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Think of each social media platform like a genre of music.  You may love opera and hate rock ‘n roll.  Or love country and hate jazz.  It’s the same thing with social media.  You don’t have to love it all but there will be a platform [...]]]> Yes, like genres of music.

Think of each social media platform like a genre of music.  You may love opera and hate rock ‘n roll.  Or love country and hate jazz.  It’s the same thing with social media.  You don’t have to love it all but there will be a platform (or two, or more) that you really enjoy engaging in, and those are the ones you concentrate on.  After all if you’re not having fun with it, you won’t engage with it and then what’s the point?  Social media is about being engaged, consistent, and active so pick the genre(s) you love!  And stick with them.  To understand the style of each genre of social media check out this posting on donuts.  It’ll make sense when you get there!

Once a logo is designed (the brand identity) implementation is next.  Sure the agency/design firm will pull together [...]]]> …too much?

From private colleges with multiple locations to start up franchise companies with 15 locations and counting, visionary leaders, heads of marketing, owners are all perplexed by the complexity of their brand identities.

Once a logo is designed (the brand identity) implementation is next.  Sure the agency/design firm will pull together the basics like letterhead and business cards, but what of all the material that follows?  Posters, announcements, flyers, quick brochures, and so on?  Over time, and sometimes even right out of the gate organizations begin to develop additional brand flourishes as visual cues for their brand that go beyond the logo.  What then?  Well, if it works with the brand positioning, great.  But, what if it confuses everyone?   That’s not good.  How do you reign in those wavy lines under or behind a logo, those added dots or exclamation points?  When does it stop making sense?

Here are five easy steps to ensuring your brand flourishes are adding to an understanding of your brand not taking away from it.

1.  Do these flourishes reflect the personality of your culture and organization?  For instance, does that wavy line add a whimsical element to your look and feel?  If so does that reflect who you are as an organization on the inside?  Ensure the personality of who you are on the inside if reflected in the design elements you use to reflect who you are to the outside world.
2. Define the purpose of each flourish.  They were added to your materials for a reason:  to represent an important element of how you present yourself to the outside world; to emphasize a point or part of your brand that a certain department or group in your organization feels is not well represented.  Having a view of “the why” of each flourish will help fill in weak areas.
3. How many additional flourishes have you added?  Your designer put together a brand guideline that outlines proper uses and misuses of your logo.  It includes a colour palette and a summary of typography.  Together these represent your visual brand.  Have you added one or ten additional graphic elements (e.g. waves, punctuation, shapes, shading, photography)?  Engage your designer explaining why these were created and have them develop a set (3-4) additional flourishes that are part of your brand guidelines and meet your needs.
4. Has your designer incorporated brand flourishes that you don’t understand.  Nip that in the bud!  Get to the heart of what the design is seeing in your brand that you may not be.  A designer’s visual cues to your brand must be substantiated and grounded in a clear understanding of what and who the brand is representing.
5. Understand who you are.  Knowing who you are on the inside will help you present that to the outside world.  When you have that inside/outside match you build trust and integrity with your audience and that breeds success.

This is where things have gone wrong with branding in the past. Agencies come up with cool and trendy stories about organizations without giving a thought to whether that image accurately reflects who they are. [...]]]> A brand is not what you say you are.
It’s actually who you are.

Where things have gone wrong

Brand is not what you say, it's who you are.

This is where things have gone wrong with branding in the past. Agencies come up with cool and trendy stories about organizations without giving a thought to whether that image accurately reflects who they are. When who you are on the inside doesn’t match how you present yourself to the outside world you can’t live up to what you’re saying about yourself. When you do have that inside/outside match it establishes trust between you and your audiences and that breeds success. It’s what Studio Pinpoint calls Brand Integrity.

Do you hate going to work in your own company? Tony did.

The reason we look at culture is because that is a clue to uncovering your values. Cultures are the sum total of the values and character of the people in an organization. Let me give you an example. I had the pleasure of speaking with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com a couple of years ago after he made a presentation at a business conference I was attending. In his presentation he talked about the first firm he founded, a tech firm which he later sold for a couple hundred million dollars to Microsoft. Tony said people often see this as a success but to him it was like a failure. He built this firm with the help of friends and friends of friends and after a while they grew so big that the culture of the organization changed and he hated coming to work in his own company. He learned a big lesson here.

Define who you are

Defining who you are is a key to building a successful, profitable and well aligned organization – and one that you’ll be happy to go to work in. Read about Tony’s amazing work at Zappos.com in his blog post on brand and culture.

What to do?

Begin from the inside. What is the culture of your company that makes people a good or bad fit? Note those qualities and build on those. When designing your advertising, writing web copy, writing a press release reflect this quality in your outside persona.

“Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” – Oscar Wilde.

If you know anyone that’s not enjoying going to work in their own firm send them the link to this posting and have them click on the this link:  We’ll offer them a brand discovery session at no cost or obligation.

Rick is also a photographer and what most people don’t know is that organizations sometimes bring him [...]]]> Measure Well, Sleep Well

We are pleased to welcome Rick Shea of Optiv8 Consulting as our guest blogger this week.  Optiv8 is a marketing effectiveness consultancy focused on optimizing marketing spending.  Now who doesn’t want that!

Rick is also a photographer and what most people don’t know is that organizations sometimes bring him in to take photos of their events, which is how he found himself at the AllerGen 2012 Annual Research Conference.  This post was inspired by his experience at the conference.  I’ll let Rick take over from here.  You can read his original story in his newsletter here.

AllerGen is a not-for-profit organization whose role is to mobilize Canadian science to reduce the illness, mortality and socio-economic costs of allergic disease. The conference showcased the latest research in this regard and while often over my head scientifically (not hard to do), I found it quite interesting.

During an afternoon break at the conference, a distinguished looking gentleman named Douglas Barber approached me to talk photography. Our pleasant conversation eventually shifted to the conference and he told me a story that I quickly realized fit my thinking on marketing measurement.

Douglas explained he is on AllerGen’s board and that an issue of concern to him is the cost to the Canadian economy from the “asthma drag” on productivity. He explained how asthmatics can be less productive at work or even miss entire days of work following sleepless nights caused by asthma. Parents of asthmatic children can also experience the same productivity losses. Douglas also told me how he once did a quick “back of the envelope” calculation to estimate that asthma costs our economy between $10 and $20 billion per year in lost productivity.

Is this all we need?

Sometime after Douglas did his quick calculation, a full study was done to properly analyze and estimate the economic impact of asthma’s drag on productivity. The study concluded the annual costs are $15 billion. That’s right; a costly and complex measurement process produced the same answer as one expert using a pen and the back of an envelope.

Two aspects of this story relate to my views on marketing measurement:

• Douglas’s back of the envelope calculation relative to the full study is similar to how a marketing scorecard can be a proxy for a sophisticated and costly marketing measurement process. In both cases, the less sophisticated approach doesn’t need to be perfect, just accurate enough to support analyzing options and making the right decisions. As I like to say, it’s not about precision, it’s about the decision.

• The back-of-the-envelope estimate worked because it was done by an expert using a sound methodology.  Douglas has an extensive business background and apparently knows more than just a little about productivity and related calculations. Scorecards are a proven methodology that you can enhance with expertise about your marketing and your business.

There is another lesson in Douglas’ story, and that’s the need to right size your measurement efforts to the magnitude of the decisions you need to make.

Research Investment Decision

• Douglas’ back of the envelope calculation and the full-blown study produced essentially the same estimate and both pointed toward making the same decision. It’s a pretty compelling proposition if investing perhaps a few hundred million dollars into research would lead to recovering even just 10%, or $1.5 billion of the lost productivity, especially as that benefit would be realized every year.
• The problem is that any decision to potentially invest a few hundred million dollars needs to be substantiated by more than a back of the envelope calculation. In this case, the cost of the research needed and the probability of recapturing that 10% are two other variables that I think would need to be estimated. It’s understandable that a full-blown study was needed to examine the overall business case.

Marketing Investment Decision

• Similarly, for companies that invest tens of millions annually in marketing, it makes sense to support the decisions that need to be made with sophisticated marketing measurement efforts that might cost hundreds of thousands, or more.
• For most companies with smaller marketing budgets, a practical lower cost approach such as one using a scorecard may well be the right sized measurement solution. In most cases, the overall measurement expense likely needs to be a small single digit percentage of the total marketing budget.

I like simple and elegant solutions that deliver what you need. A marketing scorecard’s simplicity keeps measurement costs down, while its elegance allows the flexibility to include a suitable level of expertise and sophistication to right size your measurement efforts to your marketing budgets.

Whichever measurement approach you choose, be sure to combine a sound methodology with the right expertise to learn what you need to know to make the right decisions.  Measuring well will help you to sleep well and be a productive marketer!

Rick Shea of Optiv8 Consulting and Studio Pinpoint Guest Blogger