All posts filed under: Strategy

Rethinking the response

By Mark Di Somma

There’s a simple, human reason why behaviours happen time and time again in my view.  We are creatures of habit and familiarity. It is much more comforting to keep hammering away at what we know than it is to stop, reappraise the problem and completely redesign the playbook. Relentless speed and ubiquitous impatience have spawned an approach to strategy based on “not enough time”. The underpinning philosophy is that there’s either not enough minutes in the day to do the thinking, or even if these can be found, the strategy will be outmoded by the time the company gets to implement it. Wrong. It will almost certainly take far less time to strategise the road ahead than it took to get into trouble. And it will cost a whole lot less than reacting to another bad snap decision. However, those who hate change can always fall back on a simple tactic. If in doubt, raise more doubt … “What if it doesn’t work?” “But it’s not working now.” “OK, what if it works even worse?” …

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 …

“What are we going to do?”

By Mark Di Somma

It’s been said on too many occasions that actions speak louder than words. Said so often in fact, that many brands today seem to have a disregard that borders on disdain for taking the time to really think through what could make them outstandingly competitive. In today’s manic, results-driven world, fewer and fewer people, it seems, feel they have time to strategise where their company and their brand needs be heading, and how to retain their edge. It’s better instead, they believe, to just get on with the business at hand. Everything happens now. And as a result, considered is an idea that seems to have passed its use-by date. Execution is the mot du jour. The best way to solve any problem is to do something. In fact, not just something, lots of things. Kevin Roberts calls this, “ready, fire, aim”. I call it stupid. Looking to reaction and sheer activity to get you out of trouble relies on the fallacy that doing something has got to be better than doing nothing. In fact, …

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 …

Participation versus differentiation

By Mark Di Somma

Right now, across the world, hundreds of different people are opening an office, a restaurant, a social media company … They’ve sunk everything they have into it. They’ve thrown their life at it. It’s what they’ve always wanted to do, and every one of them and the people who has supported them hopes and believes they’ll succeed. Most won’t. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is planning a business that will one day be bigger than every other brand in their sector. The next shipping magnate woke up somewhere in the world today, without a ship to their name. The property magnate of the future is eating lunch in a schoolyard somewhere. Tomorrow’s Madonna has a clothesbrush, a mirror and perhaps an i-Pod … The contrast couldn’t be greater, and yet curiously, the two groups are interdependent. Because in order for someone to stand out in a market, the vast majority must fail to do so. If every café that opened stayed open, the hospitality sector would collapse because no-one could succeed, no-one could …

Likeable brands: Debating the true value of Likes.

By Mark Di Somma

If brand owners are buying Likes on Facebook, what are they actually worth?, asks Alexis Dormandy in this recent article in The Telegraph. “Can we really value a ‘Like’ or a ‘Follow’ when so many of them are bought rather than earned?” Dormandy’s question goes to the heart of the marketing community’s ongoing fixation with volume and to the business world’s fascination with social metrics. With marketing managers under huge pressure to build and participate in scaled brand communities, perhaps it’s inevitable that fast-track approaches to ramp up fan bases have become more popular. There’s good, bad and ironical news in this. Let’s start with the good. Slowly a real value case for using social media seems to be emerging. In a recent post on the RICG blog, comScore’s Linda Abraham and Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow reference research showing that a “share” on Facebook can lead to $2.10 in incremental sales, and drive up the average conversion rate to 10.2 percent per share. A key reason Abraham and Lazerow give to factor social media into …

The future of brands: 7 takes from Jim Stengel

By Mark Di Somma

Recently, Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer at P&G, opened up on his blog on what he perceives as the future of marketing. I very much liked what he had to say. My takes and comments. 1. Brands are becoming more important not just as identifiers in crowded markets but also as valuation mechanisms. As Stengel points out, 30 years ago, “almost none of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 could be attributed to brand equity; today it is above 30%.” Stengel sees that as a sign that marketing has become more important. I agree – certainly in the sense that brand can now be visibly seen to add value on the bottom line. I wonder though whether marketing itself has gotten more important or whether it has become increasingly important for marketers (with their heritage involvement in communications) to evolve their understanding of the value, performance and application of brands. 2. Marketing will be more and more about the behavior of the people behind the brand, not what the brand says. Absolutely. …

Human marketing

By Mark Di Somma

This highly informative post from James D. Roumeliotis on Customer Devotion introduces to me the expression “human marketing” which I am much taken with. Not only does it speak to the necessity for everyone within the organisation to think and act like a marketer, it’s also a reminder that, ultimately, people deliver some of our most powerful and memorable consumer experiences – and insights. People have an instinct for people that simply cannot be duplicated any other way. In the rush to mechanise and socialise, it’s easy to overlook the need for brands to continue to humanise their offering – to make it easier, more enjoyable, more fun etc for people to interact with. Powerful brands feel human. There is a real sense of people behind what’s on offer. And that I think is Roumeliotis’ key point: you can’t build and run a great brand if you don’t have a culture that loves people – as staff, as suppliers and as customers. In that regard, while much is made of the need to monitor and …

Gazing into the tea leaves

By Mark Di Somma

Happy New Year to you all. Over at Corporate Eye, Susan Gunelius references two JWT Intelligence reports just out that are predicting these five key trends for 2012. Here’s how I see what JWT are seeing. 1. Price Opportunities: Brands will introduce low-cost entry-point products into markets for price-sensitive consumers with “stripped down offerings” and smaller sizes. My view: Agree. The combination of depressed consumer spending and the rise of house brands will see brands looking to diversify their price points. In many sectors, I think this will be accompanied by diversity in the service experience as well – with online increasingly offering lower prices and help-yourself service levels, and full-price, full-service reserved for physical outlets. 2. Shared Value: Companies will shift from simply donating money to charitable causes to integrating social causes into brand strategies. My view: Inevitable, and in many ways mandated by both social media and the politicised consumer. Customers will want to see companies doing more than just talking about their social concerns or throwing dollars blindly at a problem in …

Transformation secrets: Please don’t try to change your brand

By Mark Di Somma

Change is on everyone’s mind at this time of year – or more particularly people are preoccupied with resolutions of change. Hopes of transformation fly high. But most of us will lapse from whatever pledges we make, not because we don’t really want to change necessarily but because the habit of what we have done or know well is too comfortable for change to endure. Companies are no different. As Professor Robert Sull put it so well back in 1999 in a paper titled “Why Good Companies Go Bad”, organisations, just like individuals, tend to snub the transformation they really need to decisively shift their reputation or market share in favour of persisting with established patterns of behaviour that they are comfortable with. Sull dubbed this phenomenon not just as inertia but as “active inertia”, because companies keep themselves busy with activities that, conciously or not, are often directed away from the transformation they claim to want and towards variations of business as usual. Professor Sull’s point was that such sustained patterns of behaviour degrade …