Category Archives: Brand Management

Push, then Pull

Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations, Web Analytics,

To summarize, there are significant forces in play that require Marketing folks to realize that optimizing Marketing goes far beyond media, message, response, and all the traditional MarCom stuff.

To take advantage of these changes, there has to be a Strategic admission that Sales, Marketing, and Service are all parts of a customer-centric whole.  Interactivity forces this on you; it’s a Relationship Marketing environment.

CMO’s have an opportunity to step up and take control of this situation.  If they don’t, the job of integrating these disciplines will be handed to a Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, or some other needless C-Level fabrication.  And that’s not really going to work, it’s a partial solution.

For those of you with Brand as your current primary focus, it should be easy to make the argument about why this integration matters and why you should be in charge of it.   If you don’t do something about really integrating all the customer facing disciplines, examples abound of the Brand damage that can occur.

No amount of “Advertising” can fix Brand rot, you have to get to the Root Cause, which is probably cross-functional in nature.  It really doesn’t make sense to ignore excellence in execution and then react to the problems caused when you can discover, address, and fix these issues before they happen.

Here are some ideas to think about on the Tactical side:

1.  Don’t use Mass Media to try and build / close Relationships; that’s a waste of time.  Use Mass Media for what it’s very efficient at – creating Awareness and Intent.  The first step of the 2-step, it’s the Push part.  If Push sounds like it’s intrusive, remember people expect Push from Mass Media to begin with.  You have the proper context; that’s why Mass Media can be effective for Push.

Use unique taglines and phrases in the execution, knowing a search on the web is a high probability next step.  Google just released a study on what this looks like for newspapers. Make sure the web team is prepped for the Mass Media, that they have optimized the unique taglines and phrases for Search, both Paid and Organic.

2.  Make sure the copy directly implies you are open for the Brand Promise to be tested in an interactive environment, where Brand Proof will take place.  This will usually be the web, but it could be a call center or other venue.  Invite those with Intent to convert this Intent to Desire through Interaction with you; this is Pull.

Focus on driving curiosity and peaking Interest rather than selling, e.g. “Want to Know More?  Here’s our web site…”

3.  Pull is self-service, it’s about proper execution – consistency with the Mass message, ease of use, transparent, Relationship building.  Potential customer is now driving, you are awaiting response.  Answer the questions raised by the Brand Promise (on a web site or in the call center), allow them to be tested.

Don’t simply repeat the Promise – that job has already been done, it’s a waste of time, it’s redundant, not respectful.

Instead, fully and completely Expose the Brand Promise, let it stand for testimony.  Allow Brand Proof to take place.  This is not the time to be Intrusive; that’s out of context.  Make it easy for the prospect to feed back the experience, and be ready for the dialogue.  Relationship Marketing is an Exchange, a dance, two-way, back and forth.

React and Respond.  Be “Social”, if you want to call it that.

This portion of the program – which might consist of many different campaigns driving traffic into it – is where failure most often occurs, and where you get into this whole “customer is in control” thing.

Like that’s a negative?  What they are in control of is their own process, and what’s the matter with that?  It’s enabling, empowering for the customer; it builds the Relationship.  Hopefully, what you have done here is given control; as opposed to having it taken from you.  There is a very big difference between the two.

If the customer has to “take control”, you’re doing something wrong.  You have broken processes, you have cross-functional chaos, you’re not enabling a dialog.  Or you’ve inflated promises, created false expectations, at worst, told half-truths.  You’re creating frustration.

That’s when customers feel like they have to take control from you.

That covers the Tactics for Aquisition (AIDA), I’ll tackle Retention (S) in the next post.  As always, Comments on are appreciated.

The Desire in Desirability

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Web Analytics,

So, what have we got with this Desirability thing?  Let’s start with a Strategic View, and then get down to the Tactical “what it means to me at work” stuff.

Going back to the classic AIDAS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction) Psychological model of buying behavior, I think what we are seeing is a gradual acceptance by traditional Brand Marketers that:

1. The actual definition of “Brand” is changing
2. A media type is best optimized for a specific AIDAS job

1.  Brand is traditionally a premium strategy – I convince you to pay more for essentially the same goods because they have this “Brand”.  But there is increasingly an experiential component required of Brands, a “proof” of sorts that affirms the Brand Promise / Premium.  These proofs often reach deep into areas outside what most people think of as “MarCom”.

So now you’re talking about package and product design (Usability), you’re talking about Service, you’re talking about Customer Experience.  All of this together is now Brand.

Brand is both Promise and Payoff.

2.  This means Brand folks now effectively have a two-step to execute: they can create a Brand Image / Promise / Attention and Interest with the Mass media, but actual Payoff / Action requires an “affirmation” of Brand Promise.  These affirmations now take place largely through web research and interactivity.

In other words, with the consumer knowing they have easy access to tons of fact and opinion on a product through the web, they’re probably not going to make it to the Desire phase without doing a few minutes of research first.

These Affirmations create Desirability, which leads to Action.

Put simply, Mass media can no longer drive people through the entire AIDAS cycle.  It loses them at Interest, where the web largely takes over the role of creating Desire.

This is the hard linkage between Engagement and Desirability?  Engagement is a measure of Desirability, of the Brand to “pull” people into the Desire phase of AIDAS from the Interest phase and through to taking Action.  You can “push” people into Awareness and even Interest, but you have to “pull” people into Desire and Action.  A two-step, as it’s known in direct.

The qualifier and the closer, the front-end and the back-end.

None of this means Mass media is dead, or Web media is better, or Social Media Rules, or any of that. What it means is you can waste a lot of Marketing budget saying the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time.  More about that when we talk about Tactics.  It also means MarCom folks should think about becoming true Marketing folks if they want to succeed in the long run.

If you’d like to read detailed background on the Brand / Media idea above, see Online, the Web Site is the Ad.  More background on the proper (Strategic) role of Marketing in the Integrated Interactive business model is found at CMOs: Strategic Seat = Chief Customer Officer.

What do you think?  Is this model of Media and Behavior making sense to you?  Anything broken?

Want Engagement? Get Desirability

Analytical Culture, Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

Forrester’s Marketing Forum this year covered Engagement, but not the kind of Engagement so often discussed in web analytics.

Nope, Engagement from a Marketing perspective, you know, surprise and delight leads to better customer experiences leads to better customer retention and higher profits.

The presentation came complete with some nifty offline Engagement examples, e.g. the more a patient is Engaged in their healthcare the better the result.  The improved results came from, get this, “improving doctor usability”.  And yes, there was a test on this business optimization effort with tangible results generated.

You can get a good feel for where this conversation is headed from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog by listening to the 2 Forrester keynotes, each about an hour long.  For those short on time, pick one, depending on your interest:

Strategic Level: platforms, frameworks, etc. from Brian Haven

Tactical Level: examples, “how to” etc. from Kerry Bodine

No time for a video?

For a bulleted list of the key points you need to understand in order to optimize your Marketing model, see the “Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing” ClickZ article here.

I’ll have more to say on why these ideas are so important in the next couple of days.  For now, I will leave you with this:

If the customer is taking control, it’s only because you’re using the wrong Marketing model, maybe one like this one.  No customer wants to have to “take control” in the first place.

The more Engaging you are, the less old-school “pray and spray” Marketing  – online or offline – you should have to do.

That’s the whole point of Engagement.

Comments on the videos or article?  Anything ring a bell for you?