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Beautiful adventures

By Mark Di Somma

It seems even iconic hotelling isn’t safe from convergence. Flagship Parisian hotels are now finding themselves challenged by major Asian hotel groups keen to make their mark on the Continent. For the European establishment, it seems, the Far East just got a whole lot closer to home.

The effect, according to Time, will be a 40% increase in the number of luxury rooms in the city, and a classic competitive tug-of-war between iconic Gallic chic and a lighter, more cosmopolitan stay that still emphasises luxury.

Two particular ideas in this story really caught my eye – one as an idea, the other as a strategy.

The first – the idea – was Philippe Leboeuf’s description of the new Mandarin as a “beautiful adventure”. What a fabulous term. Now that’s an idea I can see being applied far beyond the refined world of the Parisian avenues. A beautiful adventure, at least in my head, is both elegant and exciting, it has grace and adrenalin, aesthetic and wildness … It is an idea with the potential to fire the imaginations of everyone from car designers to retailers because it combines such starkly contradicting factors as reassurance with curiosity.

Architects and urban planners – take note. Imagine rebuilding my home town of Christchurch along those lines. Yum. Bilbao on a stick …

The second thought – the strategy – was how the big French hotels intended to respond to the threat of newcomers – because I think it’s an important reminder for all market leaders, particularly long standing market players – facing faster moving, younger predators.

Reshape and remind.

Make the changes necessary to project your business forward, at the same time as you remind everyone of why your jewel should remain a treasure. And the way you do that of course, if you’re a Parisian landmark, is to weave extraordinary and unique stories directly from your history into your reshaped narrative – stories filled with romance and history and torment and triumph. Stories like these:

“the Crillon emphasizes that Marie Antoinette took piano lessons in its drawing rooms, and the Ritz honors Coco Chanel’s 30-year residency there. At the Bristol, managers recount how during World War II, their predecessors erased a suite from the floor plan and harbored a Jewish architect, who later thanked them by building the hotel’s elegant wrought-iron elevator at its center.”

Yet another reminder in itself that even in a business that emphasises staying, nothing stands still for long.

Finding the long tail of distribution

By Mark Di Somma

This story about how United Villages is using motorcycles, mobile phones and face to face selling to bring big brands to the smallest villages in Jaipur in Rajasthan, India is a stark reminder that tapping tomorrow’s multi-billion dollar markets isn’t about the latest fave apps at the tech conferences.

On the contrary, it’s about simple things like allowing retailers to keep trading by delivering the goods to them. It’s about local reps that the retailers get to know. It’s about something as straightforward as a product guarantee.

This is the real long tail of distribution – a genuinely untapped maze of villages stretching across India, China, South Asia, Indonesia, the Pacific, in fact a good chunk of the earth.

As the buzz from SXSW swirls online, it’s easy to forget isn’t it that massive numbers of the world’s future brand consumers are only now moving out of the analogue age.

A brand within a timeframe

By Mark Di Somma

It is perhaps the ultimate exit strategy – a company with a closing date. This article in the NY Times talks about NPOs such as Malaria No More and Out2Play that have decided their work is done. They’re closing because they have accomplished what they set out to do.

Now imagine doing that with a brand. Setting a date by which you would have achieved set business and social goals along with an agreed return on capital – and ending it there. Too radical? My friend Sam Kebbell set up his architectural practice using that exact premise – a company that would last 50 years. And brand strategist Dan Herman has already successfully proposed just such an idea with his concept of “short-term brands”: brands that focus excitement and buyer loyalty because they are built not to last.

Funny isn’t it how we all acknowledge the pace of change, and how much consumers crave the new, and yet we expect brands to just keep running. Perhaps that’s why they go stale. They need continuing infusions of energy, and as Dr Herman suggests one way to do that is to give them start and end dates, to effectively produce brands that are conceived, brought to market and ultimately concluded as limited editions.

What would you do with your brand if it only had four years to run? You’d make faster decisions, you’d be very, very focused on producing brands with enormous crave factor, you’d look for creative ways to feed that excitement by adding value without adding cost and you’d be very aware of your performance at any given point in time.

Potentially brands could get very short indeed. Pop-up length.

And if you are part of a bigger group, you could even mix up your brand portfolios so that they were set to run and ‘expire’ at different times. 150 year brands, 10 year brands, 3 year brands, 3 week brands … with all the different emotions that such brands could conjure, all reporting to a central story.

Classics and fads … or as Dan Herman puts it, brands as fashion. Chop, chop …

CEO discretion is advised

By Mark Di Somma

Further to the post of a couple of days ago. One of the great temptations of the online age is that you can gain attention. A lot of attention. Very quickly. Do something outrageous – in the case of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, shoot an elephant and display the trophy video for all to see – and people will react.

If you’re the CEO of a company, it must be tempting to think that a stunt like this is creating buzz, getting people talking, raising your brand’s profile. It’s all part of the job, right? All part of the controversy? All part of leading a challenging brand? Just a continuation of getting ads banned from Superbowl or whatever?

The danger for colourful leaders is of course that at some point in the bid, they overstep the mark.

Clearly someone forgot to tell the GoDaddy-in-chief that’s also what makes attention-seeking the ultimate brand honey-trap.

Perhaps he doesn’t care, or notice? That may say something too of course. To some people, it may say quite a bit.

Loyalty and lust

By Mark Di Somma

Over tea with Alex in the sun a couple of afternoons ago, we got talking about what you can count on in a market, and what you can observe but not necessarily depend on. I’ll leave it to Alex to share the specifics of what she talked about in her own inimitable way, but our conversation did get me thinking about the different kinds of customers that brands have today because in the face for scale, it’s easy to confuse the different levels of interest and loyalty.

Let’s start with what happens when you get waves of visitors. It’s tempting to have your head turned by the massive numbers that can swarm a post, a thought, an idea, a product. Suddenly your metrics are through the roof and your mentions are running like ticker-tape. You are the talk of the world, and the temptation of course is to think you’ve made it. You have their front of mind. But that space is mercurial, and attention – one the Holy Grail of marketers – is now a false prize. That’s because such amazing scale-up comes with an equally astonishing fade, as something literally crosses the collective spheres and then disappears. You may get the attention but that’s no guarantee you’ll hold it. Once the swarm moves on, chances are you’re flocksam; one more thing they leave behind.

However, at the very same time as you are being swamped by a popularity wave, chances are you are also growing a loyalty current.

The two groups have very, very different drivers. But they grow, at different rates, simultaneously. Two distinct behavioural bell curves.

While those in the wave are momentarily inclined to fashion and trends, those in the loyalty current are looking for stability, consistency and reliability. They want to go on a journey with you – and they’ll stay as long as it’s exciting, rewarding, involving. They may well be a smaller group, possibly a quieter group, but they are vital because, critically, they fill the gaps between the waves you generate. They are your residual brand base. They are the ones who will talk about you in a sustained way, buy into your story, give you feedback, will you to succeed. They are the ones who are buying your products between the headlines. Currents generate cashflow.

But that comes with conditions – and one of those conditions is that, as their loyalty increases, they will take more and more interest in what the brand is and what it stands for. They will hold you to account for where they believe your brands needs to go and what they expect to see and experience. And they will want that journey to be what my friend Christine calls “consistently surprising”. Upset them, and the impact will be more than sensational, it will be financial.

Increasingly brands are going to need to be able to sift waves from currents, and to find sophisticated ways to recognise and realise the potential of both. That will require a much more dimensionalised view of the marketing, products and viewpoints needed to capitalise on on-going loyalty (big talk) versus those that gain the attention of, and provoke the buzz for, passing interest (small talk).

Another one of those topics I’m sure we’ll come back to …

Making the second sale

By Mark Di Somma

People say the first sale is the hardest to make. You have to find the right person in the right company, you have to catch them at the right time in the right mood, make your pitch, you have to convince them to go with you. That’s got to be the hardest thing in the world doesn’t it?

I’m not so sure. Because, at least with the first sale, there’s the curiosity factor. There’s the opportunity to try you out, maybe on something small, maybe on something others are struggling with or that issue they have not got round to. First sale takes determination and courage and the willingness to push through against many, many obstacles.

But I think the second sale is more difficult. OK, it’s easier in that they’ve seen what you did. You have some small degree of familiarity on your side. The risk of course is also that they’ve seen what you did. They feel they know you. They’re forming their own impressions about your abilities.

The real disadvantage though is that by second sale, people want to know why sustained interest in you is warranted. Not only that, they also need to convince themselves that choosing you again is better than choosing anyone else they already know (including all their previous first timers), the hot “new thing” they haven’t yet tried or the many first-timers who are now banging down the door asking for their chance.

If you’re a new brand, and you’ve overcome all the obstacles to get a product to market, to get noticed, to get distributed and you’re filling targets, congratulations. Enjoy the moment.

Soon, very soon, you’ll need to turn your attention to the make-or-break question:

Now what have you got?

What are you worth?

By Mark Di Somma

Some fascinating insights in this piece on how consumers are valued collectively and individually by organisations. I was amused to see how, in B2B trades, consumers were valued at much, much more than they were when organisations contacted consumers directly.

Some time back I had an issue with what each Facebook customer was worth (still do). But in comparison to some of the deals mentioned, they’re being very modest. Compare for example the $1147 that AT&T is proposing to spend on each T-Mobile customer or the $4,700 that Cablevision Systems Corp. will pay for each Bresnan Communications customer with the much smaller amounts that cable, utility and credit card companies pay individuals to switch.

One example quoted has Energy Plus offering JetBlue frequent flyers 3,000 points, worth around $45, for choosing it as their electric supplier.

It tells me that what the market values customers at as a group and how the companies themselves value customers as individuals appear to be at significant odds. It’s almost as if as soon as they can put a face or even a name to the relationship, the relationship loses value. A lot of value.

Is this the financial equivalent of a problem with intimacy do you think?

What’s a brand problem?

By Mark Di Somma

I’m always fascinated when people tell me they have a brand problem – because I’ve seldom encountered one. I’ve encountered a whole range of business problems however that addressing the brand can fix.

One of the real concerns I have with many “brand strategies” is that they work in too small a circle. The vicinity of their reasoning is marcomms, which is important of course and immediate, but what gets lost with such a restricted approach is the wider thinking needed to really address and resolve the matter at hand.

And unless you take that broader approach, unless you actively build the widest context into your consideration set by really understanding what’s happening to and within the business, you’re just dealing with what’s in front of your nose. There’s also a very real risk that the brand strategy is actually little more than an elaborate but ultimately isolated justification for the communications approach.

Light my fire

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do if you’re one of the world’s most famous lighter companies and the number of smokers is dropping?  If you’re Zippo, you look for ways to capitalise on your ‘cool’ image and extend your brand into products ranging from watches to leisure clothing.

Zippo hit its zenith around the mid-1990s with 18 million lighters a year. Today, that figure’s dropped to around 12 million lighters a year and the hunt is on for products that are, in the words of president and chief executive Gregory Booth, “rugged, durable, made in America, iconic”.

It seems to be a standard operating procedure these days. Brands hit a certain scale and then look to diversify in order to fish in other waters, or else, their iconic products hit their use-by date and they start looking for ways to sweat their assets, or someone brings a brand back from the dead and looks to add product lines to what they hope is its revitalised equity.

Sadly, many of these diversifications don’t strike me as strategic. They are reactions or speculations – planned perhaps, but reactive or speculative nevertheless. And like all sequels to the original story, some will work but many will simply not live up to the original.

Simply attaching a brand to a catalogue of goods does not guarantee success. Diversification has to make the brand stronger, more relevant, more accessible – not just look to draw on the existing equity in order to cast a wider net.

The good news for Zippo is that they seem to have spotted the problem well ahead of time and planned carefully for the transition. They will just need to make sure that whatever they do has line of sight with their on-going story, rather than on depending on recognition alone.

If you’re tempted to go down this route yourselves for any of the reasons mentioned above, here’s my questions:

  • If you introduce this new line as part of your brand, what are you asking the consumer to believe?
  • Is that a reasonable belief? Will it make sense for them? Does it extend what they already believe about you?
  • Will it intensify the loyalty that your customers have for the brand?
  • Why are they going to believe your new story over the story they’re already hearing from another brand for whom that product line is core business?

What’s in the box?

By Mark Di Somma

Marc Levinson’s book The Box explains why a “soulless aluminium or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end” was able to revolutionise trade.

As Levinson points out the container is about much more than what it does, it’s about what it now represents to all of us living and buying in the global economy: an extraordinary system for moving goods between places at minimal cost and with as little complication as possible.

Along the way, the humble container literally changed the world around it: new ports became valuable; just-in-time became possible; international trade accelerated; loading and delivery times shrank; trade became standardised; supply chains extended.

But the economic benefits that arose from the container didn’t come from the box itself, clever as it was. The real innovation came from entrepreneurs who, over time, discovered how they could apply the potential of the container to their commercial advantage. It was those people who saw that this box with “all the romance of a tin can” represented much more than just a change in shipping. It was literally the shape of trade to come.

As that happened, Levinson points out, the real shift occurred. Businesses that at first had struggled to see how the container would work for them came over time to reshape themselves to ensure they could make better and better use of the equipment that was redefining whole industries.

The container serves as a powerful parable for all of us developing brand strategies and stories. The temptation is to go so far as to ask: What does it do, or even What could it do?

But finding the real potential, the wonderful story, the innovation that the rest of the world may have missed in a product or idea requires us to go three questions further.

What could it be? Where might that lead? And who would that excite?