Blinkpoints
Paul Marsden’s piece on “Thinking Fast and Slow” (thanks Hilton Barbour) raised some great marketing implications from Daniel Kahneman’s work that are well worth reading.
All posts tagged: marketing
Building a better business case for brand internally with CFO’s
It’s an old bias but a telling one. Finance people accuse marketers of only spending money. Marketers accuse finance teams of only counting it. It’s another re-run of the analytical versus emotive debate yet it has the potential to carry deep bias into decision-making. As Brad VanAuken observed in this article, “I have found that many scientists, engineers and finance and operations professionals view marketing as a soft skill that lacks the rigor of other disciplines and that it deserves less attention and investment.”
Brands and the power of joy
From a marketer’s point of view, numbers don’t drive recessions. They may start them. They may justify them. But they don’t actually make them happen. What drives recession in a consumer economy is very much the same thing that drives boom: emotion. When enough people believe in it, it will happen – and that’s because there will be enough people acting in a recessive way for the mindset to become embedded, and for the behaviours to seem logical, sensible, responsible, unavoidable.
A simple guide to being an interesting brand
I’m intrigued by the number of people who insist they don’t believe in marketing, that no-one takes any notice of it and that they don’t have time to engage with brands. Until … they have something they want to tell the world. Then, suddenly, marketing – specifically their marketing – is interesting, exciting and something they know will work once they reach people. “Everyone will want to hear.”
What’s the difference between a lovemark and a trustmark?
This article in Harvard Health Blog in many ways mirrors why consumers take comfort in choosing branded products generally. A brand name means they know what to ask for. They believe in the quality that they associate with the brand. The distribution system believes in the brand.
What’s your brand advocacy strategy?
Every brand wants advocates. Little wonder. According to Janessa Mangone, people who actively promote your brand can be 50% more influential than the average customer in helping you secure new sales. So perhaps attracting them is something best not left to chance. As we head into the busy Christmas season, here’s some simple but timely reminders on how to put some wow! in your WOM. 7 ways to motivate your advocates Give them something to talk about – advocates love to share. Release news, ideas, tips, FAQs, case studies, video and reviews that the people who love your brand can enthusiastically share with others. Use email marketing to give them ‘scoops’ that are not released in the general media, and watch your traffic. It’s a simple way to monitor the amplifying effect of your advocates. While companies are increasingly looking at content marketing to bring new people to their brand, it’s easy to overlook the need to keep your current community involved and excited. A comprehensive piece here by Joe Pulizzi on how to attract …
Brand truth: fascinating insights into what holds true for consumers
We don’t always mean what we say in social situations – nor, it appears, in research. That seems to be the key take-out from recent research (delicious irony!) by Chip Walker and the Y&R research team. In their recently released study, Secrets and Lies, (thanks Hilton for the reference and for the introduction to Chip) the team concludes that consumers’ conscious motivations differ markedly from their true deep drivers. In fact, they’re often the opposite of what they say. Those conscious-unconscious biases are also reflected in the brands that people say they like versus those they actually like. Consider this: “The top 10 conscious brands are Amazon, Google, Apple, Target, Whole Foods, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Facebook, AT&T and Prius. That contrasts with the order of the top 10 brands consumers favor unconsciously: Target, Amazon, Facebook, Whole Foods, National Enquirer, Exxon, McDonald’s, Apple, Starbucks and AT&T.” While it’s important to recognise that, for the purposes of the study, people were asked to rank a finite list of brands not to nominate those brands from scratch, the contrast …
The irony of market research
Every brand wants the insights that great research brings. And every consumer wants the relevance. They want products that fit with them, service that gels with them, ideas that excite them, attitudes that ring true … They want brands to read their minds, even though they themselves may not be clear as to why they make the decisions they do. But no-one wants intrusion. And no-one wants the same questions and the same ratings system and the same format. Perhaps it’s because they know that the researchers aren’t actually interested in them at all. It’s not personal, it’s research. The people asking the carefully formatted questions are just looking for data. They just want another answer to their questions coming out of another mouth in a format that they feel comfortable with. It’s always hard to get people involved if they don’t believe that the feedback they give is going to make any difference. It’s even harder when they see brands then making changes that they don’t believe are in their interests as consumers or …
The strategy of radical beauty
Should you climb a mountain because it’s there, or because you believe you have a more than reasonable chance of conquering it? In a commercial setting at least, I’ll plumb for B – because presence alone is not a rational reason to participate. I continue to be intrigued though by the human instinct to believe that the odds are there for beating. I watch brands plunge into markets where they honestly believe they can do what others have failed to do for no other reason than that they believe in themselves and/or they have little respect for the current participants. Believing in your own brilliance and/or relying on the incompetence of others however, as Michael Porter reminds us, is not a strategy. In fact, it’s nothing short of a gamble. In a wonderful article on “How strategists lead”, Professor Cynthia Montgomery of the Harvard Business School gives a telling example of how some great companies have fancied their chances in the furniture manufacturing sector, only to become a cropper. They have, she says, looked to …
Crunching on cacti
An airbrushed problem is not an easier problem to solve. In many ways, it’s actually much more difficult because the nature and extent of the problem itself is encoded in euphemisms, which usually means that the potential impact is also encrypted. I call these deflections and understatements “icing the cactus”. Generally, they involve playing up the momentary nature of what has happened (“unseasonal”, “untimely”), playing down the likely effects (with words like “blimp” and “unfortunate”) and playing off one action or group against another (“there’s no doubt it would have worked if …”) Personally, I’ve always held with the Stockdale paradox: that organisations need to present issues frankly and without blinking, at the same time as they must utterly believe in their ability to be resolved. You can’t fully solve what you don’t fully know, and therefore what you are prepared to fully admit to. Actually, problem solving itself is a misnomer – because the problem itself is seldom the problem. The real problems are usually the attitudes, mindsets, blindsides, denials, assumptions and stupidities that …