Catalyst Branding

The Wisdom of Engaging by Intruding

July 22, 2013

Have you been watching traditional TV lately?  Does showing me the same ad for ED in every show I watch through the day really engage me?  Does watching an ad twice in a single commercial break make me pay more attention?  In today’s world, does the notion of a “commercial break” continue to be relevant for how we really live?

I feel like I’m watching the very end of an era.  The world of advertising and advertisers are struggling to hold onto the last vestige of the Mad Men era, when the consuming public has moved to a whole new way of engaging with brands and making purchase decisions.

Think about it.  Traditional advertising works by intruding into the experience that audiences are enjoying.  It forces targets to stop doing what they want to do and listen to what the advertiser has to say.  And this is supposed to be engaging.

How much sense does that make?  Let’s build engagement by bugging people, interrupting them, forcing them to listen to what we have to say and keeping them from what they really want to do.

Today, we’re much smarter about how our targets prefer to be engaged.  Study upon study shows that targets – both b2c and b2b – move through a learning process where they talk with people they trust, do their homework on brand websites and review sites, consider expert opinions and then make their choices.

It’s all on their terms.  They control the decision process and determine how and when they consume information.  Engagement is built through learning and experiencing.  The preferred media is the web and the preferred communication style is informational.  If you can make the information a little entertaining, all the better.

This is buttressed through recent studies that show us that company websites and the opinions of category experts are the only two media people trust more than they distrust.  All other media – advertising, email, collateral, etc. – are more distrusted than trusted.

Research does tell us that traditional advertising still has a role.  It is a particularly strong validating tool, especially for people who have made big purchase decisions and for the employees of companies that advertise.  However, traditional advertising’s role as a catalyst for shaping decisions is on the wane.  Fewer and fewer customers cite advertising as one of the touch-points that shaped their decisions as they moved through the selection process.

Given this, it’s time for marketers, business leaders, consultants and agencies to be much smarter and more creative in building successful engagement programs.  We need to disrupt the status quo and leverage the touch-points that customers actually prefer to use in navigating through their purchasing process.

We’ll be far better served by teaching rather than interrupting.  We need to be there when customers want us rather than force them to pay attention to us when they would rather be doing something else.  When you think about it, it’s fairly obvious – isn’t it?

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Changes in branding, Customer journey mapping, Demand Driving Strategy, General

Understanding your trigger

February 27, 2013

The year is off to a vigorous start and I’ve already had the chance to dig into some very meaty challenges and opportunities. In the course of two recent workshops, I was reminded of the importance of truly understanding what triggers your customers to start an active search for your brand.

In one workshop, the client team had little clue as to the triggering event for their category and as a result were considering a major promotional effort that would yield very little in return. In the other, the team was well versed in their trigger events and was actively engaged in crafting strategies and tactics to catalyze demand for their brand.

Over the years it has intrigued me that so few of the clients I’ve worked with had actually taken the time to identify the trigger events in their category. In my view, this is one of the most important aspects to consider in shaping any marketing or brand engagement program.

Understanding the trigger helps you be there with answers as a potential customer’s questions are being framed. This gives you a distinct advantage in winning brand new customers, capturing competitors’ customers, or very importantly, securing your wavering customers.

To identify your triggers, you must carefully analyze the journey your customers move through in building and sustaining a relationship with your brand. Triggers come in many forms and reflect varied psychological states. Some are quite rational and some very emotional. They generally fall into three categories:

  1. Something I must do to comply with an external mandate
  2. Something I need to do because it’s time to do it
  3. Something I want to do because I really desire it

“Must” and “need” triggers are largely rational and have easily traceable catalysts. “Want” triggers are powerfully emotional and are a bit more difficult to trace.

Once you’ve identified your triggers, it is important to understand the decision making process your customers move through following the activation of the trigger. Examine the touch points they consult, the type of information they seek and the steps they move through in determining a solution for their needs and desires.

This analysis will help you understand where and how you can influence their process to position your brand distinctively as they make their decisions, both through the touch points that are regularly consulted and importantly, through the creation of new touch points you can invent to enhance their decision process.

With this understanding, you have the insight needed to craft your engagement plan. It is important to segment the plan to distinguish between stimulating a new purchase, capturing a competitor’s customer or securing one of your own. It is also important to acknowledge the customer’s mindset and speak to the trigger’s motivating psychological state.

With the very limited exception of offering a current client a motivating counter offer to prevent churn, the purpose of the engagement communications effort should be to inform and solve, not sell. The beauty of this approach is that it allows you to build rich, confidence based relationships with customers where, by virtue of the content you deliver, they sell themselves on the merits of your brand relative to competitors who’ve invested far less in understanding their needs and helping them make their critical decisions.

It’s as simple as that. Once again, by being thoughtful and zeroing in on an important, yet basic aspect of the customer journey, we can yield significant benefits.

The better you understand the trigger, the easier it is to be there with answers when the customer’s decision process begins.

The better you understand the trigger, the more you can leverage that understanding to proactively motivate your competitors’ customers to rethink the value of their existing relationships.

The better you understand the trigger, the more you can be a catalyst in shaping and managing demand for your business going forward.

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Customer journey mapping, Demand Driving Strategy

Branding sure has changed

January 14, 2013

Today, branding matters more than ever. But, the nature of branding has changed dramatically in recent years.

In the course of helping my good friend Jim Little create a “Ted” style presentation, we explored the ways that brand has changed over the years we’d been working together. These are the seven most significant ways that branding today has evolved to better drive demand.

1.  It’s about relevance, not just awareness

We know that today people are crazy busy and besieged with messages wherever they turn. To pierce this clutter and get people to notice what we have to say we must speak directly to their needs. If people see our relevance, they’ll be actively aware of our existence. Without relevance, the best we can hope for is passive awareness, which can make us feel good, but won’t generate any meaningful economic value for our firms.

2.  It’s about performance, not just positioning

It’s important for us to engage our targets with a meaningful promise. But, people today have no time for empty promises. We need to deliver exactly what we promise or they will turn to an alternative faster than we can say “good bye.”

3.  It’s about dialogue, not monologue

Gone are the days when we could stand at the top of the mountain and shout at everyone we could afford to reach. Credibility is no longer simply a function of visibility. People today want to interact with our brands the way they would communicate in the course of any relationship. We need to relate to our targets in a meaningful way, interacting and responding to their needs, as the relationship requires.

4.  It’s more about earned media than traditional advertising

Advertising still has its place, but we need to rebuild people’s trust in the medium.  People trust what others say about us more than what we have to say. We need to be able to tap all of the new media sources available to give people the opportunity and the venue to open a dialogue with and about our brand.  This will build their confidence in their learning and help them to make better decisions about forming a relationship with our brand.

5.  It’s about retention, not just acquisition

It’s very important that we not only win business, but that we win our customer’s love and keep it.  They’ll be loyal to us and will share their good feelings with those that they influence. We’ll grow our business and our brand on the basis of the security of these relationships and the new demand they help to generate.

6.  It’s about advocacy, not just intention to purchase

This means there’s a big change in what we need to measure to ensure we’re being successful.  When I started, the magic number was intent to purchase.  Today, that’s just the beginning.  Now, the most important variable is the degree to which people are willing to be an advocate for our brand to others.

7.  It’s about informing and teaching, not selling

The most profound shift I’ve seen over the years is in how we communicate.  People today are actively involved in decision making about brands.  They seek the information they need to make better decisions and are turned off by “selling.”  The brands that recognize this fundamental shift are going to be way more successful than those who don’t.  In the sell, inform, solve continuum, inform is now the most important function.  If we inform well, our clients will sell and solve for themselves.

So there you have it.  As you can see branding has changed quite dramatically, but for the better.  A brand today is all about the relationship.  Managing a brand today comes down to understanding the fundamental rules around how people want you to behave within that relationship.  Following these rules enables us to build strong, rich relationships that build mutual value and the spur the growth needed for our businesses to thrive.

Who knew that I would have been better off with a degree in psychology than marketing.

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Changes in branding, Demand Driving Strategy, General

Demand driving brands are built from the inside out

November 25, 2012

I’m just flying back from a 10-day trip to the UK and Portugal where I was working with a very special client helping them to engage their organization to drive demand across their markets.  During this second annual planning session, we worked through the process of reassessing, validating and refining strategy, reviewed progress against key initiatives and forged plans for the coming year.

Once again, I have come away totally reinvigorated by what can happen when an organization is engaged and focused on achieving something special.  The power of building and sustaining this united force is inspiring and reminds me on this long flight home exactly why I’ve been doing this work for 30 years.

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to work on some very important initiatives.  In each case, I’ve been part of a team that built a solid strategy, an engaging communications system and a powerful action plan.  Some of this work has been amongst the best I’ve produced over the span of my career.  Yet in spite of the quality of our work, a few of these programs never achieved the results we believed they were capable of producing.

It drove me crazy then as to why.  In retrospect, it is clear to me now that the difference between great success and modest results comes down to a single common denominator.  The most successful demand driving programs resulted when the organization united behind a powerful strategic idea and worked through thin and thick to deliver that value to their marketplace.

There’s no question that success requires a solid demand driving strategy – one that uncovers opportunities to be relevant and distinctive in a marketplace offering significant potential for growth.  But the difference lies in the ability to inspire the organization to do all it takes to seize that opportunity.

It’s much more than getting people to nod their heads in intellectual agreement.  You obviously must be sure that the opportunity marries well with the organization’s capabilities and that the leadership team believes that the organization can truly deliver what will be required to achieve success.  This assures you of at least modest success.

The difference lies in getting the organization excited by the opportunity and inspired by the chance to do something quite special.  We’ve all seen the power of a team that believes it is destined to achieve something special.  Whether it be sports, politics or business, the team that rallies around a distinct purpose achieves superior results.

The magic challenge then is to find that allusive ingredient that will be the catalyst for such inspired performance.

In my work, this ingredient often comes down to a focus on what the team does that makes them the most proud of their role in the organization and the value they deliver to their world.

My friend Gordon Johnson introduced me to a process that has been foolproof in uncovering such a basis for building inspiring strategies.  This process is elegant both in its simplicity and its ability to get people to focus on what they’re doing when they’re at their very best.

Within this framework, we forge team engagement by getting members to think through and discuss three simple questions:

  • On your very best day serving your customer, client, consumer or colleague, what were you doing that made you the most proud of the value you were delivering?
  • What do you need to do more of to ensure you can realize that feeling more often?
  • What do you need to do less of that keeps you from doing what makes you the proudest?

This is exactly the process we used in our sessions over the past several days in the UK and Portugal.

The content that grows out of these discussions provides the foundation for building internal communications and customer experience programs that drive inspired performance.  It unleashes people to think about what could be and it builds consensus around an inspiring sense of purpose.  I’m amazed at the level of engagement that results from this process.

As always, we’ll keep testing and honing this approach to achieve our desired results.  As we move thorough this journey, I may come across something even better.  But, for now, this process will be core to every demand driving strategy my clients and I build together.

Posted under: Demand Driving Strategy, Internal Brand Engagement

Rethinking Branding Architecture to Better Drive Demand

November 15, 2012

I have a good friend and colleague who never met a branding architecture challenge that wasn’t best solved through a masterbrand.  Unfortunately, his view is not unique in the world of branding.

The branding profession has long held that a masterbrand approach is the superior solution for the majority of branding architecture challenges.  Why not?  This approach is the most efficient, most economical, most consistent, easiest to manage and sustain.

All very good reasons, but if the mission is to drive growth by managing demand, these are not the most important factors to consider when selecting the branding architecture right for the future.

There is no question that in some very specific cases, a pure masterbranded system is best.  Masterbrands are perfect for mono-line service offerings that can easily convey distinctive value under a single powerful brand.  In these cases, a masterbrand can be powerful demand driving catalyst.

However, as soon as the organization needs to feature individual aspects within an umbrella offer to drive new demand, a masterbrand becomes an impediment to establishing a differentiated presence in the marketplace.

Look at the big banks today.  For years the branding profession advised these organizations to roll-up acquired entities into a single overarching positioning and brand.  The rationale – consistency, efficiency and brand spend leverage.  The result – homogenized units, struggling to make the best of lowest common denominator positionings while steadily losing ground to more focused, relevant and agile competitors.

Can you name a single, distinctive, demand driving banking brand today?  It’s hard. These once great brands have become mere commodities under all inclusive, diluted masterbrands.

As organizations shift perspective from branding for consistency to branding to drive demand, conventional branding architecture theory must be rethought. 

The most successful organizations realize that to drive demand today, they must effectively orchestrate at least three levels of branding – the brand of their representative in the customer relationship, the brand of the product or line of business and the corporate brand.

Each of these levels plays a very important role in fulfilling the drivers of demand in today’s markets.  The corporate brand helps establish the foundation of trust so critical to the formation of any customer relationship.   The product or business unit brand helps build the competency credibility necessary for relationship development.  The representative brand establishes the sense of empathy or understanding that customers need as they are solidifying their choice.  Ultimately, all three levels of brand combine to convey the sense that the brand can truly help customers in achieving their ultimate objective for the relationship.

Today’s branding architectures must allow each of these levels of branding to fulfill their roles, both individually and collectively.  Conventional, one-dimensional masterbrand thinking won’t satisfy this need.  There’s room for a significant rethink and much new innovation around types of architecture relationships and better orchestration throughout the critical stages of the customer decision-making process.

As we transform our frame of reference to catalyzing demand, the things we’ve done all along often come up quite short.  There’s so much more the branding profession can do to help clients be more successful.  This is just when it gets fun.  Stay tuned.

Posted under: Branding Architecture, Demand Driving Strategy