All posts tagged: branding

Loyalty and lust

By Mark Di Somma

Over tea with Alex in the sun a couple of afternoons ago, we got talking about what you can count on in a market, and what you can observe but not necessarily depend on. I’ll leave it to Alex to share the specifics of what she talked about in her own inimitable way, but our conversation did get me thinking about the different kinds of customers that brands have today because in the face for scale, it’s easy to confuse the different levels of interest and loyalty. Let’s start with what happens when you get waves of visitors. It’s tempting to have your head turned by the massive numbers that can swarm a post, a thought, an idea, a product. Suddenly your metrics are through the roof and your mentions are running like ticker-tape. You are the talk of the world, and the temptation of course is to think you’ve made it. You have their front of mind. But that space is mercurial, and attention – one the Holy Grail of marketers – is now …

What’s a brand problem?

By Mark Di Somma

I’m always fascinated when people tell me they have a brand problem – because I’ve seldom encountered one. I’ve encountered a whole range of business problems however that addressing the brand can fix. One of the real concerns I have with many “brand strategies” is that they work in too small a circle. The vicinity of their reasoning is marcomms, which is important of course and immediate, but what gets lost with such a restricted approach is the wider thinking needed to really address and resolve the matter at hand. And unless you take that broader approach, unless you actively build the widest context into your consideration set by really understanding what’s happening to and within the business, you’re just dealing with what’s in front of your nose. There’s also a very real risk that the brand strategy is actually little more than an elaborate but ultimately isolated justification for the communications approach.

Light my fire

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do if you’re one of the world’s most famous lighter companies and the number of smokers is dropping?  If you’re Zippo, you look for ways to capitalise on your ‘cool’ image and extend your brand into products ranging from watches to leisure clothing. Zippo hit its zenith around the mid-1990s with 18 million lighters a year. Today, that figure’s dropped to around 12 million lighters a year and the hunt is on for products that are, in the words of president and chief executive Gregory Booth, “rugged, durable, made in America, iconic”. It seems to be a standard operating procedure these days. Brands hit a certain scale and then look to diversify in order to fish in other waters, or else, their iconic products hit their use-by date and they start looking for ways to sweat their assets, or someone brings a brand back from the dead and looks to add product lines to what they hope is its revitalised equity. Sadly, many of these diversifications don’t strike me as strategic. They …

What’s in the box?

By Mark Di Somma

Marc Levinson’s book The Box explains why a “soulless aluminium or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end” was able to revolutionise trade. As Levinson points out the container is about much more than what it does, it’s about what it now represents to all of us living and buying in the global economy: an extraordinary system for moving goods between places at minimal cost and with as little complication as possible. Along the way, the humble container literally changed the world around it: new ports became valuable; just-in-time became possible; international trade accelerated; loading and delivery times shrank; trade became standardised; supply chains extended. But the economic benefits that arose from the container didn’t come from the box itself, clever as it was. The real innovation came from entrepreneurs who, over time, discovered how they could apply the potential of the container to their commercial advantage. It was those people who saw that this box with “all the romance of a tin …

The dangers of categorical denial

By Mark Di Somma

Some things are too big to fight. If you’re planning to redefine a whole category for example, then, unless you’re already a market leader, plan on a big outlay and a long runway. You’re literally battling the millions others have already invested to define what it is, what it means, who it’s for, where it’s found, who the key brands are, what the products generally cost and so much more. If your competitive advantage is predicated on breaking one of those fundamentals, be very aware of the fight you’re buying: You’re battling the pigeonhole that your supply chain will want to put you in; You’re fighting the expectation that your customers automatically have of you; You’re asking for the competition to diss you as unimportant or uninformed; and If you somehow beat all that, and manage to get established, you just pressed the GO button for a whole bunch of imitators to copy your IP and innovation Here’s the irony. If you’re going to enter/change a category, you must provide the market with enough for …

Stars and scandals

By Mark Di Somma

I’m not a huge one for the ins and outs, behaviours and otherwise of the fashion world (preferring to leave such pursuits in the experienced hands of friends like Jack), but I did take some note of the recent John Galliano scandal because it highlights the risk that brands take when they associate themselves so closely with an individual who is a brand in their own right. It’s not always bad of course. Steve Jobs turned up for the iPad2 launch, and everyone took heart. The stock price even went up. And in fashion, most would agree I think that designers like Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfield have done wonders for the brands they are associated with. Galliano too up until this point. But how quickly, and dramatically, things can change. Almost every brand today it seems is just one YouTube clip away from a crisis. And when things go wrong in this kind of situation, there is fallout on three levels: the individual’s brand suffers; the employer’s brand suffers; and the halo effect that …

How do you value a crowd-based brand?

By Mark Di Somma

What is the value of global friendship and can you actually assign a price to it? Facebook’s own stats say that the site now has more than 500 million active users, and that 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day. That means Goldman Sachs’ implied valuation of $50 billion suggests every active user is worth around about $100. Is that a lot? I actually don’t think it matters. The much more interesting question is: $100 – to whom? Users are not paying money to talk to their friends, post their photos and catch up on what’s going on as they generate content on Facebook, but if Goldman Sachs is right, then that’s what their millions of activities will generate for someone else. So who’s anticipating the $100 of value, and just as importantly, how? Investors, yes. But based on the production of what? There have been any number of comparisons between Facebook and Google – but to me, they overlook a fundamental difference. Google does produce something: a very powerful search …

Refreshing the connections: a perspective on The Pepsi Refresh Project

By Mark Di Somma

It’s great to see Pepsi deciding to spend money over a year in communities instead of splashing the lot on the Super Bowl. It certainly makes sense at one level. Conscientious consumers are asking corporates more and more questions about where their money is being spent and how committed they are to the people who buy their goods. On that score, this is huge. And it certainly lays down the gauntlet in terms of challenging corporates to think about where they put their money. Top marks for that too. The ultimate Pepsi challenge. It’s a move that has huge feel-good. Let’s face it, what’s not to like? Pepsi’s given away more than $20 million in grants to causes that otherwise would struggle to find the money they need to make a difference. Touchdown in that regard. And there’s been incredible traffic online. So a huge participation win. A lot of people talking over an extended period of time. But there’s one other thing I think they still need to do for this to really work: …

Flogging a dead Playhorse

By Mark Di Somma

Brands retain value from their legacy providing they are still seen as relevant and interesting, providing they are still competitive and providing they retain goodwill. Or if people have had enough time to forget why they failed in the first place. In other words they can recover if they have enough momentum, or they can be reborn on the back of nostalgia, but once they’ve flatlined, and particularly if they have been in that state for some time, they can be very difficult to resuscitate. Take the case of the Playboy brand. It’s powerful, sure. And it does have significant heritage. It’s logo is recognisable anywhere and there is huge history there. But can it just continue to trade on the value it had? Doubtful. It is, as Adam Gordon rightfully points out, “a classic failure of industry foresight” and even though Gordon observes that “Brand is value stored up in the past to be reaped in the future”, I don’t share his apparent optimism about the brand. Playboy cannot realistically expect to carry on …

Refreshing your brand promise

By Mark Di Somma

Great products sell themselves. No they don’t. But equally, people don’t just buy brands because they’re brands either. Familiarity matters, but for the most part today’s customers are far too sophisticated to buy just anything with a nice or familiar name attached to it. Or rather to keep buying it without question. A brand by itself doesn’t guarantee you anything. Sometimes companies with brands that were once iconic forget that. They somehow believe that because the branding process can add margin, all brands must equal margin and presence must equal profit. Wrong. So wrong. Brands will only bring margin when everything else is right. Right itself seems pretty straightforward. Make a really interesting promise. Deliver on it in really interesting ways. Do that, and the circle is seamless. Get it wrong and the circle is vicious. When you don’t pay attention to the detail of your brand, there are consequences. The brand itself starts to breaks down. It degrades. To a name. And instead of a brand portfolio, all you’re really left with is a …