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

Don’t just provide reasons to buy. Change the reason for buying.

By Mark Di Somma

It’s tempting when your product all but parallels that of your competitors to be drawn into a meaningless war: a fight for market share that revolves around devaluing (looking to price the other guy out), trivial pursuit (nit-picking on features in a bid to show technical advantage) or overshadowing (spending up large in mainstream media in a bid to raise “awareness”).

The problem with chasing competitive preference is that brands spend far too much time focusing on the competitive aspects and far too little insight on identifying where the preferences could lie.

All three approaches above are looking to provide consumers with reasons to buy, but while they may change perceptions, they actually do little to change affinity. It’s a distinction that’s easily overlooked. Changing what consumers think of you for now does not automatically translate into a shift in how consumers feel about you – especially in the longer term. They may, as a result of the above actions, see you as offering them more value, they may like the fact that your product contains ingredient X, you may even feel more familiar to them – but unless you have the pockets and tenacity to maintain the fight, and unless you too are prepared to up the ante even further in response to competitor activity, advances are tenuous.

If there is still little to distinguish what you offer and what others offer in their minds, you have not dismissed substitution because you have not changed the equation in their heads. You may have convinced them temporarily that they are getting more from you than they’re getting from the other brand, but the comparison is still quantitative not qualitative.

A reason for buying, on the other hand, provides a buyer with an incentive to chase a result. And the lesson from brands like Moleskine is that when you change the outcome for consumers, you change who they prefer and why they prefer.

Finding that starts with a deceptively simple question for brand owners: What are we going to give our customers that will excite them? A discount is not exciting. Features are not exciting. Familiarity is not exciting. Labels, identities, colours, celebrity endorsements – none of them are exciting. They may be exciting to the people who create them or manage them.  But they are only of passing and functional interest to the man or woman in the aisle. They are just more ways to recognise. They explain.

I can’t even begin to imagine how many companies there are out there offering notebooks. The functional differences between those notebooks are non-existent, and yet Moleskine ties its products to a distinctive outcome that their audience craves. When you write in a Moleskine, you continue a tradition begun in a golden age of writing in Paris. You become part of a spirit that links to Hemingway and Picasso. Yes, that’s a beautiful and romantic story – but far more importantly, that feeling of inspired creation, of being in the moment and capturing something that will excite the world, is an outcome that every creative person treasures. It’s a ‘result’ that Moleskine has woven into every aspect of its business. They want their product to be more than something you write in. They want writing in a Moleskine to be an affirmation of the writer’s identity.

Starbucks changed the coffee market by convincing buyers not that they could have a nice(r) coffee, but that they could basically have the coffee of their dreams, served exactly the way they had always wanted it, in a place they loved to linger. When they stopped doing that, they quickly got into trouble.

Apple has consistently delivered people the most beautiful technology in the world (certainly by form, and for Macheads, also by performance).

Perhaps we should do away with the concept of competitive preference – and replace it instead with a mandate to find a competitive pleasure (result) that will then form the emotive basis for how the company does business. That’s because a distinctive and powerful outcome should also inspire and influence everything around it. Here are some examples:

• Your purpose should define what you value most in all the world, and therefore what you are most seeking to achieve as a brand. (That goal should be a goal your consumers will be fascinated by.)
• Your story should explain why you value what you value, the greatest result you want to achieve for your customers and what led you to pursue that
• Your strategy should explain why and how your brand can deliver that result in a way that no-one can, or would dare
• Your pricing should reflect what that special feeling is worth to the consumer

It’s not rocket science. When you deliver what people are most looking for, they will continue to look for it – and they will continue to pay for it. After all, why would they want to feel anything less?

More reading
In this post, I look at why I think the Moleskine story has succeeded

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Heart” by Seyed Mostafa Zamani, sourced from Flickr

8 ways to react when the knives come out

By Mark Di Somma

Being non-popular is not the same as being unpopular. Brands that are non-popular are simply not prepared to do whatever it takes to court popular favour. They do their own thing, their own way – and look to attract cult followings via like minds. But brands that have become unpopular have lost likeability. That’s a disturbing development if you’re trying to be liked by as many people as possible.

The hardest thing about seeking to be liked is that we all do business today in an environment where criticism is ubiquitous. The ability for anyone with an internet connection to not just hold an opinion but to broadcast that opinion to the world is freedom of speech on a good day and freedom to abuse on another day. At a time when it’s easier than ever for others to get the knives out, the problem it seems to me has shifted for those on the receiving end. The dilemma these days is less about what do the critics think and rather, which criticisms should you act on and which are you better to brush off as beneath your dignity?

While every brand will quite rightly set its own guidelines, there are some clear principles that make sense to me in terms of meeting the balance between maintaining reputation and over-reacting:

1. Hold firm on your purpose, your worldview and your values.

2. Debate priorities, opinions and options.

3. Initiate or at least participate in conversations about matters that have been raised that you believe have not been properly explored and to which you believe you can bring a refreshing perspective.

4. Encourage suggestions, feedback and criticism of experiences and service. (As long as you’re prepared to reply stating what you’re going to do about what’s happened.)

5. Acknowledge and apologise for mistakes, errors of judgment, accidents and cases where you have not been fair or consistent.

6. Redress scaremongering, inaccuracies, speculations, lies – and sometimes comparison wars and competitor taunts.

7. Acknowledge, even applaud, a witty joke or satire at your expense (depending on its cleverness)

8. Ignore idiots.

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Case of kris daggers 1” by Marshall Astor, sourced from Flickr

The new dichotomy: Coke or cult?

By Mark Di Somma

Just want to pick up some excellent points raised by Carol Phillips in her post The Hostile Brand Strategy on Branding Strategy Insider. I’ve said for some time that the middle market is the muddle market – and that a more polemic approach by brands is, in my view, inevitable.

Carol’s analysis of hostile brands shows this burgeoning dichotomy in action, with even relatively mainstream brands like MINI-Cooper, Marmite and Hollister, increasingly playing hard to get. She has highlighted a sign of marketing in our times: the popularity contest vs the non-popularity contest.

I wonder though whether this is more than a schism between likeable and if-you-like brands. To me, it points to a radicalisation not just of attitude but also of availability, involvement and even access. Carol draws attention to the adage, “it’s better to mean something to somebody than everything to nobody”. I’m going to go one stage further and suggest that brands increasingly have to mean something to anyone or one thing to somebody. The middle ground between those positions is dying.

In the green corner – the likeable brands. Based on scale, globally focused, universally appealing, instantly recognisable. Huge, familiar, instantly findable, comforting.

In the red corner – the cult brands. Based on exclusivity, narrowly focused, unseen and unappealing to most, only recognised by those in the know. Polemic, difficult, hard to find, testing, deeply attractive to believers with a similar worldview. Cult brands are increasingly the speakeasies of consumerism. If you don’t play by their rules, you’re barred.

To me, this inclination towards one approach or the other is the continental drift of branding – and I expect it to accelerate in the years ahead as brands look for ways to encourage consumers to be more definite. Ubiquity versus unique. Engaging versus enraging. And, as Carol puts it so nicely, more and more versus defiantly less.

The marketers vs the cultrepreneurs.

However, I don’t think the ongoing challenge for brands behaving badly lies just in the behaviour itself – that’s relatively straightforward in a world looking for things to view. Rather, the challenge for polemic brands is to use their bad behaviour to their competitive and commercial advantage rather than simply to garner attention. Equally, likeable brands must find ways to continue to engage and compel consumers in the face of more and more radical plays for attention.

As the camps separate, and the Love to buy/Hate to buy stakes lift, the one word everyone needs to keep their eye on is “buy”. Because as another bad-boy brand, Stiff Records, used to delight in reminding all of us many years back: without that, it ain’t worth a _________.

Further reading:
Two leaders kissing. A killer app or a sex tape?

Acknowledgements:
Photo of “I’d Like to Give The World A Coke” by L. Allen Brewer, sourced from Flickr

Forget supply and demand. Think supply and desire.

By Mark Di Somma

According to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, but interestingly increased the effects of seasonality. However, the actual nature of that seasonality has changed.

Pricing now has got nothing to do with how good a product or service is, what it does, what it doesn’t do or where it came from or how many of them there are. Pricing is decided by how much people want something, and the degree to which it is novel and available.

Commoditisation, it follows, is also driven not by “market” forces but by desirability forces. Brands that fail to attract a strong price have lost their desirability or that desirability is fading. People then want to pay less not because the product is necessarily worth less, but because consumers want it less, which of course is why they perceive it as less valuable.

Getting the balance right between desire and price therefore is critical. According to this BrandZ survey from a couple of years back, on average only 7% of consumers buy on price alone globally, down from 20 percent ten years ago. By contrast, 81% regard brand as an important purchase driver. In other words, brand has increased in importance relative to other purchase drivers such as price, location, convenience and habit.

Recognising that, competitive brands need to adjust their pricing based on changing levels of desire – meaning brands should monitor how much consumers want them and use this as an effective benchmark for pricing. Striking the right balance between these two factors is critical. Brands that are too expensive for the level of desire they deliver, as I have already observed, risk losing market share. Conversely, those that don’t charge enough for the desirability they deliver risk leaving money on the table.

The way I see it, there are three ways to strategise an effective desirability story that keeps pricing higher than the default market value:

High supply, high desire: The scale equation – things that everyone wants, readily available. This is a globally focused story driven by momentum (gathering interest) and recognition (peer pressure). This value proposition largely retains desire through authority and reputation in B2B and new model releases, upgrades and powerful brand awareness in B2C.

Limited supply, high desire: The cult/luxury equation – things that are deeply interested to a select group but that retain their pricing because they are deliberately fed into the market at below-demand levels. This is a scarcity story. This value proposition retains desire through exclusivity and the thrill that comes with being ‘in the know’.

Access: The social equation – the power of this approach lies less in the thing itself and much more in the access and introductions that come with being part of the network. For example, flying Concorde in years gone by only partly had to do with the speed. Of much more interest was who you might find yourself sitting next to, and the conversations that might follow. This is a door-opening story. The value proposition comes in where it leads.

Sadly too many brands are still telling availability stories: what it is; what it does; where you can get it; how much it costs. Business leaders forget this too as they obsess on capacity, productivity and innovation. Unless what is being planned, made and told is being planned, made and told as more and more desirable, it must, by deduction, be at risk of becoming less and less valuable.

Unless your go-to-market strategy is built on robust and deliberate grow-in-market criteria, you aren’t really building a brand, you are juggling a supply chain.

Acknowledgements
Photo of “more” by *_Abhi_*, sourced from Flickr

30 things likeable brands do

By Mark Di Somma

Being likeable is not about being liked by everyone. Likeable brands actually need to be very clear about who likes them and why and how they need to behave in order to continue to appeal to their community. 10 ways to build a truly likeable brand states the principles of likeability and is one of my most popular posts. As a companion piece, here’s my 30 point action list on how brands should systematically accumulate likeability. Order can vary.

If you want to be a likeable brand:

1. Decide who you want to be liked by – and what you want them to value you for. Better yet, find the (sizeable) group of people that want to buy and that no-one else likes. Pay them attention.

2. Have a clear, world-changing purpose that speaks to the people you want to reach – and act to realise that purpose in everything you do. Support things no-one else has thought to support and that your audience would like to see you support.

3. Know what your customers like. Talk with them about things that make them smile.

4. Make beautiful things – beauty in this context meaning the most wonderful way to achieve something. I can’t think of a single likeable brand that doesn’t hold design close to its soul. Bring joy to the people who matter to you. (Ignore everyone else)

5. Continue to give your customers new things to like about you. Surprise them. Enchant them. Charm them. Flatter them. Above all, involve them.

6. Be nice and play fair – state your principles and your values and stick to them. Be very public about that.

7. Decide who/what you don’t like in the world, why you are fighting to stop them/that and how you will articulate that. Rail against things that have your customers shaking their fists in chorus.

8. Seek support and loyalty – not popularity. Have meaningful metrics. If you’re just chasing the analytics, you’re just chasing shadows. Trending is not a business case.

9. Bang your own drum. Do enough to be recognisable in a category, but never conform to the extent that you become replaceable.

10. Bring people together. Be a gathering point, not just a buying point (and certainly not just a price point). Give them things to talk about. Encourage them to socialise around you.

11. Protect your reputation at all times, in all places. You’re never off the record, you’re never offline, you’re never after-hours – because none of these analogue ideas exist in a social world. Likeable doesn’t have business hours. If it does, it’s just ‘like for sale’ – and no-one likes that.

12. Sell the ways you know your customers like to buy.

13. Be where your customers would like to find you – and be there wholeheartedly.

14. Give your customers the service they deserve, and tell them why. If they’re paying a premium, give them premium service. If they’re paying less, do enough and explain why that’s what you can afford to offer them. Offer them ways to buy more/better (for a price) if that’s what they’d like.

15. Be humble – but proud. Front up to any situation. Put a face to the issue. Act quickly and decisively to put mistakes right. Apologise when you get things wrong. Explain but don’t make excuses. Ask for forgiveness if it’s warranted. Communicate, communicate, communicate … Be the brand people would like you to be.

16. Be worth the asking price (not just your margin) in everything you do. Purchase is the most powerful “Like” there is. Repeat purchases are the ultimate “Follow”.

17. Have a language that is all your own. It’s a code amongst the community. It binds people together in the simplest and most powerful way.

18. Love your clients’ world. Likeable brands walk in their customers’ footprints. They play in their neighbourhoods (psychologically at least) They’re likeable because they’re relatable. And being relatable makes them relevant.

19. Share secrets. One of the great ironies of our social age is that at a time when everyone wants to share, people also want to know or access something first. Take your customers behind the scenes. Show them something they would never expect to see. Offer to tell them something they would never normally get to know.

20. Anticipate a demand or a trend. Recognise a need before it is a need. Surprise is one of the most-powerful attributes of likeable brands. You have to be able to look past all the research and make the natural, intuitive decisions that blow people away.

21. Don’t just market, find ways to entertain. Sometimes the most powerful way to sell yourself is not to ask for the sale. Share what they will like. Give people something to read, something to watch, something to listen to or think about – and frame why you are doing so in terms that relate to your brand.

22. Do things for free occasionally – but understand that doing so should serve to make the purchases feel more worth it. Again, explain why.

23. Keep everyone in the loop. Talk about what’s going on. Ask for suggestions. Invite people to get involved. State your support for something that aligns with your purpose.

24. Share stories – and encourage stories to be shared. It builds community and trust.

25. Be there in times of need, doing what’s right. People will judge your integrity on how you respond to situations of need. Do it because it needs doing – not to make a buck. Feel human. Act human. Put a human face to what you achieve.

26. Make people feel welcome. But don’t be afraid to tell them if they overstep a boundary or try to take advantage.

27. Treat your customers – but always give a loyal customer more than a new customer. You can announce rewards or not announce them, up to you. People can earn incentives or just receive them in spontaneous acts of kindness.

28. Celebrate what you sell – and who you sell to.

29. Help people plan ahead. Provide them with clear processes and ample help. Encourage them to make you a priority by giving them incentives to act ahead of need.

30. Thank people – and mean it. Say you’ll follow up – and do. Give people more than they expected and without them asking, because, actually, they’re entitled to it.

What have I missed?

Acknowledgements

#30 by Andreas Lindmark, sourced from Flickr

The fall of the wall between customers and culture

The context for cultures is changing. In four vital ways.

Firstly – the relationship between customers and companies is shifting as social media dissolves the traditional divide between the parties. Specifically social has shifted the goalposts in terms of familiarity. Facebook, Google and Twitter have brought consumers closer to brands than ever before. And as people shift their relationships with brands, the processes that link customers with brands and their cultures are also changing. Those relationships are becoming much more interactive and increasingly they’re taking place in real time.

Actually, the underlying relationship is changing in an even more fundamental way still. Increasingly brands are transforming from individual purchase decisions to shared belief systems and brands are bonding with their customers on that basis. That shift has major implications for how brands organise and run their cultures. Looking forward, brands cannot expect to simply market products. And a culture cannot simply expect to service that market and the brand’s customers. A brand, its culture and its customers now not only need to concur on a distinctive belief system, but also to interact and build trust and loyalty as a community on that basis.

Secondly, and in parallel with the above, consumers now want to deal with brands that fundamentally understand them and interact with them as human beings. Really, it’s those interactions and the experiences generated by those interactions that increasingly make brands valuable. It’s then that customers decide whether they want to form a relationship with you, or they’re “just looking thanks”. If you’re a high-touch brand, it’s actually the people that make touchpoints magical.

Because of that, the role of the people within a brand is also retrending. Specifically, as quality relationships become the key decider for customers, the emphasis for people inside a culture shifts to establishing and building what they have in common with customers rather than what they are looking to get their customers to do. And as a result, it’s inevitable in my opinion that people working for a brand will transit from makers, guardians and sellers to socialisers and curators.

Thirdly – to help build sustained and close relationships with customers based around shared beliefs,  brands will need to foster a much greater sense of purpose inside their culture. I believe purpose will replace mission and vision. People need a powerful purpose because it takes huge energy to work in the ways outlined above. To inspire that level of motivation, people need something to commit to collectively; something they feel will actually make a difference. An idea that justifies spending the huge amount of time they do at work.

As Walt Disney said, “You can dream, create and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality”. When you give your people a deep and rich cause to work for, and a direction in which to take that cause, you give them purpose. When an organisation has a purposeful culture, it has focus. Your purpose is your company’s mindset strategy. It determines the headspace in which your people work together and in which you go to market as a company. Get it right – and you have a cause that is powerful enough for hundreds of people to leap out of bed every weekday morning and get to work. They are quite literally looking to make a change to the world they believe in because, as Hugh MacLeod expressed it so perfectly, “Life is too short not to do something that matters”.

Finally, no change will last if employees themselves don’t value what they are doing and have not made a personal decision to make the changes needed to accomplish all of the above. “We” won’t change until “me” changes. As Paul Stewart says, it’s only at that point that you will see the most important change in a culture: from a basis of compliance to a foundation of commitment that starts and ends with each person working for what the brand means for them.

To do that, brands need to give individuals the actions, attitudes, changes and tools they need to turn the communal idea into something that they each talk about and are excited by. People need to see that there are implications for them in what they do, in what happens, in where that leads and in what the business achieves collectively. That’s why companies need to take the time and invest the resources to make the brand and all it means real for people, no matter where they work in the organisation. You can’t give to a brand, if you don’t live by what it strives to achive. Ultimately, business is becoming much more social and therefore much more personal.

We’ve tended for sometime, quite rightly, to regard the customers and cultures of brands as inter-related. But those groups are becoming integrated and interactive as a community. The walls between the brand inside and the brand outside are falling. In a world of increasing sameness of product, how you as a business intend to change the world, and the story you tell yourselves and others around that intention, is what will galvinise your people and distinguish you as a brand and a competitor from all the other brands around you. To make that happen, you will need people with a purpose to work to, a story that they agree on and a strategy that will help them get to where you know you need to be.

To sell your products effectively, everyone will need to buy the brand. Literally. And/or at least philosophically. After all, if there’s nothing in it for “me”, there can’t possibly be anything in it for “us”, never mind anyone else.

More reading

Is your brand ready for the experience war?
Read the updated article Singing in Your Rain for more details on how to build a sustainably purposeful culture.
Human marketing
Great brands unearth
Sense and Seratonin
The power of being purposeful

How good are you at saying goodbye?

Brands and customers part company for all sorts of reasons. Relationships are tidal. We outgrow the need for a brand or product, our tastes or priorities shift, we don’t live where we lived or work where we worked or spend our time doing what we used to do all the time, perhaps we decide to pass on the latest upgrade.

And, objectively, that’s a healthy thing. Those ebbs and flows provide markets with movement. They ensure that new players can enter and gain new customers and current players can change their position in a sector as they gain or lose followers.

Most brands have their heads around winning new customers. They seem less certain on how to say goodbye with good grace. But how you do that can, in the longer run, and in the context of your brand, be as important as how you welcome customers in the first place. Wishing them well on the next stage of their journey, and assisting them to start that stage in the best light, may well put you a lot closer to  welcoming them back.

The critical thing is to stay true to who you are and what you stand for, whilst keeping your minds open to opportunities to improve. The key question is, why are they leaving and what can you as a brand learn from that?

• If you lose business on price, that probably means your value equation isn’t clear enough or strong enough. Don’t try to re-negotiate the result by radically repricing. That just makes your whole value structure look arbitrary and untrustworthy. If you honestly can’t afford as a brand to deliver what they want for the price they’re prepared to pay, then don’t. Explain why you can’t accept the arrangement and politely walk away.
• If they’re leaving because of a perceived wrong or shortcoming, that probably means your relationship management and perhaps your problem escalation processes are patchy. Acknowledge that they feel the way they do, and (particularly if they have a point) tell them what you are doing to fix the problem they have identified. At least ask if you can be in touch when you have an answer. That keeps the relationship going and shows good faith in looking to rectify a situation.
• If they’re leaving because they perceive the grass is greener, then you either have lost profile in the marketplace or you have failed to remind your customer of the value you bring. Try to find out what they think your competitor has that you don’t. You could do this through a survey or an interview. The insights gained from this exit poll can be very revealing.
• If they don’t take up your latest offer, or they go somewhere else for it, then you either haven’t provided them with a good enough reason to change, you’ve lost ground as a brand or you’ve simply asked too much of your customers. Take a long hard look at what you’ve been asking them to buy and whether, in the context of what you’re asking them to spend, their priorities and what your competitors are offering, it’s really worth it for them.

Lifetime value is pretty much a thing of the past. You have to assume for the most part that customers have a limited loyalty timeframe. You can’t (and often shouldn’t) fight to keep the business at any cost. But you must always fight to keep your good reputation – because at some point, the customer who left you will be ready once again to move on.

How you said goodbye can have a lot to do with whether they boomerang to you or leapfrog to yet another player. Even more importantly, how ex-customers remember you can have a huge influence on whether new customers embrace you.

More reading

• Brands shouldn’t try to make sense
• Does sponsorship actually work?
• For your information
• Likeable brands: Debating the true value of Likes
• Human marketing
• Gazing into the tea leaves

This is your captain speaking …

Just over six years ago, I wrote a post about the futility of pilot announcements. In it, I asked:

“Why do pilots always insist on giving us details of the flight plan and our intended altitude? Because, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care how high we’re flying or the course we’re taking – just as long as we get there. I just need to know they’re present and correct, and in an appropriate state of body and mind to do their job. And besides I have no way of knowing whether it really is 27,000 feet or not, so what’s the point in telling me? …”

Every brand would like to tell their audience more about what they do. They like to think that explaining in detail how hard they work and how much they know quantifies the value they add. But what it really amounts to is the brand having a “conversation” with its customers on terms it feels comfortable with.

It’s smalltalk, disguised as information. The pilots probably aren’t iinterested. They signed up to fly. You’re probably not interested. You paid up for a seat. But it happens anyway – because somehow the airline’s not happy with silence (it seems unfriendly) and the passengers understand they can’t actually ask to just be left alone please (which might also seem unfriendly).

So in reality both parties are probably engaged in an exchange that neither genuinely wants but both feel compelled to have.

So here’s my two questions for the next time you’re thinking through how to differentiate your brand experience. What “experiences” do customers get from your brand because you feel comfortable delivering them? And what do they not get that they would actually like?

More reading:

• Customer service is worthless
• Loyal – to what point?
• Credentials as comfort food
• Chemistry or contamination
• Participation versus differentiation
• Gazing into the tea leaves

New article: 5 things to do when social media reacts to you

Imagine being flashmobbed. Suddenly hundreds of people run into your reception area with chocolates and flowers and sing a song in your honour. What would you do? Or a crowd appears at your company’s gate and each person there shakes their fist and jeers everyone entering the building. Then, just as quickly, they’re gone.

It happens a lot. To firms all over the world. Not literally of course. On Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube. Brands are hit by a wave of emotion, good or bad, that rolls in, and then recedes, leaving everyone affected breathless and confused.

What the hell just happened?

The force at work is “critical mass”: the impact that many, many people can have when moving together, with purpose, towards a singular point. It can last minutes, hours, days. It can generate smiles and business, or scandal and significant losses. It can transform people and brands into heroes or villains, celebrities or scandals.

Whilst I think a lot of us continue to search for a credible return on investment model for brands employing social media, there is no denying the ability of social media, on occasions, to galvanise people – and there is no denying the huge effects that such gatherings can generate. These channels can bring together consumers from many places to form a significant mass of opinion, in support or against, based around an issue they consider important to them. And they can do so like no other communication means before them. Hence the “mass”. The “critical” components are that participation usually comes with some strong opinions, and your reaction to that influx can be make-or-break. Continue reading to find out whether to step up or step back.

More reading

• Always be branding
• You can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand 
• 5 things to do when social media reacts to you. Read the full article
• Gazing into the tea leaves
• Highs and lows: the new value equation in the social economy? 
• The new take on redundancy
• Why women are driving the rethinking of the sales model. Read the blog post summary
• Why women are driving the rethinking of the sales model. Read the full article
• The efficiency debacle
• Strategy or resource budget?
• Rethinking the response
• Participation versus differentiation
• “What are we going to do?”
• The future of brands: 7 takes from Jim Stengel