All posts tagged: differentiation

Credentials as comfort food

By Mark Di Somma

How does the fact that I’m travelling on the world’s biggest airline change my travelling experience? Or the world’s biggest cruise liner? How does the fact that I’m working with the world’s biggest professional services firm change what I get from the lawyer, accountant, engineer etc assigned to me? What more do I get from buying a bottle from the world’s biggest winemaker? Or a toy from the world’s biggest department store? It makes no difference. And yet brands love to emphasise their size or the number of countries they operate in or the projects that they’ve been involved in. They think it provides reassurance. They think it gives them a storyline. It doesn’t. It gives them big numbers but in most cases, it says nothing at all. Credentials in my view are much over-used and much over-rated. They don’t add to the excitement that consumers feel. And, given the complexity of most corporate structures, it could be argued that they often don’t ameliorate the risk of dealing with many entities. Credentials might feel important …

Highs and lows: the new value equation in the social economy?

By Mark Di Somma

The dynamics of customer service are shifting. Not so long enough, the ultimate goal was to deliver customers “high tech, high touch” – a highly digital experience that was nevertheless comforting and personalised. Increasingly that framework is becoming a paradox I believe as brands sort new economic models for dealing with cross-channel customers. The current trend of sift online, buy offline is unsustainable in so many circumstances. High tech is jeopardising the economics of high touch. It encourages customers to price hunt, and then to bargain down prices in a physical environment using what they’ve found online as a cost index. The implied “plus” between high tech and high touch doesn’t work. So I think we’re going to increasingly see it change to “or”. And with that shift will come more delineated choices for consumers. Brands will seek to attract customers by experience or by engagement. In fact, the separation of those two thoughts – engagement (focused on cost conscious availability) and experience (focused on one-on-one immediacy) is interesting because it suggests that rather than …

Always be branding

Always be branding

By Mark Di Somma

Somehow, it just doesn’t feel right. In fact, to some it feels tantamount to suicidal – spending money on your brand at the very point in time when the company feels like it can least afford to invest in “intangibles”. To all those people who’ve thrown that argument at me over the years, you’re right. Well, partly. At the “wrong” time, it absolutely doesn’t feel right. But that’s the thing about counter-cyclical decisions. They’re out of sync with the spirit of the times – or more particularly, they’re not aligned with your spirit at the time. And, actually, if you’re honest, the feeling that you have about the futility of branding in bad times is probably the same feeling you have when things are going well. Except then it feels like you don’t need to spend money on your brand. Whenever anyone asks me, “When’s the right time to spend money on your branding?”, I respond with, “When’s the right time to be competitive?”. I’m not being a smart-ass. There’s never a wrong time. So …

This is your captain speaking …

By Mark Di Somma

Just over six years ago, I wrote a post about the futility of pilot announcements. In it, I asked: “Why do pilots always insist on giving us details of the flight plan and our intended altitude? Because, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care how high we’re flying or the course we’re taking – just as long as we get there. I just need to know they’re present and correct, and in an appropriate state of body and mind to do their job. And besides I have no way of knowing whether it really is 27,000 feet or not, so what’s the point in telling me? …” Every brand would like to tell their audience more about what they do. They like to think that explaining in detail how hard they work and how much they know quantifies the value they add. But what it really amounts to is the brand having a “conversation” with its customers on terms it feels comfortable with. It’s smalltalk, disguised as information. The pilots probably aren’t iinterested. They …

Know thy enemy

By Mark Di Somma

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus. Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to. An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so. Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand …

Great brands unearth

By Mark Di Somma

In his recent post on imputing, Tom Asacker used a single word that for me clinched the mystery and the power of great marketing, and explained why so much money is spent on communication that just inspires a change of channel. That word: unearth. Unearthing is about discovering. It’s about seeing for the first time something that has been hidden for a very long time. It’s about revelation. It’s about something that inspires. Great brands release emotions that people are not asked to feel most of the time. They uncover the irrational drivers that impel busy, pressed, distracted human beings to stop doing nothing or something else and instead make the time to take an action. Because that action is worth it to them. And it’s worth that time because it feels worth that amount of time. Most brands don’t work that hard to win our time. They are unsurprising, uninspiring, unprovoking. They unearth nothing. On the contrary, they monotonously state the obvious. They go over and over and over the same old ground. And …

The power of being purposeful

The power of being purposeful

By Mark Di Somma

In an age where products are increasingly similar and of equal quality, the opportunities to compete just on the basis of what you sell are disappearing. In fact, I’d go further than that and say, they’re as good as gone. Even if you know that your product has some sort of technical advantage over that of a rival, the chances of you continuing to hold that advantage or of that advantage being of such significance that consumers actually care are as good as nil.

Sense and Serotonin

By Mark Di Somma

Recently in response to a post by David Meerman Scott about the need to apply left and right brain thinking to content creation, I suggested in the comments that brands should apply that same approach to most aspects of marketing. As I pointed out at the time, blending right and left brain signals is critical to how brands engage with prospects and buyers because it ensures that people remain fascinated and justified as they make their way through the sales funnel. Logic and magic. I think most of us accept that consumers generally buy emotively and explain logically, so the ability to provide them with experiences that they enjoy and talk about, and at the same time to arm them with reasons that help them explain, to themselves and to others, what they are doing is critical. It’s easy and tempting though to treat each hemisphere as separate: to apportion logical arguments for those who think that way or for times when they are needing to rationalise; and to ramp up the emotions and associatives …

Participation versus differentiation

By Mark Di Somma

Right now, across the world, hundreds of different people are opening an office, a restaurant, a social media company … They’ve sunk everything they have into it. They’ve thrown their life at it. It’s what they’ve always wanted to do, and every one of them and the people who has supported them hopes and believes they’ll succeed. Most won’t. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is planning a business that will one day be bigger than every other brand in their sector. The next shipping magnate woke up somewhere in the world today, without a ship to their name. The property magnate of the future is eating lunch in a schoolyard somewhere. Tomorrow’s Madonna has a clothesbrush, a mirror and perhaps an i-Pod … The contrast couldn’t be greater, and yet curiously, the two groups are interdependent. Because in order for someone to stand out in a market, the vast majority must fail to do so. If every café that opened stayed open, the hospitality sector would collapse because no-one could succeed, no-one could …

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 …