All posts filed under: Consumers

Positioning your brand through memories

By Mark Di Somma

I think it’s healthy for there to be a direct relationship between memory and frequency for a brand. The more often a customer comes into contact with your brand, the more consistent the memory needs to be. That’s because brands that frequently interact with their customers have the power of habit on their side. In fact, when someone is buying from you frequently, the memory itself needs to focus on regularity: greeting customers by name; being easy to find; recognising what they like and maybe working with that; introducing suggestions that fit with what they’re looking for. The memories are smaller in their impact and their “experience” factor, but their frequency makes the effect powerfully cumulative. By contrast, when your customers only interact with you occasionally, then the memory needs to be stronger and much more enduring. It literally needs to “last” until the next time a customer needs to buy because there isn’t the same front-of-mind of course – which means less consistent awareness and less reminders. It’s easy for customers to decide to …

We need to talk

By Mark Di Somma

What have you got to say for yourself? We were talking about this today as we discussed how and when a brand should best take a stand. Go hard or go soft? Soft. Taking a stand this way is about clearly and simply stating the things that you cherish and value as a brand, in such a way that consumers have clear line of sight between what you say, what you offer, how you act and what you value. It’s positive. It’s connective. It’s constructive. It’s honest. It shows the strengths of your beliefs. Specifically, it explains your worldview. We do this because … Or we don’t do this because … It’s not emphatically saying we’re right or wrong. It puts opinions on the record and asks the consumer to sign up if they want to. It proves consistency. Hard. What polarising brands do. They set out to set up sides and they do that by deliberately upsetting people, by getting under people’s skin, by provoking the response they want. Often they court publicity by …

Renormalising

By Mark Di Somma

Brands are all about habits. But as this article in Time reminds us, sometimes the best thing a brand can look to do is to change a habit – even if they helped create the habit in the first place. Of course, brands tell themselves they do this all the time – but for many brands, the focus of their problem solving is on increasing consumption. Their answer to a pattern they feel they know and understand is more of that pattern. But the insight here is that changing a habit for the better doesn’t necessarily mean just offering the consumer more of what they have, or more of what the brand perceives consumers want. In the context of the fast food industry for example, generosity is not a competitive advantage. When everyone’s offering bigger portions, the portions aren’t more generous. They quickly become the new normal. The pattern itself hasn’t changed, it’s just got bigger. One of the reasons why brands are so reluctant to change patterns is that they take so many of …

In your face

By Mark Di Somma

I think you can read a lot of things into Facebook’s decision to team up with Skype. It certainly aligns with my “war of the worlds” theory in some ways. But what interests me is that, regardless of the technical pros and cons, it does actually make sense from a brand point of view. (I’m still far from convinced that Skype constitutes a sustainably bankable business, but that’s another argument.) Facebook’s brand is all about people connecting. The introduction of Skype simply channels that sentiment into a different technology. Looking for new partners in an increasingly scaled and bitter war, they have literally searched as far as their own name. Who else is in the business of ‘face’ that’s big enough to feel like a meaningful ally? And it’s a simple reminder to all of us that sometimes the best diversification strategies are staring us straight in the … Quite. Now all it has to do is work. No pressure.

Don’t study their actions, study their habits

By Mark Di Somma

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 …

Who’s afraid of commitment?

By Mark Di Somma

Christine responds to my observations about the “war of the worlds” with an observation of her own that could well prove a dilemma in the making, although not an immediate one. As the big social media brands synergise and extend their offerings to make it more and more convenient to inhabit their brand of ego-system (hat-tip Brian Solis), when will it all become too much? Is there a danger that it will all become too invasive? And even if it does come to feel that way, once things are that integrated, where’s the exit row? Can you just buy a branded product anymore in that space without being drawn into a bigger commitment? When does commitment become claustrophobic? When does convenience become imposition? When are customers being asked to buy into more than they want, even if what, or some of what, they are buying into is being offered to them free? Perhaps that’s my real concern about Google+. It’s not about whether or not it’s better than Facebook, it’s about the fact that it …

Being liked: The danger of popularity for a brand

By Mark Di Somma

Wonderful, wonderful article by Neil Strauss on why we should all dislike the “Like” culture. Strauss maintains “Like” motivates us to compromise, to chase stupid metrics in a desperate search for acceptability. “There’s a growing cultural obsession with being blogged, digged, tweeted and liked,” Strauss observes, and it’s all about hitting the numbers, at the expense of having a distinctive point of view. He has a point. Today’s buzzword – influence – is really all about cultivating a following – with the emphasis on cultivating. On the one hand, that’s a very positive thing. It brings people together, it generates and mobilises conversation. It has an outreach driver that is positive and convivial. It also provides real showcase opportunities to articulate individual expertise and authority in a subject matter, which can be important platforms if you’re looking to publish, speak or consult for example. But Strauss’s point is that, when our actions are influenced by our stats, and not the other way around, the search for approval becomes a straitjacket. “Like culture is antithetical to …

Joining the dots

By Mark Di Somma

Jeff Bullas’s piece on whether Google’s new Google+ marks an all-out war between Facebook and the search giant for dominance in social media raises some important issues. Bullas points to the demise in popularity of MySpace as a precedent for Google’s need to be concerned. From a technical point of view, I can see why Google+ can be perceived as an intervention in the social media space and as a challenge to the incumbent Facebook. But I think seeing it in that context alone risks missing the wider environment within which this struggle may well be taking place. I’m not convinced that it’s about the fact that Google wants to necessarily get into the social media space. Rather, they may believe they have no choice but to have a presence – and a successful presence – there in order to defend their very business model. In other words, whilst this may look like another attempt to gain a foothold in an arena that Google has attempted to enter several times before, I see it being …

Take a moment

Take a moment

By Mark Di Somma

Coming home from Sydney, Paul and I were talking about ‘moments of truth’. One of the great ironies, and frustrations, for many brands is that reputation must be built over years, but can be lost in a tiny fraction of that time – seconds. All because of an action or a word, a misunderstanding or an expectation that may or may not even have been reasonable in the first place.

When was the last time you actually changed your mind?

By Mark Di Somma

The hardest thing a brand can do is convince – to go against what people already believe and to ask them to believe something different. Actually, that’s not just true for brands, it’s applicable to anything or anyone. In the scheme of natural human interactions, conversion is relatively rare. To succeed at convincing, you need to overcome all the natural resistance that comes with encountering something new. Essentially, you need to break down all the inclination that has already amassed for an idea or a storyline. You need to destroy the loyalty that already exists for what people have and replace its equity. That’s amazingly difficult. As Seth Godin once observed, “If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.” Redirection is simpler. You change soaps. You change airlines. You change shirt brands. Particularly if soap, airlines and shirt brands don’t mean that much to you. Changing from a brand that says and does one thing to another brand that seems …