Nailing your opinions: creating a powerful brand manifesto

By Mark Di Somma

On All Saint’s Day 1517, Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church, sparking, in the eyes of many, what would become the Protestant Reformation. Whether or not he actually did post the Theses (of course there is historical debate) and what that generated are off-topic, but the action of pinning your colours to a statement of beliefs for all the world to see lies at the core of building and articulating an opinionated brand.

Brands build trust through behaviours. And behaviours should be based on clear principles. Those principles should bring your purpose to life by laying out the clear psychological guidelines within which your brand operates. They are, when done well, an inspiring précis of your organisation’s worldview.

Martin Lindstrom made the brand case for opinion for me in this post several years ago when he wrote: “The fact is that consumers are tiring of perfectly polished brands. Inoffensive brands. … Brands without well-defined opinions will find it increasingly difficult to gain traction in the market place. The challenge is to ensure that the opinions are in tune with the core values of the brand. That they are authentic, and not an opportunistic and superficial play for attention by deception.”

Diesel’s famous “Be Stupid” is one of my all-time favourites. It’s a wonderful mix of observation, grace, defiance, sarcasm, insight and counter-intuition that lays out Diesel’s anti-smart stance, including the fabulous assertion that “Stupid is the relentless pursuit of a regret-free life”. You’re left in no doubt as to Diesel’s abiding philosophy, and the case is put in such a way that the viewer is pretty much asked to choose one way or the other, stupid or smart.

So what’s the basis for a powerful manifesto? Jean-Claude Saade captured it nicely here with the thought that there are 7 doors to connection between people and brands:

• Shared values, such as peace, equality and liberty;
• Shared roots including religion, ethnicity, language, culture, citizenship, education, profession and geography;
• Shared fights, be they political, environmental or ethical;
• Shared pursuits such as wealth, power, information and notoriety;
• Shared lifestyle aspirations;
• Shared passions, including sports, arts, music and travel; and
• Shared preferences, including food, drinks, cars and clothing

What’s clear from Saade’s observation is that there are rich and diverse grounds for creating likeability. The challenge though doesn’t lie in finding your point of affinity. The hardest thing about creating a compelling manifesto is having your own take as a brand on that intense point of connection.

A powerful manifesto stems from a disruptive premise. And an inspiring narrative. My suggestion: Don’t write a piece of prose. Write a rallying cry in the media of your choice, with:
• The anger of a placard
• The commitment of a doctrine
• The beauty of a story
• The hope and excitement of a vivid dream
• The sense of a philosophy and
• The call to action of a direct response ad.

You’ve nailed your manifesto when it evokes one very, very simple response: “Couldn’t have said it better myself …”

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Church Door” by Acrylic Artist (Rodney Campbell) sourced from Flickr

Evolution or transformation? 17 key brand factors

By Mark Di Somma

No business these days can just sit pretty. But the extent and nature of changes confuses many. Brands evolve. Or die. But they must also retain something of what consumers know. Or they fade. So which is more important? And how should a brand act, when? I get asked about this a lot. So here are my takes on what must stay and what can go (sometimes):

Keep:

1. Your good name (in every sense) – it’s the thing people know you by. Unless of course you need to re-engineer your reputation or your old name doesn’t fit what you do anymore.

2. Your purpose – the ways you intend to change the world should remain an inspiring constant for staff and customers (providing it’s inspiring to start with, of course)

3. Your values – only change them if you’re going to make them more challenging

4. Your promises – trust is the basis for any brand’s success. Without that, you’re nothing.

5. Your principles – in today’s transparent markets, transgressions will be discovered. It’s just a question of time.

Consider changing:

6. The category you compete in – if the current category isn’t working for you, if you can’t achieve breakthrough in that space or if there is a disruption opportunity in another market, look for a different place to compete, or change the business model under which you compete.

7. How others must compete against you – look for ways to shift how you do business so that any reaction from a competitor disadvantages them by forcing them to work in ways and/or places where you have advantages.

8. Where you’re positioned – adjust your market position to put daylight between yourself and others.

9. Who you target – if your current market isn’t buying, go in search of new segments and/or change your current offerings to better meet the changing needs of your customers.

10. Your story – adjust your story to reflect the other changes in your business. Tell people a story that haven’t heard yet.

11. Your personality – to better fit with what people want. Bring an attitude that inspires and excites people.

12. Your language – visual and verbal, to better converse with the people you’re trying to reach. But be aware too that complete overhauls of your identity in low-attention sectors can literally see customers walking past your brand.

13. How people perceive you – use advertising and smart content marketing to give people different perspectives.

14. What you offer people – through improvements, upgrades and limited edition versions of your products

15. How people experience the brand – reach them through new channels and/or change the levels of service that you offer customers

16. How people access the brand – by giving them a value alternative to get them started or by offering them different ways to acquire what the brand offers.

17. What people feel they get for their money – particularly important in budget-conscious sectors. That doesn’t necessarily mean you discount. It can mean you have to demonstrate more actively why you’re worth what you’re worth through added features, improved performance, complementary offers etc.

Evolution vs transformation

The distinction between evolution and transformation lies in the extent of the changes rather than whether to change or not.

In the course of normal brand evolution, core beliefs and behaviours should remain constant but product lines, experiences and competitive approach need to keep pace with shifts across the marketplace. In this context, brands modernise but within a context that consumers clearly recognise.

A transformation process by contrast challenges the whole premise of the organisation and in so doing brings into question every aspect of the brand’s credo by requiring the business to redefine its ‘reason for value’. In this scenario, everything’s up for scrutiny including all the things that you might otherwise keep. The brand becomes something it has never been before by questioning everything it has previously held dear. This pulls the seat out from underneath everyone – but get it right, as organisations like IBM have done on a number of occasions, and new markets literally open up in front of you.

One thing we can safely assume: brands that don’t continue to change to the extent required of them (however radical that might be) must, in time, become extinct.

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Just Sit Back and Relax” by Vinoth Chandar, sourced from Flickr

Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.

By Mark Di Somma

People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, particularly if their viewpoints compromise the personality of the brand itself.

Hands up if you’ve ever been to this meeting:

“I like orange.”

Or “Don’t make it orange.”

“Use short words.”

Or “People don’t read.”

“We need to be on TV.”

And/or “We need to export.”

Brands thrive when they are based on meaning, trust, relevance and delight – but of course they must deliver that meaning, trust, relevance and delight to the buyer, not the seller. Otherwise they risk narcissism.

Every brand must pursue a life of its own – not affirm the life of a manager. And to me, that integral sense of being an asset in its own right hangs on ten things. A brand must have:

Its own name (obviously)
Its own purpose
Its own values
Its own viewpoints
Its own story
Its own language – verbal and visual
Its own structure
Its own pricing
Its own style of marketing
Its own experiences

Without distinctive brand attributes, companies are left to market the Emperor’s new clothes. And yet at the same time as a brand’s attributes must evolve to remain distinctive, they must remain recognisable to consumers.

Brand evolution is not about yes or no. It’s about on-brand or not. Personal opinion is a dangerous decision maker because it seems so reasonable to the person with the opinion. Unless managers can put distance between what they believe and what the brand believes, unless they can plan not just for difference but for distinctly and consistently branded difference at every point, a brand can quickly fall victim to compromise, distraction and sector and personal bias.

As Ron Johnson, the ex-CEO at JC Penney, has discovered to his cost, what feels so “yes” to a decision maker can be worlds apart from what the people making the buying decisions want. While his replacement, Myron Ullman, is quoted in this NY Times article as saying, “Nobody ever wins by going back in retail because the customers’ expectations change all the time”, it’s equally true that the way forward must align with what people expect for the brand as well.

As Bill Campbell pointed out in an interview in Wired recently, “Johnson was tone-deaf to the issues … Whatever you need to do, you have to keep the current business going while you are experimenting with your new one. He didn’t do that. What he did was put a bullet hole in his current business and went about trying to create a new one.”

It may even sound like I think brand managers’ opinions don’t count. Of course they do. No-one is closer to a brand and has more direct impact on its future direction than those who guide it and who are responsible for it every day. Just be very clear what sorts of opinions hold value. And which represent trouble.

Know the customers’ agenda. Pursue the customers’ agenda.
(Not what you think it is. And not what you’d like it to be.)

Acknowledgement
Photo of “Coat hangers” by Matt Callow, sourced from Flickr

Don’t plan to be a start-up. Plan to be an upstart.

By Mark Di Somma

You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing.

“Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more established in order to prove oneself.

Launching an upstart on the other hand is all about putting a business in play that really challenges what everyone else has accepted as the rules.

That’s because a start-up focuses on getting a product or an idea to market, whereas an upstart focuses on an “enemy” (be it an attitude or a standardised approach) and looks to a product or service to change that.

Without a business model trained on defying and disrupting the status quo, you are destined to be another player trying to get a footing in another overplayed market. A feature, no matter how beneficial, is not a disruption. If all that stands between you and your competitors is a product improvement, a customer service change, a change in your distribution plan or a new pricing model, you can bank on it being copied, commoditised or counter-attacked at the first sign of sustained success. Then what?

The equation is stark. Rock the boat, and keep rocking the boat – or risk ending up in the same boat as everyone else.

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Row boat” taken by PAVDW (Paul VanDerWerf), sourced from Flickr

The future myth

By Mark Di Somma

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture. Banking on it is simply speculation.

To evolve successfully, brands must grow out of what they have into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future.

That is what they have control of. That is what they are responsible for. The customers they take with them into the future. The actions they drive in the future. The products they will make. The culture they build for the future.

All strategists and decision makers can and should read out of the macro-trends, and even the supposedly “specific” future trends for that matter, are the broad indicators of the change that’s coming and perhaps a sense of where it might be coming from. Nothing more – certainly not the exact nature and timing of that change.

But what brands can do, indeed must do, is use what they’re hearing and what their data is telling them to quantify what must be dealt with today: the instability of the present; the intensity of the competition; the changes in the world that they want to take charge of; and the degree to which they may be able to build on, or reject, what they have as they push forward. Being aware of those things will help quantify receptivity for what they have planned.

Deal with what you know, but look beyond what you have.

Acknowledgements
Photo of Barometer by Matt Wharton (electricinca), sourced from Flickr

The global challenge of doing business openly

By Mark Di Somma

Congratulations to All Good Organics, the first New Zealand company to make the prestigious Ethisphere Institute’s World’s Most Ethical (WME) companies list. All Good may be tiny but this ranking puts them in some great company – one of just 145 companies, chosen from more than 5000 entries. Judge for yourself.

In the light of this win, interesting to read Raz Godelnik’s take on the difference that CSR actually makes for companies in this post on TriplePundit:

A MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG survey showed 40% of executives polled believed the greatest benefit to an organisation in addressing sustainability was “improved brand reputation”.

Godelnik goes on to cite evidence that CSR initiatives help companies retain stock value when facing corporate governance scandals and product recalls, and that firms viewed as having weak CSR suffered stock declines twice the size of firms viewed as having strong CSR after riots surrounding 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle.

While consumers might not be willing to pay higher prices for greener products, he says, they will more likely purchase goods from firms that are more socially responsible. However, consumers are often not aware of a firm’s CSR activities and that in turn limits the extent to which CSR reputation actually makes a difference in customers’ decisions.

Godelnik’s conclusions? “In all, it looks like studies support the notion that CSR can impact companies’ reputation positively, helping them improve their reputation with stakeholders and be more resilient in times of crisis. Still, companies need to work hard to make sure stakeholders are aware of their efforts and that these efforts are sincere.”

Two questions. In the light of Godelnik’s findings, is CSR more than just a marketing exercise for many companies? And is his conclusion specific to CSR – or could one just as easily replace CSR with the word “actions” and the statement work just as well? That’s not intended as any belittlement of what the writer is saying – simply an observation that I think the conversation that’s been centred around CSR has been too narrow. The discussion can in fact be broadened to include the ramifications of actions (and reputation) generally, and from there to a closer inspection of the radically different way in which business is being done now.

To me, CSR is the symptom, not the subject. We are in the middle of a wider and much more radical transition than the move to ethical. I have stated on a number of occasions that to me, the key issue is one of responsibility. But the broader adaption I think is about how brands adapt to a world of unparalleled openness. It’s about the fundamental challenge to closed trading that the internet introduced and now encourages – and the questions that openness generates. How do you continue to make money when everyone can see more and more of what you’re doing? Companies are still struggling in my view to find a path through what feels like the conflicting pulls of ethical behaviour and competitive behaviour.

A truly social business world is do-able – but it’s far from done. In her excellent e-book “11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era”, Nilofer Merchant makes this salient point, “Things we once considered opposing forces – doing right by people and delivering results, collaborating and keeping focus, having a social purpose and making money – are really not in opposition … But we need a more sophisticated approach to understand business models where making a profit doesn’t mean losing purpose, community, and connection.”

I think those business models are still very much in development. Some, like All Good and those on the Ethisphere list, are addressing that by, quite literally, competing ethically – and inviting the world to watch and emulate. Contrast for example Godelnik’s analysis of what companies are looking to get out of CSR (a reputational insurance policy in a world of insatiable scrutiny) with All Good owner Chris Morrison’s view, quoted in an article on Stuff, of why they are in business: “”All Good believes we can’t ignore the consequences, humane or environmental, of growing the food we eat and enjoy, even though it may happen a long way from New Zealand.”

It’s one thing to incorporate CSR initiatives into a traditionally strategised business in a bid to win ethical brownie points. It’s quite another to view responsible behaviours as part and parcel of a broader and longer term transit to a globally competitive environment based on no harm and no secrets.

The capitalism of yesterday thrived on winning. The capitalism of today (with its need to work in a socially connected world) thrives on sharing. But the capitalism of tomorrow will need to succeed by giving. Thanks to ethical companies like All Good we have started to see the capacity for brands in the future to actually give more by trading more. Cradle-to-cradle thinking might even suggest that, going forward, new competitive models may pivot on that greater generosity, so that the more people trade, the more poverty is reduced, the cleaner the environment becomes and the better off the whole world is.

I’m excited to see where that might lead.

What have you never questioned?

By Mark Di Somma

Every business has loops. Some are driven by fear, some by tradition, some by distraction, some by lack of awareness or industry convention.

Everyone says they’re looking for “competitive difference” – but then, in the race to get it right, they copy each other’s ideas, they mimic each other’s thinking, they catch up with each other’s formulas, they pile onto Facebook alongside everyone else. Sometime later they wonder why their sector seems so much more competitive. Why wouldn’t it be? As conformity grinds down diversity, there are more and more companies in every sector but less and less real choices for customers.

The irony of loops is that the more people behave in the same way, the more assured they feel and the less distinctive they become.

People too get used to thinking certain ways, doing certain things. And slowly, inevitably, workplaces get into loops as cultures become set in their ways. They talk themselves into believing that the best way to make their loop competitive is to leave it as is but to make it go faster – to outpace the other loops. They bind conformity into their language. They do more of the same, more quickly, and congratulate themselves on their productivity.

Same applies to customers. People get used to things, very used to things, and then bored with things. All the way through the first 2/3 of that cycle they want more of the same, and more, and more … And then they want to move on. Blackberry went from customer hero to technological hermit in no time flat. The Palm went from the pocket to the bin as novelty faded and new options beckoned.

It’s human nature to loop because loops are driven by two powerful centrifugal forces: habit; and comfort.

Loops get companies stuck. Think of any company that’s gone under recently. Chances are it was killed by a loop. Think of brands that are fighting to stay relevant. What they’re really fighting against oftentimes is their loops, their own logic, as they shed value with every turn. Think of brands that have commoditised. Loops again.

Here are six sure signs that you are in a loop:

• You have a “stable” business. (Stability is a dangerous state for any brand, because so often it signals complacency.)
• Sales are arcing down or at least they have plateau-ed but no-one seems worried. It’s explained away as a cyclical blip or as a symptom of the economy.
• “But we have a better product/better people” is used to explain away almost any adverse result.
• There’s a lot of talk about history and tradition. The internal mentality is one of preservation rather than pre-emption.
• Concern about looming or converging competition is dismissed as “scaremongering”.
• The customer pool is shrinking. Everyone’s too busy to notice.

But how do you find and correct something that is so much a part of your day, so much a part of how you think and work, so much a part of what you expect?

Actually, you start right there. By asking: what have we never questioned?

It’s an idea I call The Feynman principle, based on the workings of scientist Richard Feynman. The principle: always question what you do know before you enquire about what you don’t know. Feynman saw assumption as the greatest enemy of inquiry, but instead of limiting his focus to how assumption might jeopardise new fields, he continued to question the levels of in-built assumption in what was accepted as known.

So much “innovation” focuses on creating new things in order to move forward. Loop-breaking is about honestly questioning those things that, through force of habit and comfort, have gone un-litigated. Start small. Start with what feels so familiar, too familiar. Start by putting  the question out to everyone who works on the brand. And don’t ask once. Pin the question where everyone can see it. Ask every day.

Acknowledgements

Photo “Merry-Go-Round VII” by isapisa (Isabell Schultz), sourced from Flickr

Can you innovate too quickly?

By Mark Di Somma

What is the right pace for a brand to transform in an iterative economy? So often we’re told that success will stem from pushing the innovation accelerator flat to the floor. As proof, we hear about those companies that failed to innovate or didn’t respond quickly enough – and were buried. But is that true?

Is innovation just about turnover, or is it more complicated than that? Where should brands take their cues – from their own development programmes, from their competitors, from the media, from their own marketing demands?

Where do you look for prompts when you have new work in the wings?

There’s a theory for this (of course) – diffusion of innovation. It revolves around two key aspects: an adoption process that generates critical mass (a.k.a the bell curve); and Professor Everett Rogers’ five influential factors concerning take-up:

• Relative advantage – how much better the innovation is than its predecessor
• Compatibility – how easily the innovation can be assimilated into everyday life
• Complexity – how easy or difficult the innovation is to adopt
• Commitment – how easily a person can try the innovation out before they commit to it
• Visibility – how easily the innovation can be seen, recognised and endorsed by others

I would add three more considerations to his list:

• Pace – how often are innovations announced, particularly if the product innovation cycle appears to have sped up (this may cause consumers to feel that the innovation has been rushed)
• Similarity – how similar does this innovation seem to what came before it (and therefore how inclined are people to forsake what they see as minor improvements by ‘skipping’ a generation)
• Excitement – how much attention has the innovation garnered both for itself and in comparison to other concurrent offerings coming into the launch.

Michael Schrage tackles the issue of how to pace change in an HBR post recently. He provides a great answer: “The issue is less about how fast CEOs are willing to move than how quickly their most reliable customers are prepared to change … Your own rate of change is determined less by the quality or price/performance of your offerings than the measurable readiness of your customers and clients … Their inertia matters more than your momentum.”

“The measurable readiness”. The critical success factor for innovation is not just speed to market, it’s speed with market. Scaled inclination. While consumers may have become very accustomed to witnessing change, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will participate. Observing change doesn’t mean that they will buy the change. Something causes them to switch. But something can just as easily can cause them to question.

And that questioning can occur not just before a purchase but also after it. Take the introduction of the iPad 3. It may have felt good to many at the time – but with the arrival of the iPad 4 so soon afterwards, “measurable readiness” for what the iPad 3 was and what it had contributed came under fire. A Toluna QuickSurveys poll found that 45% of the third generation iPad owners it surveyed were upset with Apple for releasing the fourth generation model just seven months after the former tablet’s release.

OK, the dissatisfaction didn’t affect iPad 4 sales, but it does sound a cautionary note I think to brands looking to “rush” the market. Innovators need to be very careful in their pacing of releases not to be seen to be leading consumers on or for that matter to be seen to be deliberately holding back.

I summarise it this way.

The 10 reactions to innovation:
People will buy something wondrous.
They’ll examine something that’s markedly better than what they have.
They’ll consider an improvement.
They’ll hesitate over an adjustment.
They’ll dismiss a lack of progress.
They’ll reject a mistake.
They’ll vilify a disappointment.
And if you fail to renew fast enough, they’ll look for a copy (at a better price).
But they’ll also forgive.
And they may even choose to forget.

Acknowledgements

Image of “Apple iPad 3 Event” taken by Blake Patterson (blakespot), sourced from Flickr

Other perspectives

• How Tim Cook Should Really Be Running Apple (forbes.com)
• ∞ Delivering innovation vs delivering products (loopinsight.com)

Seeing past the problem

By Mark Di Somma

Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all.

As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use.

But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause.

It’s the prompt.

And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to.

Do you know the lovely story of Abraham Wald? His reasoning shows why what you think you see can be so misleading. The mathematician was called in to determine how to make bombers safer during the Second World War. Everyone agreed they needed more armour. But where? Armour is heavy. If you put it everywhere, the bombers would never get off the ground. The answer seemed obvious. Put the armour where the planes were being shot the most. So Wald went to work and sketched all the places where bombers returning from their runs were most shot up.

But then, in his analysis of the situation, Wald turned everything on its head. The areas of most apparent damage were not the problem, he concluded, because they appeared on planes that made it back. The real areas of vulnerability on a bomber were those areas that weren’t marked – because planes shot there were the ones that never made it home.

Wald’s wonderful insight was to resist the temptation to ask “what am I looking at?” and to ask instead “why can I see this?” It’s a reminder to all of us. As are the words of the philosopher Karl Popper who said, “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

Here’s what I got out of both men’s approaches. The next time you’re grappling with a marketing issue, don’t focus on the symptom or the approach, focus on the situation. And don’t veer towards what you understand. Set a course for what truly isn’t making sense.

Acknowledgements

Photo of man looking at us by Bryan Gosline, sourced from Flickr.

More reading

The strategy of radical beauty
Crunching on cacti
The contradictions of eyelashes and data

If there’s a transformation issue I can help you with, please contact me.

Why are you waiting for things to improve? 10 ways for middle-market brands to tackle austerity now

By Mark Di Somma

There’s nothing to suggest that the global “downturn” is about to upturn any time soon. We’re in the middle of a sustained bear and nothing in the economic news – America’s debt, China’s slowdown, the flat-footed European economy, Britain’s economic woes, commodity trends – suggests a sudden and universal change of fortunes.

Austerity is the normal. It’s not a market trend. It is the market.

And yet so many businesses say that they’re holding on and waiting for things to change for the better. Once the economy improves, we hear, they’ll be able to start growing again. That implies they do not see adaptation as their responsibility. They continue to apply the same models and mindsets that they have been applying. They are literally waiting for light to show its face at the end of the tunnel.

A better strategy would be to adjust to the tone of the times we now face. Too many brands are trying to sell to a market sentiment they hope for rather than one that realistically prevails. Setting aside the more obvious market strategies of bargain brands and luxury manufacturers, how do middle-market brands attract buyers and gain preference today?

Start by recognising the human factors:

Everyone still loves to be inspired. Excitement is a timeless sentiment especially in times of perceived bleakness. But the adrenalin rush of naked materialism is perhaps less appropriate today than the powerful sentiments of empowerment, hope and resilience. Materialism is increasingly seen as pre-GFC. People still want to believe. Human nature is to look forward. The key for brands will be how they tap into that in order to tie momentum and a realistic sense of progress to what they’re offering.

The familiar is even more important. In a world where change is trumpeted in the press, instability pushes many towards what they’ve known; the things that feel ‘proven’ to them. A recent survey by JWT, cited here, suggests the over-riding priorities for most people are health, time with family and control over their lives. People want to care, and they want to feel good about the things they care about. Tap that.

Rituals, habits and rewards have renewed significance. This is very much an extension of the previous point. People enjoy the familiarity and the immediacy of doing things they know, love doing and are comfortable doing with or alongside others – especially when they work in times that see them under increasing pressure. Rituals also suggest a renewed interest in planning, in thinking ahead and having things to look forward to. A beer at six is a habit. A family Christmas or a regular holiday is both a ritual and a reward. It requires thinking ahead to fulfil something that has a specific timeframe for all involved. Provide things for people to look forward to.

Local matters. Another extension of the above. Home-grown brands feel like “one of us”, are familiar, contribute to the wishes to build strong communities and to give back, and come with [unstated] implications of less risk. People draw strength and comfort from what happens in their vicinity.

People love a bargain, but not at any price. Research by Trajectory suggests that recession-sensitive consumers are more aware of price and less loyal (no surprises there), but still prefer brands that couple value with values. Brands need to be responsible, and to be seen to be responsible – in the broader sense of the word.

Now apply those insights to your strategies.

1. Give people not just real hope, but a refreshed sense of hope. The hunt for happiness has shifted from what people own to what people have around them, but it’s still very much present.
2. Raise their adrenalin rate.
3. Give them more of what they know you for (or more particularly more of what they choose you for) – perhaps with a twist, perhaps not.
4. Suggest [new] things to do that they will enjoy doing, or new ways of doing what they enjoy doing now.
5. Give them new things to value but in ways that reflect what they want to value these days.
6. Act responsibly – and call on others to do the same.
7. Demonstrate that you ‘belong’ here (wherever ‘here’ is).
8. Give buyers what they feel they can afford or deserve without making them feel cheap.
9. Encourage them to think ahead by offering a pay-off for planning.
10. Give them rewards that sincerely acknowledge the effort they’ve put in.

Combine to compete

None of these ideas is new. And one could well argue that no one idea will work by itself. Rather the competitive opportunity for your brand lies in how you develop your own mix of these sentiments to re-incline consumers to what you offer via what you are seen to stand for.

Be a provocative, exciting, proactive, responsible, relevant, practical, familiar, valuable and evolving presence in people’s lives. That’s always going to be a lot more interesting and competitive for your brand and to your customers than waiting for the world’s economists to start whistling a happier tune.

More of my thinking on market leadership here:

The strategy of radical beauty
Market leadership: you can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand.

Looking for a speaker on this?

Market leadership is a topic I really enjoy speaking about. Get more details. Or sign up here and let me keep you up to speed with my presentations.

Acknowledgements:

Image of “Austerity ahead” road sign by 401(K) 2012, sourced from Flickr.