Archive for March, 2008
Passion of the Brand
Somewhere, deep in every brand statement/ pyramid/ onion/ anatomy/ iceberg/ essence/ journey/ vehicle is an answer to the question ‘what are we passionate about?’
But I don’t think that brands make a big enough deal about passions in general.
Passions in truly great businesses (and brands) tend to be about things like delivering a great customer experience or totally user focused NPD rather than making more widgets for a lower price per unit.
An end-user’s passion for a brand is far more likely to be based on brand experience, usability or all-round gorgeousness than the latest BOGOF deal or the thingumydigit technology behind it all.
The ideal scenario would be to make the businesses behind brands passionate about doing whatever it takes to excite their customer’s passions.
logo from says-it.com
email today from the Traffic department
I can confirm today is Tuesday.
I know it’s the first day of the working week and it’s a bit confusing, but today is Tuesday and tomorrow will still be Wednesday.
On the plus side, this means Friday arrives 24 hours earlier in your working week than usual. On the minus side, this means Friday arrives 24 hours earlier in your working week than usual.
digital wins with winds of change
Upon reflection, it strikes me that my ranting about the weather actually leads on to a relevant point.
The web has obviously made responding to change much easier – for example my gardening client has pay per click campaigns queued up on google just waiting for the right weather conditions to arrive.
But its rare to see a DIY shed buying up the nearest 6 sheets as the first flakes of snow begin to fall to point out that they stock rock salt. Or a wet bank holiday weekend 
resulting in the local cinema taking out a more prominent ad in the local paper. Those media options would be ideal, but traditional media is too slow. You just can’t turn offline communications round fast enough. And that’s where online media will always win.
In the right hands, digital media can be truly reactive. Which I suppose begs the next question – will online media have to become a 24-7 operation to service this?
snow joke
Thats it. I completely give up on trying to chose suitable outfits or plan any activities according to the time of year and therefore the expected weather conditions.
Last Summer it rained pretty much non-stop for five months, ruining two pairs of shoes and making all seasonal events decidedly soggy affairs.
Then Spring temporarily showed it’s face in early February, resulting in pub gardens full of mystified coat-less punters.
So what with it being the four day Easter Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK right now, this greeted me when I opened the front door this morning:
I give up.
Carmageddon
We call the car park at work Carmageddon as the parking situation is so dire.
To make things more complicated, in the absence of a company car scheme we all seem to have bought the same car so finding and releasing your vehicle in order to get home at night is getting a tad challenging.
The quant researcher in me reports that our car park consists of 9% Golfs, 8% Minis and 6% Clios (thrift ever being our watchword outside London) and is 47% German.
“Matthew, where’s my feckin microwave?”
Genius. Yes, I know cog and tipping point came first, but this is more fun.
if campaigns go Stealth, what are we going to blog about?
There’s been a lot of fuss this week on t’interweb about whether Ad X is a ripoff (or homage) to Ad Y and if Campaign Z is actually any good.
But what are we all going to blog about when all this media fragmentation, CRM and digital malarky gets its act together and means that enormous campaigns could be running and we’d never know about them?
Because if done well, communications will only interact with the precise audience they’re targeted at, rather than anyone who happens to switch on the telly at 9pm.
I suppose its Stealth Marketing. As a brand you could, in theory, be as provocative or offensive as you like because so long as it doesn’t offend your target audience, no-one else is going to experience it…
putting the advertising cart before the business strategy horse
Why can’t some marketeers grasp that they need a business strategy in place before they start worrying about a marketing plan, or a comms plan, or an ad campaign?
I keep coming across marketeers who will quite happily let you present insight driven concepts for creative work (as per their brief), before suddenly admitting that they don’t actually know which market sector they’re aiming at, or what their NPD strategy is, or in one memorable case, what the blumin company is going to be called next month.
I appreciate that in an ideal world some of this could or even should be led by the brand positioning itself, but I’m increasingly frustrated by senior client-types who put the advertising cart before the business strategy horse.
Perhaps its something to do with the relative ease of briefing an agency compared with the complexity of putting your own house in order. In some cases, in the absence of an immediate role for communications, I’ve ended up becoming more of a business consultant and coach to my clients stuck in Multinational Bureaucracy Hell than their Planner.
I suspect that sometimes there’s some kind of desperate hope from clients that the agency will wheel out their hitherto unmentioned top-level management consultants and offer their services as part of the fee…
So I suppose I’d better add Coach, Consultant and Strategic Guru to my list of alternative job titles for a Planner.
that’ll be me then…
Meme me me me
I’ve been tagged by Sam offof The Adlads to share with you eight random things about myself. I can only come up with five, so that will have to do:
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I’m properly, medically allergic to photocopiers. The light brings my skin out in red welty things. Also an excellent excuse to palm off reproducing that double-sided-but-not-on-every-page report onto someone else.
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I’m getting pretty good at this riding side saddle malarky, but I fell off riding astride (which I’ve been doing since I was five) twice last month.
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I tap dance. Party trick -rolling double triple pickup timesteps.
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I won’t eat onions, peppers or anything spicy.
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My sister’s a professional bellydancer and a black belt kickboxer, so don’t mess.
I also can’t think of anyone left in the blogosphere who hasn’t been tagged, but if thats you, please feel free to join in.
mad about the Mad Men
I finally got round to watching Mad Men last night on BBC iplayer.
I really enjoyed it and it occurred to me that in AdWorld, some things change (technology, use of insight, number of women in senior positions, amount of admin support available) and others stay the same (blagging your way through last minute client meetings, office politics, drinks after work).
It did make me glad that I was born in a different age – somehow I don’t think I’d have found an agency role taking dictation and making coffee with the long term goal of a good marriage and lots of babies terribly fulfilling.
I did have fun imagining how the Mad Men might react to a modern-day Planner wondering about clad in jeans and trainers, weighed down by laptop, mobile and digital camera and going on about ethnographics, media fragmentation and the Velocity Age….
