Find the latest insights, trends, and topics on B2B and healthcare marketing.
What makes for a strong impression in the market? Tech brands have built a three dimensional strategy that, when used, can help give their company an advantage with customer brand loyalty. We’ll explore how the B2B brands that are using a strong, trustworthy and emotive brand voice find that they, too, are at more of an advantage.
Whether you realize it or not, your company has an employment brand — the perception your employees and prospective hires have of what it’s like to work at your company. Your employment brand is the first impression you make on potential employees. It’s the expectations you set for new hires. And it’s the reason that your most valuable employees decide to either stay with you or leave for ostensibly greener pastures.
Too many companies fail to take an active role in shaping their employment brand. They allow it to be shaped by things such as word-of-mouth of current and former employees, customer interactions with staff and media coverage of the company, whether employment-related or not.
Working to shape your employment brand is critical to attracting and retaining your ideal employees — the ones you have deemed critical to your success. Fortune Magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For reads like a rundown of industry leaders such as Google, Starbucks Coffee, Aflac, SC Johnson, Network Appliance and Wegmans Food Markets. These companies aren’t great employers just because they’re at the forefront of their markets. Their success is due in great part to their ability to hire and keep the right people.
In addition to the recruitment and retention benefits, here are some additional reasons for taking an active role in shaping your company’s employment brand:
Building your employment brand has an impact that reaches far beyond recruitment and retention. Studies have shown correlations between a strong employment brand and:
These benefits are tied in some way to having the “right fit” employees at your company and having employees who are committed to the success of your business. Developing an effective employment brand has a direct effect on these factors.
A strong employment brand positions you as an “employer of choice” by highlighting how you address the needs of prospective hires better than your competition. Time and again, studies show that salary is not the most important factor when people are deciding where to work. Instead, they are looking for which workplace offers the best “value” — the group of benefits that address their specific needs.
Being perceived as having a better employer value is supported by the prospective employee’s educated perception of what you offer. A fully understood and well-articulated employment brand keeps the focus on overall value, not just salary. In the talent acquisition arena, winning margins are often small. The winners are usually those who are perceived by their targets as delivering the best sustained value.
A properly developed employment brand will include messaging that convincingly communicates the benefits and value that you offer to prospective hires. Developing your HR and talent acquisition collateral and tactics around your employment brand and its related messages allows you to focus your resources and communicate more effectively. This will aid in getting more out of every HR dollar you spend on recruitment and retention.
A strong employment brand also enhances employee retention, reducing the need to recruit to fill vacated positions and allowing you to stretch your HR budgets further.
Saleforce’s Instagram feed highlights everything from the company’s six month maternity leave program to a predilection for cupcakes.
Your employment brand faces both outward (to prospective hires) and inward (to your current employees). A well-defined employment brand aligns employee and management expectations so that promises made during the hiring process are delivered. This continuity is critical to retaining your employees and fostering a more productive work environment. Disconnects between expectations set before accepting a job and the actual employment experience can have a significant effect on employee morale and retention rates.
Good employment brands complement, leverage and align with the power of their companies’ corporate brands. In many ways, your employment brand is the employee manifestation of your company brand. It helps set expectations for how employees should represent your company and how customers should be treated. A strong employment brand helps employees commit to your business and its mission by clearly laying out the value they receive from their place of work.
The employment brand is just one aspect — although typically the most overlooked piece — of corporate branding. A strong employment brand, while enhancing recruitment and retention efforts, brings companies benefits that reach beyond the HR function. It should be a part of every corporate branding effort.
Want help building a more loyal customer base for your company? Contact Bob Murphy at 312.487.3603 now or visit us online at moveo.com.
The most successful companies understand that if employees are aligned with the brand strategy — including the brand promise — they’ll express it more consistently. Powerhouse companies like GE and Apple have internalized this idea, and have reaped the benefits of a consistent brand expression delivered at every touch point. In our white paper, “Five Steps to Building a Strong Internal Brand,” you’ll discover the five keys to building a successful internal brand. Read it now!
Bob Murphy, Movéo Managing Partner
Now more than ever, companies are asking themselves tough questions — like how loyal are their customers? And how likely are they to be interested in competitive products or services?
The answers to these two questions and how you address them can literally be worth millions.
The issue of customer loyalty is frequently discussed in the B2C arena, but not nearly enough in the B2B sector. However, when it comes to loyalty, the stakes are just as high in B2B — if not higher. In his book, The Loyalty Effect, Fred Reichheld writes that a 5% improvement in customer retention rates will yield a 25% to 100% increase in profits, across a wide range of industries.
Two recent studies conducted by Movéo Integrated Branding targeted B2B audiences that included specifiers and purchasing managers. In total, the studies queried over 1,300 respondents from over 1,000 companies, in the U.S. and across Europe.
Both studies included the following questions:
The findings included an interesting paradox: Between 36% and 51% of respondents indicated they were loyal to the brand(s) they currently used, yet between 37% and 56% indicated they would be interested in trying a new brand. On the positive side, this means a relatively large percentage of your prospective customers are likely to be receptive to your marketing and sales efforts. Unfortunately, it also means a relatively large percentage of your existing customers are open to appeals from your competition.
So how can you increase the loyalty of your customer base, while decreasing the likelihood they will be “poached” by competitors? The most important step is to better gauge their loyalty — is it “hard” or “soft”? And while input from your sales team will be very valuable here, there is no substitute for the data that can be gathered via primary research.
Did you know?
Research conducted by the Harvard Business Review indicates that companies in the U.S. lose nearly 50% of their customers every five years. The study concludes that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by as much as 100%.
Recent trends suggest that the costs associated with acquiring a new customer are five to six times what it takes to generate an equal amount of new business from an existing customer.
During a recession, investing in research may be seen by some as a luxury. However, it’s actually one of the best investments a company can make. A specifier’s/buyer’s mindset is most likely different today than it was even a few short months ago. While research insights can help you continue customer relationships, “customer satisfaction” can be a very nebulous concept. “Satisfied” does not mean they intend to keep buying — behavior is a better measure of this. Ask your customers whether they intend to buy from you again and why or why not. Ask them what you can improve. Ask them if they would refer you to a colleague (we’re strong proponents of the Net Promoter Score™). Answers to these types of questions can help you create a “Loyalty Index” that you can compare to the rest of your industry. This, in turn, lets you modify your marketing strategy accordingly. How? If you discover, for example, that you have “soft” loyalty, you could focus your efforts on retention by:
One last word: To truly build a solid core of loyal customers, a company needs the involvement of more than just marketing and sales. It needs to be an effort that encompasses teams across the enterprise, including HR. It’s no coincidence that companies who have the most loyal customers, also have the best employees.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
Want help building a more loyal customer base for your company? Contact Bob Murphy at 312.487.3603 now or visit us online at moveo.com.
In an effort to better understand their customers, B2B marketers invest significantly in customer satisfaction studies. While there are many methodologies, there’s just one “it” metric that has become the new rallying cry in many B2B boardrooms — the Net Promoter Score (NPS(R)). In our white paper, “A Customer Survey That Matters in the B2B Boardroom,” we explain why NPS is such a powerful tool, and why you should harness it for your business.
B2B content marketing has evolved from a niche area of interest to an industry-wide phenomenon. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 92% of B2B marketers use some degree of content marketing to reach their customers. However, widespread adoption does not equal widespread mastery. I set out to identify some workable laws around content, so that marketers could systematize and optimize their operations.
These laws will not address every eventuality a business might face. Nor should they be thought of as eternal, as the industry continues to evolve. However, B2B content marketing has gained enough momentum — and demonstrated enough consistent challenges — to justify these laws as a guide for more effective marketing.
I am a baseball fan, and more specifically, a Chicago Cubs fan. I read several blogs on the team on a daily basis, but a short time ago, I noticed that I always read these blogs in the same order. I started to wonder why that was. All of them are well written and one of them, which had now been relegated to last on my reading list, was the first one I had found. Then I came upon the answer — the blogs that had the most up-to-the-minute content were the ones I read first. This brings us to the first Law of Content:
For the “consuming connected,” there is now more information to read, watch, analyze and share than at any time in history. Yet, for many, simply consuming these vast tides of information is not enough. We now place a very high premium on the currency of information.
Experience has shown that with many types of communication — social media being the foremost example — audience engagement is increased when content is filled with new (preferably as close to real time as possible) commentary and context. This is especially true with web content, as frequently or recently updated pages are more likely to receive high SEO rankings. Even content that is written or produced at length (e.g., white papers, collateral, videos) is not immune to the effects of this phenomenon. While people will always appreciate the effort that goes into this “slow content,” they will increasingly seek out the latest — even if it sometimes comes at the expense of the greatest.
It might have to do with our physical make-up as much as anything else. A recent study shows that our brains change their hardwiring according to our behavior, eventually accommodating that behavior and making it less under the control of our conscious free will. * The availability of fresh content may actually enhance the desire for it, giving the phrase “information junkie” a literal meaning.
The implications of this law for content producers are significant — content is perishable, and marketers are increasingly aware of it. As a joint report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs reveals, 56% of marketers increased their content creation spending over the past 12 months. The need to scale up content creation is likely to increase still further as the rate of content churn rises.
Entropy, a law used in the study of thermodynamics, has found application in a number of other fields as well. This is because it loosely describes something we all know by casual observation: The amount of chaos in a system tends to increase with the complexity of the system. This holds true for the second Law of Content as well:
When your organization was eking out a couple white papers a year, the need for a content plan — much less a content strategy — was nonexistent. Yet, today content is the fuel of the marketing engine. Everything from nurture marketing programs to search engine optimization to social media demand a steady supply of it. With so much content around, it is more important than ever to manage its collective presentation in ways that create meaning. This calls for a documented content strategy — something 63% of businesses don’t currently have, according to the Content Marketing Institute. And it calls for a new skill set — the skill set of a curator.
To return to our science example, a curator is an “information chemist.” He or she must strategically develop, select and place content in the appropriate vehicles, in the appropriate environments, in order to engage the audience, convey a message or inspire action.
The majority of organizations are set up to sell products and services, not to manage the production and delivery of a wide array of editorial material. This can result in creating content for content’s sake, with little alignment with the strategic interests of the organization. In other cases, words, images, audio and video can be shoehorned into vehicles that weren’t truly designed with the real-world content requirements of the audience in mind. When these things happen, the audience can’t find what it’s searching for, or worse, doesn’t value what it finds. Either of these eventualities can tarnish the very brand the content was meant to burnish.
Organizations need to take a hard look in the mirror. If they don’t have a rigorously documented content strategy and the curatorial capability to execute it on staff, they need to hire or outsource that capability — and before they execute their next wave of content.
Today, content is the fuel of the marketing engine.
There is a world of difference between a carefully cultivated, well-researched news outlet and a minimally fact-checked blog — and consumers know this. Institutions that produce quality information have carefully cultivated reputations that set them apart from their less-reputable counterparts. This suggests the third Law of Content:
Everyone has heard the expression, “Opinions are like (fill in the body part), everyone’s got one.” And so it is with viewpoints on everything from where whole industries are heading to why product “A” is better than product “B.” The internet has been a great equalizer, enabling almost any person or organization to publish content. But that doesn’t mean all content is equally good. In fact, the vast majority of it is far less than that.
I recall a video from a few years back in which one of the characters deadpans the line, “So basically I thought the best approach would be to repeat exactly what you told me on the first call and shuffle the words around a bit.” This statement summarizes much of the content on the Internet — unoriginal and devoid of critical thought. Bad content can be more than uninformative; it can be insidious or frankly dangerous. Lots of online material is now produced at “content farms,” companies that employ large numbers of writers to generate content designed specifically to be ranked highly by search engines. While this content might pass muster with indexing technologies and algorithms, the discerning reader can usually spot it a mile away. What’s more, factually incorrect or deliberately misleading content continues to proliferate, which means reliable content producers must work harder to cut through the noise.
As a result of these trends, consumers will increasingly rely on the sponsor of content as a shorthand for its quality. The implication for content producers? Sharing useful information can help build credibility and trust, but only a strong brand will ensure that your content is both consumed and valued.
The stand-alone, paper resume is no longer the uncontested king of job searches. Today, job-seekers develop online portfolios, answer employer submitted questions via an automated phone system, or even upload videos of themselves explaining their background and expertise. The experience becomes much richer than we would have thought possible a decade ago. This brings us to the fourth Law of Content:
Increases in bandwidth, processing power and storage do not mean the written word is in immediate danger of losing its seat at the content table, but it clearly has less elbow room than ever before. “Share of eyeballs” for richer content is growing, which makes sense given that motion and sound can make for a more informative or engaging user experience.
Growth in online video consumption, arguably the highest form of content production value now available, has been increasing rapidly for some time.
The implications of this law for content producers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the content that is produced will be more involving, increasing message penetration and the likelihood of further brand engagement. On the other hand, producing such content will be more time consuming and resource intensive (e.g., video equipment, editing software, skilled creatives, etc.) than the written word. This means more and more content will need to be outsourced, at least for those organizations that have not made the capital expenditures to make such production possible in house.
According to Zazzle Media, 65% of marketers find it a major challenge to consistently produce content that engages prospects and customers. This percentage will likely go up as technology — and the production value of content — continue to advance.
Growth in online video consumption, arguably the highest form of content production value now available, has been increasing rapidly for some time.
What is the difference between a report from Frost & Sullivan that costs $6,000, and a report on the same topic that is available in exchange for an email address? Clearly, the anticipated value of the content. Yet, in either case, content can be viewed as the linchpin of a quid-pro-quo transaction. This gives rise to the fifth Law of Content:
This law has significant implications for the kind of content that is created by content producers. “Thought leadership” has been defined by Gartner as “the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.” Central to this definition is the expectation of exchange — in a best-case scenario, a prospect may become a customer after being impressed with some intellectual capital; in a worstcase scenario, a prospect grants the content producer permission to contact them in the future with the implicit understanding that they may be interested in receiving additional content. Businesses are increasingly incorporating thought leadership into their marketing mixes, because C-Suite executives demand it. Edelman reports that 58% of decision-makers spend at least an hour a week reading thought leadership, up 8% from just a year ago.
The right content can indeed be a manageable tool to drive business, but getting it “right” requires strategy. Industry issues must be carefully aligned with organizational capabilities, and both must be looked at through a brand/positioning lens. If this all sounds beyond the talents of the wordsmiths you employ, you are in need of a good content strategist. The upfront costs for these services may be more, but the demand for higher value content downstream will make it all worthwhile.
Other laws may be added or adapted as content marketing continues to evolve, but one thing remains certain: Content marketing represents a tremendous opportunity for brands and brand building. To take full advantage of this opportunity, many organizations will need to stop thinking about content as simply grist for communication and view it in its proper light — as a brand asset worthy of strategy, planning and resource allocation.
*Learning-Induced Gray-Matter Plasticity by Janina Boyke, Joenna Driemeyer, Christian Gaser, Christian Büchel, and Arne May
Movéo is a demand generation agency uniquely built to help its clients measurably improve business performance. We focus on three interdependent drivers of growth — branding, lead generation, and customer engagement — to attract, secure, and retain customers for our clients.
I feel your pain.
This phrase, which quickly became a punch line in late-night television monologues after it was delivered by then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, still finds occasional use today.
Used to express empathy, or more precisely, the “intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings,thoughts or attitudes of another,”(1) it may soon be finding application in a very different context — the branding world. Specifically, I would argue that “Brand Empathy” is the next logical step in the evolution of business-to- business (B2B) brands.
In order to explain this idea, it is necessary to go back a few years — remarkably few — and take a closer look at the role of brands in the B2B selling environment.
B2B sales have always been thought of primarily as “considered purchases” — that is, often complex, high- ticket, high-risk offerings (e.g., enterprise software or jet engines) that are purchased only after great scrutiny. The behavior of both buyers and sellers is significantly different in the B2B sales environment. This is especially true in three areas:
Companies have historically taken the approach that it is the role of branding to create awareness of and preference for a company’s products/services in the evaluation and recommendation stages, since that is where efforts were likely to have the greatest influence (Figure 1).
Over half the buying process is completed before a buyer ever engages with a vendor or a sales rep.
51% of tech buyers said they are influenced by at least one social network when considering business purchases.
To no one’s surprise, the Internet has impacted this process in no small way. For years, it was the job of the B2B buyer to weigh the merits of competing brand claims, tolerating whatever bias was inherent in these claims. Google, blogs, Twitter and discussion forums have turned this process on its head. Today, it is the job of the buyer to compare product/service information (often based on first-hand experiences) published by disinterested third parties (often industry peers) against brand claims. In fact, a recent study shows that 51% of tech buyers said they are influenced by at least one social network when considering business purchases. Since there is a perceived lack of bias in this “socialized” information, there has been an understandable loss of brand influence at stages of the process where it once was considerable. Like in online dating, a brand can now be eliminated before it has had a chance to even knock on the door with bouquet in hand. In fact, according to one study, more than 50% of the buying process is completed before a buyer ever engages with a vendor or a sales rep.
Is branding less important now as a result of these changes? Not by a long shot. A loss of influence in one part of the process can be more than offset by gaining influence in another, formerly neglected part: Engaging buyers before they fully enter the buying process.
Think about it. B2B buyers are first out to solve a problem or fulfill an unmet business need – not to buy a product or service. This type of thinking usually starts a long time (months? years?) before vendor evaluation begins. What if your brand could get in early, at a stage where its influence may be much higher than you ever expected? The secret to doing this is creating “Brand Empathy” – the perception that your company deeply understands and cares about a prospect’s business, its challenges/needs and the marketplace in which it operates — in a way that creates a more favorable environment for your brand downstream.
Brand empathy:
The perception that your company and cares about a prospect’s business, its challenges/needs and the marketplace in which it operates
Why is this such an important strategy? Three reasons:
Most B2B customers know all too well what ails them. They’re just suspect of the cure – too many different doctors handing out prescriptions without taking note of symptoms! Brand Empathy is about reversing this order to the benefit of your brand.
In Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, business strategist Dev Patnaik provides a number of cases of how great companies around the world benefit from building a culture of empathy for the people they serve. One example he cited was IBM. When Lou Gerstner became CEO in the 1990s, the company was in a state of serious decline. One of the measures he took to turn things around was “Operation Bear Hug,” a program that involved sending out Big Blue’s top managers to meet personally with customers. They were instructed not to try to sell anything at these meetings, but instead, to listen to customer challenges and then to think about how IBM might help.
Operation Bear Hug was essentially an attempt to change the culture of a company known at that time more for its arrogance than its empathy. By the author’s account, it worked:
Managers discovered that large corporate clients were fascinated by the Internet, but unclear about what they should do about it. Beyond selling product, IBM realized that it could make a major impact by providing the infrastructure needed to help large enterprises leverage the power of the Web. The resulting e-business initiative was wildly successful and helped put IBM on the path to long-term growth.
In Patnaik’s view, when people inside a company develop a shared sense of what’s going on with their customers, it can serve as a powerful driver for business growth – as in the case of IBM discovering new opportunities for innovation. By making empathy an aspect of brand strategy, however, companies can leverage this dynamic externally in ways that will also lead to economic benefit by creating a more favorable perception of a company in the minds of its customers and prospects early in the purchase process (figure 2).
Even if the marketplace believes your company empathizes with its challenges, you’re only halfway there. The next hurdle is to convince buyers that your way of attacking their problems is superior to that of your competitors. If your customers and prospects are philosophically aligned with your approach, approving a P.O. for the purchase of your solution will not lag far behind.
vAuto, a company that markets inventory management software to automotive dealerships, has been very successful in employing this strategy. The company has displayed a profound understanding of a problem automobile dealers across the country face – the Internet hurting their used car business by giving consumers price transparency in their local market. Instead of just acknowledging this problem and marketing its software as a “better mousetrap” (as its competitors do), vAuto sells a philosophy – Velocity Management. This philosophy is based on three core principles:
According to vAuto, successful implementation of its approach can transform dealerships into operations that will thrive in today’s used car marketplace. Naturally, vAuto’s software delivers everything a dealer needs to implement its approach, but that’s almost besides the point – once a dealership buys into its Velocity philosophy, the rest is a fait accompli.
Brand Empathy shares some characteristics with what has been known for years as “thought leadership marketing.” Take this definition by Gartner:
Thought leadership centers on earning trust and credibility. Thought leaders get noticed by offering something different – information, insights and ideas, for instance. Thought leadership positions you and your company as an industry authority, resource and trusted advisor by establishing your reputation as a generous contributor to your industry.**
Thought leadership, however, has a somewhat different goal than Brand Empathy: To position a company as an industry visionary whose opinions become highly respected and sought after. While this is a worthwhile objective to be sure, Brand Empathy is about earning customer trust through a shared recognition of their problems. In other words, it is achieved not by first showcasing your expertise, but by listening and then engaging in conversations that are far bigger. It’s about convincing customers and prospects you care about what they are up against, not just how smart you are.
One of Movéo’s clients, Westex, is a manufacturer of flame resistant fabric sold to garment manufacturers. The protective clothing made by Westex’s customers is worn by electrical workers at risk of serious injury or death if involved in arc flash explosions. One of the important issues surrounding the use of flame resistant clothing is compliance – many workers won’t wear it because they mistakenly believe it to be uncomfortable or even unnecessary. Battling this perception is paramount for garment makers, and not only for the human toll involved – if such clothing is not used, it is often not bought.
For years, Westex has hosted live arc flash demonstrations and educational seminars attended primarily by companies with employees at risk. This unique annual event – put on free of charge, but produced at considerable expense by Westex at an independent testing facility – is intended to promote greater understanding of arc flash hazards in the hope that companies will better be able to educate their workers.
While Westex obviously benefits if, down the road, one of these companies purchases garments made of its fabrics, the event is not about ringing the cash register. It’s about showing empathy about a serious and still-prevalent industry problem. As a result of this and other activities, the Westex brand is perceived as a highly trusted thought leader on the topic – across the entire sales channel, as well as in standards bodies. However, it is also perceived as a brand that cares enough to put “its money where its mouth is.”
Caveat venditor: Before you start restructuring your brand and marketing program to take advantage of this paradigm, here are a few words of advice:
Brand empathy cannot be bought While you can attempt to influence perceptions through the use of tools and tactics, it is ultimately your prospects and customers who grant you “empathy status.” You need to sincerely wrap your head around their problems and needs before you go to market. This may take research or (gasp!) actually listening to the sales force, who hears about customer problems every day.
Brand empathy should not be sold A recent post on the Harvard Business Review Blog talks about “gift economies” – ones where value is not determined by supply and demand, but from the relationship between the giver and receiver and its meaning in the community.(3) Taking that as a cue, demonstrating Brand Empathy should not involve a financial transaction. By giving away something for nothing – valued thought leadership, for instance – you build trust. Yes, you can ask for their contact information, just not their money.
Brand empathy does not mean brand apathy For the foreseeable future, B2B marketing will continue to involve a mix of compelling content that is aligned with all parts of the buying process. Just because the influence of this content may not be what it once was in certain stages does not mean it is not needed or valued anymore by anyone.
Here are a series of other practical steps you can take to introduce Brand Empathy into your program:
Try your own version of “Operation Bear Hug.” Remember not to try to sell anything at these customer meetings – other than the fact that your company cares enough to sit back and listen.
Acknowledge your customers’ challenges consistently — don’t write a single white paper or blog post and check Brand Empathy off your “to do” list.
Review your content strategy. Today, how much of it is about your solution vs. customer pain and your approach to solving it? Try “inverting the pyramid” (Figure 3).
Be down-to-earth and authentic in communications — customers and prospects can spot a phony a mile away.
Get the sales force on board. Introducing customer pain/need early in a presentation has long been recommended by experts on persuasion (e.g., Monroe’s Motivated Sequence).
Be confident in your solution, but don’t be a know-it-all. It’s OK to acknowledge there may be other approaches out there, just explain why your company took the path it did.
Monitor social media. If customer problems are being talked about as you would talk about them, your efforts may be paying off.
“Bring it back to them.” The moves your company makes – a new product, an acquisition, a new CEO – should always be somehow traceable to your customers’ best interests.
Before presenting your solution, never assume everyone is operating from the same point of reference or knowledge base.
Look for opportunities to be collaborative. Offer to test, learn and solve things with your customers – not just for them.
In the future, exhibiting Brand Empathy will become an increasingly important way for B2B brands to earn business. Does creating it have to be a monumental task? For companies that have already taken the time to appreciate the world through the prism of their customers, perhaps not. For other companies, it very well might be. To the latter, all I can say is “I feel your pain.”
Redefining what an “advertising agency” can be, Movéo uses data-driven insight to help business-to-business and healthcare brands quantifiably improve marketing performance. For more information, visit moveo.com
Unfortunately, simply knowing what the cause of this acceleration is does not make it any less astonishing — or easier to deal with. In fact, we would argue that the dizzying pace of change in our field poses the greatest single threat to its health. This paper is about this threat — and what you can do to minimize it.
Three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering something extraordinary. While conducting observations on the universe, they confirmed that it was indeed expanding, as had been theorized, but (to their astonishment) at an accelerating rate. Unable to determine why, they attributed this phenomenon to a previously unknown force called dark energy.
Like the universe, modern marketing is also expanding at an accelerating rate. In this case, however, the force behind it is no mystery — it’s technology.
Think about it. From the moment you hear about a new tool, technology or trend, the clock starts running. As marketers, we’re expected to figure out what it is, evaluate its appropriateness for our organizations, vet competitive solutions, integrate it with our IT infrastructure, begin executing it flawlessly and stand ready to prove why it is such a great investment. Oh, and could you have that on my desk by Monday morning?
Multiply this by the seemingly daily emergence of new applications of technology and concepts (all of which promise to be game-changing), and you have something akin to “paralysis through analysis.” Instead of the field of marketing being comprised of people who have had time to develop expertise and judiciously act on their knowledge [figure 1], it is increasingly populated by perpetual novices — people so busy trying to learn the next new thing that they can’t master anything [figure 2].
While this predicament hasn’t yet been given significant attention, we believe there is tacit recognition of its existence. Take, for example, this recent debate motion found on the Economist website:
“Are there better ways to manage the vast amounts of information assaulting users on a daily basis? What is the right balance between new tools and information streams, on the one hand, and minimizing the impact of information overload on the other? Are people losing their ability to reflect rather than just react?”
From what we’ve seen, most marketers are trying to cope with the breakneck pace of change by simply running faster. Yet, the net effect of this is a loss of marketing effectiveness. Why?
While the first two are bad enough, this last point is especially insidious. Mayur Gupta, Global Head of Marketing Technology for Kimberly-Clark, describes it this way: “I think many marketing organizations are sucking things in like a vacuum — a tendency to pick up every shiny object out there. Big data, mobile first, predictive modeling, and so on. The challenge is a lack of connected thinking that brings all these different pieces together in a cohesive and well-knit machinery.”
So what can be done? Clearly, the answer is not taking things slower — everyone from our customers to the C-suite simply will not allow that. Perhaps you can wait it out? After all, the rapid rate of change could be an “acute” rather than a “chronic” condition of the current environment. If it is the former, the rate of innovation will return in the near future to a more manageable pace. That’s a bad bet to take. What we believe to be far more likely is that a constant state of disruption is the “new norm.” If that is the case, an entirely different type of behavioral approach will be needed to thrive in such an environment.
Take, for example, Big Data, a trend that is certainly top-of-mind for all marketers. As a recent IBM survey quoted one CMO (echoing the sentiments of most), “At this moment, I don’t know how our marketing department will cope with the expected data explosion.” This is understandable — the volume and variety of data available today is staggering. Yet, perhaps the data itself is not the problem — it’s how companies are approaching it. A recent study by the CMO Council and SAS found a lack of CMO/CIO alignment, rigid silos, unclear responsibilities and a lack of leadership all impeding organizations from using Big Data to its full potential. The cause of the problem in this case, then, is not the “Bigness” of the data, but rather, the “Bigness” of the organizational barriers to dealing with it.
These organizational barriers are often the product of individual behaviors. As we have already suggested, how employees gain job knowledge and how they use that knowledge to make accurate judgments on the job can be compromised by the perpetual novice syndrome.
We would argue that the cycle that leads to being a perpetual novice is one of maladaptation — the accumulation of behaviors that, while reasonable at one time, have become more of a hindrance as change accelerates around us.
The dilemma we’ve described may seem intractable on its face — the world will not slow down and apparently, we cannot speed up enough to catch it. In light of this, the only real answer is to heighten our ability to deal with hyper-change by perceptually slowing IT DOWN to a conceivable rate — think Neo IN THE MATRIX, adroitly dodging bullets. There are several strategies that come to mind that, in combination, would prove valuable in doing this:
Accepting accelerated change
According to Buddhist belief, because all things are constantly in a state of flux, attachment to them becomes a cause for future suffering. And so it is with what we think we know about marketing. Don’t get bogged down in the way you used to do things — three- to five-year high-level marketing plans, divided into 12-month sections and based on strict schedules. Such approaches may have worked well in the past, but they are far too rigid for today. Programs can have broad contours, but it’s better to think in terms of weeks — not years. Also, forget about having perfect information before you act. Today, such perfection comes with a high price — prospects that are sucked up by aggressive competitors, or the loss of coveted “first-mover” status. Besides, as Malcolm Gladwell has noted, there are times “when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.”
Decoding accelerated change
To avoid being spotted by an enemy, military aircraft can spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminum called chaff, which either appears as a cluster of secondary targets on a radar screen or swamps the screen entirely. Companies today must be able to see which new trends and technologies should be targeted by their organizations and which are “marketing chaff.” Do you have a process for identifying salience (e.g., appropriateness to your organization) of oncoming change? A simple “gut check” may have sufficed at one time, but something more formal is in order now. Try developing strategic filters with which to review new trends and technology — long-term impact vs. short-term impact, highly aligned with business strategy vs. less aligned, etc. The better your vetting process, the more focused you can be on what matters most.
Processing accelerated change
A distinction needs to be drawn between information marketers get bombarded with everyday and information they should actually use. In fact, the processing overload that fuels perceptual novice syndrome can, in many cases, be viewed as “skeptical underload” — the problem is not so much the speed and volume of information, but our difficulty discerning bias in that information if we are not authorities on a certain subject. In an era of accelerated change, it is critical to not lose your “North Star” — the precepts that govern good marketing. These should serve as a litmus test when you are engulfed in the hype of a new tool, social media gateway or methodology. Yes, look closely at harnessing the advantages of the next new thing, but always keep one eye on the fundamentals. For example, no matter how cool thing “x” seems, you
ultimately need to build trust-based relationships with your customers. Will it help you do that?
The emergence of more and more sophisticated tools, technologies and channels separated by shorter and shorter time intervals is not something we can control.
What we can control is how well we adapt to such an environment. Increasingly, this will be the key determinant of whether we realize a positive return on acceleration.
Movéo is a demand generation agency uniquely built to help its clients measurably improve business performance. We focus on three interdependent drivers of growth — branding, lead generation, and customer acquisition — to attract, secure, and retain customers for our clients.
Few words in the English language have inspired as many definitions as the word “brand.”
To quote a recent author on the topic, “ask someone to define ‘brand’ and you get a deep and confident inhale followed by a few words of preamble, starting with one that indicates the coming statement will be replete with logic and certitude, and continuing with a few words that restates the question as a declaration, ‘Well, brand is a!’ quickly followed by some sputtering that ends up in a verbal morass of conflicting descriptions.” 1
If that remark may be something of an exaggeration, it is a slight one. That’s why it’s more important to understand what a brand does — particularly a strong brand — than to know what one is. So, rather than adding to “the morass,” this paper will forgo any attempt at definition and instead opt for description; specifically 10 simple truths about strong brands.
…it’s more important to understand what a brand does — particularly a strong brand — than to know what one is.
Simple Truth # 1
In 2011, Netflix really messed up. The company informed customers that it was spinning off its popular DVD rental operations and raising prices 60 percent. In short order, Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers and its stock price dropped 77 percent.
The company quickly reversed course. In mid-2013, Netflix’s stock hit a 52-week high and was up 213 percent over the previous year. Apparently, all had been forgiven.
And this is my point.
Strong brands can weather storms that would quickly send the customers of weaker brands into the welcoming arms of competitors. They can do this because they build up reservoirs of goodwill. These reservoirs are not bottomless (as Netflix almost found out), but their depth is a function of a brand’s strength — how well it delivers on its value proposition, how visible it is in the marketplace, how entrenched it’s become in its customers’ lives.
What brand wouldn’t like to know it had a reservoir to dip into if things ever really got hot?
Simple Truth # 2
Today, most every brand has some sort of play in the social space, but often it’s just a hedge. Better to be there than not, right? This betrays a lack of understanding from these brands — not about social media — about themselves.
In 2012, Red Bull had almost $3 billion in sales and controlled 42 percent of the energy drink market. It has built this juggernaut, in part, by becoming a major social publisher. The company knows exactly what its brand means to the audience that devours its “pushing the limits” content on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Instagram every day. Rather than serving as a hedge, Red Bull is “all in” with social. It can make this bet with certainty because it knows who it is.
Like people, not all brands thrive in social environments. Some strong brands can do quite nicely being “wallflowers” — i.e., using their marketing resources in other ways. What’s important is that they are able to zero in on what’s right for them.
After all, anything else may just be bull.
Like people, not all brands thrive in social environments.
Simple Truth # 3
Consumers today are inundated by choice. Being forced to make too many decisions on a daily basis — where to eat, what toothpaste to buy, which cable channel to watch — can add anxiety and stress to our lives.
Whether we, as a culture, have reached something of a saturation point in this regard can be debated. What cannot be is that brands play a role in our decision making.
Researchers have known for some time that people’s psychological state is an important consideration in buying situations. When there is a lack of structure (e.g., due to overwhelming choice) an overall desire for simplicity is enhanced. Consumers in this state tend to narrow their thinking and go with brands that have met or beat their expectations in the past — causing them to be more likely to reject alternatives vying for their consideration.
Now that’s a mouthful, but all it really means is that when we have too many options, we stick with strong brands. It’s that simple.
Simple Truth # 4
I was paging through a business publication a couple years ago and saw an ad that made me do a double take. It was for the Disney Institute, the professional development arm of The Walt Disney Company, which engages organizations in “time-tested best practices, sound methodologies, and real life business lessons that facilitate corporate culture change.”
That’s a long way from spinning giant teacups.
Extensions as far afield as the Disney Institute are typically the province of strong brands. Ralph Lauren (clothing, fragrances, housewares, restaurants) and Virgin (over 400 extensions) are two examples of companies that have successfully leveraged the power of their core brands for this purpose. This is important because up to 80 percent of new products use a brand extension strategy. Companies able to reduce the risk associated with introductions gain a significant competitive advantage.
While brands of lesser magnitude often fail in their efforts to stretch (Hooters Airlines anyone?), strong brands, such as Disney, are able to venture successfully into entirely new areas — without looking Goofy.
Simple Truth # 5
Ever since brands went from being niceties to necessities, companies have become more adept at their dissemination. Now, it seems, every employee can recite the organization’s brand promise backwards.
Yet knowing about the brand in the mailroom is not the same thing as putting it to use in the boardroom. At too many companies, “brand” is just a buzzword given lip service by executive leadership instead of being what it should be — the impetus behind every decision they make. It needs to guide the mission. Be enshrined in the values. Inform strategic planning. Strong brands liberate the brand from marketing dogma and make it the true driver of the business. As a result, their entire organizations move in a unified direction, starting from the top.
These companies realize that getting on the Fortune 500 list requires more than simply crossing “brand” off their to-do list.
Simple Truth # 6
The other day I was Uber disappointed. Uber, for the unacquainted, is an on-demand service that arranges cab or limo transportation through a smart phone app. Ever since I became a customer, I’ve loved how fast and reliable the service was, how easy it was to use, how professional its drivers were — the whole shebang.
It was when I phoned Uber that I had a disconnect — not with the call, with the brand. A voice message notified me that since information can get garbled over the phone, it’s better to just email them with any inquiries. Really? Then why include a phone option at all?
Brands make implicit promises with every positive contact they make. Once a promise has been kept, it creates an expectation that the next one will be too. When a negative “touch” occurs — even when it’s a small detail, it can have an inordinate effect on the overall experience. Strong brands excel in achieving consistency across all touch points — they perfect the “user experience,” in the latest parlance.
Do I really think less of Uber because of one small misstep? Maybe. That’s a tough call. Consumers today are inundated by choice. Being forced to make too many decisions on a daily basis — where to eat, what toothpaste to buy, which cable channel to watch — can add anxiety and stress to our lives.
Simple Truth # 7
When I first received AppleCare, Apple’s product protection plan, I couldn’t help but smile as I opened the austere, but still somehow elegant, box that contained my warranty. Only Apple, it seemed, would deem a simple card important enough to package in such a housing. It was yet another example of just how essential design was to the company largely responsible for elevating our collective sense of it over the past few decades.
Yet Apple did not pioneer design — it only mastered it. Years before, a select group of brands such as IBM and BMW led the way, spreading the gospel of “good design is good business,” to anyone that would listen. Today, companies as varied as IKEA, Starbucks and Pinterest have continued to raise the bar, and design excellence has become for them, as it has for Apple, an inseparable part of their brand experience.
Steve Jobs was right when he said design was the soul of man-made creation. But luckily for all of us who appreciate simplicity, intuitiveness and beauty, it is also the heart of strong brands.
…design excellence has become…an inseparable part of their brand experience.
Simple Truth # 8
The phrase “brand owner” is something of a misnomer. It suggests a certain unaccountability, yet customers are always the ones who have the final say.
With the rise of social media, we are seeing that “final say” work its way up the brand-customer relationship. Today when brands act, they get a reaction right away — participation is now a birthright of purchase.
How that participation is evolving is exciting. From co-creation (the Doritos Super Bowl commercial and Zipcar’s “One Crazy Day” campaign) to crowd sourcing (My Starbucks Idea and Dell Ideastorm) to user production or support (Wikipedia and Mozilla’s Firefox), the factors contributing to brand “co-ownership” will increasingly mean opportunities for customer self-expression, creativity and, overall, a greater voice in the decisions that shape brands.
Don’t get me wrong — strong brands will always need strong owners. Increasingly, though, they’ll need to know when to take a back seat.
Today when brands act, they get a reaction right away…
Simple Truth # 9
“This is one of the saddest days of my life, a sad one for me, for employees, officers, and directors; indeed, it is sad for the American public. Apparently, there is just not the need for our product in today’s scheme of living.”
When Martin Ackerman, president of The Saturday Evening Post, spoke these words in 1969, a brand that had been a weekly staple of American life for 72 years was no more. It, like many others brands before it and since, had failed to remain relevant.
The battle for relevance is one of the most important that can be waged in business. By continually evolving and adapting, strong brands are better able to survive everything from onslaughts by aggressive competitors to sudden shifts in marketplace tastes.
Look at how IBM purposefully transformed itself from a mainframe maker into a systems integrator, or how shrewdly McDonald’s has refined its menus, advertising and store appearance over the years.
Relevance requires renewal.
Simple Truth # 10
When you’ve been in this business a long time, it’s easy to become jaded. This never happens working with strong brands. When “firing on all cylinders,” brands acquire a special patina, a rarefied air that attracts, charms and influences. They pull you into an orbit around them – and keep you there.
The Apples, Cokes and Nikes of the world are often said to have this ineffable quality. Though it’s possible to break down many of the factors that make these brands special – timelessness, authenticity, personality, etc. – failed attempts by competitors to imitate them have shown the sum of the parts do not always equal the whole.
Peter Drucker said that “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Strong brands have an uncanny ability to deliver on the things that truly matter. This is ultimately what inspires people to buy them. To work for them. To invest in them.
And to write white papers about them.
Redefining what an “advertising agency” can be, Movéo uses data-driven insight to help business-to-business and healthcare brands quantifiably improve marketing performance. For more information, visit moveo.com