All posts filed under: Strategy

How to create strong signals

By Mark Di Somma

Spotted this article in The Economist on the growing cost of thought leadership. In an escalating battle for top-of-mind, the top consultancy brands it seems are prepared to spend large amounts – up to 5% of gross revenues by one estimate – to produce thinking they then give away for free. The activity shows no sign of slowing down in these recessionary times, with spending on such papers up by 500% according to one estimate, yet ironically the very consultancies that hammer their clients on the need for accountability can ascribe very little hard data – at least publicly – on the return on the investment. So why do it? My sense is that this really is a battle fought around something my friend and colleague Alex calls “strength of signal”. Much of the thinking about that is fairly obvious in a B2C market, but how do you generate ‘strong signals’ in the B2B market where the big consultancies are competing? I subscribe to more than my fair share of such papers. So what follows …

What’s new about what your customers already know?

By Mark Di Somma

Most brands get launch. They understand how to make a splash for a product on a day. But what do you do between splashes? How do you keep front-of-mind? And more importantly, how do you stop the inevitable awareness fade as the ripples from your big splash die away? If you’re Walt Disney, you start introducing shorts between your new features, just to keep up awareness of your most popular and lucrative characters. And you do so knowing that such a cue will reactivate interest and re-kick merchandise sales. Cross-referencing in order to cross-sell. Nothing new in that – except that here it’s happening at a launch. When Disney releases Cars 2 later this month, audiences will be reintroduced to the key characters from Toy Story in a six-minute short. As Albie Hecht observes in this article in BusinessWeek, “It’s a way to extend the characters and the brand without its fans waiting two or three years for a new movie.” There’s a lesson here. It’s tempting for brands to think of their products as …

Reaching the limits of conversation

By Mark Di Somma

Reach is one thing. Notice, and more particularly trust, are quite another. Yesterday Alex gently challenged me over my assertion that six degrees of separation will soon be replaced by six clicks. Her point – and it’s a very important one – is that there is a marked difference in loyalty between degrees and clicks of separation because we generally build stronger bonds face to face than we do online, and the strength of those bonds will extend further into our networks. Six clicks, she believes, is just too many. Alex’s view is that much after two clicks, the network is already so wide and the bonds of engagement so unsupported that people simply drop off our radar. We don’t take it any further. There is a limit to the familiarity we can, and probably choose to, leverage, and it occurs at a much earlier point than in the physical world. In the physical world, knowing someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone is intriguing and …

9 lessons planking can teach brands

By Mark Di Somma

1. Sometimes, there’s just no way of knowing why something becomes a phenomenon. But momentum is addictive – once an idea takes hold, it assumes a life of its own. After a time, it is because it is. The power of an idea is not in actually in the creation, it’s in the radiation and the subsequent take-up. 2. Remember though that a global idea can still be an idea going nowhere. It can be just one more thing to wile away a moment. The numbers can be impressive, but they don’t always point to something meaningful. A million downloads is often a million free clicks. That’s not the basis for a business model. 3. Life is most powerful, and perhaps becomes most alive, when it is visual. Powerful images move us to laugh, share and try. Give people amazing things to look at, and they will literally stop and do so. 4. Posts are the new fingerprints. Give people a simple but fun way to participate in something, especially one they can easily record …

Every brand must dream

By Mark Di Somma

Positivity comes with benefits if this article on the optimism bias is anything to go by. While, collectively, our view of the future can swing in synch with the news, the budget or the crime stats, a 2007 study found that 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future for their own family. According to the author, “Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.” It gives rise to phenomenon like talk of ‘green shoots’ in the midst of terrible financial depression because, it seems, we are compelled to find them. The take-out for brands is obvious. Clearly, there is merit in espousing a clear and positive view of the way forward. It’s not enough to just inform. Brands need to inspire, because that optimistic prognosis of what lies ahead holds real opportunities in terms of engaging and involving people. It humanises brands. Optimism, I surmise, also aligns directly with our worldview. In other words, …

Waiting for the uplift

By Mark Di Somma

I once had a flatmate who was a pilot. He used to fly these ridiculously small planes in and out of crazy airstrips throughout Papua New Guinea. Every take-off, he used to tell me, was almost literally a leap of faith. You barrelled down a ramshackle runway in the middle of the mountains, literally fell off the end and waited for the winds to pick you up. He used to come home from an assignment, throw his bags on the couch, and announce, “So far, so good”. For some reason, I thought about Simon today as I read this article about the fall of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO). What a long way down. In 2005, Martha Stewart’s publicly listed company was worth north of $1.8 billion. Since then, the stock has plummeted a whopping 88%. Now it looks like it may be up for sale – maybe even revert to private ownership – at a fraction of its peak worth. Sure, they’ve been some contributing factors to that – conviction for Stewart herself and of …

The effect on Oprah?

By Mark Di Somma

We’ve all seen what the Oprah-effect has done for others. Now it will be interesting to see the effect of change on the O-brand itself. By changing the formula, how much does she risk tampering with the magic? Will another talk-show rise to fill the afternoon gap, or will the 40 million O-army decamp and migrate en-masse? Is that even possible? How much do the dynamics of a brand fundamentally change when you quite literally shift the channel in which it is seen?

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 …

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 …

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 …