Are brands better with less...and a little more skin?

Why is it that when I look at the media strategies for big brands I often feel as if they haven't gone beyond "what we've always done" + "the web". And when I speak to small to medium businesses they can go from one extreme to the other from innovative to old-fashioned, but never just thinking - ok, what TARP weights and frequency do I need to hit to have a high likelihood of success? And to impress our retail buyer?

Which makes me wonder - would big brands actually do better with less?

Smaller businesses feel the impact of their activities immediately, and therefore test and measure faster and with more direct customer feedback than some of the big brands. This is done with less time and dollars, forcing creativity.

One of the key differences is immediacy...having some skin.

They literally have skin in the game, unprotected by layers of budgets and departments for dispersal of impact.It is sense checking not just with sales dollars, but relevance to customers and impacts on perceptions at the same time.

So, would a big brand do better with less dollars, but more skin in the game?

There are many ways to make this happen, even when you work on some of the biggest brands!

• Make a case for a proportion of the promotional budget to be experimental - including allocated people time to support that experimentation!
• Figure out what skin is for you - is it spending an hour a week on the customer service lines, venturing into online conversations, hosting a customer party or walking the supermarket floor with your buyer?
  
• Is there a way you can do fast, small tests for promotional ideas - and keep them coming? Try giving free hot chocolates as people are waiting for public transport in the cold, negotiate directly with a friendly store manager to test some new point of sale...how can you test, now?

This is not suggesting strategic planning gets scrapped, it is about planning for flexibility and putting in place methods for low cost testing to increase the overall effectiveness of execution - and acting like it is your skin in the game.

Flickr photo credit: Brandon Schaefer

Personal brand and the pitch

I have been going through really interesting and useful training at the moment on building relationships. As part of this the conversation turned to personal brand.

Have you considered how your personal brand affects your ability to pitch and to manage your relationships (privately and professionally)?

Going beyond the obvious effects of a strong personal brand bringing higher levels of awareness and attraction for your brand, how does your brand translate in a pitch situation for example? Imagine if you decided that your personal brand essence was Presenter Extraordinaire and you delivered a lame deck of clip-art embellished Powerpoint slides.

Authenticity in personal branding is just as important in personal branding as it with organisational brands.

Without it, you cannot establish credibility and therefore Trust.

And without trust you can rarely access deeper levels of a relationship necessary to create long-term, result-generating relationships with clients. Nic from Six Degrees talks about building strong relationships built on a deeper understanding a client and their business for a pitch using a circle of 5 stages - compile information, connect, clarify needs, compel and complete.

The trust equation we talked through was one I have referred to previously:

Trust = credibility + reliability + relationship
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self-orientation

Trust enables you to increase the information you gain about the business and the key people involved through the compile and connect stage, making your understanding of both what they need and how they need it presented deeper and more accurate. The fundamental of great pitches!

If you think from a clients' perspective, rating your relationship on a scale from 0-10 on each of these...how would you perform? And how can you continue to integrate this useful measure of your relationship (and indirectly your personal brand), on an ongoing basis? Even better - do it with the client! What a great way to objectively discuss your relationship and show the client how important they are to you.

Measuring once tells you what is, measuring on an ongoing basis will help you shape what the relationship will be, hand in hand with the client.

Thanks Nic - fabulously practical and thoughtful tips.

For more information on personal branding, you can explore Dan Schawbel's Personal Branding Blog or read through Dr. Hubert Rampersad's article on Brand channel on Personal Branding. There is a lot of articles and blogs which discuss personal branding, some with more authenticity than others.

No time to read up? Try this: write one phrase that describes the essence of who you are and will be perceived. Mine for example is Curious Thinker. Then write your values (I aim for no more than 5 for the sake of clarity) that support this essence. You can also do it the other way around if this makes things easier for you. I recommend you leave it for a day / week and come back to it. Does it still resonate? If so, articulate some behaviours that support the values. For example, One of my values is challenging, the behaviour is questioning. It is these behaviours that will ultimately translate into you communicating your own brand with authenticity.

flickr photo credit: lucam

Bucking the star?

It looks like Starbucks is quietly bucking the star, at least on this site.
Rumoured to be a possible testing ground for a new model of coffee shop, the site has a more authentic, localised feel with coffee blended and roasted in small batches and pastries sourced fresh from a local bakery.
The name for the new site: 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea

Given Starbuck's softening performance over the last two years, this could be the beginning of a new face, brand or experience for Starbucks. Such is the connection with the brand (in love or loathing)that it has appeared in major news and is inciting considerable commentary amongst specialists and social media alike.

Innovation exhaustion

It is difficult to know where to begin, when you begin to think of innovation.

There is no common definition - one person's innovation is another person's logical line extension.
If they noticed the new product at all (think many new car launches).

Perhaps innovation should be defined by users? It has been stated that innovation is one of the strongest levers to change customer behaviour, and to generate profit. If customers don't change, is it not innovation? Or just not relevant? Does innovation by its very nature have to be relevant? For example, would a car that changed colour when in use be an innovation?

There is a new product failure rate (variably) quoted as 50-90%, with companies spending enormous amounts of money and time investing in 'innovation' at all ends of the spectrum.

Recently it seems there is an (arguable) decline in the rate of innovation in consumer goods, based on my experience and touched upon here. Is this a symptom of the financial downturn or are many organisations realising there is a problem, stopping the wastage but then not knowing how to progress?

Or is it innovation exhaustion - people, companies and industries that have been running so hard for so long with such low success rates and high levels of corporate pressure (and risk aversion - see an antidote from Neil Perkins), that it has become all too much for us all.

So we have decided that for now, we need a little lie down?

Some great examples of some (product) companies refusing to lie low are Help, Slow cow and Sipahh

I have a feeling that this is just a power-nap and the next phase will be when consumer good companies start to 'get' genuinely consumer led innovation.

Flickr photo credit: out_of_rhythm

it's all too serious...

glimpsing away from the navel for a second...came across these. cute funny.

Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
Seagull Manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, and then leaves.
Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.
Stress Puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
Treeware: Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.
Alpha Geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the Alpha Geek around here.
Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of attacking an electronic device to get it to work again.

Thinking about a bit of percussive maintenance on my always too slow internet dongle...

noise and common sense

It feels like there is a hyerbabble of noise around marketing and social media...so much so that I wonder how much is noise and how much is actually just common sense?

Why are people scurrying to have a presence in the latest social medium, forums and events? Is it to have a voice, to enable customers to talk to you, to be cool?
Is this about being cool, or just common sense that you need to enable customers to speak with you and tell you what they want?

And all this talk of authenticity, firms trying to act with and create that sense of authenticity, trying to make sure each and every touch point is authentic. Perhaps if they just focused on what they wanted and needed to do, and focused on doing it well...I guess that would be pretty authentic!

Authenticity is about doing what you say you will, being what you say you are, and interacting in an honest way with people. It really should be pretty straight forward. Although it may not always be that easy when enmeshed in a history of organisational systems, products, processes and politics.

Common sense doesn't have to just mean using logical (and proven) tactics and offerings in the market, it can be just as sensible to offer something extraordinarily different in the market. This means that you have less direct competition, more efficient marketing spend and increased opportunities for sustained brand differentiation and growth. It is also common sense to understand where you customers are going, understanding their evolving needs, particularly in a culture-shifting moment such as the current GFC, as highlighted by Trendwatching.com.

To me, it is common sense that when you deliver what people want, with honest conversation about what they want, customers will be happy, and your business will grow. And if you find new tools to do that better, be it social media or not, it is common sense to use them too.

Flickr photo credit: goodbyebyesunday's

Collective for good (and gain)

Today I stumbled across many examples of crowdsourcing. In one case, crowd-sourcing patient data for tracking disease and health state information, to crowd-sourcing scientific data and Nike crowd-sourcing running information.

All amazing examples of using the power of the collective. Fundamentally super-charged by technology, enabling access, connection, storage, tracking and distillation - to either the macro or the micro. You can see that the global average running time is 35 minutes and that people in America run shorter distances, more often. If you included Nike+ mapping you could take it to the favourite running tracks in your neighbourhood.

So - this acts on the fundamental lever of engagement and kicks off the Hawthorne Effect - what gets measured (observed) gets done.

What are you trying to change - are you trying to improve heart health, encourage people to make the healthier choice in breakfast cereals (which just might be yours)? How can you enable and engage people, harnessing their collective information to help them? Would it be that hard to set up a national wine drinking poll or a national dietary register...? The learnings could work to shape an entire country's behaviours to a healthier way of life.

All by enabling one person at a time to simply track their behaviour.

It may not be perfect (i.e. Wikipedia)...but it can be an enormous step in the right direction.

Flickr photocredit: Geoff Penn