Tag Archives: marketing

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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May 12, 2016 · 10:59 am

Girl Talk

As our girls were growing up, I tried very hard not to speak in gender-specific terms. There were no “firemen” or “policemen” or even “postmen.” In part, I guess I wanted to send a subtle message that anyone can do anything – boys or girls, men or women. The other part was just a feeling that taking on a tone of talking to girls in a language more specific to girls (which I have no clue about) was silly.

English: Gender neutral toilet sign at departm...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I bring this up because I was reminded both of that and of David Ogilvy‘s famous quote this morning as I read about some research from the Fluent people. Ogilvy is known for reminding us that “The customer is not a moron. She is your wife.” You can get the full report here, but the Fluent research talks about how many of us are speaking to our female target audiences and how they want us to do so:

Women overwhelmingly prefer gender-neutral ads. 73% of women say they sometimes receive marketing messages directed specifically to women…74% say they prefer marketing messages to be gender-neutral.

Fluent surveyed 1,443 US female internet users ages 18 and older to come up with that number and the study was designed to better understand the impact of online and offline marketing channels on their purchasing decisions and how engagement varies across different age groups.  So while only 26% of respondents said they preferred marketing messages directed specifically to women, almost three-quarters of female internet users said they prefer marketing messages to be gender neutral. A little out of touch, no?

Smart marketing these days isn’t about selling anything.  We need to understand our customers and the problem they have which our product or service solves.  Explaining that you’re there to help with that – being a resource – is like talking to your friends and not to a mark. Speaking in clear, gender-neutral language is generally how I speak with my friends.  You?

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April 12, 2016 · 11:22 am

Get Dirty

It’s amazing how much every business depends on technology.  Whether it’s as basic as email or as complex as cross-platform measurement and analysis, it’s hard to find a job that hasn’t been changed over the last two decades by the advent of various technologies.  That’s obvious for those of us who work with technology and technology-related businesses every day.  It’s less obvious for people in non-tech businesses or areas of responsibility such as accounting.

English: This diagram details the layout and w...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One thing I see happening is that we tend to isolate ourselves into our primary areas of responsibility.  We learn, for example, what good marketing entails but we draw the line at understanding the technology that drives much marketing activity.  We might write great content but we have little notion about what’s involved in making that content visible both to humans and to search engines.  It gets worse as you go higher up the food chain.  I’ve known plenty of managers or directors or higher-ups who not only don’t get their hands dirty but don’t wish to understand much of anything involved in the workflow.  They love to see the finished sausage but they refuse to see how it’s made.

We can’t allow specialization to keep us from knowing a little bit about a lot. I’ll give you an example.  I got a frantic call from a client years ago.  Their new website wasn’t showing up in Google and they couldn’t figure out why.  They had used an outside developer who was unreachable (I think avoiding them since they were kind of high maintenance) and wanted to fix the issue.  One look at the homepage code showed that the developer had used a “Noindex” command which tells the search engines to ignore the page.  It’s a common thing done in development and easy to spot if you know about it. I’m certainly no coder but by knowing a little bit about it, I could help.  Problem solved.

We need to know more than just our jobs.  We need to know a little bit of everything.  You have to get your hands dirty in many processes and speak the languages spoken elsewhere in your company – tech, finance, marketing, whatever. Does that make sense?

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