All posts tagged: branding

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 …

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 …

A Virtual Coffee with Tom Asacker

Brands and Beliefs: A (Short) Virtual Coffee™ with Tom Asacker

By Mark Di Somma

I was first introduced to Tom a number of years ago when he and I were on the same contributor panel and I’ve always been taken by four qualities that come out time and again in his work: his call-it-the-way-it-is approach; his extraordinary ability to condense whole systems to meme-length summaries; his relentless search for new form; and above all his humanity and clarity. Tom’s fifth book, The Business of Belief is about stories, dots and history (you’ll see why below). It did what I knew Tom would do: took a space that seemed finite and broadened the consideration-set to include ideas and insights that were very revealing. Reading it prompted me to seek a deeper understanding of what’s playing on Tom’s mind about beliefs and brands. Here’s some of the highpoints from our conversation: 1. Wishes drive beliefs Tom: The word “belief” comes from the Middle English “lief,” which means to wish. Belief is simply a working assumption about something or someone … driven by what we would wish something to be. 2. People …

Telling the short (brand) story

By Mark Di Somma

Everyone has a story to tell. Not everyone feels they have the time to listen. Which is why brands need to become adept at the short story form. Increasingly, the messages that pass between brands and their customers will need to be articulated in 140 characters, 6 seconds, a shot, an update … But brevity is not the full answer – and those who believe they can communicate exclusively in such formats will risk selling themselves short. To master short form storytelling, marketers will need to know the long form version of their brand story better than ever. (You can’t edit what you don’t have.) And they will need to judge duration and relevance with greater accuracy. The ability to distil and disseminate bursts of interest, and to mix those short forms with longer, deeper, richer forms of expression, will decide who flourishes and who withers. Acknowledgements Image of “Clock” taken by Earls37a, sourced from Flickr

How would you like your brand story to end?

By Mark Di Somma

Bill Taylor has said that if your customers can live without you, eventually they will. Conversely, I’m fascinated by how so many industries will stick to business-as-usual for as long as they can before they have to change. In each case, the rules of supply and demand will at some point over-ride the sentiment of legacy. The more people who do what you do, the more easily you can be replaced, and the less noticed your absence will remain. Everyone nods at this point. But … That realisation actually spurs a fundamental question that businesses and brands should be asking themselves. And it’s a very uncomfortable question to confront. How would you like your brand to come to an end? To reference TS Eliot, with a bang or a whimper? Your answer will drive your strategy. Or rather it will drive the mindset behind your strategy. You can ride your current train of thought all the way to silence – do what you do for as long as you can until the margins become unbearable …

Brands in a no-attention economy

By Mark Di Somma

I’ve said for some time that brands seem to be taking more and more of their prompts from the fashion industry – in how they act and how they think. Not surprising, given that the upgrade economy now demands that brands refresh and update their products with increasing frequency. Indeed as Matt Baxter-Reynolds points out in this article on the likelihood of an Apple iWatch, “over the past dozen or so years Apple behaves more Louis Vuitton and Prada than Microsoft or Samsung.” That being the case, it’s interesting to look at fashion journalist Suzy Menkes’ recent observations on the pace at which the fashion industry itself is now forced to work, and to ask whether we can expect the same behaviours across the wider brand spectrum. Once, says Menkes, a handful of fashion houses produced four seasonal collections. But today, with thousands of designers in the marketplace, promotional shows in Asia, Dubai and Brazil and between-season showings, the industry has 138 fashion weeks worldwide, and schedules that pack in up to 264 shows over five days. …

Not for what? Why the NGO sector needs to rethink its branding

By Mark Di Somma

No sector in its right mind should define itself by what it’s not. So why do non-government organisations (NGOs) and not-for-profits (NFPs) do exactly that: define themselves so proudly by what doesn’t get done rather than what they do? No is not a brand. Car manufacturers aren’t in the non-bike business. Food manufacturers aren’t in the non-hunger business. Phone companies are not in the anti-isolation business. So, excuse the pun, but what gives? Both the NGO and NFP labels, it strikes me, are useless ways of positioning those intend on delivering on a strong altruistic intention. First of all because the terms themselves carry no meaning. (Not being part of government doesn’t actually make anyone part of anything.) Secondly, because to be perfectly frank, every organisation is interested in making money – it’s just what they do with it that differs. And thirdly, and most importantly, because the NFP/NGO label doesn’t talk about the one thing that really motivates those who are being asked to support and donate: the difference that their support actually makes. …

When brands attack: 12 reasons to confront a competitor

By Mark Di Somma

As in most things in life, there’s a time to hold your ground when you’re a brand, a time to step back and reassess, and there are times when you should look to front-foot your position. Those calls should be based on pragmatism not impulse, because the resources required to up your game can be considerable and the consequences of failure can be significant. So when should a brand take on a competitor, directly or indirectly, and how should they behave when they do so? Let’s start with the circumstances in which an attack makes sense. 1. It’s the only way to expand your market share – if you have carefully thought through growth plans but are competing in a market with little or no organic growth, the only way to expand your presence is to take it off someone else. Be aware though that in many static markets, fluctuations in market share are small – so a concerted effort to grasp a bigger piece of the pie is likely to be costly, drawn out …

The speed of criticism

By Mark Di Somma

1. No scandal is as bad (or as good) as you think it is. 2. Criticism travels faster than attention. In this digital age, it’s as fast as light. 3. Scandal travels even faster than criticism. 4. Fallout makes the best news. It balloons scandal into incident. 5. If you handle anything perishable, you must be response-ready. If you’re not response-ready, you won’t catch up. 6. If your key people are off-camera, you’re off-brand. Acknowledgements Photo of “High Speed Lights” taken by Liam Swinney, sourced from Flickr

What makes brand advertising iconic?

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma Many of us who started in advertising did so I imagine because we saw an ad or a series of commercials that made us dream of creating something that good, something that a whole culture talked about. Recently, the people at Hubspot reached back, took five of the great campaigns and had them reimagined for today. It was an intriguing exercise. But while the creatives seemed to focus for the most part on how much the channels had changed in the time since the campaigns were forged and the implications of that for execution and campaign distribution, I thought it would be interesting to look at what some of these iconic ad campaigns did that made it possible for them to have such a deep cultural impact in the first place. What’s clear is that iconic status is not about the nobility of the product. As CNBC observed, AdAge refers to its selection of the top advertising campaigns of the 20th century as including: “two air polluters, nutritionless sugar water, one …