Brand Building - How the Little Things Add Up.

I confess.  I'm pretty much a Starbucks junky.  

It's hard for me to walk past one without wanting to go in and get a fix.  Partly, it's the coffee.  But a lot of the explanation for why I'm addicted to Starbucks is that I admire the way they've built their brand and I love to look for the new little things that they keep adding to the in-store experience.  Over the years, Starbucks has carefully and intelligently cultivated their brand and invested in it and built it one brick at a time.  It's now one of the most formidable and valuable brands on the planet.  Marketeers can all learn from observing Starbucks and watching not only what they do but how they do it.

Starbucks is a great real world example of "Purple Cow" thinking (a topic of an earlier Marketing Sanity blog posting).  "The Starbucks Experience:  5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary"  is a good book that outlines the guiding principles of the Starbucks brand.  The principles are:

1. Make It Your Own:  Are you old enough to remember when Maxwell House and Folger's owned the coffee business?  Starbucks re-invented it and has never looked back.
2. Everything Matters:  More on this principle in a minute.
3. Surprise and Delight:  Exceeding expectations.  It gets harder and harder to do, but somehow Starbucks keeps managing.
4. Embrace Resistance:  Listen and learn from the anti-Starbucks people.
5. Leave Your Mark:  Be a great corporate citizen.  Give back.  Care. 

Two recent developments at Starbucks have really caught my attention and both are great examples of both "Everything Matters" and "Surprise and Delight."  

The first and biggest is their strategic alliance with Apple and iTunes.  Every week at Starbucks you can collect a "Pick of the Week" card good for a free download of a song by a featured artist.  That's a $.99 value.  How cool is that?  Soon, you'll be able to do a one click download in the store onto your iPhone or iPod.  Hear something you like while you're enjoying your mocha?  Instant gratification.  Download it then and there.  This alliance is an obvious win-win for both companies on many levels.  It is definitely delighting in my book as a customer of both brands.

The second example is smaller but also surprising and delightful.  Recently, Starbucks has started a partnership with "Good" and begun distributing a weekly "Good Sheet".  Each weekly sheet is sponsored (so the cost to Starbucks is probably close to nil) and each features intelligent information about a thought provoking important issue of the day.  Just the thing to make me and a friend spend an extra few minutes in the store looking it over, discussing the issue and maybe ordering that second latte.  

These two new additions to the Starbucks brand are polar opposites from a technology standpoint:  one is digital and one is newsprint.  Yet they  both enhance the Starbucks brand and the in-store experience.  

As you're taxed with building your brand, in addition to all the big "important" things like ads and packaging and PR, think about all the little things you can do to surprise and delight your customers.  Then do them.  Commit to them.  Add them to your brand's experience.  Collectively, they will turn your brand into something unique and wonderful and very very valuable. 

Microtargeting - Political Marketing Tool That's Either Creepy or Cool - Decide for Yourself

Our national elections are less than three weeks away and we're all being bombarded with political marketing messages.  

I've you're like me, you find most of these highly packaged and super slick messages that are being pushed at us to be a terrible way to elect our leaders.  The issues of the day are highly complex and none of them have simple solutions.  If they did, they wouldn't still be issues would they?  They'd have been solved long ago.  No politician has all the answers even though they all claim that they do.  In the real world, no one likes or trusts a know-it-all.  Why do politicians think they need to pretend they have all the answers and then claim that their opponent is a clueless idiot?  One day a really honest straight-talking politician will hit the scene and take the country by storm.   

I want a politician who will tell me what they believe and how they think.  I don't want a spin-sensitive, word-smithing, equivocating, double-talker who's just looking to tell me what he or she thinks I want to hear.  

The October 2008 issue of "Fast Company" reports on the state-of-the-art marketing tool being used today by all the sophisticated campaign managers and politicians.  It's called microtargeting.  It's a database tool that enables campaign managers to identify undecided voters, learn what is important to them and then target specific messages that will sway them to vote for their candidate.

Here's a quote from the "Fast Company" story:  "We've come up with 30 major DNA strands within the electorate, such as soccer moms, Nascar dads, evangelical earth stewards, country-club Republicans, married-to-their mortgage families.  Then we say, 'These people need war-on-terror messages, these people need education messages, these people need tax messages.'"

This is just good old marketing 101, right?  Identify your target market, learn what's important to them and then deliver a product that satisfies their needs.  Nothing wrong with that.  Or is there?

Maybe I'm too old school, but I'm bothered by the idea of candidates as "products" with features that can be manipulated depending on what microtargeting dictates.   I'd like to think I'm electing someone with principles and ideals that will drive the decisions they make and what they do while they're in office.  How can I determine what a candidate is really all about when they're using microtargeting to tell me just what I want to hear?  It's hard enough to cut through all the bologna in election campaigns as it is.  

If a candidate is trying to cater messages to all 30 of these "major DNA strands" how can I understand their real priorities?  Maybe this is just smart modern day political marketing.  Or maybe this is one of the things that's now fundamentally wrong with the way we elect our political leaders.  

What do you think?

The Marketing Bull's-Eye

There's an amazing lack of continuity in most marketing campaigns today.  Instead of running for years and building equity and gaining power with repeated exposure, most of today's "campaigns" seem to be as perishable as yesterday's fresh cut flowers.  It's dumb marketing because it turns those marketing dollars from "investment" into "cost."  And in today's environment, every good senior executive is looking to cut costs.  The result?  Good-bye marketing.

Why aren't more marketing campaigns developed and used for the long-term?  

One reason is the incredible turnover in senior level marketing executives today.  The new sheriff in town almost always feels compelled to do their own thing and re-invent the wheel.  After all, the old marketing person was more than likely fired, so why stick with anything they developed?

But there's another reason why marketing campaigns don't last.  It's because they're not properly "sold in" to all of the important brand stake holders.  Broad-scale ownership of the campaign is not created and company-wide "buy in" is not achieved.  It becomes "the marketing department's campaign" instead of the company's campaign and that's usually the kiss of death.

Think of all of the brand's stake holders as concentric rings of an expanding circle - like a bull's-eye.  As you create and develop a new campaign, you must persuade an ever growing list of brand stake holders that the campaign is excellent enough to earn their support and long-term commitment.

Let's start at the center of the bull's-eye and move out.  

The first stake holder that you need to convince is yourself.  Is this campaign good enough that you're willing to bet your job on it?  To advocate it to all the other brand stake holders and put your neck on the block if it doesn't work?  Can you sell it to others with passion and conviction?  Is it right for the company and the brand and does it represent a "BIG IDEA" that can last and last and last?  

The next group of stake holders (the second ring of the bull's-eye) is the rest of the marketing team (including your agency partners).  Do they share your conviction?  Are they behind the campaign, too?  If not, why not?  Do they have real reasons that need to be addressed or bogus reasons because they're simply too whimpy to take a stand? Addressing real concerns will strengthen the idea further and make it better and that's what you need to do.  You'll generate idea ownership and you can then move out to the next stake holder ring of the marketing bull's-eye.

It's the sales organization - both your internal sales team and your distributors and channel partners.  Their enthusiasm is priceless.  Their apathy is death.  Do not understate the need to win this group over.  Do not wait to involve them in the campaign until it's too late to change it.  Your mindset needs to be that every stake holder group can add value and help strengthen the idea.  When they help create the final campaign, they own it and that ownership helps give the idea the power to last.  

The next stakeholder ring is the rest of your co-workers.  The sell-in should not stop with sales and marketing.  Every other department in your company should ideally be enthusiastic about the campaign.  Take the time to turn everyone in your company into brand and campaign ambassadors.

Only after this "internal" sell-in process is complete are you really ready to take your campaign to its intended target.  Make sure you have your measurement tools in place and as you identify ways you need to improve the initial campaign, celebrate that learning as a good thing.  No one should expect immediate perfection.  A great campaign will be a growing living thing.  Strong at birth but a behemoth after a few years of TLC and fine-tuning.  

The CMO's role is to evaluate all campaign input along the way, weed out the bad from the good, keep the BIG IDEA from being watered down and turned to mush, but be open-minded enough to recognize when good input is received and then courageous enough to embrace it and implement it.  The result will be a campaign that your entire business enterprise "owns" and an invaluable long-term business investment for your company.  Not to mention job security and enhanced market value for you.  Being the originator of a well-recognized and highly successful long-term marketing campaign is one of the most powerful career enhancers you'll ever have. You will have hit the Marketing Bull's-eye!

 

Two Books All Marketing People Need to Read

Here are two books that I think every marketer should not only read but have on their desks as every day references.

The first is "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin.  

The premise of Seth's great little book is that in today's world, you're either remarkable or you're invisible.  It's not enough to take some product or service, slap some marketing lipstick on it and consider the job done.  Marketing people must be engaged deeply in the product, packaging and service development process to insure that something about the product, packaging or service is TRULY and REALLY remarkable.  If marketing is brought in after these things are already finalized, your product development process is broken and needs to be fixed. 

We all know that most new products fail.  The reason is not usually poor marketing.  The real reason is that the new product is simply not remarkable enough to make it.  How high is the new product bar at your company?  Are you shooting for "remarkable'?  Are your new products buzzworthy?  REALLY buzzworthy?  If not, you've got a real uphill battle on your hands to achieve new product success.  

Are you also developing remarkable marketing programs for these hopefully remarkable products and services?  Or are you doing the same old tired things and hoping for the best? Unless you have a track record of remarkable new products launched with remarkable marketing, you need to get way outside your usual comfort zone and challenge everyone involved to adopt "Purple Cow" thinking as an integral part of your product development and marketing process.  

The second book is "Jeffrey Gitomer's Sales Bible."

Marketing people work with sales people for their entire career.  In many companies, there's a friction between the two functions.  Typically, this is because the leaders of the functions aren't working well as teammates and, as a result, the people in each area don't fully understand the mutual dependency that exists.  Each group blames the other for any lack of success and each group thinks they are more important or superior to the other.

Jeffrey Gitomer's fun book is a must read for all marketing people.  You will come away from his book with not only a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the sales function but also a much improved understanding about how to improve your own personal selling skills.  You'll also learn a tremendous amount about what makes great sales people great.  You'll learn how to recognize the great ones that work with you and, hopefully, you'll also learn how to help the not-so-great ones get better.

Google Seth Godin and Jeffrey Gitomer.  Sign up for their newsletters.  Read their books.   You'll be delighted by the fresh insight each provides.   And...you'll become a better marketer in the process.