Year: 2012

This is your captain speaking …

By Mark Di Somma

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 …

New article: 5 things to do when social media reacts to you

By Mark Di Somma

Imagine being flashmobbed. Suddenly hundreds of people run into your reception area with chocolates and flowers and sing a song in your honour. What would you do? Or a crowd appears at your company’s gate and each person there shakes their fist and jeers everyone entering the building. Then, just as quickly, they’re gone. It happens a lot. To firms all over the world. Not literally of course. On Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube. Brands are hit by a wave of emotion, good or bad, that rolls in, and then recedes, leaving everyone affected breathless and confused. What the hell just happened? The force at work is “critical mass”: the impact that many, many people can have when moving together, with purpose, towards a singular point. It can last minutes, hours, days. It can generate smiles and business, or scandal and significant losses. It can transform people and brands into heroes or villains, celebrities or scandals. Whilst I think a lot of us continue to search for a credible return on investment model for brands …

Does sponsorship actually work? Driving up likeability through association

By Mark Di Somma

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

By Mark Di Somma

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?

By Mark Di Somma

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

By Mark Di Somma

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 …

Chemistry or contamination: Dow at the Olympic Games

By Mark Di Somma

Right now a brouhaha is building between the India Olympic Committee and the IOC over the presence of Dow Chemicals at the London 2012 Summer Games. In particular, India is up in arms over Dow’s sponsorship of an $11.4-million decorative wrap to be installed around the London’s Olympic Stadium, according to this post in Brandchannel. The Indian Olympic Committee takes exception to Dow’s ownership of Union Carbide, which Dow bought in 2000, 16 years after that company’s plant in Bhopal had leaked gas killing thousands and injuring hundreds of thousands more. For their part, Dow seem to be saying that they didn’t own the plant when the accident happened and therefore the Bhopal tragedy is not their responsibility. In a letter to the Indian Olympic Association quoted here , IOC President Jacques Rogge explained that “Dow had no connection with the Bhopal tragedy. “Dow did not have any ownership stake in Union Carbide until 16 years after the accident and 12 years after the $470 million compensation agreement was approved by the Indian Supreme Court. …

Great brands unearth

By Mark Di Somma

In his recent post on imputing, Tom Asacker used a single word that for me clinched the mystery and the power of great marketing, and explained why so much money is spent on communication that just inspires a change of channel. That word: unearth. Unearthing is about discovering. It’s about seeing for the first time something that has been hidden for a very long time. It’s about revelation. It’s about something that inspires. Great brands release emotions that people are not asked to feel most of the time. They uncover the irrational drivers that impel busy, pressed, distracted human beings to stop doing nothing or something else and instead make the time to take an action. Because that action is worth it to them. And it’s worth that time because it feels worth that amount of time. Most brands don’t work that hard to win our time. They are unsurprising, uninspiring, unprovoking. They unearth nothing. On the contrary, they monotonously state the obvious. They go over and over and over the same old ground. And …

Rethinking the response

By Mark Di Somma

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

By Mark Di Somma

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.