Last week on my Facebook page

Some of the things I’ve been linking to and talking about over on my Facebook Page this last week:

1.    Allen Adamson’s article on why MacDonald’s decision to change their Happy Meals can’t be a one-off.
2.    How KFC have decided to honour their founder – yes, there really is a Colonel Sanders.
3.    The power of personal branding is called into question: does it in fact generate quite the opposite – a self-commoditising brand?
4.    The addiction of customers to social media and what influence that might have, now that it’s become a societal habit.
5.    Upgrades to catch up: why the ship-it-fast mentality may be causing tech manufacturers to short-cut excellence.
6.    Great article in Fast Company on six ways to build a thrilling brand.
7.    Seth Godin’s post on the flip-side of influence.
8.    Some great ideas on how to build interestingness – written for people, but just as applicable to brands.
9.    The emerging use of social media as a customer collaboration tool.
10. Martin Bishop weighs in on whether News Corp’s “house of brands” approach will be enough to protect them.
11. I ask what should we read into the move by Hollywood players to invest in social media companies.
12. Is influence a self-fulfilling prophesy?
13. Local government is just one of many places where brand and identity are used as synonyms … and probably shouldn’t be. A follow-on to my post on the difference between the two.
14. Interesting Fast Company article on the first signs of social consolidation.
15. A look at how more and more consumers are holding brands accountable for their actions.

 

Sure you’re social, but are you interesting?

Fans matter, but friends of fans matter more it seems when it comes to spreading the word. According to this article in FastCompany, just 16% of company messages reach users in a given week, and the solution to that is to reach the friends of fans. So while Starbucks’s 23 million fans is impressive, the bulk of the numbers are the friends of those same fans: 670 million.

In other words, you can tick all the boxes in terms of traffic and friends, but the real sphere of influence is actually at the next degree of contact – and the dynamic driving that is the somewhat old-fashioned notion of talkability.

You may recall, some time back, the discussion about how many degrees of separation have strength in the social universe. How far into the network of friends of friends of friends do you have to go before the signals fade along with the trust? What this piece indicates to me is that two degrees out the message can be even stronger than it was at the first point of contact if it makes it that far. And the reason is that people aren’t hearing messages from brands themselves, they’re hearing about those brands from their friends.

I suspect though that the dynamic forks at the next level out. There is either huge drop-off as the subject runs out of talk-time or your brand “trends” and the talkability continues to climb as word gets round.

Ultimately though the take-out from this research has nothing to do with social media at all. The thing is, if you’re interesting people will talk about you – and if you’re not worth talking about, your brand will only get as far as the fanboys.

Most people recognise that you can’t just start talking and expect to pull off a keynote. Some planning needs to go in. Equally if you want people to have conversations about your brand, what do you want them to talk about? Have you planned the talking points? Or are you just leaving people to talk amongst themselves?

So many brands it seems to me start from a premise that they must be fascinating because people like them. Yes, that’s true for the first circle. But how do you get pass-on? How do you appeal to people where your brand doesn’t have top-of-mind?

My suggestion: take a hint from the world of costing and start from a zero-base. Assume no inherent interest and look at how you will build interest into who you are, what you do, what you say, where you go … to reach a targeted level of interest amongst that bigger friends of fans group.

You’re only as interesting as you make yourself.

Is thinking a desk job?

Over at Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni asks :Where do you do your best thinking?” For me, it depends on the problem. And what I think and even how I think about something is directed by that. Here are my seven favourite approaches:

1. Sometimes it’s sitting somewhere quietly with a pencil and paper and just writing thought sequences down until something clicks. Usually that’s about rethinking the associations. Scrabble means charades with a touch of Pixar over a business model.

2. I read avidly for the same reason. It’s all about finding different lines of logic. Disrupting. That’s really good for new products or ideas where there is no precedent or if you need to put daylight between what normally happens and what will need to happen for the brand you’re working on. Read about a completely different situation, and then apply what you got from it. To find out more about this, read The Medici Effect.

3. Other times it’s a walk – to get sensory inputs such as eye contact, noises, colour, vistas. Good for getting into the emotions of a situation or problem. Take your phone, sing to yourself, absorb. Good for quiet days.

4. Finding a picture of the situation works the same way. It can crystallise the situation and quite literally frame the argument. It’s not unusual for me to spend hours trolling National Geographics in search of an image that epitomises a situation or a relationship for me. I recognise that this doesn’t always look entirely productive to other people. Visual people get it. Others struggle.

5. Actually going to a place, sitting with a coffee and watching what people do in the real-life situation can be amazingly insightful. It almost always challenges your preconceptions because people don’t behave as you’d expect, and even knowing that, you can still be taken by surprise. A cross between playing detective, amateur psychology and thinking of a problem like a documentary. Very good when you need to change a habit.

6. Sometimes it’s good to talk – but not always about the problem itself. I have conversations with Gren, Alex and others that seem to cover everything but the issue. They work. I always walk away feeling everything has snapped shut. Everyone else seems to walk away in a state of bewilderment tinged with amusement. Synapsial. Good for lateral answers. Requires humour. May look like time-wasting to others. I think of it as the water-cooler comes to the meeting room.

7. If it’s a seriously knotty issue, it’s time for a bath – a habit I happen to share with one of my favourite authors, the late Douglas Adams. In a book about the making of the original radio scripts for Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a lovely story about Adams’ love of Chinese takeaways and baths, and his tendency to consume more and more of both, the closer he got to deadline. As a result, the more pressing the timeframe became, the cleaner and more replete the writer. May or may not work for you.

Out-take: Work doesn’t always have to look like work in order to work.

The vital (and ironical) difference between brand and identity

Are there such things as brands in much of the Government sector? I don’t think there are. That’s a good thing. And here’s why. I believe brands fundamentally require a competitive environment in which to actually work. I’m sure there’s an economic model that explains why – I don’t know it. But the reason why and when I believe brands work best has to do with the value I think they are intended to create: to drive preference; to encourage loyalty; to lift margin; to underpin and align a competitive and commercial business model with the people who believe in and buy from that organisation.

Brands have to work to help consumers to make choices. They need to stimulate recognition, preference and loyalty based on interaction and clear senses of expectation and delivery. Therefore you need to have both choice and competition available. There are of course parts of the public and local government sector that are contestable – and there the dynamics of brand work well. Equally in the NGO sector, one of the most competitive sectors of all in my opinion, there is huge opportunity to use brands to good effect, although many don’t. (We should talk about that some time.)

But where brands don’t work is where people have no choice and no competition. You can’t brand treasury functions for example or Inland Revenue. You can’t brand welfare. You can’t brand public health, airport security, food regulators (in fact regulators of any sort) etc. And you can’t brand local government either.

You can, and must, give those organisations identities so that they can be recognised and contacted but that doesn’t make them brands. An identity is not a brand.

Brands are driven by the need to create profit by delivering to customers. Non-brands are judged on their ability to frame, uphold and deliver on robust systems and processes.

Those are completely different frameworks – and rightly so. As the world has discovered on a number of occasions, bad things happen when you let brands run riot without market controls and equally when you ask public-good entities to suddenly adopt a commercial model when there are no competitive forces to keep them in check.

So to the irony. A brand always need an identity. But sometimes organisations with an identity work best if they don’t try to behave, or think of themselves, as brands.

Announcement: Now on Facebook

In a move that may surprise some after my recent posts, I’ve decided to make a move onto Facebook by starting a Mark Di Somma, Writer page.

The main reason is that, in addition to providing a place for those who prefer to go to Facebook to get their stories, some of the topics/developments that catch my eye have ongoing coverage, and I see this page as an appropriate place to carry on threads of conversation that fall between a post and a tweet.

For example, I’ve just linked to a story from Fast Company that concurs with my thinking around “war of the worlds” as it applies to the consolidation of social media. I’ve also linked to another story there about the growing awareness of CSR credentials for consumers and what that might mean for brands.

I hope you’ll join in.

 

Volume is nothing like intensity

Speculation in recent days about what a “fan” is worth to a business is a timely reminder to separate volume from intensity.

Many commentators in the social universe it seems to me remain beguiled by quantity. The more liked you are, they seem to think, the more valuable you are potentially. Not so, of course. It costs nothing to say “like”. And in many cases I would venture to add, it means nothing and adds nothing.

Intensity though is quite a different metric – because it speaks to commitment and the bottom-line results of that commitment rather than just impressions. Intense fans buy the brands they feel strongly about. Money changes hands.

Intensity also defies volume. If you have customers who feel intensely committed to your brand, then you can have a much smaller, much less impressive number of them. Apple doesn’t have the biggest market share in a lot of the sectors it participates in, but it has perhaps the world’s most intense fans. And if a good percentage of those committed people only buy your brand or purchase predominately from you, then they are actually worth much more commercially than the hundreds of thousands of people who like you and move on without even a sideways glance at the cart.

Edward Boches says that we should also treat with real caution any suggestion that a “like” is a new customer and therefore a potential convert. In an excellent post on which came first – the loyalist or the like – Boches has this to say about the real market value of fans: “A program that strives to pile up fans will at best simply identify people who are already loyal. At worst, it will convince someone to click a button because it’s effortless, but potentially also meaningless.”

He continues: “The only thing we should be measuring is whether or not [what we do] induces prospects to become customers and customers to become repeat customers …”

Amen.

Like is a button. Commitment is a purchase. And brands the world over should be seeking to be intensely bought rather than just freely shared.

Competition amongst brands in the social universe: is it an open and shut case?

This thought-provoking Fast Company post calls into question something that I think most of us hadn’t even bothered to question – and that is whether in fact social media sites compete with one another. Google’s Eric Schmidt has argued for some time that this is not a zero-sum competition and that Google does not actively compete with other social networks, saying that everyone benefits when people spend more time online.

As the article observes: “Social networks often confine user data to their websites, forcing users to stay within their ecosystem … Google, on the other hand, seems intent on exploiting its newfound popularity to force rivals into more open data policies.” The article goes on to reference Google’s Chief Economist admitting that their products want to push Google’s open standards on competitors.

My sense is though that you always need to approach the concept of competition with an open mind. And that’s because while brands may not wish to, or expect to, compete in some ways with one another, the element of competition, and therefore the search for advantage, is always there with commercial endeavours.

For example, in this particular set of circumstances, it may not be in Google’s interests to compete for access because, as I’ve said before, closing systems to search actually compromises Google’s scale model. Google’s revenue model is built on traffic – so the more traffic they can encourage directly and through third party interactions the better. And the more that they can make searchable, the more important they are for users. They have a lot to gain from a more open social universe.

But I very much doubt whether Google would be quite so generous about sharing or ceding revenue. In that arena, they will absolutely compete head-on with others (including more traditional channels of course) for market spend priority.

The same applies to many brands. There are times when being seen alongside one another is useful – it works to the benefit of all – but that doesn’t mean brands are necessarily going out of their way to help one another. At some point, the commercial realities must apply. Coke still want other drinks to be available at the outlets they’re sold at, because otherwise consumers would feel they had no choice and the integrity of the outlet as a convenience channel could be compromised. At the same time though, they want to access as much of the beverage buy as they can get at that outlet and to make the maximum amount from the space allocated to them.

Markets are full of dichotomies and this is just another one of them.

Collective mass makes companies, particularly in emergent channels, credible and therefore viable. Google, Facebook et al carry weight because they carry numbers. Schmidt’s right when he says that everyone benefits when people spend more time online, and to do that users need to be able to move freely and easily online. Sharing, liking, linking etc have done a huge amount to foster that. And in that sense the competition is not zero-sum amongst the participants. They need to demonstrate that they are a collective force to be reckoned with. They need to continue to expand and to progress. That’s what makes them a sector.

And yes, I think we will continue to see co-operations, such as the Skype/Facebook alliance, where parties stand to mutually gain from an association, again based around access to services/experiences that the other is renowned for.

But beyond that? No. And the reason is that you always need to distinguish in situations of co-opetition between what’s not at stake and what is. Ultimately open systems and open searching carry few sacrifices, but they have the potential to deliver convenience, speed and goodwill to all who participate. There’s actually very little at stake from the parties working together. But elsewhere, where there is actually earnings to be lost, or even put at risk, the stakes are very real and competition will continue to thrive. In fact, it would be illegal if it didn’t.

Nudging: making the most of the power of suggestion

We’re much more susceptible to the power of suggestion than many of us might like to think – at least that was my take-out from more reading from Time: this time on how brands use buying suggestions to entice us to buy more than we might otherwise.

The article quotes John T. Gourville, a Harvard Business School professor of marketing who specialises in studying pricing strategies. Consumers, he says, tend to follow the suggestions listed in brochures or store aisles, so people tend to buy the amount, or buy in increments, that are advertised. If they see five for $5 or 10 for $5, they buy five or ten, regardless of the fact that they normally buy three.

And that, as the article points out, is the key strategy here: to get consumers buying more than they would if there was no sale. It seems we respond positively too to the suggestion of limitation – imposing a limit of two per customer or six per customer incentivises people to buy right up to that limit. The article concludes, “this is the power of suggestion at work, and it has little to do with whether the item’s sale price is good, or whether you, the consumer, actually wanted any of that soda at all.”

So, if you want to increase how people respond to your brand, make suggestions. Try with this, add that, good with three of those, best value when you buy six of them … and then look to put a limit on how many.

Intriguing isn’t it? That retailers can nudge people to buy more and yet restrict how much more they buy almost in the same breath. But it goes back to two things about brands that we need to remain mindful of. As consumers, we’re looking for guidance and value in a world of choice. Brands need to make use of that, but not abuse it. And secondly, exclusivity never fails to intrigue us. The moment we’re told we can’t have as much as we want as consumers, we immediately want all that we can get.

In a world where everyone just expects access, and to have things rammed down their throat, almost so that they can ignore them, making something unreadily available can be a sure way to get attention. It works for selling wheelbarrows. It’s working for Google+.

At times, a nudge really is so much more compelling than a push.

A brand that discounts or a discount brand?

This article in Time on how to get the most out of Apple is a reminder that there is a noticeable difference psychologically between a brand that discounts (even if it’s only occasionally) and a discount brand. Apple does discount – but for selected parts of its range or for specific reasons: change-over on a model, for example. The most important thing is that they don’t give that impression.

Apple’s approach is to treat price as a reliable indicator of value. By not overtly or uniformly discounting, they maintain the value of the brand by making products that excite customers and they continue to charge for them at that level of value until there is a good reason not to do so. In other words, Apple’s ethos is never discount an Apple product while people are most excited about it – no matter whether that is days or years after it was first released.

But while Apple have worked hard to position themselves as a full-price, full value brand, that’s not always the case. As the article points out, “With the exception of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple products are typically discounted within eight days of first hitting the market …” Surprised? I was. But “As for the most in-demand Apple products—iPad and iPhone—there doesn’t seem to be much financial incentive to delay your gratification. The price for either is unlikely to change by waiting a few days, or even a few months … discounts have basically been non-existent until it’s time for Apple to introduce the latest new-new model.”

Even when Apple do discount, the wider motivation seems to be to give customers entry points to the Apple universe. By lowering the price of a laptop, they invite customers into their world, knowing that they will then be pre-disposed to go Apple all the way. At least that’s my theory, and it’s one I think extends to the pricing of their new operating system. Lower the barriers to entry to get people involved, but retain the pricing and the aspiration on the iconic products that people continue to be excited by and around which the world of Apple pivots.

Such an approach seems worlds away from the volume-driven approach taken by discount brands that advertise serial sales to drive up their top line. But as I’ve said many times before, there’s nothing wrong with that model if you’ve built your business and your brand around it. Smart discount brands rely on a very different perception of price though than a brand like Apple. Whereas Apple sees price as proof of value, astute discount brands treat price as a pain point. And they rely on easing perceived pain in order to generate interest. They rely on you paying less in one area but more in others to help balance the load. Just like with Apple, it’s a feel-good balancing act. The difference is that one brand makes itself known for discounting and the other doesn’t.

One truth straddles both approaches. No matter how you choose to use discounting, to use it effectively you need to hard-wire it into your ethos not just your pricing. You need to be very clear too about how it works to protect your margins store-wide.

You might like to ponder that the next time you see a sign advertising “30% off selected lines”. Which lines have been selected … and more mportantly, why?

Positioning your brand through memories

I think it’s healthy for there to be a direct relationship between memory and frequency for a brand. The more often a customer comes into contact with your brand, the more consistent the memory needs to be. That’s because brands that frequently interact with their customers have the power of habit on their side. In fact, when someone is buying from you frequently, the memory itself needs to focus on regularity: greeting customers by name; being easy to find; recognising what they like and maybe working with that; introducing suggestions that fit with what they’re looking for. The memories are smaller in their impact and their “experience” factor, but their frequency makes the effect powerfully cumulative.

By contrast, when your customers only interact with you occasionally, then the memory needs to be stronger and much more enduring. It literally needs to “last” until the next time a customer needs to buy because there isn’t the same front-of-mind of course – which means less consistent awareness and less reminders. It’s easy for customers to decide to explore a new technology or take advantage of what they see as a better price.

Natural or special? Which sentiment do you generate? The feeling that comes with a trip to your favourite deli or the excitement that wells up at the thought of a trip to another part of the world? That’s the choice for many brand experiences. Something so easy that life wouldn’t be the same without it. Or something so wonderful that you really look forward to buying it again.

Which one do you want to be? For some professions that’s easy. If you’re a grocery brand, for example, or a snack food. Or if you’re a luxury perfume or an upmarket clothes store. But sometimes that choice is less obvious? If you’re a firm of lawyers for example – how do you want your customers to feel about you? Natural or special? If you’re a consultant? Or a speaker? Do you want to be familiar, trusted, part of them, or a treat, something indulgent, an occasion?

Perhaps those are the real ways to think about positioning your brand. What expectation do you want to set, what timeframe do you want to interact in and what memory do you want to generate?