All posts filed under: Language

Sustainability: Being good, not just doing good

By Mark Di Somma

Historically, corporate social responsibility has put the emphasis on how businesses are doing good. It’s become an increasingly varied checklist of “things we’ve done right”. Today though, socially aware audiences want more. They increasingly make judgments about you based on your overall likeability. They want to do business with brands that are good. And that in turn means that, at a social level, your reputation depends less on your ability to simply highlight good works done in isolation (through community activities or sponsorships for example), and much more on your ability to show that you are inherently principled in your dealings and that you behave consistently across your organisation in ways that align with your social and commercial reputation. That shift in the significance of social actions has a downstream effect on critical social initiatives such as sustainability. In my opinion, they should no longer be seen as nice-to-haves or even as opportunities to improve efficiencies across your supply chain. Rather, the actions you take in these areas are competitive opportunities to distinguish your company …

Credentials as comfort food

By Mark Di Somma

How does the fact that I’m travelling on the world’s biggest airline change my travelling experience? Or the world’s biggest cruise liner? How does the fact that I’m working with the world’s biggest professional services firm change what I get from the lawyer, accountant, engineer etc assigned to me? What more do I get from buying a bottle from the world’s biggest winemaker? Or a toy from the world’s biggest department store? It makes no difference. And yet brands love to emphasise their size or the number of countries they operate in or the projects that they’ve been involved in. They think it provides reassurance. They think it gives them a storyline. It doesn’t. It gives them big numbers but in most cases, it says nothing at all. Credentials in my view are much over-used and much over-rated. They don’t add to the excitement that consumers feel. And, given the complexity of most corporate structures, it could be argued that they often don’t ameliorate the risk of dealing with many entities. Credentials might feel important …

Likeable brands: Debating the true value of Likes.

By Mark Di Somma

If brand owners are buying Likes on Facebook, what are they actually worth?, asks Alexis Dormandy in this recent article in The Telegraph. “Can we really value a ‘Like’ or a ‘Follow’ when so many of them are bought rather than earned?” Dormandy’s question goes to the heart of the marketing community’s ongoing fixation with volume and to the business world’s fascination with social metrics. With marketing managers under huge pressure to build and participate in scaled brand communities, perhaps it’s inevitable that fast-track approaches to ramp up fan bases have become more popular. There’s good, bad and ironical news in this. Let’s start with the good. Slowly a real value case for using social media seems to be emerging. In a recent post on the RICG blog, comScore’s Linda Abraham and Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow reference research showing that a “share” on Facebook can lead to $2.10 in incremental sales, and drive up the average conversion rate to 10.2 percent per share. A key reason Abraham and Lazerow give to factor social media into …

What’s a brand strategist?

By Mark Di Somma

There are two answers. You can be exactly what the words describe. The person who decides what the branding is, what it represents, how it will work and how it will be communicated. It’s a key part of planning effective and inspiring communications. Or you can develop strategies for brands. You can be a person who works to make brands more valuable, distinctive, profitable and utterly aligned with the culture, the systems, and the distribution channels that must deliver what has been promised. That’s much more about the business. It focuses on making sure companies are utterly competitive through their brands. Each description involves very different interests, priorities, conversations … even clients. Just like in any role, a simple change in the words doesn’t just alter the meaning. It can actually shift the mandate. What do you do?

Is thinking a desk job?

By Mark Di Somma

Over at Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni asks :Where do you do your best thinking?” For me, it depends on the problem. And what I think and even how I think about something is directed by that. Here are my seven favourite approaches: 1. Sometimes it’s sitting somewhere quietly with a pencil and paper and just writing thought sequences down until something clicks. Usually that’s about rethinking the associations. Scrabble means charades with a touch of Pixar over a business model. 2. I read avidly for the same reason. It’s all about finding different lines of logic. Disrupting. That’s really good for new products or ideas where there is no precedent or if you need to put daylight between what normally happens and what will need to happen for the brand you’re working on. Read about a completely different situation, and then apply what you got from it. To find out more about this, read The Medici Effect. 3. Other times it’s a walk – to get sensory inputs such as eye contact, noises, colour, vistas. …

Volume is nothing like intensity

By Mark Di Somma

Speculation in recent days about what a “fan” is worth to a business is a timely reminder to separate volume from intensity. Many commentators in the social universe it seems to me remain beguiled by quantity. The more liked you are, they seem to think, the more valuable you are potentially. Not so, of course. It costs nothing to say “like”. And in many cases I would venture to add, it means nothing and adds nothing. Intensity though is quite a different metric – because it speaks to commitment and the bottom-line results of that commitment rather than just impressions. Intense fans buy the brands they feel strongly about. Money changes hands. Intensity also defies volume. If you have customers who feel intensely committed to your brand, then you can have a much smaller, much less impressive number of them. Apple doesn’t have the biggest market share in a lot of the sectors it participates in, but it has perhaps the world’s most intense fans. And if a good percentage of those committed people only …

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 …

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 …

How to create strong signals

By Mark Di Somma

Spotted this article in The Economist on the growing cost of thought leadership. In an escalating battle for top-of-mind, the top consultancy brands it seems are prepared to spend large amounts – up to 5% of gross revenues by one estimate – to produce thinking they then give away for free. The activity shows no sign of slowing down in these recessionary times, with spending on such papers up by 500% according to one estimate, yet ironically the very consultancies that hammer their clients on the need for accountability can ascribe very little hard data – at least publicly – on the return on the investment. So why do it? My sense is that this really is a battle fought around something my friend and colleague Alex calls “strength of signal”. Much of the thinking about that is fairly obvious in a B2C market, but how do you generate ‘strong signals’ in the B2B market where the big consultancies are competing? I subscribe to more than my fair share of such papers. So what follows …

Reaching the limits of conversation

By Mark Di Somma

Reach is one thing. Notice, and more particularly trust, are quite another. Yesterday Alex gently challenged me over my assertion that six degrees of separation will soon be replaced by six clicks. Her point – and it’s a very important one – is that there is a marked difference in loyalty between degrees and clicks of separation because we generally build stronger bonds face to face than we do online, and the strength of those bonds will extend further into our networks. Six clicks, she believes, is just too many. Alex’s view is that much after two clicks, the network is already so wide and the bonds of engagement so unsupported that people simply drop off our radar. We don’t take it any further. There is a limit to the familiarity we can, and probably choose to, leverage, and it occurs at a much earlier point than in the physical world. In the physical world, knowing someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone is intriguing and …