Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
About this Insider
BrandShift explores key trends in branding such as customer
experiences, market conversations and social technologies. Our goal is to
help executives and brand managers evolve their brands to thrive in the new
customer-driven marketplace.
I've had many "moments" with analysts - all flavors in fact. These include "moments" where I've recommended companies stop funding certain industry analysts. But that is very different than Altera's moves covered in the NYT this morning. They are cutting a financial analyst out, claiming it is not in the interests of shareholders to work with him. Bad move on their part. No need to do business with them if you don't like their views, but I beleive companies have a responsibility to communicate.
First, this sends entirely the wrong message to shareholders. So you are going to make calls on who gets to ask questions and who gets information? As a shareholder I want you to be entirely transparent. Opacity is a reason to sell, not to buy. Assuming we don't have the smarts to read and interpret research is insulting.
Boing Boing reports that Virgin Enterprises is suing a small business owner for using the name Virgin Threads. This strikes me as grandiose and obnoxious.
A joint-task force composed of members of the Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation yesterday unveiled an initiative that would shake up the classic equation of advertising math that determines consumer exposure to an ad. It would replace the concept of frequency -- the number of exposures to an ad -- with “engagement,” a metric that could better reflect the growing number of media choices facing consumers, from cell phones and the Internet to video games and podcasts. [AdAge]
This will only become more important as communicators discover the need to measure the degree to which customers are participating in their communities and brands. The best campiagns will measure what changed: did we move markets, change minds and increase sales? This isn't just about driving communications accountability, its also about driving marketing accountability.
Samsung has executed a stunning brand campaign that has established it as a worldclass brand. Evidence of that came today in the latest Interbrand rankings. According to AdAge, there has been a historic reversal:
(AdAge.com) -- In a reversal of fortunes that has been building for years, Samsung trumped Sony on Interbrand's Top 100 Brands list. On the just-released 2005 poll, published in conjunction with Businessweek, Samsung has taken Sony's No. 20 spot this year, while Sony dropped to No. 28.
Sony, in fact, topped the list of companies that lost the most brand value, dropping 16%, more than any other company in the top 100. On the other side, Samsung, which was No. 21 in the 2004, ranked in the top five of companies whose position climbed highest, with a 19% increase in brand value.
The overall top 10 brands on the list for 2005, in descending order, are the Coca-Cola Co., Microsoft Corp., IBM, General Electric Co., Intel, Nokia, Walt Disney Co., McDonald's Corp., Toyota Motors and Marlboro (Philip Morris USA).
According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, Costco puts Wal-Mart to shame in the arena of low pricing. They steadfastly hold to the rule that nothing shall be marked up more than 15% (compared with competitor's markup of 25% and more). They pay their employees an average of $17 per hour... 42% higher than Sam's Club... and have one of the best health plans in the industry.
Costco's stock has risen more than 10% in the last year. Employee turnover rate is nearly non-existent. Sales revenue for June of 2005 is up 9% from the same period last year.
What does Wall Street have to say about this? If you can get their thumbs out of their mouths long enough to tell you, they wail that Joe is too generous. He just isn't shaving enough off the top for them to get their greedy little hands on. An analyst from Deutsche Bank whines, "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder." "They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell," complains another analyst at ThinkEquity...
My God. A business that puts its employees and customers before the Almighty Profit does exist. Isn't it amazing that a simple thing like that would create cult-like customer loyalty and $40 billion in revenue... with almost no advertising?
Jeff Risley's firm is sposoring a survey on cause-related marketing. They're talking to marketing people and not-for-profits. Jeff's looking for suggestions for questions.
Doubleclick's third annual Touchpoints Survey reveals that the web is the most consistent factor in purchase influence across ten product categories, according to MediaBuyerPlanner.
Interesting piece by Al Ries on Hilton and the need for clear brand positioning. (logon required).
Do you know your brand? What’s your brand? If you can’t answer that question about your own brand in two or three words, your brand’s in trouble. Powerful, long-lasting brands are built by owning a word in the mind. What’s a Volvo? A safe car. What’s a BMW? Fun to drive. What’s a Barilla? Italy’s No. 1 pasta.
Our actions, expressed as Attention, establish networks that connect us, our family, our friends, our colleagues and our affinities.
The net currently has a schizophrenic but unique way of remembering bits and pieces of these attention streams: Not all data is captured; the consumer has no central attention management tool; and most companies don’t want you moving your history between their networks anyway.
Despite these points of friction, more and more applications are being built upon our attention streams.
Innovations in internet media are like handfuls of white flour dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention. At times, user behavior drives media construction directly, but at other times the original user behavior evolves beyond the ability of the media to engage it. These hollow shells of former behavior are being swept up constantly by domain, banner, click-thru and lead brokers who recycle the detritus into more usable (aka monetizable) impressions.
The notion of brands that intersect attention streams is an interesting one. It's not just about intersecting demand patterns. Demand patterns reflect later stage attention streams.
Very good article by Jay Rosen, about media coverage of the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice in the US. He suggests that two sides are preparing to do battle in a way that seems to be about activists battering away at each other without noticing that they're not likely to achieve much. Here's a snippet:
Reaching for her cliché gun, Robin Toner can say "nothing less than a national political campaign had begun," but she has no idea how it's supposed to work, either. Everyone parades around as if this mobilization of opposing armies makes perfect political sense, when in fact "all the time and money spent on campaigns may have little influence on the outcome."
Why does this go on? One reason is that activist groups, by opposing each other, use each other for mutual self-definition. They too don't know how their e-mail blasts and TV ads are supposed to work. Like spammers, they just send the stuff out. What they know is that the other side will be sending e-mail blasts and running TV ads. Spam must meet spam.
I don't want to dwell on US politics in this blog, but I think what Rosen sees here is a kind of folly that marketing folks often get trapped by: obsessing with positioning and defining themselves against their perceived competitors, rather than focussing on expressing their own views or (heaven help us) thinking whether any of these campaigns really touch the customer.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
