Future Files Part 2: Location Branding

Note: Photo taken by my good friend Brittany Parent on her latest trip to Paris, one of my favorite cities,!

In the book, Future Files, Richard Watson talks about how the global connectivity & globalization trends are making it so that you can get anything, anywhere. From which, he brings up the question, why travel, in the future, if everything is going to look, smell & taste the same?

Fortunately, for locations/countries/cities, those differences only reside on the surface, and that the history and nature of these locations is where the unique differences reside providing rationale to seek adventure in new places.

But for people to know these differences exist, when everything on the surface appears to be the same, locations, like organizations, must embrace branding. By branding themselves, they will be able to focus on and leverage their points of difference to intrigue people to visit and/or live, which stimulates the economy and increases the location's global exposure and reputation!

Like Sally Hogshead mentioned at The Art of Marketing Conference, when a market becomes increasingly more commoditized (i.e. places appearing similar on the surface) and, therefore, more competitive, they needs to focus on what makes them fascinating to capture people's attention & draw them in!

Saffron's European City Brand Barometer notes, to effectively brand a location you must foster stories about the place that intrigues potential visitors, making them excited to visit the destination and proud to say they went there. In addition, these stories will excite locals making them proud to live where they do. However, the location must have the goods to back up those stories (i.e. the buildings, the monuments, natural scenery, culture, etc.) to deliver on its promise and satisfy visitors.

So, to ensure a location has sustained demand in a future filled with similarity, focus and build on what makes the place special and unique, exciting people to both travel and live there!

Future Files Part 1: Too Much Choice

Over the last little while, I have been reading the Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson. It's a great read that gets you thinking how the world is evolving and how our daily actions are fostering these trends.

I personally love reading about trends, because with all change and evolution comes exciting new challenges and opportunities!

Over the next few days I'm going to post a series on the 3 trends that captured my attention and felt branding could offer aid and stimulate opportunities.

The 3 trends are:

1. Too much choice (which we will chat about today)
2. Location branding
3. Meaning will attract & retain future talent

If you have any trends that peak your interest or add to these trends, feel free to join the conversation! Trends are a great way for us to see exciting new opportunities for organizations!

Too Much Choice

A strong trend within commerce, that Richard Watson refers to in his book, is Too Much Choice! The idea behind choice is that it leads to consumer freedom so they can choose the product best suited for them, rather than being forced to pick a single option.

Naturally, having competitors, who each produce a product, creates consumer choice. However, organizations wish to capture the greatest market share within their category, so they create multiple options to dominate shelf space hoping to win over consumer choice maximizing their share. For instance, the typical store now has 26 different types of Colgate toothpaste, when there used to be only 2 in 1970!

Unfortunately, having this kind of extensive choice leads to paralysis, as the above quote from Barry Schwartz notes. What this means is that people become so overwhelmed with the selection, that rather than selecting an option, they don't select anything at all! Which is counter to the organizations' initial intentions to try and win market share by dominating shelf space!

In the book, Richard noted that when a supermarket reduced its number of products, it saw an 11% increase in sales. Indicating that consumers were better able to make purchase decisions with less options!

So what does this mean for brands? Well, it means keep it simple! Don't produce so many variations of your products that you lose sight of what your initial product was trying to accomplish (i.e. the organization's brand purpose) and begin appealing to the masses resulting in no longer standing for something. Which eliminates the brand's point of differentiation and, therefore, the reason to buy that product to begin with.

Let's refer to the old example of Apple. In the 80s, when Steve Jobs was not running the show, Apple produced an overwhelming number of computers, which caused confusion among consumers resulting in decreased margins, poor sales and a loss in brand loyalty. But when Steve Jobs came back in the 90s, one of the first things he did was eliminate all unnecessary products, saying Apple was going to only produce a desktop computer, a laptop and it was going to launch a music device.

By focusing on those 3 key products, they were able to improve them, foster focused innovation, and create strong reasons to buy allowing Apple to charge a premium on its products. With every launch of a new Apple product, it's a big deal! Launching updates to existing products happens frequently, but launching a new product only happens when it's something meaningful and game changing.

We can even look to Red Bull. The energy drink purposefully maintains limited shelf space to appear elusive and hard to get stimulating intrigue and demand from customers. They focus on one thing and one thing only - an energy drink. They don't have different types of energy drinks. Although they have launched a diet version, they don't have different recipes - they only have one. Indicating that this is their specialty - all their energy goes into perfecting that one product. This makes product selection easy for customers when shopping for an energy drink - they go with the one that they instantly associate with energy drink and nothing else.

So when you go to create a new product, ensure that you are not going to cannibalize your market. Know your customers appreciate some choice, most of which they are already receiving due to competitors within that market place, and are looking for quick triggers to know what to buy - who's known in that product category and stands for one clear point of differentiation.

Choice is only going to become more plentiful as the world becomes more globalized and more competitors enter the market. Therefore, brands must innovate with their brand purpose in mind to ensure they are creating distinct reasons to buy!

Care, Evolve, Fascinate & Engage: The Things I Learned from The Art of Marketing Conference

Last week I had the pleasure of attending The Art of Marketing Conference with a few colleagues from Critical Mass. It was a great day for inspiration with an amazing line up of Guest Speakers:

• Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick
• Gary Vaynerchuck, author of Crush It and creator of Wine Library TV
• Sir Ken Robinson, author The Element and internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources
• Mitch Joel, digital marketing expert and author of Six Pixels of Separation
• Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate
• Max Lenderman, Director of OuterActive at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and author of Brand New World

The key takeaway I took from this conference was how important it is to have a strong, unique & motivating force guiding the organization forward in an open, honest and caring manner, because the digital environment has revolutionized the way consumers & brands interact!

As I’ve written in the past, consumers are more in control of an organization’s brand promise than ever before, since word of mouth (WOM) is on steroids thanks to social media!

I think Gary Vaynerchuck described how brands must adapt to this digital environment brilliantly when he said that businesses have to go back to small town business values – where customers are people you interact with directly and shouldn’t be treated like faceless numbers, and where if you don’t deliver on your promise, consumers won’t give you their business and they will make sure to tell everyone in their community about your shortcomings. However, if you do deliver on your promise and care for your customers, they will be proud to recommend your brand to everyone they come across!

To reap the benefits of creating strong brand advocates with extensive reach, brands must change their perspective on interacting with customers in this highly engaging digital world and focus on their purpose to become open, honest & caring!

An organization’s purpose stimulates the brand promise. This promise must be captivating & relevant to customers as the market becomes more competitive (especially as brands become more global increasing the competitive set) to give reasons to select/buy your brand over another. Sally Hogshead described this as the need to fascinate, in order to captivate & win your customer’s attention!

This unique point of fascination & intrigue not only attracts customers who appreciate what the brand is all about, but it also attracts talent to the organization who feel they can contribute & help the organization deliver and, even, overachieve on its brand promise!

Chip Heath mentioned that it’s this kind of emotional motivation (a sense of association & identity), which helps stimulate change in an organization. And considering the importance of remaining relevant to consumers, and interacting with them in a way that is meaningful in the current environment (i.e. encouraging socializing, sharing, collaborating & creating), an organization must continually facilitate change.

Therefore, brand purpose helps motivate the organization’s talent to innovate & create new products/services to deliver on its promise giving consumers a meaningful reason to select your brand over another. In addition, the purpose also attracts talent whose values align with the brand enabling people to work on what they’re passionate about and be in their element, as Sir Ken Robinson mentioned, making it easy for them (and, therefore the organization) to deliver on the brand promise creating an organization that is not afraid to operate in an open & honest manner.

So, to be a successful brand in this evolved environment, it must have a motivating purpose, which creates a fascinating promise to attract customers and top talent. Once the brand brings in customers it must deliver on its promise & continue to care/listen/engage with them or the brand will suffer, since WOM is stronger than ever!

An organization may not control its brand, but it sure does have the power to strongly influence it by leveraging these new & engaging digital tools. However, it is important to note, these digital tools do not replace traditional methods of branding, rather they offer additional ways to deliver on and influence the brand, further emphasizing its reasons to buy!

Thanks to all the people responsible for arranging such a great day with an inspiring line-up of speakers!

How far can brand damage spread?

Note: Image from Newsweek

Yesterday I came across an interesting article surrounding BP, and how the oil spill is not only affecting its brand but it's also impacting the brand of the entire Oil Industry.

Obama was quoted saying:

"This disaster will shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come"

and that we need to:

"move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented... visionary energy policy that we so vitally need & has been absent for so long"

These statements that got me thinking - actions with instantly noticeable results strongly influence the public's opinion/perceptions of brands, be it organizations, industries, people, nations, etc.

Because of the BP oil spill, people see oil in a horrendously devastating way that is beginning to impact their lives. Seeing poor birds covered in oil, or oil seeping onto the coastline and beaches is an extremely impactful and negative association to have with oil.

Rather than perceiving oil as this wonderful resource that gives people energy to perform daily needs (i.e. driving cars, powering homes, etc.) which is also 'supposedly' hurting the environment, people are now seeing oil in a dirty and environmentally damaging light!

The threat of environmental damage is not as impactful as the damage happening in the moment in a way that affects people directly!

Take smoking for example: with all the knowledge we have around the fact that smoking kills and the labels we put on cigarette packages, we still see people in love with smoking. I believe this to be because there is no immediate cause and effect. People have never experienced the pain of dying from lung cancer, and, therefore, are unable to comprehend it. Rather, the immediate benefits a smoker receives from smoking a cigarette are far more influential than the future threat of dying.

This is the same for oil, pre-BP oil spill: people couldn't see or understand how it's going to impact the environment because they have no personal experience with it, so demand for oil & gas remains high.

But now, with seeing the horrible impact of this spill, people's perceptions of oil are changing and based on Obama's statements, demand for new energy sources will be on the rise. Of course the revolution, in how we consume energy and where that energy comes from, will not happen over night. But it's interesting to see that one organization's actions and lack of up-front honesty around the situation has begun to impact the entire industry! People are beginning to question the industry as a whole, due to the inability to live up to promises!

So a lesson can be learned from this for brands:

People's perceptions are strongly influenced by immediate cause and effect, which impact them and/or their surrounding environment far more than the threat or the distant promise that something will happen.

So, for organizations to effectively influence consumer perceptions of their brand, they must make a promise and immediately deliver on that promise in a way that is relevant to the consumer (i.e. through innovations, customer service, philanthropic initiatives, etc.), otherwise you risk confusing the customer or you end up being meaningless in their eyes. And being meaningless means you are providing no valuable reason to buy, and are left to compete on price, which jeopardizes your earning potential stunting the brand's ability to accomplish its reason to exist!

But even worse than becoming meaningless, a brand could create passionate hatred and distaste, if it produces actions that run drastically counter to its promise, which could spread these negative emotions impacting the perceptions towards the entire industry, as we're beginning to see with BP and the Oil & Gas industry!

So to positively impact your brand's perceptions, you must create initiatives that produce immediate results proving that the brand lives up to its promise and is satisfying its purpose for existing!

The Man Behind @BPGlobalPR

With working on an exciting new business pitch this weekend, I haven't had a chance to put together a blog post for you all!

So I thought I would share the letter the person behind the @BPGlobalPR released to the media this week. It has some interesting points on how a brand's actions are what build (or in this case shatter) your brand. At one point he notes forgetting about your brand - what he's implying here, is that BP should stop worrying about advertising and spinning the story and start establishing a brand promise and deliver on it!

Thanks Johnathan Bonnell for sharing this link the other day!

Dearest Media,

My name is Leroy Stick and I am the man behind @BPGlobalPR. First, let me begin by explaining my name.

When I was growing up, there was a dog that lived on my block named Leroy. Leroy was a big dog with a disdain for leashes and a thirst for blood. He made a habit of running around our block attacking anything he saw, biting my dad and my dogs basically whenever he had the chance. He chased me a few times, but I always escaped because I was/am an amazing tree climber.

Anyhoos, after Leroy’s second or third attack on my dogs, it became clear that the police and Leroy’s owner weren’t going to do anything to stop him, so my dad took matters into his own hands and came up with a brilliant invention: the Leroy stick.

The Leroy stick was, you guessed it, a stick. My dad carried an axe handle and I carried a plunger handle. My dad told me two things about carrying the Leroy stick. First, if Leroy came near me or the dogs, I should hit him. Second, if I hit Leroy with my stick, I would not get in trouble. Was it legal? Probably not. Was it right? It sure felt like it. We set the example and soon a lot of our neighbors started carrying Leroy sticks as well. Soon enough, Leroy and his owner saw everyone carrying sticks and Leroy didn’t run free anymore.

If you think the point of this story is to beat dogs with sticks, then I’m guessing you probably still think I work for BP as well.

The point of this story is that if someone is terrorizing your neighborhood, sometimes it’s alright to grab a stick and take a swing. Social media, and in this particular case Twitter, has given average people like me the ability to use and invent all sorts of brand new sticks.

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them. I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

Why has this caught on? I think it’s because people can smell the bullshit and sometimes laughing at it feels better than getting angry or depressed over it. At the very least, it’s a welcome break from that routine. The reason @BPGlobalPR continues to grow is because BP continues to spew their bullshit.

I’ve read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR. First of all, who cares? Second of all, what kind of business are you in? I’m trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company? One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach. That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer.

Do you want to know what BP should do about me? Do you want to know what their PR strategy should be? They should fire everyone in their joke of a PR department, starting with all-star Anne Womack-Kolto and focus on actually fixing the problems at hand. Honestly, Cheney’s publicist? That’s too easy.

BP seems to only care about maintaining their image so they can keep making money, two things we have blatantly avoided. I don’t have an image and I’m not making any money AT ALL for myself. Every penny we make from the t-shirts goes to the Gulf Restoration Network. Just a few hours ago, we made our first official $10,000 donation to healthygulf.org from the money we’ve made selling free “bp cares” t-shirts in one week.

So what is the point of all this? The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

In the meantime, if you are angry, speak up. Don’t let people forget what has happened here. Don’t let the prolonged nature of this tragedy numb you to its severity. Re-branding doesn’t work if we don’t let it, so let’s hold BP’s feet to the fire. Let’s make them own up to and fix their mistakes NOW and most importantly, let’s make sure we don’t let them do this again.

Right now, PR is all about brand protection. All I’m suggesting is that we use that energy to work on human progression. Until then, I guess we’ve still got jokes.

Love,

Leroy Stick (aka a guy in his boxer shorts)