Tag Archives: positioning

Brands are behaviors

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I was recently at the Corporate Social Media Summit (East Coast edition) and I was approached by a friendly fellow from Sprinklr, a sponsor of the event. He had a big sheet of white paper and was asking people to answer the question, “In order to scale social, the enterprise must ______”.

In return for an answer he offered a cupcake. How could I resist?

I like to take my time answering these types of questions. They offer an opportunity to try and distill down often-complex ideas into simple statements – a high art form in my opinion. I joked with the guy that this might take me a minute, and it did. After some consideration, here’s what I wrote:

In order to scale social, the enterprise must behave its positioning. (I’ve written about this before.)

I think the fellow was caught a little off guard. It’s not a light throw-away statement. It is, in my opinion, the secret to good marketing, brand building and customer service in just a few words.

We live in a world full of promises and claims. We’re inundated by them daily. None of us takes any of them at face value. To really ring true, a business has to live its positioning, not just in product delivery but in every other facet of how it does business. It’s not enough to say what you are, you have to be it at an operational level. Otherwise your marketing promises come off as inaccurate at best and at worst, lies.

Marketers spend vast sums of money trying to get a perception lodged in a prospect’s mind. If you pull this off, no doubt to great expense, doesn’t it make sense that when the prospect comes knocking they should get an experience that reflects the promise you made?

I’m a purist. I believe a brand can only really stand for one thing, maybe even one word. That positioning should be the singular consistent idea that aligns your company from the bottom up and inside out. It should be visible in the everything from vision and mission of the company down to how customer service people answer the phone. It should define how a business behaves across the entire ecosystem where it does business – from employees, to strategic partners, to yes, social media.

Technologies come and go. Today it’s Facebook, tomorrow who knows what. All social media technology is transient. But the macro trend that has been happening is that our media are allowing for more frequent, day to day, emotional communication between companies and customers. This is bringing them into closer proximity and even giving a sense that a business has similar traits to a human being.

It may have been legislators that first established corporations as being similar to people, but new technologies are now offering us a chance to scrutinize them like people too.

More and more, and especially among the considered purchases of our lives, products are the spearhead to a relationship with a company. There is great opportunity here. What company doesn’t want more share of mind (and wallet) from their customers? Informed consumers are now looking deeper than packaging claims, advertising slogans or showroom floor displays when making their purchase decisions. With a few taps of the keyboard they can see how a company behaves day to day and where its values really lie.

From corporate social responsibility to customer service, if the decision is important we evaluate our options on many more levels than just the headlines, features, claims and promises of advertising. In fact, because we’e all been sold to since we were infants, we may be looking at how a company behaves because we know can’t count on how it talks about itself.

Instead of catchy commercials, which may put a company in the consideration set for purchase,  as consumers we also weigh aspects of a company that have similarities to interpersonal relationships. Is the company empathetic or cold? Does the company practice what it preaches? If the company makes a mistake does it come clean or try to cover up? Is the company inviting or standoffish? Are they interested in me or my money?

TV commercials may always get the bigger budgets and celebrity spokespeople, but the millions of small moments that happen on the phone, at the counter, on Twitter and Facebook – these define the company and its brands in a far more authentic, believable and ultimately opinion-forming manner than all of that catchy advertising – so you’ll want to be on your best behavior.

Word of Finger: Persuasion & the Science of Marketing.

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Amazon has its reviews. YouTube has its star system. Sites across the web invite people to comment, rate and review products, content and even each other. A whole other batch of people make decisions on these ratings. Does this seem unusual to anyone else?

Think about it. No one vets the people making these reviews. They could be anyone. Yet when twenty-five people give an Amazon book 5 stars we’re inclined to believe it must be a good book. Why? Are these people at all qualified to rate a book? They might be professors of literature, sure. They might also be brain-dead dropouts. Or worse (and in high probability), they might be friends of the author signing on to plug the book without having even read it. You just don’t know.

But a book is a $15 purchase; even if you buy it and dislike it, no real harm is done. However, this isn’t just happening in the small-ticket category. It happens among ‘considered purchases’ too – electronics, even cars. Again and again we allow perfect strangers, people we know nothing about, to influence our purchase decisions. It’s one thing to say I won’t trust the advertiser because they’re going to spin the story – of course they are. It’s another to go 180º in the opposite direction and rely on a bunch of strangers who with minimal effort can register their whims on a comment board.

Consumer Reports used to be the resource for people looking for vetted, impartial reviews on products. I’m staggered that said company has not made more noise. This ‘trust a stranger’ social media world  is a perfect environment for Consumer Reports to demonstrate its value and become a superbrand. Why they aren’t more vocal is beyond me.

Recently, WIRED magazine’s Jargon Watch introduced me to the term Word of Finger. It’s meant to differentiate social-media style buzz from true word of mouth though I think WIRED missed an opportunity in its definition.

Word of Mouth traditionally has implied dialog (and not necessarily orally, despite the term). This in turn implies the people probably know (at least something about) each other. Historically we don’t express our opinions to strangers unless we’re professionals paid to do so. Word of Finger, as I see it, recognizes the nuance that some social media actions are indeed between strangers. In this sense I would argue Word of Finger isn’t as valuable as Word of Mouth even though the former travels faster and has a broader reach than the latter owing to the dynamics of (true) friend networks vs. simply connected networks of individuals.

In this sense Facebook would be Word of Mouth – even though you actually enter the information with your fingers. Amazon’s comments panel is Word of Finger for most people (unless you happen to know one of the commentators). With the former, you know the people and can gauge whether they have any valid capacity to review a topic. With the latter you have no clue who they are, what they know or if they’re in any way qualified to make a judgement call on the topic at hand. Common sense would dictate that the Word of Mouth references have higher persuasive capacity than the Word of Finger. But is this so? I find scant information on the matter. This post on a Nielson blog was as close as I got. Witness the following chart:

What is surprising to me is not that people don’t really trust commercial advertising (duh.) but that absolute strangers have such a high level of trust. It’s worth noting here though that this is a measure of trust and not persuasion – an important difference. I may trust that you actually believed a certain product was great but whether that’s enough it make me buy it myself is another matter.

To date, most of the social media measurability I have seen is tied much more to reach and awareness issues. I would argue that this is because marketing people, and especially new media marketing people are firmly focused on a technological aspects of what they do. Geeks get a rise out of the idea that Facebook is getting as big as China. A nifty statistic for sure, but for most practical business purposes somewhat meaningless.

I also believe that the discourse around social media has largely been focused on how it displaces traditional media. This has had the effect of funneling the thinking around social media into comparative dynamic which tends to force old categories to the surface. I would even go so far as to say the applications of social media have been largely focused on satisfying the same needs as traditional media – awareness, recall, exposure, impressions. This latter is probably the industry’s way of adhering to the principle of apperception.

Today’s social media industry is an art-meets-math world of stat reporting which offers click paths and session times with little sense of how these are correlated to persuasion or drive. Yet the difference between Word of Mouth and Word of Finger is at least 20% according to Nielson above and I would bet, figuring for persuasion as defined by actually acting/buying/changing behavior, that Word of Mouth (among true friends) delivers added value still.

Persuasion has always been the achilles heel of marketing and advertising in terms of metrics. Since the day ‘www’ appeared in browser windows, we have all promised more measurability, yet surprisingly little ground has been gained in measuring persuasion. We tend to now, as we did two decades ago, measure awareness and exposure because frankly, they’re the easiest measurements to make – especially online with server logs.

The bad news is, while social media can provide awareness and exposure they in fact do it less well than old media did; requiring more in both resources and attentiveness. It was much easier to buy TV time in the 1980′s and just run a campaign than it is to orchestrate a social media campaign across the splintered media landscape.

The original book Positioning written by Jack Trout and Al Ries made healthful mention of psychology, a key science in the understanding or persuasion which in turn is central to the objective of marketing. The newer edition (still over a decade old) embellished upon this even further going so far as to stipulate that a mind that is made up is very hard to change. (Think about the implication of that for a minute brand people.) Here are a few profound little tidbits:

“..short-term memory appears to be more auditory than visual, whereas longterm memory can be both.”

“Material learned while one is happy is better recalled when one is happy, and material learned while one is sad is better recalled when one is sad.”

“Minds tends to be emotional, not rational.”

“In order to change an attitude, then, it is presumably necessary to modify the information on which that attitude rests. It is generally necessary, therefore, to change a person’s beliefs, eliminate old beliefs, or introduce new beliefs.”

“Too many advertisements try to entertain or be clever. The Starch research people can demonstrate that headlines that contain news score better in readership than those that don’t.”

“We tend to think of boredom as arising from lack of stimuli. But more and more commonly, boredom is arising from excessive stimulation or information overload.”

It’s amazing to me what happens when you step outside of one industry and its lexicon (for example, marketing) and look at the dynamics from the perspective of another industry and its lexicon (pyschology in this case).

Related to this is the interesting if controversial Transtheoretical model. Conceived to help psychologists help people make healthier choices, it nonetheless provides some interesting insights into the idea of readiness and persuasion that could be applied to other fields.

Yet except for the occasional article here and there or the tromping around of the rare psychologist hired by an agency as a brand planner, there isn’t a sense that marketing is conducted as a behavioral science.

Shouldn’t it be?

Shouldn’t we be spending as much time studying the nuances of Word of Mouth vs. Word of Finger as we do oohing and aahing about the ability to ‘check in’ at a local Dunkin Donut’s to get a coupon? Shouldn’t sociology, anthropology and psychology be departments within agency walls? Wouldn’t these skillets enable a keener understanding of what all these new media opportunities truly afford us?

Requiem for the tagline.

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worth_the_wait_pc_hourglass_icon_photosculpture-p1539141672349109753s98_400Coming up in marketing and advertising the tagline was an indispensable part of any ‘big idea’ and subsequent campaign. The best taglines were meant to embody the essence of a brand’s positioning (a term coined by Jack Trout and Al Ries). Positioning, in turn, was the expression of a brand’s longterm strategic place among its competitors.

From ‘You’ve come a long way baby’ to ‘Gets ring around the collar and your whole wash clean’ to ‘Just do it’, ‘It keeps going, and going and going’, and ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’, taglines reflected the essence of advertising; that being a one-way dictation of what a brand stood for.

These taglines were pounded into our heads on TV, in print, online, at events, in store, and on and on. Integrated Marketing was a late 90′s trend in response to media fragmentation. It held that a a company needed to pick a positioning it wanted to hold in the market and reinforce that through every available channel of communication. The tagline became a thread across media, connecting the dots and creating a whole brand image.

Positioning took time. Branding took time. Companies, in thinking through their tagline were encouraged to think about where they wanted to be five years in the future.

But what good is a five year plan in a five minute culture?

While agencies encouraged companies to think longterm, everyone from shareholders to the media, to competitors and even their own consumers were revealing shorter and shorter attention spans. Innovation happened faster. New media were introduced faster. Celebrities, fashions, trends and technologies explode onto and fade out of our collective consciousness in a matter of months, not years.

This presents a problem for traditional tagline/positioning marketing on several fronts:

  1. There’s not enough time. At the current rate of innovation many companies staking out a position through a tagline are likely to find the merits of said positioning irrelevant (from a competitive standpoint) before their marketing efforts have a chance to make the tagline ‘stick’ in our heads.
  2. There’s not enough money. Ramming a tagline into someone’s head cost a lot of money back in 1980 when there were still mass channels to use. Today, to make a tagline ‘stick’ in enough people’s heads takes more and more money. Don’t believe me? Spit out then first ten taglines you can think of. Then Google them to find the dates. You might be surprised to see how many are far older than you think.
  3. Not enough people are listening. Social media has given us all the chance to talk to peers about products and services. We increasingly don’t need to listen to what an advertiser says to form a perception of a brand. This hasn’t hit its tipping point yet, but as Boomers and Gen Xers age out of the marketplace, this trend will continue.

So if taglines and the traditional tactic of proclaiming your market positioning for all to hear is winding down what will replace it? It might be useful here to look at the tech sector. Of all industries, technology grapples most with a frantic pace of innovation and a lightning-fast novelty-to-parity cycle.

You might notice that many top technology names don’t bother with taglines. Apple doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t. Twitter doesn’t. Amazon doesn’t. Some that have taglines like Google (‘Don’t be evil’) don’t really use them. Other’s that do use them don’t get much from them. Do you know Adobe’s tagline? IBM’s? Cisco’s? Nokia’s? Motorola’s?

The value of values.
Maybe taglines and traditional 5-year positioning strategies aren’t helpful to technology firms. What is then? I would posit that values are the new positioning – not just for technology companies but for any enterprise.

A company’s values *should* impact every aspect of its operations from how it develops products to how it provides customer service. When a company has a clear mission and values and aligns their whole business around them, the business achieves two important tasks that are critical to surviving in a five minute culture.

First, it allows for consistency across all touch points. Few consumers ever quoted a company’s tagline in everyday conversation, even during advertising’s hayday. But by behaving consistently in accordance with the company’s values, the benefits of ‘integration’ are gained without the burden of rigidity.

That brings us to the second benefit, flexibility. A company that focuses more on aligning all aspects around its values has the ability to be nimble. If a disruptive technology comes to market, the company can apply its values in adopting or competing against it. If a new industry emerges, the company can apply its values to entering that market (provided its worth migrating to). Strong alignment around values galvanizes the enterprise, keeps it oriented during rough seas of change and allows it to go with the flow when unanticipated events alter the course of its future.

For marketing and customer outreach the ‘big idea’ and its tagline articulation will increasingly give way to a flexible, adaptive and demonstrative approach to engagement that has less to do with features, benefits or claims and more to do with the values an enterprise holds and how it expresses them in every detail of its operations.