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What should be the voice of a brand?

Monday, March 1st, 2010 by John Mallen

By: John Mallen

Special circumstances aside, I believe that a brand should be a stand-alone entity. In our world, the brand is JMC Marketing Communications & PR – long name but it communicates 85 percent of what we do. We have a tag line, and just the other day, a contact of ours got the tag line and wrote about it as being the brand: “You folks are communications in the real world.”

I’d never thought about the tag being a stand alone, but it really is – maybe even better than the brand itself!

My point here is that a brand has a place within the organization that owns the brand and in the minds of customers and other stakeholders. But when the organization speaks, the brand doesn’t.

The company can be the first person narrator, as in “We greatly appreciate your business.” But the brand is always referred to by the speaking organization: “We value your selection of Acme products. Acme consistently outperforms competitors …”

The key principle is to always make the brand stand alone as third person, that which is being referred to. Even when “we” the organization are speaking, we treat the brand as a valuable third person entity. We call it by name and speak to its attributes.

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Posted in Branding, Corporate communications, Marketing, Marketing Communications, News & Thinking, Public Relations | 1 Comment »

What Are You About?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by John Mallen

I just revisited a blog by Steve Rubel called “How the Leading Social Sites Describe Themselves” Steve’s piece is well worth the read. He observes that when one reads how major social Web sites describe themselves — Twitter, digg, Friendfeed and others — it would be difficult to tell them apart by simply relying on the descriptions themselves.

It’s an observation that applies too often in multiple segments and in many vehicles ranging from brochures and videos to ads and even exhibits — maybe especially exhibits.

One of the products most in demand from our marketing communications firm is the JMC Messaging Platform(TM). The platform takes shape as a document in which we distill the essential elements of a brand — things such as how it should be positioned in the minds of stakeholders, or what the value proposition is to a customer group.

But the first and most debated element in virtually every JMC Messaging Platform process that I have worked on is the definition of the business — how the organization describes itself. One would think that such a straightforward statement would be the simplest. Not so! It doesn’t seem to matter whether the organization is a closely held business or part of a multinational organization. When we meet with the leaders in our facilitated brand messaging workshop and begin with that fundamental question, most of the time it opens a lively debate.

When there is little debate, the reason is typically that an official milquetoast-like definition has been developed and the language is, as Rubel observed, so bland as to be meaningless.

No reason to delve into the organizational psychologies at work. That could take forever. But there is good reason to suggest that it does pay for the leaders of any organization to wrangle through a process of clarifying how the company or its brands describe or define themselves. If the message is muddled to those of us on the outside, how must it be to the people on the inside? And contrarily, if the people inside are clear about the definition of the organization, how much more likely are they to relate to and resonate with the publics that enable success?

I’m with Steve Rubel. Describe yourself! It’s job No.1 for any customer-facing activity.

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Posted in Best Practices, Branding, Corporate communications, Marketing, Marketing Communications, News & Thinking, Public Relations, Social Media, differentiation | 2 Comments »

Are Tactics Wagging your Marketing?

Thursday, September 17th, 2009 by John Mallen

I like how this article in yesterday’s Fast Company draws attention to the importance of the corporate brand ( where the corporate brand is needed) and reminds us that strategy not glitzy tactics should be guiding the marketing.  Tactics are great, but need to be marshalled toward an end.

” … With the growth of the Internet and social technology tools, personal branding activity and opportunities have exploded. On the other hand, in some ways, the arc of Web 1.0 to 2.0+ (not to mention this current economy) has seduced many marketers into being focused on tactics at the expense of strategy including branding. Hot media tactics often substitute for the “strategy.”

Thanks to Kevin Randall, Director of Brand Strategy & Research at  Movéo Integrated Branding for these words.  The remainder of the article is also a great primer on the  important elements of a brand.

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Posted in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Communications, News & Thinking, Social Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

When Customers are a Village

Monday, September 14th, 2009 by John Mallen

Christopher St., Greenwich Village by Beulah BettersworthI have just read a blog essay called “Finding Your Village of Customers” by Sonia Simone, senior editor at Copyblogger .  This is must reading for the micro-businesses among us.

Such firms, like my own, may have a global band of customers who not only know those who serve them, but delight in the relationship. She is spot on. In this space you really do listen to your customers, really understand them and respond to their needs — before you’re asked!  The village is your market, the regulars who love your offerings as well as the status of being a “regular,” like the Beacon Hill bar in TV’s “Cheers.”

Simone’s post is short, so I won’t go on except to summarize the key needs (besides listening, understanding and taking action). Every village needs:

“A leader. (That’s you.)

“A purpose. (That’s your market position or winning difference.) . . .

“And a place to come together.

“You might create a membership site for your best-loved customers. Or organize special conferences, user groups, and gatherings. You might build something as simple as a private online forum where your village can share their experiences — good and bad.

“But give your village a place to get together. To know you better, and know one another better. A place where everybody knows their name.”

And that’s one powerful way to use communications to amplify success. The “place” is likely one you develop on the Social Web.

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Posted in Best Practices, Business development, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Social Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Eclectic markets ideal for social marketing

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 by John Mallen

 I finally had the conversation. It was with Mike Thompson who for a number of years has been our organizational development coach. His firm is now called peoplesmartllc.  (The site is not fully running.)

These days Mike is breaking into new ground as colorful and as varied as his many interests. One of them is marketing and selling small crosses made by the homeless in Kentucky (who receive part of the sales price), with the cross being distributed to the U.S. military In Iraq and Afghanistan.

The whole initiative is run by Catholic Action Center,a non profit that has worked with the underserved and marginalized for the last 15 years. “Sometimes faith can be challenged when facing adversity. Sometimes a simple thought or promise that there are those who care can mean all the difference in the world,” the center says. They are right, I know, from being in a similar situation at another time.

But the cause (whle great) is not my point here.  Their marketing challege is my point. Bcause this was another one of those conversations which, as so happens frequently today, led me to strongly recommend that Mike and his team consider social media as a means of helping create and sustain buzz. It would be at a price they can afford (almost nothing)  and rise from the months of conference events they will attend  in which one-to-one connections with like-minded folk willtake place.  Like minded folks by the thousands with iPhonse, Facebook , and Twitter.
But  then come the questions. What is it? How does it work?  Why social media? I tried coacing back, explaining the dynamics of social media and slowly the light began to glow!
In eclectic markets whose members have distinctive interests, traditional marketing can be challenged to reach the 2 in 100 who share an interest. But the people who have an interest they are passionate about do connect with one another in person and on line.
We can ignite communities of interest with an awareness that flows from one conversation to another into a viral online babble of like minded members cross connecting across the country, across the world.  Soon  a trend is born that, in turn, energizes demand.

 Social marketing

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

College Marketing - A Big Challenge

Monday, May 25th, 2009 by John Mallen
Sometimes there are no readily available elegant strategies for using communications to drive success.

That becomes abundantly clear in the case of college recruiting.

We have a fully empowered social-media equipped market comprising teens who shun most of the vehicles many of us think of as being new and cutting edge, like blogs and Twitter. They are deeply rooted to Facebook and texting as their preferred media.

Teens, the research tells us, don’t use mainstream media except maybe TV as background, don’t e-mail, and basically leave Twitter to adults. Their facebook activities and texting are confined to their circle of friends.

Of course parents and high-school advisors have influence — because many teas are driven to get into college — the right college. Of course they have tremendous on line resourcers including reference sites and digital match-making tools.

So how do admissions offices avoid producing messages the kids don’t pay attention to, and effectively reach out to their potential freshmen? It’s looking more and more like the answer is strategic buzz.

 

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Posted in Marketing, Marketing Communications, Social Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

How to drive business development for small business

Friday, January 30th, 2009 by John Mallen

How do you drive business development for your small business?

There are numerous sources of business ideas. Many are excellent and proven. I want to bring your attention on one tool we all use — but too often left to fend on its own — communications.  Call it advertising, promotion, public relations (PR) or anythiong else. But all of these are in the communications bucket. In small business (and often larger ones) communications is the empty seat at the leadership table. But it is a powerful success enabler.

“Okay,” you say, “let’s get out there and run some ads.” Let’s get a promotion going.” Not necessarily bad, not necessarily good either. What you need to start is a business strategy which is well-supported by a communications strategy. Let’s take it by the numbers.

First — be clear about your business strategy. If you have been moving along from one year to the next, stop. Take stock of where you stand, what you want to achieve and how you will get there. All this sets the foundation.

Second – market research. This can be as simple as listening well to customers or asking questions of customers and prospective and listening to their answers. Market research could be results of a highly sophisticated study conducted by your trade association. It could be as basic as having your people ask a similar set of questions of everyone they deal with for a period of time, and systematically analyzing what they say. Research means understanding the context of your market, the dynamics affecting behavoirs and the impressions shaping opinions about your firm or the future.

Third — explore how communications can work in the marketing environment to accelerate your organization’s stratgegy and its progress toward realizing your goals. Central to success here means stepping away from tendencey to type cast marketing communications, and in, “Let’s get out there and run some ads.” Ads to do what?   Knock on the door of your customers’ attention to get awareness, share of mind, or generate traffic. Understanding how communications can contgribute to your business strategy means setting communications goals and developing a strategy for communications — all in support of the business growth plan.

Fourth — do it. Create an affordable, executable plan of action. Using one communications tool effectively is far superior to using a set of tools that fail to achieve, because you cannot achieve the frequency needed, or they don’t reach the right people, or any of dozens of reasons these efforts so often fail.

The greatest cause of failure is the fixation on the tools that we personally understand and find appealing versus the tools needed to drive the strategy — if there is indeed any strategy at all.  These four steps can be extremely difficult to execute with any discipline, especially when you’re taken with the daily challenges of running your business. Being so close to your business does not provide the vantage you need to move effectively from step one to implementation. If you can, it would pay you to enlist the support of a professional or a small brain trust of advisors to help you set the course.

The most citical professional support initially is not the development of an ad or drafting of your press releases. These skills will make sense, but only once you have identified a strategic plan for communications. In many cases, it would be preferable to execuite simply so long as it is focused and sustainable. By this I mean having one well-targeted promotion, or driving awareness through one well-aimed direct marketing ad campaign.

Communications is one means of driving devbelopment for your small business. Following these steps will ensure that whatever communications you deploy drive success.

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Posted in Advertising, Communications, Communications effectiveness, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Public Relations, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

My Rules for Making it in Tough Times

Thursday, September 18th, 2008 by admin

Though today’s markets rallied in response to good bottom feeding, rumors of a Resolution Trust Corp. and other factors. But the economic news has been bad and the is a general sense is that it will remain difficult for the forseeable future.

Such times lead us to ponder the future and what’s necessary to move on and up. Here’s my five rules for navigatng through these times.

Rule No. 1 – Stay Close to Your Customers
The first rule comes from Tom Garbett, one of the best and brightest when it came to corporate positioning. (I knew Tom in his final years at DDB Worldwide; he died in January 2007.) Tom’s advice in the recession of the early 1980s: “Stay close to your clients.”

Over time, I’ve come to lean on this advice. It’s not only how we can stay whole in our business-to-business relationship, but it naturally leads one’s ear to really understand our customer’s issues and creatively consider how they can better connect with their consumers.

Rule No. 2 – Access The Long Tail
Given the structural economic shifts in the last three decades and the uncertainties of any forward-looking prognostication, we may also need to figure out how to add new customers, as well as keep the existing ones.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, coined the phrase The Long Tail, as a demand-side model that shows the impact of selling specialty items to smaller clusters of customers. The tail can represent more of a market share than the spike. As with Amazon.com, the total volume of low-popularity items exceeds the total volume of high- popularity items.  In tough times, this long tail becomes appealing – and more achievable – when it is coupled with two other factors: (1) the Internet and (2) channels. Anderson emphasizes the value of the Internet as the vehicle making it possible to connect with so many individuals about specialty items.

Rule No. 3 – Use the New Laws of Web 2.0 Marketing
In a nutshell, the Web has become the “go-to” place for virtually everyone seeking information.

The Old Law would have us pushing information to your prospective customers – and a lot of others who are not prospects but happen to fall within target demographics.

The New Law tells us to make the data available for buyers to find. It has us using the Web site as a meeting ground which customers and prospects can visit to find useful information.

Beyond buying ads, placing publicity, or promoting at events, the New Law would have us publishing content and establishing relationships that our public helps to expand virally by pulling in friends and associates.

Rule No. 4 – Work the Channel
To drive success, especially when customers, clients and consumers aren’t beating a path to anyone’s door, I turn to the concepts in Michael Hammer’s Agenda. Here the author of Reengineering the Corporation points us to the “customer economy,” coaching us on how to succeed when customers have the upper hand.

Just the chapter headings give you a sense of what he’s about: “Run Your Business for Your Customers. Become ETDBW (easy to do business with).” Or “Give Your Customers what They Really Want. Deliver MVA.” Hammer writes, “MVA means that you give the customer more, perhaps far more, than you ever have before.”
But I think the most telling notion is his call to “turn distribution chains into distribution communities.”

In short, use the “New Laws of Web 2.0 marketing” to maintain close relationships with today’s customers and to efficiently attract a new ones.  Then, engage both current and prospective customers as part of your “community of interest.”  You can rely on enduring wisdom of public relations to creatively maintain these connections.

Whether it is a multi-billion, multi-million or even smaller business, the Web is a powerful vehicle for attracting and holding the attention of customers who are looking for answers, guidance, advice and options, even in – perhaps especially in – a tough economy.

Your relationship will not only become viral as it progresses, with current customers referring new ones, but your business reputation will endure long after the business cycle turns up again. We saw this in the Great Depression and again during the shortages and rationing during World War II. Consumers remembered the good guys — businesses that stood by customers when times were tough or supplies were short.

Rule No. 5 – Manage and Nurture the Spirit
This final rule is far more personal than institutional. It is important for you and your employees to remain committed and conduct yourselves with integrity.

Take a leaf from Seth Godin’s latest – and maybe best – book, The Dip. It’s about deciding when to power on or when to quit, change strategies and to move forward with a fresh approach. The most successful in business and life quit all the time – to enable themselves to reach their vision.

But how one moves ahead in difficult times is crucial.

Listen to my friend Tom Whittaker – the  first disabled person to climb Mount Everest – who, on his third expedition, after spending a total of six months on that mountain, finally reached the 29,035 ft. summit:
“Almost a year ago today I was standing in front of the dais in the Grand Ballroom in Buckingham Palace where I was being inducted into the Most Magnificent Order of the British Empire. After pinning the MBE to my lapel, Queen Elizabeth II stepped back and engaged me with keen blue eyes and said, ‘So, Mister Whittaker, you must have been jolly proud to have made it to the roof of the world!’
“ ‘The thing I was most proud of, your Majesty,’ I replied ‘is that I wasn’t guided up the mountain by able bodied guides. I was the expedition leader. I picked and trained my team and I climbed the mountain on exactly the same terms any serious mountaineer would climb it.’
“The 80 year old monarch reflected for a moment and replied, ‘Yes. Style is so important isn’t it?’ 
“The ’style’ she was referring to is of course how you achieve your goals. Your style is not only how you will be judged by your peers, but in the last analysis, is how you will judge yourself.

“I work with business leaders that have been shaving away thin layers of their integrity year after year until they stand in front of the mirror and see the wallpaper through their image. They have indeed gained the world but lost themselves and they are in crisis.

“To never, ever compromise on HOW you do business is not just what you have to do to survive, but to be relevant in my world and in yours. What you achieve, once you understand the unforgiving nature of the game, is all up to you. 

“The good news is that the tougher it gets the more you have the opportunity to stand apart!” 

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Posted in Creative Solutions, Marketing, Social Marketing, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Differentiate? Or What?

Sunday, March 30th, 2008 by admin

Differentiation has become a holy grail in PR and branding. It’s evangelized most fervently in Differentiate or Die: Survival in our Era of Killer Competition, by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin, published in 2000 and now reissued in its second edition.

I like Jack Trout’s work and like many in the communications business, I love touting how my client’s offering stands apart from everyone else! To what degree is it different? Does that even matter? Does the difference have that much to do with the value proposition? Not all the time.

For a fresh view of differentiation, take a look at Matt Kurchaski’s blog Define or Differentiate? A Marketer’s Dilemma. “Too many companies ask the question “how can we be different” when they should be asking ‘what does the customer want and how can we deliver better than the other guys?’. ” Matt offers a crisp summary of a thoughtful article by Eric M. Morgenstern, APR, Fellow PRSA just published by The Counselors Academy, which is part of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). The full text is available for purchase through the PRSA.

There’s a lot to think about here. It’s, well, different.

Posted in Advertising, Branding, Marketing, Public Relations, differentiation | No Comments »

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