When the Women & Girls Foundation (WGF) needed an annual report to showcase their girl-empowering good deeds over the last five years, we didn’t hesitate – after all, we’ve built a brand around one powerful, whip-carrying female.

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We’re starting a new file at Fitting Group. I’m going to call it the “turn down the heat and let it simmer” file. In this file, we will store all of the great and crazy ideas we have for clients and postdate them for 18 months to three years from now. We’re doing this to maintain our sanity.

In reviewing the work of our agency over the last three years, I began to see a pattern. In our desire to help clients get ahead of the curve, we have often promoted ideas that were viewed as too risky. So the conversation goes something like this:

FG to Banking client: (seeing the regulatory environment loosen up and allow more competition plus the trend in online banking) “We think you should change the name of your bank to UnBank. We’ll advertise that you’re a new kind of bank – completely transparent, with no hidden fees or evil practices. Unbank takes the pain out of the banking relationship for the customer. You’ll launch new products with no minimum balance requirements, no penalties for early withdrawal or loan payoffs, no ATM fees, etc.” (more…)

All eyes will be on Pittsburgh the week of the G-20 Summit in September, and local government officials, community leaders and the media are talking about what an opportunity this is to elevate the perception of Pittsburgh to something more than a dirty old steel town. Pittsburgh is not the market leader when we think of US cities. It’s definitely not the biggest. It’s not top-of-mind. And it certainly has never been thought of as the most prestigious. These characteristics make Pittsburgh a Challenger Brand city, and they’re why we must break the rules to take our rightful place in the market — as the most innovative and marketable city in the US. (Dream Big! Brand Spanking® Cardinal Rule #4*). (more…)

Ten years ago, Adam Morgan, believed by many (including me) to be the Challenger Brand guru, wrote the first edition of Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders. Morgan, who worked for one of the largest ad agencies in the world at the time, wrote from his experience with second, third and fourth-place brands. Nevertheless, the Challenger Brands he used as examples were still industry behemoths compared to the regional players or early-stage types that I am accustomed to working with. He outlined eight credos in his book to guide others to succeed, and I became one of his disciples — or as Seth Godin might say, a member of Morgan’s “tribe.”

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Can the Gap brand be saved?

The all-American brand of the Gap has been under scrutiny over the last several years from Wall Street analysts, branding industry leaders and advertising publications all asking roughly the same question: Can the Gap brand be saved? The topic even came up earlier this year on Gap’s own Facebook discussion board, albeit without much action.

The most recent move by the Gap was to go outside of their agency of record relationship to hire Crispin for their holiday season campaign. A bold move? Yes. The correct move? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I am fairly certain Crispin will be very creative. However a clever holiday campaign may boost year-end sales, but will it truly save the Gap brand?
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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.

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.

We spend a lot of time in other people’s heads (afterwards we’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the PA Turnpike). More specifically, we always try to see things through the eyes of the audience our client is trying to reach. This is a very difficult thing to do, and something most companies cannot do for themselves as they are entirely too close to their product or service. That’s what makes it one of the most valuable services we provide.

It’s getting more valuable everyday, with just about everyone doing just about everything on the Internet. On the web, with the competition just a click away, if your users can’t find what they’re looking for on your site right now, they will look elsewhere. It’s as simple as that.

That’s why usability must be priority #1 on every website. Part of being a Challenger Brand is not making your website a challenge to use. It seems obvious, but too often it’s forgotten. It’s somewhat understandable for clients, but what’s really frightening is how many web developers are guilty of this.

The sad part is how easy it is to avoid this mistake. All you have to do is stop at the very beginning of a web project and ask, “What is our audience really looking for?” That’s the hard part. Finding out the answers is easy.

Web analytics for your current site is a good place to start. See where people are spending most of their time and make it easier for them to get there. Google Analytics is free (and quite robust), so there’s no reason for not having it on your site.

Another option is simply to ask your audience what they want. You can do this easily with an online survey. This is a totally underutilized option because people think it somehow kills the user experience, but the information gathered is invaluable. Besides, nothing kills a user experience like a website completely out of touch with its users’ needs. Companies like Survey Monkey (inexpensive) and Opinion Lab (not so much) offer the tools to get your survey up ASAP.

Once you get the information, there are many resources that will help you figure out what to do with it. Sites like UseIt.com and UIE.com offer tons of great, free info.

Finally, the sacred writ of Web Usability – Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! This book is a must read for anyone who’s ever come within 20 feet of a website. I’m on my third reading and I still slap myself on the forehead every three pages.

This is no time for the faint of heart in business. So if you’ve been listening to our Challenger Brand messages about being bold, gutsy and sticking to your brand strategy, no matter what…I say it’s even more important now while the whole world goes through what’s going to amount to an economic restructuring.

Our Challenger Brand philosophy has always promoted thought leadership, leveraging the tools of marketing and advertising without sacrificing profitability and focusing on creative ideas and integrity. In this economic climate, customers will be looking even more for trustworthy business brands that have their act together, so it’s important to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do – and that you’re here to stay. Customers want, no NEED, to trust your brand and be assured that your company is focused on their business problems, not on your own.

How can you demonstrate this? In every single way:

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