All posts filed under: Leadership

"Why do they only look like that in the ad?"

By Mark Di Somma

You want to tell the best story you can, to showcase your product in the best light, to prefer you over others. So you show the optimistic end of what you deliver. The burger looks generous and juicy. The staff behind the counter are attractive and smile. The car corners beautifully on endless, empty roads. The child in the trolley in the busy but not overly crowded supermarket is gorgeous, and the product is lit up like Christmas. Every brand manager wants to tell that story. Because it’s safe, clean, positive and aspirational. It promotes the product benefits. It ticks all the boxes. Except one … It’s untrue. The actual experience of course is nothing like that. And everyone knows it. In reality the burger is dismal and squashed, the staff don’t smile never mind talk, the roads are jammed with irritated souls who make getting anywhere miserable and slow, the supermarket smells of over-ripe fruit and you can barely see the product because the fluorescent tube overhead is on the blink (sometimes literally). Right …

Sure you’re social, but are you interesting?

By Mark Di Somma

Fans matter, but friends of fans matter more it seems when it comes to spreading the word. According to this article in FastCompany, just 16% of company messages reach users in a given week, and the solution to that is to reach the friends of fans. So while Starbucks’s 23 million fans is impressive, the bulk of the numbers are the friends of those same fans: 670 million. In other words, you can tick all the boxes in terms of traffic and friends, but the real sphere of influence is actually at the next degree of contact – and the dynamic driving that is the somewhat old-fashioned notion of talkability. You may recall, some time back, the discussion about how many degrees of separation have strength in the social universe. How far into the network of friends of friends of friends do you have to go before the signals fade along with the trust? What this piece indicates to me is that two degrees out the message can be even stronger than it was at …

The vital (and ironical) difference between brand and identity

By Mark Di Somma

Are there such things as brands in much of the Government sector? I don’t think there are. That’s a good thing. And here’s why. I believe brands fundamentally require a competitive environment in which to actually work. I’m sure there’s an economic model that explains why – I don’t know it. But the reason why and when I believe brands work best has to do with the value I think they are intended to create: to drive preference; to encourage loyalty; to lift margin; to underpin and align a competitive and commercial business model with the people who believe in and buy from that organisation. Brands have to work to help consumers to make choices. They need to stimulate recognition, preference and loyalty based on interaction and clear senses of expectation and delivery. Therefore you need to have both choice and competition available. There are of course parts of the public and local government sector that are contestable – and there the dynamics of brand work well. Equally in the NGO sector, one of the …

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 …

Competition amongst brands in the social universe: is it an open and shut case?

By Mark Di Somma

This thought-provoking Fast Company post calls into question something that I think most of us hadn’t even bothered to question – and that is whether in fact social media sites compete with one another. Google’s Eric Schmidt has argued for some time that this is not a zero-sum competition and that Google does not actively compete with other social networks, saying that everyone benefits when people spend more time online. As the article observes: “Social networks often confine user data to their websites, forcing users to stay within their ecosystem … Google, on the other hand, seems intent on exploiting its newfound popularity to force rivals into more open data policies.” The article goes on to reference Google’s Chief Economist admitting that their products want to push Google’s open standards on competitors. My sense is though that you always need to approach the concept of competition with an open mind. And that’s because while brands may not wish to, or expect to, compete in some ways with one another, the element of competition, and therefore …

Nudging: making the most of the power of suggestion

By Mark Di Somma

We’re much more susceptible to the power of suggestion than many of us might like to think – at least that was my take-out from more reading from Time: this time on how brands use buying suggestions to entice us to buy more than we might otherwise. The article quotes John T. Gourville, a Harvard Business School professor of marketing who specialises in studying pricing strategies. Consumers, he says, tend to follow the suggestions listed in brochures or store aisles, so people tend to buy the amount, or buy in increments, that are advertised. If they see five for $5 or 10 for $5, they buy five or ten, regardless of the fact that they normally buy three. And that, as the article points out, is the key strategy here: to get consumers buying more than they would if there was no sale. It seems we respond positively too to the suggestion of limitation – imposing a limit of two per customer or six per customer incentivises people to buy right up to that limit. …

A brand that discounts or a discount brand?

By Mark Di Somma

This article in Time on how to get the most out of Apple is a reminder that there is a noticeable difference psychologically between a brand that discounts (even if it’s only occasionally) and a discount brand. Apple does discount – but for selected parts of its range or for specific reasons: change-over on a model, for example. The most important thing is that they don’t give that impression. Apple’s approach is to treat price as a reliable indicator of value. By not overtly or uniformly discounting, they maintain the value of the brand by making products that excite customers and they continue to charge for them at that level of value until there is a good reason not to do so. In other words, Apple’s ethos is never discount an Apple product while people are most excited about it – no matter whether that is days or years after it was first released. But while Apple have worked hard to position themselves as a full-price, full value brand, that’s not always the case. As …

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 …

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 …

Are your analytics cheating on you?

By Mark Di Somma

Numbers matter, but different numbers matter differently. To me, one of the great confusions is extent and value: Extent – how far your brand reaches. Value – how much your brand is worth (both literally in the minds of the market and in terms of margin in the minds of consumers). The temptation is to assume that the brands with the greatest reach must (ultimately) be worth the greatest amount of money and therefore have the greatest value. But to my mind that’s an assumption too far, because of course extent does not monetise or convert to sales consistently, and the value that can therefore be placed on that extent varies greatly. Does a brand with more likes make more profit than a competitor that doesn’t have as many? Sometimes. Perhaps. I guess. And what’s the critical gap? At what point does extent start to bite? Don’t know. I’ve seen lots of assertions about the value of reach, but few about the cumulative bottom line effects for most brands with a social media presence. I’m …