All posts tagged: branding

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 …

The Balanced Brand: some preliminary thinking

By Mark Di Somma

What is it with me and earthquakes? Last Christmas, I was in Christchurch for the Boxing Day shake. This year, I was there on Friday, and it happened again. They are scary – and it’s interesting how different people are scared about different aspects. For most, the fear of death and injury is prevalent as you’d expect – but almost as distressing for others are the noise, the shaking itself and of course the damage that brings silt to the surface, breaks possessions and puts everyone on edge. To all those in Christchurch, including of course my own immediate and extended family, my prayers and thoughts are with you. We all live with fears I guess, and they come to the surface at different times. That’s as true for business as it is in our personal lives. Today’s obsession with growth has it seems to me often overshadowed the more important strategic question of what do we want our organisations and our brands to grow into – how will they evolve, and how will the …

Seen and not herd

By Mark Di Somma

What’s the real cost of the sales seasons on the high street?  That’s the question posed and answered by Laurence Green in this well-considered article in The Telegraph. Green quickly hones in on what he sees as two of the biggest enemies of effective branding today: the impulse to discount; and the compulsion to appeal to everyone that manifests itself in communications that stand out from no-one. What appear at first to be two completely different issues quickly condense into a single problem. According to Green, discounting comes at a cost that extends far beyond the lost margin. Their effect, he says, is to slowly unstitch everything that the company has been doing to add value in the minds of consumers across the rest of the year. Indeed Green goes so far as to suggest that “resistance to discounting pressure is one of the hallmarks of a strong brand” and backs up that claim by referring to an address by Mark Ritson of MIT Sloan in which the Associate Professor compared The Gap and Abercrombie …

Two leaders kissing. A killer app or a sex tape?

By Mark Di Somma

I always grin when people do that whole “any publicity is good publicity” thing. Because it’s simply not true. That observation it seems to me is predicated on a belief that awareness is the doyen of marketing, whereas I would argue that, in most cases, perception overwrites straight recall in terms of bankability. The temptation, if you follow the former line of thinking, is to assume that successful marketing is just about gaining attention. It’s an attitude that the advertising industry and the online world has done much to encourage. Gain attention and the business will follow. But a sex tape will get you plenty of eyeballs. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the foundations of a durable commercial model. Notoriety does work if your brand is built on a ‘bad boy’ reputation. As I’ve noted before, if you’re Gordon Ramsay, for example, or the Sex Pistols, then outrageous behaviours are both scandalous and intriguing. In these circumstances, people love to be shocked. Antics are in fact part of what people expect and buy …

Turning your brand into the authority

By Mark Di Somma

In this article in Business Week, Howard Schultz talks about how the mighty Starbucks brand lost its way – mistaking aroma rather than coffee for the core of its business and embraking on a strategy that saw it shift seriously off-course. The problem, as Schultz explains, is that by the time the company realised that they had diluted their brand position, breakfast sandwiches had become 3 percent of the company’s total revenue. Getting back on track was a big call. He did it anyway. We talk a lot these days about thought leadership – but really, I see that as a component of a bigger objective: market authority. You may or may not want to be the biggest in a sector, but the article says there are three actions that you need to take if you have lost your mojo and, like Starbucks, are looking to re-establish brand authority. I actually picked up five: The first decision is obvious – decide what you want to be the authority in as a brand, and keep the …

Brands only work locally

By Mark Di Somma

Really enjoyed this piece by Pankaj Ghemawat on the myths surrounding global brands. His point that only 16% of the top 10,000 brands on the Milward Brown database are recognised in more than one country, and only 3% are recognised in more than seven is a reminder that the world is not as open as many of us would like to think. Indeed Professor Ghemawat points to what happened to Coke as a sure sign that Ted Levitt’s principle of increasingly homogenous markets was incorrect. After steadily pursuing a process centred on standardisation throughout the 1990s, Coke has since shifted almost 180 degrees. Today, the company offers a diversified product set, market-specific price points, localised production and distribution and clear distinctons between the approach it takes in the States and internationally. And those same principles of distinction and specification that now influence a mass market brand like Coke are extending to other brands looking to build share in markets away from home. Ghemawat’s advice? Focus on the cultural, administrative, geographic and economic differences between markets …

What’s a brand strategist?

By Mark Di Somma

There are two answers. You can be exactly what the words describe. The person who decides what the branding is, what it represents, how it will work and how it will be communicated. It’s a key part of planning effective and inspiring communications. Or you can develop strategies for brands. You can be a person who works to make brands more valuable, distinctive, profitable and utterly aligned with the culture, the systems, and the distribution channels that must deliver what has been promised. That’s much more about the business. It focuses on making sure companies are utterly competitive through their brands. Each description involves very different interests, priorities, conversations … even clients. Just like in any role, a simple change in the words doesn’t just alter the meaning. It can actually shift the mandate. What do you do?

Measure for measure

By Mark Di Somma

Economist Brian Easton’s statement – “don’t talk about the intangibles when there is nothing else” – is a timely reminder to all of us in the ‘fuzzy’ areas of business that if there is no demonstrable bottom-line return for all the reputation enhancement, profile building, credibility, authenticity, loyalty and goodwill that has supposedly been generated by or at a particular event or activity, then it essentially carries no value. It may not be worthless, but the cost that has been incurred has subsequently made no tangible economic contribution. Therefore there is no actual return on the investment. In that context, what brands are often getting, and paying for, is an impression – or at the very most, a contribution – towards an abstract sense of progress. A best guess. That’s as true for those pouring money into the Rugby World Cup (Easton’s specific gripe) as it is for social media or advertising. If you’re putting money in and you can’t or won’t measure what you’re getting back on your bottom line over the medium and …

Getting your social approach right: protecting your brand from critics

By Mark Di Somma

A number of people have asked me this week about how they should prepare their brand for attacks from activist groups who criticise them in the media. I’ll leave the mechanics of crisis management to the legal and PR people who specialise at it – but here are some thoughts on simple things you can do as a brand to make sure you are as ready as you can be. 1. Don’t view advocates for another opinion or worldview as enemies. You may not like what they say, or the manner in which they say it, but, unless they are physically attacking your business, essentially they are competitors (and on occasions even potential allies) – and the reason why they are more like competitors is that they have the potential to take attention, influence and market share away from your brand. So treat them like you would any other competitor: get to know them, get to know what they believe in and the opinions they compete against you on. Draw up a watch list. Keep …