Laurence Vincent

If you're going to make a mistake, make a huge one

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:00:06 -0800

Terry Gross: Did you learn anything working with Bernstein and watching him work?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, sure. A great deal. Yes. Mainly I learned something about courage. I learned – Lenny was never afraid to make big mistakes. He was never afraid to fall off the top rung of the ladder and I learned by implication that the worst thing you can do is fall off a low rung. If you're going to make a mistake, make a huge one.

curiositycounts: How memory erasure works, part of a...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:50:52 -0800

curiositycounts:

How memory erasure works, part of a fascinating piece by Wired’s Jonah Lehrer on the invention and ethics of a forgetting pill that erases painful memories.

A terrific piece on what we know about human memory and, specifically, the science of recalling bad memories. Best quote: “Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.”

Wage a Campaign Inside

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:49:00 -0800

It’s time for a new mode of thinking in brand alignment. When we introduce a new brand to customers, we launch a splashy campaign. But when we introduce that same brand to employees, we delegate brand cops who will crack down, compel, and control. I tell my clients they need to think of an internal brand launch as though it were a political campaign. Political campaigns change how people think and create a groundswell of public interest. An internal brand campaign should do the same. There’s much that political science can teach us about transforming a branded organization, including how to frame the mandate and the narrative.

Every four years, when American voters cast their ballots for the highest office in the country, pundits wonder about mandates and they frame the narrative of the candidates’ campaigns. Framing and mandating the narrative are critical buzzwords for an internal brand campaign. Your mandate is a better brand experience—framed by the narrative of your strategy, which is tailored to key audience segments. We have already discussed the importance of a brand narrative, but in this instance we’re focusing it on the people inside. You begin your campaign by articulating why change is necessary. What benefit will be created? What promise must be kept? How will it be delivered? You can’t effect change unless you can clearly answer these questions for your employees, partners, and investors. As you develop your strategy, you must consider how you frame these questions for two groups within your organization: supporters and the unconvinced. We can further divide these two macro groups into four subparts, as follows.

Supporters

• Evangelists: These are the people who do more than believe in the mandate. They’re willing to get out there and convince others of its necessity. Your job is to provide them with the narrative that will help them grow the base. You should identify your potential evangelists early in the process. You’ll often find them while you’re developing the brand strategy. You’ll know who they are by their ability to persuade you of the brand’s opportunities and merits. You’ll also know them by the influence they have in the organization. While you’ll certainly find brand evangelists living in the C-suite, you’re likely to find even more working close to the action. Don’t mistake official status with evangelistic potential. Some of the best brand evangelists line up with the majority of the organization. That’s why they wield power.

• Followers: These are people who believe in the mandate and are mostly willing to do what it takes to see it through. They need a narrative that articulates what they can do to make a difference. In the age-old will/skill analysis, these internal audiences have the will, but they usually need skills and resources to be effective.

Unconvinced

While it’s not the most appealing segmentation name, the “unconvinced” comprises anyone in your organization who’s not yet on board with the strategy. The campaign to the unconvinced is the battleground for a winning brand implementation effort. It addresses two subsegments.

• Detractors: Though this is generally a very small segment in most organizations, an influential detractor can greatly impede brand implementation. Most detractors, for whatever reason, don’t believe the strategy reflects the true promise of the brand. Maybe they have a conflicting agenda or maybe they’re misguided, but they are strongly opposed to the change you wish to make. If not addressed, they will create a counternarrative that can derail or diffuse your effort to act on the mandate.

• The undecided: This is often the largest audience to address, particularly in big organizations. Most of the undecided aren’t opposed to the change you wish to make; they just don’t understand the mandate. In my experience, most people in an organization who have no opinion about the state of the brand are that way because no one has taken the time to help them understand why the brand matters. No one has linked a promise to the brand’s experience. No one has illustrated how the delivery of that experience creates value that is relevant to the undecided employee. This is where you focus your narrative.

The Road to and From Memory

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:43:00 -0800

Think of memory as a two-way street. First, memory is about storage. Your memory is a place to file away information for later use. Unfortunately, your brain can’t remember everything. If you tried to store every experience, every idea, and every mundane piece of data that you encounter in your life, you would quickly exhaust your supply of brain cells. That’s why your brain is selective. It filters through all the information that streams by you in a day, and it uses clever rules to decide which information is worth storing in memory. To win the memory game, a brand’s first priority is to pass the brain’s fitness test and earn a lease on some memory cells.

Storage is only half the battle, though. Each of us stores a lot of information in memory that we seldom retrieve. It’s called forgetting. You know how it goes. Suppose you’re casually rifling through your closet and you come across a shirt you’d totally forgotten. Now that it is in plain sight, maybe you remember when and where you bought it, or maybe you remember odd little details and emotions from the last time you wore it. These memories flow into your stream of consciousness with little effort. All it took was a simple reminder—a cue. Until you were cued, the shirt was out of sight and out of mind. But the cue unlocked memorized information about the shirt. How well a brand is retrieved from memory is a critically important factor when you play the memory game. We forget about a lot of brands we encounter, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get stored in memory. It just means they aren’t top of mind. An effective brand is easy for us to store in memory and hard to forget.

If you want to win the memory game, you need to answer three important questions:

What is it about my brand that will make it easy to memorize?
What can I do to ensure my brand sticks in a consumer’s long-term memory?
How do I encourage a consumer’s brain to recall my brand at relevant moments in time?

Fortunately, there’s good science to help you answer these questions. For starters, we know that associating a brand with a concrete idea makes it more likely to be understood and stored in someone’s memory. Concrete ideas are specific. They connect to concepts we already know and understand. They are tangible, not abstract. We’ll talk more about them in a moment.

Once you’ve defined your brand concretely, repeated exposure improves its chance of making its way into the consumer’s long-term memory. Repetition plays an important role in making a brand top of mind.

Finally, the brands that are recalled most often are connected to a consistent system of cues. Variety might be the spice of life, but to ensure the highest rate of memory retrieval, real brands help us connect dots. Through consistency, they use cues that trigger a chain reaction of memory retrieval that reminds us why the brand really matters to us. Specificity, repetition, and consistency are the ingredients of brands that win the memory game. It may sound like common sense, but if you do a quick survey of the branding universe you’ll find a lot of brands that ignore the rules and end up ignored.

Stake Promises, Not Positions

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:32:00 -0800

A brand promise is not the same as a brand position. It is a common nugget of brandlore that the two phrases mean the same thing. They do not, though they are related to each other. A position asserts a line of argument (as in “what position shall we take in this message?”) or it pinpoints a location in perceptual space (as in “which position do we or shall we occupy in the mind of the consumer?”) Positioning thrives on “open space”—perceptual territory that your brand can claim because it is unclaimed by competitors. Imagine you operate a brand in an environment where every competitor uses a red logo. To effectively position your brand, you might choose to make your logo blue because that color is “ownable.” This example is a gross oversimplification of positioning, but it illustrates one reason a position is different from a promise. You position to be different and to stand out. It’s an essential activity, indeed, but it is possible to reposition a brand by focusing on purely cosmetic changes and not deliver any real, incremental value. In contrast, when you make a brand promise, you still stake a position, but you also create a covenant with consumers. You commit to deliver value.

Positioning is an artful and intelligent way to design messaging campaigns. One particularly useful application is to position in order to deposition a competitor. Coupled with semantics, a position can help you cast doubt on your competitors and it can cause consumers to reconsider their current behavior. Used in this way, positioning is a powerful redirection tactic that transforms public opinion in a short period of time. Consider how Republican pollster Frank Luntz described the way he depositioned the estate tax in a matter of days. “It’s not an estate tax,” he said. “It’s a death tax, because you’re taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn’t viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people.” It’s compelling proof of why positioning is useful, but it also demonstrates the difference between a position and a promise. Luntz’s position didn’t prescribe value-producing behavior.

A brand promise is the glue that aligns experience with expectations. Without it, you may stake any number of positions, but they’re little more than marketing tactics. You don’t have to promise anything to take a position. You can change your look so people think you are something that you are not (a beautiful wine label attached to an undrinkable vintage). You can send out messages that appeal to distinct audiences and trends. You can use evocative words, imagery, and experiences to create a perception of what you might aspire to be or what you want others to think of you. But that’s not the same as promising to deliver specific value and executing all of your business activities to live up to that promise. Many brands have fallen into an endless cycle of repositioning initiatives, constantly redefining the brand in an effort to satisfy market trends and shifts in consumer tastes. This never-ending positioning process actually destroys brand value over time because it confuses us and makes us question what the brand really stands for. It weakens the brand’s credibility by eroding the link between our concept of the brand, what we expect from it, and what we know of its reputation. Here’s how it works.

If you lend me $5 and I promise to pay you tomorrow, on the next day you will expect me to give you $5. If I do, you will find me to be a man of my word. You’ll be likely to lend me $5 again, and when someone mentions my name in a similar context you might vouch for me. Your experience with my brand helped me establish a good reputation. On the other hand, if you show up the next day and I pay you only $2, you’ll have doubts about me the next time around. If someone asked you about me, you might be inclined to warn them. My reputation is in danger because of your most recent experience with my brand, which did not live up to the expectation I set with my promise to you. It won’t matter how I go about positioning myself next time. I can dress differently. I can make claims about cleaning up my act. I can try to convince you that I am financially stable or I could tell you I aspire to lofty goals. None of that is likely to impress you because I didn’t fulfill my promise the last time. My positioning activities might convince other people to give me $5, but as soon as you log on to Twitter and squawk about your disappointing experience with my brand, I’d have what public relations experts call a “reputation problem.”

Wild GOP race an example of questionable brand attachment

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:56:00 -0800

After the Tuesday Republican primaries in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, a lot of election watchers are scratching their heads. Is this one of the most unpredictable primaries in history? Do we not have the “right” candidates? Are voters simply more fickle than in years past? All of these questions are being tossed around frenetically by pundits and the talking heads of media. I believe the data tells us we have brand problems afoot. One brand force that wouldn’t surprise a corporate marketer is driving the volatility for politicians: Brand attachment.

Forget likability and the favorable/unfavorable poll data. There’s a mountain of evidence to suggest that likability is a very poor predictor of consumer behavior. Many consumers claim to like brands they never buy. In contrast, attachment has been proven to be a strong predictor of purchase behavior and long-term loyalty. We measure attachment by how much a consumer views a brand as part of their own identity—how much they see themselves in it, their values, their life. Looking at the various polling data, voters are having a hard time seeing any of the candidate brands as an extension of who they are. Worse, the GOP brand is fragmented, creating two different sets of values to facilitate brand attachment. Before a voter can project their Republicanism into their self concept, they have to struggle with which kind of Republican they’re attached to. In consumer branding, we’d call this a band dispersion problem-when a master brand means so many things that it becomes less effective at attaching itself to any consumer identity.

Like any good brand, the candidates and the GOP have to focus on the promise of their brands and be comfortable being disliked by some of their constituents. Here’s why. Even though they might not like the brand at the moment, if a voter can seetheir values in the candidate’s brand, they’ll stay the course. They’re attached. A lot of voters didn’t “like” Bill Clinton before and during his presidency. The same is true for George W. Bush. But many voters identified with the values of each candidate brand and they cast their votes accordingly.

"If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:02:57 -0800

“If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.”

- Neil Simon

"Choosing bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:19:22 -0800

“Choosing bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.”

- Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Uncommon Service

campfiresmell: throwback. ~CFS

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:13:56 -0800

campfiresmell:

throwback. ~CFS

"It’s like nobody can use dirty words or nudity but Steven Spielberg."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:09:50 -0800

“It’s like nobody can use dirty words or nudity but Steven Spielberg.”

- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on the FCC’s Indecency Policy.

Live or Memorex?

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:39:44 -0800

Back in the days of tape decks, Memorex ran a series of advertisements featuring Ella Fitzgerald that asked consumers to judge whether the music they heard was live or Memorex? It was a successful campaign that lasted more than a decade. Today, consumers might instead be asked, “is it real, or is it branded?”

The US consumer has been conditioned to focus far too much on the cachet of brands. Now, make no mistake, I make a living from creating and managing brands. There’s a part of me that celebrates the power we’ve ascribed to leading brands, but with any power there’s also danger. If I had $1 for every time a client or a potential client asked me if a good brand campaign could compensate for weaknesses in the client’s product, service, or corporate culture … well, let’s just say I’d have a bigger savings account balance.

The truth is that this mode of thinking isn’t sustainable. I believe that Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party are just two sides of the same coin. Consumers are angry. They feel they’ve been duped one time too many. They’re furious at their government (i.e., the lowest Congressional approval ratings in history) and they’re suspicious of promises (i.e., the odd back and forth of this year’s Republican primary).

Now, more than ever, brands must focus on the substance of their offering. Know what you promise. Don’t promise too much for the sake of winning attention. Promise only what you can deliver. Better yet, under-promise, and over-deliver. There’s nothing new in this formula. Your father very well may have given you the same counsel. But few brands are practicing this approach. The ones that do will be the ones the market rewards. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires management to forego lucrative opportunities that might put the promise in doubt. It requires investment in parts of the business most managers find boring (i.e. human resources, infrastructure, distribution systems, etc.). And, it requires a strong focus on customer satisfaction. The customer is not always right, but when they’re consistently unsatisfied they won’t be customers anymore.

When you manage your brand correctly, your customer should see no difference between real and branded.

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:02:06 -0800

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”

- Harry S. Truman

"Novelties come and go. To qualify as a trend, something must represent an emerging consensus. It..."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:17:34 -0800

“Novelties come and go. To qualify as a trend, something must represent an emerging consensus. It must act like an eddy that runs through us…”

- Grant McCracken

366/12 2012 on Flickr. I swear that my 366 will not be...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:24:07 -0800

366/12 2012 on Flickr.

I swear that my 366 will not be countless pics of Jordan. But this scene was just too funny and a commentary on digital life. She was playing Angry Birds on the iPad while browsing Target.com on the iPhone!

"Life is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it’s about..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:15:00 -0800

“Life is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it’s about experience, it’s about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.”

- Daniel Libeskind

Disney’s America on Flickr.Funny story about this mug. We...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:08:41 -0800

Disney’s America on Flickr.

Funny story about this mug. We had dozens of them when I worked in the Corporate Alliances group. I was offered the chance to take some. Knowing what a colossal failure this project was only gives me more delight when I drink my coffee every morning. Even the great ones miss now and then. The real failures never swing.

"Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:50:58 -0800

“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.”

- David Ogilvy

365/8 2012 on Flickr.

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:47:44 -0800

365/8 2012 on Flickr.

curiositycounts: Excerpt from a surprisingly informative...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:59:28 -0800

curiositycounts:

Excerpt from a surprisingly informative infographic on sleep and sleep deprivation

I found this handy-dandy accessory for my phone today at the...

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:02:00 -0800

I found this handy-dandy accessory for my phone today at the Apple Store. I love it. I can leave my wallet behind. I feel a little naked.