THE SAVORY OBSERVATIONS AND USEFUL ANECDOTES OF AN
Artful Realist
My name is LAURENCE VINCENT. I'm a brand strategist, author, speaker, photographer and lovable nerd based in Los Angeles, California. When I'm not writing here about brands and things that inspire me, I look after The Brand Studio at United Talent Agency. I believe brands must stand for real value; and that people value brands that fulfill a promise through artful experiences.
Posts on strategy
The Hunt for Real Creativity in Advertising
My Monday morning ritual is deeply ingrained. I arrive early to find a stack of advertising and media trades to digest before launching into my client work for the week. One of those trades is AdWeek. I’ve been reading it for years but only recently noticed a new behavior on my part. When I come across the review of the week’s featured campaign I have to fire up my browser and search for the spot online so that I can view it. In years past this would have never been the case. I would have seen the spot during my television viewing. Lately, I can’t recall which advertisements I’ve seen on television.
TweetExplaining why a chocolate cupcake tasted so divine makes us love the cupcake a little less, while explaining why a movie was so horrible makes us hate the movie a little less.
// Sarah G. Moore
Assistant Professor, University of Alberta School of Business
Author of “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid: How Word of Mouth Influences the Storyteller.” Journal of Consumer Research: April 2012
(Source: jcr-admin.org)
TweetGreat Brand Experiences Change Behavior
What is “brand experience.” While a lot of managers talk about the importance of brand experience, it’s awfully hard to find agreement about what, exactly, brand experience is. At the simplest level, brand experience lives exclusively in our minds. It is impossible for me to know whether or not your brand experience matches mine because how we perceive the brand is so subjective. A brand experience affects what we think, feel and do as a result of interaction with the brand. Of these three dimensions, perhaps none is more valuable than the “do” part.
TweetWhat Avon Can Learn from Instagram
With most of the business press focused on the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram yesterday, you might have missed the big news surrounding a 126 year-old social networking company that generated more than $10 billion in revenue last year. Avon Products announced a new CEO: Sherilyn S. McCoy, who was previously a senior executive at Johnson & Johnson. McCoy has a big job ahead of her. Avon has struggled with declining sales, unsolicited takeover offers, and decreasing consumer relevance. What can this dowager brand do to become strong again? I suggest that McCoy look sideways at three relevant brands who have focused on their promise to develop fierce customer loyalty.
TweetGood Design Is Good Business: Master Lock and the Battle Against Myopia
Reblogged from aigalosangeles:
What happened was that Wal Mart came up to the folks at Master Lock and said, “We can make this same product in China for dirt-cheap. Either cut your price by 30% or we won’t give you shelf space.” Monday’s AIGA Los Angeles event at the A+D Museum ‘Master Lock and the Battle Against Myopia’ was a study of a company in crisis that found relevance through selling a brand over a commodity.
Scott Williams, tonight’s speaker, is a brand consultant whose work deals within industries where creatives are not the top dogs, and where designers have to consistently prove a return on investment. Master Lock had a product with no customer loyalty because their strategy had only been to produce padlocks. Consumers didn’t care if they bought a Master Lock or their next cheapest rival. Unlike other companies that found themselves in a similar crisis, they decided to build that loyalty.
Stuck on You
How attached are your customers to your brand? How about your employees? Your shareholders?
Brand attachment isn’t a concept that’s familiar to most marketers. In fact, when I bring it up in discussions with potential clients they often ask me what I’m talking about. Yet, attachment is a far more important concept for a business manager or owner than most of the other health measures we think about it.
Brand attachment measures how much consumers (or any members of a brand audience, for that matter) view the brand as an extension of themselves. This differs quite a bit from measures of brand attitudes. When we measure attitudes, we mostly aim to gage how much people like a brand. In contrast, attachment measures how much people will say that a brand is like them—they identify with a brand because it reflects their values and resembles the way they see themselves.
TweetSay Goodnight, Complexity
Most brands struggle with simplicity. They litter their campaigns with too much information out of fear that they will leave something out. The best brands understand that less is more. Even when it seems crazy, you can probably take one more thing out.
In his 1988 memoir, Gracie: A Love Story, George Burns described the elegant way that his wife, the famed comedian Gracie Allen, lived her life and mastered her art:
Gracie made some of her own rules, too. The last thing she would do before leaving the house, every time, was look at herself in the mirror and take one thing off. It could have been anything. A necklace, a bracelet, a scarf, it didn’t matter, she had to take one thing off. That way, she believed, she’d never be overdressed. I was probably the only husband in the country who could ask his wife if she was ready to go and have her say, “One minute—just let me take something off.”
What can you take off before your brand leaves the house?
TweetScout’s Honor
Norman Rockwell illustration of a Boy Scout showing honor.
Imagine that you and I can eavesdrop in the team rooms of some of the world’s leading brands. We sit there inconspicuously listening to the conversations they have about their brands. We’d keep a tally of the keywords that pop up again and again. Invariably, we’d see that positioning, promise, purpose, strategy, image, identity and personality would have very high scores. Our glossary would also certainly include words like voice, values, attributes, and architecture. But there’s one word that I’d be willing to bet we’d never hear in all our snooping: honor.
TweetStake Promises, Not Positions
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.
TweetIgnore the Human Element at Your Peril
If you manage a brand, plan to launch a brand, or just wonder what makes great brands work, read this great piece in yesterday’s edition of Advertising Age. The role of trust is underestimated in branding. That’s why I wrote my next book Brand Real. It’s time to stop talking about “unique selling propositions” and “positioning.” You build brands by making a promise and then doing everything in your power to deliver on that promise at every customer touch point.
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Copyright 2012 by Laurence Vincent
