All posts tagged: differentiation

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 …

Getting real value from your CSR

By Mark Di Somma

This thought-provoking article from McKinsey looks at what really drives value in corporate responsibility. As the authors point out, CSR continues to influence how companies and brands go about their business: carbon footprint, ethical and greener supply chains, volunteer programmes and philanthropy are now all par for the course. We all know that not being involved in such investments can have a negative effect on consumer perceptions, but do the activities themselves add value and if so what are the best ways for companies to make the most of that potential? “Some investments, of course, produce immediate and quantifiable gains, such as those from recycling or from manufacturing processes that save energy. But often, social investments are expected to yield longer-term benefits as engaged consumers step up their purchases, a broader investor base develops, or new talent flocks to a company’s recruiters … In these more ambiguous cases, how is a manager to know whether stakeholders will indeed respond positively?” Great question. Personally I’m always suspiscious when someone tells me that there are long term …

Will they or won’t they?

By Mark Di Somma

So often it seems to me brand owners hope to bring about change rather than planning to bring about change. They see persuasion as an awareness issue rather than as a behavioural issue – often because they regard their product as the obvious choice that somehow, miraculously will spark a “road to Damascus” moment as soon as consumers encounter it. To that end, they pad out their media schedules with as much presence as their budgets can muster and throw huge amounts of energy and disarming levels of resource into whatever’s trending on social media. So I was very interested in an article on willpower in the NZ Listener recently that refers to key elements that persuade us to behave differently. It includes some great thinking from David Thomason and the planners at Draft FCB who, like more and more of us in the marketing sector, are looking to the behavioural sciences for clues on ways to shape brands and the behaviours that make brands gel for people. The article quotes from psychologist Robert Cialdini …

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 …

Cancelling the brand: what has Qantas really grounded?

By Mark Di Somma

The ramifications for the brand after Qantas’ decision to ground its entire fleet over the weekend are obvious. It’s a move that has no doubt put tens of thousands of people in a very bad mood and set the scenes in my view for an ongoing internal war that may well prove unrecoverable. In brand terms, Qantas has done something equally damaging. In looking to force a regulatory decision, it has handed its competitors the perfect bridge: actions that discredit trust; and a prompted opportunity for customers to try out the opposition. One of the most powerful incentives for change is doubt – that nagging, unrelenting feeling that somehow a brand is not what it used to be, or even worse that it cannot be taken at its word. The other incentive is access to another channel that is viable, credible and that offers an opportunity to vent emotion. Both incentives exist here. Meaning people now not only have a reason to walk, they have lots of gates to walk to. Domestically and internationally, competing …

Does efficiency jeopardise brand?

By Mark Di Somma

In the hunt for more streamlined businesses that are less resource intensive, how real is the risk that brands are actually putting people off dealing with them? When does an efficient process become so rationalised that it loses its humanity and therefore its appeal? On the face of it, brand and efficiency have similar objectives. They’re both about creating financial headroom – but of course they approach that goal from opposite directions. Efficiency is so often about what can be subtracted. Brand is all about what can be added, at least perceptually, that people will pay more for. The problem occurs when the experience is over-compromised in the interests of saving money: when the seats become too cramped; the aisles too narrow; the servings too small; the service too automated … Because it’s at that point, that delight leaves the building, and customers start looking elsewhere because they feel you’re being mean-spirited. There are, as I see it, two ways to address this: 1. Set very clear customer expectations. If you’re running a high volume, …

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 …

Finding an obsession

By Mark Di Somma

When you apply the concept of provenance to brands, it becomes a concept centred on systematically and competitively ‘localising’ what you’re about rather than diversifying to try and meet the generalised needs of the wider world. So it’s about having a narrowcast brand: one focused to the point of obsession on a specific area of passion. Provenance is also about those other valuable ideas that the word in its original meaning conjures: focus; love; purity of thinking; authenticity; deep knowledge. That obsession can then be marbled through every aspect of the brand: language; environment; innovation; strategy … People may worry that such devotion to a single idea will stifle adaptability, but my experience is that brands that see the world through the lens of an idea they subscribe to passionately are also able to find latitude and opportunity within that idea whilst growing a strong and devoted following. Far from being restrictive, being obsessive provides a framework for creative approaches. The way I see it, brands increasingly have three powerful emotive strategies going forward: they …

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

By Mark Di Somma

Almost every brand I work with has a community policy, an environmental policy, a sustainability policy … as they should. And everyone seems to acknowledge that the policy or policies they have form an important part of their reputation and their stakeholder relations … as they should. And yet precious few brands have actively connected those social responsibility activities with their brand.

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 …