Tag Archives for brand

Service brands: vision of the future?

As a marketer and consultant, I always find it difficult to explain what a brand is to people that are not familiar with the concept (e.g. my mom). This task of explaining things becomes increasingly difficult when the brand is not something you can touch or feel like a service.

Service Brands are populating the landscape today and I feel a strong desire to learn from them as many other marketers should. Why? Because the idea of customer engagement, loyalty, or the idea of employees living the brand are old news to the service brands that get it right. Sure, the work is never done, but they are light years ahead of the consumer packaged goods companies.

I have put together the below diagram as an example of how the landscape of product-to-service brands is complex:

Examples Service Brand Landscape

The Bottom Line:

Three brands to take a page from are: Scottrade, Netflix, and Red Hat.

  • Scottrade has mastered customer service in my opinion. I must admit that I have a couple of accounts with them and within hours of making a major transaction on-line the local office (1 mile away) calls to make sure everything went as I expected.
  • Netflix mastered a simple concept of adapting to consumers lives and taking away the hassle of the rental store and late fees. Simplicity is their virtue. The next chapter of on-line and downloads for movies will likely test them.
  • Red Hat sells “free software”. In the early days, they boxed free software and made it easy to buy. Now they are leading and prospering in the enterprise business software arena and wining more than their fair share. The company’s culture of transparency and openness that is shared with the open-source community which fuels the software is Red Hat’s greatest asset. How else could you actually sell free stuff?

Links of interest:

Chris Grams Blog – Senior Director of Brand Communications & Design, Red Hat

The Official Netflix Blog

Scottrade YouTube Channel

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Mplanet update: lots of video shared by executives

Today at Mplanet the top billed presenters included:

All were well received. John and Mary shared a number of videos and ads worth sharing in one place:

Members Project – American Express

Membership Moments – American Express

Dad’s night to cook -  McDonald’s

Find the Lost Ring – McDonals’s (Olympic social mystery game)

McNuggets Rap (amateur version) – Worth watching for a laugh!

Now the commercial version of funny – McDonald’s

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Sponsorship done right: Fiat and 9th World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates

Address by Aung San Suu Kyi at the NGO Forum o...
Image via Wikipedia

With a little help from The Wall Street Journal article, I happened to stumble upon the video below in support of the 9th World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in Paris, France. Aung San Suu Kyi, a democracy activist, has spent about over a decade under house arrest in Myanmar. She is now the star of a public-service announcement that doubles as an ad for Fiat‘s Lancia Delta car.

Why is this a good sponsorship?

  • It is organic in its execution of the creative – arriving laureates have to be in cars)
  • It is “good” – who could argue with the position of freedom?
  • Activated in a social way through the interactive website sendyourpeacemessage.org that allows people to send along this message and  build a virtual map of support
  • This message has longevity, unlike sponsorships over other 1 time events, this message and advocacy can continue on long passed the event – until the release of Aung San Suu Kyi

Could they have done more… Yes, but we always can — right!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Zappos making push into insights business

franchiaccessories.com

source: franchiaccessories.com

Zappos launched zapposinsights.com, a website subscription service that vows to grant insider access to the Zappos culture and employees. Some may ask why… Zappos has made a name for itself in selling shoes online, but most importantly for building a culture that consistently delivers on its promises to customers. The CEO was interviewed by BrandWeek, “Zappos CEO: How to Build a Brand Without Spending Big on Ads“. Through purchasing the subscription, you can ask questions and get answers to how Zappos has tackled issues you are facing or what best practices they have learned along the way.

“We spend most of the money we’d spend on paid advertising and put it into the customer experience and let them do the word-of-mouth marketing for us.” – Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on brandweek.com

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Sponsorships at Amex: the experience is the strategy

American Express Company
Image via Wikipedia

In a previous post, “Choose organic product placements or your brand suffers“, I highlighted a number of criteria to think about as companies and marketers selection product placements or sponsorships.  American Express has an interesting strategy for their sponsorships that focuses on “experience”. This is also a core element of the American Express brand.

Q: What determines Amex sponsorships?
A: We think about partnerships in terms of what overlaps with cardmembers’ passions. Our cardmembers are voracious consumers of entertainment, and music is a big area of interest. First and foremost, it’s about cardmembers and providing value for them. – Courtney Kelso, VP of Sponsorship Marketing at Amex

To get the full Q&A with Courtney Kelso, VP of Sponsorship Marketing at Amex, please read “Amex Sponsorships Give Members An Experience” from MediaPost MarketingDaily.

For American Express, members (a.k.a. customers) and “memebership” are the driving force for their brand and business. By simply being a card member, customers have access and exclusiveness that provides value regardless of the actual service (credit) being provided. Now obviously Amex is smart and has built their business model on the more you use (credit) the more access and exclusiveness you gain.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Time for marketers to get religion? Secrets to engaging consumers

In reading Adage’s CMO Strategy Column, “How Apple, Others Have Cultivated Religious Followings“, by Martin Lindstrom, I found myself again pulling on my knowledge studying psychology and sociology in my college years. Martin lays out nine components of that powerful brands share with religion in the article. I also found this blog post by Adam Singer, Marketing Lessons To Learn From Religion, that shares additional ideas.

The common themes here are that religion, for believers, occupies as larger portion of our thoughts and their connections to the world around them in the images and associations they make. When you add the fact that humans are by nature are social, we then understand that groups with similar beliefs will form and reinforce and strengthen each others behaviors and beliefs. Achieving this is for some brand/product managers is the pinnacle feat.

Now think about the brands/products that fall in this category…

Lindstrom’s article highlights Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Guinness. All are powerful brands with strong followings. They are not just strong because of a nifty logo or great product, but they become identifiers for a person and how they see the world and how the world sees them (e.g. “I love Macs”, “I live Harley”, “My drink is Guinness”).  Also worth noting, these products and brands “serve” their followers by making their lives easier or granting them pure joy.

Takeaways for marketeers:

Religion is a useful framework to look at in how to drive higher engagement from consumers. Please be careful that you truly understand and are committed to the absolute need to “serve” your followers.  This servitude has to be at the forefront of your activities vs. monetizing the relationship. Serve them first and pray that they will thank you for it later. Lindstrom and Singer have additional suggestions and ideas to ponder in their respective article and post.

Finally, a video that highlights cult research and transferability to brand building…enjoy.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

“Fill all niches” product and brand strategy adopter, GM, is falling on hard times

General Motors CEO Rick Wa...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As I read about General Motors going before congress and the recent story, “Big Three May Need to Trim Number of Brands“, published in The New York Times, I have been giving thought to the “a car for every purse and purpose” strategy made famous by Alfred Sloan. The proliferation of products and brands is made crystal clear by the graphic in The New York Times article, which notably only captures a portion of GM’s total global line-up.

As I researched more, I found “GM: Live Green or Die” a story from BusinessWeek where it details how long it took for the Richard Wagoner Jr., Chairman and CEO of GM, to pursue hybrids. It was Bob Lutz that had vision but was not just not heard.

So what went wrong?

A lot… Gas prices, growing discrepancy between unionized labor contracts and non-union labor costs, soaring health care costs for retirees and union workers, and the list goes on.

One area that has yet to be covered in depth is how the fill all niches strategy for GM products and brands has burdened them with inefficiencies and growing trouble to differentiate between products. It is not clear to me how this issue manifested itself over the decades, but the result of all of this is represented below in GM’s stock performance (Black line) as compared to Honda (blue), Toyota (yellow) and Ford (red). {CHART NOT WORKING – Apologies}

Courtesy of BigCharts.com

Courtesy of BigCharts.com

The bottom line:

A “fill all niches” strategy works as a defensive measure when the company can more credibly deliver a product than the competition and thus prevent them from gaining sales. These strategies also work best in high margin environments like CPG (e.g. cereal, cigarettes) where if you need to abandon your defensive strategy you are not burdened with high fixed costs like specialized workforces, plant and equipment. Finally, please do your homework on the strategic economic impact both positive and negative of executing this strategy. For help on this last point, seek out David Ravenscraft at Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill for help on game theory.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How to get started with social media marketing

The social landscape from gregverdino.com

The best social media marketing strategy is to have a brand, product or service worth talking about. Let me stop there and let that sink in…

Lots of marketers and agencies are trying to crack the code to social media marketing. Take for example, Wendy’s Smart character (a.k.a the square hamburger) on Myspace.com with almost 40,000 friends or the folks from Kleenex and their Let it Out (TM) campaign and online community that has users submitting their own video stories filled with emotion. These are two very different approaches from Wendy’s use of exiting networks with very little campaign integration to Kleenex’s  approach with an integrated campaign and building their own community separate from more mainstream options like Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace.

So, who is doing this well? Dell has been touted as using the web and social media to turn their image around. Apple and Google have so many blog hits that they probably can stop advertising online… well if Google actually did advertise.

So what if you are not Dell, Apple or Google… what can you do to get started? Besides focusing on building the best brand, product or service, bloggers are probably the best place to start because they are the power influencers. Here are four steps:

  1. Identify your top 5% of customers that are power users or your highest engaged segment (if you can, identify if there are bloggers in this group, but do not single them out)
  2. Prepare for transparency and the need to take quick action including: changing your strategies, changing products, or apologizing if you find your company has done something this group does not agree with
  3. Now that you are prepped and know which segment to reach out to, treat this segment like the #1 media outlet that you would love to cover your business. This means giving them behind the scenes access, exclusive experiences, etc.
  4. LISTEN to them!

Finally, there is no guarantee that this approach will get you top billing on your blog of choice. You have first focused on building something worth talking about and now began to treat your most enaged customers in a special way. This has benefits well beyond social media exposure and if you are lucky you will get the exposure you are looking for.