For all those brand managers looking for ways to differentiate their brand, this compilation of ideas, co-authored with brand strategists Derrick Daye, Brad VanAuken and Thomson Dawson, may well be a definitive list. Read More
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Is your brand an option or the alternative?
My favourite saying is “Life is not a popularity contest”. It’s a maxim easily forgotten in these days of convergence. But in my opinion it’s more true in business than anywhere, and most true in terms of how companies need to think about their branding.
Every brand should be actively looking to put distance between itself and its competitors. And since true difference of offer is now one of the hardest things to achieve and maintain, the most effective and cost efficient way to do that is through difference of opinion.
Pick a fight, make a point
Every brand should look to make enemies. If I’m working on a project with Audacity where our client is #2, #3 or further down the pecking order, I start by looking for a way to pick a fight, or at least a debate, with our client’s nearest rival. Because when you do this, you give yourself an opportunity to espouse a “sticky” world view, one that people are drawn to and wish to acknowledge and support (by buying product).
If you do it well, you also draw competitors into competing with you on your terms. Apple’s PC Guy advertising campaign was a classic example of picking a fight to make a point. And the point was – we’re the significant alternative to a Windows-based world.
Difference of opinion is the fastest way to move from being an option to being an alternative.
You don’t want to be an option. Because options are like-minded decisions. An option is “I could do this, or this, or this, or this”. Read – “because it doesn’t actually matter and I feel the same about most/all of them”. Because of this, options often become price driven decisions. Say for example I need to get to Hong Kong, and I feel the same about all the airline options, I’ll very likely to pick the cheapest one.
Alternatives are different headspace decisions. Alternative is “because I don’t want/like/agree with A (or what I’ve been led to believe A stands for), I’m choosing B”. That decision is personal. It’s aligned with what a customer wants and thinks they deserve. It’s about what they believe. It’s about what they actually think is right. That’s a powerful basis for a decision. (Be warned though – if you’re going to take this route, you need to be sincere about it and you need to follow through on your commitment at every point. )
Which are you?
What’s the difference between a lovemark and a trustmark?
This article in Harvard Health Blog in many ways mirrors why consumers take comfort in choosing branded products generally. A brand name means they know what to ask for. They believe in the quality that they associate with the brand. The distribution system believes in the brand. Read More
What’s your brand advocacy strategy?
Every brand wants advocates. Little wonder. According to Janessa Mangone, people who actively promote your brand can be 50% more influential than the average customer in helping you secure new sales. So perhaps attracting them is something best not left to chance.
As we head into the busy Christmas season, here’s some simple but timely reminders on how to put some wow! in your WOM.
7 ways to motivate your advocates
- Give them something to talk about – advocates love to share. Release news, ideas, tips, FAQs, case studies, video and reviews that the people who love your brand can enthusiastically share with others. Use email marketing to give them ‘scoops’ that are not released in the general media, and watch your traffic. It’s a simple way to monitor the amplifying effect of your advocates. While companies are increasingly looking at content marketing to bring new people to their brand, it’s easy to overlook the need to keep your current community involved and excited. A comprehensive piece here by Joe Pulizzi on how to attract and retain customers this way.
- Recognise your most loyal customers – obvious,yes but often missed. Recognition might be through discounts, invitations to events, special previews or exclusive content. Above all, continue to thank these people for their support. And make sure that they never feel taken for granted. See how it’s worked for Starbucks.
- Work the industry influencers – tell them things that they can tell others. This group is different than your advocacy network because they may or may not be passionate proponents. But in a world where everyone wants content to share, giving those who have clout the information they need to spread the word adds valuable third party endorsement that will bring new people to your brand and confirm the loyalty of those who are already followers.
- Build a hall of fame – if you have celebrities or people in the spotlight amongst your fan base, look for reasons and occasions to put them, an occasion and your brand together. If the famous or infamous are not amongst your customer base, then look at developing a brand ambassador programme. Here’s how Lululemon did just that.
- Act for others – draw attention to your brand’s good works in the community or for social change and encourage your advocates to join in. Again, this broadens your appeal to new customers and reinforces the pride that advocates already feel.
- Bring people together. Encourage a sense of community online by setting up a supporters’ site – it’s a simple and highly effective way to bring people together to talk about the brand they love and to problem solve for others who are still coming to grips with what you offer. Given the widespread use of review sites to confirm purchase decisions, and Mangone’s stat that 83% of consumers require some degree of customer support while making an online purchase, it makes sense to put the people who haven’t connected with you in touch with others who have. It also makes sense to give your advocacy community, including of course your own employees, a place to share and tell stories. Some great examples of that here.
- Not sure who advocates for you, or how? Mark Fidelman breaks down 7 advocacy types here in this handy infographic.
Here’s why it’s worth it
A new index released by Boston Consulting Group last month shows why more brands should be putting more effort into driving loyalty and sales this way. Among their findings:
- Positive advocacy tends to be higher in industries whose products or services evoke greater emotional involvement, in “aspirational” categories and and for very visible purchases that involve significant money and research time.
- Spontaneous advocacy has much greater impact on positive word-of-mouth than recommendations that are prompted.
- Companies often overlook the inputs of non-customers but these people can be particularly influential in industries or segments in which only a small number of consumers purchase, or in which consumers purchase relatively infrequently.
An interesting footnote. Another finding from that BCG research is a sobering reminder to always keep an eye on your reputation – criticism damages a brand much more than praise helps it.
Always be interesting
Some years back, Paul Dunay wrote a post that has always stuck with me. Be what interests people. To me, that is everything a brand strategy should aspire to, captured in four words. And yes, on the one hand, it seems obvious. But don’t let the simplicity of the statement fool you – because whilst “interest” itself is a deeply familiar concept, it is also an elusive one. Read More
32 more signs your brand is dying (part 2 of 2)
1. You’re less connected with your customers than you used to be, or than your competitors are.
2. Your distributors increasingly hold the relationships and the tables are turning. They’re treating you like the supplier rather than the other way around. Or they’re introducing house brands that undermine your margins.
3. You’re past your heyday. There’s a lot of talk about history and the “glory days” of the business and/or the sector.
4. You’re paying too much attention to the wrong metrics.
5. You don’t know as much about your buyers as you need to.
6. You’re increasingly focused on technical excellence at the expense of relationships. My term for this fascination is “redundant excellence”.
7. Your customer base is static. So is your market share. Everyone’s comfortable.
8. You’ve lost the spark that’s got you this far. You’ve run out of ideas.
9. You’re riding a wave (but that’s all you’re riding).
10. You’re fading. Your competitors are less intimidated by you (and less respectful of you) than they used to be. You’re being successfully copied and bettered by those you would once have never given a second thought.
11. You respond to customers on your terms not theirs, because you view customer service as a cost.
12. You price-gouge your current IP rather than innovating. But exclusivity is drawing to a close.
13. You don’t do any scenario planning. You have a Plan A…but no Plan B, Plan C or Plan D.
14. You copy the market leader and bank on undercutting them to win customers.
15. Your product, or a core component of your product/profitability, is one short regulatory step away from being outlawed or substantially restricted. That day’s coming. Everyone knows it. You don’t have a back-up plan. You’re depending on lobbying to stave off the inevitable.
16. Your reputation is now dominated by what you can’t do, haven’t done, won’t do or did badly.
17. You’re lying to try and win business. Everyone knows.
18. You lack focus. You’re easily distracted into side projects that detract from your brand.
19. There’s no consistency in your customer experiences nor your brand’s touchpoints across media or cultural borders.
20. Your brand strategy is a revolving door. It changes as new executives come and go.
21. You’re giving away IP or leaving money on the table because you haven’t licenced your brand for maximum effect.
22. You’re boring. You’d rather stick with the tried and true than reinvent.
23. You squabble internally or with your competitors or investors and those wars consume more and more of your time and energy.
24. Your brand or category has been disrupted by a competitor you never saw coming, from an angle or POV you never consider.
25. You lack zeitgeist. You can’t stay relevant – or at least you can’t stay as relevant as others seem to be.
26. You’re tied to a partner who is dragging you down and you can’t/won’t separate from them.
27. You’ve lost touch with what makes you special. You have 100 ideas looking for a home.
28. You keep confusing your current customers and yourselves with new strategies.
29. You’re caught in an identity crisis. You can’t decide who you want as customers. You keep holding onto the market you know, but that market has moved on, and you’re reluctant to chase a new tribe.
30. You’re inconsistent or unreliable. No-one knows where they are with you. Perhaps there are privacy or confidentiality concerns.
31. Your CEO cannot articulate what your brand stands for and is not capable of being the ultimate brand champion.
32. The media has lost interest in your brand.
You can run this list and its predecessor up against many of the brand fades in recent years and find perfect matches on one or several points.
Here’s the good news. Strong brands reflect the qualities of those who have steadfastly built equity. And that’s a great cause for hope. Because brands are people-based and people-built, failure is not intrinsic. It is not something that is often beyond anyone’s control. But it takes open and decisive minds to take back control, act to turn things around and shift consumers to a positive frame of mind.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “Autumn leaves”, taken by Vladimir Agafinkin, sourced from Flickr
Thanks to Derrick Daye and Hilton Barbour for their additions to my original list.
30 signs your brand is dying (part 1 of 2)
It’s often not hard to see why other brands have died – especially after the fact. There’s also one interesting and abiding constant in all the casualties. What kills a brand, more often than not, is what it lacks rather than what it does: conviction; energy; value; humility; cash; discipline; imagination; focus … Here are 30 signs of trouble that I would look for.
1. Your new product or service tanked. If that’s a continuation of a recent pattern and not just a one-off, then you’ve either disconnected with your audience, failed to hold their attention or been superceded.
2. Customers are leaving. You haven’t noticed, or you don’t care.
3. You’re getting more and more questions about the value you add.
4. You’re being asked to sharpen the pencil on just about every deal, and you feel you have no option but to do so.
5. You don’t feel you’re in a position to take a position (on anything).
6. You keep diversifying in the hope of attracting more business, but all you’re really doing is piling on more cost.
7. You don’t have a story.
8. You keep telling yourselves you have a story but it keeps changing to fit your latest campaign.
9. You can’t diversify. You’re a one trick, one price pony. You stand for one thing at one price point. Or you did diversify, but you haven’t done anything with the acquisition that’s at all meaningful.
10. You keep expanding, with the expectation that sales will catch up at some point with capacity. But it hasn’t.
11. Your product’s a dog – but everyone at your place thinks it’s the customers who don’t “get it”.
12. You’ve backed the wrong product – falling sales remind you every quarter.
13. You’ve been overtaken, or usurped, by someone else’s technology/service/idea.
14. You don’t have a growth plan. You just have an existence plan. (Perhaps you don’t even have that.)
15. External costs are killing you. You can’t live with them and you can’t survive without them.
16. You have a growth plan but you don’t have a business model (or at least one that people are prepared to stick with).
17. You’re too slow.
18. You act without thinking.
19. You think without acting.
20. The hiss has gone out of your roar. You’re steadily losing momentum and velocity. You’ve run out of energy. Everyone feels too tired to fight.
21. You dismiss every new development as a “trend”.
22. You’re in love with trends – you’re always looking for the next wave.
23. There’s increasing dissonance between what you communicate, where you’re telling yourselves you’re going and what your research shows your customers want.
24. Your architecture’s a mess – too many product names, sub-brands, logos, taglines, etc, all fighting for attention and market share.
25. Your ethics worry people. You behave badly, or desperately, but even when you’re caught out, you fail to absorb blame or to acknowledge any level of irresponsibility.
26. You’re missing budget – consistently – but no-one’s alarmed because your strategy is focused on building “long term potential”.
27. Everyone’s focused on hitting budget. It’s the only thing people care about.
28. You cut corners – on health and safety, on supply chain, wherever you think you can get away with it.
29. There’s no reason to prefer you. Nothing that you have secures you any level of consistent or distinctive advantage.
30. You can’t align supply with demand or you can’t keep pace with demand. Either way, you’re starving your market share.
Acknowledgements
Image of “Tricycle ambulance militaire”, taken by Frederic Bisson, sourced from Flickr
Thanks to Derrick Daye and Hilton Barbour for their additions to my original list.
Rebalancing the brand experience
A couple of months ago, Adrienne Bateup-Carlson sent me this op-ed by Roger Cohen. In it, Cohen laments the plasticisation of experience. “The question of genuine, undiluted experience has been on my mind,” he writes. “Germans have a good word for something authentic: “echt.” We have an echt deficit these days. Everything seems filtered, monitored, marshaled, ameliorated, graded and app-ready — made into a kind of branded facsimile of experience for easier absorption. The thrill of the unexpected is lost … We demand shortcuts, as if there are shortcuts to genuine experience.”
Anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of a fast-food “service experience” can sympathise. The greetings are anonymous, the requests generic, the answers pat, the actions either physically or mentally automated. This is life on rote, experience in a box. It feels as sincere as the latest apology for downtown traffic delays, the “Thanks for waiting” message from the telco customer service team and the reassurances from an insurer that they will “gladly” pay up in the event of a claim.
It often happens because experience is acknowledged but unowned by the people most responsible for brands. In an article earlier this year, Nigel Hollis was astonished to discover that, according to Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles, most CMOs are not responsible for customer service and support or in-store/branch training. “That seems crazy to me,” he observes. “ … If the CMO is charged with developing positive brand perceptions and value, then they should at least have control over the most important elements of the brand experience.”
Completely agree.
The case for experiences, and more particularly, designed experiences makes sense. As Thomson Dawson has argued, “Design and the process of “design thinking” has added billions of dollars worth of market capitalization to those enterprises that understand its significant power and higher purpose to engage and delight customers in ways never before possible. In every leading company, design has become the soul of enterprise strategy … You don’t have to look very far to see brands that apply this principle with phenomenal results – Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Google, Patagonia, BMW, Herman Miller, Target, Gillette, Virgin – every one of these enterprises are absolute fanatics about design and its importance to their business strategy.”
So, on the one hand, we have experiences that are so patterned and explicit that they are meaningless. On the other, design has a huge role to play in adding value for customers. What’s the optimal mix? It’s something I have been talking a lot about lately: the need to actively resolve the tension between process and personalisation; to chart a reasonable and human course between the need for brands to lock down deliverables so that they can identify and measure them, at the same time as they avoid doing what Cohen is so incensed by – formulating encounters to the point where all the humanity and authenticity has been sucked out of them.
My thinking is this. The vast majority of any customer experience still needs to be pre-designed (and therefore generic). That’s because any experience at any customer touchpoint must align with a plethora of systems and procedures – health and safety, ops, security, booking systems etc. Customer themselves also require a high level of consistency. They want to know that a lot of things will happen the way they expect them to happen: that the booking system will work; that their key will be ready; that they will have the seat they were assigned; that there won’t be someone else or someone else’s anything for that matter in their room … Those are not situations in which spontaneity will be expected, or welcomed. The difference though won’t be decided there. All of that hard work will get brands to a point of parity.
The difference will come in the 10 – 20% that distinguishes the highly served from the also-served. It will focus almost exclusively on the human-to-human aspects of the experience:
1. Personality – how service is delivered and processes are executed, whether it’s with cheekiness, care, fun, familiarity or indulgence, adds humanity to interactions.
2. Recognition – how successfully and individually customers are identified and their needs anticipated decides the extent to which each experience feels tailored, specific and to some extent unrepeatable. This is about much more than just loyalty schemes or knowing someone’s name. It springs from an (appropriate!) interest in their beliefs, priorities and situation, and a working knowledge of their history with the brand. Done right, this feels helpful and respectful, not invasive.
3. Speed – no surprises here. Rapid delivery makes customers feel prioritised and that a brand has ‘dropped everything’ to attend to them. Not something to do all the time, but on occasions, the ability to act decisively and precisely to avert a problem or answer a need can generate ongoing loyalty.
4. Delight/surprise – everyone wants to feel special.
5. Exclusivity – recognition taken as far as it goes. When delight/surprise is blended with singularity, the experience can be both flattering at the time and share-able with many others later.
And where should we take our prompts from for that vital personalisation? Since it was Adrienne who first alerted me to Cohen’s article, I thought I’d leave the last word on rebalancing the customer experience to her. “As we look to create customer experiences that are pre-designed yet authentic, consistent yet individuated, relevant and resonant – consider how we re-think our fundamental assumptions in the way we approach the consumer.
“To quote Will.i.am in Wired UK August 2013: : “forget the consumer! Consumer is a bad thing to call people. Tomorrow the word will be more like ‘champion’. People have to champion your brand, not just consumer. They add value making you relevant.’ Now there’s a thought. While the customer experience must indeed be intentional and therefore designed, perhaps we should be doing it with others. The brand champions of our future.”
Acknowledgements
Photo of “Experience Music Project – IMG_1483”, taken by Nicola, sourced from Flickr
The Experience Formula diagram designed by Di Fuller, 2Di4Design
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More brands should leave more things unsaid
This is a guest post by Mark Blackham. It’s a huge pleasure to have Mark as my first ever guest blogger at Upheavals. I first met Mark many years ago, and he has been a regular commenter here on reputational and branding issues. I hope you enjoy his perspectives as much as I do.
The more I learn about how humans receive information and conceive ideas, the more simplistic most marketing looks.
We’re beginning to understand from brain research that a million different experiences, predispositions and feelings go into each human decision.
Behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman talks about a ‘remembering self’ that selects the experiences we use to create and define ourselves. Each one of us has this complex bundle of self-selected memories that influence our decisions.
Yet marketing is often based on one insight thought to be common across all target customers. When you consider the variance of attitudes possible across individuals, that insight has to be a generality to be accurate. And if it’s a generality, it’s likely to be irrelevant to the choice the customer makes (because they’re driven by memories no-one can predict). Moreover, the insight is unlikely to help a brand express a differentiation about the product.
For example, I was once in the market for a home security system. Marketing material from every service provider appealed to the human fear of burglary. That’s an insight that holds true across the target market. But when every customer has the fear, and every provider is reflecting the fear, there is no product differentiation. I chose a provider that expressed non-written cues (images and verbal) about being local and small, which suited my predilections.
It’s testament to the filtering capability of the human brain that people are able to fight their way past irrelevant marketing messages to actually still buy stuff. But on the way to buying stuff they are learning from this broad-insight-based marketing that the options are virtually interchangeable. And so they get impatient with businesses, and want to bargain down the price.
I propose a new approach to marketing which I call the “leave things unsaid” method. It means not saying what is obvious or unnecessary and giving people the evidence to make their own minds up about the suitability of your product. It means you understand what motivates people so well that you never have to put it into words and repeat it back to them. Your understanding of the customer is expressed non-verbally and with subtlety.
Subtlety is not yet widely appreciated nor rewarded in marketing fields, but it will be. Customers are now savvier about marketing, and are socially connected. They laugh together at the blunt instruments of stunts, combine to overcome corporate intransigence, and share information that bypasses the shallow appeals of advertising.
The next generation of marketing professionals will need the confidence to underplay their hand, and let the customer work out what is best.
By way of example, let me cite a television advertisement run by Burger King that said the BK Breakfast burger would help “recover from your big night out”. The insight of this campaign was that many people do a ‘burger run’ the morning after a big party.
Getting burgers following heavy drinking is a known behaviour; an instinctive, physiologically driven thing. It’s also viral; the concept spreads from person to person. In my first PR consultancy job I learned from the older hands of the delights and suitability of the burger breakfast for a hangover.
The post-drinking burger insight is hardly new, but it is important. There’s some action going on here and BK wants its burgers to be chosen for the hang-over burger run. But the insight should inform marketing, not become its subject.
Underlining the mistake, BK attracted criticism that it condoned drinking lots of alcohol. This is society operating at a public level – being seen to do and say the right thing is important. Marketing is not usually about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the real thing. Unless the strategy is to be deliberately provocative or compliant, marketing should be signalling to private and sub-conscious behaviour.
Moreover, making the burger run the subject of marketing corporatises the concept. It takes the habit off the customer and turns it an instruction. It’s often a turn-off for customers when brands adopt the habits (or trends) they originated and owned.
The “leave things unsaid” principle is based on what we’re learning about the brain; that people make up their minds based on what they perceive to be evidence. In 1995, the formative research paper Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story (Schank, Roger C. & Abelson, Robert P) first revealed how we each assemble evidence based on the narrative we generate about ourselves and life. We do not do something new because we are told to do, or because we learn of it. We do it because it suits us.
The job of marketers is to provide the evidence (and the motivation and relevance). If those factors are well chosen, people will use the sum of what they know about themselves to make choices about the brand. Marketers need to know people well, and to know their market, to choose the evidence that will work best. That’s the true core and skill of the marketing discipline.
Here are five suggestions on how you can leave things unsaid:
1. Find an answer that is one step deeper than the insight. BK needed marketing that answered the physiological and behavioural cravings of the burger run phenomenon.
2. Think of the small things. The evidence that appeals to customers is most likely to be small things that feel personal to them.
3. Don’t shout. Shouting has to be short and loud to be heard, which means your message may win awareness, but will otherwise be inconsequential in providing evidence the customer can use.
4. Be self-confident. You’ve got a great product or service. Give it space to speak for itself, and have confidence that people will be attracted.
5. Never repeat the insight or the marketing strategy in language seen by the customers.
Mark Blackham is a founder and director of BlacklandPR, which specialises in getting corporate clients persuasively closer to their public. His regular PR blogs can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Photo of “BK_061”, taken by rob_rob2001, sourced from Flickr
Brand truth: fascinating insights into what holds true for consumers
We don’t always mean what we say in social situations – nor, it appears, in research. That seems to be the key take-out from recent research (delicious irony!) by Chip Walker and the Y&R research team. In their recently released study, Secrets and Lies, (thanks Hilton for the reference and for the introduction to Chip) the team concludes that consumers’ conscious motivations differ markedly from their true deep drivers. In fact, they’re often the opposite of what they say.
Those conscious-unconscious biases are also reflected in the brands that people say they like versus those they actually like. Consider this: “The top 10 conscious brands are Amazon, Google, Apple, Target, Whole Foods, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Facebook, AT&T and Prius. That contrasts with the order of the top 10 brands consumers favor unconsciously: Target, Amazon, Facebook, Whole Foods, National Enquirer, Exxon, McDonald’s, Apple, Starbucks and AT&T.”
While it’s important to recognise that, for the purposes of the study, people were asked to rank a finite list of brands not to nominate those brands from scratch, the contrast between public and personal acknowledgement is telling. I suspect that the difference lies in the brands people want to be associated with socially versus those they actually like personally. Impression versus inclination.
Walker’s conclusion is that we need to rethink three key pillars of modern day marketing:
1. We need to rethink traditional research. His view that traditional surveys and focus groups are misleading will no doubt be greeted with loud cries of “Told you” from the many in the creative community who have stated this for years.
2. We need to rethink traditional targeting. People don’t behave consistently. They behave impulsively – meaning they both conform with, and deviate from, the behaviours that are expected of them by marketers. No surprises there.
3. His final target really interested me. Rethink positioning. “We’ve been programed to believe that single-mindedness is the foundation of all good branding. Yet this research shows consumers aren’t singular today … is it time brands move away from the single-minded idea and embrace conflict and tension?”
He extrapolates on this thought elsewhere: Brand tension, he says, “is the idea that break-away brands – like the new consumer – thrive on conflict and polarity (e.g., Land Rover is both hardworking and luxury.) Brands that are one-note (e.g., K-Mart = cheap) are simply less interesting to consumers today than those that show more depth of character by embracing a tension (e.g., Target = Cheap + Chic.) Patagonia’s new campaign … takes this concept to an extreme – by embracing eco-friendliness while simultaneously acknowledging all the ways they currently harm the environment.”
Research has simplified brands, Walker seems to imply, to the point that consumers lose interest. Brands are now so committee-ed, so uniform, so managed, so flat that they are utterly predictable. Bring back a little danger, he seems to be suggesting. Throw in some curve-balls to colour things up.
Of course re-dimensionalising brands to make them more fascinating also makes them much less test-able. That may lift the risk rate at one level, but at another it adds much needed interest. Personally, I’ve always held the view that brand values should ‘contradict’ each other to an extent in order to hold absolute principles in check. Chip’s statement takes this one stage further, suggesting that brands themselves must embrace a certain contrariness. That’s interesting on a number of levels:
1. It allows brands to explore a range of paths, that are not necessarily logically compatible, simultaneously.
2. It allows consumers to discover brands from a range of angles, which also adds to their ongoing intrigue.
3. It changes the nature of the brand story from a statement of facts to a compass for actions.
4. It acknowledges that what we think we know or believe as consumers is not always what we tell ourselves we know or believe, allowing buyers to “find” approaches in brands that really appeal to them, perhaps for reasons that they themselves can’t explain.
Best of all, it sets up a heretical question that I can’t wait to lobb. The next time a brand manager insists that the brand doesn’t behave a certain way, I shall take my cue from Chip and ask “But how much more interesting could it be if it did?”
There’s music in them jaws a-dropping …
Further reading:
Many thanks to Chip for the reading list.
Media Post
WARC
Forbes
Neuroscience Marketing
Research-live.com
Acknowledgements
Image of “talk to the hand” taken by Mahalie Stackpole, sourced from Flickr