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Good Reads

January 16, 2007

I’m not sure how you can even stay current, let alone try to stay ahead of the curve, if you’re not doing a fair amount of reading. Whether it’s books, blog posts or a great website packed with ideas — I think we all need to keep feeding our brains.

Here’s a couple thought provoking reads that are easily accessible.

Carolyn Manning is hosting another Carnival over at Thoughts & Philosophies. Lots of good reads but the one I found most thought-provoking was The Science of Success from Craig Harper.

Over at Marketing Profs, Mack Collier has posted an excellent article called Ten Steps to Creating a Brand Ambassador. You need to be a premium member…but honestly, you need to be one of those anyway.

I’ve been a member for a long time and always thought it was a bargain. The content is top notch year round and now they are doing weekly case studies that are packed with ideas, insights and tough lessons. Now, an uber bargain.

Go grab yourself some brain food! The lollipop is optional but highly recommended.

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:60 ticks marketing tip: Close your eyes and say no

January 16, 2007

Grab it fast…it’s gone in about a minute. A :60 ticks marketing tip is 150 words or less…so read it in a minute and implement it in the next!

Close your eyes. Picture a can of Coke. Now in your imagination, make the can green. What happens?

It’s not Coke anymore, is it? The folks at Coca-Cola headquarters are probably so sick of red they could scream — but they know better than to mess with their visual identity.

Remember that next time you want to change your logo’s color, font or other distinguishing features. If a company with the resources of Coke recognizes the cost of messing with their brand — shouldn’t you too?

That’s it…go put it into action! (Or in this case…inaction — leave it alone!)

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Love me or let me go (part deux)

January 12, 2007

A couple days ago, I suggested that if you couldn’t love your clients — you owed it to them to fire them. Our clients deserve not only good service and competent skills. They deserve our love.

The same, I believe, is true of our employees. If you don’t love them — fire them. Of course, loving them doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have to part ways either. Sometimes the best thing you can do for an employee who’s the wrong fit or can’t wrap their skills or attitude around your organization is to let them go. Give them the kick in the pants they need to find a place where they can be successful and contribute.

How does loving your employees benefit you, the company and your customers?

Selfishly, you get to work with people you love
It builds incredible trust and loyalty (both ways)
Your employees care about you, the business and your clients as though they owed the joint
Better profits, lower turnover, more fun
They get better because you care enough to help them get better
It’s authentic

Over at Innovation Compass, Susie de Ville Schiffli paints a nice picture of what a loving company looks like. If it doesn’t sound like your place of business — what can you do about that?

Flickr photo courtesy of omnia.

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Ease into the week – rather fight than switch?

January 7, 2007

I don’t know about you but Sunday nights are time for me to catch up. On my reading, on my work, on my relationships — all with an eye on Monday morning and knowing that the 180 mph pace is about to resume.

Sundays also seem to be my day for deep thoughts. I thought it might be fun to ease into the week together with a question that is sort of about branding and marketing but also has a personal element to it as well. A chance to get to know each other AND talk shop. Perfect for a Sunday night.

Most of you will be too young to remember the famous Tareyton cigarette campaign which proclaimed "I’d rather fight than switch." Here’s a flash from the past for those of you who love vintage ads.

So here’s the question to take us into the first 5 day work week of ’07. What brand would inspire you to utter the infamous line, "I’d rather fight then switch?"

For me, it’s Coke. If a waitress says "we serve Pepsi" I respond with "I’ll have iced tea." I fell in love with the brand as a teen. For me, Coke is Americana, baseball, and being old fashioned neighborly.

There are few treats I love more than an ice cold Coke in the bottle. It’s no one I indulge in very often, but it’s one of my favorites.

How about you…what brand is non-negotiable for you?

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Have you committed a Cardinal Zin?

January 6, 2007

This marketing truth stings. Just because you care about it, doesn’t mean anyone else does.

Whether you are the creator/inventor, business owner, assembly line foreman, sales manager or marketing genius — what matters to you may very well not matter one iota to your consumers or potential consumers.

In other words, they don’t want to buy what you’re selling.

That doesn’t mean they don’t want to buy. It means you need to get out of the way. It means you need to be smart enough to learn what matters to or influences them.

Roberta Rosenberg over at Copywriting Maven talks about the need to understand your audience before you open your marketing mouth.

Let’s look at a concrete example. 90% of wine drinkers know or care very little about varietals (vine types), bouquet (aroma), depth (layers of taste) or any of the factors that wine makers and connoisseur think are most important. If you owned a winery, because it matters to you, you’d assume it matters to the consumers. You’d be 90% wrong.

For a very long time, wineries seemed to market their product based on either quality (which most of us didn’t understand or know how to evaluate) or price. But, as Valeria Maltoni tell us over at Conversation Agent, product packaging is changing the way wine is evaluated.

Admit it, you’ve bought wine simply because of the name or label. They make us laugh or we think they’re cool or they create an aura we want to be a part of.

We can’t tell a heady bouquet from a cloudy composition. But we can tell whether our friends would be amused by sharing some Cardinal Zin or Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush!

The wineries are starting to get it in a big way. Are you?

Do you sell your product or service based on your level of knowledge or interest? Are you using terminology that makes your consumers feel like an outsider or stupid? (Anyone else ever feel the clutch of panic when the waiter pours the dribble of wine and then waits for you to evaluate it?)

Maybe it’s time to look at your sales materials, website, presentations and other marketing tools. Are they written based on what matters to you or your customer?

UPDATE: Seems like we are all talking about wine this weekend! Check out what Lonely Marketer Patrick Schaber discovered on a recent wine bottle.

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Brand yourself with a ringtone!

January 5, 2007

How a person brands themselves changes over time. Clothing labels, playing certain positions on sports teams, and Girl Scout badges evolve to the type of car you drive, your personalized plates and today in our all-tech world — cell phone ringtones.

Remember when you thought having personalized ringtones were a crazy fad the kids were into? Now, it’s absolutely mainstream. So here’s my question.

If you could only use one song for your universal ringtone (so everyone in your world and your general vicinity) would hear it and associate it with you — what song would you choose? Let me give you a running start.

My fellow Iowa blogger Doug Mitchell mentioned PhoneZoo at breakfast this morning.

Look at some of the ringtones you can have sent to your phone for free.

Are you an intense guy who’s life is sort of 24/7? How about the theme song to "24" or Mission Impossible?

Are you whimsical and short? How about the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

I know…feeling silly and colorful? Why not sound like Fred Flintstone or Peanut Butter Jelly Time from The Family Guy?

Go ahead….brand yourself with a song!

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More packaging brain candy

January 5, 2007

Again…evidence that you can take the most ordinary elements of your business and your brand…and make them something worth talking about.

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More on how companies interact with bad blog press

January 4, 2007

Isn’t it great when the planets align? If you’ve read my post, Mack’s post or Paul’s post on Kohl‘s…this is the perfect next course.

Over at brandchannel.com, they’ve posted an excellent article on how corporations/brands should/shouldn’t react when a blog slams the company and/or product.

I’ve saved it as a PDF just in case its only posted for a brief time. You can Download brandchannel.pdf here.

You can also jump into the debate on their blog. Let the evolution continue!

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Describe Kohl’s in one phrase

January 3, 2007

Paul over at Hee-Haw Marketing took some pretty damning photos at his local Kohl’s. He raises some great issues about advertising and saying one thing and living another.

Then, Mack Collier picked up the ball and posted this very interesting question: If the CMO of Kohl’s saw Paul’s post…what should he/she do?

I started to add my comment to Mack’s post and then I could hear Mike Sansone whispering in my ear “long comments should be posts on your own site.” So here we have it.

So….Kohl’s has a significant problem. There were lots of good comments on Mack’s site, suggesting what the CMO should do. I didn’t disagree with any of them.

But they all started at stage two — at the store level.

I believe the CMO needs to start at the beginning. The Kohl’s brand. That’s why I asked you how you’d describe the store. Most of us would use words like “cheap, knock offs, second runs, last year’s styles, shoddy production, disinterested employees.”

Every choice the store makes — the stock, the short-handed staff, the under trained staff, the crowded junked up retail ads…tells us that the employees who allowed that Dallas store to look like that were simply behaving as they have been taught to behave. They don’t show the store or the customers any respect because no one has taught them to respect the brand.

Punishing a store manager or answering a blog post isn’t going to fix that. That’s treating the symptom, not the cause. If an organization’s leaders are not willing to explore and uncover what their brand is all about — why they exist (and I do not believe any store exists to offer crap in a shoddy store staffed by disgruntled, short-handed staffers) then really, there is little hope. They will go down the path of K-Mart and others who thought “low prices” was enough.

If Kohl’s management could change the way they look at the chain by seeing it through a brand lens, they would change the way the employees see it. When the employees see if differently, they begin to take pride in their work and their environment. No matter how inexpensive the merchandise is. And when that happens — they change our perception.

Until then…let me recommend Target. By the way….Kohl’s tagline on their website…”expect great things.”

Yikes. They even bolded great.

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Ever considered bagging your brand?

January 1, 2007

Sometimes it is not about discovering new media. Sometimes it is about being more creative with the media you have right in front of you. Here’s to a very creative ’07 for all of us! Cheers!

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