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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. We’ve done this more often.

Here’s the thing. It’s a much stronger equation when it’s not about you.

The real value and competitiveness of what you have to offer changes when you stop thinking about what you’re interested in, and start thinking about how others really benefit from your work.

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 other points, it straight-out widened my awareness, which I think is where conferences like this are always so powerful.

Sarky, from All of Us, quoted Clay Shirky’s point that for the first time ever being part of a globally interconnected group is normal, which put everything that followed into a very real context. And I just loved his thought that all things are technology at some time. Glass was technology at a point in history. So were pens and bread. Also liked his contrast between coherent and consistent. Brands, he pointed out, have tended to be consistent. They will be a lot more powerful into the future if they are coherent. Less clone, more spirit. Big tick for that thought.

Natan Linder from MIT Labs took us on this extraordinary journey regarding interfaces and about how they define experiences. He highlighted some examples of how the Labs team are looking at how we can literally use the world as an interface, and that, with this kind of thinking, the world actually becomes a store. I sat there hoping that people like Paco Underhill and Martin Lindstrom were onto what Natan and his team were doing. It inspired the retail out of me.

Susan Bonds told us the amazing story of how Nine Inch Nails built an interactive, multi-media concept that took in digital, music, concert and a whole bunch more channels. My notes though seem to centralise around the observations she wove through the presentation:

  • The challenge of stories is that they need to generate active engagement that at first spans minutes but then must extend through to years. Stories need to go on an emotional journey that evolves from discovery to ownership.
  • When she talked about how her company, 42 Entertainment, builds games, I was very taken with the idea of moments that intercepted with people, and that it was those points of interception that generated experiences.
  • She talked about building a whole world out of fragments, which I interpreted as creating pieces rather than vistas – bits that stick and come together to lay the world before your eyes.

Dr Shane Moon spoke about neuro-marketing and how you can use techniques and ideas to influence very difficult audiences like teenagers and even change their behaviours. I was struck in particular by two particular thoughts in his presentation. The first was that creative people have tended to see research as the stifler of great ideas whereas in fact, as his Roads Victoria example showed, understanding how your audience really think can make the creativity so much more real and informed, allowing you to pursue lateral approaches. The other thought I liked was the observation that it is not what you experience that matters, but rather what you recall about what you experience. The emotive memory, in other words, is more important and is much more influential than the actual memory.

All this and a lot more, packed into two hours. Huge thanks once again to the Cato team for the invite and the hospitality.

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 media and its frenzy make brands brands.”

Brand increasingly means buzz, or perhaps something or someone that is buzzed about: something or someone who has got or is getting attention, for good or bad reasons. (Aligns with my post last week about the real value of reality brands.)

Visibility is credibility. Which comes back, in a strange way, to what those of us who were there used to say when people told us a brand was just a name or just a logo: “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

Today, I’m much more afraid there’s often not. Use has subverted meaning.

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’ and ‘why’. The pursuit of the paperwork becomes a self-appointed Holy Grail, to the point where something’s not right if it doesn’t have the ever-increasing stamps and signatures. The business becomes utterly accountable to, and limited by, the bureaucracy. And the fact that no-one really understands what happens, why it happens, where it leads, why it’s needed, who authorised it, what difference it makes or why it was even devised only seems to add to its mystique.

Next time you go to a meeting and someone suggests something, check for two pieces of feedback: “We can’t” and “We’ll need to …”. Chances are, that’s bureaucracy making its presence felt.

Which is why I’m so drawn to Bjork’s observation. Success stems from having and finding ways to get to where the business needs to go. Those are true processes. Anything else is not. Bureaucracy is cipher for barrier.

And it’s about recognising too, as Bjork observes, that systems have an inherent tendency to become more complex. The more we do something, it seems, the more we try and factor in every eventuality, every contingency, everyone … and things take on an internal logic that is utterly baffling and yet strangely compelling and reassuring, all at the same time.

We structure bureaucracy on assumptions backfilled by layers of history – ‘it must be this way, it needs to say this, it requires five of these’ – when we should of course structure everything the business does on questions. One in particular – Does this (process) get us to there (goal) as quickly and simply as it can?

That’s the chase. Cut to that.

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’.

That in turn means that the answers themselves are not definitive. They are both conditional and iterative: always subject to further questioning; and always morphing because of that questioning.

True is true, until and unless proven otherwise. And it is that need to prove, one way or the other, that mitigates assumption.

Systems and frameworks stand between this approach working and anarchy. A systematic approach to questions mean a manageable quantity of questions are being asked and answered at any given point. And the right frameworks ensure that the answers are explored, along with their implications … before new questions are raised.

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 expression of our individual worldviews. In choosing to see the world a certain way, we each make assumptions, form schemas, to fill in the blanks.

We have to.

The paradox is that while assumptions equalise our world, not all assumptions in that world are equal.

The dilemma for any brand is to sift the assumptions it must make in order to bind its customers together and efficiently achieve its goals as a business from those that it must break with in order to offer a distinctive and competitive alternative to what everyone does; to what everyone else has assumed for too long.

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 taking you.

Actually, don’t tell me at all (unless we’re working for you). Tell yourselves. Every day.

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 a step-change.

On the contrary, the approach I’m seeing seems somewhat akin to throwing multi-million darts at a global events board in an increasingly desperate search for an economic bulls-eye. These are multi-million decisions that, on inspection, are far too piecemeal, and require far more money to make them truly pay their way than New Zealand has available.

We have stories, and some of them are amazing stories: a tourism story; a yachting story; an All Blacks story etc. What they don’t add up to, and report to, is a compelling value equation.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge believer in the need to invest in events – but given how much these particular events are going to cost, were these the best events for New Zealand to choose? Are they delivering us bang-for-our-buck or just expensive bragging rights?

What do they give us an opportunity to tell the world that the world doesn’t know already? How do they add value? And how many more times will we make mistakes like these?

In this article in the Herald, the Minister says the World Cup will have lasting economic value for New Zealand because the country will be building its brand on the international stage. “We convince more tourists to come here, we convince more businesses to do business here with New Zealand companies and enter partnerships with them.” That sounds great. But the numbers don’t bear that out at all. New Zealand isn’t going to make anything. In fact, we’re staring down the barrel of a $500 million loss. So if you thought the price of admission to the RWC games was high already, it just went up $120 for every man, woman and child.

And the America’s Cup. OK, I get that in some form it might help our boat-building industry, but where does it specifically contribute to the wider NZ brand story? How do a bunch of freelancers in a catamaran add to our national competitiveness? It’s not a facetious question.

If we got offered the Olympic Games or Formula One, would we take those too, knowing that the cost-benefit ratios would be irresponsible? (Just so you know, I think the way such events are priced and structured generally makes them an irresponsible decision for most countries.) The sad thing is, I think New Zealand might be sorely tempted. For all the same reasons.

It’s healthy to love sport and competition. It’s irresponsible to get involved in directly and publicly funding events that don’t advance our national brand and our national economy.

Which leads me to all the arguments we keep hearing about intangible benefits. Intangibles in this context strike me as a concise way of saying that no-one actually knows what we’ll be getting, but they’re sure there will be something.

I have no doubt at all about the sincerity and commitment of those preparing for the Cups. But I’ve never seen a strategy yet where an incoherent story championed in different ways by a whole range of parties with different agendas suddenly gained traction and delivered “intangible benefits” that amounted to hundreds of millions in real economic benefits for everyone.

What do you think?

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 in the Kardashians really their brand?

Have Sears nailed an astute marketing association or have they too been caught up in what appears to be happening around them, and are hoping it somehow rubs off on them? Can that even happen? Whose really dreaming here?

Spin the totem. Guess, we’ll see.

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 33% of the time.

The dilemma for any brand that depends on loyalty programmes to keep its customer base motivated is this: the more you give, the more it’s expected but actually the less it means.