Tag Archives: actions

Does my brand look big in this?

Nederlands: Japanese blowfish (fugu)

Japanese blowfish (fugu) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As marketers, we’re often encouraged to puff up our brands to look as big as possible so that they appear significant and credible in a global marketplace. There’s a sense that if you’re big, you must be successful and if you’re successful, then there’s a higher than likely chance that you’ll continue to grow.

Size matters. But not always in the senses that we have been led to believe.

My own view is that the size of your business is actually less critical than the scale and/or extent of your thinking.

A big brand on the hoof is a thing of beauty, to be sure. Strong, assured, competitive, resourced and focused on bringing its vision of the future to life. Big brands command presence and respect.

But the biggest companies aren’t always the smartest, they’re not always the pace setters and they’re certainly not infallible even though they might like to think they are. I have only to direct attention to the GFC to remind all of us that neither history nor size counts as an immunity pill. Sometimes the bigger they brand, the harder they fall.

And what if you’re a minnow? What then?

If you’re a small company in a sector dominated by companies that are large, powerful, respected and ebullient, you’ll never beat them at their game. They’ll outgun you quickly, arrogantly, even dismissively. But all is not lost. You could look for ways to lay down a big attitude that draws attention and gets people interested and attached to you. Such an approach may be your key to truly downsizing the cachet of those who otherwise will simply try and lord it over you.

Being a larger than life brand brings with it opportunities to achieve greater presence and respect than your natural mass might suggest. By pushing up your profile and achieving greater front of mind than your competitors might expect or than you would otherwise command, you can “blow-fish” your size in the market by being more cheeky, fun, rewarding and engaging than all the staid big players around you.

Competitive radicalism

All this leaves brands with four options in my view – all oriented around a competitive radicalism that I predict will increasingly see brands exiting the middle ground, in attitude at least.

To stand out, think very big or very small – or be one, and act the other.

1. Be the monster – the brand that the whole world can’t help but notice.

2. Or be the upstart – the brand that someone can’t wait to discover and tell others about.

Better yet:

3. Be a monstrous upstart – a cult brand that is noisier than its size warrants because it wields a big attitude and a loyal community.

4. Or an upstart monster – an established brand that tirelessly challenges its own rules.

Strong brands project. They cast a powerful image of themselves to the world that may or may not correspond to their size. And they can project a future for themselves that is immensely powerful.

Loom large in the minds of those who buy from you and those who compete with you. Or slowly but surely fade away (or get eaten).

Stark choices.

More reading

Market leadership: the –out and the -est
The business of cloning
Always be branding
You can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand
Great brands unearth
Is your brand ready for the experience war?
Brands at the speed of life

Other perspectives

Market leadership: the -out and the -est

Two thoughts that I really like, brought together.

The first was one introduced to me by Rob Smith, CEO, Paper Plus back in August 2008. It’s called –est. It goes like this:

There are a very small number of fully competitive positions in a sector and you need to own, and align yourself, to one:

Quickest
Biggest
Cheapest
Coolest
Specialist.

Anything else is the middle ground.

Everyone I raise this with debates the number and raises other possibilities. But you get the idea. It’s superlative and competitive and combative. To me, this is the –est test in brand positioning. Who are you going to be? And are you sure, are you really sure, you want to be that?

Second thought, introduced recently by Seth Godin in this post.  Out-. You win when you:

Outsmart
Outlead
Outcare
Outlisten
Outconnect

He gives others. They’re fabulous of course. To me, they are the market leading opportunities. They signal how you intend to win.

I think this question brings the two together:

Who are you going to out-______ in order to be the ______-est in your sector?

What I really like about this is how scary it is on the one hand.

And how specific it is on the other …

More reading

The business of cloning
Always be branding
You can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand
Great brands unearth
Is your brand ready for the experience war?
Brands at the speed of life

Other perspectives

Not a problem: success pivots on what you solve, not just what you know

If you’re not a fan yet of the Scattershot blog, then I’d like to suggest you should be. In a post published earlier this week, Rajant discusses the concept of “ground truth”. Ground truth, as its name suggests, is the view on the ground that verifies and informs the satellite view. It’s a great way to separate a problem from a truth.

What’s interesting about this is that the perspective that brands have of situations gained from afar can be very different from the reality closer to home. In fact, those on the ground may not see that they have an issue at all. That’s a significant hurdle when your cue for action is something your audience doesn’t recognise. Rajant gives the telling example of P&G’s launch of Febreze, which initially failed. The reason? You only need an air freshener if you understand that you are surrounded by bad smells. The problem with that: “even the strongest odours fade with continual exposure … And Febreze’s reward (an odourless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place”. If my house smells fine to me, then my truth as a consumer is that scent is not a problem and therefore there is no reason to take action. There’s literally nothing to fix. That premise isn’t going to fly.

The actual problem for most marketers is seldom the problem we’re presented with or that we think we have. Often what we’re seeing, or thinking we have to solve, is either something we’d like to solve or a trigger action, the last straw that convinced everyone looking on of the need to take action. If you take either of those literally though, you’re breathing in the wrong air.

Selling what you want to sell is wishful thinking. And that’s all it is until you establish need, habit and (probably) scale.

As for trigger actions – falling sales are not a problem, they are a symptom. Same for increased competition, lack of market share, consumer antipathy … Any solution based on addressing that data alone risks the same outcome as Febreze. It solves something that no-one but the brand owners recognises or feels pain over. It’s not an answer. It doesn’t actually address the real underlying need. The one based on the ground truth.

Most brand strategists run a discovery process, at which they seek to uncover the facts and get to grips with the situation they are being asked to solve. They fact find. And of course that’s necessary. But the real purpose of the discovery process is not to gather information. The purpose of the discovery process is to overlay what you’re learning (facts) over what’s happening (symptoms) in order to unearth the real problem or opportunity (driver).

One of my favourite reminders is that it is not the job of a marketer, or anyone else for that matter, to revive sales, close out competitors, lift customer survey results or increase the Klout score. Because those are all things outside of a brand’s control. They are customer decisions. The role of people who work for a brand is to really understand why those things are happening and to address them in ways that delight, surprise, engage, provoke, and/or motivate buyers. The sign that they have done that well is when sales lift, market presence increases, customer survey results climb and the social media metrics increase.

As HL Mencken once remarked, “There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Marketers love to look for simple answers to easily identifiable problems. The ground truth is that consumers aren’t simple people.

More reading

Other perspectives

Would you be a fan?

What would you do with your company’s mission statement? Would you tweet it?, Brian Solis asks in this article. Just as importantly – would you retweet it?

In other words, does it carry enough meaning for you, and is it personal enough to what you strive in life for that you would literally want to put your name to it and circulate it?

I love this thought because it’s a great reminder to all of us that purpose isn’t about what you’re told to do, or believe or say. It’s about what you choose to share with others. Or at least it should be.

The “BBQ script”, “elevator speech”, “picket fence précis” whatever you want to call it can’t just be a set of words that you roll out on cue. It can’t just be marketing. Not if you really want people to believe you, and therefore the brand you represent.

Speaking of belief, let me ask you this. How much of what you talked about, thought about, met over, reviewed, presented, rationalised, advocated, defended, instructed, created, delegated yesterday … would you “Like” if you were given the chance? How much of it would you be proud to say you were proud of?

Or did it just get done?

Because if you’re not a fan of what you do, if you wouldn’t like it – why should anyone else?

What would you Like?

In this discussion on whether Liking a brand on Facebook makes you more inclined to be positive about that brand, writer Gregory Ferenstein says that rationalisation theory suggests “our actions secretly influence our opinions”.

I’m sure that’s right. We do something and we justify that action to ourselves. When we “like” a brand, we tell ourselves it’s a better brand than we might have thought it was otherwise. We make a public endorsement and we stand behind it. When we pay for something that makes us feel good, we feel better about that brand. And when we buy something alongside many others, we feel more secure because we are not alone.

The dealmaker or breaker though is that we do get what we thought we were getting – and this is where brands need to be so careful in framing expectations. If I take an action, and the action turns out to be better than I expected, I will be pleasantly surprised and I will naturally carry that through to my view of the brand. Zappos 101. Happy actions make for happy opinions.

But brands can get it very wrong in two ways.

The first is that they induce people to take actions under an expectation that never is going to be met. You see this with budget airlines all the time – where people buy expecting that they will get some semblance of the full service they’re used to. When they don’t – and they’re charged for bags or barred because they’re late – their opinions go through the floor. The actions that were taken didn’t align with the actions they were expecting, and as a result, they are bitterly disappointed.

Here’s the question. Who’s at fault? The airline – for not being clearer about expectations? Or the customer for not understanding what they were buying? I blame the airline – and here’s why. They have more to lose. If you want to avoid having disappointed customers, you have to presume that people assume. For the sake of your brand, you need to start from the point of view that unless and until your customers are told they can’t have something, they’ll assume they can. You can’t just hide that in the T&Cs.

In other words, if you want people to “like” what’s happening, you have to tell them what they don’t get – and you have to link that to what they are getting. “We close our flights off 30 minutes beforehand because …” And the “because” needs to be something that is relevant to the customer not the airline. So don’t talk about resourcing or policy or anything like that. Link it to the buyer.

For example, here’s how you might get someone to “like” the luggage policy. “Bags are heavy, and weight uses up fuel. The less bags you travel with, the lighter our planes and the less fuel we have to burn, which means you continue to pay lower fares. You can bring more bags if you want to, but you’ll have to pay for them. We think that’s fair to everyone.”

The second way brands can get it so wrong is when they think customers are taking one action when in fact, they are taking quite another. For example, offering a brand at a discount may entice people to buy – and brands may think that because customers have bought once, they will buy again, only next time at full price perhaps. The good old lost leader theory.

Except that’s not the real action in many cases. The real action – the one customers who buy this way are really liking – is not paying full price. So the real opinion that such an action influences is that the brand is not worth paying full price for.

Be careful how you judge the likings of others. What and why they “like” may be different from what and why you’d like them to “like”.