All posts filed under: Strategy

Brand transformation: Don’t focus on the change, focus on the difference

By Mark Di Somma

I regularly refer to adrenalin as the chemical of change. To me, transformation must be radical and scary, because it pretty much requires the same levels of energy and momentum to get to a ‘dangerous’ place as it does to shift to somewhere a lot more comfortable. The only difference may be the time it may take for people internally to get comfortable again. That’s particularly true if you’re a brand that has fallen behind – where the shift required to even stay alive can feel huge. And yet for all the effort, the concern, the misgivings, where your brand lands can in reality be right in the middle of the pack – meaning that sooner rather than later, the company will need to repeat the same process in order to avoid being lost. So often, it seems, those undertaking brand change misjudge impact. People assess what has happened from the point of view of how far they have shifted rather than looking at the two things that really matter: the active difference it has …

9 ways to stage a brand resurgence

By Mark Di Somma

Commoditisation is a fact of market. I always remember that great observation by VJ Govindarajan that “Strategy starts dying the moment it is created”. It dies because its (potential) effectiveness dies and with that, its relative value. That idea, transposed to brand is, in reality, what commoditisation is: the (slow) death of relevant value. However, there are strategies you can put in place to reverse the speed and/or pace of that commoditising effect. Here are nine ways I outlined to a leadership forum in Malaysia recently to decommoditise your offering and reassert its branded value. In the presentation itself, I focused on actual commodities, but the principles are in fact applicable to any brand/product that doesn’t command the value that it needs to, or once did: 1. Think of the product in new ways – when you redefine what something is or could be, you reframe its context and it’s much easier to redefine what it can be used for. When you stop thinking of milk as a drink, for example, and start thinking of …

What comes after “No”?

By Mark Di Somma

As Seth Godin pointed out recently, “no” actually means all sorts of things. The flipside of a marketplace where branding encourages people to buy for emotive reasons is that brands also need to counter consumers’ rational and irrational reasons not to buy. Or listen. Or act. Or stop acting. Some reasons are based on legacy. Some are convenient. Others stem from ignorance, bias, self-interest, loyalty, limitation, pride or tradition. Some are supported by fact. Many aren’t. The problem for the person or brand making the offer is that none of that matters. The problem that matters is not your opinion of why your buyer won’t buy – it’s the fact that they have this opinion for whatever reason, and they have every reason to keep thinking it until shifted otherwise. As Bruce Turkel pointed out in a telling post this week – “No” is also how some people have to get to “Yes”. And most people want to get there. He makes some great observations: “Because of its incomparable ability to establish terms and boundaries, …

The brand dilemma: recognition vs excitement

By Mark Di Somma

One of the intriguing aspects of understanding brands is that one must be prepared not just to balance but to actively address the contradictions that humans happily live with. Blogger Daniel Walsch sums up those inconsistencies beautifully: “We want to be alone. We want to be part of groups. We are benevolent. We are selfish. We want to be independent. We want guidelines. We are self serving. We are generous. We stick to the truth. We shade the truth. We have violent tendencies. We desire peace. And on and on it goes.” Brands mirror that humanity in the pace at which they are increasingly asked to compete. And that pace is simultaneously handbrake and accelerator. Handbrake – in that customers want consistency. They want brands they can recognise, that they feel they know, that make sense to them, that they can depend on. They want brands that they can just reach for, without giving them a second thought. They want brands that feel like part of their normal, ordinary lives. Customers look to recognition and …

5 reasons why cultures don’t change willingly

By Mark Di Somma

Here’s some great insights for anyone involved in making change programmes or new ideas work. The key to successfully transforming organisations doesn’t lie in explaining what’s required. It actually lies in better understanding what people feel threatened by. In this article in Reuters from some time back, David Rock takes the view that “People are not rational, they are social”. According to him, what we’re told is not the fundamental driver for acceptance. The key issue is that we are intuitively programmed to respond positively to social rewards, and are instinctually committed to minimising social threats. Perceived threats to our senses of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (a model Rock refers to as SCARF) will cause us to act defensively towards an event or an idea. Such threats cause people to close off the energy being passed through the prefrontal cortex, the home of conscious thinking in the bank. Change might make sense. It may even be responsible. But when information about change is conveyed to us in this manner, people react emotionally, productivity …

The brands that dare: gamechangers

By Mark Di Somma

Some brands seem to rule the world. They’re big, powerful, profitable and widely adored. They talk and the world listens. They are the game-makers. They made the game and they continue to run it. Their playbook seems to pretty much decide the rules for most. But not everyone aspires to that level of success and not every market leader is at the apex of a totally satisfied segment. Which is why some brands opt for a different agenda. The gamechangers’ intentions are, quite literally, to change the world, or at least to shake the tree of the mighty incumbents. How do you do that without getting crushed or ignored? It depends. Did your brand start out as a challenger, or did challenging the status quo become your purpose as a brand? Because the starting point drives very different strategies and storylines. If your brand was a challenger from the start, one of the most powerful assets you have, providing it’s true of course, is a dirt-poor story. The brands that start from nothing and with …

Brands Beyond Functionality: 7 great lessons

By Mark Di Somma

Everyone talks about the need for brands to keep up with consumer demand, yet, curiously, some brands have lived on beyond their purely functional need, largely because they carry with them associations in the form of eternal ideas that continue to burn strong. Watches – for example. Who needs a Rolex today to tell the time (did they ever?) and yet the marque is unchallenged because prestige is an idea that never goes out of style. Zippo is another brand that has outlasted the heyday of cigarettes. As this article in Ad Week explains, “Harnessing its long-standing popularity with men and its indelible associations with fire, Zippo now sells an Outdoor Line that includes everything from emergency fire starters to hand warmers.” True diversification. In a world where so many brands lose relevance and fall by the wayside, what lessons should we take from iconic brands that have successfully passed their necessity date and continue to prosper? The issues faced by Victorinox seem to me to symbolise the dilemmas and the opportunities. Their Swiss Army …

Outperforming as a brand: making the right investment in disruption

By Mark Di Somma

Everybody professes an interest in growing. Everyone wants to outperform the market. Yet the challenges to do so are for the most part under-estimated and the appetite required to resource adequately in order to decisively disrupt is generally lacking. An interview with Stephen Hall and Conor Kehoe, two McKinsey directors, on why companies are reluctant to aggressively reallocate resources reveals that strategic inertia springs from two sources. According to Kehoe, there is unwillingness internally to move people and/or capital to unproven initiatives. And there is resistance from investors who, even though they like the long term results, are hesitant to accept short term downturns. The business case for redistributing strategic energy though is clear. In this study, the firm compared those who reallocate resources at a high level with those that were much more reluctant to do so. The difference was a 3.9% difference in annual incremental returns to shareholders. Over 20 years, that amounts to a doubling in total returns to shareholders (assuming all dividends are reinvested). Companies that actively reallocated resources continued to …

Brands and regulators: rethinking compliance

By Mark Di Somma

It’s easy to see recent surges in regulation as a reaction to the corporate scandals of previous years and to characterise the return to a much more compliant environment as one of bureaucracy on a roll (and a role for that matter). But one of the reasons re-regulation is back, surely, is that the world is moving away from a pure market forces model (driven by business) towards a marketplace model that incorporates drivers such as consumer rights, environmental concerns, ethics and responsibility. Whether you agree with the politics of this or not, that new marketplace model is much more sympathetic to a regulatory approach. It’s also a sign of a shifting sense of consequences. The former model left it to the market within reason to decide what would and would not happen, pretty much relying on efficiency to sort out what needed to be rectified. The GFC proved that the market wasn’t the world’s greatest policeman and that sectors on a roll aren’t necessarily all that thorough about a whole bunch of things. This …

When other brands attack: 5 reasons to defend yourself

By Mark Di Somma

Is there any reason why you wouldn’t defend yourself in the face of an attack on your market share or reputation? None that I can think of off-hand. Because to do so is to simply hand hard-earned loyalty and turnover to someone else on a plate. Nevertheless, faced with a concerted effort to take market share from them, too many brands defy rational behaviour and either carry on with business as usual or simply ignore what is going on in front of them. Here are my five reasons why you shouldn’t behave that way: It telegraphs weakness or at least vulnerability: Failure to respond decisively and aggressively tells your competitor(s) that you are not in a position, physically or emotionally, to do so. As such, it simply encourages greater activity on their part. It tells your customers you don’t care: When you fail to fight for your customers, it tells the people who buy from you that you either take their loyalty for granted or that you don’t care if they leave. Delays push you …