Companies pay precious few marketing dollars to research companies that all too often use a one-size-fits-all template for identifying segments. The creative work goes into describing the 'lifestyles' and customizing the titles of these segments, typically based on psychographics (more bunk). Then of course, the thinking and marketing dollars are segmented based on the segments and what do you get? Utter confusion and not enough money put towards any particular endeavor to convince anybody to try the product.

Marketing starts with the product. If you don't have a relevant and meaningful difference built into the product - and just as importantly, know how to communicate the difference - you will fail. And all the market segmentation research in the world won't save you.

Rather than differences, it's better to find the similarities amongst the audience. Once that's known, concentrate your message and dollars and you'll be more likely to break through and create a famous and profitable brand.

Any comments, thoughts and suggestions on this important topic would be most welcome.

Despite the rosy picture enthusiasts paint, social media can be a fast track to brand disaster. Even if a brand doesn’t participate.

 

There’s a good article titled, “The Pocket Guide to Defensive Branding” that delves into the dark side of online conversations and what it means for brands:

 

Beware exuberant social-media pontificators bearing gifts. This stuff is hard, and often it blows up in our faces. The digital landscape is littered with social-media roadkill. I've been in the brand-monitoring business since 1999, witnessing what the late Dr. Carl Sagan might have referred to as "billions and billions" of online conversations. It's not all good.

 

Internet as complaint desk

The era of friction-free feedback is turning Twitter into a 24/7 anywhere and anyplace complaint desk. Facebook pages for raving fans often morph into frying pans. Paid-media gains are getting erased by "spurned media" (earned media gone negative) pain.

 

Related: Are You Allowing Lunatics to Control Your Brand Message?

The lunatic is on the grass

The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs

Got to keep the loonies on the path
– Pink Floyd

On Facebook, a friend recently posted a picture of herself fishing and got into an email spat with somebody who took offence:

Just got into a full on email fight with some DOUCHE who decided that this FINE picture of myself Fishing in Catalina is a display of "cruelty to animals" and that I should take it down as it’s promoting killing etc., etc. WTF? Get off my page ASS!

This type of busy-body nosiness and self-projection is worse for brands. Somehow brand marketers are being held to an impossible standard in the rose coloured world of the lunatic.

I’m getting questions from clients wondering how to handle negative comments on socnet sites. Worse, I’m finding some clients fearing backlash for the good products they provide.

Unfortunately, social media allows everybody to post pretty much whatever they want. In this environment, often the PC, condescending, sense of entitlement fringe is the loudest.

But however loud and obnoxious, they are far from the majority. And even further from reality.

There’s a good amount of cognitive dissonance at work that marketers have to deal with as well.

We know people buy leather goods to look and feel good, but don’t ever say the leather came from a cow. We know people buy seafood to eat healthier, but don’t ever say it came from fish. It requires too much rationalization.

It’s sheer madness. But it’s more mad to cater to absurd opinions.

Better to be congenial, while remaining unapologetic.

Explain to the toddlers that seafood actually comes from fish and let them deal with the epiphany. Let them know that people enjoy eating fish and that it’s healthy for them. And let them know that although you respect their opinion, they do not speak for everybody. So, would they please have the courtesy to allow others to live their own life, by their own values, as everybody else allows them to do.

Better yet, let somebody else do the work for you. It’s not often irrational opinions go without comment and a good public dressing down.

Forrester Research says there are 33.5 billion online brand conversations every day in the US alone.

With everybody chattering at once and so easily, a new goal of marketers is to have more people speaking positively and fewer people speaking negatively about their brand. A study by the London School of Economics states that brands with the most recommendations in their category grow four times faster than the average. Increasing recommendation by 12% doubles sales growth.

As the above study suggests, it’s important to know how to get people not only speaking positively, but recommending your brand.

By the same token, it’s important to know how to stem, if not avoid negative comments. However, there’s a caveat: Avoid watering down your message to appease a non-buying and irrational minority. Speak to your customer and don’t apologize to non-customers for the business you are in.

A famous quote from Bill Bernbach sums it up:

Stand for something and some people will stand with you and some against you. Stand for nothing and nobody will stand with you, or against you.

Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School created this video introducing her new book, DIFFERENT. She describes the book as "an intimately drawn meditation on the meaning of business differentiation."

If the book is half as good as the video promises, it should be a great read.

By Simon Billing

Marketing should be the easiest gig going. Most people have wallets stuffed full of money, all of which they are going to – all of which they are bound and determined to spend (borne out by the pitiful savings rates in most developed economies). All we have to do is convince them to spend some of it with us.

I was looking at Dave Trott’s agency website. I love their idea of predatory thinking, the strategic underpinning of an idea being expressed as the “predatory thought”. It’s a refreshingly honest way of looking at business that channels everyone directly to the real job at hand. Preying on someone else’s share of wallet is what we do. Prouk (former Chairwallah & CD of Scali McCabe Sloves, Toronto) used to say he loved attending bi-monthly Nielsen market share audits because: “they’re the body count.”

Years ago, Ries & Trout put it slightly differently when they said that in aptly positioning our brand, by definition, we reposition the competition.

The idea of predatory behaviour doesn’t sit well with most Canadians. The Protestant work ethic, which despite our vaunted multiculturalism still underscores much of life on the tundra, means we imbue the work we do with great seriousness and moral purpose. Taking a cue from our national critter the beaver, diligence is a virtue, but the vulpine instinct is not part of the national character.

Marketing has no function if not to take a sale away from someone else. No matter how unique your offering, Mr. & Mrs. Punter will spend the money with someone else if not with you. If you’re a charity, the job is to deprive some other charity of a potential donation, or a store of a purchase that would otherwise have been made with that money; if you’re Crest it’s to steal share of pearly whites from Colgate or a store brand; if you’re the Army then you have to lure potential recruits away from the police or industry or the BNP.

Wal-Mart is a voracious hunter of other stores’ customers: drugstore customers, supermarket customers, clothing store customers. Everything they do is designed to bag a sale that would otherwise have gone somewhere else.

Marketing Magazine (in Canada) is polling readers to determine the best TV spot of the Winter Olympic schmaltz fest. I don’t know how they determined the list and, having assiduously avoided watching the country engage in its conjoined pastimes of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation, I haven’t seen what else was on offer.

As dull, predictable and decidedly non-carnivorous a collection of corporate cuddliness it would be difficult to find. And yet this probably represents the largest marketing investment any of these companies have made in a decade. Millions of Canadians glued to the telly, the audience happily captive once again, for an entire fortnight, and all they have to say is “we’re nice folks, just like you”.

Go Canada.

*Credit: Gary Prouk, former Chairman and Creative Director: Scali, McCabe, Sloves (Canada) Inc.

Via Grumpy Brit

......................

Apple's, "I'm a Mac" campaign illustrates "predatory thinking" to it's maximum. A knife sheathed in velvet.

A brand has a sustained, meaningful difference

Or a difference that’s forgotten and allowed to erode

A brand is a fulfilled promise

Or a broken one

A brand is utility and innovation

Or the boring and safe, same old

A brand is the one time it failed

Not the many times it succeeded

A brand is its current advertising

Not the great advertising that may have gone before

A brand is the values of company executives

Not the values engraved on a plaque at reception

A brand is service calls handled promptly and courteously

Or service calls routed to India

A brand is made profitable through customer stakeholders

Not stockholders

A brand is why employees are proud of their job

Or hate it

        A brand is the act of offering non-customers deals to switch

        While offering current customers nothing

        A brand is policies to make the company more efficient

        While making customer’s lives less convenient

A  brand can be built or broken

Not by advertising

By the people managing it

In a post titled, ‘What is a brand?’ I finished with the words, “…branding is a verb. It is the consistent, continuous and single-minded creation of a unique concept in the prospect’s mind, based on fulfilling rational and emotional needs. Therefore, a brand is not a product, it is an evolving concept in the customer’s mind.” However, at the time, I was thinking of ending the article with this thought:

I’m starting to wonder whether a brand is also the culmination of everybody involved with it. Not just the consumer, but namely, management and employees.

I think there’s good reason to ponder this question. Take a look at GM, for example. At one time it was one of the greatest companies in the world, with a brand portfolio others only dreamed of having. It’s now basically a penny stock and its brands are in the toilet.

By contrast and in comparison, according to Interbrand’s latest assessment, the brand value of Coca Cola is $68.73 billion, making it the world’s most valuable brand.

Why has Coke’s brand held, or increased in value, while GM’s brands have plummeted?

In one word: People.

According to Coke, its mission is to refresh the world; to inspire moments of optimism and happiness; and to create value and make a difference.

Seems to me the people involved with the company and brand are doing a pretty good and consistent job of it.

Whereas and from a distance, GM’s methods strike me as arrogant and deserving of failure. From the botched handling of their pioneering electric car, the EV1, to how their current multi-million dollar, publicly funded advertising is telling us they’ve changed, without, you know, actually changing - the company has been in a downward spiral.

An article in Harvard Business Revue talks about a few reasons for their failure, including that GM makes cars people don't want. It’s too slow to innovate because of its size. And it’s too bureaucratic and unable to adjust to changing markets.

To be fair, the authors also claim that GM had trouble cutting costs, because most of the costs were fixed.

What does this have to do with brands in the age of social media?

Quite a bit, I think. GM is still acting as though communicating with consumers is an outbound monologue only. They haven’t appeared to retool and put a better product on the road, despite what their advertising says. They seem to be ignoring the fact that consumers can talk back and massively talk with each other through social media.

Overall, there seems to be a lack of transparency, honesty and acknowledgment, especially given that the public knows it’s our dollars that bailed them out. In continuing to do things the same old way, GM missed an opportunity.

People like underdogs. They like comebacks. But most importantly, they first have to like the contender.

What might GM have done to earn public support and empathy? Why not turn the distaste of public funding into an opportunity? For example, why not create a public advisory board and use social media in the election process? They could have also gotten the public involved in suggesting design and features they want. Hell, we're the investors, why not give us a sense of ownership? There’s lots they could have, should have done.

None-the-less, I think GM would have been further ahead had they spent more time conversing with and involving customers. Not to mention, changing their products, service and people’s beliefs about the company and its brands in the process.

All in all, social media is primarily about people first and technology second. A brand is about people first as well. Poorly managed and uninspired people, provided with no belief or vision - or even simply employing the wrong people - will likely result in wrong decisions, affecting a brand and pissing off its audience. And this scenario will only be magnified through social media, whether the people managing the brand like it or not.