I’ve been thinking about how to make Fitting Group’s product better, which in turn, helps our Challenger Brand clients enhance their marketing efforts. Each client has his or her own business goals, but usually among them, is growth. And I can tell you, it’s really, really hard to think up better ways to do things when you’re in the thick of things. So I sought inspiration in the Rockies.
Andrea's cogs are turning at 10,000 feet
I might look like I’m not working. But believe me, the cogs are turning furiously. The lungs are working pretty hard too.
Here’s one of the things I’ve come up with so far. The old model of marketing was pretty simple and straightforward: make a product or deliver a service that is predictable, consistent and works as expected, control your costs and sell at a profit. If you attract more customers and sell more stuff, you’ll make more money. But there is something fundamentally flawed with this model given our world today. The basic assumption relies on the principle that stability is the norm - that the “customer” will have the same needs or desires tomorrow as he does today. If that were true, the status quo would indeed be something to protect. And many keep on trying to protect it. No wonder people need the weekends to recharge their batteries. Going to work every day and holding up the dike against a sea of change saps a lot of energy. There’s not much left over to think about a better way to do things.
So at least take the holiday weekend to think about how the world has changed for your customers. Maybe you’ll be able to come up with a better way to help them cope with it.
Companies that are not the market leaders in their industries need special advice about how to compete. For example, when a Challenger Brand company like K-Swiss, a shoemaker with 3% of the athletic shoe market, looks for an agency, they need three important qualities. First, they need an agency that understands their prime customers. Second, they need an agency experienced in image-driven products.
K-Swiss exercises its voice clearly through this video.
Award-winning copywriter Tony Jaffe joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.
You’ve no doubt heard about the Golden Age of Advertising. At the risk of being cynical, there is no metal worthless enough to describe what’s happening in this age. I admit it - I watch a lot of television at night, subjecting myself to hours of safely boring commercials that make the shows they interrupt feel like Pulitzer Prize nominees. And thanks to some beautiful media buys and the rotten economy, the same spots run over and over again. And over again. To be fair, production costs are astronomical, and shooting more than one spot a year is no doubt prohibitive. Anyway, even if they had the budget you know they’d do more of the same just to keep it “interesting,” like the unusually unfunny Apple spots with John Hodgman. I especially despise these ads when they’re put on the Internet when all I want is information. I curse the Internet people as well, the greedy punks.
So what do you think of when you hear the name, Bayer? If you didn’t say Aspirin, you either work for the company or you are a geeky chemist that knows way too much about Bayer’s subdivisions in Healthcare, Nutrition and Material Science.
OK, so Bayer is a huge company with roughly 75,000 employees and many, many important products that probably make our lives better. In fact, its tagline is “Science for a Better Life.” What could be clearer than that?
But, please Bayer marketing people, I beg you to have some consideration for the sensibilities of an innocent, unsuspecting TV watcher (me). I was watching one evening when I started paying attention to a particularly disturbing commercial that showed a vast lawn with a cross-section of the ground beneath teeming with squirmy grubs.
It’s tax day. So I need something else to think about.
Since all cellular phone services are fundamentally the same, why would a group of people with similar demographic and psychographic profiles favor one over the others? Here’s another example of brand preference. Cellular companies, are you paying attention?
In a 2008 National Report, The Media Audit published a cellular phone study that reveals the demographic profile and media habits among customers of the major carriers are distinct and may warrant different media tactics to attract new customers (http://www.themediaaudit.com ). The study analyzes four of the major carriers - Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, as well as 15 additional national and regional cell carriers.
Bear with me as I wax a little nostalgic. The year was 2000. As the world wiped its collective brow after the near-calamity that was Y2K, it was time to laugh again. It was time for Alan and Jerome…
I just returned from the Beechview Branch of the Carnegie Public Library where Senator Wayne Fontana hosted a press conference to mark the launch of the new website Fitting Group designed for A Child’s Place at Mercy. Senator Fontana told members of the TV and radio media that April is Child Abuse Prevention Month and he wanted to take this opportunity to draw attention to www.achildsplaceatmercy.org, a website that he helped make possible.
Two young women were invited to the press conference to demonstrate the website for the media on the library’s computers. Both of the women are mothers who are among the primary audience for the site: caregivers who are concerned for the safety of their young children and who need access to resources about protecting their children against possible sexual and physical child abuse.
They told KDKA 1020AM radio that they felt that the website made it easy for them to approach the difficult topic of child abuse in a non-threatening and confidential way so that they could answer some of their questions and concerns in the privacy of their own homes. They commented that the site could also help give a person the courage to actually call A Child’s Place at Mercy so that the first steps to getting help for their child could begin.
Dr. Mary Carrasco and Senator Wayne Fontana at the press conference
Our Creative Director Travis Norris and I were there to make sure everything went well and to answer any questions that might come up. Our clients, Dr. Mary Carrasco, Dr. Susan Nathan and Joan Mills from A Child’s Place at Mercy were also present and answered questions as well.
With handshakes from the Senator and hugs from the Child’s Place ladies, Travis and I walked out into a beautiful sunny afternoon and hopped on the ‘T’ for the ten-minute ride back into town, feeling pretty good.
Andrea Sardone, Director of Marketing Communications and Public Relations for the Mason School of Business at The College of William & Mary, joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.
During the presidential campaign, I watched, actually marveled, at masterful messaging of candidate Obama. Despite my support of another candidate, I couldn’t help but be drawn into the brilliance of the campaign staff, who so deftly applied the Eight Credos of Successful Challenger Brands. I found myself scouring the web to read everything I possibly could to gain that one insight that I could apply to my own little niche — higher ed marketing, specifically business schools.
Now I watch/read the news and I wonder ‘what happened?’ I am now scouring the web for everything I can find so I don’t make the same mistake.
Specifically I am talking about all of the chatter about the President’s economic recovery plan and the “lack of a message.” Nearly every story on the recovery plan includes references to its “lack of message” or “muddled message” or “the president has failed to tell the story to make the recovery plan work in the minds of the American people.”
The unfortunate “tarring and feathering” (yes, I am in Williamsburg!) of Timothy Geithner, blaming him for the “lack of a plan” is not really his fault at all. I have a number of experts around me at the business school and many of them say that Geithner’s details make a lot of sense, that he may even be doing the right thing. But even they say that the problem isn’t the details, it’s that they haven’t come up with a way to communicate those details in a meaningful way!
Score another one for marketing or messaging or perception management. Whatever word or phrase you want to use, it’s obvious. The message DOES matter because it gets people in the right frame of mind to actually pay attention. The flood of details doesn’t give anyone any meaning, it just scares them. And it’s scaring them away and they’re tuning out. And they are left with a sense that this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. We hear, “Geithner doesn’t give us the feeling that he’s in charge… he doesn’t inspire confidence.”
I don’t intend to blame anyone here or second-guess the President’s handlers (although I guess I am). I am not sure who is to blame, but you would think that the President knows better. Sending in the details guy is not the way to win the hearts and minds. He needed to send someone in with a big idea, one so big that it could mean something to a lot of people or people could project their meaning onto it. Didn’t that work for him before? Our Challenger Brand stopped thinking like one!
You don’t feel details and you don’t inspire with them, especially when the details are kind of boring or don’t sound very appealing or include words like ’sacrifice’ or ‘catastrophe’. And you certainly won’t get people’s attention with them, either. You inspire with a big idea that stops them dead in their tracks. You get them to feel by telling a story that raises the hair on the backs of their necks. And that gets followed with “tell me more…”. Nobody is asking for more. They are asking for a way for them to make sense.
I’m not saying the details don’t matter. They certainly do. But they won’t matter to people not paying attention.
I read an article recently about the principles on which McDonald’s was founded. HEY…I see you rolling your eyes! But just because we love to hate those ginormous global corporations doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from them - especially as we learn about the things that made them so successful in the very beginning. That is what struck me as interesting about the McDonald’s story. Paul Facella, a 34-year veteran of the organization, tells his story in Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s. He started with the company at age 16 flipping burgers and ended up as Regional Vice President of the New York Region.
Facella, who currently runs a highly successful consulting company, was personally mentored by the founder, Ray Kroc, and by subsequent CEOs. He has many interesting anecdotes but the crux of the matter for aspiring Challenger Brands who might have “world domination” as their ultimate goal will be his Seven Drivers of Success:
1. Honesty, integrity, and transparency
2. Relationships, trust and mutual respect
3. High standards and a never-be-satisfied culture
4. Values-driven leaders who lead by example
5. Courage and risk taking
6. Consistent messaging and open communications
7. Frequent recognition and rewards
If you’re asking yourself right now, “Hmm…do I do that?”… you have potential!
Planning a wedding is like executing the biggest marketing campaign of your life. It takes a lot of money, creativity and detailed execution, and with a bit of luck, ends blissfully for all parties involved.
When I first imagined my wedding, I chose what I thought was a unique theme - a sort of “rustic Tuscan” feel with rich colors. But as I struggled to choose “rustic” invitations and “rustic” centerpieces, something didn’t feel right. After a friend told me she was genuinely surprised by my chosen theme, it clicked - sure my wedding was different, but it wasn’t really me.
The problem was that I chose a theme just to be different, not because it reflected my style or personality - my “personal brand.” Rustic just isn’t my thing - I hate the color brown and refuse to be in touch with nature. As a result of the theme being off the mark, there was a lack of consistency with the event details, and my friends and family (the target audience) were getting mixed messages.
We all know that Challenger Brands need to be different to challenge market leaders, but that doesn’t need to mean losing sight of the overall brand message. Just like my original choice for a “rustic Tuscan” wedding theme didn’t fit my personal brand, Challengers shouldn’t execute a campaign only because it says something different. If your campaign message is too far from your company’s core values, you won’t be able to pay it off and will end up diminishing the brand.
Brands don’t happen overnight - they develop over time and through numerous interactions with your target market. Once you have invested the time to develop a brand identity for your company that’s differentiated and meaningful to consumers, hammer it into people’s heads. Be sure that your message is consistently repeated with every audience touch-point - whether it’s a campaign, social media or event, or in my case, save-the-date, centerpiece or cocktail napkin.
As for my wedding, I changed the theme to something that supports my personal brand - black and white with some vintage touches. Now it’s more sophisticated and polished - no “rustic” branches or brown in sight.
It’s tax day. So I need something else to think about.
