Year: 2013

When brands attack: 12 reasons to confront a competitor

By Mark Di Somma

As in most things in life, there’s a time to hold your ground when you’re a brand, a time to step back and reassess, and there are times when you should look to front-foot your position. Those calls should be based on pragmatism not impulse, because the resources required to up your game can be considerable and the consequences of failure can be significant. So when should a brand take on a competitor, directly or indirectly, and how should they behave when they do so? Let’s start with the circumstances in which an attack makes sense. 1. It’s the only way to expand your market share – if you have carefully thought through growth plans but are competing in a market with little or no organic growth, the only way to expand your presence is to take it off someone else. Be aware though that in many static markets, fluctuations in market share are small – so a concerted effort to grasp a bigger piece of the pie is likely to be costly, drawn out …

The speed of criticism

By Mark Di Somma

1. No scandal is as bad (or as good) as you think it is. 2. Criticism travels faster than attention. In this digital age, it’s as fast as light. 3. Scandal travels even faster than criticism. 4. Fallout makes the best news. It balloons scandal into incident. 5. If you handle anything perishable, you must be response-ready. If you’re not response-ready, you won’t catch up. 6. If your key people are off-camera, you’re off-brand. Acknowledgements Photo of “High Speed Lights” taken by Liam Swinney, sourced from Flickr

What makes brand advertising iconic?

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma Many of us who started in advertising did so I imagine because we saw an ad or a series of commercials that made us dream of creating something that good, something that a whole culture talked about. Recently, the people at Hubspot reached back, took five of the great campaigns and had them reimagined for today. It was an intriguing exercise. But while the creatives seemed to focus for the most part on how much the channels had changed in the time since the campaigns were forged and the implications of that for execution and campaign distribution, I thought it would be interesting to look at what some of these iconic ad campaigns did that made it possible for them to have such a deep cultural impact in the first place. What’s clear is that iconic status is not about the nobility of the product. As CNBC observed, AdAge refers to its selection of the top advertising campaigns of the 20th century as including: “two air polluters, nutritionless sugar water, one …

Bigger and smaller: the polarisation of brand experiences

By Mark Di Somma

If you’re a cult brand looking to take on a scale player in an industry that favours significant footprint, how can you hope to win? Possibly by retaining everything that reinforces your cult brand kudos and plugging in to what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as the Collaborative Economy. According to research that he shares here, companies like Airbnb are now giving traditional hotel brands something of a run for their rooms. The model is effective, according to Thomas Friedman who wrote an article in the New York Times that Owyang references, because this collaborative approach is personal, local and based on a refreshing sense of trust. Friedman quotes Brian Chesky, the guy who started Airbnb, ““It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.” The fact that 140,000 people around the world are staying in Airbnb rooms on an given night proves that intimacy can indeed scale. That’s possible of …

Are review sites the new brand managers?

By Mark Di Somma

It’s no news that the relationships between brands and their customers are changing. But the rise and rise of a new intermediary is something we should all ponder. Once we relied on frontline staff, advisors and others to help us glean the best choices. Increasingly, as the popularity of review sites like TripAdvisor can attest, buyers are getting the lowdown on what’s good and what’s not from people just like them – customers. The good people at Clear Returns spell out the changes in this nice summary: Research from Google says 84% of customers felt that online research and feedback helped influence their buying decisions and that site visitors who interact with reviews are 105% more likely to purchase; and An Econsultancy report revealed that 43% of shoppers now use their smartphones to compare prices and read customer reviews, up from just 19% the previous year. That’s not surprising. In a world brimming with choices, buyers want to know that they are making the right decision – and review sites and searches are a critical part of …

The ironies of quantifying market demand

By Mark Di Somma

Anyone proposing something new in an organisation is likely to be hit by four questions that represent two contradictory lines of enquiry. They serve perhaps to highlight the ironies of trying to quantify demand. On the one hand: The search for precedent Question 1: Who else has done this? Wrong answer: If the real answer is that many others are doing it, you have signalled what should be a non-starter. That’s because if others are doing what you are suggesting, it is not an innovation. It is, at best, catch-up. If you present it as a competitive opportunity, then you are, as Michael Porter has pointed out, relying on the incompetence of your rivals and that is not the basis for a sustainable competitive position. Right answer: The idea is new for the sector, and a similar concept, using a parallel model, has worked well in other sectors with a similar competitive profile. Question 2: Is there a demand for it? Wrong answer: You think so, or there should be, or it’s a great idea …

Should you save your brand or let it die?

By Mark Di Somma

Recently Patrick Hanlon wrote an interesting piece on branding a DOA brand. In it, he laid out a well thought-through plan to resurrect a dying marque: rediscover your reason for being; define your zealot consumers; define your brand assets; discover your relevancy all over again. His conclusion: “Even brands that seem out of date, irrelevant, and barely resonant with consumers can be re-imagined, reconceived, and reconstructed using this simple, regimented path.” Hanlon’s approach for bringing a brand back from near-death seems logical. My question: Should you do it? Birthing brands doesn’t seem to be an issue. In fact, marketers have no problem introducing new brands to market at a dizzying rate. As Professor Jerry Hausman explains, “The number of new products introduced in any year is astounding. New varieties of consumer goods such as cereal brands are evident, as any shopping trip to a local supermarket or Wal-Mart demonstrates. Potentially even more important are the new products based on technology: more than 55 million cellular telephones are in use in the United States.” In an …

Positive impacts

By Mark Di Somma

Back to the Pavan Sukhdev interview from a few days back – and some other ideas he raised that were interesting. Corporations, he said, need to evolve their financial standards to keep pace with a changing world. Currently, they define success in terms of profit and loss, which is a 150 year old model. They now need to redesign the corporate performance system to keep pace with the realities of today’s externalities and that, Sukhdev says, means a move from shareholder capitalists to stakeholder capitalists and the commitment not just to manage and measure financial and physical assets for shareholders, but to measure and manage all impacts, including those on public assets. 10 years ago, he says, we simply couldn’t measure this. Now, we can. He also called for a resource taxation rather than profit taxation and getting the financing balance right so that the world doesn’t have companies that are too big to fail. One more thing. Accountable advertising. There was a real need, he said, to make advertising more accountable and more responsible …

Brand equity and its relationship to a good brand story

By Mark Di Somma

Like most people I’ve probably tended to silo the financial value that brands generate from the story they tell. Purpose, values and story defined a brand in my view; margin and financial worth were the outcomes of a brand well executed. More recently, I’ve been wondering whether in fact these items are not so disparate after all, and whether in fact they should be directly linked: whether the margin that a brand is able to sustainably generate, and thus the value that it achieves, is attributable and proportional to the strength, relevance and longevity of its story. David Aaker has defined brand equity as the value added to a functional product or service by associating it with the brand name. It is in effect, he says, a set of assets, including brand awareness, loyalty, perceived quality and brand associations, that are attached to a brand name or symbol. Increasingly, I believe, those assets are generated, or at the very least increased, by the stories brands tell and the experiences they deliver. This article about brand …

Finding a better good: the leap to true responsibility

By Mark Di Somma

At a recent presentation, I introduced the concept of the “goodness movement”. I defined this as a global wish for social wellness that is driving corporate social responsibility today: a recognition by brands that those that are seen to do good perform better; and a response to a wish by consumers to make a difference. Buyers want to tell themselves they are doing the right thing, and as part of that, they want affirmation on the part of the brands they buy from that good is being done. That’s never been easier. Purchases are increasingly tied to beneficial actions that, if I can refer back to my direct marketing agency days for a moment, amount to a “social premium”. The new coupon is social. Once consumers clipped physically to get money off. Increasingly, when they buy the brand, a good action is now included. Pampers, for example, have teamed up with UNICEF in a programme that sees one dose of the tetanus vaccine donated for every pack of product bought. Brands are increasingly presenting consumers …