Nearly infinite channels and touchpoints have created unlimited possibilities for brands to interact with their customers. With so much opportunity, it’s hard to imagine the effectiveness of advertising is in decline. Yet it is. Of course, it is not wrong to say consumers have lower attention spans or they are deluged with messages they ignore, but that is only a partial answer. The fault also lies with brands.

Consider the lineage of modern advertising. To one side are the brand builders whose iconic campaigns are etched in memory. Brilliant strategies paired with brilliant creative that audiences embraced, related to, and loved. These brands were the leaders. But on the other side are the direct response pioneers. These lines of business depended on more targeted and measurable interactions with consumers and different strategies evolved to create and drive actions.

Digital advertising has much more direct response in its DNA than brand building. And it is beginning to hurt brands. New advancements in advertising and marketing technologies are offering more opportunities to target consumers and respond faster. This increase in speed can often lead brands to produce an explosion of tactics which easily stray from the brand’s strategy, under the rationalization that the brand is practicing ‘agile’, ‘quick to fail’ or ‘test and learn’ plans.

At this week’s ISBA conference, Richard Huntington, chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, said, “The people who build ad tech think direct response is the only thing you’d ever want to do as an advertiser or brand owner.” Further, direct response makes it easy to satisfy a fanatical obsession with the immediate ability to demonstrate tactical-level ROI it has put pressure on marketers to pursue short-term impact over the ‘big idea’.

At last year’s Cannes, the IPA released a report called Selling Creativity Short. The IPA compared levels of effectiveness of creatively awarded campaigns with those of non-awarded ones. Before 2010, they saw creatively awarded campaigns drove 12 times more market share growth per year than non-awarded ones. But between 2006 and 2014, the number of campaigns in the IPA Databank with a short-term goal grew from 7% to 33%. And the number of creatively awarded short-term campaigns surged to 45%, with judges apparently rewarding short-termism. This is despite short-term creatively awarded campaigns being less effective as their crucial fame effects take time to build and exploit.

In fact, two years ago, BBH co-founder Sir John Hagerty said, “Advertising seems to be pursuing a strategy of making a product worse to be more effective, which I find very confusing. I’m not sure what business book people in advertising have read that says we should make the worst product and therefore we’ll be successful. I think the industry has lost faith in TV. I think it has lost faith in the big, bold idea. I think it has lost its courage and I’m deeply upset by that.”

Ultimately, if advertising is less effective because it is less creative, then advertisers will no longer be able to attract top creative talent, and the creative will continue to weaken. (There’s a great podcast from Bob Hoffman around this idea.). Here are some tips for brands:

1. Fall in love with ‘a big idea’ again – Get back to basics and make sure everyone is on board with what the brand idea is. Be sure not to confuse your big idea with a tactic.

2. Be experimental – Once you know your big idea, give yourself permission to play with many ways that idea can come to life. Think big, and ask yourself “why not?”

3. Analog is cool too – Beating the algorithms just to land in a social media echo chamber may get you lots of clicks, but what have they done for the brand. Better yet, think how on and offline can play together to create a seamless experience.

4. Less business, more art – As Geoff Colon believes, MFAs might be better marketers than MBAs. It’s not enough to understand the research and the strategy. Disruptive marketers need to know how to bring strategy to life, and do it in a way that inspires and excites.

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The speaker lineup for the TED2017 conference features more than 70 thinkers and doers from around the world — including a dozen or so whose unfiltered TED Talks will be broadcast live to movie theater audiences across the U.S. and Canada.

Presented with our partner BY Experience, our TED Cinema Experience event series offers three opportunities for audiences to join together and experience the TED2017 Conference, and its first two evenings feature live TED Talks. Below: find out who’s part of the live cinema broadcast here (as with any live event, the speaker lineup is subject to change, of course!).

The listing below reflects U.S. and Canadian times; international audiences in 18 countries will experience TED captured live and time-shifted. Check locations and show times, and purchase tickets here >>

Opening Night Event: Monday, April 24, 2017
US: 8pm ET/ 7pm CT/ 6pm MT/ time-shifted to 8pm PT
Experience the electric opening night of TED, with half a dozen TED Talks and performances from:
Designer Anab Jain
Cyberspace analyst Laura Galante
Artist Titus Kaphar
Grandmaster and analyst Garry Kasparov
Author Tim Ferriss
The band OK Go
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

TED Prize Event: Tuesday, April 25, 2017
US: 8pm ET/ 7pm CT/ 6pm MT/ time-shifted to 8pm PT
On the second night of TED2017, the TED Prize screening offers a lineup of awe-inspiring speakers with big ideas for our future, including:
Champion Serena Williams
Physician and writer Atul Gawande
Data genius Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Movement artists Jon Boogz + Lil Buck
TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi, who will reveal for the first time plans to use his $1 million TED Prize to fund a creative, bold wish to spark global change.

Branding is a serious business, but does that mean brands themselves must always be so serious. Is there room for more personality?

In market after market, CMOs are under pressure to deliver more outputs and bigger numbers. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that brands themselves have become so serious. Who wouldn’t be earnest given what is now expected?

And yet, sometimes, it is the brands that can see past the commercial intensity and project themselves with humor and humanity that consumers are connecting with best. As Alex Altman observed, “it’s fascinating to see brands turn self-deprecation into an earnest form of self-promotion … The strategy has helped some brands atone for mistakes, others address the frustrations of consumers, and others show empathy over the triteness of their industry’s advertising … It shows that they are prone to the same mistakes and vulnerabilities as humans, which in a weird sort of way, makes them more likable to a lot of people.”

It’s ironical isn’t it that in some ways the distance between brands and people has never been closer (in terms of degrees of separation) and yet many brands still feel cut-off from consumers? They try to hard to be cool or credible or hip, or they talk about themselves in ways that people have no time for. So many brands have bought into the authority myth – the belief that in order for customers to prioritize them, they must not just gain their attention, they must also corner their respect. Social media and content marketing haven’t helped. They’ve encouraged brands to believe that they must always have something important to say, and that doing so is a formula for success. But no amount of talking or posting counts for anything if no-one is interested.

The fact is you can’t be the best brand for every consumer all the time. Instead of trying to hide that, brands have an opportunity to make light of those moments when they fall short or where they are simply not as *something* as their competitors. (Like the Progressive Insurance example pictured above.) But to do that confidently, brands need to be super-clear about their comparative market positioning. For many, such an approach feels too out-there, too risky, too easily-misunderstood. They revert instead to what they know: singing their own praises; increasing their projected sense of authority.

Oscar Wilde once observed that “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” The same is true of marketing. It may be a serious business, but much more importantly it’s a human business, and the deftness of that touch is easily lost to cleverness, arrogance or showmanship. If we want the brands we work for to be more effective, then we need to make them more visibly acceptable. And in some cases, that’s about deliberately and counter-intuitively choosing to be less intrusive, less brash, less of a ‘champion’ and more of a friendly face in the crowd of messages. It’s about choosing to defy the market formulae.

Speaking of formulae, take a look at this wonderfully wicked appraisal of brand videos from a company that makes its living off selling footage. It’s also a reminder of just how much brands have vanilla-ized values and personality. The obvious, dressed up to look profound. And all of it utterly forgettable to consumers who peer right through all this terribly serious strategy, and its predictable expression, because it holds nothing of interest to them in their days.

As people, we’re drawn to those who are humble and clear, fun, whimsical and who are genuinely interested and interesting. Somehow, faced with the opportunity to write that large, most brands back off being that raw. They plumb for authority. And when they do so, they lose people.

So here’s a simple challenge the next time you’re looking for a cut-through brand idea. Try making someone smile, with a very human expression of how your brand really is. In real life.

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event. May 1-3, West Hollywood, California.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14036395/1/the-solid-jobs-report-could-mean-one-thing-a-lost-generation-may-finally-spend-on-luxuries.html

This panel will discuss ways marketers can work with music labels to further enhance their brand-building campaigns and various legal minefields and negotiating points involved in a broader music deal.

By Alex Parkinson The Conference Board and SNCR has two great opportunities to learn more about digital health and communications in the next couple of months. First, SNCR Advisory Board member Fard Johmar and SNCR founder Jen McClure will be hosting the webcast “Using AI, Big Data and Related Digital Health Innovations” on March 29 […]

Check out this Uncontainable book review!

– the book: Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives, the story of The Container Store told by its co-founder and Chairman Kip Tindell

– the brains:  Kip Tindell never intended to go into business, but from an early age he loved retail, he was involved with philosophy, and he was always organizing things (fly fishing tackle, his coin collection, boxes in the stock room of the shop he worked at, etc.). These three passions came together when his friend and mentor Garrett Boone suggested they open a store together and they decided it would sell “the resources for people to organize all the stuff in their lives.”  The file folder he had filled with “great ideas and inspiring quotes” ever since he was a teenager evolved into the seven the Foundation Principles that guide everything the organization does.

– the best bits:  Uncontainable weaves together key moments in the history of The Container Store with expositions on its Foundation Principles.  This approach effectively illustrates how the Principles have played a key role in how the company operates.  Here are just a few examples:

• Principle:  Air of Excitement!

Kip says that he thinks of retail as theater and, as such, it’s crucial that the company’s “stage” is set up perfectly.  “That’s why we take such great care with our interior design and the presentation of products—to make sure the look and feel of our stores reflect The Container Store’s mission… Our goal is ‘perfect product presentation,’ which means that the customer can clearly understand everything about the product immediately, even if our sales staff is busy helping other customers.“

To engage employees in Air of Excitement, the company holds all sorts of events and celebrations, including “We Love Our Employees Day, held every Valentine’s Day.”  Kip justifies the attention paid and resources spent on these activities, saying, “What conventional business minds don’t understand is that all the positive feeling this activity generates is really the fuel that drives our company.“

• Principle:  Communication IS Leadership

“Communication and leadership really are the same thing,” according to Kip.  “After all, how can people trust their leaders if they’re not being fully informed about what’s at stake?“

So, at The Container Store, the leadership doesn’t operate on a “need to know” basis. Rather, he says, “We ask ourselves, ‘Who will benefit from having this information?‘”  And the company gives its employees scheduled time to read, watch, or listen to whatever information is currently available.  Devoting labor hours to communication is practically unheard of in retail, especially in this era of skyrocketing labor costs — but The Container Store does it because “it’s really consistent with our belief in valuing one another, making sure we all feel appreciated, included, and empowered, and have the training necessary to be successful in our jobs.“

• Principle:  Fill the Other Guy’s Basket to the Brim.  Making Money Then Becomes an Easy Proposition.

The Container Store works on “creatively crafting mutually beneficial relationships with our vendors to help them produce and provide the kind of useful, fun, well-designed, high-quality products that delight our customers.”   The company, Kip explains, helps its vendors develop new products, places orders during slow periods, pays them on time, and is deeply loyal to them.  Vendors, in turn, give The Container Store great pricing, exclusive product, and their loyalty too.

The principle proved its value in one particular instance:  The company was able to purchase Elfa, the modular shelving company, despite not being the highest bidder.  The long history of a fantastic relationship between the two entities sealed the deal.  Kip writes, “At some point, it became clear to elfa’s owners that selling to anyone beside The Container Store would not only mean losing their best customer, but also that the hearts and souls of most of elfa’s management team and employees were with us.“

– the bottom line:  Uncontainable is equally inspiring and instructive.  It delivers insights and important instruction that should be learned by any business leader who wants to run a business that creates value for all its stakeholders.  Highly recommend!

related:

Shoe Dog by Nike founder Phil Knight

People First Leadership by Eduardo Braun

Onward by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

The post brand book bites from Uncontainable appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

The story of how the venerable Ford Motor Company managed to recover from the Great Recession of 2008 may be one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in U.S. history.  And it demonstrates how great brands rebound from turbulent times.  Not only did Ford recover, but it ended up thriving and achieving heights once thought impossible for an American carmaker.

A Different Way of Thinking About Brand

Alan Mulally, the former Boeing executive who was recruited by Bill Ford to save the company, has gotten most of the credit for pulling off the unlikely feat.  There is no question that Mulally deserves every accolade he has received.  The automotive industry, if not the whole country, should thank him for leading the restoration of a brand so iconic and a company so instrumental to American pride and competitiveness.

But the story of Ford’s recovery from its near-death experience is more than a lesson in leadership by one person.  The truth is, the turnaround at Ford required wholesale changes in culture, strategy, operations, and execution, and involved a series of decisions that company executives made as a team.  It was a transformation that, at its core, involved a different way of thinking about the company and its brand.

Ford’s turnaround makes for the ultimate case study of how great brands rebound.  Great brands including Nike, Apple, and IBM have achieved their leadership positions by integrating their brand platform into every aspect of their business.  Their brand aspirations and core brand foundations have undergirded their strategies, fueled their operations, and informed their tactics.  This “brand-as-business” approach is the same methodology that great brands including Ford have used to survive some of the most destructive threats in business.

One Ford

Mulally introduced, and his team eventually embraced and executed on, the notion of “One Ford,” a single vision for the organization and its mission.   In short, “One Ford” was about unifying the people, plans, operations, and products of Ford to restore the brand to automotive leadership.  It involved putting the purpose, spirit, and values of the Ford brand at the center of the organization and executing with relentless commitment and laser-like focus on whatever it took to make Ford great again.

Mulally was inspired by a 1925 advertisement for Ford he found in the corporate archives.  Entitled “Opening the Highways to All Mankind,” the Saturday Evening Post ad depicted a Norman Rockwellian scene of a young family atop a grassy hill overlooking a road filled with automobiles, the shadows of a Ford factory in the distance.  It encapsulated the simple, yet utterly compelling, vision with which Henry Ford began Ford Motor Company:  “I will build a car for the great multitude…it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

Credit: Ford Media

Mulally understood that, at its core, Ford stood for cars with value for the masses; the company just needed to once again deliver on that brand promise.  Every decision he and his team made from then on was put through that brand filter.  Mulally once explained the decision to sell the company’s luxury brands, including Aston Martin, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Volvo, saying, “It was a question of ‘What did Ford stand for?’ What do people think when they see Ford’s blue oval? Do they think of us as a house of brands, or do they understand that they are going to get a complete family of best-in-class vehicles that are also affordable?”

The Core Brand Values and Brand Essence of Ford

Ford’s successful recovery was actually a return to the company’s founding values and the core essence of the Ford brand.  Mulally and his team recognized that the company had deviated far from what was most valuable and different about Ford, and they set a new commitment to that core.  Using the original Ford brand vision as its guide, company leaders developed and then executed with steadfast perseverance a plan that turned in quarter-after-quarter of profits at a time when almost every other organization was still reeling from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  That original brand vision then laid the foundation for continued profitable growth.

Imagine how the history books would differ had the Ford Motor Company never lost its commitment to the core of its brand.  Henry Ford certainly had laid the foundation for a brand-driven approach with his vision for the way Ford would change the way his organization worked, the way the business would succeed, and the way people would live.  But over time, those values got lost in the internal push for growth and the external pressure from competition.  Of course, the company could not have avoided the disruptive forces of the Great Recession, but if it had kept Henry Ford’s brand vision as its central organizing and operating idea, recovery might have been easier, faster, or both.

Great Brands Rebound with Brand As Business

When an organization has suffered a blow or experienced a major setback, the “brand as business” approach provides the power, clarity, and focus it needs to recover.  Turnaround leaders use their brand as the engine, fuel, and compass to right the ship.  But great brands don’t wait until they’re under duress to adopt the brand-as-business management approach.  Great brands live out brand as business to sail ahead when business is thriving, to buttress their efforts when under duress, and to bounce back after suffering a setback.

related:

Inspired to Fail

Brands To Watch in 2017

Onward by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

The post how great brands rebound: ford’s remarkable turnaround was driven by the brand as business management approach appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are in danger, Asner’s map offers conservationists a strategic way to apply future efforts of protection, though not all scientists remained convinced of its current benefits. For now, however, Asner remains committed to his approach, with current plans to modify his technology for eventual orbit. “[Once in orbit], we can map the changing biodiversity of the planet every month. That’s what we need to manage our extinction crisis.” (Watch Greg’s TED Talk)

A tree-like pavilion for London. Architect Francis Kéré, a Burkina Faso native known for his use of local building materials like clay, will construct the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London, the first African to do so. Kéré’s inspiration for the pavilion’s design is a tree, which he describes as the most important place in his village because it is where people gathered as a community. Each year, the Serpentine Galleries commission a leading architect to build a temporary summer pavilion; previous architects include fellow TEDsters Bjarke Ingels and Frank Gehry. (Watch Francis’ TED Talk, Bjarke’s TED Talk, and Frank’s TED Talk)

The ICIJ goes independent. Less than a year after publishing the largest investigation in journalism history, known as the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced in February that they were breaking away from the Center for Public Integrity, which founded ICIJ in 1997. Under the continued leadership of Gerard Ryle, ICIJ will become a fully independent nonprofit news organization. (Watch Gerard’s TED Talk)

A virtual forest aids a real one. Under the direction of Honor Harger, Singapore’s ArtScience Museum launched an interactive exhibit dedicated to rainforest conservation in Southeast Asia. The show, titled Into the Wild: An Immersive Virtual Adventure, creates over 1,000 square meters of virtual rainforest in the museum’s public spaces, which users can explore with their smartphones. The exhibit features a parallel with reality: for every virtual tree planted (and accompanied by a pledge to WWF), a real tree will be planted in a rainforest in Indonesia. (Watch Honor’s TED Talk)

New inductees in the Women’s Hall of Fame. Autism and livestock advocate Temple Grandin and actor Aimee Mullins are two of the ten women selected to be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame 2017 class. The group will meet on September 16 during a ceremony in New York’s Seneca Falls. (Watch Aimee’s TED Talk and Temple’s TED Talk)

The race to explore the deep ocean. In December 2015, Peter Diamandis’ XPrize Foundation announced the Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, a $7 million global competition designed to push exploration and mapping of the ocean floor. On February 16, the foundation announced the prize’s 21 semifinalists, a group that includes everyone from middle and high school students to maker-movement enthusiasts to professionals in the field. The next hurdle for the semifinalists? The first test of their technology, where they will have just 16 hours to map at least 20% of the 500-square kilometer competition area at a depth of 2,000 meters and produce a high-resolution map. (Watch Peter’s TED Talk)

An iconic album reimagined. Released two days before his death, David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, is the unlikely choice for a classical reimagining. MIT professor Evan Ziporyn and composer Jamshied Sharifi recast the album in full for cellist Maya Beiser and the Ambient Orchestra. The arrangement premiered March 3 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. (Watch Maya’s TED Talk)

Two world premieres at Tribeca. Two TED speakers have documentaries premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017. Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger’s documentary Hell on Earth, directed with Nick Quested, chronicles Syria’s descent into harrowing civil war. Surf photographer Chris Burkard’s documentary Under an Arctic Sky follows six adventurous surfers who set sail along the frozen shores of Iceland in the midst of the worst storm the country has seen in twenty-five years. (Watch Sebastian’s TED Talk and Chris’ TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

By Gary Larkin, Research Associate, The Conference Board As I have researched the impact of social media attacks on public companies— namely the recent campaign by President Trump—I have discovered that good advice is hard to find on this matter. That’s why I reached out to Katie Delahaye Paine, a pioneer in the field of […]