You Brand

Names are important. We like to hear our name. “Hey + name” sounds friendlier than “Hey you”. For premium brands it is even more important. As a matter of fact it is vital. “I bought a car” is not really helpful for the brand you bought it from.

A premium brand like Hermès should know that. Hermès was founded by Thierry Hermès back in 1837 – the brand name is therefore not just a pseudoword, it is a ‘real’ name – and is about as premium as it gets.

They have a store in Munich and I’ve been a customer for several years. I happen to like their ties, even though they are insanely expensive. Every January they invite me to a sale (if you can call it that at Hermès), which is nice.

What annoys me however is that they seem to be unable to get my last name right (see photo: no ‘Umlaut’, no ‘s’ at the end).

All the fancy brochures and expensive advertising campaigns will ultimately fail, if you don’t know your customers and that includes their names.

If you define your customer as a consumer and treat her like one, that’s exactly what she’ll be. At the most, she’ll consume your brand.

Opportunity missed!

Why don’t you define and treat your customer like an afficionado? Consider the potential endorsement “I enjoy this brand” as opposed to “I consume this brand”.

Words can make all the difference in the world and attitudes most certainly do. It’s worth the extra marketing effort.

Spiders have existed for much longer than brands. For over 140 Million years many species have been around building webs. Not all use webs to catch their prey, but for those that do, the web has the great advantage that the spider can catch the prey without having to hunt it down. The spider just needs to be patient and wait. When the prey gets trapped, the spider senses the impact by vibrations transmitted through the web. This behavior reminds me of many brands in the 'other' web – they build websites and wait for the consumer. If the typical prey of a spider would behave like today's consumer, the spider would starve to death while waiting. And brands?

Posted via email from achimmuellers’s posterous

I have mentioned before that brands shouldn’t try to engage with their customers before engaging with their employees. This calls for vertical integration.

Equally important is horizontal integration. In many companies – especially old economy – the caste system is still very much alive: There’s the R&D crowd, the guys from production, sales people, marketing people, finance people and so on. Sooner or later many different ‘esprit de corps’ develop.

For example the production guys will insist that they obviously do a great job, but R&D always wants fancy solutions, HR doesn’t give them enough people, finance doesn’t give them enough budget, purchasing doesn’t give them the best parts, sales wants the product yesterday and marketing insists on USP’s. Depending on the perspective, other divisions will argue in a similar way.

The system is held together by the good old hierarchy. Board members from all divisions usually meet once a week, but what about the rest? They only meet when working on a common project, which usually doesn’t involve all divisions. It is difficult and time-consuming to develop positive relations and common understanding under these conditions. Some employees, which are more proactive than others, develop their own ‘private’ and ‘personal’ networks. But this is not the solution.

Customers don’t differentiate between divisions – for them there is only one brand. Companies are well advised to break down the caste system and facilitate horizontal and vertical integration. It improves the relations: inside and outside.

What’s your view?

Brands are defined by their customers. Not only by what they say about the brand, but also by how they use it. This obviously depends on how public the usage is. Cars are a great example. On the German Autobahn – parts of which still don’t have a speed limit – some brands tend to spend more time in the left lane than others. I know, because I used to work for one of those brands

Driving behavior directly influences the brand perception by other users of the Autobahn. After all, the only thing they can see at high speeds is the car and the brand, but they can’t identify the driver. Some people consider fast driving to be aggressive, therefore the brand they saw will get an aggressive image. Many potential customers can be lost that way.

What can the brand do? Traditional broadcasting of other brand values will not be credible. After all, the above mentioned experience was authentic. People won’t trust statements that are contrary to what they have experienced personally. The personal conversation is the only solution. But how can the brand identify those that have a negative opinion, when it is not even aware of the incident that caused it? Social networks are a good place to start looking and listening.

Another learning from this example is that your most loyal fans are not necessarily your best brand ambassadors.

What’s your opinion!

For starters, social media are, at least according to the traditional definition, not a medium. Wikipedia defines media in communication as the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data – clearly social ‘media’ is more than that.

Social ‘media’ is still experiencing staggering growth rates with people from all over the world joining. Are all of these people active users ? Of course not. According to Forrester there are ‘authors’, ‘critics’, ‘collectors’, ‘members’, ‘viewers’ and ‘inactives’. Admittedly the number of ‘inactives’ is decreasing and the other groups are growing.

Social ‘media’ are not popular for one single reason. Some people are looking to add value and share insights, they are the new leaders. Many are happy to follow and consume what is being offered. They were driven to join by curiosity and a need of belonging. This is normal. Just because hammers are available for everybody, doesn’t mean that we all go out to get nails!

Social ‘media’ are, at least partly, a ‘gift economy’, where goods and services (recommendations, information, insights, news etc.) are shared for free – reciprocal altruism if you will. That is noteworthy and causes brands, living in market economies, headaches.

Social ‘media’ must have more self-proclaimed experts/mavens/specialists/gurus per user than any other medium worldwide. Despite that, many brands are still struggling to develop a business model that works for them and the users in social ‘media’. The traditional marketing-aspirin doesn’t work, the headaches mentioned above become worse.

Social ‘media’ are here to stay. It is imperative to develop a model that adds value for consumers and brands, because they are interdependent. Is it possible to combine the benefits of a gift economy with those of a market economy? Exciting question.

May be not such an ironic look after all – what do you think?

Many brands think that due to the relevance of social media, they need a strategy to deal with it. I personally don’t think that this is the solution.

Brands and their on- and offline-activities are under constant observation by interested consumers, who inform a global audience via the social web about everything they see and hear. Containment strategies don’t work for anymore. In this connected world the credibility of brands depends, more than ever, on consistency across all channels globally. A brand promise made in one country is expected to be kept everywhere. If not, somebody somewhere will blow the whistle.

The social web and the availability of free and credible information from multiple sources have led consumers to become more sophisticated and less ‘obedient’. Integrating them in the architecture of value creation would therefore be a smart move for brands. This changes their business model with implications for all divisions of a company: R&D, production, HR, finance, purchasing, sales and of course marketing.

New rules, new and old participants with different roles and new judges have led to a new game for the brand, which requires a new overall brand strategy, rather than ‘just’ a social media strategy.

What’s your strategic assessment?

Squidoo, a company founded by Seth Godin, is launching a great platform for brands to organize and join the conversation. Brands have realized by now that conversation matters and that they can’t control it. ‘Brands in Public’ enables them to organize, join, amplify and seed it. Basically they are putting the conversation on one page open to everybody. Brands can take charge of the development of the page and personalize it for US$ 400,- a month. In my opinion that is a fair price to pay for the added value that brands are getting in return. So, check it out:

http://www.squidoo.com/brandsinpublic/hq

Actually I love advertising, especially TVC’s. The commercial break being an interruption of the program I actually want to watch, I use it to check my Emails, get myself something to drink, check what’s happening on other channels etc.

Nevertheless I’m one of thousands being counted to determine the CPT. Advertising is bought on the basis of what it costs to be shown to one thousand viewers and the CPT is still used as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of a campaign. This does not strike me as being terribly efficient in today’s media world, because many people are not watching what they are being shown. Like me they use the commercial break to do all sorts of other things.

Why are so many people ignoring traditional advertising and even railing against it?

In my opinion there are quite a few reasons, some more obvious than others. Today I would like to talk about quality. There are too many boring ads. If the commercial break is built on the principle of interruption, why not do it in a creative way? Tell a story, be credible, entertain your audience, deliver information that adds value for them – there are many things an advertiser can do to prevent me and others from checking Emails during the commercial break.

Successful brands polarize. Trying to be everybody’s darling means you won’t be noticed by anybody. Their advertising needs to polarize as well, since it is an extension of the brand. If it’s perceived as being boring, loud, dumb, worthless, annoying, the consumer will eventually look at the brand the same way. Perception is reality.

But the problem is more often than not the client and not the agency. An agency can only be as good as their client allows them to be.

What do you do during commercial breaks?

Corporate-identity programs are the expression of a corporation’s culture, personality and the products and services it has to offer – the very symbol and signature of the values that should inspire trust with consumers, employees, clients, suppliers and the financial community. Names, logos, colors, fonts, slogans and architecture have been an essential part of major branding strategies since the middle of the last century (Marc Gobé: emotional branding).

Corporate identities were developed to enable brands to make a more or less permanent visual statement about themselves. It was hoped that those statements would in turn define consumer perceptions. Many, especially premium brands, developed a rigidity bearing a resemblance to the Ten Commandments. Their headquarters and showrooms felt like modern interpretations of Cathedrals. The objective in both cases was to communicate in a convincing and at times dazzling manner that the brand and only the brand was in control. Individual interpretations by the believers, i.e. consumers, were not an option. Aspiration was cultivated, automatically including a portion of ‘hard to get’.

The social Web has fundamentally changed the relationship between brands and consumers. Consumers have been empowered by the Web and turned into ‘prosumers’, i.e. they are both producers and consumers. Brands are loosing control, as ‘prosumers’ shape them, influence their value more than ever before and effectively acquire co-ownership.

Brands need more flexiblity, because ‘prosumer’ tastes are changing more often. Not only that, tastes are often different from one ‘prosumer’ to the next. Identities have to be emotionally connected, rather than written in stone. Brands need to incorporate values like social, fresh, immersive, transformative, democratic and trustworthy. Otherwise they will fall into oblivion.

The first consequence for corporate identity is apparent: Brands must include the ‘prosumer’ globally in defining the identity, rather than leaving it to an agency. Crowdsourcing would be a good way to start. What do you think?