I wanted to share this perspective on the importance of rich brand experiences , by Laurence Knight, posted on Ad Age.com 12/23/09
Want to Innovate? Then Create a Rich, Holistic Brand Experience
Here's How CMOs Can Capitalize on This Emerging Opportunity
Brand experience is rapidly becoming the new frontier for innovation.
Such brand experiences authentically embed the product into deep content or services, stretching the footprint of the brand far beyond where it is used. This type of innovation is becoming a mandate for growth across a number of consumer categories, particularly in package goods.
Not to be confused with the lifestyle marketing approach of Patagonia, North Face, Disney and the like, experience-led innovation is all about serving up rich, differentiated experiences that encourage consumer involvement and collaboration.
As CMOs look to capitalize on this emerging opportunity, they must take several prerequisite steps.
First, CMOs must rally their organizations to create a clear vision for consumer involvement. Brand development, customer service and breakthrough innovation groups should be integrated and aligned around visionary, experience-based insights that drive the involvement.
Identifying these insights unlocks product benefits and services. Gone are the days when marketing and innovation groups can focus on new product benefits to drive growth and when the innovation group fills the funnel before passing on the responsibility for managing the brand development vision to brand managers.
Insight-led research must be broadened beyond usage to examine how a brand can resonate across core consumer experience states, looking at: 1.) "How does a brand educate me?" 2.) "How does it entertain me?" 3.) "On what can it advise me?" 4.) "Is the brand an expression of me?" 5.) "Does the experience connect me to similar consumers?" 6.) "Does the brand give me a sense of purpose?"
As a team, this integrated organization needs to work seamlessly to translate the experience-based insights into an authentic, holistic experience rather than come up with only emotional and functional product benefits.
A brand that has figured this out is Nestlé's Nespresso, which goes way beyond selling packaged coffee on shelves to offer a holistic experience delivering coffee, machines and services. The brand educates, entertains and involves the fan base in the full experience of how the coffee is grown, selected and roasted. This brand understands the insights behind its experience so deeply that it can present the entertaining style of actor George Clooney alongside the educational voice of its supply-chain manager on YouTube and knows to come up with different innovative designs to appeal to the distinct preferences in different countries.
Second, as brand and innovation teams create new experience states, it's critical to define how a brand philosophy serves the fan base. To do so, it's essential to flip one's thinking, embedding the brand in experiences created rather than taking the traditional benefit-driven approach that consumer package goods have followed. For marketers it's no longer good enough to just capture and manage the brand equity as a static snapshot of benefits, essence, reason-to-believe and key differentiator.
For instance, Unilever's Axe young men's grooming brand differentiates itself by creating authentic, consistent experiences built around a "mating game" platform. Unilever involves consumers using traditional media but also draws them into whole experiences, everything from renaming a popular nightclub in New York's Hamptons to the Axe Lounge and saturating it with Axe branding to creating a female Axe Patrol that visits bars and clubs, frisking guys and applying body spray. This platform is clearly linked to the Axe brand, and no other brand could replicate these experiences and still seem authentic.
Third, with the shift toward identifying rich experience states rather than product usage, teams must experiment with new formats for describing concepts that depart from the standard 100-word limit. Now working directly with rich-media production companies, the pioneering marketers in this area are creating deep content from five to 30 minutes that is more entertaining, educational and solution-oriented. Embedded in the rich experience are 15- to 30-second sound bites that can be used in more than just traditional media activation.
Natural beauty brand Bare Escentuals embeds the simple "swirl, tap, buff" foundation-application ritual into every brand experience, both in media and at retail. This not only educates the consumer, but the ritual becomes the essence of the brand reinforced across all experience points and creates a product connection simply through the experience itself.
A key element of Bare Escentuals' marketing is QVC programming featuring CEO Leslie Blodgett, a format that demands demonstrable, experience-driven storytelling. She has created rich stories around the brand, how it's used and where it's from, and she actively recruits her fan base as unpaid advocates to go forth and evangelize. She also drew them in with a documentary-style video shared on YouTube about how the Bare Escentuals' campaign called "Try, Believe, Love" was created. She's living the experience of the brand and showing how it can be lived on so many levels.
Brands such as these that understand, embrace and innovate using experience-based insights have a true advantage in developing breakthrough innovation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurence Knight is president-founder of Fletcher-Knight, a marketing-innovation consultancy that specializes in translating consumer insights into winning brand ideas and growth strategies.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Social Media's the Little Engine That Can Build Awareness
I wanted to share this interesting perspective from Judy Shapiro, posted on AdAgeDigital 12/16/09
Social Media's the Little Engine That Can Build Awareness
Here Are Six Reasons Why It Will in 2010
Remember the children's story "The Little Engine That Could"? It told of how the big shiny engines were not up to the task of getting up over the hill to deliver the toys to the kids in time for the holidays. Instead, despite the skeptics, it was the little engine in an act of pure will, that kept telling itself, "I think I can, I think I can," who was able to get over the big hill to get the job done.
In some ways, social media is like that little engine (and I use the term social media in its broadest sense to encompass digital and social media). Everyone is playing with social media, but there is a deeply held perception that social media lacks mass audience reach, measurability and depth to get the job done. This perception fuels the debate of whether digital agencies are "ready to lead," which as been a hot topic even within this very forum. Some digital agencies contend that social media is mature enough to be the leading vehicle whereas big agencies stay true to the law of large numbers that traditional media reliably delivers.
But the debate about who should lead seems rather irrelevant, because the key concern should be what will work to get over that "awareness hill" that every advertiser must scale to achieve business results. Is the little social media engine ready to scale the big hill?
"I think it can" and here's why.
When social media exploded on the scene (and I think that's a fair characterization), it garnered attention because it held the promise of microtargeting in combination with a new level of engagement that one-way traditional advertising could never duplicate. No one doubted the value of reaching people in these highly engaged environments, but no one really knew how to do it efficiently en masse. Large agencies operated within the traditional ad model that delivered numbers while digital agencies tended to rely on the "viral" nature of their tactics to deliver large numbers. That approach was too hit-and-miss to satisfy most businesses and rightfully so.
This is why, until now, social media has not captured a larger share of big advertisers' budgets -- it seems oxymoronic that social media's microtargeting capability can ever deliver mass audiences.
But like our little engine, I believe 2010 will be the year where the social media finally says "I think I can" to deliver large audiences because the technology pieces are coming together to create the formula for audience reach, measurability and interactivity that yield intent and business results. There is a new maturity in this space as represented, for example, by marketers who now understand that thousands of Twitter followers has no direct relevance to effectiveness or that Facebook alone can not launch campaigns.
Here's how the social media engine can be used to deliver mass audiences efficiently:
Social Media's the Little Engine That Can Build Awareness
Here Are Six Reasons Why It Will in 2010
Remember the children's story "The Little Engine That Could"? It told of how the big shiny engines were not up to the task of getting up over the hill to deliver the toys to the kids in time for the holidays. Instead, despite the skeptics, it was the little engine in an act of pure will, that kept telling itself, "I think I can, I think I can," who was able to get over the big hill to get the job done.
In some ways, social media is like that little engine (and I use the term social media in its broadest sense to encompass digital and social media). Everyone is playing with social media, but there is a deeply held perception that social media lacks mass audience reach, measurability and depth to get the job done. This perception fuels the debate of whether digital agencies are "ready to lead," which as been a hot topic even within this very forum. Some digital agencies contend that social media is mature enough to be the leading vehicle whereas big agencies stay true to the law of large numbers that traditional media reliably delivers.
But the debate about who should lead seems rather irrelevant, because the key concern should be what will work to get over that "awareness hill" that every advertiser must scale to achieve business results. Is the little social media engine ready to scale the big hill?
"I think it can" and here's why.
When social media exploded on the scene (and I think that's a fair characterization), it garnered attention because it held the promise of microtargeting in combination with a new level of engagement that one-way traditional advertising could never duplicate. No one doubted the value of reaching people in these highly engaged environments, but no one really knew how to do it efficiently en masse. Large agencies operated within the traditional ad model that delivered numbers while digital agencies tended to rely on the "viral" nature of their tactics to deliver large numbers. That approach was too hit-and-miss to satisfy most businesses and rightfully so.
This is why, until now, social media has not captured a larger share of big advertisers' budgets -- it seems oxymoronic that social media's microtargeting capability can ever deliver mass audiences.
But like our little engine, I believe 2010 will be the year where the social media finally says "I think I can" to deliver large audiences because the technology pieces are coming together to create the formula for audience reach, measurability and interactivity that yield intent and business results. There is a new maturity in this space as represented, for example, by marketers who now understand that thousands of Twitter followers has no direct relevance to effectiveness or that Facebook alone can not launch campaigns.
Here's how the social media engine can be used to deliver mass audiences efficiently:
- Think about creating "content campaigns" to drive a focused message using a multichannel approach, e.g video, mobile marketing, social networks and even traditional media. This approach puts the value on content as an audience builder but in a very strategic way. And to help content campaigns along, there are innovative new technology companies, like WebCollage, that offer content syndication and management services to make this task very efficient on a large scale.
- Tap into the power of your customer service organization to be your social-media front-line soldiers. It is one of the most powerful ways to achieve mass reach within current organizational resources. JetBlue is a great example here as they make it a point to respond to every tweet within minutes.
- Create mobile apps to propel new interactions while allowing you to bake in the viral looping element. Gap Style Mixer is a great example; the app gets you in-store discounts while letting you share the discounts with friends.
- Use behaviorally appropriate ad networks as the "carpet layer" of a social-media campaign to deliver large number of impressions similar to the old fashioned GRP (gross rating points) of TV. But to ensure that impressions deliver interactivity, weave in a diversity of behavioral targeting opportunities and retargeting programs from companies like FetchBack or SearchIgnite (this is where you re-present ad an to a target who did not respond the first time).
- Adapt real-world social networks to extend the reach of your social media campaigns. One innovative company in this space is called HouseParty, which allows people to host real world parties for product sampling (think Tupperware parties or Avon Ladies). This company cleverly utilizes social media so they can deliver large scale numbers quickly and efficiently.
- Introduce new tools to measure social media that focus on engagement, interactivity and intent. One great example is a company called Nuconomy, which provides new tools to understand how interactivity drives intent and sales.
As in our story, when the little engine scaled over the hill, it gleefully said "I thought I could, I thought I could." Perhaps 2010 will be the year when the social media is able to say the same.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judy Shapiro is senior VP at Paltalk and has held senior marketing positions at Comodo, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Bell Labs. Her blog, Trench Wars, provides insights on how to create business value on the internet.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Economic Recovery Mirrors Customer Strategy
This is an interesting article that compares and equates the broad economic dynamics of the past year with that companies in how they deliver to their customers...
"There was a shattering of confidence and no trust" within the global banking sector. If a lack of confidence and trust brought the world's economies to their knees, imagine how a lack of customer confidence and trust can impact a company. "Once confidence goes, you're in a terrible position because you don't know how far down it will go," added Gerard Lyons, Ph.D., chief economist at Britain's Standard Chartered Bank. He was referring to national economies, but he may as well have been speaking to a room full of customer executives.
1to1 Weekly
Date: 11/09/2009
Issue: November 9, 2009
The Economic Recovery Mirrors Customer Strategy
Global economic recovery and customer-focused business strategy have a lot in common.
These days, when economists get together, the conversation usually isn't pretty. The Great Recession this past year hit almost every industrialized nation, and then some. At last week's Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) conference, however, leading economists framed what they think will be a global recovery in a way that mirrors customer-centric strategy.
The recession has two overarching causes, according to Joseph Quinlan, managing director and chief market strategist at Bank of America's Global Wealth and Investment Management division. "There was a shattering of confidence and no trust" within the global banking sector, he said. If a lack of confidence and trust brought the world's economies to their knees, imagine how a lack of customer confidence and trust can impact a company. "Once confidence goes, you're in a terrible position because you don't know how far down it will go," added Gerard Lyons, Ph.D., chief economist at Britain's Standard Chartered Bank. He was referring to national economies, but he may as well have been speaking to a room full of customer executives.
As the recovery begins, the tactics and strategies being discussed sounded a lot like what you would find in a customer strategy playbook. "We are seeing the first flickering signs of recovery," said David Hale, a global economist at Hale Advisors, referring to slightly positive numbers around housing starts, consumer confidence, and the loosening of credit by banks. However, we've got a long way to go, he said, and there is still rampant unemployment and uncertainty.
One positive outcome of the recession, Hale noted, was that as a consequence of layoffs in the U.S. there has been a gain in productivity compared to other nations that did not eliminate as many jobs. "U.S. businesses will enter 2010 ten to 15 percent more competitive than Japan or Germany," he told the PBLS audience. "This puts us in a good position for export growth."
Growth in exports is akin to a strong customer acquisition and retention plan: Who are we going to export U.S. goods and services to, and will they buy? Lyons said that within the past decade more people in the world have emerged from poverty, creating a new middle class in China, India, and other parts of the world. As potential customer bases expand, nations will have to understand the needs of these new consumers to deliver the right products and grow share-of-wallet in these emerging markets. "Countries with the ability to adapt and change will be successful," Lyons said.
The invisible versus the visible handIt's almost impossible to get a group of economists together without someone bringing up Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. And the PBLS event was no different. During the conclave Lyons pointed out that Smith's term "the invisible hand," which describes the free market, doesn't tell the whole story. He explained that Smith also defined a "visible hand" – morality and ethics. "People talk about the power of the invisible hand, but not the visible," Lyons said. "The financial sector has lost that."
This is another direct reflection of customer-centric thinking. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., discuss in their latest book, Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, a company that does not act in the best interests of its customers shouldn't operate a business at all. Acting in customers' best interest is necessary to create an internal corporate culture that encourages morality and ethics in all business dealings. Trust and transparency, effective employee engagement, and the balance of short- and long-term strategy are the foundation of a successful customer-focused organization, they write. It's also the foundation for a successful global economy. "We need to get some morality and ethics back in the system and focus on the long-term opportunity," Lyons said.
"There was a shattering of confidence and no trust" within the global banking sector. If a lack of confidence and trust brought the world's economies to their knees, imagine how a lack of customer confidence and trust can impact a company. "Once confidence goes, you're in a terrible position because you don't know how far down it will go," added Gerard Lyons, Ph.D., chief economist at Britain's Standard Chartered Bank. He was referring to national economies, but he may as well have been speaking to a room full of customer executives.
1to1 Weekly
Date: 11/09/2009
Issue: November 9, 2009
The Economic Recovery Mirrors Customer Strategy
Global economic recovery and customer-focused business strategy have a lot in common.
These days, when economists get together, the conversation usually isn't pretty. The Great Recession this past year hit almost every industrialized nation, and then some. At last week's Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) conference, however, leading economists framed what they think will be a global recovery in a way that mirrors customer-centric strategy.
The recession has two overarching causes, according to Joseph Quinlan, managing director and chief market strategist at Bank of America's Global Wealth and Investment Management division. "There was a shattering of confidence and no trust" within the global banking sector, he said. If a lack of confidence and trust brought the world's economies to their knees, imagine how a lack of customer confidence and trust can impact a company. "Once confidence goes, you're in a terrible position because you don't know how far down it will go," added Gerard Lyons, Ph.D., chief economist at Britain's Standard Chartered Bank. He was referring to national economies, but he may as well have been speaking to a room full of customer executives.
As the recovery begins, the tactics and strategies being discussed sounded a lot like what you would find in a customer strategy playbook. "We are seeing the first flickering signs of recovery," said David Hale, a global economist at Hale Advisors, referring to slightly positive numbers around housing starts, consumer confidence, and the loosening of credit by banks. However, we've got a long way to go, he said, and there is still rampant unemployment and uncertainty.
One positive outcome of the recession, Hale noted, was that as a consequence of layoffs in the U.S. there has been a gain in productivity compared to other nations that did not eliminate as many jobs. "U.S. businesses will enter 2010 ten to 15 percent more competitive than Japan or Germany," he told the PBLS audience. "This puts us in a good position for export growth."
Growth in exports is akin to a strong customer acquisition and retention plan: Who are we going to export U.S. goods and services to, and will they buy? Lyons said that within the past decade more people in the world have emerged from poverty, creating a new middle class in China, India, and other parts of the world. As potential customer bases expand, nations will have to understand the needs of these new consumers to deliver the right products and grow share-of-wallet in these emerging markets. "Countries with the ability to adapt and change will be successful," Lyons said.
The invisible versus the visible handIt's almost impossible to get a group of economists together without someone bringing up Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. And the PBLS event was no different. During the conclave Lyons pointed out that Smith's term "the invisible hand," which describes the free market, doesn't tell the whole story. He explained that Smith also defined a "visible hand" – morality and ethics. "People talk about the power of the invisible hand, but not the visible," Lyons said. "The financial sector has lost that."
This is another direct reflection of customer-centric thinking. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., discuss in their latest book, Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, a company that does not act in the best interests of its customers shouldn't operate a business at all. Acting in customers' best interest is necessary to create an internal corporate culture that encourages morality and ethics in all business dealings. Trust and transparency, effective employee engagement, and the balance of short- and long-term strategy are the foundation of a successful customer-focused organization, they write. It's also the foundation for a successful global economy. "We need to get some morality and ethics back in the system and focus on the long-term opportunity," Lyons said.
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