May 7th, 2006 by admin

Back in the early 90s, I was the manager of a wine store in San Francisco. At the time, we knew next to nothing about branding, yet instinctively everyone in the store was aware of the power of smell.  We had concrete floors.  Inevitably, a bottle of wine would break every now and then.  After a while, we began to notice that the scent of wine caused sales to increase.  It actually became a running joke.  Whenever we had a store full of people browsing and not buying we would joke with one another that someone should break a bottle of wine.

Why tell this story?

I’ve been making my way through Martin Lindstrom’s new book , Brand Sense.
In a nutshell, Martin argues that companies should use sensory stimuli
to better build their brands.  A few facts on page 97 and 98 caught my
attention

Another experiment was conducted in Harrah’s,
a casino in Las Vegas.  One area was set aside and infused with a
pleasant odor… Revenues from the scented area were 45 percent higher
than those of the scentless counterparts.

A Disney World popcorn
attendant… knows that when business is slow, all he has to do is turn
on his artificial popcorn smell…

Woolworth’s in Britain… introduced the smell of mulled wine and Christmas dinner

Victoria’s Secret has their own blend of potpourri.

May 6th, 2006 by admin

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called Combine and Surrender expousing the need to combine your sales channels and surrender to your customers in order effectively market in today’s atmosphere.

I want to thank the Modern Marketing Blog for cluing me in on a great interview with David Weinberger, author of, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. 

Alistair Craven, from Management First, asked David,

In embracing the Internet age, what would you say were the biggest sins organizations have committed?

David replied,

Most businesses still think they are the best source of information
about their products. They still think that they can control their
markets by controlling what information they release. So, they look to
the Internet as a way of doing business as usual, albeit with bits
instead of paper. That’s why most corporate websites are boring,
pointless and offensive.

Customers have figured out that
other customers are the best sources of honest information about
products. Networked markets know more than the companies they’re
talking about. That changes everything, but not enough companies have
caught on.      

The biggest organizational sin remains
insisting that the organization remains in control. That control was
always largely illusory. Now it gets in the way of the exponential
increases in innovation and customer loyalty that occur when businesses
have the guts to encourage customers and employees to find one another
and talk freely.

Alistair went on to ask,

During your career you have held several marketing roles, and The Wall Street Journal has branded you a marketing guru.  What are the most pertinent challenges confronting today

May 5th, 2006 by admin

Although it might be impossible to clearly define the word, "Brand," it is possible to track the way companies have gone about trying to brand their products.  In the first few pages of the book Brand Sense, Martin Lindstrom concisely tracks the evolution of branding in the 20th Century.

• USP - Unique Selling Proposition - In the 1950s the Unique Selling Proposition, "ensured that the physical product, rather than the brand was the core differential."
• ESP - Emotional Selling Proposition - In the 1960s "similar product were perceived as different primarily because of an emotional attachment. Think of Coke and Pepsi."
• OSP - Organizational Selling Proposition - In the 1980s "the organization or corporation behind the brand  in fact became the brand."  Nike is a good example.
• BSP - Brand Selling Proposition - In the 1990s "the brand was stronger than the physical dimensions of the product.  think Harry Potter, Pokemon, Disney, or M&M’s."
• MSP - Me Selling Proposition - Recently interactivity  and technological innovation "have seen consumers taking ownership of the brands… Nike and Levi’s websites offer to customize any of their models exactly to your need and size."
• HSP - Holistic Selling Proposition - For Martin Lindstrom this is the next branding permutation.  Martin writes, "HSP brands are those that not only anchor themselves in tradition, but also adopt religious characteristics at the same time they leverage the concept of sensory branding as a holistic way of spreading the news.  Indeed, Martin Lindstrom is not alone in predicting Holistic Branding.  Patrick Hanlon outlines a similar theory in his book, Primal Branding.

May 4th, 2006 by admin

Many words have been exchanged both in print and online trying to define the word "Brand."  It has been defined as everything from a blueprint that a company uses, to a position in the mind of the customer.  The first takes an internal view, while the later an external view.

I prefer to take an Eastern point of view, a brand is everything about the product and nothing at the same time.  It is both internal and external.  A logo is part of a brand, but a brand is not a logo.  The company is a brand, but a brand cannot be completely defined by a company.  The brand is the product, but stripped of its name association the product ceases to be a brand.

It helps me to think of a brand like a sub-atomic particle.  A long time ago I read the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters.   Tenets from this book continue to direct my thought today.  Once you pinpoint the brand as a snapshot in time, there are things you cannot know about it.  A brand is a holistic, dynamic entity. Once a brand is disected and analyzed, the analyzed object ceases to mirror its current reality. 

April 28th, 2006 by admin

Divide and conquer is the wrong mentality when it comes to
branding. Instead think along the lines of combine and
surrender.

The last
thing you want in a brand campaign is a fragmented marketplace.  Figure out how
to connect your marketplaces.  You want them to be talking to one another.  Use
social networking tools such as blogs, forums, and wikis.  It is through conversations between customers that brands are built and take on a life of
their own.

Stop
trying to imprint your brand message onto your audience.  Conquering
through advertising no longer works.  Instead, surrender to the people.
They are the ones that will build it. A brand is an idea in the mind of
the customer. Give your customers an arena to freely develop their
conception of you.

Once you
combine and surrender to your customers you might find out that they have a
more wonderful idea of what your brand should be that you could ever
think up yourself.

Surrendering
creates transparency.  You will no longer have to guess why people choose your
product or service.  Your customers will tell you what aspects of your service
you should concentrate one and which aspects you might need to change or
delete.

Divide
and conquer is old school marketing.  Marketing Segmentation is
dead. 

Combine
and Surrender is the new way.  Fire the marketing department and hire the
customer.

By Drew Hendricks

April 27th, 2006 by admin

Martin Lindstrom, author of Brand Sense, published an article on ClickZ the other day entitled "The Story of Branding."  Using the example of three rocks he illustrates the power of a story when it comes to establishing a brand.  Take three identical rocks.  While at first glance the three rocks might appear to be identical, once you find out the origins of the rocks, or their story, one becomes more valuable than another.  For Martin it is not the rock itself that gives it value, but rather the fact that it was from the moon or the Berlin Wall.

Seth Godin wrote a book about this very idea called, All Marketers Are Liars.

Both Seth and Martin are right.  It is the stories we hear and choose to believe that create value and brand perception.  This is not to say that a Company can spin out any old lie they want.  If it is too far off from the truth, then no one will believe it.  Or worse yet people will find out they were deceived and the story would have a negative impact.

The key is customers must choose to believe these stories.  If a company produces schlock and tries to spin a story of quality, no one will believe it for long.

April 26th, 2006 by admin

If I were to ask the average person walking down the street to describe a company’s brand message, more often than not that person would start with the logo.  Like it or not, the logo is an important piece of an overall brand massage.

Logolounge tracks the design trend of logos.  While on one hand it is fascinating to look at the similar trends between logos, on the other hand it is a scary testament to a lack of creativity in the final product.  I can only wonder how many truly great designs fell onto the cutting room floor because upper management wanted something a little more cutting edge.  "Cutting edge" being a euphemism for "more like our competitors."

• 2005 Trends
• 2004 Trends
• 2003 Trends

April 25th, 2006 by admin

Yesterday, I examined the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-George Gadamer in relation to spreading a brand’s message.  Extrapolating from Gadamer’s writings, I found that for a brand’s message to resonate with a consumer, it must match that person’s conceptual horizon.  Gadamer, not being a business man, used abstract terms such as individuals, understanding, and the fusion of horizons.  Seth Godin, on the other hand, is a business man and restates the same principle nearly 46 years later when he wrote, "Your story has to be grounded in the worldview of your intended audience."

Whether you like Gadamer’s abstract choice of words or Seth Godin’s, the principle remains the same.  The marketer is the one who has to adapt to match the consumer.  The consumer is viewed as an unchanging force that must be adapted to.

This piece of advice, while valuable, has risky implications for the marketer whose task is to develop a long term strategy.  The risk is that the marketer will be too fixated on matching the current world to properly come up with a plan to get consumers from their current worldview A to a worldview B five years down the line.

A  marketing strategist’s task is to not only match the customers current state, but mold the customer and prepare them for a future vision of the world.  How does one do this?

A popular tactic many companies use to accomplish this task is through movie product placements.  Think back at how many movies you have seen that showed actors using fanciful products with actual product names.  The movie script enables the marketers to transport the viewer to a future point in time where that particular world view makes sense.  While watching the movie the viewer has a willing suspension of disbelief and the otherwise disjointed marketing message magically resonates. Years down the linem, when the product does come out, the customer remembers the scene from the movie showing just how useful that product can be. 

If your task is to prepare an audience for a product five years down the line and your company doesn’t have 50 million dollars for movie product placements, then your task is much more difficult.  However, it is not impossible.  What you need to remember is to not fall into trap of simple tailoring or message to current worldviews and expectations.  In the words of Seth Godin your message simply has to be "grounded in the worldview."

Build the seeds of long term strategies into your short
term marketing pieces.  these seeds need to be subtle.  Ideally, customers will not even
notice these seeds until it is time for them to sprout.  When it time for the seed to sprout their message resonates.  This resonation is possible because as the seeds germinated, they subconsciously shaped a future world view that included a demand for your new product.