All posts filed under: Storytelling

Plenty of ideas coming out of AG Ideas 2011

By Mark Di Somma

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the AG Ideas 2011 plenary yesterday morning via the simulcast into Wellington’s Te Papa museum. My highlights: Definitely the video of the kids workshop, with two stand-out examples of great design ideas by young minds that, as Ken Cato pointed out, do their creating with no preconceptions. The first design suggestion: a hot dog with legs, so that, in the words of its young inventor, overweight people, who love hot dogs, would have to chase them and thus burn calories. And then, the second suggestion, via this exchange: Ken Cato: What have you designed? Child: It’s a surfboard with flames. Ken Cato: How would that work? The flames in the water … Child (slightly impatiently): It’s a new design. Of course, the brief notes that follow cannot do justice to the presentations of the four featured speakers, but I thought I’d pick up on some of the thinking that particularly struck me, because it intersected with, and informed, the things that fascinate me – and, at …

Mind games

By Mark Di Somma

Here’s another of those inconvenient questions: is it really worth our while for New Zealand to be involved in hosting global sporting events? Or more to the point is it worth our while, the way we go about it? Yes, I know … participation, competition, world stage, all that … but given that it’s actually costing us significantly more than we can expect to make to host the Rugby World Cup, for example, how do we intend to get a payback? And the $36 million for the America’s Cup – what are we projecting that will bring home? My sense is, it could be worth it – but it probably won’t be. I don’t get the sense that each of these initiatives is a calibrated and layered contributor to a defined and well-laid out New Zealand strategy designed to get the nation from point A to point B by lifting our competitiveness and our margins. In fact, I don’t get the sense that the Government has an economy-wide story right now that will gain us …

How real is the value of reality brands?

By Mark Di Somma

Last night I sat down and watched Inception. Today I spied this article on the Kardashians – and I couldn’t help but wonder whether the dream states of the film mirror the “reality” of the brand value of reality brands. The Kardashians appear to be a retail success story, for now, and we’re told they have raked in millions. What’s the business model? Their “real” lives? And those millions of followers – what are they following? The real Kardashians or three levels down? Does the Kardashians’ show and product portfolio add up to a brand, souvenir merchandise or fashion? Does that become stronger, or more real, when it diversifies? Why all the questions? Well, because if I was Sears, and I was looking at setting up a Kardashian shop within my shop, it might hugely influence my decision to know what exactly I was partnering with. Of all the celebrities in the world, why them? What’s the connection between what they are and what Sears represents? And, as I say, is what Sears are seeing …

Upsizing the impact

By Mark Di Somma

Interesting isn’t it how we perceive messages. 50,000 jobs on offer at McDonald’s sounds huge, but it actually averages out at around 3 – 4 positions at every restaurant in the U.S., which suddenly doesn’t seem anywhere near as impressive. I have no doubt that McDonalds could have quietly filled those positions by advertising locally. But that would have significantly pixelised the effect. Instead they chose to offer all those tens of thousands of positions on one day across the nation. All that hope, all at once. A dollop instead of a glimmer. A chance for the applicants themselves to be part of something that felt so much bigger, so much more powerful, so much more universal. A chance for McDonalds to make its presence felt and to reinforce its credibility as an employer brand. An event big enough to set social media abuzz. The next time you’re planning to a “soft” release, maybe ask yourself this: What could we do to upsize this? And how big would we have to make it to get …

What would you Like?

By Mark Di Somma

In this discussion on whether Liking a brand on Facebook makes you more inclined to be positive about that brand, writer Gregory Ferenstein says that rationalisation theory suggests “our actions secretly influence our opinions”. I’m sure that’s right. We do something and we justify that action to ourselves. When we “like” a brand, we tell ourselves it’s a better brand than we might have thought it was otherwise. We make a public endorsement and we stand behind it. When we pay for something that makes us feel good, we feel better about that brand. And when we buy something alongside many others, we feel more secure because we are not alone. The dealmaker or breaker though is that we do get what we thought we were getting – and this is where brands need to be so careful in framing expectations. If I take an action, and the action turns out to be better than I expected, I will be pleasantly surprised and I will naturally carry that through to my view of the brand. …

Take a chance

By Mark Di Somma

Why do consumers go out and buy a Lotto ticket or take part in brand-run promotions when they know that their chances of winning are so very small? According to Kelly Goldsmith in this article in the Time blogs, it’s not because of what they stand to win, it’s actually because of where consumers focus. Most people it seems focus on the outlay – it’s just a dollar or two. And when they connect that outlay to the potential reward, then they basically believe they have nothing to lose. Involvement appeals directly to the universal love of curiosity, surprise and of course winning. But, ask people to think about the problem the other way round, in terms of their chances of winning, and interest wanes substantially. In other words, where something is portrayed as hopeless, we find it much harder to justify even a small amount of money. We’re hugely inclined to chase a dream if the price to do so seems small enough, but that interest declines rapidly when we’re reminded that we’re unlikely …

Little jewels

By Mark Di Somma

Last night I attended the launch of my latest “book” – this one, the story of the Victoria Cross with particular emphasis on the 22 New Zealanders who have been awarded the country’s highest military commendation. It was a commission for New Zealand Post, one of a number I’ve done for them over the years on a range of subjects. In fact, last year was a bit of a year for these larger writing projects because I was also involved in a beautifully-finished corporate history of the Pryde Group, a Hong Kong based company which owns the world’s largest windsurfing and kitesurfing brands. People have asked me over the years why I get such a kick out of this kind of work. It seems such a long way from the strategic and communications work that Audacity does. And I think it’s because projects of this scale require you to be so curious, to look for the smallest humanity in even the broadest story. You need to find a structure that is robust enough to hold …

Every price point needs a story

By Mark Di Somma

The temptation is to see story as a luxury item: something that brands implement to lift their margin. There’s nothing wrong with that of course – it’s powerful and it works. But I don’t think that story is just a top-end nice-to-have. My view is that most brands, no matter where they are priced in the marketplace, need a storyline. To understand why, first let’s think about the alternative. Without a storyline, a product is just that. It has everything it needs (hopefully) to do what it’s being bought for but that also means it’s just another detergent, car oil, computer, whatever …That makes it highly vulnerable to house brands and to cheaper versions of what amounts to ‘the same thing’. It also means markets get packed very quickly with variants of the same idea that rapidly diminish the value equation: we talked about Groupon and its 425 competitors a couple of days ago. This problem of course only becomes more acute as you move down the value chain – meaning that at the very …

Which north?

By Mark Di Somma

Yesterday St John asked whether north meant true north or magnetic north. Good question. As I said, most people have a sense of what the company they work for should be like. It’s natural for people to look for tangible ways to improve things. As we all know, it doesn’t take long for employees to offer a multi-point to-do list. Listen very carefully to what you are being told. But, at the same time, be careful how you treat this information. Chances are what you are hearing is, at some level, a variation on today. It is magnetic north – the reality they are naturally drawn to. Taken literally, it’s probably an improvement on the reality people are part of – rather than an indication of where you truly need to be heading in order to be competitive. As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, if he had asked people what form of transport they wanted before he delivered them the automobile, they’d have asked for a faster horse. Don’t get me wrong, many of …

Travelling north

By Mark Di Somma

Keith Yamashita has a phrase I love. He talks about companies and brands finding their northern star. The term isn’t astronomical, it’s aspirational. He’s referring to an ideal of your company or brand that burns bright in front of you and your staff, that leads you on, that fires you up and that you never let out of your sight … It’s the brand and the culture you dream of being. It’s what your people long to be part of. And it’s who your customers always hoped you would be and that your competitors can’t be. It’s what a company’s vision should be all about. At Audacity, we call it your ambition. Without it, you drift. So many people can see that north star in some form. When I ask people in workshops about the company or the brand they dream of working for, they can tell me, sometimes in amazing detail, what it looks like, how it feels to be part of that , what it’s renowned for. They can see it. At times, …