By Robert Wheatley

Powerful tools to build brand value and relevance

Today the Wall Street Journal features a story about a new ad campaign from General Mills for their iconic Pillsbury brand. You can watch below.

What’s obvious to the viewer: this spot is less ad-like and more about story telling. The approach is appropriate in an environment where consumers remain skeptical and disinterested in overt pitches and interruptive selling. This spot is anything but.
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By Robert Wheatley

Fractured trust upends power of communications

Perhaps at no other time in the history of modern marketing have we been faced with such an incredible accumulation of contiguous scandals, recalls, startling revelations, bankruptcies, forced marriages, mistruths, half-truths, malfeasance, behavioral inconsistencies and general evidence of bad business behavior.

From miscreant members of the Clergy to chemical leaching plastic water bottles, lead-covered toys, and fallen sports legends, consumers have been bombarded with evidence that leaders, corporations, brands, institutions and communications cannot be trusted. People are learning rapidly that corporate messaging is suspect at best as buoyant reports of happy trails ahead may be masking an impending fall from grace. We discover even the most storied of conservative business icons in banking and insurance can fall under the spell of temptation to play fast and loose. Awesome out-sized basketfuls of assets are gambled away through investments in flimsy financial products constructed on a floor of actuarial quicksand.
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Brands must reassess the path to building belief…

By Robert Wheatley

United Airlines extols that It’s Time To Fly, while simultaneously revealing more fees to go alongside the other precipitous declines in service. Travel is already painful but never mind. Banks and financial service firms wax on about their forthright expertise and ask investors to place their faith in them. Right behind the message comes scandal, bankruptcy and accusations of malfeasance, which are flying in all directions.

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New world order for brand building

By Robert Wheatley

We really appreciate and enjoy reading Patrick Scanlon’s think pieces and articles. His latest published in AdAge entitled ‘Winning in the Pick Economy’ charts the changes in dynamics between marketer and consumer in an age of the latter’s over-arching control.

Says Scanlon: “In today’s world, media are fragmented, markets are fragmented. Skews of race, sexual orientation, work life, digital experience, marriage and child status, plus other sociological forces crosscut markets even further. We have micro-trends, micro-markets and micro-meals. Only in rare cases can products, like oil and toilet paper, claim to be (both) ubiquitous and necessary. These days’ consumers choose from miles of aisles of cars, clothing, electronic equipment, food, beverages and other staples. To push is dangerous. To pull is difficult. We are engaged in a revolutionary new marketing model not driven by manufacturers or their marketing partners.”
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What’s the best path to increased sales and relevance?

Steve Yastrow’s book WE: the Ideal Customer Relationship is focused in part on the evolution of technology in business and how Read More»

Can we bring back the close personal relationships that dominated buy-sell interactions a century ago?

We’ve raised the issue before in this blog about transactional thinking and Read More»

For relevant, engaging, interesting products and brand propositions, consumers are looking (and spending) for luxury and affordable indulgence. Similarly for products and categories that provide no tangible emotional connection and payoff, purchases are heading south at a rapid pace to the price and commodity zone where consumers take great pride in flaunting their thriftiness.

Implications for packaged goods, beverages and Read More»

Recall ruptures brand propositions – opens doors to new players

We love our furry pals, all 163 million of them. We have so fully anthropomorphized these wet-nosed relationships that the business of pet related products is now larger than the annual US sales of movies, video games and recorded music combined.

The entire industry is expected to gross Read More»

If the consumer has already gamed the old “push” system by tuning out, what makes you think they’re tuned in? If you build it (say it) they will come?

Almost no one argues any longer that consumers have managed to take control of the brand/customer relationship. Equally so, the reams of evidence about clutter and media proliferation help shine a spotlight on why the consumer has chosen to ignore most of the marketing noise they’re exposed to: 3,000 messages a day according to some sources. Even with the ample evidence, we are often confronted with a form of entrenched denial: let’s throw as much push-style communication as we can out afford out there in mass media channels because of its apparent reach. Surely someone (or everyone) will be listening and awareness interests will be served.

But is that the goal of marketing? Awareness vs. engagement…. It has to be the latter if impacting behavior is to come into play.

There may be a lingering, recurring, omni-present, gigantic assumption that consumers are paying attention despite the 800-pound gorilla in the room — we’re smack dab in the midst of the marketing message avoidance era brought on by clutter overload among other things.

What does all this mean? What strategically do you do when consumers actively ignore most of the “talking at you” communication?

Let’s look at the elements of a solution:

Seek The Seekers

Often there’s a latent fear of narrowing the aperture of communications strategies. The desire (potentially unhealthy) to cast a broad net and appeal to everyone — and in doing so to be relevant to no one — is strong indeed. Yet within nearly every category there exists a community (often not so small either) of involved and engaged consumers who are fans and heavy users. Yet so much energy and money is spent that bypasses the deep-dive a brand could be taking to build a relationship with its most ardent customers. And why bother? Because these are the people at the nexus of word-of-mouth – now identified routinely in consumer research as the most credible and persuasive form of communication. They seek out relevance and engagement. They are listening! They may also be your most profitable customers – those willing to pay a premium price and to go out of their way to find you despite cheaper alternatives.

Examples of immersed audiences:

Food products: Kitchen commanders or those who get their self-esteem out of creativity around a stove.

Home products: Novice decorators and household creatives who look at their dwelling as a canvas for personal expression.

Fashion brands: The self-expressives and personal branders who see their look as integral to telling the world they are unique and special.

Travel brands: The learners and cultural sponges who define themselves on their acquired experiences and worldliness from visiting other places.

Mining the higher purpose:

Relevance and engagement are an outgrowth of brands meeting consumers where they live. By definition this will transport the marketing conversation from “buy me” to how a brand can enable and facilitate the interests and passions consumers are intrinsically focused on. It is going to require a willingness to see beyond the forest of features and benefits and reach to grasp an idea that is at once naturally meaningful to a brand’s users.

Example: Panasonic recently announced a platform entitled “Bring Back Family Time” in reference to a multi-faceted project of working to enable families spending time together. This is a higher and more relevant purpose than specsmanship selling so common in the home electronics category. You can see where this could go if you really drive against it: bringing in outside experts on family values and the benefits of time together. Assistance in helping families better plan their time around busy schedules. Creating events and sponsorships that facilitate family interaction. Creating social media communities that allow families to share their experiences and ideas. We could go on and on.

The direction: invest in research to uncover target audience lifestyle insights. Work to find an intersection between the brand’s DNA and your customer’s personal desires. In doing so you can secure a passage to deeper meaning. This is how you earn the right to a mutually beneficial relationship. Second — don’t shrink from investing energy, time, ideas and budget against narrower audiences of brand fans. Segmentation can be a useful exercise to identify these user communities and build a pipeline to a two-way conversation.

“>Hard Wired Humans Look For Authenticity

Cleaning out some files I ran across an article from FastCompany that I blogged about in May. Really resonated then to Bill Breen’s take on brand strategy. Just leafing through the piece again I stopped on this point: “overloaded by sales pitches, consumers are gravitating towards brands they sense are true and genuine…(the) hunger for authentic is all around us.”

But what sets the stage for authenticity?

This is a frequent subject in our blog because it is so fundamental to successful brand and communications strategy. Breen goes on to state, ”authenticity comes to a brand that IS what it SAYS it is (read: not a poser).” Jim Hardison, Creative Director of Portland based brand consultancy Character explains authenticity this way: “The story that a brand tells through its actions (must) align with the story it tells through its communications.”

I honestly cannot think of a more powerful expression of the essence of the PR mindset and approach to brand strategy and communication than the previous statement. And why does this matter?

Hard Wired Humans…

This concept of brand behavior syncing with communication is fundamentally respectful of how people see and resonate to the world around them. Sure there will be aberrations to the norms. However for the most part we are hard wired in our response to the actions and behaviors of people, brands, businesses and everyday life:

We believe in fairness

Desire honesty over spin

Prefer truth instead of lies

Respect innovation

Root for the underdog

Embrace love

Admire self-less behavior

Abhor cheaters

Believe the best should prevail

Are You Aligned?

Respect and love of the consumer begins with an unrelenting commitment to the highest levels of integrity in how a brand presents itself. Consumers are more aware than ever of the facts around them and highly observant of behaviors in the context of what a brand may claim about itself or its product/service.

Inconsistency in this arena is a dangerous game. Half measures, window dressing, fakery and marketing make-up applied over a less than authentic proposition goes against the grain of the consumer’s own internal Integrity Meter.

The Authenticity Reality Check:

If your customer service stinks the inconsistency will come back to haunt the moment a reasonable branded alternative arrives. Cable guy anyone?

Are formulas and ingredients matching the proposition?

If you executed short cuts to meet a cost number but left the basic positioning for your product claims at a loftier level, are you courting disaster? Think they won’t notice? Think again.

Overstating the benefits?

There is a great temptation in communications to stretch the language (hyperbole) in an effort to maximize the appeal. This can be tricky — go too far and consumers will see through the hype.

Do you love your employees as much as you “love” the consumer?

Fairness, honesty, truth, care – are these characteristics of corporate behavior in dealing with employees also aligned with the efforts made to court the affections of buyers?

When behavior and communication match the stage is set for authenticity – which, by the way, is now table stakes for successful brands in the age of transparency and consumer control.