Eleven ideas to celebrate the depression

Recently I read a statement delivered by the esteemed NY Times Economics Columnist, Paul Krugman to the ANA.

"History tells us that we should not count on any kind of recovery anytime soon," he said. "The economy is depressed because people don't want to spend."

It was reported as a pronouncement of ongoing doom and caution.

What if we keep it real and accept that people are just behaving the way they need to in order to look after themselves and their families. This is our customers adjusting as needed to live well in the future. Surely this is a good thing?

So, to celebrate our customers newly focusing on that which is important to them and responding in new and creative ways to the challenge, here are 11 ideas to help customers celebrate the depression:

1. Send your customers a surprise bonus - just because. An extra something, a discount, $10 off their bill, some ideas on how they can use your service more efficiently.
2. Use your power to help your customer. If you have large purchasing power, special relationships with suppliers or unique access to places and objects - how can you leverage this for your customers benefit?
3. Do less. Charge less. Ask your customers what they can do without to pay less.
4. Support customers' re-focused lives - what about supporting local volunteering organisations, holding a street-long open dinner party or supporting walking to school?
5. Facilitate re-training and re-employment activities - start / wrap in a re-training program at your business that supports people that may have had forcible employment changes. Help them help each other.
6. Promote the great new more financially conscious lifestyle people are living, publicly. I saw a great campaign with luscious luxe green styling with the message "saving is the new spending". How can you make your customers feel proud of their new conscious choices?
7. Spend less as an organisation. Tell people people about it and the fact that this means that you did not need to put up your charges to them.
8. Spark a 'tight-ass tuesday' dinner party idea for customers. Share recipes, images, theme ideas and social linkages to help them do it.
9. Sponsor a council to create local free events for your area.
10. Utilise your space. Is your foyer, meeting rooms or carpark unused at times - how could you share this with customers to help them achieve their goals more cost effectively?
11. Support people to get and stay engaged in their community, irrespective of their work status. A great example of this is the Innocent big knit.

All of these celebrate the reality of people being more conscious and financially responsible whilst supporting your goal of increasing awareness and loyalty.

I don't know about you...but I'm feeling ready to get out and celebrate right about now :)

You? How are you helping customers celebrate the depression. Or do you think this is unreasonably fluffy for cash-constrained marketing budgets to contemplate?

Image Credit: Life Magazine (via http://www.chrisperruna.com/category/misc/)

stop talking.

Recently there has been discussions, presentations and articles (check out the interesting link to the Age of Singularity from @RyanMacJones here) upon the notion of 'brand purpose'. Essentially, this is a re-badged blend of a good old fashioned brand vision and corporate social responsibility (CSR) marketing.

My challenge: stop talking about it to your peers and do good things.

As a marketer we need to sell constantly, to our management, our sales team and our peers to get our ideas across and implemented. Taking the principle of brand purpose at it's base level - the whole point is to do good things. And do so in a way that sustainable for your business (i.e. delivers profitability).

So now that you have sold it in - stop talking, start doing.

You? What are some of the great brand purpose initiatives you are initiating?

Image credit: Zami.com

A short recipe for naming

Naming can be hard. Excrutiating. Or a no-brainer.

Here is a simple method that I follow to cook up some great names for new products and businesses.

Use physical or virtual pen and paper and ideally a bunch of people who have an understanding of your customers, who you are as a business are (i.e. your values, purpose, people) and a mix of perspectives. Then ask the following three questions to spark a basket-load of ideas:

1. What names would clearly tell people what benefit there is to them of using this product, or simply, what it does. Let's use a desktop cloud computing company as an example.

• What it does for people: freedom, functionality everywhere, always-on, device freedom, easy desktops, forget about it. i.e. Get started (note - web design)
• What it is: a no PC PC, a computer without the box, a PC in your pocket, a vitual PC, tech-agnostic, flexible personal computing. I.e. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

2. Who are we? And why are we special?

• Exceptional architects, experience management, Ex consultants, Dynamic consultants, Old fixers, Men with spanners, formidable, Bob's PCs, business technologists, deep computing thinkers.

3. What is a name that is completely unrelated to the product or service, but has the potential to have meaning loaded within it (i.e. become a real brand). It is different enough in the industry to have cut-through and strong enough to create visual cues.

• For example, Yellow, Orange, , alice euphemia, Zara, Lululemon

Method:

Brainstorm.

Check in with customers.

Decide.

Go.

You? What do you think of this method? What names do you love and why?

Image credit

Endless loops

Workshops, actions, engagement, meetings, calls, following up, managing up, managing down, minuting, maximising...hurrying.

I wonder, what would the corporate world be like without the endless loops of communication, planning, sharing responsibility and activity organising. And we just focused on the doing.

What would organisations be able to achieve if we weren't spending time in endless loops?

Would the world be a different place?

Sparking some ways we could do this. What if....?

- The entire organisation had a 5-to-do rule. No more than 5 major areas of focus.

- Daily tasks can only be listed on post its (inspiration: 99%)

- Everyone does what they say they will, first time.

- The organisation celebrates when people say no.

- Work only in small teams, with discrete focus and fast actions (inspiration: Thoughtworks).

- From an organisational perspective - making really clear goals, resource allocation and basis for achievement > lessens jockeying (and associated time wasting activities) and improves focus.

- Shorter time-frames for delivery (no more than 1 week)

- Entire org run in an agile manner (aka 37signals and Thoughtworks).

- Have customer voting each week on what the org should do > pinpoint accuracy for delivery to customer needs.

- Say it is OK to fail. People try new things, better ways and stop wasting time covering their tush.

- Cookie cutter communications - clearly outlined 'you should communicate this and then', so people share what needs to be shared, without waste.

- The opposite - total acceptance of different working styles but ruthless accountability for the work that needs to be done.

- Task lists / business priorities with voting buttons - decisions made fast.

- Simple (gasp) paper signs on everyones desk - this is what I do, this is what I don't, this is what I decide.

- All work is integrated into some form of project, with project 'bubbles' sharing and overlapping. (note, need to be cautious with notional business aka SM style distraction

- Could have a 'mute' button on all incoming information streams for when we need to focus.

What are things you do, or could do to stop endless loops in your organisation?

Me, I'm going start with clarifying responsibilities and the post-it to-do list.

image credit: adriapocera

Why little brands are sexy

Having a conversation with another brand geek made me wonder - what makes it so hot to work with big shot brands?

So, you get social recognition (oh, you work for them.....ooooh), bigger budgets (oh, you managed that squillion dollar campaign.....oooooh), recruiter recognition (oh, you tick that box....oooh).

But little brands are sexy. Evolving, passionate, meaningful and unlimited potential. Sexy.

It is a hard choice as a marketer to say no to the platinum blondes of brands. However it is with little brands that you have the scope to do truly great work, shaping the positioning in the market, inspiring the team and being forced and allowed by your size to do truly creative marketing.

Some great examples: Mast Brothers Chocolate, Pom wonderful, Craigslist, McIlhenny Tabasco, Bacon Salt, Little Creatures, Cullman Liquidation, Carmans, Hummingbird Bakery, Honest Tea, Trunki, Maldon Salt, Fisherman's Friend, Monocle, Dumbo Feather. Filled with attitude, in touch with their customers and with brands that outweigh their org structure.

As a marketer, the small brand is definitely sexy.