Take a moment

Coming home from Sydney, Paul and I were talking about ‘moments of truth’. One of the great ironies, and frustrations, for many brands is that reputation must be built over years, but can be lost in a tiny fraction of that time – seconds. All because of an action or a word, a misunderstanding or an expectation that may or may not even have been reasonable in the first place.

There’s always that apparent double timeframe between how long it takes to build a brand into an asset, and the experience-time within which many brands are judged.

Some people of course will see such a dichotomy as an exercise in futility – all that work, always at risk, capable of going with just a moment’s notice. But building brands is not a Sisyphean task. And here’s why. Loyalty is built in exactly the same way – in many of those very same moments across another very long timeframe. The decisions customers make to be loyal are often decided by criteria that occur in moments and that are as simple, small and whimsical as the decisions they make the other way.

That’s why for me, brands are no longer about big, clearly signposted “moments of truth” and much more about “moments”, or more particularly the truth in moments for a customer. And the success for a brand in each of those moments is decided by two things: the action taken; and the reaction it stimulates.

Different people working for different brands make different action decisions based on different criteria. Some decide intuitively on that moment’s notice. Some decide on process. Some decide on indifference. Some decide generously. Some decide consistently. Some decide surprisingly. Some decide reluctantly. Some ask you to make the decision for them.

With so many moments spread out across so many people over so many countries and so many channels on any given days, most brands would probably like each moment to exist where and as it happens. And for years it did. A bad moment, for example, extended as far as the customer who didn’t like an action, and to the network of friends that they talked about that moment with. Impulse created penalties or rewards, but they were reasonably contained.

The game-changer though has been social media – a channel made for, and perfectly timed in, moments. 140 characters long. A sound-byte wide. A “send” button away. It has changed the very dynamics around which moments themselves are judged. It has uncontained them.

People on the frontlines for brands are expected to make faster and faster decisions. Customers want answers. Now. But the consequences of those immediate decisions can continue to play out over much bigger vistas. Because in almost the time it takes to act, a customer can react. And the reactions generated in response to an action, any action, taken in the name of a brand can create ripples that extend as far as, often beyond, where the brand can see. They are visceral, uncensored, immediate … and cached forever. They can make your brand the talk of the world, or the recipient of some very bad feeling.

That in turn can have other far-reaching effects. Service is no longer just about what gets done. It’s no longer just accountable to what is delivered or when. Its success now pivots on what gets said as well as the result. Because that’s where the exponential effect really kicks in – good or bad. The sobering question each of us must keep asking ourselves, even as we cram more and more into every day, is “What happens when I do/say this?”

Moments have never had greater leverage. Or carried greater risk.

Funnel vision

It’s always fascinating to compare how you see your place in the market with how others see you. Warren made this astute observation the other day. If you’re in a very small market like New Zealand and you look out, you see the whole world before you. There seem to be endless opportunities.

But step around to the other side of the world and look back, and you see a market like New Zealand from a completely different perspective. It seems small and hard to find.

The issue of course is not specific to place brands. It’s applicable to all brands that are small in comparison to the scaled markets they would like to reach. The brands themselves see a panorama. The world looking at all the choices available to them from so many sources discerns barely a speck.

This is quite literally ‘funnel vision’. Your perspective depends entirely on what end of the funnel you are looking from – the scaled end or the narrow end.

The only way that situation can change is when the brand at the narrow end finds ways to increase its profile and presence, so that it literally looms larger in the minds of those far away. Search can help do that. Partnerships and supply chains can also add proximity.

In the Southern Hemisphere, we talk a lot about the tyranny of distance. But in actual fact, the problems many of our brands face, like the problems small brands face in any scaled market, is the tyranny of profile.

What is not seen is not missed.

Can brands fly?

Do you remember when you were a child the first time someone made you a paper plane? If your recollection is anything like mine, you couldn’t believe how it left your hand and made its way across the room. Before long though, it lost height and velocity, and fell to the floor.

One of my more cynical friends has this joke about how much media budget is needed to keep a brand going successfully: “Give me all the money you can burn and it will go like a rocket!”

It’s easy to see a brand as an expense that relies on getting attention to make its presence felt and to make the expenditure worth it. Detractors see it that way too. They’re very quick to opine that unless they’re constantly fed money to keep them in front of consumers, brands simply fizzle and fall to earth.

I don’t share that view. Particularly now, with all the different ways that we access and talk about brands, I see them less as rockets kept airborne by media schedules, and more as planes that need air flowing over their wings to help them maintain lift.

Those currents are made up of a number of elements that collectively generate value. They include:

• Perception
• Reputation
•  Distinction
•  Awareness
•  Relevance
•  Image
•  Loyalty
• Story
• Competitiveness
• Packaging
• Availability
• Offer

The currents work in different combinations and to different levels of intensity and effectiveness at various pricing and positioning points across every competitive sector. And when they are working well, brands maintain their elevation, even climb. The key point here is that success is not just about the money you spend on your brand, it is about the lift you generate and maintain through this combination of factors, some of which you control and some of which are beyond your control.

It also raises two aspects of market dynamics that help explain to me the need for an iterative brand strategy: market friction; and market gravity.

• Market friction – the levels of resistance your brand encounters in the marketplace. These are the forces that combine to make your brand fall short if it runs out of impulse. Most of these are generated by competitors, some by wider macro-economic factors, some by reputation

• Market gravity – there is a natural inclination for brands to fall. When currents diminish, stall or fail, it does not take long for brands to start to lose height. Some will lose prominence but continue on. Others will go into an arcing dive, at varying angle of acuteness, that may or may not lead to their demise. That’s why you cannot set and forget a brand, or assume success.

An iterative brand strategy, in fact an iterative business strategy, is about checking the ‘height’ of your brand relative to your competitors and to your history, and adjusting and responding to the volume and the dynamics of the currents passing across your brand.

How should we rethink the advertising industry?

I enjoy seeing people poke business models, but it’s important that when you look to disrupt a business that you do so without assumptions. The call by Marc Ruxin of Universal McCann to rethink the creative department of ad agencies is a great idea but my sense is that his suggestions still assume the battle is for attention, and that winning that attention and holding it via great content, well presented, is critical to achieving consumer preference.

The noise preventing that, he says, is formidable. Brands are trying to get their messages heard and acted upon in an environment of 150 million tweets a day, 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, 300 million global players of Zynga games, 200 million Daily Deal subscribers …

I’m far from convinced though that attention and preference are a linear progression. And I think we need to insert at least three further filters into that zig-zag of decision making: notice, consider and purchase. You may gain a consumer’s attention momentarily, but until they choose to escalate that attention and actually take notice of you, there’s no way they’re going to consider you, never mind prefer you – and even then, they may not buy.

It seems to me Mr Ruxin is still trying to run an interruption model based on see, want, get. I feel he still thinks content is the make or break, and he’s now looking to adapt that model to fit the new channels that consumers now occupy their time with. That doesn’t so much require a rethink of the creative department as it requires the creative and media departments to rethink their approach and to adopt new skills. Not quite the same thing.

In his article, the author suggests: “It is a new world: Brands + Skillfully Placed Media Investments + The Right Platforms + The Right Partner + The Right Offer = Creative Success” Two things about that. I don’t think that’s a new world at all. That equation doesn’t look any different from the way it looked when I started in advertising – it’s just that the media, platforms and partners themselves have changed. And there’s no reason to believe that ‘Creative Success’ is the result anyone should be seeking anyway. That’s an agency metric, not a commercial one.

I absolutely agree with Mr Ruxin though that we need to be having this discussion, and I sincerely mean what I say here to be taken as dialogue not refutation. So, rather than just being negative about a call for change, let me give my own perspectives on what needs to run, and I think for the most part is happening, inside the agency world. It’s not a definitive list by any means, but hopefully it hints at where the model might go, philosophically at least:

1. It’s not what brands do for people that matters, it’s what people feel they can do with brands. The dynamics of the brand-consumer relationship have almost completely reversed. Consumers identify with brands because they see them as an expression, and perhaps an extension, of their own views. Tricking the consumer, catching them out, interrupting them … these are all outmoded ideas. Increasingly I think it’s just an expectation on behalf of consumers that brands will be where consumers expect them to be.

2. The creative process is no longer just about what you create, it’s about what you start, inspire and encourage. The creative product itself is only as important as its catalytic effect. If it doesn’t work, it has no value.

3. It’s not just about how much attention you get, it’s about how much uptake you get and how much product you shift – and keep shifting.

4. It’s not about platforms or environments, it’s about encounters, and more particularly it’s about encounters that resonate with people. Resonance, not just presence, generates attention and more importantly, engagement, interest and desire. The platform or environment is the means for that, not the end.

5. Increasingly a communications issue is the flash point for widespread thinking not the defining point for what needs to be considered. I completely agree that a wider range of people need to be involved in the creative process, but I also believe that the creative process needs to extend beyond the realm of preparing and sending messages. If you look at how companies like Ideo, Stone Yamashita or Fahrenheit grapple with a problem, it’s about way more than what is said.

6. Agencies are successfully making the move from advertising to communications to ideas. Now they need to make the radical move to answers. Ideas are wonderful, but that level of involvement alone is increasingly falling short of what’s required. My sense is that agencies need to continue to call on the thinking, disciplines and frameworks of their craft but to apply those to new scenarios. In my own case, whilst I freely admit that I struggle with the technical aspects of social media, for example, many of the ways one might draw on to engage and involve consumers are straight out of the direct marketing playbook – they just need to be adapted for new dynamics and expectations.

Finally, I am optimistic this will happen. Creative agencies have extraordinary experience in building brands. They have hugely talented people capable of achieving great outcomes. They absolutely need to draw on what they know, because there is huge value and insight in that experience – but they need to do so across a changing commercial and social plane. No one conversation will solve this … but at least a whole lot of people are talking. And that can only be a good thing.

Headgames

I love this observation by Jay Deragon about the Social Learning Curve: “All things social are creating a herd of copycats following practices, methods and behavio[u]r created by the frenzy of learning something new …”

To what end? is the inevitable question.

Once learned, something is no longer new. In fact, it retains distinctive value only whilst the numbers of people who have access to that knowledge remains small. And yet, thanks to all things social, the chances of that happening are becoming less and less. And the pressures to democratise what one knows are also increasing.

So everyone feels a pressure to learn, and many brands feel a pressure to share, but once accessed by many people, learning retains diminishing competitive advantage. It quite literally devolves to common knowledge. It becomes how ‘everyone’ does things, what ‘everyone’ agrees on, the way ‘everyone’ sees the world. Soon, what was new is basis.

The tipping point for example. Once breakthrough. Now mainstream.

Knowledge commoditises.

I happen to really like Collins’ book ‘Good to Great’, but if you believe that by reading it today somehow you will emerge with an understanding that presents you with a clear competitive advantage, you couldn’t be more wrong. Why? Simply because everyone you’re competing against has read it too. And between those readings, the reviews, the lectures and assignments at every business school across the world, and the many subsequent discussions, all the learnings are now widely circulated and applied. There is no secret to be had. ‘Hedgehogs’ are now relatively commonplace.

That dynamic puts so many brands in the knowledge business in three ways:

1. They must keep pace with the learning around them to avoid being left behind;
2. They must share new learnings publicly in order to make their brand more findable, to gain authority in the marketplace (ironically by making more and more people aware of, and accepting of, what they know), and to encourage others to feel that they should share their learnings too; and yet
3. Brands must retain and protect some learning, or some aspect of their learning, and continue to generate new learning or new variations of their cornerstone learning, in order to differentiate their brand from that of their competitors. Otherwise they too will become an also-ran.

Increasingly it seems to me brands must steer a knowledge course between three very different principles:

• Momentum: They must use knowledge to gain thought leadership status in their sector and to move customers’ and investors’ thinking forward to the point where it aligns with what they offer.
• Protection: They must take care not to be so open with their thinking that competitors gain the upper-hand or that customers feel they can do things themselves.
• Reaction: They must be prepared to react astutely and decisively as competitors choose to advance their own thinking in order to meet the insatiable demand of the market for new learning.

I liken this to trying to get anywhere by car in Rome during rush-hour: accelerator, brake, lane change …

When was the last time you actually changed your mind?

The hardest thing a brand can do is convince – to go against what people already believe and to ask them to believe something different. Actually, that’s not just true for brands, it’s applicable to anything or anyone. In the scheme of natural human interactions, conversion is relatively rare. To succeed at convincing, you need to overcome all the natural resistance that comes with encountering something new. Essentially, you need to break down all the inclination that has already amassed for an idea or a storyline. You need to destroy the loyalty that already exists for what people have and replace its equity. That’s amazingly difficult. As Seth Godin once observed, “If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.”

Redirection is simpler. You change soaps. You change airlines. You change shirt brands. Particularly if soap, airlines and shirt brands don’t mean that much to you. Changing from a brand that says and does one thing to another brand that seems to say and do the same thing under a different name is easy. That’s why and how things commoditise. When we see no difference between them, when changing makes no difference for us, because it doesn’t represent a change to our core belief system, we can do it without hesitation. Add in a good price, and we’re gone.

The irony is that as consumers, we all say we welcome change. We don’t really. What we really welcome is improvements, additions or extensions. And we have strong preferences and priorities. Some things, packaged in some ways, appeal to us more than others – but only if those elements conform with our worldview. A dispositionalist would explain this by saying that as humans we are significantly, if not completely, influenced by the cache of beliefs that we run behind the scenes and that subconsciously decide huge amounts of what we agree with and disagree with every day.

Marketers are optimists. We naturally believe that the power of a strong, well-presented argument must win through. It’s simply not true.

The easiest thing a brand can do is confirm – to give us more, by way of physical product or perspectives, of what we already know and agree with. Loyalty jumps when brands tell their customers, show them, present them with something they had always wanted to hear, see or think about. Launching iCloud recently, Steve Jobs told Apple fans the world was entering a post-PC age. It was an idea that was readily and speedily embraced, because it confirmed what Apple fans believe, or would like to believe, anyway.

Marketing may help decide preference but it cannot alter fundamental inclination. On the contrary, inclination pre-decides the success of so much marketing.

Now on Alltop

This feed has just been added to Alltop – here and here.  Nice.

An option or a choice?

Just getting a presence in most markets can be hard work. One of my friends is finding that in the beverages game – a longer runway than he and his partners expected, and a lot more patience required as well. Long days, he says, having to justify every metre of shelf space you’re allocated.

Same with being a speaker or a consultant. But doing all the work to get on the map just elevates you to the status of another option.

That’s not the same as being a choice.

Options form part of the line-up for how customers decide. Choices are a conscious decision in themselves. Option means you’re available, you’re on the list, in the books. You’re a speculation. Choice makes you an active decision, one part of yes/no, either/or. You’re known, you’re quantified, you’re considered.

Now if you’re in the business of selling variety – like supermarkets, book stores, speakers’ bureaux, search engines – options fill out the stock book. They reflect well on you because they prove that you can tap the market. They give you a long tail. And they give your clients the sense that they have the full pick of what’s available. Chances are, for that reason, if you’re in the business of selling variety, you welcome options (or at least the best options) with open arms.

Being the option isn’t quite so glamorous. It may have boosted your ego to have made it past reception, but if you just stay an option, frankly, you’re making up the numbers. And it’s easy to forget that, in order for the market to continue to work efficiently, for every brand that becomes a choice, so many more must either become or stay options.

Today’s marketing environment has tricked many brands into believing they are contenders. They post a website, they get traffic, they’re making their metrics. To them, they’re a choice.

But until that traffic monetises or that shelf placement improves, or the call volumes really lift, they’re more likely to be an option.

The thing is, most times you don’t get to decide your status. Customers decide – based to some degree on what distributors decide, agents decide, the media believe you will be worth to them. Fundamentally, the shift from option to choice isn’t based on attention, luck or talent alone. It’s based on consciously shifting influencers’ perceptions – of your value and your potential value.

New keynote: Taking the cannibals out for lunch

Just added new notes about my keynote “Taking the cannibals out for lunch” here

Two very different types of stickiness

I love this distinction by Martin Bishop between the brands we’re stuck on versus the one we’re stuck with. Brands we’re stuck on captivate us. Brands we’re stuck with hold us captive. As Bishop points out, “Consumers may be loyal to both types of brands if loyalty is simply measured in terms of repeat business but their feelings about the two types brands [are] very different.”

Brands we are stuck on reward us emotionally through the relationship we have with them. We are loyal to them, and our relationship is expressed through repeat business. Brands we are stuck with are there strictly for functional compliance – because we feel we have no choice but to have a relationship with them, or with someone equally as unattractive. And we engage with them as much as we have to, but only to that point.

The difficulty for brand owners is that the metrics for these two very different levels of “loyalty” can look very much the same: low churn; repeat purchase; consistent revenue. The difference lies in how the customers themselves feel, and whether they openly express that or not. And the litmus test for such loyalty is when a viable and competitive alternative offer hits the market. Those who are stuck on the brand may notice it but consciously choose to stay away. Those who feel stuck may well decide not to stick it out any longer or at the very least to look to escape at the first opportunity.

The stuck-on business model is hard work. It takes commitment and responsiveness, inventiveness and a genuine wish to do good by those who are loyal to you. That can be time-consuming and tiring, but very rewarding. The problem with the stuck-with is that it’s a bit like a Ponzi scheme. It works for a while and the returns are good … as long as you can keep feeding people in the top of the funnel. But social connectedness now means that the viability of doing that at a sustainable rate is diminishing.

Loyalty may look much the same in the numbers (for a time at least), but it feels very, very different on the ground.