Brand Management » Marketoon

Marketoon: I’d rather be earned media

Brand Management — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:28:35 +0000

Earned media is on the rise as marketers scrutinize the effectiveness of traditional paid media. Marketing plans have always juggled some form of paid media (buying an ad), owned media (building a web site or store), and earned media (coverage in press or word of mouth). But the lines have blurred between these three forms of media. Some ad agencies have started hiring Earned Media Directors. Some PR agencies have started placing media buys.

The best paid media generates earned media (which is why last year’s Superbowl ads drew so many views even before the actual game). And the most successful earned media often needs paid media as an accelerant. Grant Owens from Razorfish said, “Earned often requires a paid spark. We have empirical evidence that a kick-start from paid media is often the difference between a cultural juggernaut and complete silence.” I found this media chart useful, showing the integrated commingling of Paid, Owned, and Earned Media.

The net result of this blurring is that we have to earn ALL of our media more. A lackluster paid media placement is a missed opportunity. The impetus is on marketers to create marketing worth sharing, whatever the media. We can’t rely purely on paid media to carry the weight.

Bron: Tom Fishburne

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Marketoon: the art of product management

Brand Management — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:35:28 +0000

There’s always room for one more feature. Feature creep is the ongoing addition of new features, over-complicating the original idea. It often comes from committees making compromises. At Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment company, they call their product managers “Product Editors”. Deciding what not to put into a product is more important than deciding what to put in.

I stumbled across Andrew Chen’s article on Square and the product editorial model. He shared these insights: “Bad ideas are often good ideas that don’t fit. In the context of literature, books, and newspapers, it’s the job of the editor to pick the good stuff and weave it into a coherent story. You remove the bad stuff, but ‘bad’ can mean it’s a good idea but just doesn’t fit into the story… “You don’t just jam lots of characters and plot points in a story just because. Even if they are good characters, it can bloat the story. Same with features- sometimes you have many, many good ideas for your product, but if you come to do all of them, you ultimately make it a confusing mess. Instead, you have to “edit” down the feature list until you have a clean, tight experience.”

Bron: Tom Fisburne

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Marketoon: one size fits none!

Brand Management — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 09:17:16 +0000

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole,” an HBS professor named Theodore Levitt famously told his students. Too often, marketers get wrapped up in the features and functions of their products, rather than solving the actual problems of the consumer. That leads to a lot of one-upmanship versus competition and over-bundled products that don’t handle any one feature particularly well. Marketers also tend to average out all of the feedback from consumers, ending up with one-size-fits-none products.

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Marketoon: what is our mission?

Brand Management — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:31:01 +0000

Every brand needs an anthem. Most settle for a humdrum mission statement or competitive benchmark instead. In my recent “Brand Laddering” cartoon, I parodied brands that stretch too far beyond believability, trying to make corn chips stand for world peace. I think there’s just as much to make fun of with brands that don’t try to stand for anything at all. Too often we define our brands only by how we stack up versus our competition. The Fast Food market works this way. Brands typically pivot off of each other, claiming Cheaper, Bigger, Tastier, etc. Taco Bell asked consumers to Think Outside the Bun. Quiznos introduced Toasty as a point of difference versus Subway.

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Marketoon: Brand laddering

Brand Management — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:31:24 +0000

“Brand Laddering” is one of the most common marketing tools. To drive growth and loyalty, marketers frequently work to elevate benefits of the brand from technical to functional to emotional. But there’s a risk of over-reaching, particularly when brands aim for abstract emotional benefits not really supported by the product story. Brandgym founder David Taylor calls this phenomenon “brand ego tripping”.

I gave a talk this week at MARCOM12, the largest marketing conference in the Netherlands. I spoke just after Anne Charbonneau, a partner at Brandgym with David. In Anne’s talk, she mentioned a cartoon I drew way back in 2004 where I made passing reference to the idea of brand laddering to world peace. Her comment inspired me to expand this idea into its own cartoon (and I pasted the original at the bottom of this post).

David Taylor illustrates “brand ego tripping” with the trial and error story that eventually led to the famous Dove Campaign for Real Beauty:

“They originally developed three different “brand anthem” campaigns that tried to get women to stop judging themselves so harshly (‘Beauty Has A Million Faces One Of Them Is Yours’, ‘Give Your Beauty Wings’ and ‘Let’s Make Peace With Beauty’). However, as the planner from Ogilvy agency commented :

“‘Unfortunately, women were not impressed. They found our ideas patronising. The top-down approach seemed to lead to rather didactic, theoretical and distant work. So we decided instead to work bottom-up – product first, wrapped in beauty theory.’

“I love that last line: ‘Products wrapped in beauty theory’. Tell a product story, but in an impactful, emotionally engaging way. This led to the launch of Firming Cream, with the now famous advert of real ladies in their undies. It was fresh. It was honest. And it plugged a product: “As tested on real curves”. “Real-ness” and “honesty” was the brand’s personality, but not the idea itself.”

Tapping the right emotional benefit can transform how people think about a brand, and create distance from commodity knock-offs. I saw first-hand how Cheerios successfully laddered from the “first finger-food moment with toddlers” to stand for “nurturing” as a brand benefit, which drove ideas like including children’s books in cereal boxes and supporting literacy. But the right emotional benefit has to be supported by the products.

Bron: Tom Fishburne

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Marketoon van de Week: Our Facebook Page

Brand Management — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:02:08 +0000

The unrequited hype of the Facebook IPO last week echoes the unrequited hype many brands experience with social media in general. There’s a get rich quick mentality – a “Like Grab”. Many brands believe if you just build it, the audience will come. The problem is that this sets the false expectation that social media is easy. Social media holds tremendous potential, but it requires a long-term commitment. Many brands give up early when social media doesn’t immediately live up to the hype. David Altschul, founder of Character, shared some observations this week on lessons of the Facebook IPO and brand.

“Facebook, following in the well trod footsteps of many tech companies, seems to have purposely cultivated a kind of gold-rush mentality in the days leading up to their offer. While playing on the audience’s desire to get rich quick has often been enough to launch a tech stock into the stratosphere, it doesn’t seem to have been enough to help Facebook reach escape velocity. Why is that? Well, from a story perspective, we believe it’s because of an inherent dissonance between the gold rush mentality and the meaning of the brand…

“Facebook was trying to tell both stories at the same time. The social network is about community and connectedness, while the public stock offering was all about getting rich quick. Of course, every successful brand has a human story and a money story living side by side. The question is, do the two stories compliment each other in some interesting way, or do they cancel each other out?”

The same lesson holds for brands and social media in general. Social media can generate a return, but we need to keep the emphasis on the right place. It’s not about getting rich quickly. It’s about deepening the connection with our audience. We need less gold rush and more long-term community building.

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Marketoon: moments of truth

Brand Management — Mon, 28 May 2012 12:15:16 +0000

This cartoon is part of a new series I developed with Motista to parody the state of traditional market research. Motista is giving away a signed print of this cartoon to everyone who shares a comment or suggests a cartoon idea at the Motista blog by July 17th. What really and truly motivates the consumer is so fundamental, yet it’s so often guesswork. A deep understanding of the consumer is often the lightest part of our plan. It’s easier (and more quantifiable) to diagnose competitors, so we tend to focus our energy there. That gives us tunnel vision. We start to compete on one-upmanship, and lose sight of the actual consumer.

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Marketing Clutter

Brand Management — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:21:13 +0000

There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.” At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc. So we marketers are interrupting consumers more, but with fewer meaningful things to say.

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