By Alex Parkinson We’re exploding out of the gate in the New Year at SNCR! There are a number of opportunities for you to participate in our events and programs, including a webcast for European audiences (but anyone can join), an in-person briefing in Palo Alto, and of course our Excellence in New Communications Awards, […]
In our world of abundant solutions it is becoming more difficult to position brands.
For much of the last 50 years simply copying best practices from any business book on brand management was enough to function and possibly be discovered. This was because of the scarcity factor. If you wanted shaving cream, there were only three companies that produced it. Better yet, there were only five media channels in which to advertise to your audience. Walk into any pharmacy today and there are over 50 different types to choose from. And there are over 75 different channels to communicate with more coming on the horizon as we reach peak Moore’s Law.
During the scarce era of brand positioning we relied heavily on the four P’s (Product, Promotion, Placement, Price). This worked in an industrial, physical economy where you had no digital solutions, no mobile phone and no frictionless buying experience. Companies were less transparent and could destroy the world while reaping profits. While the four P’s may possibly remain relevant in some situations, the world has shifted and disruption has occurred where it is now about the emerging four P’s™ for branding: Personalized, Pervasive, Predictive and Plausible.
Technology now allows for us to search by category instead of brand, to have content served to us based on interests and to understand what we’ve purchased based on history. It is no longer enough to think of the four P’s when mapping brand positioning. Also customers have more information about you and your brand than ever before. You can issue as many press releases as you would like, that doesn’t mean consumers will believe any of the words. Thus, here are four areas that will influence how you position your brand in the very near future.
1. Personalized Positioning
Location and GPS aren’t just good to help you get around, notifications can be used to serve up the right experiences within the right context because brands will know who is near a specific location that acts as a touchpoint. Personalization isn’t about buying ads on media and then blasting them to the masses. There is little effectiveness in such a scenario and it is a relic from a scaled mass media era that has bypassed us within an individual newsfeed ecosystem. Personalization knows what you like, purchase and enjoy because you’ve opted in and technology has levels of indication about what you like or don’t like. This is very important for brands who understand who their customer is. Most brands still market to customers and non-customers alike with their messaging. But we’re entering into a world where customers want brands to know they are customers. If I speak to a conversation bot on a brand website, that bot better not ask how I am and welcome me like I’m new if I already have an account. The bot should know this and thus be able to treat me in a more unique and personalized manner. The majority of companies who lack vision are those who over-index their gross revenue into advertising. What you are saying to your competition is that you are out of ideas because you think more advertising will help build brand love whereas brands who have data on who loves them already win in this long tail.
2. Pervasive Positioning
Pervasive spreads in ways that cannot be stopped. This is what happens when those who love your brand are given the freedom to express this love. Too many brands don’t allow this or don’t know how to do this well. Again, they serve up advertising in a world that is no longer one-directional. Pervasive allows user-generated content, whether positive or negative, to become the conduit to future customers. Not many legacy brands do this well, it’s almost not part of their DNA but plenty of startup brands have no trouble with it. Think of how you recommend a brand. What do you say, do or act to help others know and begin to love what you love about it? Have you even thought about this in your marketing meetings?
3. Predictive Positioning
So many brands run an algorithm. They have a formula. Why change when what they are doing is enough? But that is not enough to halt progress. That is not enough to prevent disruption. Smarter brands know where the world is going and how they fit into it. They possibly are even mapping new categories rather than waiting for others to map that for them. They have an understanding that communication is not simply a part of the economy, but it IS the economy. How people speak, act and like or loathe you are key predictive factors. What are they searching for? What are they sharing? How relevant are you within the current and future ecosystem? This is how small brands become giant killers and giants become overthrown. The former imagines a future and how they fit into it. The latter is simply just living in it without a care in the world of where it wants to go next.
4. Plausible Positioning
Many are saying this is the end of the brand era. Fewer people can name their favorite brand. Many seek substitutes from the name brands of the past. Voice search which is evolving quickly puts more emphasis on category than brand names. What actions are you taking around this transformative behavior? What do you believe in? If you think all purchase decisions are made on product alone, there is a major shift away from this action in those aged 13-37. This is what we mean by plausible. The ability to understand probabilities in a quickly evolving world and how you fit into it. What does your brand mean today? What will it mean tomorrow? What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? If you could create your own disruption, what would it look like? How would the brand that disrupts your brand behave? What would it sell? How would it communicate? If you have time to think of the old four P’s, you have time to imagine a quickly changing world and if your brand will even be in it tomorrow.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
Amanda Palmer performs a tribute to David Bowie at TED2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
Looking for a few great talks to inspire you for a great year ahead? TED’s content+editorial team staffers pick their favorites — including some don’t-miss talks you might have passed by in this busy year.
Fawn Qiu: Easy DIY projects for kid engineers
Don’t you hate it when an operating-system upgrade means your carefully customized software no longer works? (Rest in peace, Now Contact...) When Fawn Qiu heard that her favorite game on her phone, Flappy Bird, was being discontinued, she built a physical version of the game, which she called Flappy Bird Box. It turned out to be equally maddening to play, and Fawn’s YouTube video about her contraption has been viewed more than 2.8 million times. As she describes in this brief talk, Fawn applies the same why-not pragmatism and sly whimsy when she designs projects to introduce kids to engineering. Her classes use low-cost, readily available objects like fabric and paper, and feel like playtime, no matter how old you are. — Cyndi Stivers, director, TED Residency
PLUS: Fawn was a member of the inaugural class of the TED Residency, an idea incubator housed at TED HQ in New York City. During a circuit-making workshop she conducted, I built a beating heart out of construction paper, copper tape, a tiny light bulb and a cheap battery. The battery is shot now, but this heart still beats for her. Application is open for the spring 2017 TED Residency, which runs March 6 to June 10, 2017. Deadline: January 2, 2017.
Lidia Yuknavitch: The beauty of being a misfit
By the end of the talk, I truly believe the words I’d read in its description: “You don’t know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That’s your beauty.” As an added bonus, Lidia’s participation in the comments section of her talk is the perfect example of the genuine, uplifting spirit you were introduced to in her talk. They’re a pleasure, and a comfort, to read. — Kaitlin Pierce, community lead
Angélica Dass: The beauty of human skin in every color
I read quite a bit about the science of human races and skin color. I thought I knew it all about this topic. Until Angélica told us her stories and showed me that art can get to me in a much more profound way. — Gerry Garbulsky, Spanish curator
Reshma Saujani: Teach girls bravery, not perfection
Reshma’s talk on how we teach girls to be perfect and not brave was like a punch to the stomach — in a good way. She illuminated so many patterns in my own life, my behavior in school and at work, that are a consequence of this teaching, but that I had never been able to put my finger on before, like when a word is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite find it. Reshma’s talk gave me that word, that understanding, and that makes it easier for me to face my own struggles and become a little braver every day. — Rebekah Barnett, speaker coordinator
Kenneth Lacovara: Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe
I spent time with Ken backstage before his talk, talking about friends we have in common. I then ran to get a good seat to see him on stage, so that I could later tell our friends about this talk. Little did I know that a few minutes later I would be deeply moved and crying listening to Ken’s dinosaur stories. — Gerry Garbulsky, Spanish curator
Luke DuBois: Insightful human portraits made from data
Every time I come back to Luke’s maps, I’m reminded of how diverse and complicated this country is. I think back on Luke’s warning, “You guys know what this is — you call this “data visualization.” When you do it right, it’s illuminating. When you do it wrong, it’s anesthetizing.” I love that he used dating profiles to build his maps, arguing that it’s in only our profiles that we get to describe ourselves as we want to be seen. Maybe this map, this way to view our country as a big community of people trying to be seen as they are, is empowering in a time when we need to be empowered. These ideas haunt and guide me. — Diana Enriquez, Research chief
Toni Mac: The laws that sex workers really want
Sex work is one of those parts of the economy I had no idea how to begin making sense of, let alone how policy might affect it. Over the course of this transformative talk, Toni Mac opens our eyes to the perspective most important in the conversations about sex work: the sex worker. In doing so, she taught me—and I’m sure many others—a key lesson: if you want to make fairer and more respectful policy, you better ask the folks who most partake in the activity that policy is going to impact the most. — Francisco Díez Buzo, Researcher
Marwa Al-Sabouni: How Syria’s architecture laid the foundation for brutal war
She looks calmly into the camera as she records her talk from her home in the Syrian city she has always lived in. Unable to travel due to conflict that has broken all normal systems of daily life, Marwa Al-Sabouni, an architect, speaks about living through a war that has destroyed her studio and left her city of Homs in rubble. Her story is one of survival, yes, but also a clear-eyed analysis of how bad urban planning decisions and ill-conceived design has contributed to the blight. Just as architecture can foster community and heal, Al-Sabouni tells us how, when done without the needs of the community in mind, it can engender divisiveness and feed conflict. Her blunt critique, using her own city as case study, has lessons globally for urban development. I applaud Al-Sabouni’s steadfast courage and am grateful to her for showing us so vividly how our built environment truly matters. –Chee Pearlman, Design curator
Emma Marris: Nature is everywhere
Pristine is a bad word for conservation. Because nowhere on this planet is pristine anymore, whether it be soot settling into the soil of the farthest reaches of the Amazon or climate change altering the ice in Antarctica. Plus, pristine has too often meant without people–leading to forced evictions from national parks, for example. But as Emma Marris notes in this wonderful talk, pristine may be nowhere, but nature is everywhere, even in the cracks of a city sidewalk. And that’s reason enough for hope on this new, human-dominated planet. — David Biello, TED Science Curator and author of “The Unnatural World“
Jennifer Kahn: Gene editing can now change an entire species — forever
In any given era, seeds of powerful scientific discoveries are being sown — seeds that eventually sprout into a new reality for all of us, much like the recognition of penicillin’s power in the early 20th century. We are already experimenting with gene editing in full force, but its potential reaches far beyond its current applications. In this talk, science journalist Jennifer Kahn provides a beautifully articulated summary and perspective on how CRISPR can alter our existence — for good and for evil. — Cloe Shasha, Producer
Mariano Sigman: Your words may predict your future mental health
I love the talks that leave me thinking ¨How the hell did they come up with that question?!¨ Mariano asked himself how the ancient Greeks thought and if their consciousness was like ours today. And then, he (and his collaborators) came up with the answer by analyzing old texts that can serve as fossils of human thought. Wow. — Gerry Garbulsky
Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other
This talk made me feel excited. I was excited to be hearing this extraordinary truth of the world that I’d never known, and to know that I’d never quite look at trees the same way again. I felt excited, with childlike awe, at the magic of nature (something I rarely feel from behind a computer screen!), and I enjoyed picturing humanity learning a few lessons from the trees 🙂 — Kaitlin Pierce, Community lead
Juan Enriquez: What will humans look like in 100 years?
Between Jennifer Kahn, Ellen Jorgensen, and a recent screening of Gattaca, I’d been feeling pretty down about gene editing. But leave it to TED’s resident futurist to turn me back around. Taking evolution into our own hands still ranks among the most dangerous ideas humanity’s ever had*, but I’d rather go out swinging than wait for the end. — Dan Kwartler, Coordinator
* See, literally any literary examples of “Playing God”
Sam Harris: Can we build AI without losing control over it?
Yes, AI is coming, and yes, we aren’t prepared. But what’s really scary, and what Sam highlights in this talk, is that for some inexplicable reason we aren’t afraid. In a year of doom and gloom, it seems fitting that one of TV’s bleakest shows captures this idea perfectly: “When you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags,” Bojack Horseman. — Dan Kwartler
Rabbi Sharon Brous: It’s time to reclaim religion
I think most of us seek transcendence in some form — a sense of being lifted and joined with something bigger than our simple selves. And we need it on a regular basis — as much as you want to get permanently lifted by listening to that one perfect TED Talk, a lot of us instinctively or habitually seek it week after week in ritual, whether that’s a faith tradition or a long weekly walk with headphones and the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon. So, as much as I love Rabbi Sharon Brous’ call to reclaim religion as a force for good rather than an excuse for evil, I equally love her call to reclaim the weekly religious meetup from boredom and habit. A regular dose of transcendent connection — no matter how we get it — is worth taking. — Emily McManus, managing editor
Amanda Palmer, Jherek Bischoff, Usman Riaz: “Space Oddity“
Okay, so this isn’t a talk, but I found Amanda Palmer’s performance from TED2016 with Jherek Bischoff and Usman Riaz to be such a moving, powerful tribute to the late, great David Bowie. And it features a special surprise guest. — Kelly Stoetzel, Content director
Every January, over 150,000 people make the pilgrimage to Las Vegas to attend International CES (previously known as the Consumer Electronics Show.) Far from being an expo of electronic gadgets, it’s an exciting, inspiring, and (over)stimulating way to experience all things tech. There is so much to see (new products on the show floor like the OLED TV from Sony), to hear (keynote presentations from execs such as Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields), and to learn (from sessions including “The Challenges Facing an Artificially Intelligent World”). But beyond all the typical announcements, demos, and content, I’m always on the lookout for technology that consumer marketers need to know about.
Here are three picks for International CES 2017 highlights you don’t want to miss:
1. Automotive highlights at CES 2017
As consumer electronics brands have become quite predictable, automotive brands have become the most exciting innovators at CES in recent years. You can find exhibits for most of the major brands including Ford, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz on the show floor in the North Hall.
BMW will be introducing its HoloActive Touch system, a Minority Report-like free-floating touch and gesture-controlled display interface between the driver and vehicle. Be sure to check out the booth from Faraday Future, where the highly anticipated high-performance electric vehicle production car is set to be unveiled. The brand seems to be mounting a direct challenge to Tesla, so Faraday Future will likely make for juicy tech news in the weeks to come.
Illuminate. Communicate. Differentiate. We’re lighting the way #FirstForward at #CES2017. pic.twitter.com/aybOvIXBIj
— Faraday Future (@FaradayFuture) December 19, 2016
Also check out the Self-Driving Technology Marketplace just outside the North Hall, where you’ll be able to experience innovations from Hyundai, NVIDIA, and more.
2. Health and Fitness Highlights at CES 2017
Whether it’s activity tracking wearables, IoT devices, smart fabrics, or enhanced training systems, health and fitness technology continues to invade the lives of mainstream consumers, so it’s always interesting to see the latest developments at CES.
There are several venues to discover new health and fitness products and hear speakers and panels discuss trends and case studies.
3. Marketing Highlights at CES 2017
Brand marketers have attended CES for years as hawkers of their companies’ products, but a couple of years ago, they started participating in and advancing the conversation about technology and how it has transformed the way companies reach, connect with, and engage their customers.
C Space, located at the Aria hotel, was created as a venue for agencies, social networks, digital publishers, entertainment professionals, and marketing executives to share best practices, new capabilities, and challenging ideas. This year it features a keynote by Barry Diller, media mogul and chairman and chief executive of Expedia, and includes a new Chief Digital Officer Brand Summit conference track which looks like it could reveal some insights about the new marketing landscape, which sessions on the sharing economy, AI, and 5G.
More CES related content:
To Stay Relevant, Professional Associations Must Rebrand
Wearables Keep Consumers Fit
Three of the Coolest Things I Saw at CES 2015
The post don’t miss these CES 2017 highlights appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.
1. Official Mobile Strike Super Bowl 50 TV Commercial, Arnold’s Fight
Creative Agency: 215mccann
View count: 102,988,951, uploaded on Feb 7, 2016
2. Knorr, Love At First Taste
Creative Agency: MullenLowe
Media Agency: PHD, Mindshare
View count: 60,518,426, uploaded on Apr 25, 2016
3. Nike Football Presents: The Switch with Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane, Anthony Martial & More
Creative Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Media Agency: Mindshare
View count: 58,639,737, uploaded on Jun 9, 2016
4. Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge: Official Intro Launch
View count: 46,414,146, uploaded on Feb 21, 2016
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–5. Clash Royale: Theme Song (Official TV Commercial)
Creative Agency: Barton F. Graf
View count: 38,314,554, uploaded on Aug 4, 2016
6. Mountain Dew Kickstart: Puppy Monkey Baby | Super Bowl Spot
Creative Agency: BBDO
Media Agency: OMD
View count: 28,020,947, uploaded on on Feb 3, 2016
7. Always #LikeAGirl – Keep Playing
Creative Agency: Leo Burnett
Media Agency: Starcom Mediavest Group
View count: 27,826,999, uploaded on Jun 28, 2016
8. The Chase – Hyundai Super Bowl Commercial | The 2017 Hyundai Elantra
Creative Agency: INNOCEAN USA
Media Agency: Canvas Worldwide
View count: 26,154,262, uploaded Feb 1, 2016
9. #Pokemon20: Pokémon Super Bowl Commercial
Creative Agency: Omelet
Media Agency: MediaCom
View count: 25,364,933, uploaded on Jan 25, 2016
10. Skittles: “The Portrait” w/ Steven Tyler. Super Bowl 50 Commercial.
Creative Agency: DDB Chicago
Media Agency: MediaCom, Starcom
View count: 24,288,291, uploaded on Feb 2, 2016
Note: View counts are as of December 30, 2016; uploaded on is the date the ad was first published on YouTube.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–
The discipline of agency management has become increasingly more data-driven to significantly improve efficiencies, effectiveness, and ultimately relationship value.
For brands to succeed in the next decade, they will have to realign their thinking and operating model so that they can not merely function, but actually matter.
Here are three of a growing number of new requirements to earn a place in the future.
1. Employee Advocacy Instead Of C-Suite Spokespeople – In old models, the highest ranking officials at a brand or company spoke for that organization. But there’s a problem that has now surfaced for brands. The most vocal and influential employees may not be VPs or SVPs but simply managers who have built up an effective social media influence. These employees can now be advocates on behalf of brands as subject matter experts if those brands move toward a flattened matrix model and give up on the hierarchies of the past. There should no longer be one defining voice for a brand but many. Brands that align their organizations in this way no longer have to rely on one voice but can rely on hundreds if not thousands of employees to help carry their conversations to current and potential customers. Software like Sociabble and TrapIt can come in handy in these scenarios. What also can be handy is how you hire and retain employees. The most successful brands have talent that are interchangeable. Put emphasis on who you hire and seek those that can be generalists and understand a lot of areas rather than specialists who only understand one. This is important in case business pivots and your brand needs to shift with it.
2. Contextual Conversations Instead Of Managed Narratives – Narratives are dead just like managed public relation programs. Customers are asking for transparency, authenticity and open honesty from every company in which they do transactions. As a result, managed perception is now a thing of the past. Customers can see that brands are simply trying to get people to think or feel a certain way and will move toward brands that are real than those who are simply corporate by design. As a result, you should be figuring out what matters to people and how you fit contextually into that conversation. You should also be able to develop points of view in real time based on what is happening in the world. If you plan everything, what if the world drastically changes? Also you don’t have to be everything for everyone. If your brand doesn’t matter to people around cultural events, then you shouldn’t be trying to insert yourself into those scenarios. Brands that did this the past three years have been ridiculed due to the fact they were “trying too hard” to be something for everyone. You don’t need to do any of that anymore. Just be you, and people will love you as a result.
3. Behavioral Experience Instead Of Channel Tactics – Brands still do marketing in silos and this is detrimental to how humans behave. Humans use a variety of different methodologies to find out information. If you are going to invest in a better way to measure effectiveness in the next year or two, align your marketing around the design experience of humans, not channels. This means you no longer should be doing digital or social marketing, but marketing where digital, social, email and mobile help people with decisions based on what they are doing at a point in time. This “point in time” scenario is more relevant to how people behave and marketers and brands must adjust to this fact. The most agile brands that are aligned around how people behave will perform the best over time because they can see where they need to invest or divest based on how their customers really behave. Right now, most brands are just piling cash into areas because they are bright shiny objects. Such thinking will bankrupt them in the short run and may not reach people in ways in which they truly interact. People aren’t shaped around marketing channels but around the world at large. Each person’s world is different from another person’s but we still share experiences as social animals. Brands that realize this will perform better because they will align around the complexity of what motivates people rather than how people are motivated by tactics.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
AARM explores important questions about big data that heretofore have yet to be addressed by many advertisers within their agency agreements.
The post Happy New Year! appeared first on The Good For You Network.
Habits are good for business. In fact, many industries could not survive without them. The incentive systems and business models of the companies that make habit-forming products require someone gets hooked. Without consumer habits, these habit-forming businesses would go bust.
While most of us think of cigarettes or gambling as habit-forming products, the fact is, a much wider swath of industries rely on consumer’s using their products without thought or deliberation. These habit-forming businesses have no secret agenda or nefarious ambitions. They are in business to give people what they want, even if at times, what the consumer wants isn’t necessarily good for them. But like every other company, habit-forming businesses are run by well-intentioned people. Hard-working folks with families and dreams of their own. So how then can these two realities coexist? How can companies seek to hook their customers, while also being run by decent people who have just as visceral of an aversion to manipulation as the rest of us?
The Habit Business
The answer lies in the business imperative. An enterprises’ worth is the sum of the future profits it will generate. MBAs are taught to calculate the value of an enterprise this way and it is the benchmark investors use to determine the fair price of a company’s shares. CEOs and their management teams are evaluated by their ability to increase the value of their stock. Their job is to implement strategies to grow future cash flow by some combination of increasing revenues and decreasing expenses.
Creating consumer habits is an effective way to drive share price by increasing what companies call “customer lifetime value.” CLTV is the amount of money made from a customer before they switch to a competitor, stop using the product, or die. Some products have a very high CLTV. Credit card customers for example, tend to stay loyal for a very long time and are worth a bundle.
Someone Must Get Hooked
Acquiring customers is expensive and time consuming. Ensuring customers are habituated to using a product decreases these expenses, thereby increasing enterprise value.
It’s worth noting that a surprising number of businesses follow a negative binomial distribution, also known as a Pareto concentration. Typically thought of as the 80/20 rule, the phenomenon occurs wherever a few buyers account for the vast majority of revenue. However, at times that split can be much more skewed than one might think.
While for most consumer goods, the concentration tends to be 60/20, for online gaming companies like Zynga, 100% of the revenue comes from just 2% of players.
In most consumer-facing businesses the Pareto Law applies. These customers are obviously very important to the company because without them, the enterprise could not survive, their profit margins simply would not allow it.
The combination of a business imperative to drive shareholder value by increasing CLTV along with the identification of the most loyal customers, means companies spend significant resources competing for a small set of “heavy users.” Habit-forming businesses are therefore highly motivated to hook customers – and keep them using their products for as long as possible.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Nir Eyal. Excerpted from his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
The Blake Project can help you identify and develop your brand purpose.
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
*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.
