Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

August 4, 2016 · 10:06 am

Rethinking Brands As People

If you’ve ever spent any time working in marketing you have probably participated in a couple of exercises. One is where you work on “personas” – models of personality. One is for the brand and there are others for various customer segments. It’s an attempt to humanize the brand and to make the customer less of an abstraction. It’s the former exercise that’s our topic today, and there is an element in the brand persona process that some research shows is overlooked.

I’ve sat in meetings where the room tries to figure out our business’ personality traits. What is our attitude? Where do our values lie and what are our strengths and weaknesses? A brand does this to make it easy for customers to relate to and bond with us. That persona is then used to create everything from messaging to packaging to customer service scripts. There are a couple of areas that are common to any brand, or should be according to some research by the folks at Edelman. They released The 2016 EARNED BRAND study, which is a global online survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries that examines the consumer-brand relationship across 18 brand categories.

The study found that brands globally and across many categories were failing to connect. Part of that might be reflective of the things the study measured: how the brand embodies a unique character, builds trust at every touchpoint, and invites sharing, inspires partnership. Generally, most brands come up very short on those traits and that prompted a thought.

Maybe instead of just figuring out what our brand is we ought to spend time trying to really humanize it by behaving in ways that a good friend ought to. Think about your closest friends. The three characteristics enumerated above and among those measured by the survey are probably things you’d say about your close friends. In business, it’s not just about who were are as a brand but how we present ourselves and treat our customers. As brands, if we want to be “people” perhaps we ought to start acting as good people do. Listen more, be memorable, do good things in our communities, and build trust.

Make sense?

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July 27, 2016 · 9:36 am

Restoring The Balance And Destroying The Blocking

If you are in business and you market that business at all, chances are that you’re using digital media of one form or another to do so. I suspect that much of your budget for that has shifted a bit based on how widespread the ad-blocking phenomenon has become. I’ve written about it a few times and the practice of installing ad blocking software on computers and mobile devices continues to grow.

While several ad agencies and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) continue to denounce the software as violating the value exchange compact (attention to ads in exchange for free content), they’re finally getting around to studying ways to get consumers to turn off the blocking software. Both the IAB and Omnicom published some results of their studies and they’re enlightening.

Advertisements, Salem, Massachusetts

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First Omnicom. Their study found that many ad-blocking users don’t dislike all advertising. They hate popups (who doesn’t!). 44% of those polled associate ad blocking mostly with blocking pop-up advertising. Popups are a type of ad that interrupts the content consuming experience, and that’s what’s pissing consumers off. As an aside, TV commercials do the same interrupting – is a remote control an ad blocker? Then there was this, as reported by MediaPost:

If consumers perceive a positive value exchange with websites, most are willing to go back to an ad-centric experience. In fact, consumers can be motivated to not only turn off their ad blockers, but will also disable them. Among those factors that would entice them to disable ad blockers, 28% would do so if the blockers slowed down their browsing speed, 24% if the ad blocker allows advertisements via payment, and 23% if they trusted websites to not serve annoying ads.  Consumers would disable their ad blockers if the website promised non-intrusive ads (35%).

In other words, people get that publishers need to monetize their content and don’t mind ads per se. They do mind being overwhelmed by ads or having to close several popups to get to the content they want. The IAB data echoed this:

A total of 330 people who said they used ad blockers blamed ads for making websites slower, either because the ads were too data-heavy or because there were too many of them…Not surprisingly, animated, moving and autoplay ads irritated consumers who used ad blockers the most, as did ads that covered up content and long video promos.

All of this sounds like common sense to me. Consumers don’t want their content consumption interrupted, delayed, or slowed-down. They don’t want to expend excess data loading ads. They understand the basic economics of the attention/value exchange but feel that publishers have tilted the balance too far in their own direction and are retaliating by blocking the ads that do so. If we’ll restore the balance the chances are good that they’ll go back to looking at the ads. Make sense?

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July 26, 2016 · 12:20 pm

Protecting Your Brand With Common Sense

The Olympic Games are almost upon us. Like most major sporting organizations, the Olympic Committee and the US Olympic Committee protect their commercial marks aggressively. That intellectual property is a huge piece of the value they sell to official sponsors and keeping non-sponsors from doing ambush marketing is a big part of any sports organization’s daily life. It becomes front and center during marquee events. 

Companies find ways around this enforcement, of course. You’ve probably seen dozens of ads about “The Big Game” every January. You know they reference The Super Bowl even though it’s never said, don’t you. It’s a term the NFL tried to protect but was unable to.  The USOC and IOC are just as aggressive about terminology ranging from the obvious (Olympics, Games, Medal, Rio) to the less obvious (Effort, Performance, Challenge).

Today isn’t about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Having spent much of my career selling and protecting commercial sponsorships of sporting events, you can imagine where I come out on ambushing. I do, however, have a bone to pick from the other side of my career, which is digital. I think it’s instructive for all of us.

Social media is social. Sharable. A conversation. More importantly, social media has become how many people learn and stay in touch with what’s going on in the world. Not in the USOC’s eyes, apparently. They sent a letter out last week which reinforces all of the aforementioned commercial restrictions around the upcoming games, especially with respect to athletes who may be sponsored by non-USOC or Olympic sponsors. But the letter went further.

“Commercial entities may not post about the Trials or Games on their corporate social media accounts. This restriction includes the use of USOC’s trademarks in hashtags such as #Rio2016 or #TeamUSA.”

It doesn’t stop there. The same letter sent by the USOC reminds companies (except for those involved in news media) that they can’t reference any Olympic results or share or repost anything from the official Olympic account. I think that’s pretty far over the foul line. Social media by definition is meant to be circulated and almost any sponsor will mention “going viral” as one of their goals. How can you tweet or mention anything about the games without using a tag that’s discoverable? Why wouldn’t you want broader attention drawn to your event if it’s not otherwise a commercial message? Yes, I understand (better than most!) how sponsors try to share the brand equity of the event without authorization, but if all they’re doing is retweeting your own post, how are they sharing brand equity?

Protecting intellectual property is one of the most important things any brand or business can do. There are limits, however, and that protection should hardly ever interfere with common sense and the world of social sharing. You certainly don’t want to be seen as a bully. Do you agree with that?

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