FusionBrand

Dumb-Ass Branding: The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

   The dumbest branding title I've ever seen has to be "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding" by Al Ries and his daughter Laura. Immutable??!!  Immutable??   According to the wikipedia and other definitions, immutable means "not subject or susceptible to change."

    In this age of empowered consumers, rapid technological change, increasing global competition,  and  new business imperatives, who can believe that their branding practices "not susceptible or subject to change."

    The only way for any brand to survive and thrive in a dynamic environment is to adapt to changing conditions, adapt to new values and conditions and keep pace with changing customer requirements. No wonder many marketing personnel don't get any respect in the boardroom.  While CEOs are struggling to adapt to changing customer and competitive requirements, their marketing personnel are reading books about laws "not subsceptible or subject to change."

    So if you're my competitor, please, please buy this book.  While you are fossilizing your marketing from the last century based on "laws" not subject to change, I'll be changing based on listening to my customers, meeting their requirements and growing my profitability. 

Wikification vs. Positioning: Jack Trout's View

When I sent out my email commentary on the death of "positioning" and the birth of wikification, one subscriber sent me this interview with Jack Trout, the theorist behind "positioning" and a co-author of the landmark book, first published in 1979. He defends many of the common complaints about "positioning," except for the most important -- the lack of measureability. He also has some eyebrow-raising comments in there, such as his attack on McDonald's abandonment of "positioning" and his suggestion that Sri Lanka abandon its current identity to return to "Ceylon," which was its name as a colony of Britain. That undoubtedly went down well with a people who struggled so long for independence.

Jack Trout interview:
Download jack_trout_interview.doc

Wikitorials, and the lessons for brand wikification

In a well-publicized and innovative step, the LA Times decided to produce what it called a “wikitorial.” Here’s how the New York Times described the effort:

On Friday, the paper introduced an online feature it called a wikitorial, asking Web site readers to improve a 1,000-word editorial, "War and Consequences," on the Iraq war.

Readers were invited to insert information, make changes or come to different conclusions. The model was based on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where anyone can add facts or update information.

"It sounds nutty," said an introduction to the wikitorial in Friday's paper. "Plenty of skeptics are predicting embarrassment; like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor, they say, The Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than be hip. Nevertheless, we proceed. We're calling this a 'public beta,' which is a fancy way of saying we're making something available even though we haven't completely figured it out."

What they had not planned for was hard-core pornography, which the paper's software could not ward off. Its open-source wikitorial software allowed readers to post without vetting from editors, who could take down posts only after they appeared. Any contributor who persisted in bad behavior could be blocked.

    The posting of the pornography caused the LA Times to take down its effort. The paper is hinting at trying again, once controls are in place to avoid a similar catastrophe.

    Instead of applauding the effort, some have used the unfortunate outcome as a launch pad for attacks on the media. In one post, Jeff Jarvis  said the LA Times made three mistakes:

The LA Times didn't understand what it was doing and made three critical mistakes:

1. Collaboration vs. argument -- I said this from the start: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its very nature, fail. This is why I suggested having two wikis, instead -- one pro, one con and let the best wiki win -- and Jimbo Wales was starting to do that... but the trolls took over the forest first.

2. Care and feeding -- All communities need attention. The Times should have gone to Jimbo and, he said today, he would have had a few good Wikipedians watch over their foray. You don't build a town without cops. You don't build a community site -- a town online -- without a clean-up crew, either. He also would have explained how to use wikis, since he knows. But the paper thought they knew best and this leads to be biggest mistake:

3. Newspaper ego -- Here is the Times' worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I've sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper's. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

I agree with point 2, but not with his first and last points. It’s not a case of “letting the best wiki win.” How could you ever determine “winning?” By who is morally correct? Gets the most votes? Is vindicated by history?  A better case can be made for following USA Today’s example of stating a position, and then inviting a countervailing view from a community of believers.

And, yes, newspapers do try to set agendas, but this is actually good. Communities need agendas as a basis for discussion and debate.  Like it or not, newspapers are community institutions. They provide links between merchants and readers. They are involved in every community event, from bake sales to tax issues. They support dozens if not thousands of workers who live in the community. For good or for bad, they interact regularly with other community leaders.  If this doesn’t give them standing to set an agenda and open it up to debate, then what does?

In another post, Joe Gandelan essentially argued that blogs are really editorials for the masses. helping to make newspaper editorials a quaint hangover from the mass economy, when essentially only those with presses could broadcast an opinion.:

So the editorial page still exists...but it doesn't have a monopoly anymore.

It's likely it will continue to exist — but be less influential overall and also assume the extra role of providing the raw material for others (bloggers) to use for THEIR editorial pages (blogs).

In many ways, both analyses miss the bigger picture.  What does it really mean when a great newspaper like the LA Times decides to place its voice – really, its brand -- in the hands of the community?

The first lesson is that the LA Times is merely formalizing what is happening everywhere.  Brands are becoming equivalents of wikis, with their values, “personality” and strengths and weaknesses driven by the interactions that prospects and customers have with the brand. A successful brand does not depend on how much money is spent on advertising and it absolutely doesn’t depend on how a chosen few in the marketing department seek to “position” it. Rather, it depends on how successful – from the customer or prospect’s point of view – those interactions are.

The second lesson must be the recognition that brands must have limits. They cannot be all things to all people.  Instead, they must be differentiated so that they provide value to a specific segment. The LA Times threw its editorial open to everyone that registered at the site. A better idea would have been to confine it to a specific segment that reflected a relationship with the paper. Candidates include actual print subscribers or, better yet, those who had written letters to the editor within the last six months.

Finally, the experience underscores once shows how important the Internet is becoming in shaping brands.  Think of the LA Times, and you think of a stack of newsprint dropped on doorsteps. But as this experiment – and the fallout -- shows that the LA Times brand has a strong Internet component, which is true of almost every other brand. The result is that brands are being shaped today by those who would have never had contact with the brand before, which is a major force in wikification.

Congratulations to the LA Times for taking this step, and I look forward to seeing how its brand continues to wikify with the next permutation of its wikitorials.   

McKinsey Trends & Branding Implications

The consultancy McKinsey & Co. recently released its Global Survey of Business Executives. The survey polled 9,300 executives in more than 130 countries on the most important trends over the next five years. The 10 trends noted, along with the percentage of executives voting for it as a top trend,  have important implications for strategic brand planning:

1. Increasing affluence of emerging economies (81%):  Still just selling to the US market? Don't have any offices or distributors overseas? Haven't customized your offering for international markets yet?  The increasing affluence of nations like China, India, Czech Republic, Costa Rica and other countries means expanding markets for your offerings.  If you are not devoting significant resources to selling overseas, then you are handicapping yourself for the long term.
2. Faster pace of technological innovation (81%): Get your technological house in order  to cope with the change.  Centralize your databases, especially those with customer information.  Integrate with your supply chain allies.  Make sure all employees are technologically astute.  And always be on the lookout for innovation that can establish closer linkages with customers.
3. Growth of low-cost manufacturing in emerging economies (77%): Start shifting your brand to services and other value-add.  Even then be prepared for low-cost competition from abroad. Accounting, medical services and marketing are being outsourced to low-cost providers in Asia and India, and other services will inevitably follow.
4. Aging population in developed world (74%): This has numerous implications. Instead of just focusing on 18-35 year olds, seek out older consumers, who also have the advantage of greater disposable income. Reshape products and communications around this older audience.  Enlarge type on Web sites and communications material, and simplify instructions and interfaces.
5. Economic liberalization (63%): Again, it is getting easier to make more money in more markets. So why are you still stuck in your home market?
6. Disruption in supply of natural resources (58%): The most overlooked skill in branding is supply chain management (SCM).  The advertising or PR or even the prettiest logo is going to mean little if you cannot deliver your offering as promised. Start building collaborative linkages and orchestrating supply chain allies to minimize these inevitable disruptions.
7. Geopolitical instability (57%): The world of tomorrow offers branding threats as well as opportunities. Be agile.
8. Greater capital mobility (50%): Barriers are falling to international brands. It also means greater competition in your home market.
9. Greater labor mobility (45%): Talent will migrate to opportunity. That means employee loyalty will become almost as great a competitive advantage as customer loyalty. What are you doing to ensure employee loyalty?
10. Growing environmental hazards (45%): Make your brand as "green" as possible now. Look at the success Toyota is having, thanks in part to its hybrid vehicles, while GM suffers from its over-reliance on oversize SUVs.   

How To Wikify Your Brand

    Top executives have locked marketing out of many boardrooms because of its insistence on using unmeasurable, dated tactics from the mass economy. But brand wikification, based on the customer-driven imperatives of today’s world, will once again give marketing the power seat in executive suites.

    The last commentary discussed the death of “positioning” and the rise of wikification (See “The Death of "Positioning" & The Birth of Brand Wikification” in the FusionBrand blog, http://fusionbrand.blogs.com/fusionbrand/2005/05/the_death_of_po.html “Positioning” died because its DNA lacked a vital component prized in boardrooms – measurement.  By elevating “mind share” over “market share” in their marketing classic “Positioning,” first published in 1979, theorists Jack Trout and Al Ries ensured that the success of “positioning” would always be unable to be quantified in a spreadsheet.

    “Positioning” had other flaws as well. By making mind share the primary goal, “positioning” unfortunately uncoupled marketing from sales. All the mind share in the world doesn’t mean much if sales don’t result. Just ask failed brands like Oldsmobile. Finally, the emphasis on “positioning” isolated marketing from the rest of the organization. Manufacturing, R&D, logistics and especially finance well understand such measurements as delivery times, MTBF (mean time between failures), order-to-cash cycles and more, but are perplexed by any “positioning” discussion.

    “Positioning” thrived for two decades because it provided a tool for leveraging mass markets and mass media. But as the Economist magazine and many others have pointed out, the growth of the Internet, rise of the empowered customer and market fragmentation have made “positioning” a relic.  Because of the changes that have transformed business and customer relationships, attempting to use “positioning” as a branding strategy is like trying to circumvent the globe with one of those quaint 17th century world maps.

    As “positioning” fades, especially for any manager under 35, brand wikification is taking its place. Wikification, which takes its name from wikis, the companion phenomenon to blogs, is based on the fact that brands are now defined by customers. How companies “position” brands is irrelevant to the only force that matters – the experiences of prospects and customers. Brands today are collectively defined by customers, based on the economic, experiential and/or emotional value received. This means that companies focused on branding must devote resources to defining, delivering, measuring and sustaining value that customers seek.
   
    Wikification represents good news and even better news for marketers. The good news is that it incorporates two elements that no boardroom can ignore – measurement and knowledge of what customers value. The even better news is that wikification forces everyone in marketing to value metrics more than “mind share,” “creativity” or any other eye-of-the-beholder concept. It also leads to greater marketing involvement in databases and operational issues that deliver customer value.

    Admittedly, wikification is not as easy as “positioning” yourself as “a leading provider of…” (a term that must be retired immediately because it describes a company in terms of goods sold, not according the customer value received). But hard work is needed to avoid marketing being eliminated as a separate department, a reorganization now under consideration by multiple firms, according to Forrester.

    So how can companies wikify a brand?   

• Incorporate Six Sigma’s VOC/VOTC (voice of the customer) program: Why did manufacturing -- not marketing! – come up with a metrics-driven approach to incorporate customer input? Six Sigma, of course, seeks to eliminate variability in products and processes. This improves quality, reduces cycle times, and increases throughput, which leads to lower costs and higher profitability. Six Sigma has been widely adopted by manufacturers and is spreading into other areas, such as HR and finance.

The lack of customer input can be costly. More than 80% of products fail to become brands, according to major consultancies. By contrast, 80% of products based on customer suggestions succeed, according to New Product News.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates that not incorporating customer requirements costs U.S. corporations nearly $100 billion a year in failed projects.

    To ensure that products reflect customer priorities, the Six Sigma VOC process includes collecting customer input, primarily through customer surveys. The process not only identifies problem areas but also their costs and revenue implications. For wikification, customer input must be used to increase customer loyalty and  profitability. Additionally, marketing can expand the repertoire of VOC-collection tools, including customer councils, help desks, etc.

• Become the organization’s data central: The power of marketing departments is directly proportional to the amount of customer data owned. Today, most marketing departments own little more than unqualified leads. Marketing will start ruling the corporate roost when it controls a centralized and consolidated database that incorporates all customer information, including sales data and acquisition and contact history. Other vital data includes warranty information, returns, complaints, retention rates and referral rates.

• Live with your customers: When was the last time you met with a customer? More important, when was the last time your purchasing, HR or other manager met with a customer? If it hasn’t been recently, then you are losing touch with the most powerful force involved in your branding.

    The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about A.G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. The reporter accompanied Lafley as he climbed the steep stairs of a small Venezuelan apartment with peeling yellow paint to listen to Maria Yolanda Rios describe how often she washes her hair. The one-on-one session symbolizes a new approach at P&G that has doubled the stock price and increased earnings 17% since Lafley took over five years ago. “P&G used to develop products in its labs and market them based on the products best technical feature. These days, employees spend hours with women, watching them do laundry, clean the floor, apply makeup and diaper their children. They look for nuisances that a new product might solve. Then, they return to the labs determined to address the feature women care about the most,” the reporter wrote. Other successful companies also demand that employees live with customers. At Cisco, for example, top executives must be in customer offices at least 50% of the time.

• Listen to the Internet: Your brand is being shaped less by advertising than by the thousands and even millions of discussions occurring in blogs and newsgroups and emails and chatrooms and other peer-to-peer communications.  An emerging class of tools and services allow you to both track and analyze these communications. But finding out what customers and prospects are saying about your brand is easy. The hard part is listening to them.

    So what companies are using these tips to wikify their brands? Stay tuned till a future blog for some case histories.

How To Make A Great Agency Hire

    Few tasks are harder – or more important than making a good hire.  A good hire can take your agency to the next level. A bad one can wreck it.

    Most hires are made amid crisis. There’s a new client, and an immediate need to meet new demands. Or a key person has deserted ship, and new blood is needed to fill the hole. But while filling a slot because “anybody is better than nobody” may solve a temporary crisis, it can create larger problems down the road – and may even lead to the loss of a client.

    So here are a few hard-won tips to making the best possible hire:

• Put the portfolio in context: Everyone loves to show – and look at – portfolios.  But there are inevitably a lot of fingers in every creative and strategic pie, and rarely does a finished product reflect a single person’s work.  Additionally, portfolios can only show you what a person has done for someone else.  It is much more important to know what they can do for you.  A better test is to show them work in progress and ask them to critique it.  Do they start by asking smart questions, like what is the strategy, who is the target market, and what results is the client trying to achieve? Listen carefully to their analysis. Do they focus on the copy, design or the strategy?  That will tell you a lot about how they will approach future problems.

• Look beyond “impact:” The hiring process, like many other activities in agencies, is infected with buzzwords – “passion,” “impact,” “driven,” etc. Unfortunately, these attributes can also be the force behind a boss from hell or a disruptive co-worker. Instead, look for three skills that will increase the productivity of your office and make clients happier.  These skills are diplomacy, or the ability to manage relationships between teams or individuals; responsibility management, or the ability to ensure that problems are not passed to someone else; and idea triage – knowing when to say “yes” to ideas and, more importantly, when to let ideas die.

• Provoke a reaction: The agency business is like rugby, a full-contact sport. You don’t want someone who can’t dodge or bounce back after a hit. During the initial interview, find a mistake in the resume, criticize an offering in the portfolio, pick apart their skills. See how they respond. Do they get defensive or even angry? Or do they take it as an opportunity for improvement?

• Focus on the hire, not the fire: Most interviews are focused on finding reasons not to hire someone. Instead, look for reasons to hire someone. What are the unique skills or experiences that you can leverage to go after new clients? How well do they complement an agency strength? If you only come out of an interview finding faults with the prospect, you are not thinking about how to grow your organization.

• Shut up: Executives will spend the bulk of interview time talking about their agency, clients, campaigns, blah, blah, blah. A good candidate will know much of that already. The candidate should do 80% of the talking. Just ask smart questions – and listen hard. A good candidate will also ask you smart questions. Be suspicious of anyone who just wants to know about vacations and benefits.

• Don’t let managers hire direct reports: If the goal is to upgrade organizational skills, don’t let managers hire those that they will be directly supervising. There is a natural human tendency not to hire anyone who might represent a future threat. Instead, let the manager’s manager make the final decision.

   “How to make a great hire” is one of the skills that they don’t teach in schools, unfortunately. While a bad campaign will quickly disappear beneath the waves, a bad hire will sabotage an agency for months or even years. So take your time and do it right. Hire in haste, repent in leisure.