to run ‘business as usual’ because of that. If so, the alarming dive in the company’s value would appear to support Govindarajan’s point.

My own view is that brands need an iterative strategy – one that addresses Govindarajan’s theory by ensuring that they shed or at least reduce their reliance on hero lines once they start to commoditise and continue prospecting for new ways to replace them. The key it seems to me is to ensure that those incoming lines fit with the brand and its storyline without simply repeating what is being replaced. (Hey, no-one said it was easy.)

It’s a reminder too that the whole point of profit is not just to reward shareholders for their faith and patience, it’s also to fund that prospecting process. The only brand that you can sustain, in other words, is one that you continue to refresh, or at the very least review. Every brand needs continuing attention. And continuing attention requires a running motor. A motor fuelled by cash.

It always amazes me the number of companies that seem to believe they will be the ones to defy gravity. They’ll take the profits without reinvesting anything. Or they’ll keep running their brands to the very last drop without any replacements or refreshments in sight. And when their value and market share falls, they seem to do next to nothing new, perhaps more of the same … they talk about their history and their past achievements and they wait.

They wait for the uplift.

Here’s the thing. Any brand, no matter how strong it has been, without renewal, without invigoration, without powerful forward leadership … will eventually run out of air.

The effect on Oprah?

By Mark Di Somma

We’ve all seen what the Oprah-effect has done for others. Now it will be interesting to see the effect of change on the O-brand itself. By changing the formula, how much does she risk tampering with the magic? Will another talk-show rise to fill the afternoon gap, or will the 40 million O-army decamp and migrate en-masse? Is that even possible?

How much do the dynamics of a brand fundamentally change when you quite literally shift the channel in which it is seen?