Catalyst Branding

How to Convert Fresh Attention to Action

April 12, 2016

Now That I Have Your Attention …

Every once in a while, good fortune shines on your brand when an important event generates wide spread attention. Such was the case for Callaway this week when Danny Willett emerged as an unexpected winner of the Masters.

When this happens to you, what do you need to be ready to convert this attention into the action needed to expand sales?

Start by understanding your customer’s decision process

A quick review of the consumer decision-making process in your category will tell you exactly where to focus. For most prospects, new attention compels people to want to learn more about the brand. Some will go directly to your website. Others will need to be nudged to act on their new intentions.

Nudge with non-intrusive media

To nudge, you need to be where they are looking. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and relevant information sites are all places your targets will be using to learn more about the event that helped to raise your brand’s visibility.

By participating in these important media outlets you’ll be in the right place to naturally influence your targets to take the actions needed to learn more about your brand. You won’t be interrupting them. You won’t be alienating them. Instead you’ll be working in the natural flow they use to learn more about what happened and participate in the debate.

Email can also an effective tool, but a bit more intrusive than social media. The good news is that email gives the consumer the option of clicking in only if they are interested.

Content to inform and answer important questions

Once they’ve been nudged, your targets will do what they normally do to determine whether what you have to offer fits their lives. They’ll want to learn what they need to learn to make a smart decision.

This is where powerful content comes in. You’ll want to help these targets understand why you exist, what you have to offer and how it is right for their lives. You’ll want to help them assess your value relative to what they’re already using and decide whether or not to give you a try.

Short information rich video content, how to lessons, and third party assessments should always be top of your list. Channel partner and influencer content are also extremely valuable. Consumer endorsement never hurts as long as it is credible. What we stand for videos are icing on the cake.

Determine the actions you need your customers to take

Your primary objective is to give your targets the information they need to decide to take action. That action could take a variety of forms ranging from making an on the spot purchase to beginning a more protracted purchasing process.

In the case of Callaway, this could take a variety of forms. Golfers could decide in the moment to buy Callaway branded gear or balls directly, from an online partner, at a big box golf store or from their club’s pro shop.

Or, they could decide to start the process of buying Callaway branded clubs either in the moment or following a thoughtful fitting process. Again, this could be through a variety of channel options including direct, an online partner, a big box golf store or their club’s pro shop.

In either case, regardless of the chosen path, success is enabled from a well coordinated, well orchestrated experience that is seamless both within and across channels.

Plan in advance for success

Which means of course, that all of this should be well planned and managed in advance. Like most everything else, prior preparation enables you to benefit from a momentary event that brings your brand significant new attention.

In the end, success is all about the effective orchestration of touchpoints along the customer journey to nurture the decision making process. Media and content are critical for both building and leveraging attention and converting this attention into an intention to act. Managing experiences across the channels then insures that consumers follow though on their intention and take the action needed to ensure your success. If the process is especially well run, these customers will tell others all about it so that your success will be compounded across their relationships.

So when good fortune shines on your brand, be sure you’re ready to make the most of its fleeting benefits. Hopefully, for Callaway, this week marks the beginning of a very lucrative year.

Let me know what you think.

 

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Customer journey mapping, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Strategy

7 Lessons For Marketers From The 2016 Campaign

March 30, 2016

While for many the 2016 presidential campaign has been painful to watch, there’s key learning – both good and bad – for marketers to apply in crafting and executing our marketing plans.

If you want to establish a powerful and unassailable position, connect with core needs.

The reason why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have drawn disproportionately large crowds to their events is that they’ve both tapped into the politically disenfranchised in a powerful way. While going about it with differing messages, these two polarizing candidates have drawn important support by connecting with these target’s core concerns. In the process, they’ve fostered strong convictions that defy logic.

While it’s important to have a strategy, success often depends on tactical opportunism.

The successful candidates in this race are masters at counterpunching. They rule the news cycle by taking advantage of events as they unfold. They thrive by listening carefully and responding quickly to capitalize on opportunities as they arise.

Differentiation and neutralization are equally important.

We all know it’s important to differentiate our offer from competition, but success in this race has been as much about neutralizing competitive advantages as it has been about differentiation. This one is tricky for there’s a fine line between success and alienation. But, it’s becoming increasingly clear that marketers need to bring neutralization messages into our narrative to help distinguish our offer, particularly if we’re challenging the status quo.

Authenticity remains critically important.

It’s important to remain true to who you are if you want to build meaningful connections. One of the most promising candidates going into the campaign is no longer a factor in the race because he morphed his persona three times in the course of the campaign. Targets sniff that out fast and quickly turn away if you fail the genuine test.

Mechanical repetition of key talking points can alienate targets.

Marketing today is about building a dialogue. That same candidate’s waterloo moment came in the midst of a national debate where he mechanically repeated his key talking points over and over in the face of critical onslaught. It turned many interested voters off and cost him valuable ground, which he never recovered. Targets want to be talked with, not at.

Influencers can be effective if they are credible.

We’ve seen a marked dilution of the impact of endorsement in this campaign. Does that mean influencers are no longer valuable? Research tells us that third party endorsement remains one of the most powerful catalysts in the buying decision for both consumer and b2b targets. But, targets must believe the endorser’s message. They just can’t say it. It must be credible.

The impact of traditional marketing media is on the wane.

Fascinatingly, attack ads are not working in this election as they have in prior contests. The most polarizing, yet successful candidate has leveraged free media and relied primarily on Twitter and Instagram as his social media of choice. This has worked gloriously for him. Targets are consuming media as they live today. New channels are reaching people more effectively than traditional channels. It’s time marketers take notice.

These are some of the key lessons I’ve taken away. I’m sure there are many more insights that each of you have gleaned from this process. I’d love to know what they are. Please share.

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Changes in branding

Curing Brand Schizophrenia

January 28, 2016

Removing a Growth Inhibitor: Curing Brand Schizophrenia

 

For years, big players in financial services and enterprise technology have rolled up organically built and acquired businesses under a single, overarching corporate brand.

This plan made sense when originally conceived. Of the alternative models, this approach generated the greatest efficiencies, provided the most consistency, was the easiest to manage and sustain.

The advantage to this approach lies in its economics. By leveraging a single overarching brand, firms are able to concentrate their media spends and generate significant economies of scale. It’s easy to understand why it has been so widely embraced.

Unfortunately, this approach has its downside.

With limited exceptions, these roll-ups suffer from muddled market perceptions. Just look at the biggest banking and enterprise IT firm brands today. Distinctiveness is sacrificed by basing the collective positioning on a common denominator across the business. This compromises the ability of individual business units to compete effectively with more focused, relevant and agile competitors.

The resulting “brand schizophrenia” inhibits growth.

By trying to be multiple things for multiple people, these brands make it extremely difficult for customers and prospects to appreciate the relevance, credibility and value of individual competencies.

Even worse, in some cases unforeseen channel conflicts have created insurmountable barriers to growth.

In response, some forward thinking organizations have embarked on strategies to replace these “roll-up” structures with far more focused pure play models that separate unrelated competencies into distinctly branded, stand alone entities. This refined strategy fuels growth by focusing resources, clarifying market positioning and eliminating channel conflict.

Doing It Right: The IO example

 

IO is an innovative enterprise IT organization that faced head-on the challenges of “roll-up” structural constraints. The company built world class competencies in IT infrastructure services and IT infrastructure technology, but was increasingly frustrated by results that did not live up to forecasted market potential.

A thorough review of the challenge revealed that these two seemingly synergistic competencies were actually inhibiting growth under a single brand. Customers for the service company failed to appreciate the added value of the technology competency and because the most lucrative market for the technology was other service providers, the structure created an inherent channel conflict that completely impeded growth.

Management took the bold step of splitting the company into two distinct entities to eliminate constraints and fuel growth.

IOPOS3

IOBrand2

Doing it Wrong: The HP example

 

Confronting similar challenges, HP embarked on new strategy to distinguish its consumer technology business from its Enterprise IT organization.

Unfortunately, this well considered strategy is compromised by poor execution. The resulting new brands are too closely aligned. They share the same name and the same original visual style.

 

HP2

How to do it right?

 

If you’re going to do it, then really do it.

The key learning from reviewing HP’s mistake is that success in such an endeavor requires pushing the businesses and brands apart to create two distinct entities.

This means examining the strengths and weaknesses of each entity and building the respective brands on the basis of the strengths that are unique to each. Shared strengths will help with operational success, but for brand building purposes we need to focus on the strengths that each business owns uniquely.

VennDiagram

Building the Brand BluePrint

 

If you going to do this, the key to success lies in how you frame the strategy. The goal is to define the focused brands as distinctly as possible to avoid confusion in the marketplace.

The easier this is to do, the more comfortable you can be that the separation decision is right for the business. Conversely, if you’re finding it difficult to distinguish the brands then the separation strategy is probably not the best solution for the challenge you are attempting to solve.

To build such a strategy, we employ a simple, yet effective model to shape the foundation for the brand. Our “Brand BluePrint” model starts with the business challenge and focuses the brand strategy to solve this challenge and enable opportunity.

The key components of this model include:

BrandBluePrint

It’s all about crispness

 

In the end, the key to eliminating the constraining impact of brand schizophrenia lies in defining the individual brands a crisply as possible. This new clarity will free the businesses to compete more effectively with pure play competitors and will eliminate the hurdles of channel conflict.

Success starts with an effective strategy. If you’re going to do it, drive the brands apart as far as possible. The crispness will make it easy for targets to embrace the value.

Posted under: Branding Architecture, Branding Strategy, Demand Driving Strategy

The Power of a Refresh

October 6, 2015

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I use Asana – a wonderful productivity enhancing, program management app. Asana is entrenched as part of my everyday ritual. I can’t imagine living without it.

Yet, like most other habits, my relationship with Asana is largely back of mind. The app is an important tool, but I rarely consciously think about it.

This week, Asana launched a very well done refresh, including a fresh new logo redesign. Interestingly, the net effect brought the brand front of mind for me again.

I was reminded how central Asana is to my everyday work life. I went to the blog and the website and discovered new features that are even more helpful. I learned and appreciated more than I have in the past year. The brand refresh helped renew my relationship.

My experience with Asana is very similar to that I have with Apple and other important brands. A software or hardware refresh often has the same impact. I learn more. I’m reminded of how important the brand is to my everyday life and I recommit to the brand again.

Given my ADHD, that all lasts just a few days. But, the impact is extremely powerful.

All of which leads me to believe that brands should think differently about how regularly to refresh.

Conventional wisdom suggests a five-year refresh cycle, at the minimum. I think that dated advice is no longer helpful.

Instead, I’d be looking to refresh some element of the customer experience twice yearly to keep customers actively engaged with your brand.

This doesn’t mean taking steps as dramatic as those taken by Asana. But, it does mean being much smarter and more aggressive in keeping your brand front of mind with your core marketplace.

I’d start today to craft a regular refresh plan and roadmap. Begin with an assessment of user experience needs and opportunities. Then craft a plan with logical stages – from regular clean-up to transformative regeneration. The return will more than offset the effort.

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

How Branding Strategy Goes Wrong

June 2, 2014

I spent yesterday in an all day session kicking off a new partnership between two premier firms. Our mission was to begin the process of positioning and marketing a new product offering that will be the basis for the partnership.

Lots of branding strategy and design work had been accomplished in the past year by one of the partners as a prelude to finding the right strategic partner. We spent the morning reviewing that work to determine our go forward plan.

This review was quite enlightening. The new brand has the potential to be quite distinctive in the market – in spite of the strategy it was designed to fulfill. Fortunately, the business users leveraged the inspirational quality of the new brand identity to forge delivery strategies that have the potential to ladder up to a compelling overall brand strategy. But, the strategic platform that led to the actual creation of the brand revealed what can happen when so called branding experts build strategies that are disconnected from the reality of business.

Yesterday’s session highlighted three common flaws I regularly see in branding strategies that are not fit for purpose.

1. Designed for a moment in time

All too often, branding strategies are developed against a state of the moment understanding of the business. Positioning plans are developed relative to a real time assessment of competitor strengths and weaknesses and market psychology. Decisions are made. Stakes set in the ground. And then … everything changes, and the strategy is no longer relevant.

True experts in branding must understand the flow of the business, psychology and market dynamics. Strategies must be designed to anticipate transformation through new entrants, new technologies or competitor turnarounds.   That’s hard.

Scenario planning makes it easier. By charting possible scenarios and building a strategy that embraces the broadest range you can make sure your brand strategy is future proof. Re-assessing on an annual basis and morphing as needed adds additional protection.

Alternatively, you can forgo “strategy” in favor of what my friend Jim Little and I have coined, “tactical opportunism.” In this case, you build your branding platform to capitalize on in the moment advantages and then constantly morph the platform to maintain advantage as customer psychology and market dynamics continue to evolve. This form of “branding chess” requires true market understanding and nimble response, but it is often the best tactic to stay ahead in fast changing, quickly transforming markets.

2. Misguided pursuit of emotion

We’ve all read the articles and listened to the gurus – effective brands must forge emotional connections in order to thrive.

While this is surely true, our problem lies in how so brand practitioners believe that emotional connections are forged. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom defaults to a fallacy where emotional connections are the Holy Grail and rational connections are simply category antes.

This widely held fallacy ignores customer psychology and disregards the new engagement process that shapes consumer, b2b and b2b2c markets today.

Powerful relationships are built on the emotional connections that are forged through the process of fulfilling rational needs.

Today’s engagement process has become highly rational. No matter whether we’re purchasing a car or a cloud computing solution, we do our homework, listen to the experts, evaluate, test and hone our understanding as we move closer to a solution. As our rational thresholds are satisfied, emotional attractions begin to form. In the process, we finalize our decisions based upon what we believe the offer will do for us, fit into our life and make us feel. Rational and emotional drivers are inextricably linked with rational drivers serving as the gateway.

You can’t build sustained emotional connections without satisfying rational thresholds. No matter how good the product makes me feel, I’ll never love it if it doesn’t work for me.

3. Disconnected from business and marketing

Again, all too often, what is passed off as brand strategy ignores the obligation that effective strategies have to fuel marketing and CRM. The brand is presented in isolation with the expectation that others will pick-up the baton and develop the required marketing and customer experience plans.

Sometimes this works out, as was the case yesterday. Unfortunately, more often than not, it results in diluted effectiveness and lost opportunity.

My experience since founding Catalyst has taught me that branding, marketing and customer experience must be inextricably linked in order to drive business success.

Branding strategy must fuel engagement and define the imperatives to be delivered throughout the customer experience. It must highlight touch points and content to be leveraged in the process of managing to purchase and it must define standards for behavior and interaction that help manage from purchase to advocacy.

True experts understand that branding, marketing and customer experience are all linked. When they are, effective strategy can actually drive demand and influence success.

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Demand Driving Strategy, Success Driving Briefs