Year: 2012

Brands shouldn’t try to make sense

By Mark Di Somma

The flipside of a marketplace where brands encourage people to buy for emotive reasons is that brands also need to counter consumers’ personal reasons not to buy. Some of these reasons may be legacy. Some may seem to be convenient self-interest. Others may look like they’re based on ignorance, bias, selfishness. They probably don’t make sense to you. That’s important because … actually, it’s not. It’s not important at all The problem that matters is not your opinion of why your buyer won’t buy – it’s the fact that they have this opinion, that it’s rational to them and they have every reason to keep thinking it until they don’t want to anymore. Chances are you won’t talk people into liking your brand. The most effective way to deal with an “unreasonable” objection is to counter with a riveting motive. Most people think that means price. But simply dropping your price is no silver bullet. It doesn’t make you a more likeable brand. It may make you a more attractive brand – in the short …

Out of the blue moments

By Mark Di Somma

As marketers, we’re taught to look for patterns. Research, we are told, will give us the insights we need to predict how whole swathes of our society will react. Brands are looking to predict how buyers will act or react so that they know what to expect. Consumers themselves of course operate under no such constraints. They happily accept their own behaviours as making sense to them. One of the great challenges we face as branders is appealing to the mercurial side of consumers. Getting to grips with the fact that they won’t always behave the way we think they should, that they will do the unexpected, the illogical, the unprecedented and the unresearchable – and that they are all the more exciting and interesting as people because of that. Across your business, across your channels – where could you promote/allow/celebrate  impulsive moments? How could you be a platform for what consumers themselves just feel like doing, and how can you improve loyalty and profitability by doing that? A simple way to start may be …

Customer service is worthless

By Mark Di Somma

We shouldn’t even think of “customer service” as being about something that is valuable to customers. The reasons are simple. We live in a service-focused age, and the people who buy from your brand know they’re customers. So “customer service” does not describe anything customers don’t expect and it certainly doesn’t envelope anything of particular value to them. Every brand is a service business at some level these days. In reality, customer service is the means to the real goal: sustained and profitable relationships forged between customers and a brand. Until you achieve that, you haven’t added any sense of worth for either party. You’ve just done what was expected. Success is not about achieving world-class customer service or carrier-level or benchmarks or any of the other abstract customer service qualitatives that are freely bandied about. Success pivots on whether your brand delivers experiences that your customers continue to be enchanted by. People don’t come back to a brand because they got good metrics. It’s sad then that some companies still think their job is …

Strategy: why the 2% is so critical

By Mark Di Somma

As part of making his case for why execution rules over strategy, and particularly why spending too much time on strategic thinking is a waste of time , Tom Peters features a quote from Al McDonald that unequivocally states the views of the former Managing Director of McKinsey & Co on strategic planning. “Never forget implementation, boys. In our work, it’s what I call the ‘last 98 percent’ of the client puzzle.” McDonald clearly intended this as an exhortation to focus on actions rather than wasting too much time on strategy. But I don’t read it that way. Instead, the critical point it seems to me is that the success or otherwise of nailing that huge 98 percent of the client puzzle is predicated on getting the first 2 percent, the strategic thinking, right. Based on McDonald’s own words, the return on investment from having the right strategy should in fact make the focus on strategic thinking a no-brainer. As Michael Porter observes: “There’s a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about …

Excitement vs risk: The very different emotions driving purchase of B2B and B2C brands

By Mark Di Somma

Philip Kotler once described brands as helping people to make decisions. In a world of frenzied competition and bewildering choice, they are of course the fastest, simplest and most effective way to link a name to a perception of value. What can easily be overlooked however is that B2B and B2C brands are not just about very different types of decisions but that they also involve very different types of decision making. For the most part, consumer brands look to influence an individual and/or groups of individuals (tribes). They are at their most powerful ‘in the moment’. They are about excitement through identification, and they are often strongly influenced by culture, taste, fashion and what’s important to people as people. B2B brands have different drivers – and the most important of these, I believe, is that no-one buys a B2B brand alone. Normally, there are multiple decision-makers involved, each with their own specific areas of responsibility and priority. There’s normally an elongated decision process (sometimes highly regimed) where final approval for go-ahead must pass set …

Posting a profit

By Mark Di Somma

Likeability has both a top-line and a bottom-line. Social monitoring tends to focus on the top-line: mentions; retweets; likes; comments. Top-line likeability is important because it monitors partiality towards your brand – the prevailing emotion at that moment. But it can be easily swayed, by offers, for example, or news. Bottom-line likeability is the measure of how much and/or how often consumers buy. It’s the money that drips or floods out the bottom of the sales funnel. The other p – profitability. But just as you can be famous and broke, so your brand can have strong top-line likeability without proportionally strong financial returns. And indeed, vice versa. Part of the problem, as Brian Solis has astutely observed in this recent post, is that chasing the “soft metrics” of top-line likeability has become as addictive to organisations as chasing top-line revenue can be for sales teams. It provides numbers, sometimes giddy numbers, but not “the insights necessary to glean ROI or deep understanding of what people do and do not want, need or value.” And …

Brands at the speed of life

By Mark Di Somma

What a pleasure to discover the writings of Simon Graj. I very much enjoyed this post on how changes in the speed at which consumers see and recognise brands affect the nature and manner of the relationship. Graj suggests brands are on a collision course with consumer habits because while brand creators and managers feel increasingly inclined to engineer complexity into their stories in order to give them depth and dimension, consumers are looking for “elegant, plug-and-play simplicity” – brands that are clear, attractive, binding and capable of being absorbed at an increasingly frenetic pace as we dash to work, check our phones and pursue our lives. “Brands are now something we experience out of the corners of our eyes,” he says. That suggests that in “a world that rockets us from experience to experience”, brands need to be able to collapse their symbolism into smaller and smaller bytes of information. As Graj observes, the 30 second sit and watch platform has all but disappeared. Brands appear in the margins of our search engines, in …

Anzac Day

By Mark Di Somma

I posted this four years ago. I think it will always be true. All the anger, bitterness, atrocity, outrage, anticipation, pain, grief, triumph, pride, disfigurement, panic, hatred, death, injustice, comradeship, loss, desperation, disease, mud, stench and utter, utter waste – captured, symbolised, in a simple, single red poppy.

Loyal – to what point?

By Mark Di Somma

As I write this, I’m sitting about six rows back from where I normally sit on this flight. The space around me feels like it has shrunk – again. They haven’t offered me the nice headphones. I didn’t get a newspaper like I used to. I’m not grizzling. After all, they’re such little things aren’t they? And they’re a formula. If you’re a gold flier you get this. If you fly even more frequently than that, you get this. The thing is that formula of recognition is now well entrenched in my flying experience. I’ve gotten used to it – to the point where I usually don’t even notice when it happens, but I very quickly notice when it doesn’t. That got me thinking – What happens when your business model clashes with the economics of rewarding your customers? What do you do when it seems like your brand can no longer afford to give people who buy from you the “bonuses” that they are so used to? First of all, I think it’s important …

Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle …

By Mark Di Somma

Markets today operate in a vicious circle of increasing assumption. The more companies deliver, the more customers expect. Business as expected is all the things you must do to confirm your place in the crowd. All that effort doesn’t inspire loyalty, it doesn’t even change the relationship, because it doesn’t change the way you’re seen. And yet it’s a critical underpin. If this part isn’t right, nothing works. We could probably debate how important this “constant and consistent improvement” element is, and it probably varies according to sectors, but I’m going to suggest that it constitutes 70 – 85% of a deeply competitive brand. The remaining 15 – 30% is less predictable. It has to be, because what really alters how much you are valued is what you deliver that’s surprising. Business as unexpected are those things that your customers actually want but may not even have realised they wanted – until they were presented with them. A surprise could be an idea they agree with that no-one else in the sector champions, an attitude …