Brand equity; saying and doing (and knowing the difference)

Recently I was in the office of a Marketing Manager I'm doing some consulting for (we'll call her company Brand X because that makes life easy. Ok it makes my life easy. Moving on...). I was giving her a hard time because her company talks a lot about its interest in the environment, yet still uses Styrofoam cups at its outlets (obviously it is a food & beverage retail shop). How did they expect me, the consumer, to take them seriously on the environment when this was the case?

We got into a debate and then a bunch of stats were put in front of me, research that had been done showing their utilisation of Styrofoam cups actually impacted the environment less than if they used recycled paper. "What a fascinating statistic," I said. "Why don't you share that?"

Apparently they do, or at least have done in the past. The problem with Brand X is their management has a fairly 20th century view of marketing; we can't sell our product online as it is part food preparation, so what is the point in marketing online? Actual quote. I needed a forklift to pick my jaw off the ground the first time I heard that, such an incredibly narrow-minded approach, you almost want them to go out of business.

Back to the Styrofoam cup though. They were attempting to convey their message in ways that just didn't make it out there in a Marketing 2.0 world. A wholly flash-driven site, content buried within, hidden from search engines and RSS and all the things that have come along to make it easier to communicate with your audience. I suggested a few things which I won't go into now for various reasons, but the kicker came when an example of an alternate cup was produced.

Out of a box the Marketing Manager pulled a recycled-paper cup. It had dimples all over, making it easier to hold I suppose, but she sighed and simply said "The branding isn't as strong on this one."

Allow me to step out of my story here people, and relay the following: If you are relying on your logo being on the side of a cup to promote your branding, you have issues. Seriously pack up and turn the lights off, theres nothing for you to see here. If a change of cup starts with "the branding isn't as strong" and not the story behind it then you are proper fucked. Full stop.

Brand X failed (and fails) to understand three things:

1. The story around legitimate environmental concern


2. The way that ties into their brand


3. The way it manifests itself at the store-front

Environmental Concern

I talked recently about CERES, an organic farm that goes out of its way to practice what it preaches. Everything about the place rang true, you didn't think for a second that they were stretching the truth in any aspect of their operation. Made to Stick talks a lot about this; concrete ideas, simple and easy to understand, even easier to execute. The best and most successful companies have this at their core focus, and they're able to execute on it because the CEO doesn't need to be present to convey a 12-step program to each employee every second of the day, they can't possibly be. What they can do is boil the vision for the company down into a single, concrete goal.

For Google, it is all about being the best in search, even BEING search (ie. do you "search" for something or do you "Google" it?. For Southwest Airlines, it's about being THE low-cost carrier. Once an employee understands that, each decision gets a whole lot easier. I do a lot of work with Hippo Jobs right now, and we're all about being THE job site for youth. Once a person understands that core goal, it informs every decision and makes life a whole lot easier; I couldn't possibly tell you what was informing Brand X's decisions; I know innovation is supposed to be a core value but that is far too vague to be in any way meaningful.

If environmental concern is genuinely a core goal, then you make your mandate the following: we will be THE most sustainable and environmentally-friendly company in our space. If that vision is communicated, then it informs every decision made and is easy to execute culturally (if not always financially).

How does this tie into the brand?

There is a serious lack of authenticity in Brand X's voice, and this stems largely from the absence of focus in its management. It is clear from an operations point of view it is driven by financial results, not notions of altruism it makes claim to. Understand, they are working towards a number of things, I'm haranguing them on the environment because it is an easy point to make. If Styrofoam is actually a better choice for the planet then that story needs to be told, nobody is going to trust you just because you can buy space on TV or in a shopping mall.

When writing about The Black Swan, I showed the importance of telling a story vs. presenting the facts; rolling over and producing a paper cup sends the message "We're more interested in playing to popular opinion than really doing the right thing" to me (though to the market it may suggest a genuine interest in the environment as the stereotype is Styrofoam is bad). Regardless, as soon as the tide turns again, Brand X's convictions shatter. Which means people don't ultimately buy in to your brand (even if they can't quite put their finger on why). Which means people move as soon as the next guy presents something they can believe in. Hugh Macleod nailed this in his Hughtrain Manifesto when he said "the market for something to believe in is infinite". If your product or brand doesn't start tapping in to something fundamental about the human experience, don't expect to stick around, and don't be surprised when people toss you over for the next craze.

You need to be authentic.

You need to stand for what you stand for. Every. Second. Of. The. Day.

Even then you may not make it, but people will remember you for having the balls to take a stand; if you don't get remembered for that, then you get remembered for being divisive and not, in the end, worth anything.

The Way This Manifests Itself at the Store Front

When a business' goals are articulated clearly to everyone that works for it, things happen on their own. At CERES they decided to stop selling bottled water because of the myriad of environmental issues the plastic caused. They laminated pieces of paper (initially bad for the environment) so they didn't have to go through endless pieces of paper (long term sustainability). These are the things at the surface level, the "branding on the cup" so to speak; they're obvious to all who visit the place and are clearly the manifestation of core goals the organisation has.

As much as the management of Brand X would like to think it, the 16 year old employed last week has a hard time buying in to the corporate culture unless they see it ring true and inform the choices of those around them. Enthusiasm and passion are infectious, they inspire those around them to greater heights, to better truths and bigger ideas. Energy saving lightbulbs, green energy providers, flyers about sustainable initiatives and products in store, articles in the Brand X club magazine and franchisee initiatives are not only easy steps forward to take, but they write the story themselves and I bet there are a hundred more that only come to light once you know the business inside out.

People used to spend all their time trying to come up with single word associations to define their brand, but that isn't good enough anymore. We need big ideas, we need mission statements, we need concrete goals set that every single person in an organisation works towards. When you get it right, you're Google (or at least the Google of your space).

When you get it wrong you're...hmmmm...

Come to think of it, I don't remember. Do you?

Twitter; the new talkback?

A good friend just asked me if I really thought Twitter was going to take off, and I guess around that are a host of questions on the value it offers to its users. Maki has some great thoughts on ways it adds value to its users (thanks to Jennifer Laycock for the link), but one thing that just occurred to me as my friend asked the question and I glanced at my laptop to see the conversations roll past is that it seems to operate the same way talk-back radio did (or does for those who still listen to radio).

My Dad pointed out to me years ago the things the talk-back guys were discussing were invariably the things that made newspaper headlines the next day. In the same fashion, the conversations on Twitter revolve around other newsworthy pieces of information. They may not make the front page of the New York Times, they may not even make the front page of the New York Times website, but they will invariably make it up on somebody's blog, read by any number of people from one to a million.

In this fashion, I love Shel Israel's notions of global neighbourhoods. I am not American but I am about as interested in the US election as a foreigner could be, and because of this I can discuss the goings on today in Florida with people actually State-side and engage in a discussion about it; I doubt there's an audience for US politics large enough on Australian talk-back radio to make it worth anybody's time to take the subject on. It also reminds me of something I think I read in The Black Swan, but I can't quite remember; you can have only three readers for your blog, but those readers are the presidents of America, China and Russia, your influence out-games the raw numbers...there's more there I think...

So with the understanding that a blog readership, no matter how small can have a significant impact on the (on and offline) world around the writer, and for a percentage of those posts to have origins in conversations on Twitter, then I think there is a role for it to play as a topic is started by The World™, discussed on Twitter, generating a blog about that discussion which incites further discussion and winds up any number of places. Or as James Governor ironically pointed out (via Marshall Kirkpatrick), if markets are conversations then Twitter is money.

*After-thought* I went back over to Twitter to think some more and saw a note from Loic about Seesmic. If Twitter is the start of a new talk-back, Seesmic is where it is going (additional thoughts on that as I get more into the service...)

The Black Swan pt. 2

I pushed through the end of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan this week, and while I can say I really enjoyed it, by the end the disparaging tone he takes whenever talking about traders or economists wore a little thin. I have no stake in either of those professions, but once a point has been made and an opinion established (neither of which are crucial for the book's central argument), reiterating it at every conceivable opportunity insults the readers who have come along for the ride. OK, we get it Nassim, you don't respect (for the most part) economists and traders, but I didn't pay the price of admission to wade through you settling personal vendettas, that was achieved when I bought your book and not your rival's.

Having said that, there is a lot of value to be gleaned between the book's covers. It rambles in places but the central idea which I've been summing up as (rightly or wrongly, feel free to offer an alternative viewpoint) "the distinction between two sentences: "there is no evidence of black swans" and "there is evidence of no black swans". Whatever issue I take with the author in the above paragraph, I find that idea and the way at which we arrive at those sorts of statements fascinating.

Nassim also hits a couple other great points which are tackled in a much more straight forward fashion in the next book I picked up, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Written by two brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, it explores, well, exactly what it says. Both brothers have spent time as educators in some fashion, and convey their thoughts in indelibly straight forward terms.

The cross-over between the two books comes in the emphasis both place on the power of narrative. As human beings we love a story! We have told them throughout history, sometimes for lessons, all of the time for entertainment. Stories are much more powerful than facts; that notion gets played out every night on the evening news. Made to Stick talks a lot about using that to your advantage, citing screenwriting guru Robert McKee as opposed to a litany of philosophers and thinkers who add limited value without extended research. Nassim attempts to use his own journey as a way of taking the reader through to his point, but an idea that comes up in the first hundred pages of Made to Stick is one he could have benefited from: simplifying a message can give it more impact and not dumb it down.

I'm not even halfway through Made to Stick yet so bear with me on it. I'm already making moves to apply it to my daily work habits though and enjoying the "Clinics" interspersed through the book, an opportunity to apply the thinking you've just learnt. If like me you love learning and hate the classroom, consider this one, so far, indispensable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan

I had thought that when I got to the end of the afore-mentioned book I would review it and post my thoughts on it, however it seems every few pages there are a raft of new ideas, ones that suggest new trains of thought, undo previous ones, and generally beat you over the head should you be caught sleeping. The book itself is more essay than anything else, but I mean that in the best possible way. Personally I had never heard the word vitiate before (it means to reduce or impair the quality of, just FYI...), which is a challenge in itself, but it certainly isn’t the kind of book you start reading if you’re not up for an exchange of big ideas. 

So, rather than wait until the end and try to disseminate what I’ve learned, I thought I would use this blog as a place where I could dump my thoughts for the day, a reading diary and would serve as the notes I’ve taken along the way. I’m not quite half way through, a page into chapter 9. If you haven’t read it yet don’t worry, there aren’t spoilers to be had, and I welcome the thoughts of anyone who cares to share, whether you’ve read the book or not.

The idea that is sticking with me most right now (and that could be because I just finished a chapter on it) is referred to as silent evidence. Taleb uses a myriad of examples of this throughout the chapter, I’ll relay a summation of what gamblers refer to as “beginner’s luck”. Simply put, if a thousand people sit down and start gambling, odds are that one among them will strike it better than any other because of the unpredictability of games like roulette. There will be no rhyme or reason, and 999 people may go back to what they were doing.

That one person though will continue to gamble, convinced their success has been preordained, the silent evidence of the other 999 you won’t find out about, because their experience gave them nothing to share. The notion of beginner's luck exists because you only hear about it from people who experience it, not the vast majority who lose their money and leave, thus giving the false impression that all people who start gambling kick it off with a string of lucky breaks.

In the book, Taleb warns against forming opinions on events based on the evidence directly presented. He is far more concerned with the statistics that aren’t being told. If a drug came out that cured cancer but potentially also killed 1 in 10 people, a doctor would never prescribe it; the potential law suits would make it an untenable position.

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote.” (pg. 112)

A previous point he had made along those lines was a fictional account of two men flying to New York, one a local, one planning to visit Central Park for the first time. The local gets drunk and regales the visitor with a stor about how his wife’s brother’s co-worker’s 2^nd cousin’s nephew had a friend who was mugged and killed in the park, leaving behind a wife and two young children. The visitor could be greeted with a myriad of statistics espousing the safety of walking through the park, but in all likelihood would be consumed with the image of a man lying in the park, bleeding to death, and a family with no husband or father.

As in the cancer-curing drug example above, anecdotes are much more powerful than statistics.

I could cite a dozen more pieces from the book where Taleb paints a compelling argument for the Black Swans, however it really is worth your time reading it yourself. If you want an overview, stay with me over the coming week or so as I move through the rest of it. As I said above you need not have read the book to share your thoughts on the ideas; one of the first points he makes early on is the best and most disruptive ideas often come from people unaware of the rules of the game.

More as it arrives…

Figuring out what is wrong (as opposed to what is right)

I was quoted over at Chris Wilson's Fresh Peel in response to a question he asked: what companies really listened in 2007? Facebook cropped up a few times, and while it can be argued they were forced to listen, the outcry against Beacon paled in comparison to the dissent that rose up against the news feed when it was first introduced. Back then Facebook hadn't become the media darling it is now, and cries of injustice on a still-emerging social networking site were treated with the same gravitas that gets associated with stories about property being stolen in virtual worlds. Were it still operating in that same void, personally I think it would have gotten far less attention and been able to go about it's business. Whether or not that is a good thing is up for (continued) discussion, personally if advertising can be distilled down only to things I am actually interested in, then maybe it simply becomes information, and that is fine by me.

There's more to this though. Online strategies are increasingly being formed not around what is right, but what is least wrong. The idea itself is nothing new and gets discussed exhaustively in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan (shameless plug: I'm part way through and thoroughly enjoying it). It's something I encounter in my day job too; the fact of the matter is if you're working in this space you are almost always trying new things. Can I say for certain that "Idea X" is right? No, but I can tell you it is less wrong than "Idea Y".

My thoughts here are well and truly still forming, but the beauty of this medium is you're allowed to share them before they become concrete, in the hope they become something better. At the risk of going out on a limb, I'm going to say for certain that that is right.