All posts tagged: behaviours

This is your captain speaking …

Just over six years ago, I wrote a post about the futility of pilot announcements. In it, I asked: “Why do pilots always insist on giving us details of the flight plan and our intended altitude? Because, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care how high we’re flying or the course we’re taking – just as long as we get there. I just need to know they’re present and correct, and in an appropriate state of body and mind to do their job. And besides I have no way of knowing whether it really is 27,000 feet or not, so what’s the point in telling me? …” Every brand would like to tell their audience more about what they do. They like to think that explaining in detail how hard they work and how much they know quantifies the value they add. But what it really amounts to is the brand having a “conversation” with its customers on terms it feels comfortable with. It’s smalltalk, disguised as information. The pilots probably aren’t iinterested. They …

Does sponsorship actually work? Driving up likeability through association

Does the passion and commitment that fans feel for their favourite sports and events carry across to the sponsors who often help make such events financially feasible? Previously I’ve examined how advertisers have woven their participation into the very fabric of Superbowl Sunday and contrasted the sentiments that such engagement enjoys with other sponsorship arrangements where brands are much more sidelined. I’ve also looked at Dow’s involvement with the upcoming London Olympics. Now Kirk Wakefield, Professor of Retail Marketing at Baylor University in Texas and Anne Rivers, Senior Vice President at Brand Asset Consulting in New York, have studied the relationship between brands and fans more closely by looking at the effect of official sponsorship on key aspects of the brand relationship Using key sponsors from the NFL, they’ve looked at what role sponsorship plays in brands achieving knowledge (how well the brand is understood), esteem (how well regarded the brand is) relevance (how appropriate the brand is seen to be), and differentiation (how distinctive the brand is in its point of view from competitors) …

Breaking the habit of dissent

Blair sent me this great story about harnessing the power of habit from NPR. It includes an explanation by business reporter Charles Duhigg from his upcoming book “The Power Of Habit” of how companies have successfully altered people’s habits by tapping into what the author refers to as the “habit loop.” According to Duhigg, this loop has three parts: the cue, which triggers a behaviour; the routine, which is the behaviour itself of course; and the reward, which is the signal that goes to the brain to store this habit for future use or not. Duhigg also talks about when Paul O’Neill took over as CEO of a dysfunctional Alcoa. By focusing on worker safety and the dangers of inefficient manufacturing to workers, O’Neill found a way to get everyone on the same page. He went on to build a highly profitable and efficient company. The story serves as a reminder that a change in culture only takes place when you achieve a change in mindset; when you break what Duhigg calls a “keystone habit”. …

Strategy, or resource budget?

Why have management teams reduced strategy to a compliance matter – something they go away to do once a year. Some have even invented a host of reasons why they can afford to take strategy off their list of tasks. “Strategy is a talk-fest.” “Strategy isn’t real.” “Strategy isn’t practical.” “Strategy is just a fancy name for planning.” In so doing, they have overlooked the creative, pre-emptive and competitive opportunities that great strategy should go looking for. In an interview with McKinsey Quarterly in November 2007, Professor Richard Rumelt of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, says most corporate strategic plans don’t deserve the name. Far from being strategies, they are actually three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets tied to a market share projection (designed, I imagine, to appease shareholders’ demands for dividends). Calling this strategic planning, Rumelt says, creates  false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy. Amen to that. Great strategy is not about all talk and no action or the talk before the action. I  don’t think it’s about just …

Know thy enemy

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus. Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to. An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so. Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand …

Rethinking the response

There’s a simple, human reason why behaviours happen time and time again in my view.  We are creatures of habit and familiarity. It is much more comforting to keep hammering away at what we know than it is to stop, reappraise the problem and completely redesign the playbook. Relentless speed and ubiquitous impatience have spawned an approach to strategy based on “not enough time”. The underpinning philosophy is that there’s either not enough minutes in the day to do the thinking, or even if these can be found, the strategy will be outmoded by the time the company gets to implement it. Wrong. It will almost certainly take far less time to strategise the road ahead than it took to get into trouble. And it will cost a whole lot less than reacting to another bad snap decision. However, those who hate change can always fall back on a simple tactic. If in doubt, raise more doubt … “What if it doesn’t work?” “But it’s not working now.” “OK, what if it works even worse?” …

The power of being purposeful

The power of being purposeful

In an age where products are increasingly similar and of equal quality, the opportunities to compete just on the basis of what you sell are disappearing. In fact, I’d go further than that and say, they’re as good as gone. Even if you know that your product has some sort of technical advantage over that of a rival, the chances of you continuing to hold that advantage or of that advantage being of such significance that consumers actually care are as good as nil.

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Almost every brand I work with has a community policy, an environmental policy, a sustainability policy … as they should. And everyone seems to acknowledge that the policy or policies they have form an important part of their reputation and their stakeholder relations … as they should. And yet precious few brands have actively connected those social responsibility activities with their brand.

Don’t study their actions, study their habits

We get it so wrong don’t we? We develop ideas and look to see if they’ll work by intricately studying people’s actions and reactions. We poll them. We survey them. We sample them. We question them exhaustively. Whereas, what we should be doing, according to Dr Art Markman, is studying our customers’ habits and developing products and services that fit with how people want to behave. That way, they’re already pre-disposed to take an action. After all, habits drive actions, not the other way around. All a brand has to do is encourage a new habit and tie the accompanying actions to their brand specifically. Habits form, says Markman, whenever and wherever there is a consistent relationship between the world and an action. That means that “[U]nless you are in a business where you interact with each customer only once, your customers have habits related to their interactions with you.” Strong brands capitalise on those routine behaviours. But to do so, says Markman, brands may need to change some habits of their own: Stop asking …