All posts filed under: Storytelling

Market leadership: you can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Looks to me from this article like Samsung are going down the same competitive route as others before them in their battle with Apple. They’re looking to out-do them and to build a reputation and loyalty for themselves that replicates the following that Apple has. Here’s the thing. As soon as any brand does this, there’s a very real risk that what it is actually doing is fighting with its perceived nemesis on their terms and therefore, subconciously or not, by their strengths. Because of the underlying references, Apple also becomes a focus and therefore, by implication, an authority. And all this within time and space that Samsung is paying for and looking to own. Unless they are very careful, there’s a real risk here that Apple could be allowed to Occupy Samsung’s marketing real estate – by Samsung itself. After all, Apple is very good at being Apple. And their consumers love them for the brand they are. It’s not smart brand strategy to address a strong brand competitor at their strongest points. If …

Finding an obsession

By Mark Di Somma

When you apply the concept of provenance to brands, it becomes a concept centred on systematically and competitively ‘localising’ what you’re about rather than diversifying to try and meet the generalised needs of the wider world. So it’s about having a narrowcast brand: one focused to the point of obsession on a specific area of passion. Provenance is also about those other valuable ideas that the word in its original meaning conjures: focus; love; purity of thinking; authenticity; deep knowledge. That obsession can then be marbled through every aspect of the brand: language; environment; innovation; strategy … People may worry that such devotion to a single idea will stifle adaptability, but my experience is that brands that see the world through the lens of an idea they subscribe to passionately are also able to find latitude and opportunity within that idea whilst growing a strong and devoted following. Far from being restrictive, being obsessive provides a framework for creative approaches. The way I see it, brands increasingly have three powerful emotive strategies going forward: they …

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

By Mark Di Somma

Almost every brand I work with has a community policy, an environmental policy, a sustainability policy … as they should. And everyone seems to acknowledge that the policy or policies they have form an important part of their reputation and their stakeholder relations … as they should. And yet precious few brands have actively connected those social responsibility activities with their brand.

The opportunity of dull

By Mark Di Somma

There are days when Alex really makes me laugh. I grinned merrily at her observation recently that if you really want to make significant changes as a brand, you should go all out and look for something … dull. That’s right, find something uneventful, even pedestrian – and poke it for opportunities. And the reasons, on reflection, are simple. Chances are people do whatever it is often. So it comes with scale and frequency. And secondly, if it’s that tedious, frankly the only way is up. High energy, exciting activities already have high EQ by their very nature. And they attract the most interest from brands. So the chances of doing anything breakthrough are so much harder. Dull stuff is out of the limelight. It’s dull and it stays dull for most people until someone does something to change that. So it’s actually a lot less difficult to make the boring better: to take something that people don’t want to do or don’t enjoy doing, and to inject new elements and ideas that surprise and …

Time to rethink the business model of some NGO brands?

By Mark Di Somma

Brands like Toms with their “one for one” shoes programme have proven that companies can be both profitable and philanthropic. So why do so many NGO brands stick with a funding model that relies on, well, charity? Peter Salmon, MD at social innovation company NextPlays, certainly has his doubts about models based on grants and donations as opposed to “financed” business practices. Here are some of his thoughts on why “cause” brands need to stop begging for money and start putting up business cases for financing social change. The current models of financing social organisations are through philanthropic grants, equity investment, or conventional debt financing, he says, but the dominance of foundation and philanthropic grants creates an ineffectual social innovation sector that delivers poorer outcomes. 1. Both financing and grant approaches require well researched documentation but a grant application requires a proposal, whereas financing requires a business plan. These may seem like subtle differences, but one is far more open to innovation than the other. Grant applications are often judged to fit within already pre-determined …

Don’t be disappointed: why price underwrites the brand experience

By Mark Di Somma

What’s the difference between a budget airline and a pig? Pigs fly more often – and on time. Harsh perhaps, but it’s a reminder that in a market, there is always a price to pay, and the price is not just about money down. Some people will be happy with budget. It’s worth a cancelled flight or two for the savings they make. For others, that’s far too high a price to pay for a few dollars saved. Years ago, I was in a workshop where three people in the group were asked to make the business case for luxury over economy. The team made their case in a pointed and dramatic way. First, they invited the wider group into a huge open sunny space, where sofas were laid out. Each person was escorted to a sofa and provided with bubbles and canapes. There was a sign on the wall that read $3000. Then, we were invited into a second room. This room was smaller, and instead of couches there were seats. Each person was …

Intersections

By Mark Di Somma

At dinner the other night, the conversation turned to carpet ads. Why, someone asked, do retailers keep advertising carpet ads when most people only buy carpet once every 7 – 10 years? Because, they don’t all buy them at once, I reminded them. A brief explanation of interruption theory followed. Because so many retailers have neither the inclination or the resources to build and sustain relationships with their diverse customer bases, they basically rely on a marketing approach that pivots on informed chance. Reach and frequency advertising models depend on reaching a profiled consumer at a specific moment when that consumer might have an interest and a need for the product. It’s a scatter-gun approach (despite what the media planners might tell us) that relies on a machine-gun barrage of noise and repetition. Most of the time it has the majority reaching for the remote control to turn off the noise because whatever’s being talked about is “N/A” to their needs right now. But brands keep beaming ads in the hope that one day customer …

"Why do they only look like that in the ad?"

By Mark Di Somma

You want to tell the best story you can, to showcase your product in the best light, to prefer you over others. So you show the optimistic end of what you deliver. The burger looks generous and juicy. The staff behind the counter are attractive and smile. The car corners beautifully on endless, empty roads. The child in the trolley in the busy but not overly crowded supermarket is gorgeous, and the product is lit up like Christmas. Every brand manager wants to tell that story. Because it’s safe, clean, positive and aspirational. It promotes the product benefits. It ticks all the boxes. Except one … It’s untrue. The actual experience of course is nothing like that. And everyone knows it. In reality the burger is dismal and squashed, the staff don’t smile never mind talk, the roads are jammed with irritated souls who make getting anywhere miserable and slow, the supermarket smells of over-ripe fruit and you can barely see the product because the fluorescent tube overhead is on the blink (sometimes literally). Right …

Sure you’re social, but are you interesting?

By Mark Di Somma

Fans matter, but friends of fans matter more it seems when it comes to spreading the word. According to this article in FastCompany, just 16% of company messages reach users in a given week, and the solution to that is to reach the friends of fans. So while Starbucks’s 23 million fans is impressive, the bulk of the numbers are the friends of those same fans: 670 million. In other words, you can tick all the boxes in terms of traffic and friends, but the real sphere of influence is actually at the next degree of contact – and the dynamic driving that is the somewhat old-fashioned notion of talkability. You may recall, some time back, the discussion about how many degrees of separation have strength in the social universe. How far into the network of friends of friends of friends do you have to go before the signals fade along with the trust? What this piece indicates to me is that two degrees out the message can be even stronger than it was at …

Is thinking a desk job?

By Mark Di Somma

Over at Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni asks :Where do you do your best thinking?” For me, it depends on the problem. And what I think and even how I think about something is directed by that. Here are my seven favourite approaches: 1. Sometimes it’s sitting somewhere quietly with a pencil and paper and just writing thought sequences down until something clicks. Usually that’s about rethinking the associations. Scrabble means charades with a touch of Pixar over a business model. 2. I read avidly for the same reason. It’s all about finding different lines of logic. Disrupting. That’s really good for new products or ideas where there is no precedent or if you need to put daylight between what normally happens and what will need to happen for the brand you’re working on. Read about a completely different situation, and then apply what you got from it. To find out more about this, read The Medici Effect. 3. Other times it’s a walk – to get sensory inputs such as eye contact, noises, colour, vistas. …