All posts tagged: leadership

Could the future of brand rivalry lie in being asymmetrical?

By Mark Di Somma

Three seemingly unrelated articles got me thinking today about the future of brand competitiveness in a world where the competitors are increasingly globally scaled. Conventional knowledge suggests that brands square off in the arena of public awareness. Each party assembles its awareness and loyalty generators and then launches a charm offensive to consumers offering them multiple reasons and multiple channels to choose them over others. In the fight between big and big, that’s a relatively straightforward competition. But how do you take on the biggest brands in the world if you are a much smaller marketing force or if you’re looking for an alternative strategy? Perhaps you do so by not taking them on directly. And perhaps you don’t take them on alone. The thought for this came from an article by Stan McChrystal (thanks Alex) on the lessons he learnt in Iraq: that a massive and powerful adversary can be seriously affected by a much, much smaller force that leverages its network and moves quickly to find points of vulnerability. The relevance of McChrystal’s …

Fighting the "fadar" …

By Mark Di Somma

We now have greater access to ideas than ever before, but the ideas themselves, it seems to me, have a much shorter half-life. New thinking, new people, new everything are presented to us at a dizzying pace – in editorial, feeds, slide decks, talks, videos, articles, almost everywhere one cares to look. In an age of instant celebrity and content marketing, thoughts and variations of thoughts are being championed from every social soapbox. Ideas have become fashion – because they are marketed to us as fashions. And like fashion, most will barely outlive the press release that trumpeted them. A proliferation of lists across the media adds to the sense of volatility. The “fadar” is how I describe the promulgation of ideas fighting for our collective and individual attention across every aspect of the cultural landscape. Some will shine. Many won’t get the chance. Others will bedazzle on first view only to burn out well before they hit paydirt … (Ironically, as an idea in its own right, the fadar is of course subject to …

Evolution or transformation? 17 key brand factors

By Mark Di Somma

No business these days can just sit pretty. But the extent and nature of changes confuses many. Brands evolve. Or die. But they must also retain something of what consumers know. Or they fade. So which is more important? And how should a brand act, when? I get asked about this a lot. So here are my takes on what must stay and what can go (sometimes): Keep: 1. Your good name (in every sense) – it’s the thing people know you by. Unless of course you need to re-engineer your reputation or your old name doesn’t fit what you do anymore. 2. Your purpose – the ways you intend to change the world should remain an inspiring constant for staff and customers (providing it’s inspiring to start with, of course) 3. Your values – only change them if you’re going to make them more challenging 4. Your promises – trust is the basis for any brand’s success. Without that, you’re nothing. 5. Your principles – in today’s transparent markets, transgressions will be discovered. It’s …

Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.

By Mark Di Somma

People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, particularly if their viewpoints compromise the personality of the brand itself. Hands up if you’ve ever been to this meeting: “I like orange.” Or “Don’t make it orange.” “Use short words.” Or “People don’t read.” “We need to be on TV.” And/or “We need to export.” Brands thrive when they are based on meaning, trust, relevance and delight – but of course they must deliver that meaning, trust, relevance and delight to the buyer, not the seller. Otherwise they risk narcissism. Every brand must pursue a life of its own – not affirm the life of a manager. And to me, that integral sense of being an asset in its own right hangs on ten things. A brand must have: …

Don’t plan to be a start-up. Plan to be an upstart.

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing. “Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more established in order to prove oneself. Launching an upstart on the other hand is all about putting a business in play that really challenges what everyone else has accepted as the rules. That’s because a start-up focuses on getting a product or an idea to market, whereas an upstart focuses on an “enemy” (be it an attitude or a standardised approach) and looks to a product or service to change that. Without a business model trained on defying and disrupting the status quo, you are destined to be another player trying to get a footing in another overplayed market. A feature, no matter how beneficial, is not a disruption. If all that stands between you and your competitors is a …

Brands as operating systems

By Mark Di Somma

In this post, Nigel Hollis explores a fundamental misalignment. Brand owners tend to view customer experiences in isolation, by channel, whereas customers of course view and grade their experiences cumulatively. Tom Asacker captures why customers think this way. A brand, he says, is “one, interdependent system of behavior”. The problem is that in too many organisations the “system” has many masters and each wants independent control of their domain. CMOs, who might be expected to have responsibility for the overall experience as of right, do not. That’s because large chunks of the interface with customers, and the factors that influence that interface, remain for the most part outside of their control. They do not fit neatly into the “normal” org chart definition of what constitutes marketing. And when multi-lateral ownership makes contact with a unilateral expectation, just as at Penn Station, the scene is set for disappointment. As a result, there is significant potential for the system to jeopardise itself at any time, at any weak point – through bad training, bad coding, bad quality, …

The future myth

By Mark Di Somma

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture. Banking on it is simply speculation. To evolve successfully, brands must grow out of what they have into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future. That is what they have control of. That is what they are responsible for. The customers they take with them into the future. The actions they drive in the future. The products they will make. The culture they build for the future. All strategists and decision makers can and should read out of the macro-trends, and even the supposedly “specific” future trends for that matter, are the broad indicators of the change that’s coming and perhaps a sense of where it might be coming …

The global challenge of doing business openly

By Mark Di Somma

Congratulations to All Good Organics, the first New Zealand company to make the prestigious Ethisphere Institute’s World’s Most Ethical (WME) companies list. All Good may be tiny but this ranking puts them in some great company – one of just 145 companies, chosen from more than 5000 entries. Judge for yourself. In the light of this win, interesting to read Raz Godelnik’s take on the difference that CSR actually makes for companies in this post on TriplePundit: A MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG survey showed 40% of executives polled believed the greatest benefit to an organisation in addressing sustainability was “improved brand reputation”. Godelnik goes on to cite evidence that CSR initiatives help companies retain stock value when facing corporate governance scandals and product recalls, and that firms viewed as having weak CSR suffered stock declines twice the size of firms viewed as having strong CSR after riots surrounding 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. While consumers might not be willing to pay higher prices for greener products, he says, they will more likely purchase …

Can you innovate too quickly?

By Mark Di Somma

What is the right pace for a brand to transform in an iterative economy? So often we’re told that success will stem from pushing the innovation accelerator flat to the floor. As proof, we hear about those companies that failed to innovate or didn’t respond quickly enough – and were buried. But is that true? Is innovation just about turnover, or is it more complicated than that? Where should brands take their cues – from their own development programmes, from their competitors, from the media, from their own marketing demands? Where do you look for prompts when you have new work in the wings? There’s a theory for this (of course) – diffusion of innovation. It revolves around two key aspects: an adoption process that generates critical mass (a.k.a the bell curve); and Professor Everett Rogers’ five influential factors concerning take-up: Relative advantage – how much better the innovation is than its predecessor Compatibility – how easily the innovation can be assimilated into everyday life Complexity – how easy or difficult the innovation is to …

Why demographics matter

Why do demographics matter?

By Mark Di Somma

A study by Catalina Marketing appears to cast significant doubt over a veritable pillar of media marketing. Demographic targeting, it seems, often falls wide of the mark. Catalina researchers looked at 10 brands targeted at households headed by women ages 25 to 54. They found that, on average, just 15 percent of the ads playing in those households reach the people that account for 80 percent of sales.