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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 happy.

Look a little harder. You’ll probably find they’re not.

Now imagine if everything else we normally mull over was inversed. Instead of the KPIs being how we measured success, those operational metrics became an indication of how happy people felt working with us, buying from us, trusting us. In other words, imagine using the numbers to quantify the success of achieving the emotion rather than generating an emotion based on the success of the numbers.

Of course you’d need parameters. Not everyone can be happy all the time. Not everything we do in business is happy. And happy itself is hard to define. Legal would have a field-day. Finance would agree that the whole place had gone to the dogs. But if your goal every day was to make people happy, your organisation might be a little more empathetic, helpful, friendly, engaging, inclusive, tolerant, involved, human, generous, optimistic … which aren’t bad qualities.

Imagine replacing your marketing strategy with a happiness strategy. OK, ignore the term please and focus on the outcomes. That might make your customer service policies a little less myopic and your new business pitch a little less about what you want to say and more about what your customers would enjoy seeing. You’d look for ways to delight, charm and pleasantly surprise in your dealings … again, not bad qualities.

Now quantify how much churn you’d save, productivity you’d gain, commitment you’d garner if your people were happier.

Maybe it is simplistic. But sometimes the barest questions really do come with the greatest cut-through.

Imagine if every marketing manager asked “Would I be happy to see this?” before they signed off the next campaign. Wow. That’s around 90% of most ad breaks gone.

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 than just underwear-draping with a gorilla. In fact, as the whole world knows, the revamped King Kong beat the dinosaur, defended the girl and still had time at the end to scale the building.

Clearly another primate thing isn’t going to cut it. Not in this day and age.

So instead, someone simply suggests erecting a large white sign on a hill.

That gets attention. Facebook goes mental. There are demonstrations, media stories, outrage, traffic jams, comments, derisions, mentions of civil disobedience, and even offers of prizes to bring the wretched edifice down …

That was easy. And it may well be just as easy to get the momentary attention of people flying into the city. “Look, a sign. Ha, ha”

But then what? How does this sign connect with what people come to Wellington to experience? What does it add or inform beyond that moment of attention?

That to me is the real issue here. And I’m hoping that’s what this Wellywood sign proposal is – a way of getting people to pay attention and focus on how Wellington could use such a prime piece of real estate to extend its story. If that’s the real intention, then Wellywood’s certainly done its job.

If not, and this really is as far as it goes – banana, anyone?

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 change, competitors change, customers change, businesses change – and brands need to be able to move with those currents. This to me is the most changeable aspect of a brand. This is where the tweaks and the upgrades happen.
  • Initiative – to avoid being a passive player, brands must take the lead. They must be prepared to innovate. These are the changes that happen over the medium-term. They take that much longer because they have greater scale, require greater energy and, if done well, motivate your competitors to rethink their own position.

The role of prediction

Prediction plays a part in all of these decisions and getting any part of this mix wrong can play havoc with a brand. So here are some of the questions I ask to help arrive at the right mix of decisions.

  1. What are the things that a customer most looks for as signs that everything is tickety-boo? It might be the identity, it could be the service, it might be the attitude … something in people’s hearts underpins the relationship, or at least tangibilises it for customers. That’s a no-go zone unless the very fundamentals of the brand are the things holding it back.
  2. What are others doing? Where are they making inroads? What excitement are they generating in the marketplace and why? As a general rule, I build these decisions around how the brand will achieve its own objectives by directly confronting or countering competitor plays.
  3. Finally, where’s the unexplored territory in the market? What’s no-one thinking of or about that the brand could claim the high ground on? It might be a social position, it might be a service extension, it might be a learning from another market?

The key aspect is that every projection is just that. An educated guess as to what will be required in the future. And like predictions, you cannot assume that, once made, these changes will automatically make all your wishes come true. They require their own metrics and of course they need to be tracked and responded to as carefully and objectively as possible. The moment you believe you know where the market is going and how people are going to react, you set yourself up for … disappointment.

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 it again here. When your business model and your brand reputation is prefaced on what people can get and do for free, monetising the model remains a challenge. How are they going to link their reputation and awareness to a money engine?

LinkedIn will have a great day today. I hope they enjoy it. Personally, I love the platform and I wish them the very best. But I can see some sleepless nights ahead in the months ahead when the analysts come calling.

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 another formulated cheap experience. They know because it’s happened to them before. Many times before.

So while the brands are congratulating themselves on what they’ve got away with, there’s a good chance that the top x% of their customers are mentally packing their bags.

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 have, and continue to, come at generating much of that involvement and interest from different angles.

I don’t see that synergy in the other big tech news of the week – the Skype acquisition. What I see there is Microsoft buying a very large customer base for a lot of money that by and large is very used to paying nothing for the service they get and that may or may not be Microsoft-friendly. YouTube visitors by contrast are already watching movies. This latest development just shape-shifts the nature and scope of what viewers have available to them.

The deals are interesting, but what we’re seeing here in my view is the start of a bigger showdown. The rise of content is ubiquitous. Now the fight is on in terms of how to manage that between brands that are bought and brands that stay separate but share. Control vs flexibility – an age-old dilemma, reiterated.

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 to fail, make sure you fail fast and move on.

7. Document. Everything.

8. One of the great myths of delegation is that you give away control. Never give away control.

9. Don’t carry. Be profitable at every step in your business. It’s part of the discipline.

10. The best relationships happen face to face. Technology hasn’t changed that.

11. Costs are opportunities. In a manufacturing business, over half your product costs are in your materials. Every percentage point you can save on materials makes you more competitive.

12. Plan as much as you can. Even though most plans seldom survive their first contact with reality, that’s still a whole lot better than having no plan at all.

13. Don’t burn bridges. It’s amazing how people you think you’ve said goodbye to can come back into your life, sometimes in the most surprising ways. You need to be able to work with them the second or third time around as well as you did the first time.

If you’d like to get your hands on your own copy of Will to Win, it’s available online.

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 pay a lot of attention to things that attract and keep their attention. The truth worked for Domino’s because it got attention. And it got attention because it was interesting and the new product was interesting.

Maybe that’s how we should really analyse retracting brands: not so much as companies that have lost market share but as companies that have lost market interest. That explains of course why established brands die. They become so cautious, they literally die of boredom in spite of multi-million dollar media schedules and aggressive discounting.

As marketers I think we’ve generally been taught to over-estimate awareness and under-estimate curiosity. As the composer John Cage once remarked, “I like being moved. I don’t like being pushed.”