What do you need to consider when searching for integrated marketing?

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Posted by Brad VanAuken, The Blake Project
From the Brand Strategy Insider

Choosing a brand consultant can be tricky. First, you must determine what you are seeking in a brand consultant. Do you want to know how your brand stacks up against competitive alternatives? Are you concerned about an emergent competitor? Has your brand lost its competitive edge? Do you need to reposition your brand? Has your brand’s architecture gotten too complicated? Are you seeking an updated identity? Does your brand need a new tagline? Do you want to create a new marketing campaign? Are you trying to rally employees in support of the brand? Are you trying to create an improved brand building culture within your organization? Do you need to understand your brand’s customers better? Are you looking for ongoing education for your marketers? Be specific and clear about what you are seeking in a brand consultant.

Next, find out what the consultant’s skill sets are. Marketing research? Brand equity measurement? Brand valuation? Marketing strategy formulation? Brand (re)positioning? Brand identity development? Brand plan development? Advertising campaign development? Brand extension? Ask not only for a client list, but also for case studies on the services in which you are most interested. What type of person is the organization mostly comprised of? Brand strategists? Marketing researchers? Graphic artists? Copywriters? Account executives?
And, know this, if the consultant’s tool is primarily a hammer (or copywriting or marketing research) every one of your problems will seem like a nail (or a copy writing exercise or a research exercise) to him or her. People and organizations mostly use the tools with which they are most familiar.

While a list of big name clients can be impressive, ask what project or projects the consultant did for specific clients. Many of the biggest brands have used multiple consultants over time and even in a given year depending on the division or specific need. Sometimes a consultant’s best work may be for a smaller, lesser known client for which there is a greater chance for enterprise-wide impact.

We often are asked if we have extensive experience in category XYZ. Sometimes the same people also want us not to have worked with one of their competitors recently. Other than the pharmaceutical industry, I have found that brand work does not vary much across branded entities, from consumer packaged goods, B2B, healthcare and professional services companies to universities, museums, municipalities and start-ups. While there are some differences, deep knowledge of a specific industry or product category is generally far less important than specific brand consulting knowledge and experience.

A good consultant is good at listening. Have the consultants you are considering feed your situation and issues back to you. The one who has the deepest understanding and insight is the one most likely to do the best job for you. That is probably also the one who asked the most probing questions before crafting a proposal. Watch out for the consultants whose approach is “cookie cutter” – replace the last client’s name with your brand’s name and the proposal is “good to go.”

Client references and testimonials are also very helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask the references detailed questions about their branding projects and the value that the brand consultant added to those projects.

Be wary of large consulting companies that send in their business development “A” team to make the pitch. They will knock your socks off (because that is what they are supposed to do), but you will likely never see those people again. Someone else will be assigned to your project. Make sure you have met the people who will be assigned to your project and especially the day-to-day team leader. That is the person on whose shoulders your project’s success will rest.
I wish you great success in selecting the brand consultant who is right for your brand’s specific needs.

Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop

by Megan Plaksiy

A recent intern at PeakBiety branding+advertising, Megan Plaksiy, wrote her thesis at the Art Institute of Tampa on sustainable packaging. We found the information interesting and valuable and wanted to share it. Here’s an excerpt.

BACKGROUND

Packaging in the modern world has changed the way companies focus on sustainability in an effort to minimize their overall carbon footprint. Companies are following the demands of stakeholders and investors, looking to “be green” and “do green,” by decreasing pollutants, lowering their carbon footprints, producing eco-friendly goods, reducing energy use, exploring alternative energy sources, and creating processes that augur for a long-term sustainable enterprise. The term “sustainability” has spilled over to the consumer world, leading to a global movement in reducing carbon emissions and preserving the planet. When searching for a potential company to do business with, consumers will often research the company’s green efforts, selecting the “greener” brand. This is the leading reason why corporations have begun to choose their materials wisely, constantly making sure that their products are as environmentally positive as possible. Eventually, every aspect of modern packaging ends up being impacted by one of the many sustainability precepts. Designers often collaborate on defining the best way to create an environmentally sustainable package.

Traditionally, packaging designers contemplated technical performance, expenses, presentation and regulatory compliance with national and international law when designing a package. Modern designers must now also consider what type of packaging the product will use right down to the materials and their ingredients. What sounds like a simple choice is not an easy task. Just because the designer thinks a certain material would be ideal for a particular product, it does not mean that when the development phase rolls in, the manufacturer will have the necessary resources to purchase such a material or if its attainability is even possible and sustainable at all. To distinguish the significance of design-phase decision-making, packaging professionals measure the environmental effect of their package designs against other common uses and agree thereafter on the best possible solution. Creating a completely and perfectly sustainable product can be very challenging. Every single phase must be considered right from initial idea to final distribution. The challenge of sustainability is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle of what makes a product or material sustainable.

PROBLEM

Communication and informational flow play a great role in packaging. Not only does the consumer need to be informed, so do the warehouse and the distribution chain. However, due to the lack of information known about sustainable packaging by designers and businesses, many misconceptions exist. Packaging is considered to be a part of the product through the whole entirety of the supply chain, meaning the design of the packaging influences the information, features, functions, and cost aspect of a product. With this, packaging is an essential part of the product-selling process and is responsible for bearing information to consumers. There is an overload of recycle/sustainable symbols in the industry that are specific to either one particular subject or material. There needs to be a simple approach for designers, businesses, and consumers to differentiate a package’s sustainable metric between countless packages on the shelf today.

SOLUTION

Purpose: To educate and inform designers, companies and consumers about the materials and frameworks which are currently in the industry for sustainable packaging, so that designers, companies and consumers are able to clearly distinguish sustainable metric for packaging.

Solution: Produce a manual informing designers, companies and consumers about the sustainable options that are currently available within the industry to educate them about the options available. Include the top sustainable and traditional materials to allow designers to be informed of selection available to them before the implementation stage is encountered. Present case studies about current sustainable packaging solutions that are being developed and implemented in the industry today, to show designers possibilities available to them. A framework for sustainable practice would allow the designer and consumer to quickly acknowledge the sustainable metric when comparing packaging. Showcase sustainable packaging through various advertising platforms such as iAd, will allow information to expand to an increasingly diverse body of users.

Although so much in media changes quickly, after watching this feature we were reminded that third-party borrowed interest techniques (i.e. imaginary characters) still work. Geico’s gecko offers one of the best examples of a more recent popular and memorable icon. The “return” of Mr. Peanut speaks volumes for effectiveness. Often, these icons derive from anthropomorphized versions of real creatures as in the case of the Tony The Tiger, Geico’s gecko and the Trix silly rabbit. Many win us over with a cute and lovable demeanor as in the case of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. What’s not to enjoy?

In the latest issue of Marketing News, Josh Bernoff (VP, Forrester Research and coauthor of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies) asks the question—Is Your Agency Relationship Past Its Expiration Date? He says it’s time for marketers to rethink your agency’s role, and then rethink your own.

Based on a new Forrester report titled “The Future of Agency Relationships”, his premise is that in a stable media era, agencies can specialize. As a result, many marketers have a silo-driven approach to their agency relationships—an advertising or creative agency, an interactive agency, a direct marketing agency, a PR agency, etc. While this approach creates additional effort for brand continuity oversight and often some internal squabbling, it is the price you pay for getting the best experts in each discipline.

According to Forrester Research, that approach works fine for a world where channels are relatively stable, campaigns have a beginning and an end, and customers respond to messages pushed at them. But that stability no longer exists. The number of channels continues to explode - today its Twitter and phone apps, but what will you need tomorrow? As word of mouth becomes more important and push marketing less effective, marketers will need a consistent, long-term relationship with an agency model that is more adaptive and understands the need to think more broadly than the current specialization model provides.

The new Forrester study concludes that with the rise of social media and digital proliferation, we are entering an Adaptive Marketing era. In this era, mass media is no longer the foundation of marketing communication, and will force a change in the expectations of what marketing agencies can and should deliver. Marketers will need agency partners that are more agile, can build long-term relationships with active customers and communities, and can use data to drive real-time decisions. The key needs marketers will require from their agencies are ideas, interaction and intelligence.

Agencies must think about ideas that not only build the brand, but will work across every appropriate platform. Instead of creating an idea and leaving it to the silos to plan and implement, creativity has to be collaborative so that all possible communications get considered at once. And as customers change, marketers and their agency must change along with them.

Agencies must develop a framework for a new level of interaction with customers. Agencies have always been good at outbound messages, but have not played a similar role with inbound interactions. Smart agencies will need to adapt their approach in order to listen to online discussions, identify and connect marketers with their online social community, and build brand experiences that allow for interaction.

Finally, agencies must find ways to monitor and assimilate customer intelligence from multiple channels and be flexible enough to respond quickly to this information. Marketers and their agencies will need a more comprehensive view of quantitative and qualitative information and insights in order to react in real time and across channels to maximize efficiency. The resultant need for even more data than marketers currently have will require a shared role in evaluating and recommending strategies and tactics.

The Forrester report predicts that these changes will have consequences for both parties. Specialty agencies will need to rethink the depth and breadth of their service offering if they expect to meet this new level of need based on ideas, interaction and intelligence. As interactive channels multiply and interactivity and the intelligence it generates become more available, metrics like gross rating points and clicks may go away in favor of more esoteric measurements like energized customers and share of influence.

At the same time, marketers will need to reconsider their own role and a new level of marketing collaboration with their agencies and this will surely require a re-evaluation of the current compensation model. Forrester predicts that successful marketers will need to focus more on long term relationships and on speedy, adaptive actions that take advantage of the fluid nature of consumer attitudes and responses. And if agencies continue to only deliver silo-based expertise rather than ideas, interaction and intelligence, they will soon be replaced by a new agency form that meets this need.

What do you think? Are you satisfied with your current agency service offering, or does this new model sound more appealing to you?

—From the Sound Marketing blog of the Pugent Sound Chapter of the American Marketing Association

by Amy Phillips

The American Advertising Federation (AAF) welcomed Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate and Radical Careering, as a guest speaker at the 2010 AAF Fourth District Annual Conference in Tampa on April 30th, 2010. As members of AAF Tampa Bay, we attended. The presentation and workshop following explored the subject of “fascination” and how it pertains to advertising messages that persuade and captivate.

Sally’s new book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation delves into how fascination works in the battle for consumer attention. According to her theory, the seven triggers to fascinate are: power, lust, mystique, prestige, alarm, vice and trust. The book describes these triggers and how they can be activated for a desired response. The author’s thesis is that many of the choices consumers make are not choices at all. She writes, “Our best friends and favorite foods, our pets and pet peeves, all are contingent upon the seven triggers.” She proposes, “We’re in control far less than we fancy ourselves to be, because our behavior is being pulled by seven unseen strings.”

Although an awful lot has been written on the psychology of marketing and related subjects—Seth Godin’s Linchpin, the Heath brothers Made to Stick, as well as several by Malcolm Gladwell to name a few good ones—Sally’s personable, humorous approach and disarming openness stands out. In an industry dominated by men, it’s great to see a woman making her mark as a leader in the field.

Overall, the new book, Fascinate, gives a fresh perspective to the traditional AIDA formula by examining how attention, interest and desire take hold in today’s sensory overload of cluttered advertising messages. What she presents is really an in-depth extension of long-held and practiced beliefs about effective messaging. Connect with people in real, emotional and personal ways, and you will win them over (i.e. fascinate them).

Speaker and author, Sally Hogshead is a brand innovation consultant having worked with clients that include Nike, MINI Cooper, Aflac, Cole Haan, Target, Coca-Cola and Godiva. Her accomplishments and insights have been profiled by The New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and MSNBC. She’s been described by the press as “intrepid” and an “advertising mastermind.” A sought-after speaker, Sally leads keynotes for companies such as Starbucks and Microsoft, as well as innovation sessions around the world. She spent 2006 touring the country as a motivational speaker for CareerBuilder.com.

Pop quiz! What is the most common, yet most easily corrected, mistake small businesses make?

A. Undercapitalization

B. Marketing myopia

C. Lack of branding

D. Failure to diversify

A recent article by Steve Strauss, one of the world’s leading small business experts, posed this question.

Based on his experience, Strauss concluded that the answer was C, bad branding. “To understand why, try this little experiment: Think about a major street that you drive down every day, and think about the row upon row of businesses you see on that street. OK, now, quick, which ones do you actually specifically remember?

If you are like most of us, the answer is zero, or maybe one or two, and that is sad, sad, sad. While every one of these small businesses represents someone’s dream, very few of them are actually businesses worth remembering.”

Finding a real difference that resonates with your target audience is hard work. Most businesses never do it—even many larger ones.

Strauss goes on in the article to talk about the importance of a unique value proposition, or what we like to call, a brand promise. It’s what gives your potential customers a clearly defined reason to choose you over the competition. A big part of that is owning a word or value in the consumers mind.

So how do you determine what your brand promise should be? Often, talking to current customers can provide important clues. You also need to understand what prospects are looking for, and study competitors positions to see what, if anything, they have aligned themselves with.

Small businesses can get bigger… the key is managing perceptions.

by Dr. Bob Deutsch, Brain Sells via The Inspiration Room

It can be said that creative advertising is like brain surgery. When advertising is artfully done it cures people of the status quo by activating neural circuitry.

To be creative artfully requires a dynamic mix of imagination and understanding of how the world might work. This is not a matter of being correct, but rather a matter of making the audience wonder, provoking a self-referring reverie that elicits an expanded idea of ones-self and how the world works. As a result, we see anew.

This, of course, flies in the face of traditional methods of measuring advertising effectiveness. It also runs counter to today’s corporate metric-mania and near incapacity to conceive bold strategies and innovations.

Insight is the coin of business success. While numbers can provide a means for measurement they cannot “embody,” or suggest, meaningful insights into the human experience. At worst, numbers provide an excuse to abdicate decision-making responsibility while placating executives desirous of propagating ‘business-as-usual’.

What’s Needed for Creativity?

Creativity requires two things: focused subjectivity and doubt. One needs the ability to focus on something long enough to conjure possibilities not overtly manifest in the moment, along with an acknowledgement that not everything is known.

The unknown is fertile soil from which a world of wonders can be conjured. Here mere facts and data are circumvented in a non-linear, symbolic, not wholly rational way. The mind plays a cognitive trick on itself by creating metaphor. “I call what I don’t know by name something that I do know.”

This mental leap-frogging allows the creative impulse to extrapolate unknown scenarios. It moves from the past, which instigates an inkling that lays the basis for the beginning of a new narrative, to a springboard that weaves a web of new patterns and associations, to an insinuation of the future kicked up by metaphor.

This process produces, from the outside-objective point of view, what can be perceived as seemingly off-topic meanderings. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

An Open Playfulness without NO

What is in operation is a kind of playfulness with ideas that is essential for creativity. This toying around contains a bunch of NOs—NO analyzing (yet), NO doubts. NO pressure to conform. NO pretense. NO restrictions. NO judgment.

Those who are playfully creative possess a curiosity given backbone by their expectation that they will find what they seek even though they don’t know what exactly that is.

People from many walks of life actually live this way: writer, designer, scientist, parent, small business owner. All share a belief in a beautiful human quality—Directed Serendipity.

Just listen to them, “I have a plan which allows me to begin to move forward, and in doing so I learn about myself such that when other doors open I sometimes walk in. But you have to have a plan to switch from the plan.”

Another version, “You go down a path and things evolve. By adapting to randomness you shape, but do not control, your end point. You define your end point by your own reaction to it: Ah, ha! I like this. This is for me. This is me.”

Buffeted by a Directed Serendipity

People who allow themselves to be buffeted by directed serendipity live at the creative point of becoming—who they are and what they do are the same. They don’t know—and don’t need to know—the end. They are open to the process as process, and are gregarious with their fledgling notions. They share ideas before they are fully formed. They want camaraderie. They want feedback. They’re excited.

In a state of directed serendipity you first focus on problem structuring rather than problem solving, seeking to understand rather than to explain. You try to comprehend meaning from the inside out, in its unfolding. You are not approaching the world from an intellectual stance.

Einstein, in a 1945 speech at Princeton, gave elegant voice to this perspective:

“Words or data, as they are logically written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my primary mechanism of thought. The psychical entities that do seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and images. These elements themselves are visual and muscular in type, originating in the intuition of the body.”

The creative communicator is an alchemist of thought, attending to the reasoning of emotion. That’s what they should get paid for. That’s what they need to have time to do. In their natural habitat, they are artful image-gatherers, whose only enemies are cynicism, number crunchers and arbitrary tinkering.

Corporate executives should embrace their creatives and let them attack the status quo. Then CEO, CMO and their courtiers can sit back and count the profits.

from the Brand Strategy Insider

“Call the law enforcement officers. We’re being robbed.”

Not a likely scenario. What the average person is much more apt to say is: “Call the cops. We’re being robbed.”

Unfortunately, marketing people are not average persons. Marketing people are much more likely to elevate their languages until, in some cases, they lose their meanings.

A few years back a senior marketing person at United Parcel Service asked me what I thought of the company’s trademark.

I like it, I said, but what UPS really needs is a motivating idea or rallying cry, something like: UPS delivers more parcels to more people in more places than any other company in the world.

UPS, he said, is not in the parcel delivery business.

Huh. That came as a big surprise to me. We’re a customer and I always thought that UPS was in the parcel delivery business.

No. UPS is in the logistics business.

He wasn’t joking. At the time UPS was in the process of repainting some 88,000 vehicles with its new theme: Synchronizing the World of Commerce.

A serious impediment to communications is this constant upgrading of the language. No aspect of life is left untouched by the upgrade police. Not only does a term have to be politically correct, it has to be as long and as complicated as possible.
Maintenance men are now physical plant managers.

Janitors are now custodial engineers.

Garbage collectors are now sanitary engineers.

A business strategy is now a business model.

Accounting firms are now professional service firms.

The purchasing department is now the procurement department.

The personnel department is now the human relations department. (At Electronic Data Systems, the HR department has become the Leadership and Change Management department.)

Fireworks are now pyrotechnics.

A jail is now a correctional facility. Anyone setting off the pyrotechnics illegally will be sent to a correctional facility.

It would be amusing if the problem hasn’t become a serious impediment to marketing. Many firms, for example, call themselves financial services companies. What’s a financial services company?

If you want to buy banking services, you go to a bank like Bank of America.

If you want to buy insurance, you go to an insurance company like State Farm.

If you want to buy stocks, bonds or mutual funds, you go to a brokerage firm like Merrill Lynch.

Let’s go to a financial services company to get our finances serviced, is not the way people talk. People talk in terms of specifics, not generalities.

As a matter of fact, it’s easier to go from the specific to the general than vice versa. People know that a drug store sells a lot more things than just drugs. Toiletries, candy, soft drinks, stationery, photo supplies, etc. Should a drug store (pardon me, pharmacy) describe itself as a personal services store? I think not.

Boston Chicken was a huge hit when they first opened its doors. It was the first fast food restaurant chain to focus on rotisserie chicken for the take-home dinner market. But then it added turkey, meatloaf, ham and other items to the menu and changed its name to Boston Market.

Everybody knows what a chicken dinner is, but what’s a market dinner No wonder, the company went bankrupt.

The same principle holds true among marketing companies. You probably know of many famous advertising agencies and many famous PR agencies, but how many famous marketing communications agencies do you know of? Name one.

When in doubt, use the narrowest possible term to describe your category. Let the mind do the upgrading, not your marketing.

by Kathryn Clark, Art Director

Color—a difference of a few shades can stimulate, depress, provoke, soothe, and even make us shiver or sweat.

In fact, according to a study at Washington State University, people who are surrounded by the color green can endure more pain, and recover more quickly from surgery using fewer drugs.¹ Pink, on the other hand, has been shown to have a subduing and calming effect on violent prision inmates.²

If color is this powerful, what is it saying about your brand?

Here are a few of the ways color can influence brand perception:

• People will make riskier bets and gamble more under red lights as opposed to blue lights. This is why you see so much red neon in Las Vegas.³

• Being in a blue room can lower your heart rate and suppress your appetite. Red and yellow have the opposite effect—which is why so many fast food restaurants use these colors.⁴

• Yellow and red are also the best selling candy colors. Dylan Lauren, the owner of Dylan’s Candy Bar in NYC says that “Yellow is nostalgic, and red is passion. It makes people hungry.”

• Recent studies suggest that nearly all sports are enhanced in blue surroundings—including weight lifting. This may be because people tend to be more calm and focused in a blue environment.⁵

• Purple stimulates the area of the brain used in problem solving.⁶

• White pills are the most effective at soothing ulcers, even if they are merely placebos. Green tablets reduce anxiety, antidepressants are best in yellow and blue ones make the most successful tranquilizers.⁷

While the response to color is altered by personal and cultural experiences, many are universal and can be used for more effective brand positioning. From the office to the candy store, from your house to the grocery store, color affects our lives in amazing ways. Why not harness this power for your brand?

The connections between marketing and psychology are particularly interesting for an agency such as ours with the brand promise, “The Power of Perception^®”

The Branding Strategy Insider recently ran an article called Creating The Brand Halo Effect. The halo effect refers to how a product—through effective advertising, promotion and acceptance in the marketplace—takes off in sales, not only for that particular product, but for products associated with the brand.

The article uses Apple’s iPod as an example of the halo effect. In 2005, the company concentrated advertising dollars heavily on the iPod; however, their overall sales went up 68 percent from the year before. The big news here is that this jump wasn’t only from iPod sales, which accounted for 39 percent; but the other 61 percent of their sales, which came from computers, software and other services. By placing the spotlight on the best product or service from a given company, audiences form certain understanding or perception of an entire brand.

Putting most of your marketing “eggs” and advertising dollars in one basket may not be an easy idea to sell in the boardroom. But focusing on the best horse may increase sales in other areas.

The article also mentions how imprinting is an important concept in both marketing and psychology. In psychology, imprinting describes rapid learning that occurs on a subconscious level. In marketing, the first brand in a new category is often imprinted in audiences’ minds and percieved as more authentic than others. Examples of first brands are Kleenex, Hertz, Heinz and Starbucks.

Carefully managing perceptions to increase the value of brands has been PeakBiety’s focus for years.

For generations, taglines have served as the foundation for advertising—a short statement poised to deliver the brand message in a memorable way. Today, there is some consensus that the tactic is on life support.

The reasons range from ever-shorter tenures of CMOs (13 months on average, according to recent research) to ever-splintering consumer demographics.

“It used to be on the list of deliverables,” said Mike Wolfsohn, vp/executive creative director at Ignited, Los Angeles. “It was mandatory.” He suggested marketers be bold and definitive about taglines, or skip them all together.

When it comes to developing a hit tagline, there is no set formula, Wolfsohn said. There is little commonality in ones that work.

“Treat it heroically,” he said. “Celebrate it. Don’t relegate it to 8-point type in the lower right-hand corner.”

Too often, taglines are used as safety nets out of a fear that the rest of the campaign isn’t communicating well enough, he said.

These slogans are often more utilitarian and less emotional. They tend to be fed through the focus group mill until they’re watered down beyond recognition. That process does not produce “Think Different,” “Got Milk?” or “Just Do It.”

“If the Nike tagline were suggested today, the question back would probably be, ‘Just do what?’” said Wolfsohn. “There’s a level of trepidation now that people won’t get it and they won’t be able to parrot the idea back to you. So, taglines get over defined.”

That’s when they loose strength and become meaningless, he said.

For a slogan to stick, it’s not just coming up with five catchy words or less, said Landor & Associates’ managing director Allen Adamson. It’s vital to weave that message through all the communications and the very brand DNA itself.

“It has to be the right promise, with the brand living up to it, expressed in a sticky unexpected way,” Adamson said. “And then you have to spend money and stay with it for the long haul.”

He points to GE’s “Imagination at Work” as a break-through tagline because it’s more than a slogan. “It’s the business strategy,” he said. “It’s the mission of the company.”

What’s your opinion on taglines?  Or, as we prefer to call them, brand promises?  Should we stick with one memorable line that sums up the brand?  Or, should we vary the message with the market?  We’d appreciate your thoughts.