By Sally Falkow The Digital World is all around us. It’s created by the convergence of the virtual and the physical and digital transformation is happening at a dizzying pace. Digital has become so intertwined with our everyday existence it touches almost every aspect of our lives. Many of these digital touch points are so […]
Trade Sentiment Lingers, Emerging Markets Face Headwinds There is little doubt that anti-trade sentiments are clouding the future of the global economy. For proof, look at the March G20 meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, which made headlines for excluding anti-protectionism language in its joint declaration. This clearly broke the G20’s tradition of giving a thumbs-up to […]
What is Brand Essence? At the core of your brand strategy is your Brand Essence — your Brand Essence is what you stand for. Brand Essence is often thought of as your brand DNA, the essential value of your brand, or the ultimate role your brand plays in the world. It’s a critical element of your strategic brand platform because if you want your customers to be clear about what your brand stands for, you must first be.
Brand Essence is usually articulated in the form of a couple of words or a short phrase. Nike’s Brand Essence is “innovation and inspiration.” Southwest Airlines’ is “freedom.” “Belonging” is Airbnb’s and Facebook recently changed its to “the social infrastructure for community.”
Some companies specified their Brand Essence when they were founded, but others haven’t ever taken the time to clearly articulate theirs. This post is for the latter.
The following are five Brand Essence exercises to help you identify your Brand Essence. These originally appeared last month in a series of #BrandTools articles on LinkedIn. Now all five Brand Essence exercises are here in one place. If you haven’t yet articulated your Brand Essence or you are looking to change it, try one — or several — of these. I’m confident you’ll be able to uncover and crystallize your Brand Essence.
Create a brand documentary video, compiling clips that capture different elements and expressions of your brand. Give the video a title that epitomizes the content. Translate those words or phrases into your Brand Essence. Get detailed instructions and descriptions of how the tool has been used here.
Think of your brand as though it were a person who just passed away. Write an obituary that would appear in the newspaper and include a headline. The words and phrases in the headline will reveal key ideas for your Brand Essence. Learn more about this exercise here.
Use brand levers that form the acronym B.A.R.A.T.A. (Benefit, Attribute, Role, Attitude, Territory, and Awareness) to classify the unique and essential nature of your brand. Based on your dominant lever, articulate a specific descriptor of lever for your brand. Use that description as your Brand Essence. You can find step-by-step instructions for this exercise including a visual map to help you here.
Stage a mock court “trial” on your brand, with people arguing for and against your brand’s impact on the world. At the conclusion, examine the brand values and attributes discuss and distill them down into a singular idea that encapsulates the Brand Essence. Learn how to execute this exercise here.
Analyze your brand through the lens of storytelling archetypes. Describe your primary and secondary brand archetypes in a short phrase. This will either point to — or in some cases directly articulate — your brand’s core essence. Get a complete list of possible brand archetypes and instructions how to use them here.
Hope you’ve found these exercises helpful. Please let me know how you’ve used them. And if you use other Brand Essence exercises, please share.
The post what is brand essence — and brand essence exercises appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.
This blog is authored by Gad Levanon and Diane Lim. Like every U.S. jobs report, this morning’s report gave an incomplete snapshot of the labor market’s current condition and trajectory. Make no mistake-the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report remains the gold standard in terms of being the highest quality, most reliable labor market data […]
Can customers be “earned?” CEO of Owner Media Group, bestselling author and influencer Chris Brogan joined me on “Magnificent Time” to share his simple marketing and sales approach based on valuable content to earn the right to sell and serve. I originally learned about Chris’s work when I participated in…
Dell has delivered social media policy training classes to more than 50,000 employees. In this Q&A, Amy Heiss explains why the classes are paying dividends for the company.
By Shel Holtz I regularly develop an overview of news stories, posts, studies, and reports designed to help organizational communicators stay current on the trends and technology that affect their jobs. This post is an overview of all the stories that have caught my eye this week. You can read the full version here. News […]
– the book: The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide To Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service, a practical guide on an important topic
– the brains: Jeff Toister, customer service author, consultant, and trainer. I met Jeff when we were both launching our first books — his was Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It — and I’ve enjoyed our friendship ever since.
– the best bits: The Service Culture Handbook really is a handbook — it walks you through the steps to developing a customer-focused culture in your organization and refers you to a downloadable toolkit comprised of worksheets and guides for doing so.
After starting out by explaining how “culture is the key to outstanding customer service,” Jeff shows how to define your culture and then align your company’s service with your customer service vision through goals, hiring, training, empowering, and leadership. Some of the best sound bites include:
“…Culture isn’t attributable to just one thing. There’s no single initiative that will magically get your employees to consistently make customer service a priority. Culture is the sum of all the things we do in an organization.”
“Every customer interaction is an opportunity for a hero moment or a service failure.”
“Trying to copy another company’s culture is an exercise in futility. Every organization is unique.”
“Building the right culture is simply too much work for most companies. The few that break through work at it every day. They resist the urge to take shortcuts, and they stick with the initiative for the long-term. These elite few companies understand that culture isn’t easy, and they embrace that challenge.”
– the brand story: A highlight of the book is the story of Rackspace, the computer hosting company. Jeff recounts the unexpected solution when an internal network outage shut down service to its 300,000+ customers.
Initiated first by a lone technical support agent who tweeted out his personal phone number, employees started reaching out to upset customers on Twitter and many used their personal cell phones to get customers on the phone and help them solve their problems. This unconventional approach was born out of the company’s ingrained culture — an extraordinary brand of customer service it calls “Fanatical Support.”
Its “Fanatical Support Promise” reads:
We cannot promise that hardware won’t break, that software won’t fail, or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong, we will rise to the occasion, take action, and help resolve the issue.
Rackspace employees took the creativity and initiative to deliver on this promise at a critical moment when most other companies would simply have put up a service advisory on their website. The story demonstrates the power of a customer service vision that is articulated with conviction and executed with commitment.
– the bottom line: The Service Culture Handbook is a terrific resource for organizations that want to lead the field in customer service.
P.S. At the risk of seeming too promotional, I want to mention that Jeff has an “Early Purchase Program” in which you receive lots of cool benefits if you buy the book by Friday, April 7, 2017, so if you’re interested in The Service Culture Handbook , I recommend getting it now.
related:
Uncontainable by Kip Tindell
Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer
Customer Service Ain’t What It Used to Be
The post brand book bites from The Service Culture Handbook appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.
Every business owner is a dreamer, steeped in the belief that they can be, create, and deliver the very best. A new ad campaign from Dell Technologies and Y&R New York shows them how they can build a solid, vibrant reality from the magic of their dreams.
“Let’s Make It Real” is the first major campaign for newly formed Dell Technologies, now the largest enterprise technology company in the world.
The series of four television spots feature Jeffrey Wright, star of the HBO series Westworld. Tom Hooper, director of feature films including the Academy Award-winning “The King’s Speech,” directed.
“Magic is pretty amazing,” Wright says in the first spot, from his seat at a lavish performance theater, where a toad is transformed into a prince. “It can transform a frog into a prince, and sadness into ‘happily ever after.’ But it can’t transform your business.”
Then, from center stage, Wright highlights the work of Dell Technologies clients, transporting viewers via life-size, projection-mapped images and models to a hospital room, which technology has transformed into a global diagnostic network; an airplane hangar, housing a jet now powered by engines able to self-diagnose and send alerts about problems; and a dairy in India, where cows transmit their habits and health data by text message to farmers.
Each element in each of the television spots was chosen to demonstrate the Dell Technologies approach, down to the use of the projection mapping technique – creating complex visual effects using on-set, in-camera projection mapping technology – rather than the quicker, more common post-production CGI.
“We used projection mapping to bring some tangibility and create a visual language for all that Dell Technologies does and all the technology at work around us,” says Christian Carl, Y&R’s Global Executive Creative Director “Let’s Make It Real” is an invitation to customers to bring us their toughest problems and biggest challenges, so we can work together to make what might sound like fantasy, or the impossible, a reality,”
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Dell Technologies
Chief Marketing Officer – Jeremy Burton
SVP Global Brand and Creative – Liz Matthews
Director Brand Strategy and Advertising – Rachael Henke
Brand Strategy and Advertising- Valerie Daubert
Ad Agency: Y&R
Global Executive Creative Director – Christian Carl
Global Creative Director – Thomas Shim
Copywriter, Creative Director – Justin Ebert
Executive Producer – Bobby Jacques
Content Producer – Nicole Lederman
Sr Business Manager- Maggie Diaz
President, Global Technology & Business Practice – Joe Rivas
Account Director- Heather Hosey
Group Account Director – Rachel Krouse
Account Executive- George Rainaldi
Strategic Planning Director – Jenna Rounds
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Tom Hooper
Co Founder: Brian Carmody
Executive Producer: Shannon Jones
DP: Justin Brown
Line Producer: Alex Lisee
Edit House: Rock Paper Scissors
Editor (It’s Not Magic): Adam Pertofsky
Editor (GE, Columbia, Chitale): Ted Guard
Executive Producer: Eve Kornblum
Producer: Jenny Greenfield
VFX: Framestore NY
Dez Macleod-Veilleux – Executive Producer
Maura Hurley – Senior Producer
David Mellor – Creative Director
Gigi Ng – Senior Flame Artist / VFX Supervisor
Georgios Cherouvim – Senior CG Lead
Dan Soloman – Senior Designer
Karch Coom – Senior Compositor
Callum McKeveny – Concept Designer / Senior Matte Painter
Color: Company 3
Colorist: Tim Masick
Sound: Sound Lounge
Mixer/Sound Designer – Tom Jucarone
Projection Mapping: Go2 Productions
Music: duotone audio group
Executive Producer: Ross Hopman
Creative Director: Jack Livesey
Producer: Gio Lobato
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Gents creates an Alpro brand momentum with the brand’s new campaign. The Ghent based communications boutique put together a smart campaign puzzle that consists of a series of recognisable and interchangeable lifestyle moments.
The brand’s multifaceted slices-of-life campaign claims a spot inside people’s hearts and eating habits through authentic and universal storytelling that centres around Alpro’s tasty variety of plant-based ingredients. No matter what kind of breakfast person you are, Alpro’s plant-based products made from nature’s most tasty ingredients offer everyone a pleasurable way to pursue a healthy lifestyle, starting at breakfast.
Gents creates a natural and green world made of plant-based ingredients such as coconut, almond, oat and soy, and underscores Alpro’s role in changing breakfast routines through inspiring and recognisable micro-moments. Gents produced a multitude of combinations with different micro-moments that showcase the many ways in which Alpro can fit everyone’s healthy lifestyle.
Alpro’s beloved cute and quirky brand characters reflect both the functional and emotional aspects of the Alpro brand. Each character represents one of Alpro’s unique plant-based ingredients: the active monkey represents coconut, the cheeky squirrel stands for almond, the strong deer for oat and the little smart owl represents soy. In their role of little helpers they facilitate tasty breakfast moments and reflect the vast variety of products.
“The brand campaign truly embodies the joy in the brand’s tagline ‘Enjoy Plant Power’. Alpro’s variety of tasty plant-based products have the power to excite and change consumers’ breakfast routines into smart, healthy and absolutely delicious new ways of eating”, says marketing director EMEA Gaëtan Van de Populiere who established a renewed focus on the delicious and natural taste of the plant-based products in this latest brand effort.
The new brand campaign also marks the birth of Alpro’s new audio branding. Gents conceptualised a crisp and lighthearted pop-song that tells the story of breaking with routines and getting ready for something new.
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Client— Alpro
VP Marketing & Innovation— Séverine Distave
Marketing Director EMEA—Gaëtan Van de Populiere
Senior International Communication Manager— Karlien Mestdagh
Agency— Gents
Creative Director— Tim Helsen
Creative Strategist— Sander Vanermen, Vincent Daenen
Account Director— Leen Van der Mijnsbrugge
Account Manager— Julie Bataillie
Production— The Breakfast Club
Postproduction, 3D & compositing— Nozon
Audio production— Audiothèque
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*reSET is the only Connecticut organization to receive the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Growth Accelerator Competition Award, announced by President Obama on August 4th, 2015.
