What can the business and branding world gain from Eddie Izzard? Aside from any obvious answers, there lies an intriguing connection in the back-story of the comedian’s success. First, Eddie Izzard (Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story) does not perceive himself as being naturally funny. Being a comedian for him is a lot of work. He plans out his ideas, practices his delivery and prototypes skits with small audiences. Only after working on the content, refining the delivery, and sharpening timing is the new comedy recipe tried again on other audiences. Elicited responses again are evaluated, fine-tuned, and re-delivered. The end result is that he has mastered his delivery, the crowd walks away happy, the cable networks get their viewers, and the brand that is Eddie Izzard grows.
Lots of failure + Lots of iteration = Strong brand
Now think about traditional development process. Planning, design, and launch. Launch? Here’s an age-old concept that is being re-shaped in the era of the proto-brand. As social media and technology open up development, co-creation will become the normative process for many brands.
As the speed and quantity of new offers being thrown at us increases, our attention spans become shorter and we’re more easily distracted. In this 21st century business environment, brands cannot rely on the one-liner. People’s considerations are changing faster than ever, in some cases disrupting the validity of our traditional segmentation practices. So, in a world where the only constant is change, how will you evolve your products, services, and experiences? How are you structuring your existing customers and yet-to-be-discovered clients to allow for Eddie’s approach to testing and iteration?
In the world of open, brand is more valuable than ever. More than what you can offer is the outcome of the way you act: trust, equity, and loyalty. Open up to people, and you gain empathy, support, and forgiveness. Close the door to them, tell the same jokes over and over, and soon you’ll be looking at a theater of empty seats.
We used to live in a time when making a purchase meant having to visit multiple shops and retailers to attain new goods. Today, with the ease of Internet shopping sites and powerhouse sellers such as Amazon, it is possible to choose from a greater variety of items from one location. In a world where you can get anything you want, wherever you are, how can a brick and mortar retailer compete?
Creating a better reality with storytelling is a powerful way for a company to reach its customers on an experiential level. Providing a meaningful experience for consumers while retaining relevance to the product is paramount.
Leveraging creative initiatives, retail shops can build connections with their consumers. Spotisquare is an example of this. Foursquare teamed up with Spotify to connect venue and retail locations with music playlists. Visitors can make collaborative playlists and share the experience of making music in relation to a place.
Stickybits is a social network in which users attach personalized content to a product barcode. When another member of the network scans the barcode, they see the notes, recipes, tips, photos, and reviews of that item. Retailers are engaging consumers on a more personal level creating stories based on their personal experiences.
A more localized approach to creating consumer connectivity comes from Subway in Japan. The restaurant allows you to grow and harvest your own lettuce, which is then immediately placed on your sandwich. It’s about creating an experience even for objects that are ubiquitous; making the customer more excited about interacting with a product or brand through relevance.
It may be more difficult for physical retailers to compete with larger warehouse-style Internet markets. They can build a sustainable, competitive advantage by engaging consumers to interact with them on an experiential level.
To see how ready your brand is for change, try these ten questions:
Brand = platform
1. Do you give customers a new power of some sort, like Skype or Twitter? Or do you just help them do old things better?
2. Do you let customers in, reveal your strategy, admit to mistakes, like JetBlue? Or are you secretive?
3. Do you get customers to participate (donate their time or skills, provide content, design products…), like Wikipedia or Lego? Or do you create everything yourselves?
4. Do you encourage a network effect (enable peer-to-peer activity, get customers to bring in new customers), like Zopa or Zipcar? Or do you deal with customers one at a time?
5. Do you happily give away some of your intellectual property, like Mozilla? Or is everything strictly copyright?
Brand = link
6. Do you work through other organisations, thinking collaboration rather than competition, like Better Place? Or are you suspicious of collaboration?
7. Do you offer collaborators a unique technology or attitude or ethos that multiplies the meaning of their brand? And does their brand add to the meaning of yours? Are you like Amazon Marketplace or (RED)? Or are your brand and your collaborator’s brand quite separate?
Brand = theme
8. Do you deliberately offer different things, and act in different ways, from country to country, like Mandarin Oriental? Or do you pride yourself on your consistency?
9. Are you happy for customers and collaborators to adopt and maybe adapt your brand identity, like NYC? Or is that anathema?
10. Do you develop your brand by experimentation, like Google? Or does everything have to be 100% perfect before it hits the outside world?
Brand Value + Social Media + Corporate Responsibility
CSR reports have become the vehicle by which organizations put a moral and ethical face on their existence. At its core, it is a reporting exercise. It is usually reflective and without standards — but is that about to change? In autumn of this year, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) will release ISO 10668 – Monetary Brand Valuation. What does brand valuation have to do with CSR? Well, the back of this ISO offer has an interesting hook, SAM Group – the guys who produce the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) – intend to upweight businesses in the DJSI if they adopt ISO 10668. Suddenly, the criteria for exacting value on brands is directly linked to their sustainability ranking.
The upweighting is based on three key factors: Legal, behavioral, and financial analyses. Taking a look at behavior analysis, the brand must understand the size of the market and trends. What are the stakeholder attitudes? What are the economic benefits bestowed on the business by the brand? In many cases media is still used as a platform to talk at instead of enabling conversation with constituents and customers.
Here’s the reason why social media, brand strategy and CSR folks should start meeting by the water cooler more often. If we’re entering a new paradigm of evaluating brand behavior as well as CSR reporting methodologies representing the practice toward improved corporate citizenship, and if we agree that social media is the most relevant way to start and maintain conversations with people to share a brands values, how might we use this brain trust to help shape business strategy?
The following are 5 key challenges that, if addressed correctly, will differentiate leading brands and lead to greater customer loyalty.
1. Create value with Values- gain trust through responsible and transparent actions.
2. Visualize brand value (and risks) across the complete brand eco-system: the offer, culture, business model, and communications.
3. Stop approving obvious solutions; overcome incrementalism as the hallmark of efficiency engineering, and make change that people want and need.
4. Bring back experimentation and invention as business values, and open them up to collaborators.
5. Constantly challenge, inform and refresh people’s exposure with the brand over their entire experience- not as market segments with prescribed preferences.
Zappos’ innovative approach to customer service, Target’s social giving platform, Patagonia’s footprint chronicles, Proctor & Gamble’s the brandery, Interface Carpet, and Seventh Generation are just a few of the increasingly inspiring examples where brands have embraced the system of social communication, and embracing some or all of these challenges in a way that builds brand loyalty and value, while mitigating risk, reducing costs, and positioning the business for a new era of growth.
Is your brand fit for the future?
(Eric Wilmot)
photo courtesy of Victoria Garcia, Creative Commons
Over the years Latvia has been many things: an independent Baltic state reliant on agriculture, a small part of the dominant Soviet Union, a vibrant business centre as part of the EU, and – more recently – a country in economic crisis (or stag-do central, depending on your level of interest in current affairs). Understandably, it is a place that is often misunderstood by the rest of the world. When Said Business School carried out research into people’s perceptions of it in 2003, they found that many had negative associations, such as corruption, and for many others it simply wasn’t even on their radar (“Latvia? Don’t know much about Latvia, I’m afraid”).
In reality, Latvia is a country rich in many things: culture, natural beauty, and perhaps most importantly, overwhelming optimism. Latvia has periodically been felled by war and economic instability, not least the recent credit crunch. And each time the population has responded with remarkable resilience and embraced the chance to create new opportunities. There is no self-pity – happiness is what hits you when you step off the plane in Riga. Which is what makes their latest national branding effort, the Latvian pavilion at the World EXPO 2010, so apt.
The pavilion is called the Technology of Happiness and consists of a huge multicoloured tower containing a wind tunnel where willing volunteers fly up and down to the excited gasps of the watching crowds. It is a neat way to demonstrate physically how happiness “lifts you up” (as per the explanation on their website). The idea and the colourful identity created to support it are ambitious, irreverent and full of imagination – and judging by the big smiles on the faces of all those involved it managed to spread a little happiness. Which are all great things to associate with Latvia.
As part of a wider brand campaign to elevate Latvia away from negative perceptions the pavilion is an important step. It taps into the irrepressible spirit of Latvians and created an experience to remember for all those who visited. However, the installation is already 3 months in to 6 month lifespan, after which it will drop from public consciousness. The question is, can the positive perceptions of Latvia live longer?
The Technology of Happiness is a successful building block for a new, positive nation brand because it puts something real in the world – letting people take part, not just plying them with information. People believe not what you say, but what you do. At Wolff Olins, we believe that the best brands, the ones that help businesses grow and nations flourish, are the ones that do new. New experiences, new services, new ways to collaborate. To make a lasting impact in people’s minds, therefore, Latvia must take this success and keep doing new. People need further reasons to believe that Latvia is unique and intriguing, leveraging all that they have to offer, including their optimism and enthusiasm for life.
We live in a world where things are changing fast, where the power is shifting from brands to consumers, and where consumer behaviors are constantly evolving. As a brand manager, it’s hard to keep up… The four Ps (Product, Place, Promotion and Price) framework was created in 1964 by Neil H. Borden (The concept of Marketing) and has been widely used by generations of marketers. The four Ps are the parameters that the marketing manager can control, subject to the internal and external constrains of the market environment.
Is the 4 Ps framework still relevant today? Are the 4 Ps still the right concepts to keep in mind when you think about marketing? The answer is yes, more so than ever. The framework helps the marketing manager to innovate based on what matters.
Product: the fact that 75% of new products fail at launch demonstrates that people don’t need more stuff, they need better experiences. More than thinking about products, brand managers should think in terms of experiences. How can the offer be integrated within a social context? How can product delivery build customer loyalty when quality is less and less a differentiating factor?
Place: the Internet opened new opportunities for product distribution. More than a new retail channel, the web represents today an enabler for a new type of transaction. How does the Internet reshape the distribution strategy of your offer?
Price: the severity of the economic crisis has prompted consumers to fundamentally rethink the way they act and consume. Price is probably the burning topic in any brand manager’s head right now. 55% of the people who reduced spending as a result of the recession did it through choice (source: McKinsey consumer research, 2010). How will your pricing strategy reflect the new thrift mentality of consumers? How can you leverage new saving mentalities to innovate on new products and services?
Promotion: promotion represents “the various aspects of marketing communication, that is, the communication of information about the product with the goal of generating a positive customer response” (source: NetMBA.com). Today, 65% of people feel they are constantly bombarded with too much advertising (source: Yankelovich 2009), and 76% of customers don’t believe the claims made in advertising (source: Word of Mouth Marketing Association, 2010). Promotion is still at the core of successful marketing strategies, but tactics need to evolve. How can you create relevant, open and long-lasting conversations with customers?
Don’t think the framework is bad. Despite its limitations and perhaps because of its simplicity, the 4 Ps framework still offers a solid approach to marketing. What represents each of the 4 Ps may have changed, but the framework still invites each of us to ask ourselves the right questions.
Pepsi has decided to take a large portion of marketing funds for the year (including what they usually spend on Super Bowl spots) and put it toward public service grants to basically improve the world.
This is a major move for Pepsi, in the right direction. Not only Pepsi shows its commitment in making the world a better place, but also its ever more sophisticated marketing initiatives: a brand that wants to stand for something more meaningful for consumers, with branding tactics that go beyond the simple commercial.
Following the trend of de-branding, Absolut Vodka introduces their “No Label” Edition bottle, further emphasizing the company’s slogan: “In An ABSOLUT World, There Are No Labels”.
The intent of the initiative is to challenge labels and prejudice caused by branding (which they have helped to perpetuate). In any case, this is interesting because the Abosult brand is the bottle, not the typeface or color palette. So iconic is the shape of the bottle that it does not need words.
The no label edition is now available at Colette’s online store here.
