Tell your own story ...
A handful of things have been brewing in my head lately:
I want to combine the creative aspects of my life with the technical, putting together a novel in a new medium for people to enjoy.
My proposed project would have three parts: [Read more...]
Art is never finished, only abandoned. — Leonardo Da Vinci
Working in a startup company and developing a new product, I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement. We’ve spent countless months of hours laboring on our little project only to determine we need more time to finish it. This button isn’t polished … that color is off by a shade … this might not be the right word to describe it … the reasons to not move forward are endless.
All the same, we must still move forward.
Without taking the next step, we will never verify our hypotheses about the customers. We’ll never know if the market research was accurate. So rather than completing our masterpiece, we abandon it to the sphere of public opinion and customer demand. It’s a depressing aspect of customer development, but a necessary one.
No product is ever completed to perfection – to spend precious resources trying is futile and wasteful. There’s a reason iTunes is on version 8.2. There’s a reason we aren’t still using MS DOS. Development and progress requires that we take the next step and deliver our product.
So how far are you on the deliver schedule for your next breakthrough? Has development stalled so you can apply the final finishing touches? Or are you ready to take the plunge?
The other day in the office, we had a very important discussion regarding formality in our written materials. The best summary of this conversation is straight from the original email from our tech writer:
I can stick with the normal, more formalized tech-writerly language (e.g., “Following are the minimum hardware and software requirements to run our product”), or I can make it more personal, fun, and informal (e.g., “Here’s what you need at a minimum to run it”). Doesn’t matter to me which way…so do you have any preference?
It might not be obvious to everyone, but this chat was a very important conversation regarding our brand. The question isn’t so much about the tone we should use, but the personality of the company as reflected through what we write. Knowing the character of your customer helps you narrow down what the character of your brand should be, but ultimately you are still responsible for making the decision.
Whatever you choose for your brand’s personality, you need to live it every day. A “personal, fun, and informal” company can’t have a drawn-out bureaucratic process for customer support. Likewise, a “more formalized” company (think suit-and-tie) can’t host a college bar football party without raising a few eyebrows.
Your brand needs to be consistent, and it needs to accurately represent the way you do business and interact with the community. So in a world where many businesses are just beginning to develop their brands – what do you want your brand to say about you? How much “formal” should your brand have?
“If we can’t beat the price on any comparable mattress then the mattress is free!”
I’ve heard this low-price guarantee off and on over the past several years from one distributor in the area. I’ve never really believed it, though, and there are some very important reasons.
Firstly, just think of what the promise means. They aren’t promising the best mattresses, the highest quality, the best value, the best comfort – they’re promising the lowest price. At the same time, they try to avoid affiliating their brand with “cheap.” Seems a bit difficult.
Secondly, it betrays their purpose in the market. Why go to an expert retailer to buy a mattress when you could just pick one up at, say, Bed Bath & Beyond? Why go from one specialty shop to another if you can get everything done at a big box retailer? Specialty shops are meant to provide a sense of added value – ‘we guarantee you’ll take home the best mattress for you’ would be a better tag-line.
Finally, this brand promise is entirely empty. They can never fulfill it! Let’s say I find the mattress of my dreams and it costs $300 at store A. I come back to this store and mention their guarantee, so they give me a discount and sell it for $250. I find another store carrying the same mattress for $250, so they offer it to me for $225.
There is no way they can’t beat the price unless someone is standing on the corner giving mattresses away for free to begin with! Even if someone offered my dream mattress up for $1 they could still beat the price.
A brand promise is all about defining your relationship with the customer. What is it you do for them that only you can do and that you focus all of your energies and resources? Is it an empty promise to charge them the least amount of money as in the above example? Are you setting yourself up for failure by promising something you can’t deliver?
That was close. I underestimated the millennials’ ability to intercept electronic transmissions. Luckily, I don’t think any of my research was compromised.
It’s exciting to see the birth of branding. Everyone in this century seems to know what branding is, even if they don’t fully understand the concept. Yes, the larger corporations will spend a few million dollars trying to “brand” their way into a better bottom line. They might even succeed. But the beauty is in seeing the effort a small corner shop puts into their brand. Uniformed staff, standardized first-day training, matching marketing collateral and logos. It’s intoxicating to be around, really.
When I was still in university, I had an argument with one of my professors about this era. I told him that, even though the world didn’t really accept branding (let alone brandology) as a practice, they were already well on their way to establishing it. He told me I was wrong and, of course, marked my thesis down considerably. If only he could be here with me today to witness the reality of my theory.
Coca-cola, on the one hand, has a multi-million dollar marketing budget – of which, branding makes up a small portion. The company makes sure its employees “fit” into the brand, and takes a great deal of time to develop the entire customer experience around the character and personality of its beverages. They are, in my opinion, at the forefront of branding in this era – just slightly ahead of Apple.
Then we have Chang’s Chinese Bistro down the street. They aren’t the mega-behemoth Coke is, but they are just as careful about building their brand. Employees are trained to uphold a particular level of service and build a certain atmosphere, and all of the marketing collateral (what few there are) are in sync with the company image. Chang’s has a well managed brand … and didn’t need the millions Coke has spent to build it!
I asked my waiter yesterday what he thought of branding. I know, I broke another rule. Sue me. He shrugged off my question and said, “we can’t afford branding.”
Ha!
This is the best part of this era. The millennials are already branding and they don’t even know it! It’s amazing the “brand” that branding has built for itself over the past few years. It should be just as fun to watch things unfold over the next two!
Some of my latest posts have been regarding a brandologist, who has traveled back through time to study us “milennials” at the apex of marketing theory and thought. I’ve noticed, though, that I haven’t really stopped to explain what I consider “brandology” to be.
Branding, as I usually define it, is the practice of managing the entire image of an entity and the whole experience of those who interact with it. In the business world, this would be your company’s reputation, the relationships you have with your partners, and the overall experience of your customers. It is the practice of grabbing real estate in you customer’s mind by building automatic, habitual associations between your product, service, or story and something your customer will come across on a regular basis.
The Starbucks logo is an easily recognizable beacon of hope to the weary coffee drinker running behind in the morning. The choice to pull in to a Starbucks on the way to work isn’t so much a decision as a programmed behavior – the atmosphere is comforting, baristas are friendly and help you relax, and the actual product is of comparable quality every single time. When then experience of going to Starbucks is consistent and consistently understood, then the brand managers are doing their jobs.
Brandology is studying branding. It sounds simple, but really isn’t. Branding is intuitive story telling, and you can get it wrong just as easily as you can get it right. Take “new Coke,” for example. Coca Cola was well-recognized and popular, but the managers of the brand failed to realize this and, in attempts to actually strengthen their product offering, cost themselves their jobs and their company a great deal of respect by the public. There’s just as much art in the practice of branding as there is science, and brandology is the study of that clever dance between intellectual finesse and deep down in your gut confidence.
Branding is one of the newest fields of marketing and, in my opinion, becoming one of (if not the) most important aspects of the discipline. In an era where the color of your product’s packaging is less important than the minimum wage in your overseas factories, creating and delivering on a consistent brand story is increasingly important.
In the wake of sweat shop scandals for some of the largest apparel manufacturers in the market (::cough:: Nike ::cough::), the public opened their arms to new entrants like American Apparel, made in downtown Los Angeles. Their products are comparable in price with those manufactured abroad, though at the obvious expense of the bottom line. The company is going strong, though, bringing in customers who shop because of the domestic aspect of the brand, not the prices.
New Season’s market is another great, albeit local example. While the store carries several national brands, most of its produce and a great deal of its packaged goods are products of local companies. People shop at New Seasons for the consistency of the “grown local” message and brand story.
Creating a brand is easy … creating a successful brand is incredibly difficult and almost a matter of luck. One day soon, though, we “milennials” will figure out a pattern behind branding. Once that happens, creating a popular, marketable brand will be as formulaic as scripting a cable sitcom. Hopefully the ride from here to there will be more entertaining, though … and the first one to get there will definitely hold an enviable spot in the market for quite a while.
