All posts filed under: Brand marketing

Is Google mad?

By Mark Di Somma

No-one can accuse Google of resting on its laurels. But having sought to shape-shift the social universe with Google+, what to make of the decision to acquire Motorola? Are patents the latest tech bubble? This post on Business Insider certainly raises some doubts about the prudence of Google’s decision, saying basically that unless they’re in it to strip the intellectual goodness of the patents and run, this is a Time Warner-AOL re-run in the making. The key concerns are: The discrepancy in margins and profit ceilings between the two companies, with Google in a league of its own in online advertising and Motorola an also-ran in the low-margin frenzy of hardware manufacture. The common descriptor of “technology” is not enough to hold together two companies that are so disparate in their outlooks, priorities, philosophies and outputs. Motorola will distract resources, time and attention. Without that, Motorola’s returns will quickly drag on the Google balance sheet. And my own question – How does much of the rest of the mobile world which uses Android react to …

Critical mass: understanding what drives fluctuations in likeability for brands

By Mark Di Somma

Whilst I continue to question the financial returns from social media for brands, there is no denying their ability to galvanise. In fact, social media is the driving force behind “critical mass” – the ability to bring together consumers from many places to form a significant mass of opinion, in support or against, based around an issue they consider critically important to them. For brands, critical mass can be a powerful forum for advocacy, feedback, testing, support and, perhaps most importantly, a way to stay directly attuned to what Mr and Mrs Consumer are feeling. But a critical mass also makes for a powerful enemy: as we’ve seen this past week, a group of people united by a single idea can turn on a brand with extraordinary ferocity. Critical masses flock and disperse in response to ideas. People join, leave and link at whim. So these groupings are constantly forming, dissolving and reforming on a global scale. They are not one constituency. And the density of the mass and its duration derives directly from the …

Time to rethink the business model of some NGO brands?

By Mark Di Somma

Brands like Toms with their “one for one” shoes programme have proven that companies can be both profitable and philanthropic. So why do so many NGO brands stick with a funding model that relies on, well, charity? Peter Salmon, MD at social innovation company NextPlays, certainly has his doubts about models based on grants and donations as opposed to “financed” business practices. Here are some of his thoughts on why “cause” brands need to stop begging for money and start putting up business cases for financing social change. The current models of financing social organisations are through philanthropic grants, equity investment, or conventional debt financing, he says, but the dominance of foundation and philanthropic grants creates an ineffectual social innovation sector that delivers poorer outcomes. 1. Both financing and grant approaches require well researched documentation but a grant application requires a proposal, whereas financing requires a business plan. These may seem like subtle differences, but one is far more open to innovation than the other. Grant applications are often judged to fit within already pre-determined …

Don’t be disappointed: why price underwrites the brand experience

By Mark Di Somma

What’s the difference between a budget airline and a pig? Pigs fly more often – and on time. Harsh perhaps, but it’s a reminder that in a market, there is always a price to pay, and the price is not just about money down. Some people will be happy with budget. It’s worth a cancelled flight or two for the savings they make. For others, that’s far too high a price to pay for a few dollars saved. Years ago, I was in a workshop where three people in the group were asked to make the business case for luxury over economy. The team made their case in a pointed and dramatic way. First, they invited the wider group into a huge open sunny space, where sofas were laid out. Each person was escorted to a sofa and provided with bubbles and canapes. There was a sign on the wall that read $3000. Then, we were invited into a second room. This room was smaller, and instead of couches there were seats. Each person was …

Everything to no-one

By Mark Di Somma

Great question by Paul Dunay: Is sentiment making brands stupid? As the writer points out we are increasingly obsessed with using monitoring tools as virtual tea leaves to try and read the sentiment of the markets towards our brands. Mentions have become the new money – and machines now break those mentions down into chunks of data and attach a ranking to them that brand managers read as gospel. But, Dunay argues, the premise is a false one because “most people can’t agree on the spirit or intention of a tweet anyway and they never will”, meaning brands could be giving greater credence than warrented to metrics that are easily lost in translation. The direct risk from such an approach is that brands essentially treat social media as polling booths for their strategy, and are then unduly influenced in their thinking by the flood of opinions ebbing and flowing across the social universe. It’s important to listen, we’re all agreed on that, but if brands then look to appease everyone and to compromise and tailor …

How brands lose sight of customers

By Mark Di Somma

Interesting observation in a meeting yesterday from Richard about service organisations, and specifically large service organisations and why they often lose sight of the customer and the shifting demands of a dynamic market. Everybody says they’re in business to serve the customer, but the people who are actually customer facing and customer serving are often those with the least experience, the least knowledge and the least authority because that lowers cost-per-serve. Unfortunately, it also lowers quality, depth, flexibility and engagement, compromising the brand experience and making service a commoditised set of processes that frontline staff are judged on their ability to conform to. The situation should logically resolve itself as people become more valuable to the organisation, and therefore gain what has been missing when they were on the frontline – experience, knowledge, authority, influence and networks. But what actually happens is that those people are shepherded into talent programmes that promote them further and further away from a direct relationship with customers – which is an increasing juxtaposition in itself – and their focus …

Intersections

By Mark Di Somma

At dinner the other night, the conversation turned to carpet ads. Why, someone asked, do retailers keep advertising carpet ads when most people only buy carpet once every 7 – 10 years? Because, they don’t all buy them at once, I reminded them. A brief explanation of interruption theory followed. Because so many retailers have neither the inclination or the resources to build and sustain relationships with their diverse customer bases, they basically rely on a marketing approach that pivots on informed chance. Reach and frequency advertising models depend on reaching a profiled consumer at a specific moment when that consumer might have an interest and a need for the product. It’s a scatter-gun approach (despite what the media planners might tell us) that relies on a machine-gun barrage of noise and repetition. Most of the time it has the majority reaching for the remote control to turn off the noise because whatever’s being talked about is “N/A” to their needs right now. But brands keep beaming ads in the hope that one day customer …

"Why do they only look like that in the ad?"

By Mark Di Somma

You want to tell the best story you can, to showcase your product in the best light, to prefer you over others. So you show the optimistic end of what you deliver. The burger looks generous and juicy. The staff behind the counter are attractive and smile. The car corners beautifully on endless, empty roads. The child in the trolley in the busy but not overly crowded supermarket is gorgeous, and the product is lit up like Christmas. Every brand manager wants to tell that story. Because it’s safe, clean, positive and aspirational. It promotes the product benefits. It ticks all the boxes. Except one … It’s untrue. The actual experience of course is nothing like that. And everyone knows it. In reality the burger is dismal and squashed, the staff don’t smile never mind talk, the roads are jammed with irritated souls who make getting anywhere miserable and slow, the supermarket smells of over-ripe fruit and you can barely see the product because the fluorescent tube overhead is on the blink (sometimes literally). Right …

Sure you’re social, but are you interesting?

By Mark Di Somma

Fans matter, but friends of fans matter more it seems when it comes to spreading the word. According to this article in FastCompany, just 16% of company messages reach users in a given week, and the solution to that is to reach the friends of fans. So while Starbucks’s 23 million fans is impressive, the bulk of the numbers are the friends of those same fans: 670 million. In other words, you can tick all the boxes in terms of traffic and friends, but the real sphere of influence is actually at the next degree of contact – and the dynamic driving that is the somewhat old-fashioned notion of talkability. You may recall, some time back, the discussion about how many degrees of separation have strength in the social universe. How far into the network of friends of friends of friends do you have to go before the signals fade along with the trust? What this piece indicates to me is that two degrees out the message can be even stronger than it was at …

Is thinking a desk job?

By Mark Di Somma

Over at Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni asks :Where do you do your best thinking?” For me, it depends on the problem. And what I think and even how I think about something is directed by that. Here are my seven favourite approaches: 1. Sometimes it’s sitting somewhere quietly with a pencil and paper and just writing thought sequences down until something clicks. Usually that’s about rethinking the associations. Scrabble means charades with a touch of Pixar over a business model. 2. I read avidly for the same reason. It’s all about finding different lines of logic. Disrupting. That’s really good for new products or ideas where there is no precedent or if you need to put daylight between what normally happens and what will need to happen for the brand you’re working on. Read about a completely different situation, and then apply what you got from it. To find out more about this, read The Medici Effect. 3. Other times it’s a walk – to get sensory inputs such as eye contact, noises, colour, vistas. …