Branding Archives - Page 27 of 42 - McLellan Marketing Group

But will they buy Paul Potts’ CDs?

June 20, 2007

Odds are you have watched at least one YouTube video of Paul Potts, the cell phone sales guy who arrived at the UK’s Britain’s Have Talent as the unknown underdog and took the world and the competition by storm.

If not…here’s a chance to see him in action. This particular video has been viewed over a million times and it’s one of many variations.

So why are we so fascinated and taken by Paul Potts?

He’s the underdog.
He’s ordinary.
He’s not gorgeous or appearing to have any other "advantage" in life.
He’s afraid but doing it anyway.
He has a dream that he’s willing to take risks to explore.

We are suckers for this kind of story. We take heart in them. We cheer on the underdog and feel like maybe if he can capture his dream…then we can too! (cue the music.)

But.

I know…I’m the jerk who is raining on the parade. The world has embraced Paul Potts. But he sings opera. And the bulk of the world does not like, listen to or understand opera. And he is ordinary looking in a field (entertainment) that clamors for beauty. Think I am being mean? In his first post-winning interviews, Potts also focuses on his looks and the "repair work" that needs to be done.

So now what? Do you think Paul Potts will change the world’s impression/buying patterns regarding opera? Will he at least take the opera world by storm?

Will the traits that attracted the world also inspire them to pull out their wallets? Or will Paul be a great inspirational YouTube video and in a few months, be back at the cell phone counter?

His personal brand served him well to win the competition. He won our hearts. Do you think it will serve him well in the marketplace and let him win our wallets?

Wondering who is going to buy an iPhone?

June 19, 2007

Check out the profile of who’s most likely to buy an iPhone later this month. Read more about the survey at TrendsSpotting. How about you…going to get one?

Let go

June 17, 2007

It seems appropriate to share this with you on Father’s Day. It’s something that’s come to me as I’ve blundered through being a dad. It’s one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn. Fortunately, the difficulty has been commensurate with the value.

When my daughter was a little less than a year old, she, like all babies, was struggling to stand and take those first steps. I would walk behind her, her hands wrapped tightly around my forefingers to provide some stability, and together we would walk.

Of course, I was handling most of the balancing. She was just putting one foot in front of the other and sort of lunging. If I had removed my hands, she would have fallen. So I didn’t.

My mistake. Once I let her fall a couple times, she figured it out. And took her first steps.

Flash forward a few years. My daughter loved riding her bike and was ready to go sans training wheels. So we took them off. We started out slowly. I’d walk (then run) behind her, holding onto the seat so she wouldn’t fall. Every time the bike would start to tip to the side, I righted it and we kept going.

My mistake. Once I let her fall a couple times, she figured it out. And rode down the street, triumphant and training wheel free.

I’ve observed this pattern in our lives together many times. When I hang on too tight out of fear or protectiveness, she doesn’t grow. She doesn’t master something new. She doesn’t get to be all that she can be.

I know, as we approach the dating years, I am going to be painfully reminded of this lesson. And I know I won’t always heed the little voice in my head that’s whispering, "let go." But I’m going to try.

Beyond parenting, I believe the "let go" lesson is incredibly relevant in marketing.

We can craft our marketing messages and our brand promises until we think they’re perfect. But sooner or later, we have to let go. We have to recognize that it’s a conversation, not a monologue.

When we hang on too tight out of fear or protectiveness, nothing grows. We can’t master something new. And the relationship we’re trying to forge with our community of customers doesn’t get to be all that it can be.

What’s something that you held onto for too long? Or, tell us a success story of what happened when you let go.

Bands, Brands and all that jazz!

June 14, 2007

The music marketing agency from the UK, FRUKT believes in the power of blending music and branding. Check out FRUKT’s music brand affinity thinking.

But now, they’ve gone one better. They’ve launched a new blog Brands|Bands|Fans that promises to be worth a read. They focus in on music & brand campaigns from across the globe. They are also writing/releasing an e-newsletter every couple weeks on the same topic.

Some very interesting thinking and insights. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Viral product placement — do you think it drives sales?

June 14, 2007

One of the newer trends in marketing is the development of videos (think Mentos & Diet Coke) with specific products playing a primary role. On YouTube alone, the Mentos video was viewed over 2.2 million times. And imagine what that number balloons to when you consider all the places the video was shared.

A more recent viral video coined "Catch" features a guy catching a pair of Ray-Ban glasses on his face. Despite some pretty hard to believe scenarios.

That video, on YouTube alone, has been watched almost 2.5 million times. But…does it makes you want to buy Ray-Bans? Or does it even make you more aware of the brand?

Josh Warner, President of the Feed Company who produced the video sure hopes so. He was the subject of an interesting Q&A on the topic. Their home page says "200,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube and the web every day. You might be an agency or entertainment company that’s great at making ’em but getting web videos ranked, forwarded, and featured is an art in itself. Let us feed the monster – we know what it’s hungry for."

What do you think?

Does it sell product?
Does it raise brand awareness?
When the viewers realize its been produced as an "ad" does that change/diminish its effect?
Would the technique play better if it occurred naturally or doesn’t it matter?

Hint at exceptional service

June 13, 2007

I had dinner the other night with a business associate/friend. We were seated and the hostess turned to my friend and asked, "would you prefer a black napkin?’

Being a dumb boy, I was surprised and a little confused when my friend said that yes, she would prefer a black napkin. The hostess must have noticed my puzzled expression. She nodded at my friend and said, "she’s wearing a dark dress. A white linen napkin might leave a bit of lint on her dress."

Wow. We were in for an exceptional dinner.

Any restaurant that would pay attention and make accommodations for that level of detail was going to go out of their way to deliver a remarkable experience.

And they did. If there’s a Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar in your area — get there. And ask for a black napkin.

More important — what’s your black napkin?

BrandingWire: The Coffee Shop

June 11, 2007

Welcome to the first monthly installment of BrandingWire. For the first month, we are using a fictitious local coffee shop chain as a case study. If you are or know of a company that would like the posse at BrandingWire to tackle a challenge, let one of us know. Your idea may get chosen for a future BrandingWire feature!

The challenge (in a nutshell):

Small, family owned coffee company in mid-America. They have a few retail stores, roast their own beans on site, kind of country-funky décor. They’ve got a strong local following but nothing beyond that geography, in terms of business awareness and/or traffic. They’re reasonably profitable and have good cash flow.

They have a bad name and bad tagline (great coffee at great prices!) and no distinctive visual pieces/brand.

They want to grow but are not sure how/in what direction. Competition is closing in.

My response:

It’s incredibly tempting to simply prescribe a solution. That’s one of the biggest dangers facing marketing professionals. It’s very seductive to just make one of the following assumptions at the outset:

We are the audience – "I hang out at a coffee shop so I must be just like their customers."

We know who the audience is – "I get the coffee shop people. They’re all yuppies who want…"

This is just like another project we worked on – "when we did the re-branding for the salad dressings, we…"

Are there kernels of truth in all the statements above? Most likely, yes. But do we know enough to make sweeping recommendations? Nope. And if we do, we’re going to get it wrong. Even if we’re partially right.

So where do we go from here?

Really, this is three very different challenges:

Branding – how should this coffee shop differentiate themselves from their competition?

Marketing – how should they spread the word, increase traffic and demand for their products/services?

Growth Strategy – in what directions (more stores, customer loyalty/ambassador clubs, online sales of coffee beans, adding food/catering, coffee tasting – like wine tastings, coffee region tours etc) should the store owners take the business to create sustainable growth?

Just from a manageability point of view, I am only going to address the first of the three, because I’d like to go deep, rather than scratch the surface of all three. And I suspect this is already going to be my longest post of all time! Normally I’d break this up into a series, but…bear with me and the length. Hopefully it will be worth it.

I wrestled with how to approach this branding challenge for quite a bit. I could make some assumptions (even sharing what they are) and propose a solution. But that’s not how my agency or my brain works. And I don’t think the readers of this blog (and the BrandingWire site) will gain as much from my guesses as they will from an abbreviated version of what we’d really do if a prospect like this walked in the door.

Just a quick refresher from my post a couple weeks ago.

A brand is a unified, singular understanding of what an organization is about and how it is unique from the key audiences’ points of view. In English – it’s why a potential client or employee would choose you over your competitor. What makes you stand out from the rest? What’s it like to do business with you? How do they experience you?

It is you standing up, hand on heart and making a promise. And then keeping that promise.

A brand is like a three-legged stool. The three legs are:

1. The company’s vision of the brand
2. The consumers’ vision of the brand
3. Where your brand sits in the marketplace

At MMG, we help a client discover their brand so they can create a love affair with their customers. To do that, we ask questions. Lots of questions. (Naturally, I’m only going to scratch the surface but you’ll get the idea.)

So let’s identify some questions that will help the coffee shop hone in on all three legs of their stool. Keep in mind we engage a client’s internal branding team in 20-25 hours of questions, exercises and exploration to help them discover their brand. But, this is a good sampling.

We’d ask the coffee shop owners to form an internal branding team that would work with us throughout the process. The branding team must include everyone at the C-level and then a member from each department or area of the shop. So it might be a bean roaster, a clerk, a barista, a bean buyer, etc. The key is to have all aspects of the shop represented.

From the coffee shop owner’s POV:

Of all the businesses you could have started, you chose the coffee shop business. Why? What appealed to you? Is it what still appeals to you?

If you closed your business today, what "hole" would be left in your marketplace? What wouldn’t people be able to get/do?

Do you help your customers do or achieve or get something that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish without your help?

Make a list of 2-3 core reasons for being. Why you exist and what unique role you play in the marketplace. (Don’t be surprised or frustrated if you can’t answer this. Most often it needs to be discovered.)

What kinds of promises do you already make to your customers? Are they related to:

Pricing
How you’ll deliver your product/services
Product (quality, quantity, variety etc.)
Environment (what the shop/experience is like)
Something else?

What do you hope every customers walks out knowing/feeling?

What are 3-5 things your customers have asked for/if you did in the past 6 months? (i.e. coffee tasting events – like wine tasting events)

If money/time were no object – how would you change/add to the customer experience in your current shops? What do you wish you could do different?

What three things are you most proud of, in terms of your business?

If your business were a person, how would you describe its personality? Give us five different adjectives. (Serious? Warm? Informed? Etc.)

From the customers’ POV:

The ideal way to find these answers is t o spend time interviewing the coffee shop’s customers, one by one. This interview technique is preferable if you are looking for qualitative data – impressions, feelings, reactions, preferences, frustrations etc.

We’d ask for a cross section of customers, both in terms of frequency of visits and demo/psychographics. What we’re looking for are trends and recurring themes.

Where did you go to get coffee before going to the client’s coffee shop?

Why did you switch?

What did you expect (both good and bad) the first time you walked into the coffee shop? Did they meet those expectations?

How often do you visit the coffee shop?

When you are there, do you go in? Drive thru? How long do you stay?

What do you do when you’re there? Are you usually there alone?

What do you love (and yes…that’s the word we’d use) most about the coffee shop?

What do you tolerate because you love the place?

Do you consider the coffee shop "your" coffee shop?

If you owned the shop, what would you do differently? What new products/services would you offer? What would you take away or stop doing?

What five words would you use to describe this coffee shop?

If the shop were ten miles further away, would you still be a customer?

If someone moved into your neighborhood and asked you about local merchants, would you tell them about this store?

If someone had never visited the store and asked you about it – what would you say?

The marketplace that impacts the coffee shop:

This is about two different aspects of the marketplace. First…who else is out there and what is their claim to fame? How do they brand themselves and how well do they do it? Keep in mind that competitors not only include other coffee shops but other places people gather, other places people buy drinks etc. The competition that most people forget is the choice to do nothing. To make coffee at home.

The second aspect of this focus is to answer the question — what’s not there? Think of the marketplace as a topographical map. Any brand position successfully occupied by a competitor is raised on the map. Where are the flat spots? What needs are not being met? Here’s the toughest question – what need that hasn’t yet been identified as a need, is not being met?

We can gather much of this information through observation. Visit the competitors and do some secret shopping. Check out websites. Clip ads.

Surveying the marketplace is a powerful and quantitative balance to these observations. Be sure that your questions measure not only how the competitors position themselves in the marketplace but if the consumers buy the positioning. Just because they say it, doesn’t mean their actions confirm it. In other words, I can tell you that I’m a duck. But, you may not believe it. My actions and choices might suggest I am more of a penguin and you probably see me as that way.

Letting the answers be your answer

By asking all of the questions and sorting and sifting through the answers, the brand reveals itself. It will reflect the coffee shop owner’s heart and soul. It will represent something the employees and customers recognize and know is authentic and true because they’ve experienced it, even if they couldn’t describe or identify it before. It will be something that the marketplace is hungry for, whether they know it or not.

And from that sold foundation, the marketing and growth strategies can build.

BrandingWire is a collaborative of high-voltage marketing experts with a wide variety of branding, marketing, PR and communications skills. The pundits of BrandingWire not only maintain individual content-loaded blogs, but also have banded together to collaboratively offer perspectives and commentary on a variety of branding themes.

Each month, we focus our creative bandwidth on a particular branding challenge or topic, and collectively give our perspectives on how we’d apply best branding practices. So tune in, early each month, for the newest jolt from the BrandingWire team! Contrast and compare our responses to this month’s branding challenge.

The posse:

Olivier Blanchard
Becky Carroll
Derrick Daye
Kevin Dugan
Lewis Green
Ann Handley
Gavin Heaton
Martin Jelsema
Valeria Maltoni
Drew McLellan
Patrick Schaber
Steve Woodruff

A bagful of ideas: 06/07/07

June 6, 2007

From time to time, I’m going to share a mixed bag of ideas, marketing tips, brilliant writing and sometimes — something that just made me laugh out loud. Here’s today’s offering:

This one had me pumping my fist in the air: Tom Vander Well hit the nail on the head when he said okay does not drive customer loyalty or word of mouth. Right on Tom! Why are so many businesses slow to understand this?

This one had me applauding my peers: Sabina shares some really creative work. Reminds us all to stretch a little.

This one had me taking notes: Get it in Writing shares the top 20 words that when/if you misuse them make you look stupid. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t need any help in that arena!

Marketing Tips from a Marketing Agency: Be disruptive

June 6, 2007

It would only stand to reason that a marketing & branding agency would be pretty good at branding and marketing itself.

So I thought it might be fun to explore some branding & marketing concepts using our own agency, McLellan Marketing Group, as the guinea pig.

Be disruptive

Marketing isn’t always about the big campaign. Sometimes it is taking something simple or expected and turning it on its ear. Earlier in this series, we talked about how we approach business cards. Being disruptive seems to be an MMG given. It’s certainly what we do with our voice mail. If you call our office, while we’re transferring your call — you’re going to be asked a question.

So, let’s say you hit my extension (17 by the way) and you expect elevator music, silence or a sales pitch. Instead you’re going to hear me asking…"while we transfer your call, ponder this. What tagline best describes your personal brand? Be ready to tell us why…"

Not only do we learn quite a bit about our callers, but the Q&A helps define our brand. We ask a lot of questions, so we might as well set the expectation now.

But the biggest value in our voicemail tactic — it’s disruptive. It surprises people and it’s something they talk about. It says, "these people do things differently."

Now maybe you can’t mess with your company’s voice mail system but come on, you can be disruptive some place, some how.

How can you cause a buzzworthy disruption?

Get your fill at the new branding smorgasbord!

June 4, 2007

Bw_logo_med_2

As you know, I seem to be drawn to group collaborations. I love the greater than the whole concept. And we’ve proven it to be true already. Together, you and I…and some other smart marketers have created the Advice for College Grads PDF, the Age of Conversation, The Blogger Social ’08 and now…

BrandingWire.

BrandingWire is the brainchild of Steve Woodruff. He wanted to create “a collaboration of high-profile branding and marketing pundits, who band together to tackle branding challenges and topics on a regular basis.” I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the merry band.

Here’s how it will work: The team will mutually decide on a branding topic or focus for the month. Then, on a specified day (for June it is a week from today – June 11th. Each blogger will post his/her take on the topic on their own blog. It will be very interesting to compare and learn from everyone’s differing perspective. My guess is that you’ll see some who will dive deep and others who will take a broader view. But there will be something to learn from each. And if you want to view/read all the BrandingWire takes in one fell swoop, you can check out the PageFlakes compilation.

It’s unscripted, it’s unedited…so it’s sure to be worth the read.

Filling out the BrandingWire roster are:

Olivier Blanchard
Becky Carroll
Derrick Daye
Kevin Dugan
Lewis Green
Ann Handley
Gavin Heaton
Martin Jelsema (also the designer of the BW logo above!)
Valeria Maltoni
Drew McLellan
Patrick Schaber
Steve Woodruff

If you’d like to read more about the team, check out the BrandingWire website.

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