The Credibility Branding Blog

Sometimes to Sell the Aspirin, You’ve Got to Sell the Pain It Cures First

As mentioned previously, a very important piece of the messaging puzzle is to identify the benefits (as opposed to features and attributes). Another way to view benefits is to answer the question, “What pain are you solving?” If your company has not figured out what pain your customers are feeling, how is it able to deliver the cure?

Identifying the challenges and industry trends facing your customers is the first step in figuring out how your product addresses those challenges, as seen in the Messaging Timeline.

To offer an example, here are some of the trends in the media and entertainment space. As with most sectors, the challenges are diverse and complicated:

Trend 1 – Digital Convergence

Digital convergence was one of those hyped-up trends that promised to create new revenue streams for the media and entertainment industry while also driving down the cost of production and distribution. Reality was different; revenue growth has mostly come from acquisitions, and returns have actually declined.

Why? Fragmented media markets are certainly a cause. For example, the average audience per media property has been slowly decreasing and remains low, yet operating costs have grown.

Trend 2 – Wireless

With the recent launch of a $327 million satellite,

South Korea

and

Japan

have joined the race to allow users of handheld devices to receive satellite transmissions. This satellite broadcast conforms to the digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) standard,

South   Korea

’s proprietary standard.

South Korean and Japanese mobile phone and handheld computer users will be able to receive broadcast transmissions of news, sports, entertainment, and other programming. This migration of broadcast delivery to new users raises questions for broadcasters, including news directors, over how best to serve this niche.

In the

United States

, MobiTV, a specialist in the live streaming of television content delivered to mobile telephones, carried live television coverage of President Bush’s State of the Union address that could be watched on a cell phone.

Launched in November 2003, MobiTV is available through Sprint and AT&T/Cingular and will be on most carriers in the coming year.

While the technology is in its infancy, mobile entertainment and streaming television content to mobile telephones will become more common as 3G (third-generation) cell phones begin to appear. This provides network and local news operations with a powerful means of branding themselves and gives them new revenue streams to exploit, enabling the carrier to reap the benefits of increased ARPU (average revenue per user).

Trend 3 – Flexible Screens

FOLED, or flexible organic light emitting devices, is a technology that could one day be responsible for bendable TV, computer, and cell phone displays at home and potentially on the news set.

On a news set, bendable video displays could wrap gently around a wavy desk or be used in interesting ways in conjunction with real cycloramas and virtual sets. Or, imagine a reusable electronic newspaper that could download and display the day’s news and be rolled up after use.

Are you starting to get the idea? These trends are what the editorial community will be writing about and are also what your customers will be exploring. Your job is to fit your story, your vision into those trends. This is the top of the Credibility Pyramid and the first section of the Messaging Timeline, and it is of utmost importance as you create your story, form your messaging, and figure out what your customers care about.

Loyal Customers Hard To Shake

You have to try really hard to lose a loyal customer, that is according to Robert Passikoff and his “Rule of Six.” Once you have established credibility and loyalty with your customers, it doesn’t take much to keep them. So if you have heavy churn it is time to take a good hard look at what you are doing (six times no less) to lose em.

Following is an interesting take on customer loyalty By Media Post’s Marketing Daily’s Emily Burg…

Customer Loyalty Engagement Index Proves The 'Rule of Six'

Media Post’s Marketing Daily

by Emily Burg, Tuesday, May 1, 2007 5:00 AM ET

ROBERT PASSIKOFF, PRESIDENT OF BRAND Keys, Inc., has a theory he calls "the rule of six" that demonstrates the loyalty bond between a customer and a brand.

This year's airline category leader in the Brand Keys' Customer Loyalty Engagement Index--Jet Blue Airways--demonstrates not only that the tenets of the rule of six are true, but also that when it comes to customer expectations, often a customer's positive residual experience with a brand accounts for a lot of loyalty in otherwise disappointing situations.

"With the rule of six, a customer is six times more likely to give the product or service the benefit of the doubt, and that's what you see with JetBlue," Passikoff explained to Marketing Daily.

This comes despite JetBlue's recent customer service fumbles and weather woes that caused many airline industry analysts and frequent fliers to question the once customer-friendly airline's ability to maintain its favor among passengers.

Other elements of the rule of six are that the customer is six times more likely to:

· engage with the brand

· pay attention to ads and marketing

· think better of the brand

· buy the product again and again

· resist competitive appeals and price offers

· recommend the product or service to someone else

· invest in the company (if it's publicly traded)

Several other category leaders in the Brand Keys' Customer Loyalty Engagement Index show the veracity of Passikoff's rule of six theory, as well as the frequent disconnect between customer loyalty engagement and brand market leadership. On this list, ubiquity does not equal customer loyalty--although in the case of retail department store leader Macy's, a first-timer on the list, Federated's acquisition streak and rebranding of its purchases of Macy's stores made all the difference.

"I was one of the people that said Federated was going be great and people nay-sayed me," Passikoff said. "The minute they rebranded their stores as Macy's, they had a built-in audience. More people were mentioning the Macy's brand, and Macy's had been fine-tuning the shopping experience for over 100 years, plus they brought the reputation as the biggest store in the world, the owners of the Thanksgiving Day Parade and Santa Claus with them. That's what does it for them."

In the coffee category, Starbucks lost to Dunkin' Donuts--the first time in five years the brand didn't come in first place. "It's not surprising, given the trade-off they've done over the past 18 months for in-store experience," Passikoff said. "Starbucks can come back but even [Chairman Howard] Schultz himself has said they traded their brand equity for vacuum-packed bags of coffee.

"In the meantime, Dunkin' Donuts has come up from behind, and their past few years of brand efforts have been right on and resonating with what people are looking for," Passikoff said.

Toyota, whose Scion brand ranked No. 1 in a recent e-commerce survey, led the automotive category. "In the automotive category, reliability is high for customers so it makes sense why Toyota and Mercedes [tied with BMW for #2] is high," Passikoff explained. "But when you see that General Motors is at the bottom of the list [at #10], that tells you a lot about how people are looking at that brand. Their cars are just as reliable as Toyotas."

GM and Gap, which ranked at the bottom of the retail stores/apparel category (H&M/Victoria's Secret tied for #1), have become category placeholders, according to Passikoff. They have ubiquitous distribution and pricing and little else associated with their brands at this point.

"If your brand is going to engage someone, what does it stand for? There has to be a foundation for an emotional bond to be established," he said.

Emily Burg can be reached via email at emily@mediapost.com

To read the post from the source Click here

Press Landscape – Your Best Credibility Marketing Research Tool

The press landscape is a tool I use to create a map of exactly what the editorial community is covering. The idea is to conduct some basic research to map out what publications are writing about in relation to your product or industry. The key findings you are looking for include the following:

· What exactly are publications writing about similar products in the market? How are they being covered—the good and the bad?

· What are editors saying about the industry as a whole? This will give you hints as to what your messaging should be when approaching these editors.

· How are editors covering competitors? What are they saying about them? Are they believing your competitors’ messaging? (Review a competitor’s recent press release and then review the coverage it received.)

· Who are these editors using as press references? For example, who is being quoted in the article? This will assist you in identifying key influencers to pursue; if the editorial community is using them as a reference then they already have influence.

The press landscape is one of the most important research tools a marketer has at hand, but it is frequently forgotten. What better way to find the pulse of the market than through what the media are covering? The press landscape can also help you formulate your messages. The way an editor hears your story or the stories of your competitors and writes about that gives you a clue as to how he or she perceives you and the sector and what the editor perceives his or her audience will care about. Publications do a great deal of research on what their audiences want to read. Don’t reinvent the wheel and make assumptions about what customers are focusing on; use magazines and editors as barometers of industry trends to assist you in forming messaging and creating strategies and tactics that are relevant and will be embraced.

Branding Focus – Targeting the Right Audiences

One of my favorite marketing blogs is my friend Derrick Daye’s Brand Strategy Insider, it consistently delivers the branding goodies. Today’s post is from my equally favorite blogger and pundit extraordinaire Seth Godin who is this months contributing blogger.

In today’s post Seth talks about “The Brand Formula” and in his usually succinct style offers a clear presentation of what a brand is. His point is focus on the target audience that will most embrace your value, succeed among them and even as you get successful think long and hard before embracing a different demographic. This is about focus. I think one of the biggest challenges facing companies at just about any time frame of its corporate life is focus.

Focus

The focus I am referring to relates to a number of areas within the company all of them represent your brand. First is the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, (which represents a majority of companies)? Or is your company an engineering driven culture? Or is it a marketing-driven culture? In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and for technology, they are generally engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is big challenge to maintaining consistent focus.

What I mean by marketing-driven is looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a "seat-of-the- pants" approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus.

What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace for specific audiences. (That's actually a key issue: "product myopia" or  “benefits” versus “features”).

In an engineering-driven culture, it's kind of a "if you build it, they will come" type of approach. They focus on "that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is… like, cool". Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvements that the engineers will resist to their death.

What is needed is a different way of thinking for example using your marketing brain when making business decisions is of the utmost importance. For example if resources are limited and you have the choice of pursuing several different customers but can't service them all, don't just go for the money. Go for the one that will meet budget expectations but also add credibility.

Here is what Seth has to say or click here to go directly to the post on Branding Strategy Insider:

The Brand Formula May 09, 2007

Branding Strategy Insider Blog - By Seth Godin

What's a brand?

I think it is the product of two things:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don't know what it means or does, it has zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do for me, but I don't care about that, no power.

Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.

AT&T is a weak brand because you almost never get what you expect, because they do so many different things and because the value of what they create has little emotional resonance (it sure used to though, when they did one thing, they did it perfectly and they were the only ones who could connect you).

The dangers of brand ubiquity are then obvious. When your brand is lots of things (like AOL became) then the expectations were all over the place and the emotional resonance started to fade. If the predictability of your brand starts to erode its emotional power (a restaurant that becomes boring) then you need to become predictable in your joyous unpredictability!

If you want to grow a valuable brand, my advice is to keep awareness close to zero among the people you're not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you

In Marketing, Perception is Reality and Visualization Helps Perception

NASA was the first organization to use visualization techniques, which led the way to successful missions that brought man to the moon long before anticipated. A NASA psychologist, Dr. Denis Waitley (who endorsed The Credibility Factor) took those visualization techniques, which were then called “visual motor rehearsal,” to the Olympic program. What the research team discovered, using sophisticated electroencephalograms and biofeedback equipment with Olympic athletes, is that when an athlete was visualizing the race, the same muscles fired in the same sequence, exactly as they might during the actual race. In other words, the brain couldn’t tell the difference between the real race and the imagined race.

So what does this have to do with credibility? Well, it is the perception piece, and it is twofold; your perception is as important as the perception of potential of customers. If you don’t believe what you are saying about your product, then your customers won’t either.

So here is a visualization planning strategy that we use in our Credibility Branding program. It is a very powerful tool; oftentimes it provides a much better picture of how the product will be used, and it even reveals how the company might support the development, production, and marketing of that product.

Visualization Planning Strategy

The idea is to create a story about your business in the not-too-distant future, describing in detail the outcome—the final result of how your product or company has impacted multiple layers. Pretend you have a magic wand and you can swish it over your business, products, customers—everything. What does this future business look like? What are you feeling? Where are you physically? What does the office look like? Who is surrounding you (customers, clients, employees, colleagues)? What are they like (describe them in detail—how they act, what they do, how they are feeling, how they respond to you)? How has the company impacted your personal life (remember that this is absolute genie-in-the-bottle wish time—whatever you want, you describe)? What do you or your company stand for? What are you feeling? How are your customers feeling? How do they act? Who are they? What do they do? How are they responding to your products or services?

The exercise entails writing a detailed story outlining the answers to the above questions. Take your time, and write stream-of-consciousness style, meaning don’t stop to correct sentence structure or grammar. Let your thoughts flow on the paper until you feel you’ve said everything you want to say.

In creating your story, follow these rules:

· Throughout your story, describe how you feel. Feeling it makes it more real. Also, when the exercise is complete, it will provide new words, phrasings, and descriptors that could help create the brand persona (the emotional piece) and perhaps help in establishing some messaging.

· When describing the individuals that are part of the business, you don’t have to name names; just describe the qualities of these employees, colleagues, and customers.

· Do not choose a specific time in the future or a timeframe when your vision will come to fruition; don’t put any restrictions on it.

· Do not include “hows.” Do not think about how it will come about; just describe the outcome, the end result.

· Dream big; whish loud.

· Write it in a stream-of-consciousness way. For example, if you can’t think of anything to write to start it, start with: “I can’t think of anything to write. This seems like a dumb exercise, but I will give it a try. What is it that I see as the future description of my company…?” And so on.

· Describe how you feel all the way through the story. (Did I mention that before?)

Why are you doing this? It takes you out of marketing speak. It takes you out of planning and traditional business practices and puts you into a new context of imagining what is possible. It takes your thinking to a new level of creativity. It will truly surprise you when you compare what you wrote with what you thought the company, product, or customers were before you started.

Take this story and read it regularly. If you want, take out excerpts and put them on your bulletin board to remind you of what’s possible. If you have a team, each member should do this exercise, and then share the results in a group meeting. Powerful new understandings can arise out of this exercise, and insights into how your team thinks become crystal clear. You might also become aware of differing visions, which will eventually emerge—better to have them revealed in this forum rather than two days before a launch.

Keep It Simple – Both for Marketers Explaining Marketing and Marketing to Your Customers

Karl Greenberg at Media Post’s Marketing Daily summarizes a talk Allen Adamson did at ANA. Below you will find excerpts from that talk below (to read the whole article click here).

Two things come up for me, one is this is so full of marketing jargon. Marketing savvy C-level executives will likely get this but even some of those might have to read this a couple of times. It isn’t that hard to understand but as I have been saying in previous posts, can’t we translate this into simpler terms?

Let’s take these statements:

"Segway's a good product, but not a strong brand for that reason”

“Best brands are blessed with both relevance and differentiation”

They make sense once you think about it, and in fact are VERY important statements. But I think they can be discussed in more straightforward way. This is the old argument of marketing needing marketing for itself.

What they mean with those statements is; deliver a great product that solves a clear problem. If one of those two things is not happening, you have a BIG marketing challenge on your hands.

The article is right on the money on a number of fronts.

· Don’t go big just because it is easy, like buying a big campaign because marketing is now the final solution to solve the bottom line problem. (Have you ever noticed how marketing is the first thing to cut then the last thing used to save the company?)

· Boil the value you are offering down to 2 – 3 simple words. This is good for customers but even better for employees who also represent your brand on a daily basis.

· Plan ahead and decide where you want to be (check back here tomorrow–Thursday– for a post describing a exercise right from my book how to do this)

· In order to do any of the above you must KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER and how your product will serve them.

Adamson At ANA: Best Brands Blessed With Relevance, Differentiation

by Karl Greenberg, Wednesday, Apr 25, 2007 5:00 AM ET

 ALLEN ADAMSON, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF the New York office of brand development consultancy Landor Associates, used the Segway personal transportation machine as an example of a brand that failed because it has a high degree of differentiation but very little relevance.

"Segway's a good product, but not a strong brand for that reason," he said.

The message was part of a conversation in the packed Manhattan Grand Hyatt convention hall on the benefits of simplicity in building a brand and why companies like Apple and Google or Timberland, for that matter, succeed by simplifying consumer choices and the brand's own proposition. "If the brand doesn't make it easy, it won't work."

Speaking at yesterday's Association of National Advertisers Conference, Adamson argued that a brand can be successful if that formula is reversed, but the best brands are blessed with both relevance and differentiation.

"The most common pattern we see is companies who have strong awareness, nonetheless continuously worried about awareness, who do things like get stadium-naming rights. They focus on that because it's easy to do," he said. "Dealing with the issue of differentiation and how to deliver it is complex and hard to execute."

The problem, he said, is that few companies are able to boil down their brand and what makes it different to a few simple words. "We'll sit down with a CEO and ask what the company does that's different, and we may get something like 'innovation.' That's a popular word these days. When we speak to the executive board of that company and ask them what innovation means, we'll get twelve different answers."

He said developing the brand's identity in simple terms and then creating a symbol and/or a compelling phrase defining it is critical not just for consumers but for employees, too--because it is clear and unambiguous, and therefore a kind of "veni, vidi, vici" for company workers, particularly those who deal with consumers.

"Once you get to where your story is, you need then to get it simple, if you can't get it down to simple idea it won't stick," he said. "If you have a brand promise, and you have dozens or hundreds who are supposed to be delivering that promise, you will never succeed ... if there's no clear, simple sense of what the customer journey is."

Examples of successful brand ideas: BP's "Beyond Petroleum" mantra; H.R. Block's "Friendly enabler" positioning. "You need to deliver that promise along consumer touchpoints, but the most successful brands choose their touch points carefully," he said. "Figure out where you want to win, and make sure you do that."

He said a simple and clear brand premise--one that argues that a brand is different from its competitors--starts with something that isn't fulfilled by what's out there already. "I always think that Jerry Seinfeld would be great at branding because he always asks the question, 'Do you ever wonder why?' You have to get to the 'ever wonder why' phrase," he said.

As an example, he illustrated how Timberland's rise from no-name boot brand to fashion accessory and one of the best-known work boot brands came from an observation by CEO Jeff Swartz.

"He bought a shoe company in Maine, was doing pretty well--some years were good, some bad, but he couldn't grow the business. One day he got out of a car, stepped in a puddle and said, "Why can't I do a waterproof shoe?' The company designed it, came up with the name Timberland."

Adamson also gave a nod to Bose headphones, Baby Einstein and FedEx (with its brand premise of absolute certainty) as companies that are successfully tapping a core consumer insight. And Mazda.

Karl Greenberg can be reached at karl@mediapost.com

Read the rest of the article

Happy Employees equals Easier Marketing and Better Brands

Alexander Kjerulf over at Chief Happiness Officer writes a great article on the importance of happy people in the workplace. This is both a message for those of us to become happier in our workplace and for HR departments and corporate managers to take a closer look at. Happy employees mean happy, creative, efficient processes equaling happy brands. Happy brands mean happy customers and happy bottom line profits which create happy shareholders… ok you get the idea. Check out the Worksona case study post to see their model as well as previous posts on corporate cultures

There is a great image and an anecdotal case study so click on the link to get the whole post. Following is an excerpt of the “list of 10 reasons”…

Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster

March 27, 2007 Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer

Here are the 10 most important reasons why happiness at work is the #1 productivity booster.

1: Happy people work better with others
Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better relations at work. This translates into:

· Better teamwork with your colleagues

· Better employee relations if you’re a manager

· More satisfied customers if you’re in a service job

· Improved sales if you’re a sales person

2: Happy people are more creative
If your productivity depends on being able to come up with new ideas, you need to be happy at work. Check out the research of Teresa Amibile for proof. She says:

If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.

3: Happy people fix problems instead of complaining about them
When you don’t like your job, every molehill looks like a mountain. It becomes difficult to fix any problem without agonizing over it or complaining about it first. When you’re happy at work and you run into a snafu - you just fix it.

4: Happy people have more energy
Happy people have more energy and are therefore more efficient at everything they do.

5: Happy people are more optimistic
Happy people have a more positive, optimistic outlook, and as research shows (particularly Martin Seligman’s work in positive psychology), optimists are way more successful and productive. It’s the old saying “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re probably right” all over again.

6: Happy people are way more motivated
Low motivation means low productivity, and the only sustainable, reliable way to be motivated at work is to be happy and like what you do. I wrote about this in a previous post called Why “motivation by pizza” doesn’t work.

7: Happy people get sick less often
Getting sick is a productivity killer and if you don’t like your job you’re more prone to contract a long list of diseases including ulcers, cancer and diabetes. You’re also more prone to workplace stress and burnout.

One study assessed the impact of job strain on the health of 21,290 female nurses in the US and found that the women most at risk of ill health were those who didn’t like their jobs. The impact on their health was a great as that associated with smoking and sedentary lifestyles (source).

8: Happy people learn faster
When you’re happy and relaxed, you’re much more open to learning new things at work and thereby increasing your productivity.

9: Happy people worry less about making mistakes - and consequently make fewer mistakes
When you’re happy at work the occasional mistake doesn’t bother you much. You pick yourself up, learn from it and move on. You also don’t mind admitting to others that you screwed up - you simply take responsibility, apologize and fix it. This relaxed attitude means that less mistakes are made, and that you’re more likely to learn from them.

10: Happy people make better decisions
Unhappy people operate in permanent crisis mode. Their focus narrows, they lose sight of the big picture, their survival instincts kick in and they’re more likely to make short-term, here-and-now choices. Conversely, happy people make better, more informed decisions and are better able to prioritize their work.

Read the rest of the post

Marketing Strategy – Why Don’t Companies Apply It? (Part 2)

Let’s take another look at strategy through an example. As mentioned in part one of this series there are objectives (the goal), then the strategy (what you want to accomplish), then the tactics (how you are implementing the strategy). Here is a very brief model of how that might look specifically using and influencer strategy.

Objective is to increase revenues by 20%

Strategy is to

1. Engage with industry influencers to endorse the product and increase visibility and credibility.
2. Identify and elevate several internal spokespersons to influencer level
3. Leverage high profile customers
4. Ensure messaging is in alignment with new level of credibility

Higher levels of credibility allows us to increase the price by 20% (therefore contributing to the goal/objective)

Tactics are:

• Pursue NAME OF INFLUENCERS
• Awards program
• Speakers bureau for internal spokespersons
• Bylined article program for internal spokespersons
• User testimonial teaser banner ad campaign
• Media outreach using user testimonials as case studies and press references
• (You get the idea.)

As mentioned, the strategy illustrated above is an influencer program. There are other strategies that could be added, such as; price to value ratios or improving the product based on current market needs etc., each with its own accompanying tactical programs. The overall complete plan would in aggregate meet the objective of a 20% increase in sales. 

You can see that even the creative aspects including the advertising are part of an overarching influencer strategy. There can be a lot of flexibility in the programs as market inflections shift consumer interests, but the structure of the strategies keeps the focus in alignment with the objectives. There are many tactical programs that may make themselves available throughout the course of an annual plan. These need to be included and incorporated, but done so through the filter of the objectives and the strategies.

Following is a great exercise in conceptually understanding strategy and building our strategic thinking muscles. This will take about 15 minutes. This may seem like an odd activity, but doing it brings a kinesthetic component to your understanding. We don’t just think with our minds we use imagination and our bodies and this exercise engages that. Please take some time and do this, I promise you will gain a new comprehension of strategy and use another part of your brain that you can apply immediately to the rest of your day. For this exercise do it in the order presented and don’t read ahead, it will spoil the surprise.

The following graphic is a Picasso sketch. I want you to print it out and redraw it. First by putting it beside your piece of paper and just drawing it by eye, so go try that.

 

How did that go… unless you are an artist probably not so good?

Now take a new piece of paper for a fresh drawing. Take Picasso sketch and turn it upside down (the head is at the bottom now). Take the old sketch and cover up the lower two thirds of the drawing so you are only seeing the top (which is actually the bottom) of the image. Now recreate the image by viewing this one third part of the image and slowly move the paper down to reveal more until you are finished.

Pretty amazing isn’t it. You should have been able to make that picture look much closer to the original. So what happened here? By only using the area that you needed to focus on, your brain was able to take in the relationships between the lines and shapes. That is what strategy is and does. A sound strategy allows you to focus on a piece of the objective and develop tactics that are more focused. Strategy is also the relationship between different elements of business, marketing, messaging, positioning, profit, margins etc. By taking a look at the relationship between things and not the whole picture you can start building something that is more organic and usually more creative.

This may seem like a silly example, but do you remember the movie “Working Girl” with Sigourney Weaver, Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith (1988). Well at the end she was able to show that the idea for a merger came from reading the paper, and putting together a business “ah ha” from the social pages. She saw the wedding announcement and another announcement for a potential merger in the same paper which gave her the idea. That is strategic thinking. So looking at industry trends and the broader picture then identifying some similarities with your product and a completely different industry could result in a strategic partnership that expands both companies’ products. That is strategic thinking.

M-Systems (recently purchased by Sandisk) was my client for years. We worked with them on a new category creation strategy, taking their flash memory disks (USB flash drives) and adding targeted applications. We called it “smart memory” and it resulted in a consortium between the two competing companies and is now a successful company U3. U3 delivers solution oriented applications on these devices. That was strategic thinking. Getting back to the analogy of the drawing, looking at the relationship between the lines allows you to build something that when combined becomes a whole picture. It is good to see the whole picture in advance (that is what the plan is for) but then taking the times to focus on the relationship between the lines and start seeing patterns and opportunities is what strategy is all about.

There is NO “free publicity”

This notion of free publicity is giving me heartache. There are so many snake oil salesmen touting FREE PUBLICITY. I just saw another one in The Learning Annex catalogue. When you say “free” it devalues the tremendous amount of hard work it takes to get to the free part. “Free” is just spin to engage you. Trust me, it aint free.

For successful programs there is always a strategy, a sound scientific market driven approach to what the market will embrace and believe. There is strategy; from determining the messaging the target audience will buy, then how the editorial community will trust it in a form they can then translate into the right message for readers. Then there is the editorial research, the event research, making sure the publicity program/stunt/pitch is in alignment and will enhance the brand. That the programs will speak to the persona of the company and/or product.

THEN there is the programs and tactics themselves each with their own form of strategy in timing, messaging and positioning.

Sure there are times when out of the blue a product catches the eye of an editor or reporter and then there is a domino effect of coverage. But even that is not free… the product had the right benefits at the right time presented through packaging and copywriting in a unique way that caught the imagination. This is not a coincidence; it is part of this process. A product that delivers on its promise is half the battle to generating marketing success.

None of that work is free. IF the work of marketing and PR is done with integrity and intelligence then, JUST MAYBE the “free” publicity will manifest in the form of articles and broadcast interviews, product placements, resulting in critical mass notice and buzz.

Many that are selling “how to get it free” are living in tactical land. Those that are buying what they are selling get a pile of tactics that just don’t work as well without a well thought out strategy, plan and credibility branding platform backing it. Bedsides, saying it is free is disrespectful to the professionals out there doing this for a living and the journalists out there being paid to be “spun? I think not. Let’s lose the FREE and start associating VALUE with the principles of marketing publicity.

Just Ask - The Brand Credibility Secret

When you ask for something what is the feeling you have just before asking? That feeling will pretty much dictate what the answer will be. This applies to asking a favor of friends and loved ones or asking for an influencer’s endorsement even asking for the order from your customer. Your sense of your level of deservedness will have a direct impact on every interaction with the contact.

So the feeling sense behind it has to be confident and “deserving,” not from and entitlement perspective, but from a competency perspective. For example, I am, and my product is competent and worthy to receive the energy of this influencer or sales contact. So, if you might not believe it at some level then how do you turn it around? My answer is 1) good old fashioned research and 2) just ask them!

Research:

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you will have heard this a lot –read, research, investigate. If you are pursuing an influencer to endorse your product or pursuing them as a possible customer, then research them in depth. Find out their likes and dislikes, discover what they have said in the press. Who else is using them and how? What are they saying about the industry, about politics, about their personal lives? If they are a high end influencer in the celebrity category it is easier to find out this information. If they are influencers that are niche or vertically oriented then it requires a little more digging. Lexis Nexis is a great resource, there is also Find Articles and of course Google News. Key in their name, find out what you can, then use it. Reference whatever you have in common with them. Also Spoke is another service that gives some details about their work history.

The next step in the research is as mentioned; use what you find. But offer the influencer something that will benefit them. For example if it is someone I admire and I have used their products before I not only mention that, but I offer how their product has directly benefited me. How, when I read the book or used the product, I experienced “XYZ (insert benefit statement here).” Give them your testimonial; write it so that it is a marketing endorsement that they could actually use. You probably know more about that influencer’s product because you use it. (The end user can often tell you a lot more about the pain that product is solving than you can.) You are helping this influencer by telling them your experience.

Secondly, humanize your approach, notice things, find out their interests then deliver news items or your own personal experience (if you have any) with those hobbies.

Ask Them:

You might want to start by using the research and simply connecting with no agenda. If you have time this is a great way to go. Develop the relationship and they will be much more willing to quickly say “yes” when you ask for something. If you don’t have time use much of what was stated above and ask them (not all in the same email brevity is still the best approach). If they say no ask them why they said no. Qualify it, “in the spirit of improving my approach to important influencers like you, was there something in particular that caused you to say no? Most will respond, and you just got your foot in the door to continue the conversation.

Bottom line is ASK! You won’t get a yes if you don’t ask. By simply approaching most will be pleased that you thought of them and your own credibility factor might just rise. By asking you are starting a dialogue that might not result in an immediate win, but who knows where that relationship will lead down the road. Do some research, pick of the phone and talk to them, or send an email.

This probably sounds a lot like sales, well it is. The caveat I place here is the intention. Once you start to do the research you will see a lot more synergy with the influencer. You will start to experience a kinship and be able to envision the partnership more clearly. These feeling states allow you to have a different energetic perception of the value of your product and that it would also be good for the influencer too. You know for yourself, when you are feeling that a certain relationship makes sense, you are more confident in your approach. The same applies here; the research has made you more confident and allows you to feel as if you know the person better (which you do).