All posts filed under: Storytelling

Reporting season

By Mark Di Somma

Excuse the extended silence. Reporting season is an all consuming time of year for me. In addition to actually writing a number of annual reports, I do a lot of travelling and lots of meetings with senior managers. I look forward to it every year. People are often perplexed. You’re into brands, they say. Why do you want to write annual reports? They position this as if it’s an either/or. I’ve never seen it that way. After all, what are brands for if not to generate profits for investors? Their question also implies annual reports are just a writing exercise. Again, I’ve never seen them that way. To me, annual reports are cues to sit down with decision makers one on one and quizz them in detail about what they did, why, what happened and what it all means at year end. I get to understand something of how the business worked over the last 12 months. And I get to hear the stories from the inside. It’s a chance to talk through the dynamics …

Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to planning, the business, the strategy and the culture all need to stem from the company’s driving purpose – its absolute reason for being. That in turn means that the purpose must be much more than a wish list or a broad hypothetical goal. It must be inspiring, engaging, profit-focused and it must work hard to stand the company apart from its competitors. Here’s how I use purpose and beliefs to drive distinctive business direction. 1. What is our core purpose (rather than just what is our core business)? When people think of our brand, what is their blinkpoint (the first association that snaps into their heads)? Are they aligned? 2. Why do people buy from us? How have we made …

Affirmation: how to make a brand experience really count

By Mark Di Somma

Everybody wants to feel they got value for money. Sure – but when exactly does something feel like it was “worth it”? For example, Lady Gaga’s just wound up a three concert stint in Auckland. When does a concert experience feel like it’s worth it? Is it when you finally see the star in person as they step onstage days, weeks, months after you bought the tickets? Is it at the end of the opening number as the crowd erupts? Is it at the end of the show as you fight your way home through the traffic, images of the last couple of hours running through your head? Is it during your favourite song? Or is the value for money moment when you’re telling friends your “I was there” story via Facebook or, days or months later, over dinner? When does a film feel worth it? How about the experience of buying a dress? When do you think the keynote speaker at a conference has delivered or is delivering value for money? At what points …

Brands at the speed of life

By Mark Di Somma

What a pleasure to discover the writings of Simon Graj. I very much enjoyed this post on how changes in the speed at which consumers see and recognise brands affect the nature and manner of the relationship. Graj suggests brands are on a collision course with consumer habits because while brand creators and managers feel increasingly inclined to engineer complexity into their stories in order to give them depth and dimension, consumers are looking for “elegant, plug-and-play simplicity” – brands that are clear, attractive, binding and capable of being absorbed at an increasingly frenetic pace as we dash to work, check our phones and pursue our lives. “Brands are now something we experience out of the corners of our eyes,” he says. That suggests that in “a world that rockets us from experience to experience”, brands need to be able to collapse their symbolism into smaller and smaller bytes of information. As Graj observes, the 30 second sit and watch platform has all but disappeared. Brands appear in the margins of our search engines, in …

Anzac Day

By Mark Di Somma

I posted this four years ago. I think it will always be true. All the anger, bitterness, atrocity, outrage, anticipation, pain, grief, triumph, pride, disfigurement, panic, hatred, death, injustice, comradeship, loss, desperation, disease, mud, stench and utter, utter waste – captured, symbolised, in a simple, single red poppy.

Credentials as comfort food

By Mark Di Somma

How does the fact that I’m travelling on the world’s biggest airline change my travelling experience? Or the world’s biggest cruise liner? How does the fact that I’m working with the world’s biggest professional services firm change what I get from the lawyer, accountant, engineer etc assigned to me? What more do I get from buying a bottle from the world’s biggest winemaker? Or a toy from the world’s biggest department store? It makes no difference. And yet brands love to emphasise their size or the number of countries they operate in or the projects that they’ve been involved in. They think it provides reassurance. They think it gives them a storyline. It doesn’t. It gives them big numbers but in most cases, it says nothing at all. Credentials in my view are much over-used and much over-rated. They don’t add to the excitement that consumers feel. And, given the complexity of most corporate structures, it could be argued that they often don’t ameliorate the risk of dealing with many entities. Credentials might feel important …

Always be branding

Always be branding

By Mark Di Somma

Somehow, it just doesn’t feel right. In fact, to some it feels tantamount to suicidal – spending money on your brand at the very point in time when the company feels like it can least afford to invest in “intangibles”. To all those people who’ve thrown that argument at me over the years, you’re right. Well, partly. At the “wrong” time, it absolutely doesn’t feel right. But that’s the thing about counter-cyclical decisions. They’re out of sync with the spirit of the times – or more particularly, they’re not aligned with your spirit at the time. And, actually, if you’re honest, the feeling that you have about the futility of branding in bad times is probably the same feeling you have when things are going well. Except then it feels like you don’t need to spend money on your brand. Whenever anyone asks me, “When’s the right time to spend money on your branding?”, I respond with, “When’s the right time to be competitive?”. I’m not being a smart-ass. There’s never a wrong time. So …

Why women are driving the rethinking of the sales model (amongst other things)

By Mark Di Somma

It’s extraordinary how so much has been made of the emergence of China and India and of the impact of new technology on the world’s economic wellbeing – and yet a factor bigger than either of these dynamics has been largely ignored. The rise in the participation of women in the economy through full-time work – an economic force I refer to as “femonomics” – has contributed more to economic growth than either Asia or online globally, and yet the attention this has received pales in comparison to the space devoted to Silicon Valley and the rise of the subcontinent and the Red Dragon. In the US, the input of women in the paid workforce has risen from just 20 percent in the early 20th century to close to 50 percent today, and it is still rising. According to Gerry Myers, American women now earn, control, and spend trillions of dollars annually. In fact, they are responsible for a whopping 80 – 85 percent of all purchasing decisions. So it’s amazing that so many marketers …

Know thy enemy

By Mark Di Somma

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus. Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to. An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so. Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand …

Sense and Serotonin

By Mark Di Somma

Recently in response to a post by David Meerman Scott about the need to apply left and right brain thinking to content creation, I suggested in the comments that brands should apply that same approach to most aspects of marketing. As I pointed out at the time, blending right and left brain signals is critical to how brands engage with prospects and buyers because it ensures that people remain fascinated and justified as they make their way through the sales funnel. Logic and magic. I think most of us accept that consumers generally buy emotively and explain logically, so the ability to provide them with experiences that they enjoy and talk about, and at the same time to arm them with reasons that help them explain, to themselves and to others, what they are doing is critical. It’s easy and tempting though to treat each hemisphere as separate: to apportion logical arguments for those who think that way or for times when they are needing to rationalise; and to ramp up the emotions and associatives …