All posts tagged: branding

The opportunity of dull

By Mark Di Somma

There are days when Alex really makes me laugh. I grinned merrily at her observation recently that if you really want to make significant changes as a brand, you should go all out and look for something … dull. That’s right, find something uneventful, even pedestrian – and poke it for opportunities. And the reasons, on reflection, are simple. Chances are people do whatever it is often. So it comes with scale and frequency. And secondly, if it’s that tedious, frankly the only way is up. High energy, exciting activities already have high EQ by their very nature. And they attract the most interest from brands. So the chances of doing anything breakthrough are so much harder. Dull stuff is out of the limelight. It’s dull and it stays dull for most people until someone does something to change that. So it’s actually a lot less difficult to make the boring better: to take something that people don’t want to do or don’t enjoy doing, and to inject new elements and ideas that surprise and …

Time to rethink the business model of some NGO brands?

By Mark Di Somma

Brands like Toms with their “one for one” shoes programme have proven that companies can be both profitable and philanthropic. So why do so many NGO brands stick with a funding model that relies on, well, charity? Peter Salmon, MD at social innovation company NextPlays, certainly has his doubts about models based on grants and donations as opposed to “financed” business practices. Here are some of his thoughts on why “cause” brands need to stop begging for money and start putting up business cases for financing social change. The current models of financing social organisations are through philanthropic grants, equity investment, or conventional debt financing, he says, but the dominance of foundation and philanthropic grants creates an ineffectual social innovation sector that delivers poorer outcomes. 1. Both financing and grant approaches require well researched documentation but a grant application requires a proposal, whereas financing requires a business plan. These may seem like subtle differences, but one is far more open to innovation than the other. Grant applications are often judged to fit within already pre-determined …

Don’t be disappointed: why price underwrites the brand experience

By Mark Di Somma

What’s the difference between a budget airline and a pig? Pigs fly more often – and on time. Harsh perhaps, but it’s a reminder that in a market, there is always a price to pay, and the price is not just about money down. Some people will be happy with budget. It’s worth a cancelled flight or two for the savings they make. For others, that’s far too high a price to pay for a few dollars saved. Years ago, I was in a workshop where three people in the group were asked to make the business case for luxury over economy. The team made their case in a pointed and dramatic way. First, they invited the wider group into a huge open sunny space, where sofas were laid out. Each person was escorted to a sofa and provided with bubbles and canapes. There was a sign on the wall that read $3000. Then, we were invited into a second room. This room was smaller, and instead of couches there were seats. Each person was …

Intersections

By Mark Di Somma

At dinner the other night, the conversation turned to carpet ads. Why, someone asked, do retailers keep advertising carpet ads when most people only buy carpet once every 7 – 10 years? Because, they don’t all buy them at once, I reminded them. A brief explanation of interruption theory followed. Because so many retailers have neither the inclination or the resources to build and sustain relationships with their diverse customer bases, they basically rely on a marketing approach that pivots on informed chance. Reach and frequency advertising models depend on reaching a profiled consumer at a specific moment when that consumer might have an interest and a need for the product. It’s a scatter-gun approach (despite what the media planners might tell us) that relies on a machine-gun barrage of noise and repetition. Most of the time it has the majority reaching for the remote control to turn off the noise because whatever’s being talked about is “N/A” to their needs right now. But brands keep beaming ads in the hope that one day customer …

The vital (and ironical) difference between brand and identity

By Mark Di Somma

Are there such things as brands in much of the Government sector? I don’t think there are. That’s a good thing. And here’s why. I believe brands fundamentally require a competitive environment in which to actually work. I’m sure there’s an economic model that explains why – I don’t know it. But the reason why and when I believe brands work best has to do with the value I think they are intended to create: to drive preference; to encourage loyalty; to lift margin; to underpin and align a competitive and commercial business model with the people who believe in and buy from that organisation. Brands have to work to help consumers to make choices. They need to stimulate recognition, preference and loyalty based on interaction and clear senses of expectation and delivery. Therefore you need to have both choice and competition available. There are of course parts of the public and local government sector that are contestable – and there the dynamics of brand work well. Equally in the NGO sector, one of the …

Volume is nothing like intensity

By Mark Di Somma

Speculation in recent days about what a “fan” is worth to a business is a timely reminder to separate volume from intensity. Many commentators in the social universe it seems to me remain beguiled by quantity. The more liked you are, they seem to think, the more valuable you are potentially. Not so, of course. It costs nothing to say “like”. And in many cases I would venture to add, it means nothing and adds nothing. Intensity though is quite a different metric – because it speaks to commitment and the bottom-line results of that commitment rather than just impressions. Intense fans buy the brands they feel strongly about. Money changes hands. Intensity also defies volume. If you have customers who feel intensely committed to your brand, then you can have a much smaller, much less impressive number of them. Apple doesn’t have the biggest market share in a lot of the sectors it participates in, but it has perhaps the world’s most intense fans. And if a good percentage of those committed people only …

Nudging: making the most of the power of suggestion

By Mark Di Somma

We’re much more susceptible to the power of suggestion than many of us might like to think – at least that was my take-out from more reading from Time: this time on how brands use buying suggestions to entice us to buy more than we might otherwise. The article quotes John T. Gourville, a Harvard Business School professor of marketing who specialises in studying pricing strategies. Consumers, he says, tend to follow the suggestions listed in brochures or store aisles, so people tend to buy the amount, or buy in increments, that are advertised. If they see five for $5 or 10 for $5, they buy five or ten, regardless of the fact that they normally buy three. And that, as the article points out, is the key strategy here: to get consumers buying more than they would if there was no sale. It seems we respond positively too to the suggestion of limitation – imposing a limit of two per customer or six per customer incentivises people to buy right up to that limit. …

Are your analytics cheating on you?

By Mark Di Somma

Numbers matter, but different numbers matter differently. To me, one of the great confusions is extent and value: Extent – how far your brand reaches. Value – how much your brand is worth (both literally in the minds of the market and in terms of margin in the minds of consumers). The temptation is to assume that the brands with the greatest reach must (ultimately) be worth the greatest amount of money and therefore have the greatest value. But to my mind that’s an assumption too far, because of course extent does not monetise or convert to sales consistently, and the value that can therefore be placed on that extent varies greatly. Does a brand with more likes make more profit than a competitor that doesn’t have as many? Sometimes. Perhaps. I guess. And what’s the critical gap? At what point does extent start to bite? Don’t know. I’ve seen lots of assertions about the value of reach, but few about the cumulative bottom line effects for most brands with a social media presence. I’m …

Not worth the paper it’s written on?

By Mark Di Somma

What do you do with a toxic brand? If you’re News Corp it appears, you opt for euthanasia, perhaps in the hope that the sheer ‘shock’ of stopping a 168 year old institution dead in its tracks will be enough to divert the rest of the media from your crown jewel assets and side-track regulators and other scrutinisers into believing you’re done enough to warrant completing other lucrative deals. Consumers can be remarkably forgiving, especially with brands that forge a ‘bad-boy’ reputation. But, as in the case of News of the World, there comes a point where they over-step the mark and brands pass through a thin veil from scandalous to unacceptable. The paper seems to have gone there, in the public’s mind, with its actions over Milly Dowler. Then what should they do? The problem with dramatically wiping the brand from the face of the Earth by way of a response is that you bury the problem, and are seen to do so – which doesn’t address or resolve the deeper and more troubling …

In your face

By Mark Di Somma

I think you can read a lot of things into Facebook’s decision to team up with Skype. It certainly aligns with my “war of the worlds” theory in some ways. But what interests me is that, regardless of the technical pros and cons, it does actually make sense from a brand point of view. (I’m still far from convinced that Skype constitutes a sustainably bankable business, but that’s another argument.) Facebook’s brand is all about people connecting. The introduction of Skype simply channels that sentiment into a different technology. Looking for new partners in an increasingly scaled and bitter war, they have literally searched as far as their own name. Who else is in the business of ‘face’ that’s big enough to feel like a meaningful ally? And it’s a simple reminder to all of us that sometimes the best diversification strategies are staring us straight in the … Quite. Now all it has to do is work. No pressure.