All posts tagged: branding

What’s new about what your customers already know?

By Mark Di Somma

Most brands get launch. They understand how to make a splash for a product on a day. But what do you do between splashes? How do you keep front-of-mind? And more importantly, how do you stop the inevitable awareness fade as the ripples from your big splash die away? If you’re Walt Disney, you start introducing shorts between your new features, just to keep up awareness of your most popular and lucrative characters. And you do so knowing that such a cue will reactivate interest and re-kick merchandise sales. Cross-referencing in order to cross-sell. Nothing new in that – except that here it’s happening at a launch. When Disney releases Cars 2 later this month, audiences will be reintroduced to the key characters from Toy Story in a six-minute short. As Albie Hecht observes in this article in BusinessWeek, “It’s a way to extend the characters and the brand without its fans waiting two or three years for a new movie.” There’s a lesson here. It’s tempting for brands to think of their products as …

Every brand must dream

By Mark Di Somma

Positivity comes with benefits if this article on the optimism bias is anything to go by. While, collectively, our view of the future can swing in synch with the news, the budget or the crime stats, a 2007 study found that 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future for their own family. According to the author, “Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.” It gives rise to phenomenon like talk of ‘green shoots’ in the midst of terrible financial depression because, it seems, we are compelled to find them. The take-out for brands is obvious. Clearly, there is merit in espousing a clear and positive view of the way forward. It’s not enough to just inform. Brands need to inspire, because that optimistic prognosis of what lies ahead holds real opportunities in terms of engaging and involving people. It humanises brands. Optimism, I surmise, also aligns directly with our worldview. In other words, …

Be happy

By Mark Di Somma

Not the best of days yesterday. Put my back out, and retired to a lie-flat position. Brain racing, body stopped … Aaaargh. To pass the time, I mused on getting my understanding of the purposes of business and branding down to their most basic forms. It led me here: What if the purpose of business, particularly a service business, is as simple as this: to make people happy. Imagine if that was the metric for your product design, your standards, your customer service, your innovation programme, your culture, your brand, your competitiveness. And what if the purpose of branding is to let people know how you intend to make them happy. Here come the objections: most of them variations of ‘we do that already’. No you probably don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have effective competitors, you wouldn’t struggle to maintain market share, you wouldn’t find yourself locked in a pricing war. Perhaps you think they’re happy or hope they’re happy, or you word your customer satisfaction surveys so that you can tell yourself they’re …

Well, well, well

By Mark Di Somma

When place branding specialist Simon Anholt explains in a podcast why nations need a carefully thought through brand strategy to which all players in the economy subscribe, he quotes the legendary David Ogilvy who once said, “If all you want to do is attract attention, then you put a gorilla in a jockstrap”. As Ogilvy himself explained it, if you want to get recall, you then put the brand on the jockstrap itself. You will certainly get buzz, and people will remember the stunt. But will anything meaningful, in commercial terms, happen beyond that? Doubtful. And the reason is that having got people’s attention, you need to do something with that energy. You need to direct it somewhere. You must provide a meaningful story and experience that links what people have seen with what they do. It’s not enough just to give them something to look at. It’s as meaningless in branding terms as a carrot, a jumping trout or just another pretty logo. Badges aren’t brands. Of course Wellington’s already done a lot more …

What they see is what they brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Oh the irony. For years, many of us tried to get the people we worked with to broaden their understanding of what a brand was. It’s not just a logo, a product, a TV commercial – that conversation. We were fighting to make the definition of brand bigger. Now I’m wondering whether we have to start going back the other way. Suddenly, there are no people, countries, groups anymore. Instead, everywhere I look, everything’s a brand. Donald Trump is a brand, Charlie Sheen is a brand, so are Kate and Will, the President’s a brand, Greenpeace and just about any professional sports team or association you care to name. America’s a brand, so are the Tea Party, Survivor, Wikileaks, the Beckhams and Lady Gaga. That suggests to me that the media is in the process of redefining a “brand” as anything that gets or has our attention. In the new parlance, brand now is much more about profile. So I think Paula Lynn is right when she comments on this story in MediaPost that, “The …

The assumption paradox

By Mark Di Somma

It’s easy to assume that your customers love your brand, that they are loyal, that they have every reason to continue doing business with you, that they want the next upgrade. It’s easy to assume that no-one noticed or cared about that little slip-up or that if they did, they understood. It’s easy to assume that your customers will continue to want what they have always wanted. Or that they will never want something back. It’s easy to assume that everything is fine – that privacy is beyond risk, that people don’t need to know that your phones could potentially track movements, that hackers can’t break into your online games, that people’s details are safely encrypted, that the takeover bid is too low, that your shareholders want to stay or that the market will continue to rise – or fall. If we each had to worry about the alternatives to each of these things all of time simultaneously, we’d go mad. So we assume. And it’s easy to do so because assumption is simply an …

Telling

By Mark Di Somma

What gives you the right to sell a product/service at margin today? It’s easy to assume you have a mandate. Or that you deserve one. But what is your brand doing to earn/retain the mandate it wants/has? Don’t tell me it’s because you opened. Because presence isn’t enough. Don’t tell me you worked hard to get here (past tense). Because then you’re relying on your history. Don’t tell me you’re doing a good job. Because most everyone’s doing a good job. Ditto service, people, methodologies, products, channels, technologies, systems, processes, efficiencies … for most companies anyway. Talk perhaps about the scarcity of what you offer, or the richness of the ideas that you encourage, or the loyalty you forge, or the need you are meeting that your competitors don’t, or the insights you’ve developed and applied that are truly valuable, or the excitement you generate, or the journey you’re taking people on, or how you are looking to generate the most wonderful change … Better yet talk about how you’re combining ideas and where that’s …

Travelling north

By Mark Di Somma

Keith Yamashita has a phrase I love. He talks about companies and brands finding their northern star. The term isn’t astronomical, it’s aspirational. He’s referring to an ideal of your company or brand that burns bright in front of you and your staff, that leads you on, that fires you up and that you never let out of your sight … It’s the brand and the culture you dream of being. It’s what your people long to be part of. And it’s who your customers always hoped you would be and that your competitors can’t be. It’s what a company’s vision should be all about. At Audacity, we call it your ambition. Without it, you drift. So many people can see that north star in some form. When I ask people in workshops about the company or the brand they dream of working for, they can tell me, sometimes in amazing detail, what it looks like, how it feels to be part of that , what it’s renowned for. They can see it. At times, …

A brand within a timeframe

By Mark Di Somma

It is perhaps the ultimate exit strategy – a company with a closing date. This article in the NY Times talks about NPOs such as Malaria No More and Out2Play that have decided their work is done. They’re closing because they have accomplished what they set out to do. Now imagine doing that with a brand. Setting a date by which you would have achieved set business and social goals along with an agreed return on capital – and ending it there. Too radical? My friend Sam Kebbell set up his architectural practice using that exact premise – a company that would last 50 years. And brand strategist Dan Herman has already successfully proposed just such an idea with his concept of “short-term brands”: brands that focus excitement and buyer loyalty because they are built not to last. Funny isn’t it how we all acknowledge the pace of change, and how much consumers crave the new, and yet we expect brands to just keep running. Perhaps that’s why they go stale. They need continuing infusions …