Is K-Mart’s “Ship My Pants” a good Ad?

16 May 2013

I have to confess, it’s a very cute ad. It makes me giggle every time. I’ve shown it to my teenage kids, I’ve posted it on Facebook and Twitter. And I’ve watched it again and giggled more. But is it a good ad? And I guess the bigger question might be is it the right ad for K-Mart?

Here’s the ad:

Is it a Good Ad?

The test of a good ad that I use is the ABC’S of Advertising which is Attention, Branding Communication and Stickiness.

Attention: A+ This ad definitely captures attention with a high degree of humor. It’s as funny as a Seinfeld episode. And for those of us, like me, it has that sharing power set up perfectly for social media.
Branding: C+ The ad doesn’t do that great of a job with the brand. And right now, K-Mart is definitely at the Indifferent stage of the Brand Love Curve, so what it really needs is to help separate the brand from the pack. Other than scoring for “this brand is funny”, this doesn’t really separate K-Mart out from the pack? I’d likely give this a higher score if the brand was targeted to a younger audience or if it was in an edgier category, the joke would have been a perfect fit for (e.g. EB Games or West 49)
Communication: B+ If K-Mart’s only objective is to establish that it does shipping, then it would be A+, but because of the vast needs for the brand, I’m a bit surprised they can turn K-Mart around by offering free shipping. This does nothing to separate the brand: LL Bean can ship pants, but LL Bean has pants I want shipped. The other weird part of the communication is that 90% of the visuals are IN the store yet the real big win is there’s an on-line play. If it’s IN the store, most items in a mass merchandiser store are so small that you don’t need them shipped. So I’m saying mixed.
Stickiness: A It certainly sticks and the amount of sharing and talk value it has generate helps. It may be polarizing to certain segments of the mass audience–some may be offended–so it may stick for the wrong reason with the wrong circumstances.

So overall, I’d rate the ad a solid B+ to A=. Very funny Ad.

But, is it the right Ad for K-Mart?

Let’s look at the K-Mart strategy through the lens of the 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you.

Brand Promise: The promise as stated is you can now get all the great stuff at K-Mart shipped right to your house. Who is the target? Based on the tone of the ad, you would think it’s such a younger audience, but does a younger audience shop at K-Mart. I know there will be people say “well with this funny ad, maybe now kids will shop there?” Really? Is that how you think advertising works?

Strategy: I’m not quite getting the strategy here. K-Mart is nearly bankrupt and has not had a true reason for being for the last 40 years. Brands are either different, better or cheaper. Wal-Mart beats it on price, Target beats it on style.

Story: The is trying to deliver the brand promise, but the tone feels wrong. As Ted Mathews, author of Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* (*It’s what people think of you.) said “The K-Mart ad is completely off-brand character. It will alienate the last remaining 50+ customers they have. This is what happens without a Brand Foundation.

Innovation: This is 2013. E-Commerce isn’t really innovative is it? The idea that I can order pants on-line and have them shipped to my house might have been innovative around 1997. But nowadays, buying pants on-line doesn’t exactly say “Hey Everyone K-Mart is really innovative”.

Experience: If there was a brand death pool, K-Mart would be near the top of the list. Every time I drive by one, only then am I reminded that they still exist. And then I say “why?”. As I watched this ad, my first reaction was “yeah, but they are still crappy pants that no one wants”. It reminds me of the Woody Allen joke: ”this steak is awful and the portions are so small”. Yes I can ship the pants, but quite frankly, I don’t want the pants.

Using these 5 Connections, I would say that, other than a funny gag, the ad does nothing to connect consumers with the K-Mart Brand.

Ship My Pants: Good Ad, Wrong Brand

Follow me on Twitter @GrayRobertson1

Follow Ted Mathews on Twitter @WeWantTed

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How will Brand Leaders Win with Media in the Future?

26 April 2013

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I’m not a media expert at all. So there will be no answers here, just questions about where I might be confused about the future or where I might see an impact to my media thinking. I come at everything through the lens of the Brand Leader. My questions are more about the impact on consumer behaviour and how the brand can win through media in the future. If you’re a media expert, feel free to add solutions. At this point, like most Brand Leaders, I’m a bit confused and I just have questions, not really solutions!

1. Will people watch even more TV in the future?

I love asking this question because it usually confuses people, because of the expected downward trend of TV viewership over the last 10 years. At first, this question might sound crazy, but with more tablets and instant internet access everywhere, we should expect a shift to watching more TV, not less. This year, books are up 13% due to increased readership via tablets. Will we see that impact to TV? More access means more use. If you’re on the subway, an airplane, waiting to pick up your kids or on your lunch hour, wouldn’t it be great just to catch an episode of Modern Family? Now you can. And while this is at the early stages with early adopters, we’ll quickly see it going mass over the next few years. But the TV model will have to change. Consumers won’t want to be watching 8 minutes of TV ads. It seems people see their computer as their personal space and they find intrusive advertising even more annoying on their computer than they do their TV. We need a new model for TV advertising–I haven’t seen it yet.

As a Brand Leader, I recommend that you don’t give up on TV just yet. Maybe it will be on a tablet or a phone. Just be a bit more creative. Maybe you need to make your spots more interesting to take advantage of viral shares. Make sure your spots are more engaging so people want to watch rather than just tolerate. Be open to integrating your brand right into the shows, or maybe go back to the past when brand sponsorship kicked off every 1950s TV show.

2. How can Advertisers Capture the Internet Babies (12-22 years old) as they move into adulthood?

As someone said, this segment never “goes on-line” because they are “always on-line”. They are never “off-line”. Last year, my 14-year-old daughter had 3 friends over and when teens visit, you have to expect a bit of excess noise. All of a sudden, there was silence for 20 minutes. I thought they must have left but then I see four teenagers all sitting at the kitchen table texting away, not a word being said. Complete silence. This generation lives on-line and put their lives on-line. It remains confusing as to their true view of privacy–do they want more or do they just figure their lives are an open book.

This group has their priorities shaped by the age of instant access. They want everything now–sports scores, rumours, or videos of what they just saw on TV. They are multi-tasking so much it’s arguable they never give anything complete focus. When they watch TV, they have the laptop up, their cell phone in hand–navigating Facebook, twitter, texting, instagram and Skype all at once. No wonder ADD is growing. They choose Apps over software, expecting an App solution for any problem they have. They see advertising as completely ubiquitous and are more open to brands than other generations. But how they consume media is completely different. E-Commerce is an expectation, as they buy songs, games and movies or a new phone case at a whim.

As a Brand Leader, we need help to figure out how to win with this group when they turn 25? I know as a parent of this age group, I have no wisdom I can pass on. Maybe someone in this age group can help us out, because I’m utterly confused.

3. Can Newspapers even Survive?

So far, newspapers haven’t figured out the profit model between the traditional broadsheet and the on-line versions. Making it free was likely a mistake, and makes it hard to turn back. If your newspaper has been free on-line since 1997, I’ll be pissed off if you now expect me to pay for it. If I’m interested in the topic, I’ll just Google the same headline and find a free version. As long as newspaper publishers see a direct link between the actual broadsheet and the newspaper they run the risk of extinction. If you think a newspaper is a collection of amazing journalists, you’re off to a good start. But if you think it has to be a broadsheet, then you’re completely lost.

News now is instant, ubiquitous and more casual/social. The tweeting that went on during the US presidential debate (e.g. Big Bird) is evidence of how social media drives the story. I don’t need to read a journalists take on it. I already know. By the time the broadsheet version of the newspaper is ready, this story is now old news and even has had 12-18 more hours to evolve into a completely new story line. The broadsheet can’t keep up. I love the business model for the Huffington Post. What started as on-line political opinion is becoming a source for broader news–entertainment, sports and lifestyle stories. With more publishers going without a printed version (e.g. Newsweek just announced they’re cancelling their printed version), this has to be the future.

As a Brand Leader, I’d recommend moving your Newspaper spend on-line or even choose other mainstream media options. You’ve put up with the bad production quality for 100 years–is there really anyone under 50 still reading.

4. Can Advertisers Figure Out how to Win in the New World?

The Commodity Brands that have funded mainstream media remain completely confused.

Traditional media has always been funded by advertisers whether that means TV ads for 8-12 minutes per hour, newspapers and magazines with 25-40% of the space for ads and radio with ads every second song. Traditional Media has been free as long as you were willing to put up with advertising interrupting your usage of the media. That ability to interrupt consumers allowed the Commodity Brands (dish soap, diapers, toothpaste, razor blades and batteries) to break through to consumers, as they sat captive and watching their favourite TV show.

But New Media is free, unbridled and fairly commercial free. In general, a lot of the advertising still just sits there along the sidelines where we don’t click. While the high interest and high involvement brands have started to figure out how to use the New Media, the Commodities remain in a state of confusion. If you want to see what confusion looks like, go see Head and Shoulder’s twitter page with 320 followers or Bounce’s Facebook page “where they talk about fresh laundry” (their words, not mine)

These Commodity brands need to either get people more involved, which Dove is the best in class brand, or they need dial-up the potential importance for a core target which Tide has done a good job. As we see many of the new media companies (Facebook) struggling to figure out how to make more money from Advertisers, there needs to be a step up in creativity to find new solutions. Banner ads that just sit along the side aren’t going to do much for the advertiser or the media owner. If social media sites want to win over these commodity brands, they need find that right balance of interrupting consumers without annoying their membership.

5. Are there too many Social Media Options?

I know there are still new social media options every month, but most of these feel fairly niche. In the mainstream social media sites, we are seeing that winners have emerged and they are turning into leaders as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linked In and Wikipedia all now dominant in their given area. It looks impossible for a new entrant to really challenge them. If a new entrant were to try for leap-frog strategy, these leaders would just duplicate the innovation and kill the challenger. Every industry has gone through a similar pattern: early innovation, divergence of brand options, then a few power brands emerge, and then a power play where the strong squeeze out the weak through mergers and acquisitions until there are a handful of brand owners remaining.

As these Social Media sites look to turn their power into wealth, we will see a shift from fighting for members to fighting for advertiser dollars. This will likely force a convergence of social media options where the strongest brands try to squeeze out the smaller sites. There are already small signs in Google’s strategy they are thinking this way–trying to be the one stop shop. Mergers are always tend to surprise us, almost the unimaginable. Can you imagine Facebook buying LinkedIn? Who knows, maybe we’ll even see a merger between social media brands and mainstream networks. AOL already tried it with Time-Warner. But can you imagine Google buying CNN, Facebook buying MTV or NBC buying the Huffington Post? If you’re an Advertiser, expect some uncertainty in the next few years and expect a few mergers.

6. Will New Media people ever be able to Convince Brand Leaders of what they Should do?

Marketers love what they know. It feels safe. The people who spend 100% of their lives living and breathing new media know what Brand Leaders don’t know. The problem is there is no bridge between the Brand Leader and New Media. New Media don’t really get the marketers, don’t understand their motivations and how they think. So they just keep barking and no one is listening. Here are some tips: Start with the consumer and map out how they interact. Don’t start with the media. Demonstrate to me that you understand my brand: who is my target, how do they shop, what is my main benefit, the key issues I face, strategic options available and how my brand makes money. Show me things other brands in my predicament have done and the results. Be fundamental in the way you talk with me. Look at how I was trained, strategy first, tactics second, execution third. Go in that order so I can follow along. Don’t show me what Bud did on the Super Bowl. Teach me as much as you can, because if I have more knowledge I’ll be more comfortable. And help me to sell it in, because everyone above me is even more confused than I am. Right now, we are a little scared and we’re doing this because we know we should, not because we know what we’re doing. Help us.

When It Comes to New Media, Brand Leaders still need to be Fundamentally Sound

For a Media Overview that can help Brand Leaders get better media plans by learning more about both traditional and digital options, read the following presentation:

How to go Deeper on the Analysis of your Brand

21 April 2013

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Too many times, marketers come to conclusions based on pure instincts and put them forward to their management team and the set of peers who might agree or disagree. The problem with instincts is that because it’s really just an opinion, with nothing to substantiate it. And even if you are right, you’ll have a hard time convincing others, so anyone with a counter view, retains their own opinion and the team remains divided. Even if they go along with it, they remain a quiet dissenter just waiting for it to fail and waiting to say “I told you so”.

When you don’t go deep on your thinking, I call it surface thinking. I equate “surface thinking” to “surface cleaning”. When your mother is coming over to visit in half an hour, you “surface clean” by quickly take everything and jam into the drawers or closets where she won’t be able to see. You never really clean up. The same thing holds with “surface thinking”. Yes, you think, but it stays at the opinion level. You don’t dig in to the data, you don’t listen to others or go do the necessary research to back up your opinion. You never really go deep enough to uncover the deep rich insightful conclusions. And everyone knows it.

Opinions are great. Every leader should have one and be able to articulate their views. But it’s best when you can layer it in fact. One good rule for communicating your opinion is something I learned in my first year Logic class: Premise, Premise, Conclusion. Try it out, next time you’re engaged in debate. Just make sure the premise is backed by fact.

So what happens when you just do “surface thinking”:

The programs bomb, and because you don’t know what elements of the program really failed, you throw out the entire program—the strategy was wrong, the tactics didn’t do what you hoped, the goals weren’t set up right and even the agency did a bad job. You throw it all out, and might even fire the agency.
There’s management doubt from your boss and your peers. They can clearly see you don’t go deep, so they remain unconvinced or even confused. They might confront you with their own opinion, but then we just end up with two talking heads that refuse to go deep. But, to protect themselves against a strategy they aren’t quite sure of, they subconsciously short-change you on investment or even on support from their team.
When you just operate at the surface level, when you’re debating a topic, instead of the team going deep and seeking out real and rich facts to support one side or the other, the conversation moves sideways instead of deep. What you’ll notice is you’ll be talking about distribution at the surface level, and because no one in the room wants to go deep, they say “well what about the new cheery flavor, I took it home and my wife didn’t like it, are we sure it’s going to work” or “this new golf shirt for the sales meeting is very cool, I want one of these puppies”. The leadership team spins, round and round, never diving deep enough to solve the issues, just casually moves on to new issues. This is how bad decisions or no decisions get made.

How to go Deeper

The best way go deep on your analysis, ask “so what does that mean” at least five times and watch the information gets richer and deeper.

Looking at the Gray’s Cookie example above, intuitively, it makes sense that going after Health Food Stores could be one option put on the table. But to say you need to be better, without digging in remains an unsubstantiated opinion. As you dig deeper, you see that going after Health Food stores, who are highly independent is labor intensive and the payback is just not there. Yes, you’re way under-developed. But it’s more expensive than other options. When you bring the option of going after mass into the mix, which is head office driven, you start to see a higher return on the investment. This is just a fictional example, but look how the thinking gets richer at each stage. Force yourself to keep asking “so what does this mean” or “why” pushing the analysis harder and harder.

Thinking Time Questions that will Help you Go Deeper

The first analysis is “What do we know?” with 5 key questions to help you sort through your analysis:

What do we know? This should be fact based and you know it for sure.
What do we assume? Your educated/knowledge based conclusion that helps us bridge between fact, and speculation.
What we think? Based on facts, and assumptions, you should be able to say what we think will happen.
What do we need to find out? There may be unknowns still.
What are we going to do? It’s the action that comes out of this thinking.

It forces you to start grouping your learning, forces you to start drawing conclusions and it enables your reader to separate fact (the back ground information) from opinion (where you are trying to take them)

The second type of analysis is “Where are we?” with 5 key questions to help you sort through your analysis:

Where are we?
Why are we here?
Where could we be?
How can we get there?
What do we need to do to get there?

These questions help frame your thinking as you go into a Brand Plan. The first question helps the analysis, the second with the key issues, the third frames the vision and objectives, the fourth gets into strategy and tactics and the fifth gets into the execution. My challenge to you: update it every 3-6 months, or every time you do something major. You’ll be surprised that doing something can actually impact ”where are we?” on the analysis.

The Deeper the Thinking, the Smarter the Leader

To read more on How to Analyze Your Brand, read the presentation below:

How to Determine your Brand’s Health using Brand Funnels

31 March 2013

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Brand Funnels

Every brand should understand the details of their Brand Funnel–what’s causing any strength, weakness, changes versus last year or gaps versus competitors. A classic funnel would measure awareness, familiar, consider, purchase, repeat and loyal. But in the change of consumer behavior over the last 10 years, I would now add SEARCH between consider and purchase.

At the very least, you should be measuring Awareness, Purchase and Loyalty rates. While sales, share and profits are the obvious measurements of a brand, they are easy to see but are the end result.

Brand Health vs Brand Wealth

When we first analyze a brand’s performance, we start by looking at the wealth of the brand and look at things like sales, share, margins. That’s a great starting point, but anyone can see those numbers. But that’s like judging someone’s health just by looking at them. You’d miss out on the cholesterol, blood pressure and the internal health an xray or MRI might show. Looking at Brand Health would include looking at how well the brand funnel performs, voice of customer, satisfaction scores and any major changes in market trends. Think of Brand Wealth as the measures you can easily see, and the Brand Health as those measures you can’t easily see.

The brand funnel provides a rich diagnosis of the true health of the brand before they even show up in share reports and provides possible indicators of future performance. Almost like a finger print, every brand has a unique brand funnel. Your brand will have certain strength as well as leaks in the funnel.

Analyzing Brand Funnels

Here are the five steps to analyzing the brand funnels.

First take a look at the absolute Brand Funnel scores, compare them to last year, compare to competitors and versus the category norms. An Indifferent brand will have a skinny funnel, a Like It brand will have a funnel that quickly narrows near purchase. Loved Brands will have a more robust funnel, maybe with one easily identified gap. And Beloved Brands have no gaps on the funnel.
Then you want to look the Brand Funnel Ratios, finding the percent conversion from one stage to the next. To create the ratios, divide the absolute number by the number above it on the funnel. For instance in the example above, take the Familiar score of 87% and divide it by the Awareness score of 93% and the ratio conversion is 91%. That means that 91% of those who become Aware will move to Familiar.
What’s most useful is to compare the Ratios of your Brand to the Ratios of your nearest competitor. In this second part of the analysis, the ratio becomes the focus.
You then want to compare the ratios, finding the gap at each of the stages. You will start to see where your ratio will either be stronger or weaker than the comparison brand.
Analyzing the difference between the two brands finds the biggest gaps and begins telling a strategic story for the gap.

Matching the Funnel up The Brand Love Curve

In the consumer’s mind, brands sit on a Brand Love Curve, with brands going from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and finally becoming a Beloved Brand for Life. At the Beloved stage, demand becomes desire, needs become cravings, thinking is replaced with feelings. Consumers become outspoken fans. It’s this connection that helps drive power for your brand: power versus competitors, versus customers, versus suppliers and even versus the same consumers you’re connected with. The farther along the curve, the more power for the brand. It’s important that you understand where your brand sits on the Love Curve and begin figuring out how to move it along towards becoming a Beloved Brand.

With each stage of the Brand Love Curve, the consumer will see your brand differently. The worst case is when consumers have “no opinion” of your brand. They just don’t care. It’s like those restaurants you stop at in the middle of no-where that are called “restaurant”. In those cases, there is no other choice so you may as well just name it restaurant. But in highly competitive markets, you survive by being liked, but you thrive by being loved. Be honest with yourself as to what stage you are at, and try to figure out how to be more loved, with a vision of getting to the Beloved Brand stage.

Indifferent: When you are indifferent, you’ll have a very skinny funnel, starting with very little awareness and consideration. The issue is no one really knows about your brand. What could be holding your brand back is a) concept that’s not breaking through into the marketplace b) poor execution behind the awareness driving programs or c) lack of investment behind the right strategy. The strategic focus should be on driving Awareness and Consideration to establish your brand into the minds of consumers and in the marketplace. Align the brand promise and the communication of that brand promise to begin gaining customers.
Like It: At the Like It stage, the funnel is fairly strong at the top but quickly narrows at purchase and has a very weak bottom part of the brand funnel. As people see your brand as a good rational choice, they might consider it and use it, but it lacks separation from the other brands and it’s missing that emotional connection. Brands stuck here usually focus on what they do (features) and not what the consumer wants (benefits) In the funnel, you’ll see pretty strong awareness and consideration but you’ll lose out at the purchase stage and have no real repeat or loyalty at all. You’ll notice fairly high trade spend just so you can keep your share going–and you use price as a weapon to close the deal. The best strategy here is to begin to Separate Your Brand from the clutter of the market, by establishing a brand promise based on benefits–rational and emotional. A brand like Dove was at the Like It stage back in the 1990s. Only when they could shift from talking about themselves to talking about the consumers would they be able to establish more love for their brand.
Love It: At the Love It stage, the funnel starts to fill out, but might still have some gaps. Your focus should be on taking the connection consumers have with your brand and drive repeat and loyalty. Strategically, focus on ways to Tug at the Heart of your consumers so you can strengthen that connection you have. This is where you take a little bit of love and try to become a Beloved brand. And you should aggressively analyze any gaps on the funnel and attack them. Also, once you start to see strength versus one of your competitors, you can start to leverage that power to squeeze them out and attack their weaknesses on the brand funnel. When Samsung started to become a Loved Brand in the TV market, they took all that power to own the in-store environment shutting out brands like LG, Sharp and Panasonic. They shifted some spend from Awareness down to Purchase. Samsung now is using the cell phone and very emotional programs to try to shift from a little bit of love into a Beloved Brand.
Beloved Brand: At the Beloved stage, the brand funnel should be very robust, better than any competitors. With such strong funnel, the strategy shifts towards Continuing the Magic with creativity in marketing programs or Innovation in the product. The analysis here is to keep analyzing the funnel over time and versus competitors on a regular basis and any weakness is attacked immediately before a competitor can discover and utilize. A Beloved Brand like Special K with all their success, has decided to attack their original cereal formula to improve the taste.

Attack Your Gaps

I encourage brands to analyse the Leaks by looking at how the consumer might move along the brand going from Indifferent (unaware, not noticed) to Like It (interested, bought) to Love It (satisfied, repeater) and Beloved Brand for Life (Fan, outspoken). At each stage, match up what the consumer feels about the brand as well as what the possible reasoning for why they might reject the brand.

Brand Leaders like Sony, started to see cracks at the purchase stage as consumers started seeing just how much better Samsung when they were able to compare brands at the store level. In fact, people hung onto the Sony brand much longer than they should have. That’s actually a sign of the power that Beloved Brand status gives you.

Use Brand Funnels to Track and Manage the Health of Your Brand

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

Be a Better Brand Leader by saying “Let’s cut to the Chase” more often

17 March 2013

Cut to the Chase and Avoid the Brand Spin

Stop being that brand that keeps spinning and gets nothing done. Within most brand portfolios, there are those problem brands that just seem to spiral downward out of control. They spin, and spin and spin. Nothing gets done. Decisions don’t get made. They try something. It doesn’t work immediately. So they change course. And spin some more. Everyone thinks they have the answer, but no-one shares the same answer. And more spin.

What’s missing is a leader who will stand up to everyone on the team say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE”

Cut to the Chase with the The 40/70 Rule

I love the Colin Powell rule that when you are facing a tough decision, you need at least 40% of the information, but oddly enough, you should make the decision with no more than 70%. Once you’re in that 40-70% zone, go with your gut and make the decision.

If you make a decision with less than 40% of the information, you are shooting from the hip and you will make too many mistakes. The 70% part of the decision-making rule is what surprises many Brand Leaders. They often think that they need more than seventy percent of the information before they can make a decision. A lot of Brand Leaders want as much data as they can. Many times they hope the data will make the decision for them. But if you want the data to make the decision, then why do we need you in the Brand Leader role? Why don’t we just put the Market Research person in your job? We could pay them less and just go with the data output from the research 100% of the time.

But, in a highly competitive market, if you wait to get more than seventy percent, then the opportunity has usually passed and someone else has beaten you to the punch. A key element that supports Powell’s rule is the notion that intuition is what separates the great leaders from the average ones. Intuition is what allows us to make tough decisions, but many of us ignore our gut. Relying on too much information can stiffen a leader, paralyzing the team to seek out more data. They become afraid to make decisions. Always keep in mind that marketing is half science and half art. Don’t forget about the art. People who want certainty in their decisions end up working for other people, not leading.

So, next time you feel your team has 40-70% of the information say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE” and see if you can push them to making the best decision they can make.

Cut to the Chase with Tough Questions

One of the big spin factors is lack of alignment. Everyone at the table has their own view of what needs to be done. The team ends up paralyzed with indecision. A team moving together towards a common strategy, even if it is only a pretty good strategy, is much smarter than a team moving in three directions, with each thinking they have an amazing strategy.

Align first on the Key Issues of the Brand. In terms of analysis, there are so many ways to do it but my preference is to use a force-field analysis of Drivers and Inhibitors. Basically, drivers are what is pushing the brand and inhibitors is what’s holding it back. These are happening NOW. Then add in the a future looking analysis of Risks and Opportunities. These could happen in the future. The simplicity of this analysis helps the next stage of your brand plan, and set up the Key Issues which are focused on finding ways to continue/enhance the growth drivers, minimize or reverse the inhibitors, avoid the risks and take advantage of the opportunities.

Here’s an example of How to do a Key Issues Deck. This is something I do with clients all the time and after a 1 or 2 day session, they can feel they are aligned.

Ask the Tough Questions of the team. Tough questions make a team pause and start thinking instead of just doing. I always frame the Key Issues in question form, believing the answers to those questions become the strategy. But I believe that 90% of your effort should go into asking the big challenging questions that startle and yet motivate the team. The better the question you ask, the better the strategy. For instance, if I wanted to lose a few pounds, I could ask the question: “how can I lose weight?” which is not really a good enough question to generate rich insightful strategies. But if I were to ask a better question: “what exercise program would help me successfully lose 10 pounds and work with my busy life?” all of a sudden better strategies start coming to the surface.

Use these tough questions that force tough solutions by saying to your team: “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE”

Cut to the Chase and Find Your Difference

Part of the spin zone brands go through is they never find their own point of difference. They over-react to what competitors are doing, copying them hoping to neutralize what advantage they have. But by trying to be everything that the competitor is doing, they end being nothing really.

The most Beloved Brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or else not around for very long. in a crowded market, it’s really hard to be genuinely be significantly better. And unless your entire company is set up to be more efficient than everyone else, it really leaves different. But as you push for being different, you want to be smart and different. Use this venn diagram to brainstorm points of difference.

Then challenge the team to find their Good and Different. Use the very simple map below to see where your ideas fall.

Good But Not Different: These do very well in tests mainly because consumers have seen it before and check the right boxes in research. In market, it gets off to a pretty good start—since it still seems so familiar. However, once challenged in the market by a competitor, it falters because people start to realize it is no different at all. So they go back to their usual brand and your launch starts to go flat. This option offers limited potential.
Good But Different: These don’t always test well: consumers don’t really know what to make of it. Even after launched, it takes time to gain momentum, having to explain the story with potential investment and effort to really make the difference come to life. But once consumers start to see the differences and how it meets their needs, they equate different with “good”. It begins to gain share and generates profits for the brand. This option offers long-term sustainability.
Not Good and Not Different: These are the safest of safe. Go back into the R&D lab and pick the best one you have–even if it’s not very good. The tallest of midgets. They do pretty well in test because of the familiarity. In market, it gets off to a pretty good start, because it looks the same as what’s already in the market. But pretty soon, consumers realize that it’s the same but even worse, so it fails dramatically. What appears safe is actually highly risky. You should have followed your instincts and not launched. This option is a boring failure.
Different but Not that Good: Sometimes we get focused on the product first: it offers superior technology, but not really meeting an unmet need. So we launch what is different for the sake of being different. It does poorly in testing. Everyone along the way wonders why we are launching. But in the end, consumers don’t really care about your point of difference. And it fails. The better mousetrap that no one cares about.

Look to the grid above and say “LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE” and push your team to find something that is Good and Different.

What is Your “Let’s Cut to the Chase” Moment?

To read more about how to create a Beloved Brand:

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

How to Write a Brand Plan: The positioning statement helps frame what the brand is all about. However, the brand plan starts to make choices on how you’re going to make the most of that promise. Follow this hyperlink to read more on writing a Brand Plan: How to Write a Brand Plan
How to Write a Creative Brief. The creative brief really comes out of two sources, the brand positioning statement and the advertising strategy that should come from the brand plan. To read how to write a Creative Brief, click on this hyperlink: How to Write a Creative Brief
How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement. Before you even get into the creative brief, you should be looking at target, benefits and reason to believe. To read how to write a Brand Positioning Statement, click on this hyperlink: How to Write an Effective Brand Positioning Statement
Turning Brand Love into Power and Profits: The positioning statement sets up the promise that kick starts the connection between the brand and consumer. There are four other factors that connect: brand strategy, communication, innovation and experience. The connectivity is a source of power that can be leveraged into deeper profitability. To read more click on the hyper link: Love = Power = Profits

Pick your Social Media vehicle and follow us by clicking on the icon below:

To reach out directly, email me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

Top 5 Things Brand Leaders Should be Worried About

12 March 2013

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Are You Worried Enough?

Everywhere you look, people are telling you not to worry so much. There has become such a “Don’t worry, be happy” mentality. You can buy books on it, go on-line for tips, take a yoga class or attend seminars that are all designed to help you worry less. These might be band-aid solutions. Because if you are no longer worried and you never took any action against those worries, you might sleep better in the short run, but your brand might fall completely apart while you’re sleeping. So oddly enough, I’m here to ask you: Are you actually worried enough? And with that worry, are you taking the right action against the things that matter???

5 things you should be worried about:

The underlying brand health numbers? Most leaders track sales and share, pushing hard on a quarterly basis. But, just like a slim person that works out and runs who can have high blood pressure and cholesterol, a brand can have the same internal health issues. Brand Funnels can help you analyze where your brand really stands, against awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty, whether looking at absolute scores, ratios, comparisons with competitors or tracking over time. The Funnel also helps identify where you are on the Brand Love Curve and can help choose your brand strategy: Indifferent brands have skinny funnels throughout. You should fuel the awareness to kick-start the funnel and drive some sales. At the Like It stage, the Funnel tends to narrows at purchase. Creating a more emotional connection will keep the consumer engaged right through the funnel to the purchase and make you a little more loved than just liked. At the Love It stage, you should have robust funnels, but may still see a leak at the loyalty stage. Closing the leak and building a stronger loyal following will turn your brand into a Beloved Brand. Beloved Brands have the most ideal funnels, but you should still track and attack any weaknesses you discover before competitors can attack them. If you know the health of your brand, you’ll sleep better at night.
How aligned is everyone on your team? I’m a strategy guy, but even I can tell you that a team moving in one direction against a good strategy is better than a stagnant team still in search of the amazing strategy or moving in two or three distinct directions. Part of the problem I see with executive teams is the Leader of each functional area comes with their own bias: The finance leader thinks the brand should maintain margins and go for a lower share. The operations leader wants less skus and a more efficient plant. The sales leader wants more volume, even if it means cutting the price. And the marketing leader wants more advertising to drive share. Each answer has merit, but they are never brought together behind one plan. Strategy is about making choices. But even with a choice, unless the teams are aligned, key members will just be anticipating the failure of the choice. If you have an aligned team, you’ll rest a lot easier on the drive home each night.
What your competitors are doing? it’s important that you’re constantly tracking where your competitors are–not under-estimating them or over-reacting to their tactics. You should understand the competitors actions deeply. A great practice in a real competitive battle is to do up a full brand plan of how you anticipate they will act. That would include budgets, goals, market research, strategies and tactics. Once you find your unique selling proposition, you must work hard to maintain ownership over it. Brands have to be either unique, better or cheaper. Or else, not around for very long. In a highly competitive and combative category, use the strategies of Marketing Warfare: 1) Defensive: Leader of category or sub-category defending their territory by attacking itself or even attacking back at an aggressive competitor. 2) Offensive: Challenger’s attack on the leader to exploit a weakness or build on your own strength. 3) Flanking: An attack in an open area where the Leader is not that well established. 4) Guerrilla: Going into an area where it’s too small for the Leaders to take notice or are unable to attack back. Constantly analyzing and attacking the competition will keep you one step ahead.
What your brand will look like 5 years from now? While you are feeling pressure to make the current quarter, if you keep going quarter-by-quarter, you’ll start to feel like a mouse who is constantly running just to make that next quarter. But every 90 days, you’re missing that long-term vision, purpose and brand values that can help guide your organization in driving the brand’s growth. Does everyone in your organization know the brand vision? Does everyone know and live the Brand’s DNA, weaving it into everything that you do. Once you establish your Brand’s DNA, it should drive every part of your brand organization–brand plan, communications, people, R&D, profitability and sales organization. Everything should drive the relationship between your brand and consumer. If you know where your brand’s direction and get everyone moving towards that common direction, trust me, you’ll feel a hell of a lot better as the leader.
How good are your people? A good leader recognizes that they are only as good as their people. The better your people, the better the work, and that means the better results. You should evaluate your team against skills, behaviors and experiences. To drive effective Brand Leaders, a good rule would be 10% of the time should be on training–not just at junior levels but right up to the Brand Leaders. Many companies are cutting back on training, and you’ll start to see the gaps in your people. Using the 10% rule would mean up to 20 training days–that would be used against strategic thinking, analytics, planning, leading and managing. But if you’re only doing 2-3 days of off-site training or the training you’re doing is to meet corporate compliance, then you’ll notice that the performance of your people just won’t be there. Who will replace the best people on your team? Who will replace you? That should concern you. What’s happening in marketing these days is we hire a bright person and just throw them into the job. While “learning on the job” is a reality in marketing, there needs to be a balance with coaching and training. If you’re relying on bosses to do the training, you have to realize that manager never received any training either so how competent are they to teach? And if you’re worried about investing in training and then the person quits, you might actually realize that maybe if you invested in training you might drive up the retention. A recent study shows that 52% of employees say they would leave a role because of their direct manager, and two-thirds are convinced their managers don’t know what motivates them to be more productive. A constant revolving door will not create great work or the results you’re looking for. To read more on what makes great Brand Leaders, follow the link to the Brand Leadership Learning Center If you have great people on your team, you’ll get much better results on the business, and you can find that work-life balance you’ve always wanted.

So the question I have for is “Are You Worried Enough?” And what are you doing about it?

To read more about how to create a Beloved Brand:

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

How to Write a Brand Plan: The positioning statement helps frame what the brand is all about. However, the brand plan starts to make choices on how you’re going to make the most of that promise. Follow this hyperlink to read more on writing a Brand Plan: How to Write a Brand Plan
How to Write a Creative Brief. The creative brief really comes out of two sources, the brand positioning statement and the advertising strategy that should come from the brand plan. To read how to write a Creative Brief, click on this hyperlink: How to Write a Creative Brief
How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement. Before you even get into the creative brief, you should be looking at target, benefits and reason to believe. To read how to write a Brand Positioning Statement, click on this hyperlink: How to Write an Effective Brand Positioning Statement
Turning Brand Love into Power and Profits: The positioning statement sets up the promise that kick starts the connection between the brand and consumer. There are four other factors that connect: brand strategy, communication, innovation and experience. The connectivity is a source of power that can be leveraged into deeper profitability. To read more click on the hyper link: Love = Power = Profits

Pick your Social Media vehicle and follow us by clicking on the icon below:

To reach out directly, email me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

The $1Billion Brand that Defies Logic: The Toronto Maple Leafs

10 March 2013

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When we look at the Most Valuable sports franchises around the world, whether it’s Ferrari, Manchester United, Real Madrid, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Lakers or New England Patriots, they usually have one thing in common: THEY WIN. And in most cases, they win a lot. We’ve never really found out what happens to those brands when they lose.

And then there’s the Toronto Maple Leafs who recently joined the ranks of the most valued brands, now worth an estimated $1 Billion. The last time the Leafs won a hockey championship was 1967, when Lyndon Johnson was President, The Beatles were releasing the Sgt Pepper’s album and Wal-Mart only had 24 stores (all still in Arkansas). It was even 8 years before Justin Bieber’s mom would be born. The Leafs have not even made the playoffs since 2004. None of their current players were even in the league in 2004. And they are the only NHL team not to make the playoffs during those years. There were two major work stoppages in the NHL in 2005 and 2012–one wiped out an entire season, the other a half season. In both of those years, the value of the Leafs jumped up.

And yet, since 2004, the value of the Toronto Maple Leafs has gone up from $280 Million to $1 Billion. Only Apple’s market value has gone up at a faster pace, but they’ve launched the iPhone, iPad and the Macbook during that time.

So clearly for the Leafs, actually playing and winning the games doesn’t really matter to value of the brand.

What’s the Leafs Brand Vision?

Up on the Leafs wall and every communication coming from the PR staff says they want to win a Championship. But they were owned by a pension fund for the past 15 years, whose only desire has been profit. And now they are owned by a Media Conglomerate who sees the Leafs as content with millions of insane Leafs fans watching in person, on TV and on-line. Winning? Does that matter? I believe a more appropriate Brand Vision for the Leafs is to be the Most Valued Sports Franchise in the World. Everything they do seems more aligned to the “most valued” than winning a championship.

Holding the Leafs up to the Principles of a Beloved Brand

My Business School Professor once said “economics proves what happens in real life can actually happen in theory”. In the theory of Beloved Brands, you need 5 sources of connection to build a tight bond with your consumers. You need a Brand Promise, a smart Strategy, a Brand Story, a freshness of Innovation and a Culture that helps deliver the promise.

Arguably, the Leafs might be defying all 5 of these sources of connectivity.

What is the Leafs Brand Promise? Most Beloved Sports Teams can say “we promise to deliver an on-field team that will always be competitive enough to win a championship”. The Yankees, Man U, Ferrari, the Lakers and Real Madrid can easily say that. Even when these other teams have a good and not great season, there is a price to be paid. The Leafs say “we want to build a team to win a championship” but is that a reality? If that was their promise, the brand would be a complete failure. Fans would walk away and the value of the team would fall. Well, at least for a normal team.

The only real promise the Leafs offer is hope for the hopeless. The Leafs are the eternal underdog, where the pursuit of victory is greater than the victory itself. Maybe if you have that underdog spirit in your own life, you see hope in the Leafs where no one else sees hope. There’s no real rational benefit you get from being a Leafs fan. You’re never rewarded for your energy. So it must be irrational. Purely emotional. Then what emotional benefit do you get from loving the loser team? A friend of mine who is a Leafs fan had a baby a few weeks ago, and I said “when do you break it to the kid that the Leafs won’t win a Championship in his life time?” I know that kid will be a Leaf fan. He now bleeds blue. And will pay thousands of dollars towards the leafs coffers over his life time.

So what’s the benefit? You don’t get to ever yell “we win”. It comes back to “Hope”. Or maybe you figure the celebration party will be so big when they finally do win, that you want to make sure you’re on that bandwagon. That’s still hope for the hopeless–it just has alcohol involved.

The strategy is to appear to be doing things to win a championship. The story is more about history than it is about the present. I don’t see any innovation in player selection or coaching. I do see innovations in merchandising, advertising, sponsorship and fan experience. And the culture of the Maple Leafs is clearly aligned more to making money than it is to winning.

The Leafs Business Model

Let’s look at how the Leafs business model works.

Getting tickets to a game is nearly impossible for the average fan. Every game is a sell out. It’s a 40 year wait for Leaf seasons tickets. These end up in people’s wills. They have strong luxury box sales and a strong base of seasons tickets. If you do have tickets, you can easily scalp them for twice the value on game night.
Every game is on TV, with exceptionally strong ratings. While the ratings totally in Canada, they are such a dominant ‘country brand’ that it makes the local market all of Canada, which means it has access to 30 Million people. The Leafs receive added earned media with 2 sports TV stations, 3 radio stations and 3 major Newspapers constantly covering every move the team makes.
The team’s sponsorship drive is incredible–carrying an astounding 50+ sponsors on its roster–including separating out the banking category into Core Banking, Wealth Banking, Credit Card banking, which allows them to get money from three separate banks.
Merchandise sales are very strong. The Leafs have just announced it was changing its third jersey to be a replica of the 1967 jersey. Which means all those fans have to go out and drop another $129 on a new jersey. This past year, the Leafs have added a sports bar to the ACC, just outside the arena that has hundreds of TVs and seating for two thousand people.
Control of Costs works for the Leafs. The NHL has a salary cap that holds teams to $60 Million per year, which is 6% of the team’s brand value. For the other hockey teams worth $200 Million, that’s 30% of their brand value. That’s a huge competitive advantage for the Leafs–still defies why they can’t win.

The P&L

In 2011 with the world facing a global recession, following up on a 29th place finish in the standings, the Leafs revenue went up ELEVEN PERCENT!!! And because of the player strike a few years ago, player costs have gone down from $69 million to $57 million. Revenue up, costs down. That’s a P&L the people of Price Waterhouse dream about. A lot of the value is now connected to how much money will be made in the future. The NHL just signed a 10 year contract giving the Leafs cost certainty. While I still don’t think the Leafs will win a championship in the next 10 years, I would bet they will hit $2 Billion.

It’s not easy being a Leaf Fan. Yet like a drug, it’s not easy to stop being a Leaf fan.

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

Forget the 4 P’s. Build Your Brand through the 5 sources of Connectivity

5 March 2013

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The Evolution of Brands Beyond the Product

Most of us started learning about marketing by looking at the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. While I’ve seen people adding P’s, a fifth one and even have seen up to eight P’s. I guess it’s a fairly easy way to teach marketing. It’s an OK way to learn, but it seems to treat marketing like an activity and not really a strategy. You get a product and then figure out where to sell it, what to charge and how to promote it and voila, now you are a marketing guru.

It’s true that most brands do start off as a product or service that helps to address some type of problem the consumer has in their lives. Early on it’s about a selling activity where you push your brand onto the target market and hope they buy. As the brand evolves, you start to establish an identity for the brand that gets well-known, you start narrowing what you’re naturally best at down to a promise and begin executing and building your experience around the promise. As you keep evolving, the Brand starts to shift towards becoming an Idea that helps solve the consumer’s emotional problems.

Apple is not just a computer or cell phone. It’s based on an idea of “simplicity that deals with the frustration over technology”.
Dove is not just a soap or hand cream, but all about the idea of “real beauty that allows women to feel comfortable with who they are”.
Starbucks is not just a coffee and pastries, but an “escape from a hectic day”

While a lot of the Beloved Brands have taken 20 years or even 90 years to earn their status, you can advance your brand faster by starting off as an idea. It becomes less about product and more about the big idea from day 1. It becomes less about hopeful tactics and more about insightful strategy. You’ll be able to build around the idea rather than getting stuck in the constraints of what your product does. An idea helps you connect with consumers and that connection gives your brand added power, and the power can be used to drive higher growth and profits.

A Beloved Brand is based on an idea that’s worth loving.

The Brand Love Curve

In the consumer’s mind, brands sit on a hypothetical Brand Love Curve, where brands go from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and finally becoming a Beloved Brand for Life.

At the Beloved Brand stage, demand becomes desire, needs become cravings, thinking is replaced with feelings. Consumers become outspoken fans. It’s this connection that helps drive power for your brand: power versus competitors, versus customers, versus suppliers and even versus the same consumers you’re connected with. The farther along the curve, the more power for the brand. It’s important that you understand where your brand sits on the Love Curve and begin figuring out how to move it along towards becoming a Beloved Brand.

A Beloved Brand uses the love consumers have for the brand to replicate the power of a Monopoly. And from that power, it drives stronger growth and higher profits.

The Five Sources of Connectivity: Promise, Strategy, Story, Freshness, Culture

Under the Brand Idea are 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Everyone wants to debate what makes a great brand–whether it’s the product, the advertising, the experience or through consumers. It is not just one or the other–it’s the collective connection of all these things that make a brand beloved.

The brand’s promise sets up the positioning and comes directly out of the idea you have for your brand. You have to focus on a key target with one main benefit you offer. Brands need to be either better, different or cheaper. Or else not around for very long. ”Me-too” brands have a short window before being squeezed out. How relevant, simple and compelling the brand positioning is impacts the potential love for the brand. Force yourself to find that point of difference, and balance the rational and emotional benefits in your promise. Even if you feel the desire to start with a rational promise, wrap it in an emotional package. And as your brand strengthens, layer in more and more emotion. But even at the most emotional stage of a brand, back it up with rational thoughts. It’s about balance. People will stay loyal, pay higher prices and follow a brand they are connected with. More and more, brands are leveraging purpose (the why) into their brand promise, because people buy why you do it, more than just want you do. Push yourself to make your promise the same as why you get up in the morning and you’ll make a fortune.
The strategic choices that brands make can make a world of difference. Most brands get stuck in thinking 3 months ahead. They miss out on the bigger picture of where you want to be in 5-10 years. To figure out where you want to go starts with where you are today. Map out what’s getting in your way and let those define your strategies. Identifying where the brand is on the Brand Love Curve (see above) helps focus your choice in strategies as you want to look for ways that tighten the connection with consumers. Bring an ROI mindset, with a pathway that has a focus, early win and a leverage to a gateway to something bigger.
Beloved brands can tell the brand story through five types of media: Paid (traditional and digital advertising) earned (PR, news, events, influencers) search (Search Engine Optimization), social media (facebook, twitter, linked in) and home (website, blog, e-commerce). Beloved Brands find creative ways use each of these media choices to enable your brand to connect emotionally with consumers and they have a bit of magic to the communication. Great advertising helps to separate the brand from the pack, telling the brand promise in a compelling and relevant way.
The most beloved brands have a freshness of innovation, staying one-step ahead of the consumers–giving them something they’d never have imagined. Having a steady stream of new products helps keep the consumer excited about the brand. The idea of the brand helps acting as an internal beacon to help frame the R&D. Every new product has to back that idea. At Apple, every new product must deliver simplicity and at Volvo, it must focus on safety.
The most beloved brands create an experience that over-delivers the promise. How your culture and organization are set up can make or break that experience. Hiring the best people, creating service values that employees can deliver against and having processes that eliminate service leakage. The culture attacks the brand’s weaknesses and fixes them before the competition can attack. With a Beloved Brand, the culture and brand become one.

The Most Beloved Brands Are Strong on All 5 Sources of Connectivity

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

How to Run a Brainstorm Session

3 March 2013

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“Creativity is intelligence having fun” Albert Einstein

Brainstorming should be a Regular Part of running your Brand.

To stay in a healthy creative space, I would suggest that each brand team should be having some type of brainstorm (big or small) once a month. You need a constant influx of ideas–promotions, advertising, social media, naming, new products, events, PR, saving money and of course as part of your brand planning, They can be a quick 30 minutes as part of a weekly meeting just to get some quick ideas or a whole afternoon to solve a problem that’s been nagging at the group. Or a team building offsite meeting that goes all day.

There are advantages to having regular brainstorms:

Team will stay fresh and open. Brand jobs can eat you up, forecasting, deadlines, reports can all make you stale. Having regular intervals of ideation, helps to disrupt the work flow to motivate and engage the team.
Keeps the best ideas near the surface. At the end of a good brainstorm, you have some great ideas that bubble up, not all of which you can immediately use. These ideas tend to keep coming up, and that’s OK Sometimes they are rejected because they are higher risk or resource dependent. But after a few sessions of getting comfortable with these ideas, you might start to see new ways to make them do-able instead of seeing why they can’t happen.
As the Leader of the team, it sends the message that while we are strategic, we win by being more creative, faster, and better on execution. It’s so easy to get stiffer as you move up the career ladder and be the one on the team finding fault with every idea. Just because you are starting to know right from wrong, doesn’t mean you need to crush every idea. Having the brainstorming forum allows the newly experienced brand people the chance to bring ideas forward and it sends the signal that you are an open leader and you value the opinions of your junior staff.
The process the team learns doing the brainstorms becomes part of their everyday job. Even on small problems, they’ll come up with a list of possible solutions, use some criteria to judge, narrow down the list to the best idea, and then be prepared with their recommendation. They’ll be able to show their leader they’ve looked at the issue from all sides, and considered other ideas. Marketers that fixate on one solution to fix the problem tend to fail more than succeed.

The Warm Up

Every session should have a warm up, either 5 minutes or 15 minutes. It gets people out of the rut of the day-to-day, and opens up the brains. One that I’ve used is this very simple innocent photo of the kids selling Lemonade and ask them to come up with as many ideas as they can to the question of “What ways can these two make more money?”. I offer a reward of cookies to the team with the most ideas and to the best idea. In 5 minutes, teams should be able to list 50 or 100 ideas. Gets out of a lot of crap ideas but it gets rid of them rejecting ideas before saying them. To get to 100, you have to listen to the group and build on someone’s idea. Eliminate the “yeah but….” I get them to circle the top 3 ideas for each group, which forces them to get used to making decisions. One observation I’ll usually make is that the best ideas are usually found in the list beyond 20 or even beyond the 50 mark, emphasizing that you need 100 good ideas to get to 5 great ideas.

Draw out the rule that “AVOID THE YEAH BUT…” because we have a process for ideating and one for making decisions. With a bunch of leaders in the room, normally you have to re-assure them that they should trust the process. The alternative to the “yeah but” is building on the idea with “here’s a different take”.

The trick to a good brainstorm is very simple: Diverge, Converge, Diverge Converge.

Diverge #1:

Divide the room up into groups of 5-7 people. I prefer to assign one leader who will be writing the ideas, pushing the group for more, throwing in some ideas of their own. A great way for the leader is to say “here’s a crazy idea, who can build on this or make it better”. But if you catch the leader stalling, debating the ideas, then you should push that leader. At this stage you are pushing for quantity not quality. If you have multiple groups in the room, do a rotation where the leader stays put and the group changes. I like having stations, where each station has a unique problem to solve.

Converge #1:

There’s a few ways you can do this.

You can use voting dots where each person gets 5 or 10 dots and they can use them any way they want. For random executional ideas, this is a great simple way.
If there is agreed upon criteria, you can do some type of scoring against each criteria. High, medium, low.
If you are brainstorming product concepts or positioning statements, you might want to hold them up to the lens of how unique they are.
For things like naming, positioning or promotions, the leader can look at all the ideas and begin grouping them into themes. They might start to discuss which themes seem to fit or are working the best, and use those themes for a second diverge.
For Tactics to an annual plan, you can use a very simple grid of Big vs Small and Easy vs Difficult. In this case, you want to find ways to land in THE BIG EASY. The reason you want easy is to ensure it has a good return on effort, believing effort and investment have a direct link.

Diverge #2

The second diverge is where the magic actually happens. You’ve got the group in a good zone. They have seen which ideas are meeting the criteria. Take the list from Converge #1 and push it one more time. Make it competitive among the groups, with a $25 prize, so that people will push even harder.

If you narrowed it to themes, then take each theme and push for more and better ideas under each of the themes
If you looked at concepts or tactics, then take the best 8-10 ideas and have groups work on them and flush them out fully with a written concept, and come back and present them to the group.
If using the grid above, then take the ideas in the big/difficult and brainstorm ways to make it easier. And if it’s small and easy, brainstorm ways to make it bigger.

Converge #2: Decision Time

Once you’ve done the second diverge, you’ll be starting to see the ideas getting better and more focused. Now comes decision time. You can narrow down to a list of ideas to take forward into testing or discussion with senior management. You can take them forward to cost out. You can prioritize them based on a 12 or 24 month calendar. You can vote using some of the techniques above using voting dots. Or you can assign a panel of those who will vote. But you want to walk away from the meeting with a decision.

Turn the Idea into a Project

Trust that the process gets you into the right zone and make these ideas now a project.Once you have a decision on the best ideas, you want to use the energy and momentum in the room to make the ideas a reality:

assign an owner and support team
get them to agree upon goals, issues to resolve
get them to map out a timeline (milestones)
outline potential resource needs (budget, people, outside agencies)

Let Brainstorming bring an energy and passion into your work.

“Love what you do” Steve Jobs

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

How to Drive Innovation into Your Brand

27 February 2013

Generating Love for the Brand

Under the Brand Idea are 5 sources of connectivity that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including the brand promise, the strategic choices you make, the brand’s ability to tell their story, the freshness of the product or service and the overall experience and impressions it leaves with you. Everyone wants to debate what makes a great brand–whether it’s the product, the advertising, the experience or through consumers. It is not just one or the other–it’s the collective connection of all these things that make a brand beloved.

The brand’s promise sets up the positioning, as you focus on a key target with one main benefit you offer. Brands need to be either better, different or cheaper. Or else not around for very long. ”Me-too” brands have a short window before being squeezed out. How relevant, simple and compelling the brand positioning is impacts the potential love for the brand.
The most beloved brands create an experience that over-delivers the promise. How your culture and organization are set up can make or break that experience. Hiring the best people, creating service values that employees can deliver against and having processes that eliminate service leakage. The culture attacks the brand’s weaknesses and fixes them before the competition can attack. With a Beloved Brand, the culture and brand become one.
Brands also make focused strategic choices that start with identifying where the brand is on the Brand Love Curve going from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and all the way to Beloved status. Marketing is not just activity, but rather focused activity–based on strategy with an ROI mindset. Where you are on the curve might help you make strategic and tactical choices such as media, innovation and service levels.
The most beloved brands have a freshness of innovation, staying one-step ahead of the consumers. The idea of the brand helps acting as an internal beacon to help frame the R&D. Every new product has to back that idea. At Apple, every new product must deliver simplicity and at Volvo, it must focus on safety. .
Beloved brands can tell the brand story through great advertising in paid media, through earned media either in the mainstream press or through social media. Beloved Brands use each of these media choices to connect with consumers and have a bit of magic to their work.

New Products can help separate a brand as well as keep it fresh. For a Beloved Brand, freshness is essential in attacking your own brand before someone can attack you. New products that truly solve a consumer problem in a unique way are rare. This is the generation of marketing incrementalism. On most brand plans I see “launch innovative new products” sits comfortably in the #3, 4 or 5 slot on the plan, while #1 is fix the advertising and #2 is get more distribution.

Stages of Innovation

There are four key stages to innovation: 1) Invention 2) Differentiation 3) Experience and 4) Perception. And the marketing is different at each phase.

Stage 1: Invention of the Core Product: The challenge of a truly new product is to finding something that is truly different: a new technology, delivery, format or process. Rarely, do we get to work on a game changing ”invention”.
Stage 1 of a new product usually focuses all of their efforts on launching and explaining why it is needed. The product at this stage is usually just the core product, not yet perfected, higher costs and limited sales with no profits. The advertising is about awareness and the message is simple: you have this problem, we solve that problem. There’s an effort to the distribution, because many customers are risk averse and afraid of new products. Consumers are willing to pay a little more to solve the problem, they overlook all the flaws and limitations, and they think “why didn’t I think of this”. While some consumers love the new product already, most consumers still sit at the sceptical and indifferent stage.

Stage 2: Product Proliferation means Differentiation: With a little bit of success in the market comes copy cats. With more consumers buying, there becomes room for some differentiation, but mostly limited to product still: new features and added services on top of the core product. They might have found a way to make things cheaper, easier to use or better tasting. Prices come down and brands offer more variety. Distribution becomes a battle ground and getting full distribution becomes the goal. Customers try to line up behind certain brands–looking for preferential treatment. The advertising is about consideration and purchase, trying to stake out certain spaces, shifting from product to brand and separating your brand from others. Brands now sell the solution, not just the product. And consumers start to choose, one brand over another. While some consumers prefer one brand over another, most consumers are at the like it stage.

Stage 3: It’s all about the Experience: In order to establish leadership or challenge for leadership, brands begin to talk about the experience consumers will have with their product. It becomes no longer about the brand or product but about the consumer and how your brand fits into their life. Brands look to use positioning strategies to separate themselves, focusing on key targets, with unique benefits–a balance of emotional and rational benefits. Advertising brings the consumer front and centre, trying to establish a routine with your brand in it. Brands try to move to the love it stage, some do, but most will be stuck still at the like it stage. Those that get stuck are forced into value and focusing on price, promotions or value. The brands that reach the love it stage can command a premium, drive share and establish leadership in the category.

Stage 4: Managing the Perception: As the market matures, any share point movements become difficult to gain any traction on real quality so the shift moves to perceived quality. Strategy shifts to brand personality where tone and manner in the execution are paramount so that Consumers connect with the brand and begin to see themselves in the brand. Brands push to become a Beloved Brand, where demand becomes desire, needs become cravings, thinking is replaced with feelings and Consumers become outspoken fans. The brand becomes powerful, with power over distribution because consumers would switch stores before they switch brands and power over competitors who are stuck trying to establish their own point of difference. Profits are at their highest–revenue, margins are both strong and spending is focused and efficient on maintaining the relationship. While at the top of the mountain, with firm leadership in the category, the brand is always at risk of losing that leadership. Challenge yourself to continuously stay at the top. Avoid becoming complacent.

Ask Gap Clothing, Cadillac, IBM computers, Levis, Sony or Kodak who have each reached the Beloved Stage only to be replaced by new products and brands and moved back down the love curve towards Indifferent. Most recently, Blackberry. Only 18 months ago, people jokingly used the term ”crackberry” to describe their addictions. No longer.

The four stages can easily be matched up to the Brand Love Curve and help establish strategic focus for the brand. At the Invention stage, consumers remain indifferent until you build awareness and explain how your product solves a problem in my life. At the Differentiation stage, some like it, but you are now facing proliferation and attack forcing your brand to stake out a claim. At the experience stage, you need to become part of your consumers life and balance the emotional and rational benefits that can move you to the love it stage. And finally, you have to tightly manage the Perceptions to become that Beloved Brand for Life stage, it’s about connecting with consumers so they see themselves through your brand. You need to establish your personality and begin to wield the power of being a Beloved Brand.

But be careful: Without Innovation, very few brands remain at the top for very long.

To read more about how the love for a brand creates more power and profits:

For a presentation on how to write a Positioning Statement, follow:

How to give Feedback on Advertising Copy

24 February 2013

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In a previous article, I wrote about How to Judge Advertising, trying to help Brand Leaders separate the Good ads from the Bad. Click here to read: Judging Advertising Copy This is a follow-up article to help outline how a Brand Leader should deliver the feedback, which is almost as important as the judging of the Advertising itself.

I come at this discussion from the client side. I’ve never worked at an agency in my life. But I have 20 years of CPG experience and have been in the shoes of the Brand Leader at every level. I feel comfortable to say that most Clients don’t know how to give effective feedback to an Agency. I’ve seen 10 people show up where they all talk and no decisions are made. I’ve seen 10 show up and no one says a word, all looking miserable. They say nothing and then email their feedback 5 days later. I’ve seen Brand Leaders writing copy and tag lines, moving photos around, adding demos and even suggesting what songs to add to make the spots great. And with modern social media campaigns, it’s becoming a mess of what people do on their own social media accounts. The lack of fundamentals in giving feedback that links back to the strategy is getting worse, not better.

A great Brand Leader should have more questions than answers. They should be able to uncover problems better than they figure out solutions. And they should respect the expertise of those they hire to tell the story of their brand.

When seeing new Advertising Copy, a Brand Leader can really only do three things: 1) Approve the Ad 2) Reject the Ad or 3) Give direction on how to make the Ad better. Even if you like an Ad, it’s rare that you will approve it outright. I know Creative Teams wish we did, but it’s just not a reality. Yes, the client feedback can help great ads get even better. If you dislike an Ad, I say you have to kill it. There’s no value in making an Ad you don’t like–even if it tests well. I know not everyone will buy this. But if you don’t love it, you won’t fight for its life, you won’t live and breathe the spot and you won’t put your heart and soul into it. So why bother approving it.

If you don’t love the work you do, then how do you expect the consumer to love your brand? If you are satisfied with OK, my only regret is that I’m not competing with you.

Advertising is Really “In the Box” Thinking

The best Advertising people are problem solvers, not blue sky “out of the box” dreamers. They are “in the box” thinkers who are motivated by the challenge of the problem, more than the execution of some simple solution. Big creative ideas can come from a tightly defined problem. The role of the Creative Brief is to create the right “box”, with enough room to move, but enough direction that defines the problem and challenges the Creative Team to solve it. Advertising is a creative expression of the Brand Strategy, helping to bring the Brand’s Promise to life in the form of a story. Great Advertising rarely comes from a blank canvass supplied by a confused client.

Getting Great Advertising is a Balance between Freedom and Control. Most Brand Leaders allow too much FREEDOM on the strategy but want to exhibit CONTROL on the creative. It seems odd because it should be the reverse. Brand Leaders should control the Strategy and give up a bit of freedom on the Execution.

A Good Creative Brief Should Be Brief, Not Long! There should be one objective, one target, one main benefit and two main reasons to believe (RTB’s). Agencies that want a long list of RTB’s want to take the strategic control away from you, so that they can provide options at the Creative Meeting. Yes, it would be easier for the Agency to make Ads with that option, but you’d be letting the creative dictate your strategy rather than your strategy dictating your ad. Creative Teams don’t want endless streams of data. They don’t want so many options built into a brief, that they don’t know where to start. Giving information “just in case” is confusing for them. They need focus in order to deliver great work for you. The smaller the brief, the bigger the ideas.

Brand Leaders should never let their Agency present “strategic” options at a Creative Meeting. The Creative Meeting should only have creative solutions that answer the strategic problem. That’s part of the whole flaw in why writing a really thick brief is a bad thing. More on writing a Creative Brief at: How To Write a Creative Brief

Now Here’s the Odd Part to Feedback

How you treat your agency is crucial. When you TELL an Agency exactly what to do, there is only one answer: YES. But when you ASK them what to do, you might hear: YES, NO or MAYBE. It also allows the agency to do what it does best, which is solving problems. Not taking notes. Brand Leaders should judge the advertising and then challenge the agency by always talking in terms of problems that they can solve.

I realize that not everyone will get this. The dance I am about to teach you will help separate the great Brand Leaders from the bad. I’m going to give it a shot. If you buy into the premise above that creative people are “in the box” thinkers, who are motivated by solving problems then don’t use your feedback to give them the answers that will actually de-motivate them. Instead, give your comments in a way that creates a new problem for them to solve. Since the brief put them “in a box”, now the feedback should really be creating a “new box” for them to figure out. Just don’t give them the answers.

If you frame it in the form of a problem, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that the solution they come up with is way better than the one in your head right now. They don’t want your solutions. Instead of writing copy for them, say “I’m not sure the middle or the script is completely reflecting the insight”. The Creative Team finds it de-motivating to be asked for their expertise (solving problems) and then not utilized (given the answer)

Stop writing copy. I’ve never met a Brand Leader that was good at writing copy or figuring out the art direction. Great Brand Leaders are great at figuring out the strategic problems. Stick to that. Let others you hire to figure out the solutions, actually figure out the solutions.

Feedback At the Creative Meeting

The Creative Meeting is not Easy. You’ve got to balance, the head, the heart and the gut against the good of the brand. Take your time and sort it through asking the following questions:

Do you love what it can do for your brand? If you don’t love it, how do you expect your consumer to love it? A great ad has to have everyone’s heart and soul put into it. If you “sorta like” it, then it will be “sorta ok” in the end. If you love it, you will fight for it. (The Heart)
Is it on strategy? Is the Advertisement an expression of what you have been writing in your strategy documents? Is it doing what we hoped it would do? I love the ABCS technique (outlined below) because it helps me to frame things in my mind, so I can evaluate it past how I feel. I think you need something to ground yourself. (The Head) If there is something in your gut says it’s off, it likely is. (The Gut)
Is it long-term Idea? Is a big enough idea that fits with the brand, does the hard work you want to do for the brand and can last 5 years. Think about leaving a legacy—which forces you to think of campaign-ability. (The Brand) Look at the Creative Brief and if the ad is not on strategy, then it has to be rejected Advertising is an expression of strategy. If it’s not on strategy, it has no value.

As for the feedback, too many people sit there taking notes and never engaging with the agency. Sadly, great jokes fall to the silence of the room creating the tension of a 11th grade Physics exam. There should be 3 types of feedback:

In the Middle of the Meeting, Talk Out Your First Impressions: During the presentation, it’s great to be engaged enough to say “I like that” or ask a question. People forget this type of feedback. You are allowed to talk. A free-flowing meeting helps ease any tension in the room, and allows you to use your instincts a little more. Don’t be afraid of voicing your first impressions, it doesn’t lock you in. You can like something and still reject it because it’s off strategy.
End of Meeting “Big Picture” Direction: Once all the work is presented, focus your comments on what‘s working and challenge the team to find ways to make it better. Focus more on the Scripts that you like first, and then move to the ones you don’t like. Stay big picture–find that balance of instincts and strategy. Avoid getting too wrapped into the details just yet.
The Day After Give Detailed Direction: Take 24 hours to digest all the little details with fresh eyes and maybe more discussion. Make sure it delivers the depths of brief–highlight any gaps you’re seeing in relation to the Creative Brief. Does it fit the target, is the tone right, and are we sure it’s communicating the reason to believe? You might have further details (copy points, placement, colours) to the next day. The key is to let the agency know about the day after direction, so they can expect it.

Who Speaks? Everyone or Just One Person

I’m a big fan of huddling as a Brand team and then giving one piece of feedback. The agency walks away with consolidated thoughts rather than a mess of comments they have to clean up. Having the Agency walk away with one message is more important than everyone on the Brand team getting a chance to voice their opinions.

From a client vantage, I’ve worked with both “taking the break” and “giving feedback live”. My preference is the break. It enables you to take your time and give clear aligned direction. Even with many years of experience, and being a fairly intuitive marketer with a love for advertising–I still have a hard time giving feedback 30 seconds after seeing the last script. While it’s good to get your instincts out, I guess my big question is “what’s the rush?” We want to get to the best advertising, right? We took months to figure out the insight, weeks to figure out the brief and gave the creative team a few weeks to write the scripts. So why do we want to decide on the best Ad within moments after seeing the Scripts?

Here’s the “Old School” process:

A senior person on the Agency side starts off the meeting by saying “we are so excited”. One of the Creative guys says something really positive about the brand they saw on shelf in the 3 weeks they were working on the spot.
The Account Team re-reads the brief at the start of the meeting. Then the agency does a 5 minute set up of each board, explaining the technique/process (e.g. this is funny spot). Set ups can taint or bias the client’s view of a spot.
Agency presents 3-5 scripts, and says which one is their favourite or recommendation. It’s potentially a de-motivator if you ask for their favourite and then you just dismiss it anyway. Why bother?
Client Feedback is given 15 seconds after the last script is presented, with the most junior person going first, all the way up to the senior person in the room. This feels very 1950s humiliation and de-motivating to the junior people on the Brand team. The account team takes notes, tries to figure out from the various comments what the final direction is. The Brand Manager caves to the most senior person in the room. Lots of polite passive-agressive behavior, but not sure of where to go next.

New School Process for Giving Feedback:

Take a 15-30 minute client huddle with just the Brand team in the room, so that they can align on the direction and then give the agency one piece of feedback. Get rid of that polite passive-agressive behavior and have a great debate behind closed doors.

It can help the overall process because:

The Agency gets one piece of consolidated feedback. They know exactly what they are going to do next. The huddle allows the client to get their story straight. The break also helps to slow down process so the client can think things through.
It Gives Ownership to the Brand Manager, who should do all the speaking on behalf of the team, not the most senior person in the room that over-rules them. When I was in the senior marketing role, I’d let the Brand Manager do all the talking and at the end, I would just say “great job everyone and I’m looking forward to the next round”.
The break allows the Client Team to have a very open discussion, freely hearing out everyone’s thoughts, giving junior people easier input. Have good rich debates to make sure you’re on strategy. It allows the senior leader to coach the Brand Manager rather than publicly over-rule. The Brand Manager hears everyone out and then consolidates it to one message.

Bit of Crazy Talk for You

It’s also time to get rid of the “reading of the Brief” and get rid of the 5 minute agency “set up” of each ad. I know half of you will think this is crazy and likely none of you will do it. Brand Leaders should be in the shoes of the consumer as they see the Advertising ideas. And unless you are going to buy an ad right beside your ad, that explains your ad, then get rid of the set ups. Instead, bring the brief, put it face down and only turn it over once you’ve seen all the work. Plus, you should have your brief memorized. It’s not that hard. You only have one brief. Remember, your brief is fairly short!!!

To see a training presentation on Getting Better Advertising:

If you are in the mood to see stories on great advertising, here’s a few other stories:

Finance 101 for Brand Leaders

8 February 2013

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To be a great Brand Leader, you have to be good at running the P&L. Even as you are launching new products, creating new advertising or writing a great brand plan, you have to have profit front and center in everything you do. Yet, there are far too many Brand Leaders who can’t run the P&L. These Brand Leaders hit the mid-point of their career and then we realize that they aren’t very good with numbers and all of a sudden, a fast track career for the super star Brand Manager completely stalls. As you’re looking up to the director level jobs, challenge yourself to get better with finance.

Looking at the P&L

Here’s my Finance 101 that can help simplify your role with the P&L. This is meant for the Brand Manager level who is aspiring to continuing to move up. But regardless of level, if you secretly are weak in the P&L area, this might help you.

While it’s important to learn every line of the P&L, where Brand Leaders can have the biggest impact is on the Net Sales, the Gross Margin and the Contribution Margin.

The Net Sales line is simply Gross Sales minus the Trade Spend. Some income statements have brought the trade spend up to the sales line, while others have left it down in the cost line. Check with your company’s or country’s way of doing it. In many industries, the trade terms are dictated by the channels. While I would want to say the more Beloved Brands have a power over the channels, many times they still aren’t able to turn that power into lowering the trade spend. If the trade spend is out of your control, you should be working with sales to ensure you are maximizing the value in programs that you are getting for the trade spend.

Net Sales is the Unit Sales times Net Price. For unit sales, you’ll have to either drive the market share or enter new markets. That’s where the marketing programs you leverage drive faster growth relative to the spend. And for price, you can increase price or get consumers to trade up to a premium price within your portfolio. The overall brand image you drive will usually be one of the biggest impacts on price. The more love you create for the brand, the more inelastic the price.

Gross Margin is Net Sales minus Cost of Goods. Just like above this can be impacted by how high of a price premium you can drive for the brand, or whether you can lower your Cost of Goods without impacting the quality of the product. As a Brand Manager, this becomes your primary focus for “profit” as you feel the below the line costs are out of you control, so you don’t pay much attention to them. However, as you get up to the Director or VP level, you get involved in discussions about marketing spend, R&D and the goals for the bottom line contribution margin levels. This is where your strength or weakness in running the P&L begins to really show up.

4 Ways to Drive the P&L

Looking at the above P&L lines, in a slightly different way you really have 4 different areas that you can impact the Profit:

With Price, you can increase/decrease the price or you can get consumers to trade up to a premium line or down to a value line.
When looking at Costs, you’re either driving the product costs or the marketing costs. You’re trying to minimize the costs without impacting the brand or the impact on the brand.
Driving the Market Share is a focus on either stealing other users or getting your current users to use more.
The Market Size is all about entering new categories or finding new uses for your current brand.

#1. Using Price as a weapon to drive brand value. It can be a price change, up or down, or it could be trying to get consumers to trade up or down.

Price Increase: You can do a price increase if the market or brand allows you. It likely has to be based on passing along cost increases. Factors that help are whether you are a healthy brand or it’s a healthy market as well as the power of your brand vs competition and channel.
Price Decrease: Used when fighting off competitor, if you need to react to a sluggish economy or channel pressure. Another reason to decrease price is if you have a competitive advantage around cost, whether that’s manufacturing, materials or distribution.

There are watch outs for price changes. It’s difficult to execute price changes especially if it has to go through retailers. You need to understand power relationships–how powerful are the retailers. Many times, price changes are scrutinized so badly by retailers that you must have proof of why you are doing it. Also, it’s quite likely your Competitors will (over) react. So your assumptions you used to go with the price increase will change right after. And finally, it’s not easy to change back.

Trading Up: If you have In a range of products, sometimes it can be beneficial to get consumers to trade up. Can you carve out a meaningful difference to create a second tier that goes beyond your current brand? Does your brand image/ratings allow it?
Trading Down: Risky, but you see unserved market, with minimal damage to image/reputation of the brand. In a tough economy, it might be better to create a value set of products rather than lower the price on your main products.

When looking at Price Increases, here’s a formula to help get you started on your analysis for gaining approval.

Beloved Brands seem more capable at driving profits through pricing, but they also are careful to ensure the premium does not become excessive to create backlash. There are a few watch outs around trying to trade up or down: Premium skus, can feel orphaned at retail world—on the shelf or missing ads or displays. Managing multiple price levels can be difficult—what to support, price differences etc. For all the effort you go to, make sure your margins stay consistently strong through the trading up or down. Be careful that you don’t lose focus on your core business. Can’t be all things to everyone. The final concern is what does it do your Brand’s image, especially risky when trading downward.

# 2. Managing cost as a weapon to enhance the Brand’s Value. It can be either your cost of goods or the potential selling costs.

Cost of Goods Decreases: You are able to use the power of your brand to drive power over your suppliers, you find cheaper potential raw materials, process improvement or find off-shore manufacturing.
Cost of Goods Increases: Make sure that you manage the COGs as they increase. Watch out for suppliers trying to pass along costs. But realize that with new technology, investing in brand’s improved image, going after premium markets, offering new benefit or a format change, that cost of good increases could be a reality.

The watch outs with managing costs: with cuts, make sure the product change is not significantly noticeable. You should understand any potential impact in the eyes of your consumer on your brand’s performance and image. Can the P&L cover these costs, either increased sales or efficiency elsewhere. Managing your margin % is crucial to the long-term success of your brand.

Selling Cost Decrease: To counter changes in the P&L (price, volume or cost), it’s very tempting to look to short-term P&L management or look at changes in go-to-market model. Where a brand stands on the product life cycle or how loved the brand is can really impact the selling costs. Even though we think that Beloved Brands have endless spending, they actually likely have a lower investment to sales ratio.
Selling Cost Increase: When you’re in Investment mode, defensive position trying to hold share against an aggressive competitor or when you see a proven payback in higher sales–with corresponding margins.

Here’s a simple margin calculation to get you going:

Always be in an ROI mindset: Manage your marketing costs as though every DOLLAR has to efficiently drive sales. Realize that short-term cuts can carry longer term impact. Competitive reaction can influence the impact of investment stance–like a price change, your competitor might over-react to your increases in spending.

#3. Externally, the Share and volume game are traditional tools for brand. Either stealing other users or get current users to use more.

Offensive Share Gains: Use it when you have a significant Competitive Advantage or you see untapped needs in the market. Or opportunistic, use first mover advantage on new technology.
Defensive Share Stance: Hold the fort until you can catch up on technology, maintain profitability, loyal base of followers needs protecting.

Be careful when trying to gain share. A Beloved Brand has a drawing power where it does gain share without having to use attack modes. Attacking competitors can be difficult. It could just become a spend escalation with both brands just going at it. After a share war that’s not based on a substantive reasoning (eg. technology change), there might end up with no winners, just losers. Many times, the channel will try to play one competitor against another for their own gain. Watch out what consumers you target in a competitive battle: some may just come in because of the lower price and go back to their usual brand.

Get Current Users to Use More: When there is an opportunity to turn loyal users into creating a potential routine. Changing behaviours is more difficult than enticing trial. It’s a good strategy to use, when your there’s real benefit to your consumer using more. It’s hard to just get them to use more without a real reason.

There has to be a real benefit connected to using more or it might look hollow/shallow. Driving routines is a challenge. Even with “life saving” medicines, the biggest issue is compliance. Find something in their current life to help either ground it or latch onto. When I worked on Listerine, people only used mouthwash 20-30 times a year compared to 700+ brushing occasions. So we focused on connecting rinsing with Listerine to the twice daily brushing routine.

#4. Increase the Size of the Market by Finding New Users or Creating New Uses.

Find New Users: When there is an untapped or under-served need. There could be a significant changing demographic that impacts your base. Or you are able to translate/transfer your reputation to a new user group. There should be something within your product/brand that helps fuel the brand post trial. Trial without repeat, means you’ll get the spike but then bust. Substantial investment required. Don’t let it distract from protecting the base loyal users.
Create New Uses: Format Line Extensions that take your experience or name elsewhere. Able to leverage same benefit in convenient “on the go” offering. Make sure current brand is in order before you divert attention, funding and focus on expansion area. Investment needed, could divert from spend on base business. Be careful because the legendary stories (Arm and Hammer) don’t come along as much as we hope.

As you look to either grow by share or new categories the two crucial calculations for you are Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and Return on Investment (ROI)

For CAGR, here is a calculation tool:

And for ROI,

Show Your Work: Just like in grade school where you get extra points for showing your work, the same thing goes when taking senior leaders through your assumptions.

Most marketers will tell you that branding is about positioning. Positioning is a means to driving growth and making money.

To view a copy of How to drive Profits into your Brand, click below:

Start a “Hate” page for your Brand, and See if People Show Up

6 February 2013

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If you are serious about the hearing the Voice of the Customer, than start a hate page about your brand. You might be shocked at how many people show up, and you might find richness in what they have to say about your brand.

In sports, they say people learn more from losing than from winning. When you lose, you can look at what exactly you did wrong, and from that you can see what you need to do in order to change, so that in the future you will be more able to win. While it’s more fun to win, no one really learns anything.

Are you serious about Voice of Customer?

If you are serious, ask yourself why you are gathering the data? Is it to find out how wonderful you are or is to find the flaws you can fix. I have sat in research collected Voice of Customer (VOC) meetings, and have seen people get so excited when the score goes up from 38% to 39%. Everyone starts to smile, mainly because these are connected to the goals for the year-end bonus. A few of the positive verbatims are read and people beam with pride. Then a few of the negatives are read, there is silence the room. And then it’s back to how great the 39% feels. Click on that Rogers page http://www.facebook.com/CanadiansAgainstRogers and read some of the stories that consumers are have taken the time to post about the Rogers brand. Every Rogers executive should start their day off by reading these stories and figuring out what they are going to do about it. Before their competitors do something about it.

Isn’t it better to Attack Yourself on Facebook Before Your Competitor Attacks You in the Market?

I know it sounds a bit crazy, but imagine the richness you can get from starting a “Hate” page for your own brand on Facebook and hearing what’s wrong so that you can attack yourself and fix your flaws faster than your competitor can find them and expose them in the marketplace. It’s the modern-day version of manning the Call centre for a day. One tool I love using is the Leaky Bucket. A great exercise in exposing your flaws–your leaks–so that you can attack them. The learning you might get from your “Hate” page on Facebook might help you populate. It adds richness to the data of a VOC study.

It’s a great tool for a Brain Storming off-site meeting. The way the tool works is go through every stage that a consumer goes through as they interact with your brand, as they move from Indifferent to Like It to Love It and all the way to Beloved Brand. Write down what you think it is that people like about your brand at each stage, and then start writing down why they leave your brand at each stage. This is where the richness of attacking yourself comes into play. ATTACK!!! You’ll likely begin seeing “leaks” that you can fix. These leaks are what you can attack and close, so that you’ll retain these consumers rather than lose them.

Attack Yourself Before Others Attack You

To read more on How to Create a Beloved Brand, read the following presentation:

To read other stories on Brand Leadership, click on any of the topics below:

There is a Facebook page called ”Brand Leadership Learning Center” at

If you or team has any interest in a training program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1

10 things that Good Advertising Should Do

2 February 2013

8 Comments

People always ask me “So what is it that makes a Brand Leader good at advertising?”

I used to think they must be more creative. Or they are more in touch with creative people. Or better yet, they are a visionary.

I never really thought these answers satisfied me. Advertising is so much more than that.

In fact there are many things around advertising that have nothing to do with the creative. There needs to be a great Brand Plan, the Creative Brief should be tight yet rich with insight. Brand Leaders have to manage the process and stay on strategy and they should have an ability to select the right media. They should take risks. They have to be able to handle the stress of ambiguity against deadlines, and the pressure to make the numbers in the face of art. Advertising is half art, half science. They have to be able to give some freedom on execution, yet maintain a tight control on the strategy.

Brand Leaders must be good at giving good feedback, maybe even a bit fussy on details. Be nice though. They have to love the work and bring that emotion to the table. What about motivating the team? Not just motivating the creatives, but the planners, the account people, the editors and even the directors. Someone who is great at Advertising has to make decisions. They have to be able to walk in the shoes of the consumer, yet still live at the desk of the brand. They must have the ability to gain alignment with their own team and yet gain approval from the senior management of the company. They have to be able to sell the work. At all stages. The list goes on and on.

There are just so many things that are required to get good advertising. Being creative is a great start. But it is more.

So after thinking about this question for a few years, I finally nailed it:

A Brand Leader that is good at advertising is able to consistently get good advertising on the air, and keep bad advertising off the air.

It’s such a simple yet complicated answer. Almost as simple and complicated as David Ogilvy’s line “Clients get the work they deserve”. I know that is true, in every way that it is meant. I always ask Brand Leaders, “if you knew that how you showed up actually impacts the advertising, do you think you might show up differently?” I hope the answer is yes. But I’m not sure they do. Those great at advertising get it.

Sadly, there is an equally long list of things that make Brand Leaders bad at advertising. These days, there is so much learning on the job that people end up as the decision-maker in the room, sitting there trying to lead the advertising when they haven’t even properly trained on how to do it. Malcolm Gladwell says you’re an expert when you’ve had 10,000 hours. And yet, there are Brand Leaders are thrust into leading an Ad Campaign with 20, 30 or maybe 100 hours. And no training. Even those who are supposed to teach you haven’t been trained. So you are both learning. How can you consistently get good advertising on the air, managing such a complicated process when you’re still learning. On the job.

The 10 Things Good Advertising Should Do

Here’s a starting point for you when you’re judging creative.

Set Yourself Apart. Beloved Brands must be different, better, cheaper. Or they are not around for very long. The story telling of the brand’s promise should help to separate the brand from the clutter of other brands that are stuck in our minds. And that starts with creative that feels different and of course makes the brand seem different.
Focused! A focused target, a focused message, a focused strategy against a focused communication idea, a focused media. The whole discipline of marketing is founded on focus, and yet Brand Leaders struggle most in this area. They always want that “just in case” option.
Keep the Idea and Communication very simple. Communication is not what is said, but what is heard. Too many people try to shout as many messages as they can in one ad. What does the consumer hear? A confusing mess. By throwing multiple messages you are just making the consumer do the work of deciding the most important message, because you couldn’t figure it out. My challenge to you is to stand up on a chair and yell your main message as though you are standing on top of a mountain. If you can’t YELL it out in one breath, then your idea is too complex. Or just too long. The Volvo Brand Manager gets to yell “Safety” in one clean simple breath. Can you do that?
Have a Good Selling Idea. While Big Ideas break through, they also help you to be consistent, because you have to align your thinking to the Big Idea. You’ll see consistency over time, across mediums–paid, earned, social and search–and you’ll see it throughout the entire brand line up of sub brands. Consumers will start to connect to the big idea and they’ll begin to relate your brand with that big idea. Look at your ad: does it have a big idea?
Drive Engagement: Too many Brand Leaders forget to engage the consumer. They get so fixated on saying their 7 messages that they figure the ability capture attention is just advertising fluff. But it all starts with Attention. The consumer sees 5,000 ads a day and will likely only engage in a handful. If you don’t capture their attention, no one will remember the brand name, your main message or any other reason to believe you might have.
Let the Visuals do the talking. With so many ads, you need to have a key visual that can capture the attention, link to your brand and communicate your message. The ‘see-say’ of advertising helps the consumers brain to engage, follow along and remember. As kids, we always love the pictures. We still do.
Sell the solution, not the product. Consumers use brands to solve problems in their lives. Your brand will be more powerful if it solves the problems of life. Figure out the consumers’ enemy and conquer it on their behalf. Consumers don’t care about what you do, until you care about what they need. No one has ever wanted a quarter-inch drill, they just need a quarter-inch hole.
Be Relevant with the Consumer. A beloved brand finds a way to matter to those who really care. It’s not only the right brand promise that matters, but the right communication of that promise. You can’t sell carpet cleaning to someone who only has hard wood floors. And you can’t sell a golf ball that goes 20 yards farther to someone who despises golf.
Make Ads that are based on a consumer Insight. Insights are not facts about your brand. That’s just you talking AT the consumer. Insights are something the consumer already knows but they didn’t realize that everyone felt that way. Insights enable consumers to see themselves in the situation and once you do that, the consumers might then figure the brand must be for them. Insights allow you to connect and turn the ad into a conversation.
Tell the story behind the brand. There should be richness in your brand’s purpose. Why did you start this brand? How does your brand help people? Why do you get up in the morning? Remember: people don’t buy what you do as much as they buy why you do it.

The ABC’S of Advertising

Another way to rephrase this list is through the ABC’S: Attention Branding Communication and Stickiness.

Attention: You have to get noticed in a crowded world of advertising. Consumers see 6000 ads per day, and will likely only engage in a few. If your brand doesn’t draw attention naturally, then you’ll have to force it into the limelight.
Branding: Ads that tell the story of the relationship between the consumer and the brand will link best. Even more powerful are ads that are from the consumers view of the brand. It’s not how much branding there is, but how close the brand fits to the climax of the ad.
Communication: Tapping into the truths of the consumer and the brand, helps you to tell the brand’s life story. Keep your story easy to understand. Communication is not just about what you say, but how you say it—because that says just as much.
Stickiness: Sticky ads help to build a consistent brand/consumer experience over time. In the end, brands are really about “consistency” of the promise you want to own. Brands have exist in the minds of the consumer.

To read more on How to get Better Advertising, here’s a presentation to follow:

Be a Better Client

If how you show up to the agency will produce better advertising work Then show up right.

Agencies should be treated like trusted partners, not suppliers. Engage them early asking for advice, not just telling them what to do and when. If you tell an agency what to do, there will only be one answer “YES”. But if you ask them what to do, there are three answers: yes, no or maybe. Seek their advice beyond advertising. Build a relationship directly with the creative teams. Be more than “just another client”.

Getting great advertising is a balance of freedom and control. Most Marketers allow too much FREEDOM on the strategy but want to exhibit CONTROL on the creative. It should be the reverse, you should control the strategy and give freedom on creative. Don’t go into a creative meeting with a pre-conceived notion as to what the ad should look like. Creative people are “in the box” problem solvers. What they don’t want a) blank canvas b) unclear problem and c) your solutions to the problem. Let them be in the box and find the solution for you. That’s what motivates them the most.

Here’s a presentation to help you be a better client.

If you are in the mood to see other great advertising, here’s a few other stories:

To see a training presentation on getting Better Advertising:

Brand Management: How to Be a Great Brand Leader

31 January 2013

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It seems that marketing these days is more about “doing” than it is about “thinking”.

“Activity Based Marketing” has replaced strategic brand management. Marketers are content if they are doing something, regardless if it is the right something. Everyone I interact with is too busy doing stuff, running from meeting to meeting, chasing the to do list. Marketers today are so busy, that they don’t have time to think. If you want to be a great marketer, you need to be carving out time to sit back in your chair and say “what’s next”.

Are you Strategic?

I know you want to say yes. And I’m sure it’s on your Linked In profile. So you must be. But if you are doing more activity than you are doing the thinking, then you aren’t really operating strategically. You are too busy chasing your own tail. Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planners who can see connections. Non Strategic Thinkers see answers before questions. They get to answers quickly, and will get frustrated in delays. They opt for action over thinking, believing that doing something is better than doing nothing. They are impulsive and doers who see tasks. They can be frustrated by strategic thinkers. Look back at the past week and ask “are you acting strategically?”

Are You a Fundamentally Sound Marketer?

No matter how bright you are, if you haven’t been properly trained, then you aren’t realizing your full potential. You likely are struggling with writing your brand plan, you aren’t quite sure what has to go onto the creative brief and you aren’t sure how to give an agency feedback. You’re not sure which media option makes the most sense for your brand. These days, marketing has become a completely “on the job” training ground. There’s very few fundamentals being taught. You are given a desk and a brand and told that “we think marketers learn on the job” and “we think it’s your boss who should be teaching you”. Since there has been a few generation of marketers who haven’t been trained, it’s very likely that your boss isn’t quite sure of the fundamentals of brand management.

If you are a bright, but you think you are lacking the fundamentals, you are not alone.

Are you Running the Brand? Do you act like an Owner?

Brand Manager has to have a mindset that reflects the CEO, accountable for growth, costs, profit and shareholder wealth. A great marketer runs the brand, rather than letting the brand run them. The starting ground for running the brand is to have your finger on the pulse of the brand and make sure everything revolves around that pulse. Everything in the company should feed off the Brand DNA. The Brand DNA (many call it the Brand Essence) is the most succinct definition of the Brand. For Volvo, it’s Safety, while BMW might be Performance and Mercedes is Luxury. The Brand’s DNA has an external and an internal. Externally, you should be looking at the consumers’ view and the brand personality you’re trying to project outward to them. Internally, the products and the internal brand beacon should help align everyone working on the brand.

The classic role of Brand Management is that the Brand Leader is at the hub and everything revolves around that Brand Leader. But in reality, they aren’t really revolving around the Brand Leader. They are revolving around the Brand DNA and it’s just that the Brand Leader owns that DNA and uses it as a lens to judge all the activity around the Brand. That is the starting point of strategy.

Everything Revolves around the Brand DNA

The Brand DNA should help frame

Brand Plan that drives the business for the upcoming year or the next 5 years
Brand Positioning that connects to the consumer through marketing communications
Customer Value Proposition that links the consumer needs to the benefits of the brand
Go-To-Market strategy that frames the distribution and the selling process
Cultural Beacons that help define the brand internally through values, inspiration and challenge and finally
Business Results, with each brand offering a unique way that it makes money. Each of these six needs feed off the Brand DNA, look to the definition as a guideline for how to align to the brand.

When you begin to blow this out one step further, you can start to see where the complexity comes into play with each of the six areas have their own needs that should still feed off that Brand DNA.

Use the Brand Plan to Drive the Direction of the Brand

The planning area should help to frame the Brand Plan, which is a combination of a one year Brand Plan and a 3-5 year strategic plan. The Vision and Mission provide the future direction, objectives align to the Business needs and Brand Funnel objectives and Strategies and Tactics help to drive towards those objectives. Included as well should be a Calendar and Budgets. For a tutorial on how to write a Brand Plan, click on the following link: How to Write a Brand Plan

From the DNA, map out a positioning statement that can help frame the Marketing Communications plan. That includes the creative big idea, the media mix, earned media (PR, Events) social media, key influencers (e.g. Doctors or Contractors or Bloggers). As well, the positioning frames the identity which could include logo, language, look and feel and brand book. My hope is that you don’t change this very often. Looking at the complexity of the Brand Management system outlined here, it baffles me that Brands facing tough times reach for changing their logo so quickly when so many other factors could be driving the issues. For a tutorial on writing Creative Briefs, click on: How to Write an Effective Creative Brief

Staying on Strategy is just as Hard as Coming up with the Strategy

If you don’t have time to think, then how do you know what you’re doing is the right thing to do? The Go-To-Market plan should also feed off the Brand DNA and come out of the Brand Plan. The Distribution strategy and needs should match up to the needs of the brand, including decisions around Key Account focus, pricing, sku mix, promotion and the possible role of new products. In a fast-moving category like cereal or gum, or a high technology driving category like computers, phones or TVs, both share a high need for product innovation. For brands that require in store selling, you should also include the In-store experience which could be demonstration, signage or trial as well as possible selling messages for sales people on the floor of the distribution channel. These messages should feed directly from the brand messages.

The R&D plan should feed off the Brand DNA and develop products that match the brand. Too many times, R&D is in their own world, trying to invent things that have nothing to do with where the brand sits. They expect marketing to be able to sell their inventions. Even in a technology driven business, Apple is driven first by the consumer. Steve Jobs really understood that you don’t just sell what you have.

Brand also drives the Culture and the DNA should provide a beacon for the People to follow. The brand story told within the company is even more important than what you might tell the market through your advertising. Talent management means hiring the right people and providing the right training. Too many companies are cutting back on training. Remember that better people produce better work that drives better results. Keep investing in your people and the business results will come. Empower your people to get the most from their ideas. Leverage values, inspirational touch points and processes to inspire and challenge them on achieving greatness.

Managing the Brand

Brand drives the Business Results. The more loved a brand, the more tightly the connection it has with their consumers. This connection becomes a source of power that the brand can wield in the market to drive higher growth rate and profitability. The Brand Leader is responsible for driving the P&L, driving sales and share, managing the forecast and costs for an efficiently run brand. The Brand Leader must figure out the levers of the P&L it can use to drive more profits. For a tutorial on driving profits through your brand, click on: How to Drive Profits through Your Brand

Leading the Brand

Putting the Brand Leader front and centre will allow you to leverage the Brand DNA into each of the areas of your business, whether that’s marketing, sales, R&D, finance or human resources. The Brand Leader should be at the centre of this hub, with each area looking to the Brand DNA as a beacon of how they can do their job most effectively in helping the brand drive long-term growth and profitability.

Here’s a robust summary on Brand Management that looks at it through 8 areas:

Beloved = Power = Growth = Profit
Brand DNA and Vision
Brand Promise
Brand Analytics
Brand Plan
Execution
Managing
Leading

Is Blackberry ripe for a Comeback?

30 January 2013

2 Comments

Blackberry created the entire smart phone category–and yet in the last 24 months, it has drifted into near obscurity. Blackberry’s biggest issue was arrogance as it thought it was invincible to attack. As the brand faced complete collapse, the ousting of its two founders and the dramatic loss in market share, the arrogance is certainly gone. But, Blackberry has also been a victim of thinking about the device first and the consumer second.

Blackberry also lacked that attention to the detail of the art of the phone that Apple has made us love. Yes, there was a camera, but a bad one. Yes, they had apps, but way fewer and they lacked magic. And yes, they had a browser and links to your favorite social media sites but it was slow, unpredictable and a complete pain in the ass some days. Once we figured out that you had to take the battery out and put it back in again, we started to think of the Blackberry as kind of pathetic.

The Height of Blackberry

If i was writing this in 2008, Blackberry would be one of the most beloved brands in the world. Those of us who were addicted were dubbed “Crackberry Addicts”. Even as the iPhone was just launching, many of us Blackberry fans weren’t quite ready to switch. Yes, the iPhone was great if you were an artist or worked at an Ad Agency, but if you had a corporate job, then Blackberry was the status symbol you wanted. For many corporations, the Blackberry was a reward of job level or title at work. Getting that Blackberry meant you had made it. It was totally a self expressive status symbol of the corporate world. And recognizing that status, the Stock Price soared upwards to peak in 2008 at $150. Billionaires were made, articles were being written as though they were….Steve Jobs.

The Crash

The crash was steady and the crash was fast. Not only were there better phone choices in the market, Blackberry’s arrogance seemed reluctant to do anything about it. They stood still and the product became inferior. The keyboard would stick, the camera was pathetic, the browser would get stuck daily and the speaker phone was weak. While the world was migrating over to the iPhone or the Android, the worst thing was when those same corporate VP’s in your office started showing up with their new iPhone at work. ”What….we can get one of those now?”. And all of a sudden, the corporate world wanted to switch over. Blackberry had lost their base user–the corporate guys.

The last straw was the launch of the Blackberry Playbook, a late response to the iPad that it had mocked only 18 months earlier. There were many problems with the Playbook–no point of difference being the biggest. The price point dropped quickly. There were no real Apps. And it seems that it was a quick opportunistic launch by Blackberry. No one wanted it. It was almost dead on arrival. People were willing to grant Blackberry a Mulligan, but when they started to ask “so what’s next?” the answer Blackberry gave was “we’re not quite sure, let us get back to you”.

The stock price went from a high of $150 down below $20. There were dramatic lay offs and then further dramatic share losses. They courted potential buyers, such as Samsung, who came in and looked around and said no thanks. The stock price continued to fall as the brand was on life support–all the way down to $6.

One of the quickest falls from Beloved Brand down to Indifferent. The term “crackberry” is gone from our lingo. Blackberry went from corporate status symbol to a bit of a loser. People sheepishly bring out the blackberry in public ready with the excuse of “I’m on a 3 year service plan, and then I’m switching”.

We Love a Comeback Story

Here comes Blackberry 10. The stock price has doubled in the last month. But for Blackberry to make it back to the status of a to Beloved Brand, they need to focus on the Five connectors of a Beloved Brand: 1) Brand Promise 2) Strategy 3) Brand Story 4) Freshness and 5) Experience.

When Blackberry first made it big in the 2001-2003 time frame, they put all their efforts behind the Innovation which was closely connected to the Experience. It was a “here’s what we do, we hope you like it” communication. That’s OK when you are as revolutionary as Blackberry was. Being able to send an email from anyone was such a revolution, that consumers did the rest of the work. We had never seen anything like it, and it changed our lives forever!!!! But once Blackberry faced some competitors, we never saw them effectively tell their brand story and their lack of innovation caused the experience to fall short on the experience. They were basically a ’one-and-done’ innovation that made it big, but they never really successfully evolved.

In 2013, the market is crowded with Samsung and Apple battling it out. For Blackberry to break through they need to effectively tell their story to their target market. From the looks of the reviews, they are mixed–which is not a bad position. Many reviewers are locked and loaded on Apple and Android. It will be a battle for Blackberry to win through critics.

Brands need to be either different,better or cheaper. Or not around for very long. Does this new Blackberry 10 feel all that different from what you can get with Apple or Samsung?

I’d love to see Blackberry speak to one audience, and stop talking to the masses. Get back to that corporate VP who once was in love with the Blackberry brand and show them why they should love you again. It’s now time to find a niche you can win over and powerfully defend. You have to matter to those who care.

Telling the Blackberry Story

For the come back to work, Blackberry must do what they’ve always been bad at: Telling the brand story. Culturally, Blackberry has known to not really care about advertising. They brought in a high powered CMO a few years ago. He walked out the door after 9 months because no one wanted to listen to him.

So let’s look at what we are seeing so far. Let me be critical of what we’re seeing so far because so far it’s not very good.

Whoever made this launch video isn’t getting it. It’s two boring guys who look like they should be in suits that have decided to leave the suit off so they can look cool and casual. I’m not a wardrobe consultant, but heck why not put on a $2000 suit and look like a damn boss. Let Apple own the casual. Secondly, the demo is bad. The whole communication is about how easy the “flow” of movements are, except in the on-stage demo, it’s not working. That can’t happen. It sends the signal of one of Blackberry’s weakness–lack of attention to detail. While Apple might screw up the maps or other things, they would never mess up an on-stage demo.

This cute little launch video is awful. It might have worked in 2005 when Blackberry had a monopoly. But it does nothing to separate the Blackberry brand from the crowded market. the lack of voice-over type ad only works for iconic brands that need very little to say. But for a small brand going after a niche, it needs to separate itself with a balance of logic and emotion.

I’m a former Blackberry lover who wants to love Blackberry again. I hope that Blackberry can find a way to make the most of the Blackberry 10 and even if they make a mini-comeback, it would be good for the market. But, as a consumer, I’m not seeing enough for me to trade in my iPhone.

What’s Your Vote? Will Blackberry have a successful comeback?

To read other stories on Brand Leadership, click on any of the topics below:

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If you or team has any interest in a learning program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1 or join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BrandLeadership

Everything Starts and Ends with the Consumer in Mind

22 January 2013

22 Comments

As Brand Leaders, our days get busy, running from meeting to meeting, trying to deliver our numbers, gain share and hit our forecasts. We have a few new products that are long over due and now we’re trying to make the most of them. Finance has found a potential cost savings from the plant but it’s unsure if it will be off-set by a one time surcharge. We have a presentation at Wal-Mart next week and think we’ll walk away with a new listing. We have a new claim from the R&D team that we think delivers superiority versus our closest competitor. And finally, we have the go-ahead to do a new ad, but we think our senior managers will insist that we make the ad to their exact requirements and that it delivers their new vision statement. This is an average day in marketing. Except, we have not thought once about the consumer. Maybe that’s the norm when we get so busy or face pressures to make the numbers.

I always like to ask Brand Leaders: “Do you represent your brand to your consumer or do you represent your consumer to the brand?” Yes, I get stunned looks of confusion when I ask that. But it’s an important question as to your mindset of how you do your job. My challenge to you is to start thinking like your consumer and be their representative to your brand. You’ll notice the work gets better, you’ll see clearer paths to growth and you’ll start to create a brand that the consumer loves rather than just likes. When this happens, sales go up and the P&L spits out higher profitability. Because the more loved the brand, the more powerful position it occupies and the more profit it can generate from that source of power.

Take a Walk In The Shoes of Your Consumer With most of us, when we first fell in love with marketing, there were two key elements that got our juices going: strategic thinking and consumer behavior. Marketing brings these two elements together in a very challenging way. You should be thinking about your consumer every day, all day. Yes, you need to hit your sales and share goals. But your consumers are your only source of revenue and you have to know them intimately. Solving a consumer challenge feels like the biggest Rubik’s Cube we can find. The reason I mention this is if you want to connect with your team and motivate them, then start talking about the consumer and you’ll see their engagement go up. This is what they love. Be curious about your consumer, constantly watching changes in the marketplace.

Live and breathe insights about your consumers. Insight is not something you just do when you’re spending the hour that you write your creative brief. You should be gathering insight at every chance you can, and unleashing that knowledge throughout every day. Insight is not something that your consumers never knew before. That would be knowledge not insight. It’s not data or fact about your brand that you want to tell. That helps, but you have to go a layer deeper to find your insights. Oddly enough, Insight is something that everyone already knows. Insight comes to life when it’s told in such a captivating way that makes consumers stop and say “hmm, I thought I was the only who felt like that”. That’s why we laugh when see the way that insight is projected with humor, why we get goose bumps when insight is projected with inspiration and why we cry when the insight comes alive through real-life drama.

Get in the shoes of those Consumers and you’ll quickly realize that consumers do not care about what you do, until you care about what they want. Instead of mentioning a feature, force yourself to ask “If I’m the consumer so what do I get” five times to see if you can get to the richness of the functional benefits. Then look at that functional benefit and ask “so how does that make me feel”. Stop talking features and start talking benefits–both the rational and emotional. No one has ever wanted a 1/4 inch drill, they just want a 1/4 inch hole.

Consumers are busier than ever. Whether it’s working late, trying to balance everything or doing too much, they have so little time. People are multi-tasking, texting while driving or on the TV while watching TV—which is up 35% this year. Traditional ways with a 30 second ad and a billboard aren’t having the same effect in today’s world. The average consumer is exposed to over 6,000 advertising message per day. The consumers’ brain sorts through the clutter until finds something that might fill their needs. Imagine your boring logical message, well thought and all, breaking through to that consumer. Even with the fast paced life, most consumers are bored with life and just want something to entice them. The simplest way to challenge boredom is to like everything you do unconditionally, but if this bored consumer meets up with a boring brand, it will be rejected very quickly. You have to matter to those consumers that really care. And you have to know what connects with them to get the way to stand out.

Living in the Consumers Shoes is Contagious. When you start asking about how the consumer buys, what they are thinking about now or what do we want them to think, you’ll notice others on your team following your cues and start thinking like a consumer. It will be energizing. When you ask “will our consumer love this” it sets the bar very high. Here’s my simple challenge for you: If you don’t love the work you do, how do you expect the consumer to love your Brand. The best filter for your work is the consumer. It’s more important than what Wal-Mart thinks or what your boss likes/doesn’t like. When looking at new products, the R&D team should be more obsessed with what the consumer wants than what they might be capable of coming up in their lab. As Steve Jobs famously said “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”

Brand Leaders Play It Far Too Safe to Find True Love. Brand Leaders choose the safety of logic and facts instead of getting too deep or going all emotional with their consumer. And, most brands end up liked but never end loved. My Mom Wanted Me to Be an Actuary. Apparently, an Actuary has one of the longest life expectancies, can make quite a bit of money and they live the ideal work-life balance. Sounds like the perfect job, but I just couldn’t do it. What’s lacking in the life of an actuary is the ability to have fun at work or drive all your passion into your work to create something big. You can make a real difference. So if you’re not going to be an Actuary…then stop acting like one when you’re the Brand Leader. We can’t afford to keep doing just the usual, we can’t get stuck in logic and we can’t just satisfy needs. We need to push to go beyond greatness at every touch point with our selfish and bored consumers. We need to cultivate a deep emotional relationship with our consumer and we need to entice craving and desire.

Everything starts and ends with the consumer in mind.

To read about how to Create Beloved Brands, read this:

I run a Brand Leader Learning Center with programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below:

To join the Brand Leadership Learning Center Facebook page dedicated to helping Brand Leaders improve then follow: http://www.facebook.com/BrandLeadership

If you or team has any interest in a learning program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand. I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better. I have a reputation as someone who can find growth where others can’t, whether that’s on a turnaround, re-positioning, new launch or a sustaining high growth. And I love to make Brand Leaders better by sharing my knowledge. My promise to you is that I will get your brand and your team in a better position for future growth. To read more about Beloved Brands Inc., visit http://beloved-brands.com/inc/ or visit my Slideshare site at http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations where you can find numerous presentations on How to be a Great Brand Leader. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamrobertson1 or on follow me on Twitter at @GrayRobertson1 or join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BrandLeadership

Apple: What Goes Up, Might Come Down

20 January 2013

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As I write this, the stock price for Apple is exactly $500.00 As my old Finance professor would say, that means there is a 50% chance it will go above that price and a 50% chance it will go below. It has been quite the roller coaster since Tim Cook took over the reigns of the Apple brand–the good news is that stock price is still $125 higher than when he took office 18 months ago, but it’s down $200 in the last 4 month. What started out for Cook as a Sustaining Success might have quickly turned into a Re-Alignment.

The Apple brand of today is still healthy, the stores are still packed and sales are still strong. But the fear is that if Apple’s innovation over the next 18 months looks like Apple’s innovation of the past 18 months, then the Apple brand may be at its peak, no longer on the climb.

A year from now, do you think Apple’s stock will be higher or lower than $500.00?

My hope is that Apple finds their way and regains the momentum of the brand that has surprised and delighted us like no other brand. But my fear is they become another Sony that rests on their laurels and coasts for the next decade. I’m a big Apple fan, typing away on my MacBook Air with my iPad mini and iPhone close by and my iMac sitting on my desk. But it sure does feel like Sony of the early 1990′s. There’s talk of geographic expansion into China, but that might take their eyes off the real need: we need to see real innovation. Enough of the incremental BS. What do you have that will surprise me beyond my wildest dreams?

Five Connectors of a Beloved Brand

To be a Beloved Brand, you must have an idea that’s worth loving. Under the Brand Idea are 5 sources of connectivity (see diagram below) that help connect the brand with consumers and drive Brand Love, including

Brand promise
Strategic choices
Ability to tell their story
Freshness of the product or service
Overall experience and impressions it leaves with you .

Everyone wants to debate what makes a great brand–whether it’s the product, the advertising or the experience. It is not just one or the other, but the collective connection of all five that make a brand beloved. If one of them weakens against the brand promise, it puts the entire brand at risk.

The big idea behind Apple is complexity made simple. Since every great brand tackles an enemy of the consumer, Apple takes on the frustration and intimidation that consumers have with technology. The Apple brand promise is we make it easier to love technology, so that you can experience the future no matter who you are.

Problem #1: Has Apple Broken their Promise?

Over the last decade, Apple has done an amazing job in creating products that take the most complicated of technology and deliver it so that anyone can use it. Apple takes the technology out of technology so we can all benefit. That’s right–”so we can all benefit”. Apple is now a brand owned by the Masses. Yes, the masses rely on the innovators for advice, but Apple caters as much to my 70-something mother (iPad owner) as it does to my 14-year old daughter (iPhone user).

There are 4 instances in the past 18 months where Apple has gotten off track:

Apple Maps were a disaster in more ways than one. The first week of iPhone 5 owners was largely filled with the most loyal Apple users, the innovators who will influence the rest of us. And the maps disaster was the first major flaw of the post-jobs era that people were waiting for.
Siri remains a disaster. Siri does not deliver the promise as it adds frustration, not solves it. Siri is a nice little toy that combined with Apple’s auto-correct takes my enunciation and turns into words I’ve never dreamed of saying. I end up having to re-type the mistakes of Siri, which defeats the whole purpose behind voice recognition. If these were brakes on a car, it would be re-called for the safety of society. It’s unlike Apple to release such a bad product.
Retina Display is not a mass play. The launch of iPad 3 feels odd.. They kept the iPad 2 out in the market and didn’t even put the #3 on the iPad 3. It feels like something the niche Apple brand would have done, but now that you are a mass brand, you must cater to your consumer.
Apple TV has done nothing really. While a few friends have it, I hear no one talking about it. A quiet Fizzle.

Strategically, these 4 innovations were some of the big plays by Apple in the past 18 months. And where do they fall on the test of uniqueness? The Maps puts you in the losing zone where you are competing with Google Maps in the zone where they kick your ass. Retina Display ends up being a niche play for photographers or fussy consumers, but for the rest of us it is in the “who cares”, certainly not worth an extra $150 compared to the iPad 2. And Siri is not on the map, because it’s just an under-delivery that while it’s an innovation that leads the consumer, it only ends up frustrating them even more.

Problem #2: Is Apple Still Making a Dent in the Universe?

What caused Apple to rise so fast during the first decade of the century was innovation–the iPod followed by iTunes, the iMac vs the PC, the iPhone and then the iPad revolutionized the way we interact socially. In many cases, Apps have replaced software. Wow, Wow and Wow!!!

But, the last 15 months has been a period of incrementalism. In 2012, we saw iPad 3, iPhone 5 and iPad Mini and the fear among investors is that 2013 might be iPad 4, iPhone 6 and iPad Mini 2. Slightly better, slightly lighter, but just as expensive. There becomes less and less of a reason to trade up. And sadly, at risk, less and less of a reason to love the brand. Technology is about leap-frog. And the world will not stand still in the next year. Brands like Google and Samsung are ready to leap.

Steve Jobs always talked about “Making a dent in the Universe” and people bought in and followed. Apple’s beauty has always been to give us what we never imagined. And yet, now we are starting to not only imagine it, but predict it. Everyone saw the iPad Mini coming. In fact, we asked for it and Apple merely succumbed to our request. Technology is supposed to surprise us with advances that not only meet our needs but cater to the needs we didn’t even know we had. Apple has to get that back.

Is Apple still making a dent in the Universe?

Problem #3: Apple must quiet the “Anti” Apple Segment

Haters are always going to hate. In the technology space, the innovators and early adopters are those who tell the rest of us what to think and do. These consumers are constantly looking for the “technology fraud” and it feels as though some are starting to call Apple on it. The Samsung advertising has capitalized on this insight, openly mocking the iPhone5 launch. The only way Apple can shut this down is with action on the technology front. If Apple’s next product is the iPad Mini with Retina display or the iPad4 comes with a better battery life than this group will become even more outspoken.

There are so many parodies of Apple being shared by millions that not only mock the technique of the advertising but the incrementalism of their technology. This only fuels the haters.

Problem #4: Leadership Style

When Tim Cook took on the Apple brand, people worried but became re-assured that he had been running the Apple brand fora while. The brand was on a high after an amazing decade under Steve Jobs, and as a leader he faced a “sustaining success” leadership challenge. Keep the momentum going. Can anyone re-live that visionary relentless pursuit of perfection that Jobs brought to the role.

Now it appears that Cook faces a “re-alignment” challenge. Cook needs to re-invigorate the R&D at Apple to push for innovation that goes beyond expectations. Making a dent in the Universe means pushing for greatness, not settling for OK incremental-ism. Cook has quickly fired all those connected to the Maps fiasco. But, he has to look at himself in the mirror for wondering how it got out past him. The pressure is definitely on. The questions of 18 months ago are back:

Can Tim Cook do it?

The World and the stock market are watching Apple.

HAVE YOUR SAY: A year from now: do you think Apple’s stock price will be higher or lower than $500?

To read How to Create and Run a Beloved Brand, read the following presentation:

To read other stories on Brand Leadership, click on any of the topics below:

There is a Facebook page called “Brand Leadership Learning Center” at

If you or team has any interest in a training program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

LEGO: Best Customer Service Letter Ever

17 January 2013

3 Comments

When you are a 7-year-old kid, Lego is likely twice as important to them than Starbucks or Apple is to you. For generations, Lego has been a Beloved Brand for those inventive minds who liked to create complex objects from very simple bricks. Current Lego products are a little more complex, but the idea of Lego remains the same.

This customer story involves a 7-year old boy who lost his Lego when he took it on a family trip to the mall. He was so upset that he wrote Lego a letter, telling them the story and asking for a replacement. Someone at Lego, made the brilliant decision to send the boy some replacement product and the following letter.

For Lego, in the world of social media, this type of story does wonders for continuing the magic of their brand. And it’s a great example of going above and beyond. What I like in the letter is how they please the boy, but also give a solid wink to the parent who is likely the bigger target of this letter. The dad ended up tweeting about the story and now millions are reading about this story (including you)

When you reach the Beloved Brand stage, the strategies become all about continuing the magic of the brand. That might mean attacking yourself on product innovation or finding new ways to surprise and delight your consumer base. There are legendary customer service stories that come from Nordstrom’s, the high end retailer that add to the mystique of the Nordstrom brand. One story involved a Nordstrom employee who found luggage and a plane ticket for a flight that was taking off soon. Figuring the customer was on their way to the airport, the employee got in his car and drove to airport to meet the customer. The second story involves a customer in Alaska returning tires that he bought at the store that was the prior tenant to the Nordstrom store. After much debate, they decided to take the tires back, even though it’s not a product they carry.

To read how to create and run a Beloved Brand, read the following presentation:

Manage Your Own Career with an Honest Self Evaluation

15 January 2013

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This time of year is when you sit down with your boss and have the dreaded annual performance review. It’s likely dreaded for a reason. You hate getting feedback and your boss hates giving feedback. It’s very common. These days performance reviews feel like a bit of jockeying. When you do you Self Evaluation, you avoid putting anything that can be used against you. And when your boss does your Evaluation, they will avoid putting anything that will imply a promotion, raise or even maintaining your employment.

In general, the feedback gets worse when you move up. I think the Manager figures “they know what’s going on and am I really going to make a difference?”. It’s almost easier to give that eager green Assistant Brand Manager feedback then it is to give a Senior Brand Manager, Director of VP good solid feedback.

If You are Managing Your Career Then Give Yourself Feedback

Are you lucky enough to have a boss that puts a lot into the review? Does your boss focus on ways to help you to genuinely improve? Is there a plan you can follow that challenges you and yet help you to be successful? Does your boss care about your long-term career success? I sure hope so. I encourage Brand Leaders to be fully engaged in the careers of their team. The leader has to buy into the idea that the better the people, the better the work and in turn the better the results. For information on how to conduct a performance review, read the following story: How to Conduct a Performance Review.

If you manage your career, (Managing Your Career from ABM to VP of Marketing) then you have to be willing to give yourself the most honest feedback you can. Below is a Tool I’ve used in coaching executives that will help to give yourself a Self Evaluation against the dimensions that would make up 1) Leading and Managing and 2) Brand Stewardship.

Go through each of the dimensions and give yourself a score in relation to your peers. A score of 5 means you’re the best in the department in a given area, a 3 means you are average and the scores of 1′s and 2′s would mean you have a gap. We all have gaps. The real question is what are going to do about closing that gap.

Leading and Managing

This covers areas related to how well you lead your team: holding them to a high standard, coaching, motivating and showing up consistently.

Hold your team to a consistently high standard of work in strategic thinking and planning.
Hold your team to a consistently high standard of work in execution in the market.
People Leadership: your team knows the team vision and is consistently motivated by where you want to go.
People Management: seen as actively interested in helping your team to manage their careers.
Coaching: Teach, guide and direct your team members for higher performance.
Training and Development: provides on-going skills development to make the team better.
Motivation and Recognition: you are seen to actively provide positive commentary to team players, one on one and in public.
Consistent Communication: Both written and spoken, big and small. Easily approachable and makes time to wander.
Actively Listens to Team: asks the big strategic questions, not the small tactical details
Leadership during times of pressure: results, ambiguity, change and deadlines.

Brand Stewardship

This would look at how you do in terms of the marketing of the brand. That looks at strategic thinking, quality of the output, processes and how well you show up to peers.

Takes the time each week to engage in deeper Strategic Thinking to ensure it’s not just about execution.
Has Crafted a Team Vision to help align & motivate team. Stewart of the Direction of the Brand and Gatekeeper to all things strategic
Challenges Team to stay on strategy, yet provides motivation for creative solutions.
Consistency in the Quality of marketing outputs: Advertising/Media, Innovation/New Products and In-store/Promotion
Relationship with Agencies, able to motivate for better work.
Consistently in the relationships you’ve built with the Sales Team
Broad Influence beyond your team with core stakeholders: R&D, Finance, HR, global.
Organization of the work flows. Your team gets things done on time. Deadlines, on budget, on forecast.
Processes: you organize, challenge and manage the processes so your team can execute.
Manages Up: Once aligned with the team you are able to effectively gain support from those above. Seen as one to fight for your team.

Identifying Your Own Gaps

Using the two elements of the review above, identify what are the 3 areas from the Self Evaluation that you feel you need the most focus on? Then as you build your own personal plan for the year, ask yourself what is your objective/goal for each of those 3 areas. And then map out a plan of attack for the coming year? It might feel a bit crazy, but going through the process should help you identify where you need the most help. If you’re reluctant in sharing this with your boss, fearing how it might be used against you, then reach out to a friend and seek their advice. If you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to bounce some of your thoughts off me. I do this with many Brand Leaders. And don’t worry, we all have gaps. I struggled at different times in my career when dealing with the sales team and it took me a while to master the art of managing up. You might be able to learn from some of my mistakes.

To download a copy of the self evaluation, you can find a word version at:

To read more on managing your career, read the following presentation:

I run Brand Leader Training programs on this very subject as well as a variety of others that are all designed to make better Brand Leaders. Click on any of the topics below:

To see the training presentations, visit the Beloved Brands Slideshare site at: http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamRobertson/presentations

If you or team has any interest in a training program, please contact me at graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

Here’s the ad:

Is it a Good Ad?

But, is it the right Ad for K-Mart?

Ship My Pants: Good Ad, Wrong Brand

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1. Will people watch even more TV in the future?

2. How can Advertisers Capture the Internet Babies (12-22 years old) as they move into adulthood?

3. Can Newspapers even Survive?

4. Can Advertisers Figure Out how to Win in the New World?

5. Are there too many Social Media Options?

6. Will New Media people ever be able to Convince Brand Leaders of what they Should do?

When It Comes to New Media, Brand Leaders still need to be Fundamentally Sound

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So what happens when you just do “surface thinking”:

How to go Deeper

Thinking Time Questions that will Help you Go Deeper

The Deeper the Thinking, the Smarter the Leader

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Brand Funnels

Brand Health vs Brand Wealth

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Use Brand Funnels to Track and Manage the Health of Your Brand

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Cut to the Chase and Avoid the Brand Spin

Cut to the Chase with the The 40/70 Rule

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What is Your “Let’s Cut to the Chase” Moment?

Skills to Challenge Your Brand Leaders:

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Are You Worried Enough?

5 things you should be worried about:

So the question I have for is “Are You Worried Enough?” And what are you doing about it?

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What’s the Leafs Brand Vision?

Holding the Leafs up to the Principles of a Beloved Brand

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The P&L

It’s not easy being a Leaf Fan. Yet like a drug, it’s not easy to stop being a Leaf fan.

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The Evolution of Brands Beyond the Product

The Brand Love Curve

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The Most Beloved Brands Are Strong on All 5 Sources of Connectivity

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Brainstorming should be a Regular Part of running your Brand.

The Warm Up

The trick to a good brainstorm is very simple: Diverge, Converge, Diverge Converge.

Diverge #1:

Converge #1:

Diverge #2

Converge #2: Decision Time

Turn the Idea into a Project

“Love what you do” Steve Jobs

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“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899

Generating Love for the Brand

Stages of Innovation

But be careful: Without Innovation, very few brands remain at the top for very long.

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