Creating Content: 3 Rules to Effectively to Build Your Brand

It’s no secret that brands are constantly in search of ways to build connections and loyalty with their customers. However many brands are tackling this challenge by blasting meaningless messages into the ether, hoping to gain a committed following. It’s a sure-fire way to turn people off and eventually leave your messages falling on deaf ears. Strong brands engage consumers with authentic and consistent material that reflects an understanding of their interests and gets the dialogue going. These days, great content makes for great brands.

The word “content” is the catchall term for brand communication, and companies around the world are hopping on “content creation” as the way to capture the hearts and minds of customers. Every day, consumers are inundated with brand generated advertising – around 5000 advertising messages compared to a mere 500 messages forty years ago. Yet, this statistic doesn’t capture the various Tweets, Instagrams and other messages companies push out every day. Content is everywhere, and the impact is real – consumers are conditioned to filter and sort through the junk more quickly and easily than ever. …Continue reading

Dove: The Most Impressive Brand Builder

What are the most impressive brand building efforts in last 15 years? In constructing such a list, it would be hard to leave out Dove. A $200 million soap brand in the early 1990s has grown into a brand that has been estimated to be worth nearly $4 billion dollars today. They play in an intensively competitive arena with large, smart and established competitors. And in my view, the Dove brand building effort played a big role in their success story.

Have you seen the latest from the Dove ongoing “Campaign for Real Beauty” that originated in Brazil and was done by Ogilvy & Mather in 2004? A forensic sketch artist draws several women, first based only on their descriptions of themselves (he does not actually see them) and then based on the descriptions of a stranger who has observed the women. The subject, seeing the resulting sketches side-by-side, realizes that the sketches inspired by strangers are much more flattering than the versions from their own self-descriptions. The tagline? “You are more beautiful than you think.” The first two versions of these videos each got over 35 million views within two weeks of being posted to YouTube. Thirty-five million!! …Continue reading

How to Identify Your Brand Personality

My last blog post, “Three Models of How a Brand Personality Impacts,” discussed three ways in which a brand personality can impact customers and the marketplace. And its reception, measured by views and comments, indicated that brand personality is a highly sought after and intriguing concept. Many recognized brand personality as a key brand vision lever for brands that are facing dynamic markets and a fragmented media presence. A brand personality can be a crucially important driver of self-expressive benefits, brand-customer relationships and the communication of functional benefits.

If a brand strategist wants to explore the potential of creating or enhancing a brand personality, then they have to address one basic question. What should my brand personality be? …Continue reading

What Patagonia, Sanuk Can Teach Rookie Brands

If you haven’t heard of Coursera, maybe it’s time to get up to speed. It’s one of a growing breed of exciting brands intending to change the world. And they have a great chance of succeeding

They’re not focusing on “being green” and saving the environment. Nor are they adopting a cause that might fall under its corporate social responsibility program umbrella and is good for PR purposes and brand-building.

Their business is their cause. These brands provide products, services and solutions that are as important to their hearts as they are to their bottom lines. They’re applying disruptive innovation to create social change. They’re brands that stand for something more. And given the vast majority of consumers’ preference to do business with socially responsible concerns, they may have a leg up.

Coursera is obviously not the first to make their business their cause. Stalwarts like Patagonia, Tom’s, Sanuk and Ben & Jerry’s have all blazed the trail, as have more recent brands such as Kiva and Teach for America. These brands have strong moral compasses and are aligned with missions and visions. They’re consistently putting proof points on the board as to why their consumers should choose their brand over the Haagen-Dazs’ of the world when all else is equal (or close to it).

As I look at a few of these newer examples, I can’t help but caution them to truly look to the past to help them guide their future. Let’s look at two of these “rookies.” …Continue reading

The Merits and Demerits of NPS®

For organizations seeking to create sustained business performance improvement, managing and improving customer experience is generally considered essential. Commonly, many companies track and manage customer experience using “satisfaction” surveys. Such surveys can be linked to commercial performance, and sophisticated analytics can optimize investment in customer touch-points to create improvements in prospect conversion, revenue and reduce churn. Detailed research and analytics can be specifically tailored to address business issues that create remedy plans for problems such as poor conversion at the first touch, the need for more up-sell, etc.

However, over the last decade, Net Promoter Score® (or “NPS”) has gained popularity as a simple alternative, thanks to the work of the author Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company (a consultancy), and Satmetrix (a software vendor).

NPS® is founded on a single question: “On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is extremely unlikely and 10 is extremely likely, how likely is it that you would recommend Brand X to a friend?” Respondents are then categorized into one of three groups based on their responses. Those who scored a 9 or 10 are termed “promoters,” those who gave 7 or 8 are “passives” and those scoring 6 or less are “detractors.” The percentage of respondents that fall in to each of these categories is calculated and the NPS® is found by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

But why has this simple question been adopted so readily at the expense of more traditional satisfaction-based series? …Continue reading

Innovation in Retail, On a Whole New Level

image via Bloomberg Businessweek

I serve as one of the judges for The HUB Prize 2012, presented by The Hub Magazine. As such, I got a preview of the winner for excellence in the retail experience. First place went to a New Delhi flagship store for Asian Paints, the third largest paint firm in India. It took retail innovation to a new level.

The concept started with the insight, garnered in part from in-home interviews, that consumers were not comfortable with color experimentation in their homes. They found paint a confusing category and were even intimidated by the idea of choosing colors.

The solution was a retail store that provides personalized color solutions within a magical in-store experience. It begins at the store entrance, where consumers step on footstones of different colors to activate a play of light and color that involves a huge chandelier and the external façade signage. This warm-up gets the consumer into color experimentation, shows how color affects space and the displays impact of light on color. Consumers play with tactile, colored blocks and select some combinations of colors and styles to see in an on-screen virtual room, guided by a consultant. The consumer’s preferences are used to prepare a personalized magazine that shows how the selected colors look in context. All the information is recorded on a RFID card, which is then taken to a conventional paint retailer to purchase the corresponding Asian Paints color. …Continue reading

The Melt Heats up Competition

Restaurants are interesting to me, particularly because there is frequent innovation-driven differentiation driving emerging subcategories and strong brands with a lot of energy. In restaurants, there are a lot of levers to pull and there are significant customer engagement possibilities. A lot can be learned from restaurant brands that are hitting a home run.

A fast food brand located in San Francisco, The Melt, caught my eye because it not only has a differentiated offering but also has the opportunity to connect with customers in different ways.

The Melt has a simple menu that harkens back to the days of grandma’s fixing lunches of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. There are five kinds of cheese, each with a matched bread, five soups, interesting drinks such as Izze Sparking Pomegranate, five desserts including a Chocolate Marshmallow S-more’s Melt, and a breakfast menu that includes Steel Cut Maple Raisin Oatmeal and Banana Maple Waffles. It is the only restaurant with grilled cheese sandwiches as its core item. And its specialized technology enables the quality to be higher and more consistent than grandma used to make.

A customer’s mobile device is an integral part of the experience and contributes a “coolness” component. When an order from a mobile device is entered, all of The Melt restaurants in the area get the information. Their strategy is to get a critical mass of outlets in an area. A customer then simply walks into any one of them and has his or her order scanned from the device. The order is immediately processed. There’s no standing in line and thinking about what to order. When a customer becomes part of the mobile system, the information can be used to make the process even more efficient and personalized. It also has the potential to create an ongoing relationship. …Continue reading

How Burger King Is Attacking Their Relevance Problem

For over a decade, Burger King has experienced mismanagement of relevance challenge by a series of “new” owners. Menus were not suitable for large, important segments such as women, families and the health conscious. At one point it was all about the young male and their burgers, but even this group was attracted to new fries/burgers/shakes concepts with attractive personalities and/or local connections. The experience was inconsistent and at times disappointing. The advertising and the “King” symbol was ineffective and even strange even to the young male. For many in the broad market that needed to be served, Burger King was simply irrelevant.

As recounted by Jordan Melnick in QSR CEO Steve Wilborg, who was hired in 2010, may have finally gotten it right. In April of 2012 Burger King announced a four-prong initiative to make the brand relevant to more than the young male burger crowd. In particular, they… …Continue reading

Interested and Interesting, Episode 3

The Path to Innovation: Aspire to Realize

Rose Shuman is an innovator. Spending many years working on developing world projects she knows well what it takes to successfully bring something new into the world. This is illuminated best through her invention of a device called the Question Box. In this episode we explore the story of Question Box through the lens of Prophet’s innovation model Aspire to Realize. This model describes the path to innovation, and the steps necessary to stay inspired along the way. With Rose’s help we hope to illuminate the innovator’s journey. [Music brought to you by: Greenland]

From Prophet’s curator and provocateur team, Interested and Interesting is a monthly exploration of the business of brand, marketing, innovation, digital, design, and analytics. Hosts Geof and Josh introduce listeners to inspiring stories that engage and illustrate business principles in an abstract, provocative way. Our goal – to inspire listeners and liberate ideas to help drive business growth.

Interested and Interesting, Episode 3 [ 16:16 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (256)

Interested and Interesting, Episode 2

The Customer Experience – Lessons from a Brooklyn Bike Shop

Co-creation, building relationships, and quality products make Joe Nocella at 718 Cyclery a busy, but successful entrepreneur. At 718 Cyclery Joe has created a customer experience that is unmatched in the New York bike scene. His signature touch point is something he calls ‘the collaborative build,’ and it’s a process worth a look. In this episode we talk to Joe about the success of his customer experience model. We’ll also chat with Fred Geyer at Prophet to give us an inside perspective. [Music brought to you by: Greenland]

Episode 2: The Customer Experience - Lessons from a Brooklyn Bike Shop [ 14:23 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (318)