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Reading between the lines

By Mark Di Somma

One of my favourite reminders to every brand is – be very clear about what it is you are selling. So often, companies have a view of what they’re offering that differs from what their customers are actually buying. News that The New York Times has confirmed its pricing strategy has me wondering if they have fallen into the same quandary.

The temptation when you produce a newspaper must be to believe that customers are buying news. The Times certainly seems to think so. According to the article, the new pricing strategy means readers get up to 20 articles per month free, and after that they will be prompted to purchase a subscription. That limit is designed to “draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.” If you get to the newspaper via social media the 20-article rule does not apply, but there is a five article a day limit for those who access the site via Google.

(That in itself is interesting because I don’t know about you but I source all my news through aggregators.)

The model infers that the Times believes those who get their news from them will buy their news from them. And whilst I agree totally with the Times’ Chairman, Arthur Sulzberger, that there is “valued content”. I’m not convinced that news per se – the data I can source freely and without cost from so many places – is actually “valued”. The inevitable question of course is: valued by whom – and why? The newspaper or the readers?

If you look at the online subscription models that have worked, such as the WSJ, what readers seem to be actually buying is authority. It’s less about the news per se and more about the analysis of situations, issues, developments etc by bright minds in a specialist environment. The information itself has become a given. It’s the thoughtful analysis of that information by a source they respect that people crave.

Next question. How far would that extend? I might pay for an analysis of an emerging market. But would I pay for the latest gossip on Lady Gaga when much if not all that information is freely circulated on Twitter, through fan sites and in social media?

Noting Moleskine

By Mark Di Somma

In theory, a company like Moleskine should be redundant. Who needs a little black sketchbook these days? Who needs pencils and the ability to sketch and note down ideas? And yet many people – and I’m the first to confess, I’m one of them – are ardent fans. Why?

It’s because Moleskine have sold us a fantastic story: a story of romance and creativity, of spontaneity and genius, of travels made and ideas explored that actually relies on its heritage to work. Woven into their brand are associations with artistic and literary giants. In fact, this little black notebook, with its polite strap, has built up a backstory that embodies great thoughts captured on the move, and celebrates freedom, inspiration and potential …

It’s a backstory of sharpened pencils, crisp paper, and lateral thinking, washed down with (at least) strong coffee, that absolutely targets those who love creativity.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do in your brand storytelling is to revive what people yearn for, or fear may become lost.

The dangers of categorical denial

By Mark Di Somma

Some things are too big to fight. If you’re planning to redefine a whole category for example, then, unless you’re already a market leader, plan on a big outlay and a long runway. You’re literally battling the millions others have already invested to define what it is, what it means, who it’s for, where it’s found, who the key brands are, what the products generally cost and so much more.

If your competitive advantage is predicated on breaking one of those fundamentals, be very aware of the fight you’re buying:

  • You’re battling the pigeonhole that your supply chain will want to put you in;
  • You’re fighting the expectation that your customers automatically have of you;
  • You’re asking for the competition to diss you as unimportant or uninformed; and
  • If you somehow beat all that, and manage to get established, you just pressed the GO button for a whole bunch of imitators to copy your IP and innovation

Here’s the irony. If you’re going to enter/change a category, you must provide the market with enough for them to recognise, but at the same time, you must clearly differentiate your product.

The innovation question is not what are you looking to be, what are you going to invent or even what are you looking to change? It’s – what will your prospects recognise as needing to change, will they welcome that change fast enough and in sufficient quantities, and how much change will you need to generate internally (in terms of systems, skills, offerings and mindsets) to make that happen?

What triggers a surge of popularity?

By Mark Di Somma

What prompts 2.5 million people to follow Charlie Sheen? It can’t be because they expect individual recognition in return.

Why do thousands of people stand outside an Apple store waiting to be one of the first to buy the next iPad? It’s not like even one of them is going to get it free. There is quite literally nothing in it for them beyond being able to say that they were there, near or at the start.

So what’s the motive? I think it’s the thought that this looks too exciting to just be a spectator. They want to share this first-hand. That’s what distinguishes participants from spectators. Proximity. How close they are prepared to get to your brand because of how they feel about it.

Keeping things spicy

By Mark Di Somma

This article about the hugely successful Old Spice campaign makes the point that Proctor & Gamble wasted a lot of opportunity when they allowed a database of more than 100,000 individuals to dissipate.

The author says Old Spice spent millions on a highly integrated and sophisticated programme, and then let it lapse. They have, to paraphrase the article, not gone the distance, and as a result, he says, it will cost Old Spice a lot more to re-engage those people than it would if it had stayed in touch with them.

Basically, we’re talking about follow-up here. DM101.

Here’s the thing though. Successful direct marketing is all about going from 0 to many and then getting all the way back to 1, and staying there … profitably.
• 0 to many gets you the mass attention to provoke a response and requires mass media and mass money.
• Many to 1 requires sweat, data, detail and the ability to close. It needs databases, interaction, lots of number crunching and delivery.
• Staying at 1 requires insight and flair, attention, entrepreneurship, interest and persistence. It’s about keeping individuals involved, interested and buying. And most of all, it requires listening and responding.

All that work to sell a stick of deodorant? You’d like to think that a savvy marketer like Proctor and Gamble did the numbers. Perhaps, given how often people buy deodorant, it just wasn’t worth it to sweat the asset. Perhaps the ‘bump’ was enough to push numbers back up to a sustainable level, at least for now. Perhaps everyone just needed a break.

When you furnish people with your full attention, when you amuse them, make them laugh, talk to them, even flirt with them, you can bet that when that tap gets turned off, some people will disengage immediately, some will miss you, some will want things to continue as they were. Almost everyone will in some way be disappointed.

Just because of the huge shift in intensity.

You can get people’s attention. You can hold people’s attention at least for a while. But can you sustain people’s attention profitably? That’s one question. And what do you do if you can’t? That’s the other.

Pleased to meet you

By Mark Di Somma

This really thoughtful post by Associate Professor Rob Cross of the University of Virginia on building valuable networks caught my eye today. Specifically, I was drawn to the final para:

If we are circulating too much with people we have known forever or people who themselves are all spending time in the same meetings and interactions, then we are not getting the performance impact … The magic lies in the new ideas and perspectives that can come from connections into different networks.

The same point applies in many ways to the networks that brands build with their customers. If they are just selling the same goods, or even new goods, to the same community, then there is no contagion – no reason for the brand to spread interest and influence beyond those who already know it.

A circle can quickly become a wall.

The opportunity for brands is to introduce new ideas into their networks and marketing that ‘stretch’ those who know the brand well, but also serve to introduce and absorb new followers beyond the brand’s established catchments. In other words, brands should be looking to continually expand their outreach, whilst remaining true to a core and unmoving purpose. The last point of familiarity should be the launch point for new ventures and approaches. And just as importantly, brands should make sure they follow the relationship and affinity trails, not just the structure trails.

In other words, expanding brands should be looking to franchise the emotional connections. People might buy more than coffee from you for example, if the emotion that enticed them to buy coffee from you in the first place translates clearly and simply into other areas. That way the brand maintains integrity, intensity and renewal. There should be, in Rob Cross’s words, “connections into different networks”.

Time to stop asking “What will this make us?” and to ask instead:
• What could we introduce?
• Who would welcome that?
• Why would they come with us?
• Where could this take us? and
• Who could we meet then?”

Follow the money

By Mark Di Somma

So what are the chances that Charlie Sheen’s much publicised “breakdown” is a reality-style seeding exercise? Depends how cynical you are I guess. But it is an interesting coincidence isn’t it that within just a few days the man has created a larger-than-life controversy, attracted two million people to his Twitter account and now signed to the latest version of the celebrity endorsement.

That seems very organised.

Serendipity? You decide.

One of the key principles of direct marketing is to always work back from the result. And I think it was David Ogilvy’s mantra to say as much as you need to say in order to make the sale. Well, if the “sale” is Charlie Sheen as a wild-child pitchman on Twitter, mission accomplished. He’s said more than enough. And lawsuits and media statements guarantee there’s plenty more to come. And if the intended result was also a new sense of profile and validation for social media monetisation models, again mission accomplished.

As this article points out:

All the attention has brought a huge amount of exposure to the business of social media advertising. Though companies have been working advertisements into Twitter and Facebook for more than two years, it’s a sometimes unnoticed practice. “A lot of people know about the business now,” says Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh. “It’s a validation of the business that we’re building and the overall industry changes that we’re a part of.”

I find this emerging model an interesting one, not least because it seems to bring together sectors that have tended to remain unconverged. It appears to combine the proven money-making power of the gossip industry with the reach and immediacy of Twitter and the corporate funding of advertisers keen to reach specific demographics. That’s a pretty powerful circle if you think about it.

So what role has Charlie Sheen really played in reinforcing the next iteration of the corporate pitch? Is this model to Twitter and Facebook what Adwords was to Google? Will it further inflate social media company valuations? Too early to tell of course. You and I both know we’ll just have to follow the story.

The strategy consulting dilemma

By Mark Di Somma

I remember having an animated discussion with the CEO of a professional services firm once about their right to take a market-leading position in problem solving. His resistance was based on the fact that, statistically, such work constituted a relatively small part of what they did, even though it was the work that the whole firm loved, and that they had built their reputation on.

How can we claim for that work to exemplify what we do when it is a smaller proportion of our fees?, he asked me. Unless you want that trend to accelerate, how can you not make a stand in the market as the strategist of choice?, I replied.

What do you want to be known for vs what you actually do the most.

Or as Rolling Stone put it so brilliantly: Perception vs reality.

This review of the state of strategy consulting suggests the dilemma was not his firm’s alone. Strategy is still the poster-activity for the smart set, but more and more firms are finding that strategy, while still the activité du jour of a thought leader, increasingly represents less and less of the money in the door. Strategy may be what they’re known for, but the real money it seems gets made much more prosaically. Consider this: “behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain.” In fact, according to the article, pure strategy is on the way to becoming the loss leader that firms ‘invest’ in, in order to win the bankrolling work.

You can read this a couple of ways. If you’re an optimist, it’s a sign of the convergence of thinking and execution into a seamless whole. If you’re a cynic, you’ll see it as one more step towards action at the expense of direction. Either way, if strategy is to avoid commoditising, it’s going to have to reassert its value or risk steady deterioration.

Does strategy consulting itself need a new strategy?

Tea and Coke

By Mark Di Somma

An interesting piece on how organic beverage company Honest Tea might fare as part of the Coke empire. As is observed here, so often these brand acquisitions are a disaster. The very essence of the brands that saw them lapped up in the first place is squeezed out by multi-nationals in their hunt for a return on their investment. Unable to act as quickly as they had when they were growing on their own, and often without the inspiration and commitment of their entrepreneurial founders, the brands quickly wither.

Doesn’t seem to have happened in this case. At least not yet. Powered by the massive production and marketing muscle of Coke, Honest Tea’s sales have skyrocketed. But their key challenge going forward will be to keep customers convinced that Honest Tea has not been compromised ethically; that everything the brand stands for, and believes in, the promise inherent in its name, still holds and that their new master will continue to allow them to hold and espouse their own views.

Opportunities and challenges for Coke too: the chance to continue to diversify out of the embattled high-sugar soda market into the healthier product lines that young and affluent consumers seem to be gravitated towards, whilst resisting the almost instinctual urge to simply throw a scale approach at this niched product and hope it will stick. The formula that works for sweet drinks needs more than a little tinker to migrate to tea.

Allowing individuality and authenticity to flourish is counter-intuitive to the command-and-control style of many motherships. But if brand diversification is to work it needs to be just that: the opportunity for a brand portfolio owner to embrace and encourage a range of approaches and philosophies – each specifically suited to the personality and customers of the brand. Ultimately that is what continues to cultivate loyalty and engagement. That’s what helps the brand feel that it still has a life and a value of its own. Anything less delicate, and the acquired brands can be quickly smothered in a formula that leeches the honesty from them.

The sign of a successful buy-up is that it doesn’t feel like a sell-out … for either party.