All posts filed under: Storytelling

Words always have a wider context

By Mark Di Somma

Perhaps you’ve seen this video about the power of words, perhaps not. The storyline itself may have been attributed to David Ogilvy, nevertheless, it is a powerful story that offers critical insights into how we should think about words and their influence in this age of storytelling. The clear intention is to demonstrate that changing the words in a context can change their impact significantly, even if the message and the intention of the message remains largely the same. “I once read that a word is like a living organism, capable of growing, changing, spreading, and influencing the world in many ways, directly and indirectly through others,” wrote Professor Susan Smalley in a deeply thoughtful post titled The Power of Words. “…As I ponder the power of the word to incite and divide, to calm and connect, or to create and effect change, I am ever more cautious in what I say and how I listen to the words around me.” Marketers should be equally aware of what they think they are saying and the …

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, …

CSR: aligning corporate purpose and social responsibility

By Mark Di Somma

It is said that CSR is how companies build their reputation and contribute to helping the world. Cynics suggest that CSR has sprung from a need by corporates to justify what they were doing to the world. Either way, it’s failed to turn things around so far: CSR hasn’t made a material difference to global sustainability; and corporate motives remain the object of widespread suspicion. According to this article by McKinsey, levels of trust in business are below 55 percent in many countries and less than 20 percent of executives in a recent McKinsey survey reported having frequent success influencing government policy and the outcome of regulatory decisions. No-one’s won – the reasons for which I’ve touched on several times, including here and here. A key reason the McKinsey authors suggest is because of the heightened expectations that consumers have of corporate behaviour, and the increasingly ability to scrutinise and critique those behaviours via social media. John Browne and Robin Nuttall give four reasons why CSR has failed to impress: 1. Lack of traction for …

Where do you stand on fair pricing? A conversation starter

By Mark Di Somma

Buyers have convinced themselves that they are entitled to deprive brands and shopkeepers of a degree of the asking price profit in the hunt for a bargain – yet in almost the same breath, they’ll tell you that businesses need to be responsible and to behave ethically and that they shouldn’t take shortcuts that compromise people or safety. But there are prices to pay for things being cheap. In fact, one could go so far as to say that once prices get below a certain point, someone has to suffer. Some of the side-effects are obvious and horrendous: child labour; unsafe working places; the flourishing replica and fake markets; food scandals. Some are less obvious but still telling: the ongoing effects of over-production on environments and economics; the free-fall decline of high street retail in the face of online trade; and declining employment in the retail and service sectors. You don’t have to look far for predictions that retail is about to close its doors. In this interview on Pandodaily, Marc Andreessen says, “Retail guys …

Lessons from an unnoticed violinist

By Mark Di Somma

I’ve always loved the story of Joshua Bell playing the Bach pieces largely unnoticed in the Washington metro station. Please watch the video if you don’t know the story. And while the experiment does indeed confirm that we don’t take the time to appreciate as much as we should, more particularly, it’s also a poignant example of the contributions of context and information to our everyday decision making. Context provides so much of how we read situations. No-one expects to see a concert violinist playing at a station – and because no-one expects it, no-one notices what he is doing, regardless of the extraordinary quality, and even fewer reward it. In that setting, in the blink of an eye that people evaluate, he’s just another musician, just another busker. If he was that good, many people would have subconsciously thought, he wouldn’t be playing here. So if he had played in another setting, even if it wasn’t a concert hall, would that have given his performance greater credibility for those passing by? Quite possibly. There’s …

From Prussia with love

By Mark Di Somma

Jeremy referred me to this fabulous presentation by Rory Sutherland, and it’s another corker from the man from Ogilvy’s. Mr Sutherland would absolutely make my short list of people to sit next to at dinner. Not only is he an adamant supporter of one of my favourite disciplines, behavioural economics, but his talks are peppered with the most wonderful references and observations. In this speech, he gives a wonderful example of how physical value can be transformed into an intangible value that defies costs, but only if the associations are powerful and valued enough. Examples abound of this dynamic working the other way (items being sold for, or even below cost) but the Prussian medal example Sutherland gives is proof that cast iron can indeed be worth more than gold if the story that surrounds the lesser metal gives it greater value, and providing of course that those seeing the cast iron medal also understand the context of why it carries the value it does. Sutherland goes on to direct this argument at the environmental …

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 …

The strategy of radical beauty

By Mark Di Somma

Should you climb a mountain because it’s there, or because you believe you have a more than reasonable chance of conquering it? In a commercial setting at least, I’ll plumb for B – because presence alone is not a rational reason to participate. I continue to be intrigued though by the human instinct to believe that the odds are there for beating. I watch brands plunge into markets where they honestly believe they can do what others have failed to do for no other reason than that they believe in themselves and/or they have little respect for the current participants. Believing in your own brilliance and/or relying on the incompetence of others however, as Michael Porter reminds us, is not a strategy. In fact, it’s nothing short of a gamble. In a wonderful article on “How strategists lead”, Professor Cynthia Montgomery of the Harvard Business School gives a telling example of how some great companies have fancied their chances in the furniture manufacturing sector, only to become a cropper. They have, she says, looked to …

Story myths

By Mark Di Somma

Great brands have great stories. But a great story doesn’t automatically create a great brand. For years we’ve told ourselves a story about what story is and how it works: develop a product; build a story around that product to give it value; sell that product at a greater degree of profit. We’ve allowed ourselves to believe that stories are the lynchpin of competition and that the best storytellers will win. But that in itself is a myth. Ultimately consumers don’t buy a story. They listen to a story. They are influenced by a story. But what they buy is a truth that directs their behaviour, captured in a story. You don’t succeed just because you have a story. You succeed when you have a story that inspires people to buy your brand. The most beautiful, uplifting story in the world won’t cut it commercially if it doesn’t achieve competitive connection – if it doesn’t provide customers with reasons to connect with your brand at the expense of someone else’s. Stories may influence behaviours. But …