Connections to key lifestyle interests invoke openness to engagement

By Robert Wheatley

“The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” — George Bernard Shaw

Business growth opportunities abound for brands that fully understand the conditions and events that set in motion openness to communication – as in “I’m listening.” Much of the time consumers are not. The presence of brand communication at any given moment is not nearly as important as the audience’s willingness to pay attention. That may feel a bit like saying water is wet. But hear us out: lifestyle interests and events drive the readiness to listen. There’s an optimal time and place when consumers will be primed to engage.

Our point: brand communication gains a whole lot more traction when it occurs in tandem with relevant consumer behavior than it does randomly. Yet all too often, brand outreach is showered broadly as a form of messaging rain, timed to coincide with retail distribution or promotion period considerations more so than consumer lifestyle connection. In effect, brands remain ever hopeful that consumers will simply collide with the message storm or will be magically lured into engagement through its ubiquity, entertainment value or sheer novelty.

Lifestyle events prime the pump of openness…

Brand communication and PR strategies anchored to a foundation of real insight about the consumer’s relevant lifestyle concerns and passions will help crack open the door to hyper-targeted communication that conveys the right thing at the right time to the right person.

Getting Alignment With Target Audience Interests

Here’s a living example — Nesties – as defined by market research firm OTX and on-line retailer The Knot – are a unique segment of 25 to 32 year old female consumers. They represent the low hanging fruit for an array of household and lifestyle products. When these women become engaged to be married it triggers a period of three to five years devoted to wedding planning, new household creation and starting a family. These events in turn motivate an array of purchases.

It is the events and changing conditions in their lives that activate a behavioral response. Collectively Nesties are long-range “planners” who feel they have primary responsibility in setting up their new households and take responsibility for decorating, cooking, social activities, household chores, caring for children and pets.

This group shows evidence of predictable purchase behavior. And offers brands an audience already receptive to establishing a relationship that could continue beyond these formative years. So investments should be made in carefully crafted dialogue focused on this unique tribe — and grounded in positioning the brand as helpful and involved with her changing lifestyle needs, concerns and aspirations. This will lead to business growth.

Finding The Optimal Moment

Strategic timing and location of communication can also yield added engagement value. Meaning if it occurs when a person is actively doing something germane. A simple example of this is what we call leveraging a food brand’s kitchen footprint or in effect building its “share-of-countertop.” There is increased receptivity to brand messaging when the delivery timing coincides with related consumer’s behavior – in this case when working in the kitchen space. An obvious starter is to provide useful meal ideas, entertaining suggestions, tabletop recommendations, recipe preparation hints and serving suggestion guidance. It is an optimal environment for having a conversation — because the consumer is naturally open to it and their brain is switched on to the subject matter.

Nailing The Best Message

Messaging gains power when it is configured around the consumer’s lifestyle interests. Finding this sweet spot of alignment is what we call identifying a brand’s Higher Purpose. When the brand positions itself as an enabler, facilitator and supporter of a consumer’s personal passion, you’re able to forge powerful outreach tactics from this base. Consider the strategic possibilities that could fall out of sharpening your focus on consumer groups devoted to specific lifestyle interests such as fashion, travel, music, art, pet care, food enjoyment, cooking, child rearing, fitness, sports, home decorating or improvement, self-improvement, gardening, outdoor recreation, entertainment, entertaining, relationships and socializing. We could go on. The point is: the days of the hard sell, transactional style relationship are over and that form of messaging is out the window with it. So you want the consumer to understand some of the unique functional benefits in your product. Ok. And the path to getting their ears switched on springs from your willingness to be generous and unselfish — and thus play a role in their passions. It’s a richer, deeper and more personal relationship you want to construct.

The end result will be increased brand relevance, preference and sales.

By Bob Wheatley

Photo credit: Sharon Dominik

Forever and a day I’ve seen this concept play out in various categories from beverages to food, travel services to floor care and cleaning products, that 80% of your profits can routinely come from 20% of your customers who constitute the most engaged, heavy users in your business. Call them your best fans.

Yet routinely we focus our efforts, strategies and spending on casting a broad net. We try to be appealing to everyone because we keep telling ourselves that our brand and business not only deserves high household penetration, but “we can’t ignore the volume opportunities.” To be sure, but the 20% that’s mainlining your brand and paying attention to your messaging with a little help and “enabling” can become a more productive core of real-world ambassadors. People who can help spread the word effectively to those who are not as fully invested and who don’t buy as often.

Take cheese and pet food for example. Cheese is one of the most popular food categories in supermarkets. We like cheese, so it’s a big volume business. Yet a closer look reveals that consumers who are more emotionally engaged and devoted to cooking represent a “heavy user” profile that purchases more cheese products, more often and in many cases will go for higher priced items when they feel the value proposition is credible. So paying closer attention to this group of emotionally charged ‘kitchen commanders’ can yield incremental benefits in talk value and word of mouth, once they’re fully embraced, recognized and rewarded by the brands they love.

Or in pet food: a dynamic audience combination we refer to as indulgers and doters consists of a high percentage of higher income households who treat their animals like family members — and will even go as far as cutting back on some of their own discretionary purchases in order to keep Fido in tip top shape by feeding him a super-premium pet food diet. Industry statistics show this group continues to fuel an incredible growth track record in the emerging natural and organic segment – even though the tough economy has weighed in heavily in many segments to compel “trading down” behaviors.

Your call to action…

Think of it this way, your PR communications ROI outcomes will improve when communicating with an audience that’s really, genuinely paying attention. Those who have emotional, personal lifestyle connections to a brand are listening — first at the category level. A brand that works over time to mine relevance with this audience has the opportunity to build a unique relationship and bond. Conversely broad awareness tactics can perform as a “reminder mechanism” for the larger audience segments out there who may buy less often but who have ties to the franchise through their habit behaviors.

1. Consider for a moment the opportunities from investing more fully in courting your heavy users. What would you do differently? What efforts might you undertake to help create a community around these groups and empower them to interact with each other – especially important for home chefs and pet parents who want to share tips, ideas, experiences and insights with each other.

2. What rewards and recognition can you offer to your most devoted followers that surprise and delight – and thus are often the triggers to generating strong, credible and organic word-of-mouth communication.

3. What sponsored experiences can you create and deliver that bring your brand as close as possible to your best fans and allow them to interact with you and each other. In food this could include unique culinary experiences that reward your best customers with an opportunity to learn from the food heroes they respect like celebrity chefs. For pets it could be local dog park events and contests that allow pet parents to engage in shared experiences with their animal and with each other.

But wait there’s more…

Today, excellent blogger and thought leader Sonia Simone has an interesting post at Copyblogger that talks about the personal side of the Pareto Principle and how it impacts you and what you do. Her observations:

“…Which means that 20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue. 20% of the time you spend behind your computer provides 80% of your best work. And 20% of that great meal you had last night provided 80% of the pleasure. (It was the chocolate mousse cake, wasn’t it?)

Because of the Pareto Principle, there’s always a “20%” you should be spending your time on. And in just about every discipline, it’s known as the fundamentals.”

Have you sat down to think about your day, your activities and to reflect on this idea – that 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of the great results and accomplishments you’re looking for? So what do the fundamentals look like for you? Maybe it’s a good idea to start by putting more energy and investment into courting your biggest fans…

Customers are not targets

By Robert Wheatley

If you think about it, words really matter. How we say things can lead to clarity or disagreement. The tone of a conversation can incite or inspire. What we say is a reflection of how we think. Our words may indeed inform our actions. What we believe is usually born out in how we verbally characterize our roles, jobs, priorities and actions.

Robert Passikoff wrote a great article on how we see customer relationships at Marketing Daily.

My point? It may be time for some honest introspection, a tune-up of sorts in how we truly, honestly view the relationships with those we wish to sell to. After all, businesses exist to serve the needs of customers and hopefully grow as a result. However is it possible that the wrong brand attitude could invoke behaviors that impede the one thing most organizations pine for – profitable growth?

The answer is yes. And it’s worth talking about. Why? Because of the seismic shift in the rules that govern how brands build customer relationships in the age of consumer control around markets constructed entirely on foundations of self-interest. The Mad Men era of “pushed” story telling worked because the power curve was aligned differently. Outbound messages could instruct consumers because they lacked the resources to learn “brand news” from other transparent sources. Business held all the cards.

Now the onus is reversed: organizations must divine the right role and pathway to gain “permission” for a brand/consumer relationship.

The entire brand/customer paradigm has flipped and so the language of business should adjust.

“You can no longer speak of your customers as faceless targets…”

The consumer is in charge and she looks for tangible and emotional value from the brands that matter to her. Mattering means important to, inspiring, connecting, worth listening to. And what’s at the foundation of mattering? It’s when what you do and say consistently and credibly conveys, “I understand your lifestyle needs and here’s how we can help.”

Brand language and behavior has to match the ethos of this new form of customer relationship building or the whole thing (your marketing plan) won’t work the way you want. Here’s how it shapes up:

Transactional relationships are about:

• Talking “at”

• Overt selling

• Persuading

• Interruptive forms of communication

• Aggregating eyeballs

• Consumers are targets to be targeted

• Message repetition

Trust based relationships are about:

• Two-way conversation

• Perpetual listening

• Pursuing lifestyle meaning and relevance

• Building rapport

• Reciprocity – big word meaning to do something unselfish

• Respect

• Authenticity and honesty

Ironically, the best brand relationships now start to take on the persona of human friendships. The language of the marketing and communications plan should reflect this awareness and understanding, lest we tempt old behaviors to return. So, treat your customers like you treat your best friends. You care, you’re interested in their lives, you want what’s best for them and it shows. Is this how you talk about your customers?

What do you think?

Social media marketing evolves to social business strategy

By Robert Wheatley

We’re standing at the edge of an entirely new business model born of the Internet age. For generations brands have made plans to target their consumers and move messages at them through various paid and non-paid media vehicles. A sort of “push button” model that would appropriate spending down different pipes of communication aimed at informing and persuading.

The Internet and social media have helped activate consumer control over brand relationships and interactions. This requires a seismic shift in thinking from command and control to mining paths of relevance and value to the consumer’s lifestyle.

Underneath the theories behind word-of-mouth marketing and social media platforms and communities is a simple but profound truth: we trust people more than we trust organizations and institutions. And trust is critical to building any kind of lasting bond between a brand and its user.

The next great leap will be the humanization of brands…

In the days of mass marketing, brands were more about their predictability and reliability. Now what matters more is uniqueness and craft. These two points alone favor giving brands a face. Literally.

Our challenge now is to humanize the interactions, communications and experiences people have with brands. This kind of intimacy breeds rapport and leads to trust. So the question we should be asking ourselves is this: how can we put a human face on the brands we guide?

First and foremost, by focusing on the people behind the brand and business. Employees, customer service reps, brand stewards, product development experts, senior management and others behind the great corporate wall should come out to participate openly in the communications process.

Why bother? A humanized brand can more meaningfully and effectively connect with consumers. What better example of this idea than agencies themselves. Sure agencies may attempt to position themselves along the lines of proprietary planning models and other methods that portend a form of “secret sauce” in the creation of effective communication. But in the end, agencies are defined by their people and the qualities, expertise and know-how these individuals bring to the table.

So too, its time for organizations to think about putting real faces in front of consumers to engage with. New media such as blogs and Twitter enable this kind of interaction. So its time now for brands to go LIVE. This approach recommends the development of social business strategy as a method of formalizing the concept and adapting the organization to this kind of change.

What do you think?

By Robert Wheatley

Can happiness build a better brand?

Granted it feels a little wishful and maybe even goofy to say happiness can be linked to business success, but hang in with me, and you’ll see how this pays out.

You have to love the story of Zappos. In less than a decade it’s gone from idea to around $1 billion in sales. Not bad. You’ve probably encountered the hall-talk and legend of extraordinary customer service and devotion to culture which grounds most word-of-mouth about this Internet e-tailer.

After browsing through some of the Tweets at Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh’s Twitter page, I discovered a link to a podcast from a recent presentation he made at a conference in Austin, Texas. It’s worth a listen. The talk goes on for a while… it remains engaging due in part to Tony’s affable, informal story-telling style. And helpful because of the insight he conveys around the “magic” ingredients that have helped propel Zappos from shoe seller to multi-category storefront.

His presentation hits a crescendo near the end when he moves beyond storytelling to advising, translating the powerful Zappos experience into some specific and focused direction that can benefit other businesses and brands. So here it is without further set-up:

Happiness

That’s right. Businesses and brands can find a path to success through a happiness strategy. Hang with me here before you conclude this is going to be psychobabble. The infrastructure that supports extraordinary service at Zappos, the investments made there to enhance the service experience and outcomes involves clear dollar and cents decisions and allocation of assets.

But underneath you can see the point emerge: it is their single-minded focus on culture and hiring the right people to fit within that world, that helps create traction with consumers. In relating this success to other businesses, Hsieh says that in the end happiness lies at the core of engagement, brand building, and business success. In customer interactions, employee attitude, longevity, turnover and, the feelings consumers have towards his brand.

He confesses to having studied happiness carefully and the triggers that bring it to life. Not surprisingly he relays that research studies consistently confirm that happiness sought-after and thought to flow through better jobs, relationships and money prove fleeting. In the end, it turns out human beings have a structural need to be a part of something larger than themselves.

Bingo: The Higher Purpose

As if he had been quoting chapter and verse out of the Wheatley & Timmons belief system about brand development, he talks about the compelling need for businesses and individuals to define a mission and higher purpose that transcends the daily balance sheet concerns of commerce.

Brand relevance springs from forging connections to a consumer’s lifestyle aspirations, desires and wants. What kind of vision, community and purpose can we craft for our brands that achieves higher purpose, meaning and therefore systemically delivers the recipe for happiness with those we wish to sell to (happy = satisfied = loyal = potential heavy user = brand ambassador)?

We all crave happiness as human beings. It is a fundamental driver in our lives. The notion of higher purpose and mission is linked to this sense and certainly fits strategically with how brands can earn a valued place in the lives of their best users. Hsieh says he’s been able to move the path in his organization for employees from job to career and then on to calling. And within the concept of calling he’s unlocked a reservoir of happiness internally that translates externally into the grist that authenticates the stories of incredible service experience.

For brands, a higher purpose becomes an enabler of relationship with core users. The unselfish acts of a brand that are intended to help facilitate lifestyle passions is a powerful vehicle to differentiate and elevate the entire strategic conversation about go-to-market strategy. Appropriate we think in the age of consumer control. Makes me happy.

What do you think?

By Robert Wheatley

Brands can help relieve the anxiety

Fact: Consumer spending accounts for a whopping 70% of the US economy, according to Standard & Poor’s Equity Research. So if consumers don’t spend, well, you get the picture.

The mechanisms that work to bring consumers closer to brands are founded on emotional cues and not analytical evaluation. So it makes sense that the economic crisis we face in some respects is an outcome of a pervasive gloominess that has infected the nation as a whole. Sure there are facts arrayed around us about bad judgment in financial markets and an outsized balloon in home values that needed a correction. But the “we’re-in-no-mood-to-spend” behavior is the thing that’s sending a chill through all levels of the economy.

The recent ABC News story ‘A Crisis of Consumer Confidence’ quotes Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, about this enveloping sense of apprehension. He says: “Consumer’s have been spending beyond their income for 25 years, and they could do it because they could borrow.” He goes on to talk about the steamroll effect of consumer insecurity, “If you lose faith you’re in a recession. And if you panic you’re in a depression. And we’re somewhere in between recession and depression at this point – and that’s why it’s so important for policymakers to act very aggressively, boldly, consistently to shore up confidence.”

What can brands do to help replace uncertainty and uneasiness with something else that more closely resembles the pillars of warmth and happiness? Here are some ideas on relevant ways to reassess your current strategies:

Generally, what can your brand do to make life easier, better, more meaningful, secure and fulfilling? Is this a centerpiece of your communications platform?

Is this a time to help enable family time and interaction?

Should you focus on hearth and home as a welcome respite from the other “outside” concerns?

Is there a role for humor? Can laughter provide a form of emotional antidote?

Are you putting a focus on the things in life consumers can control?

Is it time to align your brand communications with a higher purpose, a strategic mission that works beyond the simple message of product feature and benefit?

Are you supporting the consumers’ desire to believe in, participate in activities and passions beyond the obvious elements of commerce?

What can you convey that says you understand the misgivings and want to help? Can you offer help in tangible, specific ways?

Should we honor helping others in the spirit of “we’re all in this together”?

Are there stories to tell of courage and perseverance that serve as a guide and reminder that the current condition will pass?

Used to be awareness and implied endorsement

By Robert Wheatley

In the good old days, PR was too-often viewed within the brand marketing mix as a below-the-line bit part player that delivered relatively inexpensive audience impressions with a lovely parting gift: implied endorsement of an outside and respected third party – the editorial media.

While “earned media placement” as its called continues to be a centerpiece of client expectations from their agencies and PR staffs, the substantive contribution of PR has transitioned. Today it is most certainly an above the line strategic leader and thus is integral to generating brand growth and new product trial.

Why? The consumer mindset has changed. Dramatically. How they make buying decisions has changed. Emotionally. How, when and where they consume media has shifted. Radically. It is no longer possible to force and dictate consumer behavior through sheer tonnage in conventional ad media spending.

The incredible volume of new products (over-choice) chasing consumers in ever more narrow and specialized categories, combined with the awesome number of media and mediums (inundation) clamoring for everyone’s attention, has precipitated a near total shut-down of what was once thought to be rational buying behavior. Consumers no longer simply absorb and act on the facts arrayed near them through marketing campaigns, packaging, retail displays and other touch points. Instead they go with their gut and perceptions.

Read More»

Understanding the interplay of value components vital to sound strategy
By Robert Wheatley

In his excellent book entitled “The Momentum Effect,” author J.C. Larreche describes the unique characteristics of momentum driven businesses that seem to grow more rapidly at the top line because consumers flock to their value proposition. He says: “Momentum powered firms don’t just offer good customer value, they offer compelling value – a value so intense and personal that it resonates with their needs in a gripping and powerful way.”

But value isn’t just a quick summation of benefits, features, price and the rational evaluation of those pieces. Read More»

Sound advice from the Dean…

Saw this quote the other day and thought it was worth mentioning here:

Distilling the marketing game to its core essence

We recently saw a whiteboard presentation at Tom Asacker’s web site
that’s definitely worth a look. Read More»