Brand Promise: Know yourself and stay focused

Brand Promise: Know yourself and stay focused

by | Feb 1, 2011 | Blog, Strategy

Delivering on your Brand Promise is all about staying true to yourself.
We have already discussed Understanding the Customer and Developing the Optimal Offer, both of which also examine your Competition.

Now it is time to design or redesign your brand for success; create positive perceptions for your clients and prospects through communication – to find, attract and retain customers.

In the next section we will be covering:

  • Brand Names and Brand Naming
  • Brand Personality
  • Brand Story
  • Brand Promise
  • Brand Positioning and
  • Brand Positioning Statement

We will also examine:

  • Customer Brand Experience and of course, the fun part;
  • The development of the Creative Strategy for Effective Communication.

Once these sections are covered we will be finished with “building the foundations” of our Marketing House.

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Develop the optimal offer

Develop the optimal offer

by | Jan 30, 2011 | Blog, Promotion, Strategy

Opportunity Cost

Deep thinking is required to work out the optimal offer for your customers and prospects.

Once you have a good understanding of your customer needs you can begin to formulate your offer. Start out by asking these basic questions and remember that often best ideas come from people who are closest to the customer!

  • What problem do you solve and what is unique about the way you do it? E.g.: Sometimes all it takes is a different attitude. Max Super (a Superannuation company) in Australia took a boring and jargon laden product category and made it fun, by making fun of itself and the industry thus appealing to a younger audience. Groupon and it’s now many copy-cats have taken the concept of online auctions and group buying, word-of-mouth, and consumer desire for a bargain to create a whole new fast growing category.
  • What are the different market segments?
  • What are the Competitors offering? If your offer is no different to your competitors then how do you expect prospects to choose your company? If your offer is essentially the same and in many cases it is, then the how you communicate (promote) that offer to your target audience becomes paramount. Which is why “we marketers” focus so much on the Promotion versus all the other parts of the Marketing Mix.
  • What is the Opportunity Cost of your product? E.g.: what will your customers miss out on or give up by buying your product or service? How can you minimise this cost?
  • What features are the most / least valued? The innovation that is iPod came about precisely using this type of analysis. There were many much more technically superior MP3 players on the market when iPod came on the scene, but the ipod gave the simplicity of operation to consumers that they craved and took away the features they didn’t value (complexity). Can you imagine if this was done with Video Recorders / Players or software like Microsoft Word – where the vast majority of users only used about 10% of the product’s potential?
  • What is the Pricing Structure & Role of Price? E.g.: Price is the simplest and oldest signal of any market place. We have all grown up with the phrase “you get what you pay for”, so make sure you align your price with the perceptions you want to create. Telling prospects that you have the best software, service or widget on the market at the cheapest price may simply mean you will not be believed, so make sure you either price it as being “the best” or take great care explaining how you can deliver it at this price point to make sure your story is credible.
  • What is the Distribution Strategy?
  • What is the Selling Process?
    Make sure that your distribution strategy and sales process are aligned with your customer buying process.

Another great way of discovering new ways of solving old problems is actually examining the existing and recurring customer problems and frustrations and then overcoming those. Every customer problem is actually an opportunity in disguise to improve your customers’ brand experience.

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Improve marketing communication by understanding your customers

Improve marketing communication by understanding your customers

by | Jan 25, 2011 | Blog, Strategy

Research does not have to be expensive, in order to drive marketing communication. It will help you to understand “customer” behaviour to influence future behaviour to make SALES or:

·      To raise donations

·      To get elected

·      To change society’s views or society’s behaviour, e.g.: To stop drink driving, To curb violence.

There are many tools available to small business owners to better understand their customer needs; their fears and hopes, expectations and attitudes.

Market Research
Here are some major sources of ‘big picture’ macroeconomic research that will cover everything from market trends including supply and demand factors to market demographic and psychographic segmentation:

·      Census Data from Australian Bureau of Statistics

·      Ibis World

·      D & B

·      Roy Morgan

·      Nielsen

·      Trend Watching

·      Springwise

 

Marketing Research on the other hand is more micro in it’s approach and provides insights into the factors a small business is more in control of –
how changing elements of the Marketing Mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) impacts CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR. Marketing Research can be both Qualitative and Quantitative, it is a form of applied sociology and there are numerous methodologies.

 

Research does not equal success.
For example, the failure rate for new product introduction in the retail grocery industry is 70-80 percent.

Reference:
LM&W used statistics from the U.S. Commerce Department (Annual Survey of Manufacturers M3 Report, 1994), Fortune’s Top 100 U.S. Companies listing, the 1994 Deloitte & Touche study of costs for new product introductions and promotions in the grocery industry, Supermarket News reports and New Product News reports. The survey was conducted in September 1996.

Why is it so?
In 2002 Daniel Kahneman of Princeton wasawarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. His work, for the first time, recognised andadmitted that it’s the power of emotions and a person’s psychological makeup thatare the key determining factors in buying behaviour. And predicting human emotions and hence behavior is the greatest challenge for marketers. 

Consumers JUSTIFY their emotional behaviour.
RESEARCH now tells us that more than 90% of all human decisions are driven by emotions and that we use cognitive faculties to rationalise those emotional decisions to make them acceptable in the eyes of the people we want to be accepted by. Psychologists call this “introspective illusion”.

So how do you influence emotions?
You need to COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.

This means ENGAGING your AUDIENCE.

To do this we need to BE DIFFERENT.

So Research HOW to be DIFFERENT!
Analyse your Current Customers

·      Who is your typical customer? 

·      What do your customers value about your business? 

·      Why do they buy from you?

·      Do you know how to best satisfy the needs of your customers? 

·      Have you ever asked them if you could be doing more to make them happy?

·      What do they feel about your category?
E.g.:

– All banks are bastards
– All “tradespeople” are unprofessional
– All Real Estate Agents are liars
– All Accountants are boring

You need to ask your customers the right questions, then listen and observe.
Here are some of the low cost and free tools you can use:

www.surveymonkey.com

www.linkedin.com (Polls Tool)

http://www.google.comalerts

http://www.socialmention.com/

www.twitter.com

With the web now being an integral part of the evaluation and buying process, Keyword Research (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) can provide critical insight into the behaviour patterns of your customers and prospects. In the “4 Hour Work Week” a best seller by Tim Ferris, there are some great examples of low cost “real world demand testing” versus traditional research that we can all learn from, using Pay Per Click Advertising in order to literally test demand and the viability of a product / service idea.

Today we are able to quickly and easily test different elements such as:

·      Different Target Audience with Different Keywords

·      Different Offers and

·      Various Creative executions.

 
“You can’t plan the future by the past” – Edmund Burke, Philosopher

If a thought is original, then there is nothing like it to easily judge it against, research is may not help at concept stage. Great brand ideas should frighten you!

Incremental improvements would not have brought many of the “game changing” Apple products like the iPod or the iPhone to market! Customers could not comment on the new innovative products until such time that they played with them in focus groups or other more realistic scenario tests!

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION that differentiates your business and engages your customers requires CREATIVITY, which is:

·      the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns or relationships

·      creation of meaningful new ideas, forms, methods and interpretations;

·      originality

Research can however provide your business with brilliant insights that spell runaway success.  Here are just 2 small examples:

1.     An advertisement from an Air Conditioning and Heating Company hits the nail on the head by tapping into the fears and frustrations that exist in its category: “We install the same units and charge the same prices as everyone else. The difference is that we’re actually going to show up when we said we would. Always on time, or you don’t pay a dime. Seriously. If we aren’t there within the exact hour we told you we were coming, you pay nothing. Whatever you need is FREE. No charge. Sorry we were late. We are really sorry. One Hour Heat and Air understands that time is money. Your time. Our money.”

2.     Observation of changing demographic trends and understanding of their needs led to the idea that an ageing population means a rise in “sandwich” families, those with children and elderly parents to look after. Tricare to the rescue: childcare, elder care and pet care in one happy space. And nobody minds the noise!

 

Getting to know your customers:
The information you capture about your customers should be your most valuable asset, in order to allow you to gain insights that will translate into new and better ways you can communicate with them and offers you can make to better satisfy their needs. To do this you can segment your customers by:

·       Sales Cycle

·       Purchase Frequency

·       Value of transaction

·       Product / Service

·       Location

·       Demographics

·       Attitude

You can also find out WHERE you can reach your customers most efficiently:

·      What are they watching?

·       What are they reading?

·       What are they listening to?

·       Which websites do they visit?

·       Where do they network online and in the real world?

 

You need to know your customer metrics:

·      How many unique Visitors to your website per day/week/month?

·      How long do they stay there?

·      What is their typical journey through your website?

·      What is your COST PER LEAD in every medium you use and define what action constitutes a lead?

·      What is your CONVERSION RATE in every medium you use?

TEST, TEST, TEST your communication otherwise you are flying blind, wasting your hard earned money on marketing that is not accountable. You can test the 3 major elements of any marketing communication:

1.     Target Audience

2.     Offer

3.     Creative

·      Test one element at a time to consistently LEARN and then REFINE to improve results.

 

Get to know your competitors:

·      Who is the competitors’ typical customer?

·       How do they reach their customers?

·       Use Benchmarking Tools, which you can often get from various Industry Bodies

·      Why do Prospects buy from your competition? What do they value most?

·       Question lapsed customers

·       Question “defectors”

·      “Mystery shop” from your competitors and yourself!

 

Most importantly have a process and a system, after all the definition of research is: “diligent and systematic inquiry or investigation into a subject in order to discover or revise facts, theories, applications”.

 

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David Ogilvy Quote on Judgement

by | Jan 24, 2011 | Blog, Strategy

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgement; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.
David Ogilvy

Quote on Research

by | Jan 23, 2011 | Blog, Strategy

…the trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking yesterday, not tomorrow. It’s like driving a car using a rear view mirror
 attributed to both Bernard Loomis, an American toy developer and marketer who introduced to some of the world’s most notable brands including “Barbie” as well as Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop.