Category Archives: Brand Model

When clever headlines are not so clever

Posted on Thursday 4 November 2010 | Leave a comment

Earlier this week I was eves-dropping at a seminar in Newbury where the speaker Steve Mills was dishing out marketing advice to hungry small businesses managers.  One woman, asked “What is the secret of a good headline?”.

The lady in question explained how she was organising an event and needed a headline for her advertising.  So far she had been checking newspaper headlines and trying to think up something “catchy” and “clever”, a play on words or something similar.

When I was developing my Full Effect Marketing programme I created a formula for an advertisement that I stand by to this day.  Creatives don’t always agree, but it works and it goes like this.

  • There are four elements in an ad. – Headline, body copy, call-to-action, sign-off.
  • The sign-off, or strap-line, is your “brand promise”.
  • Your brand promise is always supported by pillars that substantiate it.  We create these in my Brand Discovery programme.
  • The headline is the first thing a reader will see.  It’s job is to stop the viewer and it has about half a nanosecond to do so, so it has to hit the mark.
  • To do this it has to be relevant and direct.
  • A good headline makes a proposition that your target will relate to.  It doesn’t have to resonate with people who you don’t want to reach, so it can talk to your target in his or her parlance and it will be all the more effective for that.
  • If you have made a good job of your Brand Model your headline proposition will reflect one of your brand pillars.
  • The body copy substantiates the proposition and links it to the brand promise.
  • The call-to-action tells them what to do next.

When you link up the components of an ad. it should tell a cohesive story.  Some organisations like Tesco, M&S and Philips do this very well, but most press ads are pretty average and surprisingly few headlines hit the mark.

In this case the lady wanted to promote self-improvement classes, so I guess her headlines should be something along the lines of “Learn the secrets of your future success”.  (So give me a break! I’m not a copywriter. I’m just marking out the ground here.)  The point is, clever headlines are only clever when they get to the point and if they are a mental obstacle course they are not clever at all.  The priority is to get your message across, if you can, express your brand personality in the language you use, which should be the same language as your target. Be clever by all means, but never make being smart your primary concern.

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Posted in advertising, brand character, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, communications, creativity, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, ideas, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Are retailers raping brands, or are our brands willing victims?

Posted on Wednesday 25 August 2010 | Leave a comment

We all like a bargain and, as always when the squeeze is on, there has been a surge in the fortunes of retailers who can pander to that need over the last few years.  TK Maxx built their UK reputation on the mountains of liquidated stock, over-orders and manufacturers over-production that were accumulating across Europe, but these days we are all more frugal and surplus stock is a rare sight.  Walk around you local TK Maxx these days and you’ll see stuff that is clearly straight out of the factory and looking suspiciously like re-specd versions of mainstream branded products.  It’s a bit of a let-down by the retailer, but what is this doing for the brands?

It’s understandable that, faced with a shortage of supply in certain categories, retailers like TK Maxx would go looking for alternative sources to support their “Designer labels for less” claim, but for me, at least in some departments, they are failing.  They’ve never been too strong in the footwear department for instance, but, I guess, having staked out their shoe pitch they probably feel its incumbant on them to protect their claim.  Unfortunately that seems to mean introducing minority brands or “brands” that nobody has heard of (because they are just labels that manufacturers slap on to inferior product to help them hood-wink the odd independent retailer into a purchase and not real consumer brands) and it seems to me, even ordering production runs in inferior materials to get the price down.  This might keep their shoe racks full, but it’s not even close to where TK Maxx have in the past tried to persuade me they stood.  It won’t be long before this development is acknowledged by enough consumers to represent a concern to the people running the business.  Somebody said to me only the other day that TK Maxx was a con, but this practice won’t only damage their business, it will reflect on the brands that have stooped to re-engineering their products to meet the retailer’s demands and even those legitimate brands that have constituted the genuine bargains that TK Maxx was built on.

Of course, there are a lot of brands with equity earned in the past that hasn’t been leveraged in recent years, often because the organisations that own them have abandoned them or shut up shop themselves.  SportsDirect is a retailer that has been quick to realise this and have built a very successful business on rebadging inferior Asian-made sportswear and equipment with famous labels from the past like Lonsdale, Kangol, Dunlop and Slazenger.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of people being able to buy a pair of sports shorts for £5, but by sewing a Slazenger label onto them Sports Direct have surely done irreparable damage to this old brand.  Before long, consumers who have been reassured by the label will realise that all they have is a pair of shorts from a Vietnamese sweat shop and henceforth that’s the association Slazenger will have with everybody.

When its a case of retailers buying from independent manufacturers I expect they’ll excuse the practice with the claim that it’s at least keeping the a consenting manufacturer in business and I’m sure there are many willing victims, but when the retailer is buying the brands with the sole purpose of abusing them, it raises a whole new bunch of issues.  Sports Direct own Dunlop in the UK and you can buy Dunlop squash rackets for £30 in their stores that look very much like those used by the world’s top players who they sponsor.  However, the shop versions are just mass-produced rackets from an Asian factory and the similarity to the pro gear ends with the badge, as anybody gullible enough to buy one will soon discover.

It’s a neat route to a quick-buck for Sports Direct, but in the long-term, what they are doing is burning brands – squeezing the life out of them, discarding them and moving on to their nerxt victim.  I guess they have concluded that there are enough old brands with decent equity around to earn their founders the retirement they have their hearts set on and they’ll no doubt go on buying brands and squeezing the life out of them all the way to Dorset’s Sandbanks real estate, but I’m not so sure and anyway, I hate waste as much as I despise abuse and this practice smacks of large helpings of both.

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Posted in brand, Brand Ambassador, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, Dunlop, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, phil darby, retailer, Sports Direct, The Full Effect Company, TK Max, transparency, Uncategorized

If you want to belong, get a guide!

Posted on Tuesday 17 August 2010 | Leave a comment

I happened upon a discussion on BBC Radio Four last week.  The question was ” In the era of the Internet, are guide books still relevent?”.

The pundit that I heard made a very interesting point.  Well, I found it interesting because it was a reality that I find myself highlighting all the time.  She said that printed guides would always be relevent because they do something that an on-line equivalent could never do.  Her point was that a traveller sitting on a train with a Lonely Planet guide (for example) instantly becomes a member of a community of Lonely Planet travellers.  The guide itself is a badge of belonging in a way that a computer or even a hand-held device could never be and in an alien environment, however fascinating and enjoyable that might be, the reassurance of belonging is even more attractive.

As someone who has travelled a bit I have first-hand experience of this.  Just carrying a guide-book in an exotic place is a license for other travellers to strike up a conversation.  Even the different publishers of the guides represent sub-communities – you can find that you become either a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide member according to the guide-book that you carry and I guess there is even a hierarchy.

I’ve recently been involved in a debate over whether being a member of a LinkedIn group is an excuse for other members, whatever their reason for belonging, to send you unsolicited e-mail.  This is an off-line equivalent.  I even had a friend who, years ago, followed a girl who took his eye into a bookshop on Charing Cross Road (They’d call it stalking these days!).  She made for the travel section and after a little browsing bought a guide to Thailand.  He did the same and then followed her to the cash desk where he engineered one of those “fancy that” moments.  To cut a long story short, they ended up going to Thailand together, although, as many partners who go on holiday together, they came back with a mutual loathing!   Personally I have never been put-out by the unsolicited approaches of strange travellers on public transport, although I could imagine, in certain circumstances that I might be, but I am annoyed by e-mail spammers disguised as fellow network members.  Now I think about it a woman on the London to Warwick train a few months ago struck up a conversation with me on the basis of a Lee Child book I was reading. She presented herself as a fellow Jack Reacher fan, which seems to have become another brand community in recent years.  I suppose there could me a moral there – if you want to date buy a book!

Back to the guide books though, the badge thing definitely doesn’t only work while you are travelling.  How often have you turned up at someone’s home and found a bookshelf full of matching guidebooks?  OK, so maybe its just the company I keep.  We’ve also seen the guide-book brands being leveraged to create TV travel programmes, luggage and travel accessories.  Yes, every brand is a community and this guide-book thing has taken my interest.  I must add it to my presentations on brand development in the future, as an example of a brand type, alongside religion, football teams and pop groups.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Guide-book, marketing, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Travel, Uncategorized

When profit is literally music to the ears of customers … and employees

Posted on Monday 9 August 2010 | Leave a comment

We all know that music influences our actions.  There is endless research on the way music is used in sports psychology and there can’t be any fitness centres of gyms where music isn’t a constant feature.  There are also reams of papers by retailers revealing the impact that in-store radio has had on their business.

Retailers are old hands at this and apart from the in-store radio and TV of the larger multiples, retailers of all types and sizes have used music, in it’s simplest form, for many years to create atmosphere that entices customers to a store and creates an atmosphere where shoppers will linger longer, and we all know the longer people stay in a store the more they spend.

However, anybody who has worked in the in-store music arena will also be familiar with the complaints of shop workers who have to listen to it for the entire day, not just a few minutes that a customer spends in a store.  This is where the error of buying into cheap in-store music. with its loops, repeats and sound-alike bands, is highlighted, but it’s also an indicator of how music can be applied in other situations to`improve employee performance.

Because I have spent so many years advising retailers around the world I’m at home with the role of in-store music, ratio and TV, but I’ve also worked with businesses in corporate TV and spent time in offices like that of Sky TV in London, where music is a constant factor of office life so I have first-hand experience of the motivating power of workplace music. Like anything else, there’s good and bad in this field and while the muzac that so many stores and hotels opt for can ruin a business by frightening customers away and making an employees day a real drag, great music can make retail tills ring and boost energy levels.  However, this music thing isn’t as simple  as a lot of people think.  Anybody who really knows the subject will appreciate the psychology that goes into matching music types to audiences, moods and brand character.

In retailing there are both customer and employee profiles to consider, regional differences, business types and the variety of day-part patterns to be accommodated in any music strategy.  Fail to do this and your workplace music could literally be doing more harm than good.  There are three ways in which workplace broadcasting of one type or another can increase the profitability of a business.

In its simplest form music will create or enhance an atmosphere that strengthens a brand, provides an inviting atmosphere or increases productivity by motivating staff.  Get it right and even om this most basic level any business can achieve all three.

On the next level up, music, even by itself, can be used to prompt retail sales.  A UK supermarket played Spanish music in its wine department and significantly increased sales of Spanish wine.  However, with announcements or commercials that effect can be massively increased.  Another specialist UK retailer I know of achieved a 600% uplift in sales of one line in tests.

On the third level, in-store radio is already being used by many businesses not only to motivate employees, but to train them with product information, procedural updates and training modules transmitted out of retail opening or during office hours.

No business can afford to ignore or take this music thing lightly. It’s a legitimate business tool and increasingly scientific in its approach.  You are unlikely to get it right without help.  On the most basic level there are business out there playing radios, CDs and MP3s, oblivious to the fact that to do so in the UK requires licenses that costs upwards of £350 every year.  Avoidance could cost a whole lot more – I saw a post on a forum last week by a Chinese restaurant owner who was facing a bill for thousands of pounds!  My advice, don’t risk it and don’t try to avoid the fees by using non-licensed music – everyone hates it so it won’t bring any benefits. Bring in experts instead and profit from a well, thought out and executed workplace music strategy.

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Posted in background music, brand, brand character, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, customer, efficiency, employees, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, in-store music, integrated marketing, phil darby, Retail marketing, retailer, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, workplace music

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Don’t hire a celeb. Benefit from the brand ambassadors that are right under your nose.

Posted on Sunday 11 July 2010 | Leave a comment

It seems to be the season for requests, for no sooner had I hit “post” on my last request-inspired piece about brand stewardship that another popped into my in-tray.  “What do you think are the attributes to look for in a brand ambassador?” it asked.  Who could resist…?

As before, let’s get the terminology straight first.  The take I have on “brand ambassador” is someone who represents a brand personally to the public.  This could mean a chairman – Richard Branson comes to mind as someone who fulfills the role admirably – or a celebrity who has no executive responsibility, for instance Lewis Hamilton plays the role for Mercedes, Tag Heuer and other exotic, speed-orientated brands.

A brand ambassador can play a powerful role in the development of a brand and will definitely help emerging brands establish themselves far quicker that they otherwise might.  But, be warned, as with all communications, the wrong person could do your business and your brand more harm than good.

The brand ambassador relationship is, to some extent, symbiotic.  It relies on PR – that’s press relations rather than public relations.  Basically your ambassador should be a darling of the press, the kind of person who is followed around by paparazzi or featured in Sunday supplements … but only for the right reasons.  I suspect that the queue of brands for Peter Doherty, for instance, would be quite a bit shorter than that for Pete Townshend! However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s all one-way traffic, because events that your organisation arranges will often provide the kind of press opportunity that some celebrities consider of benefit to them, so negotiate.

The brand ambassador gig is a kind of extreme form of sponsorship and to get your money’s worth (and this is never a cheap option) your subject has to relate to and enhance features of your business.  For example a few years back I was involved when Skoda Auto first looked at sponsorship as a way to take their Central European brand to the West and beyond.  The brief was to find a subject that would reinforce the speed, skill and excitement of their revitalised (courtesy of the Volkswagen Group) brand and appeal primarily to European and American markets.  We eventually matched them up with the Ice Hockey World Championships and the relationship was so successful they extended their involvement in the sport to national leagues, the Czech national team and national league teams in other countries.  However, the relationship with individual personalities can be deeper and more valuable that the broader benefits of events or teams and that’s waht I see to be the biggest difference between sponsorship and brand ambassadorship.

If you want to get the best out of the relationship, before you go out shopping for a brand ambassador you simply must have a clear understanding of your brand and what it stands for.  That might sound straightforward enough but there are a lot of businesses out there art aren’t as clear as they should be on this issue and there’s no better way of achieving this than with my Brand Discovery programme.  This is a series of workshops, analyses and presentations that culminate in an eleven-point Brand Model that clearly defines your brand.  The next step is to identify the kinds of people who are likely to represent those elements – the core values and beliefs upon which the relationships with stakeholders (that’s internal and external) are founded.  I call these Brandships.

The brand ambassador you eventually partner with is, in effect, a shorthand communication for your brand.  His or her relationship with your target market gives you an instant audience and the kind of credibility you will never achieve from other conventional communications forms.  You can build all manner of constraints into the deal you strike with your eventual ambassador – You’ll notice for example that Lewis Hamilton always puts a Tag watch on before press conferences and like most other sportspeople, Hamilton probably gets bonuses from his sponsors for winning races or in relation to his position in the rankings (because success generates positive press coverage) but when your ambassador is caught behaving contrary to your brands values and beliefs the relationship can become a liability, so a conduct clause is a vital part of any contract of this kind.  The publicity from a celebrity gone off the rails is always bigger short-term than anything they could generate from positive actions and the fall-out for the brand can be momentous – think

Fame or notoriety is always an important factor in your choice of ambassador because its like the readership figures of a newspaper – they define it’s value, but there’s more to the ambassadorial role.  For instance, the values and beliefs of your ambassador are just as important as the exposure he or she gets.

If you are getting the idea that the brand ambassador idea is beyond you just now don’t throw the idea out entirely. Just because your budget doesn’t stretch to the kind of numbers a big name celeb would command doesn’t count you out of he game.  Give me fifty low profile individuals who’ll accurately and reliably represent everything that’s good about a brand for free any day and every organisation has that resource at its disposal already. I’m talking, of course, about harnessing the ambassadorial value of your own brand community, Your employees and customers. I’ve seen organisations pouring millions into sponsorship while their greatest and cheapest resource goes untapped.   Any business that understands brand development, of course, will be running an internal marketing strategy and nurturing this group with a really good internal marketing strategy will cost you the tiniest part of a regular sponsorship package and give you a great return on your investment.  Organisations that are good at this are John Lewis in the UK and SouthWest Airlines in the US, but there are probably hundreds around.

With the world becoming ever-more competitive and the squeeze firmly on, no business can afford to underutilise its resource and Brandships are probably as valuable as assets can get.  If you are brand conscious you’ll know that already and be developing and leveraging your Brandships, so re-adjusting your focus to include the brand ambassador remit isn’t going to add much to your effort or investment.  Its worth the consideration of any business these days.

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Posted in brand, Brand Ambassador, brand character, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Lewis Hamilton, marketing, phil darby, Skoda Auto, Uncategorized

Brand stewardship – what’s it mean to you?

Posted on Sunday 4 July 2010 | Leave a comment

Last week I was put on the spot when someone asked me for my views on “brand stewardship”. Apart from the fact that its like asking for my view on world peace – I could either just say “I’m in favour of it” or talk for three hours -  the term “brand stewardship” poses a question in itself.  I mean what is it?  What’s the difference between “stewardship” and “management” or “development” and, given that anything to do with a brand touches on every aspect of a business, where should I start (or end for that matter)?

Let’s begin with nomenclature.  My guess is that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, came up with the “stewardship” concept in order to accommodate the fact that the closest we can ever get to owning a brand is in the role of minder.  But why not “management”?  I assume that this must be based on the belief that “management” sounds a bit too formal and structured for something that is very human and organic.  So far, even though I have a loathing of the terminology that marketing people think up to make themselves appear smart, but actually just confuses everybody, I can live with all of this and if I’m right, I guess I understand the question and whether you call it stewardship, management or development it’s all about caring for a brand.  I’m going to assume that a brand steward is like the steward of a golf club – he’s there to make sure processes are adhered to and everything is kept in shape but he/she doesn’t have an executive role. So, let me try to summarise my views on “brand stewardship”.

I must have explained my understanding of what a brand is hundreds of times, but to this day defining “brand” even among the “marketers” who participate, remains a critical component of most of my workshops and seminars.  Such are the vagaries and inconsistencies within the marketing business.  I view brands as communities, which, like any other is really just a group of people with something (or things) in common.  A large part of this is values and beliefs. Some members of a brand community create a product or services that reflect these beliefs and values and others buy and use them.

People buy BMW’s because Brandenbergischen Motorenwerke belive in things like quality, engineering excellence and innovation and the cars and motorcycles they produce are manifestations of that.  If you need a car and  these things are important to you, its logical that you’ll feel comfortable in the BMW community.  Similarly, Apple is all about innovation and style, so if these subjects are important to you, you’ll probably own a Mac., i-Phone or i-Pad.

These brands and others have taken the time and trouble to drive awareness of what they stand for and as a result the brands themselves have become icons for a clearly defined set of values – you have YUPPIES driving BMWs and then there’s “white van man”.  Provided the reality measures up to the promise you’ll have the reassurance of knowing what to expect from a product wearing a familiar label.  It works the other way too.  Owning a BMW or a Mac is a badge of belonging to a community – a symbol of your beliefs – and because, as Maslow revealed, most of us are insecure, sales of many products are driven by people who have a need to wear a badge denoting our belonging to a group.  Why else would we wear clothing large areas of which are taken up with advertisements for their manufacturers?

However, this is a bit simplistic.  Few people, for instance, will find a single brand community that represents everything they stand for so most of us combine a portfolio of brands to represent different aspects of our belief system.  If you think of a brand community as a residential community you’ll recognise that you choose to live in a place because it is “your kind of place” but because the brand thing is not exclusive, when you move in you bring the trappings of your other communities with you.  In this way, while joining the community may broaden your horizons, at the same time, to some extent, you’ll enrich the community with the stuff you bring with you.  That explains why brand communities are constantly changing.

All truly great brands are like Marmite. However broad and diversified your brand community may be you are never going to appeal to everyone, and you shouldn’t want to.  Brands with broad appeal are inherently weak because, along with the need to belong we also have a need to express our individuality.  That’s where quirky niche brands play their part in life’s rich tapestry.  A strong brand is normally vivid or distinctive and while stark differentiation like this means it won’t be to everyone’s taste, distinctive brands will foster deep relationships with community members (I call these “Brandships”) and strong loyalty.  These factors are the keys to sales, profit and longevity.

Difference is very often synonymous with newness.  Its relatively easy to be different when you are the new kid on the block, but the success that your newness drives will take you ever closer to becoming “the establishment”.  The more successful you become the greater the challenge of maintaining your difference becomes.  A successful brand will recognise that it is the difference of the products it makes rather than the products themselves that is responsible for their success and as their products become familiar and competitors bring look-alikes to market, they’ll find new ways of representing “difference”, just as Apple have done by constantly changing their products and introducing radical new ideas.  Of course, some new products and ideas will fail, but failure is good because it is a product of innovation, change, experimentation.  While longevity can be a valuable and reassuring asset it is important to recognise that having been around for a long time may not count for much if you’ve not changed anything about your business in all that time.

Brand stewardship in many ways is just the same as any kind of management or indeed parenthood.  Its mostly about facilitation, providing the scope, tools and resources and opening the doors to opportunity, guiding where necessary, but avoiding imposing your own values or rules on your charge.  Its about providing opportunities for discourse, listening to what your members are saying both to you and each other, providing what they need to do the things they want to do (Which also means predicting what they will need in the future), offering up suggestions and being around to fix things that go wrong.  In other words, providing access, introducing communications like on-line or social networking, fuelling and being involved in discussion, collecting insights and data, analysing it and developing products and services that because of all of this you can be confident your community will welcome and generally policing.

In order to do all of this you first of all have to be absolutely clear what the brand and its community is all about – its that values and beliefs thing again – and to do this you’ll need a methodology to help you condense, what is a complex thing into as simple a form as possible.  My Brand Discovery programme introduces such methodology and using it any business can create an eleven-element Brand Model that will sum up their brand.  But that’s just the beginning.  You then have to apply it to your business, making sure that the actions you take on every level of the organisation reflect and support the essence of your brand.  That will take a brand Steward into every corner of your business where he/she will influence pretty well everything that is done.  This can be a risky job in organisations that don’t already have a team-playing culture, which is why Brand Discovery also provides an ongoing management system that engages everyone in the organisation, gives them the tools they need to ensure that their decisions and actions are aligned to the brand promise and ensuring they are fully involved in the process of keeping your brand alive.

Good brand stewardship drives things like Cupidtino the new dating service for Apple users, Saturn’s annual owners factory tour, Yeti bikes’ bashes, Harley Davidson’s HOG chapters and many other different elements of the communities of discerning brands around the world.  Good brand stewardship is the reason why innovative organisations innovate and efficient businesses are efficient, but, as I said earlier, it’s a very big subject and this is a very simple answer.  If you want the whole nine-yards we’ll need a much longer discussion.

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Posted in Apple, brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, business development, business strategy, efficiency, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harley Davidson, i-Pad, ideas, innovation, integrated marketing, internal marketing, marketing, phil darby, saturn Motors, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Yeti Cycles

Social Networking – a force for good

Posted on Tuesday 25 May 2010 | 1 Comment

Liam Anderson just Tweeted a link to a TED talk on social networking by a very smart guy called Nicholas Christakis. You should take a look. His bottom line seems to be that, primally speaking, social networking drives the good in society.

This is a subject that I have pondered many times.  As you will probably know, I see brands as communities and this perspective drives all that I do as a marketer.  In the talks I deliver I often highlight the parallels between housing communities and brand communities.  You move into an area because you feel it reflects your standards and values, you aspire to fit in, or it is comfortable, which, by definition means that you have something in common with everyone else who lives there – even if that’s just that the place feels right.  However, every facet of your life is not replicated in every other local resident.  You have hobbies and interests, values and habits that are unique to you in that community and so in joining it you are also enriching it.

Take my son as an example.  He has an amazing network of friends.  Its a very close network of guys and their girlfriends who he has encountered at various points in his life in many different places.  Nicholas suggested in his talk that there are two distinct types of networks those where the “friends” are independent of each other and don’t know each other, their relationship being confined to the “host” and there are others where the friends are inter-connected, they know each other through the network.  The catalyst in both cases is the host who is either gregarious and introduces his friends to each other or is insular and protective of his relationships and keeps them separate.  Each type of network has its plusses and minuses as Nicholas points out and who is to say which, if either is right or wrong.  The important thing is that we recognise the difference.

It’s fair to say that my son’s friends’ lives have all been enriched by the network.  Each has shared their individual interests with the others and as a result there are sub-groups that go rock-walling, others play squash, a big group  hangs out in one guy’s big garden all summer grilling, drinking and playing volleyball.  The more they do together the stronger the community becomes and the broader its interests and the interests of the individuals.  From time to time members of the community have had a tough time and I’ve been amazed at the way the others, even the fringe members, have gathered around to offer support and practical help.  As Nicholas says, a force for good.

Because I see brand communities in the same way, its important to me that my clients provide opportunities for their community members to interact with each other and not just the host (my clients), but while most organisations these days do the social networking “talk”, very few indeed get around to the “walk”.  Brands have to be gregarious to be successful, they have to stand out, be communicative and above all confident enough to introduce their community members to each other.  Organise events like Saturn the US car-maker who each year take their customers on a tour of the factory, Harley Davidson, or the cycle manufacturer Yeti (my favourite bikes in the world) who organise events around the world for their owners to come together race, chat and party.  I blogged last week about Apple’s new dating site, which is another example.

Brand guardians should always remember that their community members will also be members of other communities (buy other brands) where their other interests and values are better represented, but the the successful brands are those that are central to their members lives and achieve the balance between keeping themselves and their products front-and-centre while maintaining a broad church.  What are you doing to build Brandships in your brand community?

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Posted in Apple, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand equity, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, community, customer, customers, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, Harley Davidson, integrated marketing, marketing, opportunity, phil darby, saturn Motors, Social marketing, Social networking, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized, Yeti Cycles

Britain’s biggest ever internal marketing campaign

Posted on Monday 24 May 2010 | Leave a comment

Image from BBC News. Click for full story.

As George Osborne announces the new government’s plan for its first £6billion tranche of public sector spending cuts, I am getting a distinctly uneasy feeling that there’s a spectre looming large in the shape of public sector employees, who could bring the county to its knees in an orgy of self-interest.

As one commentator put it this morning on the BBC, this isn’t just a plan to save £6billion+ is a plan to change the expectations we all have of government, in other words a re-branding and as with any other re-branding strategy, it has to start with the people delivering the promise.

I’ve worked with public sector organisations in the UK and elsewhere and I have to say that, certainly in the UK, despite their claims of having upped their game in recent years – and, to be honest, there’s a degree of truth to this – the sad fact is that the claim reveals the naiveté that is at the heart of the sector’s dire performance.  Frankly, most public sector employees, just don’t understand how out of kilter they are with their private sector counterparts.

I have sat at post-mortems for failed initiatives where the inadequacies of the people charged with the task at every level have been obvious.  I’ve heard people shrug-off any responsibility for watching colleagues fail or fall into pits that were perfectly obvious to all, but the person doing the falling, with comments like “that wasn’t my job”. I’ve witnessed total absence of any shared responsibility or common agenda, even seen people scramble over each other to assign blame to anyone who could be made to represent a target.  Worst of all, I have noted time and again the credence that managers give to this behaviour.  I’m not saying that stuff like this doesn’t happen in the private sector, but in the public sector its the prevailing culture.

I’m thinking of one regional public sector organisation in particular that is failing by a measure of two-thirds to meet its targets consistently, month after month.  It has employees at every level who may arguably have the ability to do their job, but simply don’t.  People who fill their day with an hour’s-worth of work and feel hard done by if they are ever questioned about their lack of progress.  Not only is the manager not managing the situation, there’s absolutely no consequences attached to the failure to deliver.  Each month he just turns up at a meeting and tells his bosses how much he’s missed his target by and they just nod and thank him.  I have first hand knowledge of a group of high-profile public sector organisations whose purpose is to provide specialist advice to the business sector whose “advisors” rarely have more than a grasp of the basics of their subject and certainly usually know far less than the people they are advising.  In the absence of expertise this organisation has fallen back on prescribed programmes, processes and practices executed by process-followers who force their “clients” into ill-fitting solutions, waste their time with totally unnecessary bureaucratic hoop-jumping and consider it a job well done.  The only real effort demonstrated by these and other public sector organisations I have encountered is in gathering tenuous data to support their continued existence.  This is what waste really looks like.

Apart from the blatant and intentional waste of time that goes on in these places there is inevitable consequential waste represented in the endless arse-scratching done by people who frequently just don’t have a clue what to do next.  But its the intentional waste, driven by the kind of self-interest we have seen demonstrated by Royal Mail, British Gas and now British Airways employees that will be the nail in Britain’s coffin.

I’m concerned that the public sector, being what it is, will put the usual knee-jerk interpretation on the message from Whitehall – reduced funds = reduced services – but that’s not necessarily the case.  Cut out the waste, the processes that waste time for all of us and do nothing, but keep people on the government payroll and, in percentage terms, the reduction in services will be nothing like the reduction in investment.  The public sector just has to stop putting itself first and start doing what’s sensible and right.

If the British people are to be persuaded to consider “government” in a new light, the Government must firstly define what their promise is and then undertake the massive task of getting the people responsible for delivering it committed to the task.  Only once they are confident that every employee is determined to play their part in delivering that promise to the full, can the promise be made with any credibility or any chance of success.  It’s a big ask, a massive challenge, its internal marketing on a scale that has probably never before been tackled.

Pitfalls lie on every side.  When the Labour party finally manage to get their act into any kind of togetherness their traditional support of trades unions like Unite might mean that they contribute to the obstacles facing any re-branding strategy.  Unions themselves are going to have to be realistic in their demands and employees at every level will need to be put straight on the need to contribute to a shared objective rather than perpetuate the self-interest that has been largely responsible for bringing us to this mess.  This requires transparency by the government regarding their agenda, sharing the brand vision and mission and the provision of the information that people need to understand for themselves why the strategy has been chosen and more importantly, what they must do to play their part in its delivery.

It’s about communication on every level embracing every media route – press relations, the internet and electronic media, direct marketing, corporate videos … you name it.  A fully integrated campaign the like of which we haven’t seen before, certainly in this country.  Maybe it’s an opportunity for the COI to really show us what they can do in terms of strategy and efficient project management, but more than that, its an opportunity for the best in every area of marketing and communications to contribute to a project that is really worthwhile.

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Posted in BBC, brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, communications, community, David Cameron, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, george orborne, integrated marketing, integration, internal marketing, local goverment, marketing, National Branding, phil darby, promise, public sector, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Nick Matthew – A model for the new Brand Britain.

Posted on Sunday 23 May 2010 | Leave a comment

I don’t go in for hero-worship, but if I did a definite contender would be Nick Matthew, our (the UK’s) latest world number one squash player and it’s not just because he’s number one.

I’ve had a thing for Nick for a few years … no, not like that!  I’ve haven’t even met him, although I’ve seen him play many times, both live and on SquashTV.com and to me, he defines the term “sporting hero”.  Firstly he plays a real sport.  The most gruelling of all racket sports by far in fact (Its been proven many times).  A sport where men get sweaty battling on a physical and mental level that few people can even comprehend.  Squash isn’t an armchair activity for retired people like curling or darts, nor is it a namby-pamby, designer sport like football (or soccer to any Americans who might be listening).  This is a sport that’s played by millions of people all over the world with a genuine passion that isn’t fuelled by the promise of an in-your-dreams payday should they ever reach professional levels.

The training that professional squash players put themselves through is enough to provoke a seizure in any mere mortal who just thinks about it.  Peter Nicol, our previous great world number one, described his training regime in terms of  inching his body each day past the point where his brain told him he was going to die, just so he could prove to it that it wouldn’t.  However, as if that wasn’t enough Nick recently came back from a shoulder injury that would have permanently sidelined many lesser sportsmen, enduring twelve months of surgery and rehabilitation to take the crown that is so rightfully his – Bloody brilliant Nick.  Thanks for showing us how its done.

Nothing in this world that’s truly worth having is ever achieved easily.  That’s one reason why I have no sympathy for folks who, even when the nation is on its arse, don’t want to put in those extra hours, take that salary cut or change the terms of their contract.  As for those who would rather actually withdraw their labour altogether than make a few business-prolonging changes, I’d rather they just leave the country, or better still the planet!

I meet businesses and people all over the world who get to a point of comfort and just sit back.  Businesses that are happy to make a profit, people who just want to do the bare minimum, neither being interested in being the best in town or even just the best they can be and it makes me sad.  I can’t see the point in getting out of bed each day unless it’s with the mantra “Today I’ll be the best!” and in the new economy even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll even survive because making it to the top of the heap, is by no means “job done!”.  For a real winner, it’s just the start of the race to leave your competitors eating your dust.

Because he’s the champion he is, Nick Matthew, I am sure, will be spending the next few off-season weeks, working out to what he has to do to up his game.  He’ll know that there are players our there who he has inspired to take him on next season.  Equally dedicated, highly skilled players for whom he is now the target.

Meanwhile, if I were David Cameron and Nick Clegg right now, mapping out the Brand Model for Brand Britain, I’d be focussing on people like Nick Matthew as the pillars of the brand promise and trying to work out how the same energy and commitment that has made them the winners they are, can be translated to Britain as a whole.  Looking at the check-out queue in Tesco yesterday, its clear that it might be as big a challenge as coming back from the sugeon’s table to become the world’s number one squash player.

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Posted in brand, brand Britain, brand character, brand development, Brand Model, Brand promise, branding, brands, brandships, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, marketing, National Branding, Nick Matthew, Peter Nicol, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized

Branding your High Street Dreams.

Posted on Wednesday 12 May 2010 | Leave a comment

There’s a new series on BBC television called High Street Dreams in which a couple of entrepreneurs, Jo Malone, who made a success of a fragrances and candle business and Nick Leslau, a property tycoon, work with would-be business owners to help them get off the ground.  I watched the first of these yesterday evening and although it confirmed one of my biggest beefs about “branding agencies” it also gave me a few reassuring surprises.

First the good news.  As one who is often expected to perform miracles on coffin-dodger companies, I always get a lift when I come across people who look as if they have the ability and passion to run a successful business and that was the case with all the candidates in last night’s programme.  The Singh family were hot to take their chilli sauce recipe to market, while newlyweds Roland and Miranda Ballard were already selling their Angus beef products at farmers markets, but wanted to “reinvent the beefburger” with a premium twist.

Both groups had worthy products and they were all hard-working, even well-organised to a point.  It’s good to know that there are fledgling businesses out there that might just keep Britain on the business map.  However, what really impressed me was the grasp that both groups had of the concept of brand.  I have to say their mentors were also plugged in to brands and branding to an extent that I have found rare even among so-called marketers and (and here comes the bad news) in stark contrast to the “branding agencies” they employed who were at best very average and, in the one case, probably a liability.

Of course, the programmes were edited (very well I thought) from what I guess were hours of recordings and for this reason I can’t say for sure what process these agencies had followed to arrive at their conclusion, but it seems that neither took either group through a clearly defined programme of discovery, prior to starting work on their design and as a consequence launched into the presentations of their final proposals by telling the groups what their brand was all about, which as any real marketer knows is rather arse-about-face – only the client knows this for sure and the best any agency could hope to come up with is a good guess.  Starting this way of course meant that neither agency was in a position to ease their client through the process of brand and strategy development that follows the creation of a brand model, but as they didn’t enter that territory anyway, they failed, by any definition, to qualify as “brand consultants”.  In this case the one solution was a whole lot better than the other, which should have been rejected and probably would have been had the brand model and the briefing and judgement criteria been in place, but neither were brand or branding solutions by any stretch of the imagination, they were logo and packaging designs – different planet!

As I have discovered over my years in the business, this isn’t unique in the world of marketing.  There are designers all over the place who have decided to call themselves “brand consultants” without having the first idea of what that is, just as there are advertising agencies that call themselves “marketing agencies” or “integrated marketing agencies”.  Frankly, most of them just talk bollocks, but the problem is, these guys are snake-oil salesmen who talk a good talk and if you are an SME looking for sound advice, the odds are you’ll not have the experience to spot the rogues among the smoke and mirrors.

The really sad thing about this is that for years we’ve worked with the knowledge that in the UK seven out of ten new businesses fail within three years and, post recession, that figure will undoubtedly rise.  The “new economy” is an even tougher battle ground with new rules emerging daily.  The last thing we need are idiots, passing themselves off as experts making the game even tougher for the guys who are enterprising enough to give business a go.

So as a service to would-be entrepreneurs everywhere here are three tips to kick-off your brand development process:

  1. Before you get to do any kind of logo design you need a Brand Model.  That’s a document that defines your brand and its character from as many parameters as you think is appropriate (My Brand Discovery Brand Models have eleven).  Either you must do this for yourself, which is tough if you have no experience of these things, or you should seek the help of a consultant.  A real brand agency will have a prescriptive process that they take you through to establish what your brand is all about and create your Brand Model BEFORE you even talk to a designer.  If they don’t, bid them a polite “good day” and make for the exit!
  2. Next you need to create individual briefs for your logo/package/literature designers.  These MUST be based on your brand model, which is why that comes first.  Among other things, your brief should explain to the designer how you want his work to reflect the important elements of your brand – its character, its promise and the pillars that support the promise.  Again, any brand consultancy worthy of the name will have a briefing format that works with the brand model to provide the designer with the important information he needs to do his job properly.  If they don’t and you are still in the room, think again!
  3. Then you need judgement criteria.  Its easy when you are inexperienced in working with designers to get carried away by the excitement of seeing their work and as a result accept proposals that aren’t spot on.  I can’t over-emphasise the importance of getting details like this right at this earliest stage of your business development.  Start off with the wrong logo or packaging and your business will be compromised until you change it – believe me, you don’t want to go there!  You need a set of criteria against which you will judge each proposal and these criteria will again relate back to your brand model and brief.  If the nice people at your brand consultancy don’t help you with this, its definitely time to take off the rose-tinted specs!

One of the issues that the Singh family were struggling with on the High Street Dreams, was the versatility of their chilli sauce.  They believed that it was good for cooking with, dipping and adding to food like a table condiment, but neither the “brand consultancy” nor their mentors seemed to really address this issue and it came back to haunt them when the category manager at Asda asked “where do you see this sitting in our store.  On condiments or cook-in sauces?”  The answer was both and more, but to make that credible they needed three packaging variation (they didn’t necessarily need three different recipes, although that would have been icing on the cake) A bottle to sit alongside Tabasco sauce, a wide pot to compete with salsa dip and a jar to match cook-in sauces.  Asda wouldn’t necessarily have taken all three, but it would have demonstrated the versatility of their product and given Asda the opportunity to try all three areas of the store to see which gave them the best results.

The Ballards on the other hand had a wholesome product that looked like a lot of things that are supposed to be “good for you” – pretty bloody unappetising!  Their early research had made this point quite decisively.  The agency’s answer was to put it in a box so you couldn’t see it, which is a bit of a nonsense for a product category where customers are particularly keen to see what they are buying.  It’s a dilemma and quite frankly, I don’t have the answer, but then again they haven’t paid me to come up with one, so I’m not at fault.  Unlike their “brand consultancy” who not only failed to resolve the issue, but came up with a package design that looked like a high-school project!

Again, a brand consultancy will sort things like these, because they know about in-store categories and how to work the merchandising.  They’ll also tell you what things you need to do in other areas of your business to bring everything in line with the “promise” that is made by the brand, the product and the packaging.

The new post recession economy is throwing up opportunities every day, but anybody who wants to catch one and run with it is going to have to be smarter and faster than businesses that made it in the old, pre-recession marketplace if they are going to make their High Street Dreams a reality.  If you have your eye on a place in the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs this year you are going to have to do everything you do better than your competitors and that means hiring REAL experts to help you.  Hopefully I’ll have helped you spot a good brand consultant when you need one.

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Posted in brand, brand character, brand consultancy, brand development, Brand Discovery, Brand Model, brand name, Brand promise, branding, brands, communications, design, Full Effect, Full Efffect Marketing, High Street Dreams, ideas, integrated marketing, Jo Malone, marketing, Mick Leslau, Mr Singh's chilli sauce, opportunity, phil darby, The Full Effect Company, Uncategorized