All posts tagged: branding

Joining the dots

By Mark Di Somma

Jeff Bullas’s piece on whether Google’s new Google+ marks an all-out war between Facebook and the search giant for dominance in social media raises some important issues. Bullas points to the demise in popularity of MySpace as a precedent for Google’s need to be concerned. From a technical point of view, I can see why Google+ can be perceived as an intervention in the social media space and as a challenge to the incumbent Facebook. But I think seeing it in that context alone risks missing the wider environment within which this struggle may well be taking place. I’m not convinced that it’s about the fact that Google wants to necessarily get into the social media space. Rather, they may believe they have no choice but to have a presence – and a successful presence – there in order to defend their very business model. In other words, whilst this may look like another attempt to gain a foothold in an arena that Google has attempted to enter several times before, I see it being …

Funnel vision

By Mark Di Somma

It’s always fascinating to compare how you see your place in the market with how others see you. Warren made this astute observation the other day. If you’re in a very small market like New Zealand and you look out, you see the whole world before you. There seem to be endless opportunities. But step around to the other side of the world and look back, and you see a market like New Zealand from a completely different perspective. It seems small and hard to find. The issue of course is not specific to place brands. It’s applicable to all brands that are small in comparison to the scaled markets they would like to reach. The brands themselves see a panorama. The world looking at all the choices available to them from so many sources discerns barely a speck. This is quite literally ‘funnel vision’. Your perspective depends entirely on what end of the funnel you are looking from – the scaled end or the narrow end. The only way that situation can change is …

Can brands fly?

By Mark Di Somma

Do you remember when you were a child the first time someone made you a paper plane? If your recollection is anything like mine, you couldn’t believe how it left your hand and made its way across the room. Before long though, it lost height and velocity, and fell to the floor. One of my more cynical friends has this joke about how much media budget is needed to keep a brand going successfully: “Give me all the money you can burn and it will go like a rocket!” It’s easy to see a brand as an expense that relies on getting attention to make its presence felt and to make the expenditure worth it. Detractors see it that way too. They’re very quick to opine that unless they’re constantly fed money to keep them in front of consumers, brands simply fizzle and fall to earth. I don’t share that view. Particularly now, with all the different ways that we access and talk about brands, I see them less as rockets kept airborne by media …

An option or a choice?

By Mark Di Somma

Just getting a presence in most markets can be hard work. One of my friends is finding that in the beverages game – a longer runway than he and his partners expected, and a lot more patience required as well. Long days, he says, having to justify every metre of shelf space you’re allocated. Same with being a speaker or a consultant. But doing all the work to get on the map just elevates you to the status of another option. That’s not the same as being a choice. Options form part of the line-up for how customers decide. Choices are a conscious decision in themselves. Option means you’re available, you’re on the list, in the books. You’re a speculation. Choice makes you an active decision, one part of yes/no, either/or. You’re known, you’re quantified, you’re considered. Now if you’re in the business of selling variety – like supermarkets, book stores, speakers’ bureaux, search engines – options fill out the stock book. They reflect well on you because they prove that you can tap the …

A brand strategy blog

Upheavals: A blog for people who love branding

By Mark Di Somma

Welcome to my blog. Here you’ll find my observations, perspectives, questions, ideas, new thoughts and models for brands. I focus on the changes and developments in business and brands that catch my eye (and perhaps will catch yours) – things I read, things I observe, stuff I theorise about, attitudes that frustrate me, and conversations I have in passing about market changes and their implications. If you’re a brand owner or a marketer, responsible for retaining the value and competitiveness of your brands in our rapidly shifting and increasingly social world, please take a look, add a comment, make contact … Cheers.

Conversation vs recommendation

By Mark Di Somma

Nice piece from Neil Glassman draws a distinction that I think has escaped many of us between conversation and recommendation. As the author himself says, he thought of social media as a platform to directly scale up word of mouth (WOM) marketing. But the synergy that looks so obvious doesn’t happen. In fact, says Glassman, compared to the effectiveness of what takes place offline, surprisingly little WOM is generated on social media. My sense is that while there is plenty of talk being pushed into the media, that content is then not, for the most part, being transmitted-on (or more specifically picked up) in the way that it is when WOM is in full flight. Glassman himself hints at why. People, he says, participate in social media to interact with friends and like-minded strangers about things that interest them. Social media marketers, on the other hand, engage with their customers hoping to encourage them to spread the word. The first interaction pivots on “us” – about the things that “we” share, which means ownership exists. …

The alternative to free

By Mark Di Somma

Regular readers will know that I have a major problem with the free model. To me, it’s misleading – and the reason why is that it’s based on a false premise: that if you offer goods for free, people will be in time upgrade to the paid model. I see why people are tempted to go down this track. It’s easy to see free as a simple way to open the jaws of the funnel. Free gets you awareness and therefore volume, the thinking goes. And there is an implication given by some that you can then trust the conversion process to secure enough sales off that added volume to make the give-away worth it. Easy too to believe, as you look around the social media environment, that with so many people giving away so much, you have little choice but to do the same. The problem with this reasoning as I see it is that free is not a generator. On the contrary, it is a competitor. And the reason is that giving so …

Paying less and less, getting less and less

By Mark Di Somma

The response by airlines to customers’ demands for lower and lower fares has been to do exactly that, lower seat costs, but at the same time to strip more and more of what is included in the fare out of the price. This process – referred to by Time as “the unbundled skies” – points to a business model that I see becoming more prevalent, and not just in the heavens, as price-sensitive brands lower entry points in order to get customers to commit, and then use “upgrades” to restore margin and, according to the article, add another 50% or so to the real price. Pay less, get less. Want more? Pay more. Ryanair have even suggested, somewhat controversially, that “more” could include access to the toilet. In fact, according to one consultant quoted, there are up to 35 add-ons available when you fly, ranging from baggage and food fees to flight-delay insurance and keeping the middle seat empty. You literally get what you pay for. This seems like an expedient answer to customers’ demands …

The 7Rs of a great brand strategy

By Mark Di Somma

A great brand strategy combines what Adrienne used to call ‘the logic and the magic’ – that mix of rational and emotive elements that, together, combine to give a brand engagement, connectedness and distinction. I talk a lot these days about needing to position a brand beyond reasonable doubt – and by that I mean looking for brand performance and potential on more than just logical grounds; positioning it in such a way that it ‘calls’ to customers rather than just rationalising itself to them. To do that, there are always 7 factors I look for in a brand strategy. The 7R’s … 1. Resonance – how will people react? Brands need to elicit an emotive reaction. So what’s the emotion that’s being generated here and how intense is it? Does it talk to people’s needs in ways that feel personal, relevant and wonderful? 2. Resilience – how strong is the strategy competitively? Does this really give the competition something to ponder and react to? Does it front-foot them in the marketplace? If not, it’s …

Hey you, get onto my cloud

By Mark Di Somma

You could see iCloud as Apple’s long-awaited move into the cloud – a response at last to what Amazon and Google have been doing in this space. But to my mind, from a brand point of view, iCloud supersedes because it once again joins the dots, and in so doing it both ring-fences and reinforces the Apple ecosystem. One of the many things that Apple can teach others about branding is how consistently and persistently they link everything they do back to their purpose. While others continue to market features, Apple presents what it does as steps in the Apple journey. And with the proliferation of devices over the years, they have essentially created more on-ramps at more and more price points for people to join them on the road. Syncing via the cloud not only makes sense of that proliferation of devices, it deftly sets the stage to reduce the desktop to another one of those gadgets. There’s a clear agenda here, from a brand point of view, to flatten the hierarchy between the …