All posts filed under: Storytelling

The 7Rs of a great brand strategy

By Mark Di Somma

A great brand strategy combines what Adrienne used to call ‘the logic and the magic’ – that mix of rational and emotive elements that, together, combine to give a brand engagement, connectedness and distinction. I talk a lot these days about needing to position a brand beyond reasonable doubt – and by that I mean looking for brand performance and potential on more than just logical grounds; positioning it in such a way that it ‘calls’ to customers rather than just rationalising itself to them. To do that, there are always 7 factors I look for in a brand strategy. The 7R’s … 1. Resonance – how will people react? Brands need to elicit an emotive reaction. So what’s the emotion that’s being generated here and how intense is it? Does it talk to people’s needs in ways that feel personal, relevant and wonderful? 2. Resilience – how strong is the strategy competitively? Does this really give the competition something to ponder and react to? Does it front-foot them in the marketplace? If not, it’s …

Hey you, get onto my cloud

By Mark Di Somma

You could see iCloud as Apple’s long-awaited move into the cloud – a response at last to what Amazon and Google have been doing in this space. But to my mind, from a brand point of view, iCloud supersedes because it once again joins the dots, and in so doing it both ring-fences and reinforces the Apple ecosystem. One of the many things that Apple can teach others about branding is how consistently and persistently they link everything they do back to their purpose. While others continue to market features, Apple presents what it does as steps in the Apple journey. And with the proliferation of devices over the years, they have essentially created more on-ramps at more and more price points for people to join them on the road. Syncing via the cloud not only makes sense of that proliferation of devices, it deftly sets the stage to reduce the desktop to another one of those gadgets. There’s a clear agenda here, from a brand point of view, to flatten the hierarchy between the …

Shapeshifting how your customers feel

By Mark Di Somma

I was at a speakers’ function once when the conversation turned to those who make the big dollars on the podium. Referring to one particular keynoter who charges around $100K for an address, one of the people in the group observed, “That’s $1700 every minute they’re onstage.” Are they worth it? It would be an interesting exercise wouldn’t it to pause a video of such a presentation every 60 seconds and ask ‘was that worth $1700?’ because I suspect that not every minute is worth the same amount. I suspect there’s some variation of a flight of stairs of value, with relatively little ‘value’ at the beginning while everyone settles in and the speaker introduces themselves, a building and paced period of value-delivery in the middle as they extrapolate a story, and then a sustained and high value end-game where they leave the audience inspired before exiting. Skilled speakers are experts at pacing their presentations to deliver that shape of experience. With so much at stake over such a condensed period of time, they have …

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 …

What’s new about what your customers already know?

By Mark Di Somma

Most brands get launch. They understand how to make a splash for a product on a day. But what do you do between splashes? How do you keep front-of-mind? And more importantly, how do you stop the inevitable awareness fade as the ripples from your big splash die away? If you’re Walt Disney, you start introducing shorts between your new features, just to keep up awareness of your most popular and lucrative characters. And you do so knowing that such a cue will reactivate interest and re-kick merchandise sales. Cross-referencing in order to cross-sell. Nothing new in that – except that here it’s happening at a launch. When Disney releases Cars 2 later this month, audiences will be reintroduced to the key characters from Toy Story in a six-minute short. As Albie Hecht observes in this article in BusinessWeek, “It’s a way to extend the characters and the brand without its fans waiting two or three years for a new movie.” There’s a lesson here. It’s tempting for brands to think of their products as …

9 lessons planking can teach brands

By Mark Di Somma

1. Sometimes, there’s just no way of knowing why something becomes a phenomenon. But momentum is addictive – once an idea takes hold, it assumes a life of its own. After a time, it is because it is. The power of an idea is not in actually in the creation, it’s in the radiation and the subsequent take-up. 2. Remember though that a global idea can still be an idea going nowhere. It can be just one more thing to wile away a moment. The numbers can be impressive, but they don’t always point to something meaningful. A million downloads is often a million free clicks. That’s not the basis for a business model. 3. Life is most powerful, and perhaps becomes most alive, when it is visual. Powerful images move us to laugh, share and try. Give people amazing things to look at, and they will literally stop and do so. 4. Posts are the new fingerprints. Give people a simple but fun way to participate in something, especially one they can easily record …

Every brand must dream

By Mark Di Somma

Positivity comes with benefits if this article on the optimism bias is anything to go by. While, collectively, our view of the future can swing in synch with the news, the budget or the crime stats, a 2007 study found that 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future for their own family. According to the author, “Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.” It gives rise to phenomenon like talk of ‘green shoots’ in the midst of terrible financial depression because, it seems, we are compelled to find them. The take-out for brands is obvious. Clearly, there is merit in espousing a clear and positive view of the way forward. It’s not enough to just inform. Brands need to inspire, because that optimistic prognosis of what lies ahead holds real opportunities in terms of engaging and involving people. It humanises brands. Optimism, I surmise, also aligns directly with our worldview. In other words, …

Be happy

By Mark Di Somma

Not the best of days yesterday. Put my back out, and retired to a lie-flat position. Brain racing, body stopped … Aaaargh. To pass the time, I mused on getting my understanding of the purposes of business and branding down to their most basic forms. It led me here: What if the purpose of business, particularly a service business, is as simple as this: to make people happy. Imagine if that was the metric for your product design, your standards, your customer service, your innovation programme, your culture, your brand, your competitiveness. And what if the purpose of branding is to let people know how you intend to make them happy. Here come the objections: most of them variations of ‘we do that already’. No you probably don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have effective competitors, you wouldn’t struggle to maintain market share, you wouldn’t find yourself locked in a pricing war. Perhaps you think they’re happy or hope they’re happy, or you word your customer satisfaction surveys so that you can tell yourself they’re …

The power of interesting

By Mark Di Somma

I think we’ve all seen the movie about the ad agency that starts telling the truth only to find that business booms. Funny then how fiction turns to fact with news that in 2010, Domino’s US same-store sales rose 9.9% in a market where 1%-to-3% growth is closer to what’s generally expected. And the way they did it, according to Time, was by publicly trashing their old product, and encouraging consumers to check out the improvements they had made. That, it seems, got people back into the shop, intrigued by the admission and keen to taste what had changed. On the face of it, as I’ve said, this looks like a case for more truth in advertising, and of course to some extent it is. But I’m not certain that’s why the campaign actually succeeded – and I certainly don’t think it’s an approach that Domino’s could use again to such marked effect. What this story shows me, and what Susan Bonds’ speech reinforced last week, is that a generation notorious for its inattention will …

What do you do?

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do? – I write. Doesn’t just about everyone? – What do you mean by that? If you can form a letter in any language, you can write. What do you really do? … Here’s where this goes. Writers don’t write. Writers give people reasons to read. That’s what distinguishes them from people who can put things in writing. Speakers don’t talk. They give people reasons to listen. That’s what distinguishes them from everyone with the gift of speech. And photographers don’t photograph. They frame a moment in the world. That’s what makes their work different from someone with a mobile phone. The differences have never been more important in a world where so many people have access to technology that allows them to design, publish, print, record, point, click, template … What do you do, when anyone looks like they can do what you do? So often we want to base those differences on techniques. We do it better. Or history. We’ve done it longer. Or experience. We know more. Or frequency. …