All posts filed under: Leadership

Getting the brand promise right

By Mark Di Somma

A brand promise is the commitment to deliver made between that brand and its audience. It’s made, of course, in order to encourage that audience to buy. Ultimately of course a promise lives or dies on whether it is believed and delivered on – no surprises there – but the promise is shaped by a range of factors: the nature of the offering; the capabilities and capacity of the brand; the rival promises of competitors. What’s often overlooked is that the character of the promise itself changes depending on the sector. Let me give an extreme example: a retail-style promise made by a professional services firm would fail. Imagine if a patent attorney promised her customers that they would “love how our intellectual property advice makes you feel”. Sure, it’s hardly a distinctive promise anyway, but clients would be laughing all the way to the door. (Equally, a professional services firm’s approach applied to selling domestic vacuum cleaners would be awkward to say the least.) That’s because the style and nature of the promise and …

Could the future of brand rivalry lie in being asymmetrical?

By Mark Di Somma

Three seemingly unrelated articles got me thinking today about the future of brand competitiveness in a world where the competitors are increasingly globally scaled. Conventional knowledge suggests that brands square off in the arena of public awareness. Each party assembles its awareness and loyalty generators and then launches a charm offensive to consumers offering them multiple reasons and multiple channels to choose them over others. In the fight between big and big, that’s a relatively straightforward competition. But how do you take on the biggest brands in the world if you are a much smaller marketing force or if you’re looking for an alternative strategy? Perhaps you do so by not taking them on directly. And perhaps you don’t take them on alone. The thought for this came from an article by Stan McChrystal (thanks Alex) on the lessons he learnt in Iraq: that a massive and powerful adversary can be seriously affected by a much, much smaller force that leverages its network and moves quickly to find points of vulnerability. The relevance of McChrystal’s …

Fighting the "fadar" …

By Mark Di Somma

We now have greater access to ideas than ever before, but the ideas themselves, it seems to me, have a much shorter half-life. New thinking, new people, new everything are presented to us at a dizzying pace – in editorial, feeds, slide decks, talks, videos, articles, almost everywhere one cares to look. In an age of instant celebrity and content marketing, thoughts and variations of thoughts are being championed from every social soapbox. Ideas have become fashion – because they are marketed to us as fashions. And like fashion, most will barely outlive the press release that trumpeted them. A proliferation of lists across the media adds to the sense of volatility. The “fadar” is how I describe the promulgation of ideas fighting for our collective and individual attention across every aspect of the cultural landscape. Some will shine. Many won’t get the chance. Others will bedazzle on first view only to burn out well before they hit paydirt … (Ironically, as an idea in its own right, the fadar is of course subject to …

9 factors that help anchor your brand price

By Mark Di Somma

Behavioural economists refer to the decision making process brands use to set a price in the minds of consumers, especially when those buyers are dealing with something that is unfamiliar to them, as “anchoring”. Anchoring provides a reference point from which to perceive and negotiate “worth”. Brands looking to set a high value on what they offer anchor highly; brands looking to position themselves as accessible and everyday do the opposite. De Beers anchored the value of their rings around “two months’ salary”. The message to purchasers – in this case, men in a jewellery store (perhaps the ultimate social fish out of water) – was that it will hurt but it’s worth it. At the other end of the value scale, when Coca Cola originally positioned their “delicious, refreshing” drink at 5c a glass, they were sending a clear signal to drinkers that Coke was the affordable beverage everyone could enjoy every day. Both messages were on brand, even though they presented vastly different value propositions. De Beers’ “price” of course takes no reference …

Nailing your opinions: creating a powerful brand manifesto

By Mark Di Somma

On All Saint’s Day 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church, sparking, in the eyes of many, what would become the Protestant Reformation. Whether or not he actually did post the Theses (of course there is historical debate) and what that generated are off-topic, but the action of pinning your colours to a statement of beliefs for all the world to see lies at the core of building and articulating an opinionated brand. Brands build trust through behaviours. And behaviours should be based on clear principles. Those principles should bring your purpose to life by laying out the clear psychological guidelines within which your brand operates. They are, when done well, an inspiring précis of your organisation’s worldview. Martin Lindstrom made the brand case for opinion for me in this post several years ago when he wrote: “The fact is that consumers are tiring of perfectly polished brands. Inoffensive brands. … Brands without well-defined opinions will find it increasingly difficult to gain traction in the market place. The challenge …

When projects don’t stack: the fine art of understanding mistakes

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma When a project doesn’t meet expectations, I’m fascinated by what gets asked, who does the asking and what, if anything, emerges as the key learning. My view is that we should treat projects that don’t go to plan not so much as wreckages but rather as breakages: they occur when the picture we have in our minds of what will occur shatters, splits or simply falls a different way than we had led ourselves to expect. That can mean something as elemental as having the wrong picture in the first place – or it can come down to developments that pulled things out of alignment. Faced with picking up the pieces, here are 22 questions I use to try and get to the truth, and to move on: 1. What exactly went wrong? (What did not happen?) 2. How “wrong” was it – in the sense that how much did it differ from what we had told ourselves would happen? 3. How realistic was our prediction in the first place? (How …

Don’t just provide reasons to buy. Change the reason for buying.

By Mark Di Somma

It’s tempting when your product all but parallels that of your competitors to be drawn into a meaningless war: a fight for market share that revolves around devaluing (looking to price the other guy out), trivial pursuit (nit-picking on features in a bid to show technical advantage) or overshadowing (spending up large in mainstream media in a bid to raise “awareness”). The problem with chasing competitive preference is that brands spend far too much time focusing on the competitive aspects and far too little insight on identifying where the preferences could lie. All three approaches above are looking to provide consumers with reasons to buy, but while they may change perceptions, they actually do little to change affinity. It’s a distinction that’s easily overlooked. Changing what consumers think of you for now does not automatically translate into a shift in how consumers feel about you – especially in the longer term. They may, as a result of the above actions, see you as offering them more value, they may like the fact that your product …

Evolution or transformation? 17 key brand factors

By Mark Di Somma

No business these days can just sit pretty. But the extent and nature of changes confuses many. Brands evolve. Or die. But they must also retain something of what consumers know. Or they fade. So which is more important? And how should a brand act, when? I get asked about this a lot. So here are my takes on what must stay and what can go (sometimes): Keep: 1. Your good name (in every sense) – it’s the thing people know you by. Unless of course you need to re-engineer your reputation or your old name doesn’t fit what you do anymore. 2. Your purpose – the ways you intend to change the world should remain an inspiring constant for staff and customers (providing it’s inspiring to start with, of course) 3. Your values – only change them if you’re going to make them more challenging 4. Your promises – trust is the basis for any brand’s success. Without that, you’re nothing. 5. Your principles – in today’s transparent markets, transgressions will be discovered. It’s …

Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.

By Mark Di Somma

People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, particularly if their viewpoints compromise the personality of the brand itself. Hands up if you’ve ever been to this meeting: “I like orange.” Or “Don’t make it orange.” “Use short words.” Or “People don’t read.” “We need to be on TV.” And/or “We need to export.” Brands thrive when they are based on meaning, trust, relevance and delight – but of course they must deliver that meaning, trust, relevance and delight to the buyer, not the seller. Otherwise they risk narcissism. Every brand must pursue a life of its own – not affirm the life of a manager. And to me, that integral sense of being an asset in its own right hangs on ten things. A brand must have: …

Forget supply and demand. Think supply and desire.

By Mark Di Somma

According to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, but interestingly increased the effects of seasonality. However, the actual nature of that seasonality has changed. Pricing now has got nothing to do with how good a product or service is, what it does, what it doesn’t do or where it came from or how many of them there are. Pricing is decided by how much people want something, and the degree to which it is novel and available. Commoditisation, it follows, is also driven not by “market” forces but by desirability forces. Brands that fail to attract a strong price have lost their desirability or that desirability is fading. People then want to pay less not because the product is necessarily worth less, but because consumers want it less, …