Steve Yastrow

Is your company doing good marketing? (continued)

In today’s newsletter, I focus on Question 3 of the 6 questions I use when I begin to evaluate a company’s marketing efforts.

Question 3 asks, “Are you clear about the rich story you want your customers to understand?“  Many companies look at their brands in a very cursory way, while their customers are willing to create rich brand stories in their minds.  One step to great marketing: Create a rich brand story that encourages customers to think, “I get it, I want it and I can’t get it anywhere else.”

Posted in Brand Harmony, Marketing | No Comments »

Theme for the day: The connection between customer belief and profits

There is a direct connection between what your customers believe about you and how much money you make.

What your customers believe about you – consciously or sub-consciously – influences your customers’ actions.  If customers’ beliefs about you are clear, compelling, powerful, motivating and differentiating, they will act in ways that improve your business results.  If, on the other hand, their beliefs about you are not clear, compelling, powerful, motivating and differentiating, their actions will not improve your business results as much as is possible.

Advertising, PR, customer service, product development … everything you do … is secondary.  What you do only matters if it helps customers do things.  And what influences customers to do things?  What they believe.

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Trust is a most fragile brand value

In our current marketplace, trust is not enough to win you customers.  You have many trustworthy competitors.

However, the slightest chink in your “trust-armour” can lose you customers.  Here’s an example:

I have been a loyal customer of Orbitz for a number of years, creating a near-reflexive habit of going to orbitz.com when I need to book travel.  Each time I use Orbitz I am offered the chance to click a box and purchase travel insurance, which I never do.

I noticed three travel insurance charges on my credit card bill, related to three international reservations I had booked. When I called Orbitz they said it was too late to remove these charges since the travel dates had passed.  “But I never selected travel insurance” did not seem to be a plausible objection to them.

With the agent on the phone I walked through a couple of “mock” reservations, and learned that for international reservations travel insurance is pre-selected, and you need to opt-out if you don’t want it.

What a bait and switch.  For years I’ve been given the choice on Orbitz whether I want travel insurance, and then they sneak it in when I book international tickets.  My brand impression of Orbitz changed immeditately.  It went from “hassle-free/always-works/I-can-count-on-them” to “I better keep my eyes open from now on because they will try to take money from me when I am not looking.” We went from a We relationship to a definite Us & Them relationship.

Don’t ever be tempted to sneak something by your valuable customers.  For about $100 Orbitz lost most of the trust I had in them.  Making money in this way is a great example of “bad profits.”

Posted in We relationships | 7 Comments »

The Four Scarce Resources

“So, what are your scarce maketing resources?” I have asked many people.

“Time, money and people,” are the most likely answers.

True.

But there is a fourth scarce resource: Customer attention.

You need to view customer attention as a finite resource. It is a rationed good, and you must use it frugally and wisely.

In the old days of brute force branding, it made sense to focus on exposing your customer to your marketing messages as many times as possible. After all, the working paradigms were “cut through the clutter” and “capture eyeballs.”

Now, things are different.  If you waste your scarce ration of customer attention on merely invading your customer’s field of vision or sound,  you will quickly wear out your welcome, and the customer will elect to ignore you. (”Capturing eyeballs” is so old-school)  On the other hand, if you focus not on just invading your customer’s senses as often as possible but on fewer, richer interactions, your customer will appreciate you, notice you and, more likely, be moved by your message.

Your customer’s attention is as valuable to him as your time, money and people are to you. Use this fourth scarce resource wisely.

Posted in Brute Force Branding | 2 Comments »

Outtakes

Things are rarely perfect the first time.

I used to write songs with a good friend of mine.  We had a problem. If an idea wasn’t perfect, the first time we played it or sang it, he focused on how the idea wasn’t good enough to be in a song.  He couldn’t move forward. He had to discard the idea.

I think it is important look at imperfect ideas in a different way.  The trick is to see the possibility in the idea, and then make it a little better.  After many iterations, these possibilities become real, as a substantive idea starts to take shape.

I remember learning, in college, about Beethoven’s obsessive rewriting of phrases.  Over and over, note by note, he would tweak, change and edit until he got it just right. At first I thought it was just his obsessive perfectionism, but then I realized it was something more.  He could see when the possibilities in an idea had not yet been realized.

Outtakes are critical to the creative process.  “Take 22″ is not necessarily a sign of failure, a lack of creativity, or poor execution.  In a strong creative process, Take 22 is 22 steps better than Take 1.  You must be willing to take what’s good about an idea and improve upon it, and take what is bad about the idea and extract it, without killing the whole idea.

Iteration is the path to idea improvement.

Posted in Creativity | 1 Comment »

Brand Entropy

Entropy is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It is the tendency for systems to move from states of order to states of disorder.  Line up all of the toys on a child’s shelf, and soon they will end up scattered all over the floor.  Clean up your to-do list, and by the end of the week you will need to re-organize yourself.  It’s easy to see why entropy is so powerful when you consider that the ordered state is only one of millions of possibilities for the system; disorder is much more probable than order.

Entropy can dilute your customer experience, if you do not have a strong brand essence that acts as a glue to hold together all of the elements of the experience.  The reason for this is simple – there are thousands of different ways a particular customer interaction can happen, but only a few of these possibilities will reinforce your brand story and add to the sense of Brand Harmony that your customers perceive.

Consider a very simple example.  You own a athletic shoe store, and you believe that you can differentiate your store by asking a customer to describe his personal exercise habits, and the aches and pains he gets from exercise, in order to find the perfect pair of shoes to fit his needs.  Your website and in-store signage describe this brand promise, and you, personally, deliver this promise when you wait on customers.  Now, think about what happens when another employee serves a customer. The “right” ways to interact with a customer make up only an infinitesimal portion of the possible ways to interact with a customer.  So, if this employee doesn’t have a strong sense of your brand promise, and doesn’t feel the essence of the brand in her bones, it is highly likely that she will not support the brand when she interacts with customer.  The result:  It is more likely that a customer interaction will dilute your brand promise than it is likely that it will support your brand promise.  Brand entropy is more likely than brand reinforcement.

If you want a strong brand, you need to be one of the (few) companies who define their brand essence with great richness and detail, and ensure that everyone who works in the company understands the promise, with equal richness and detail.  This takes a lot of effort, but, then again, entropy is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

Posted in Brand Harmony | 5 Comments »

Recalibrating customer interactions

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about recalibrating the approach to customer interactions.

The day started off with a meeting with a client about a potential project.  Our discussion explored how this very successful company can develop more business from current customers, especially in these tough times where it is harder to find new customers.

As we talked, it became clear that the best answers lie not in more lucrative promotions, better offers or a new loyalty program.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  Interacting with customers during this time of economic uncertainty and turmoil requires, more than ever, an approach based on the customer interaction principles that have obsessed me for years.

• It’s not about customer service.  It’s about the relationship-building encounter. Customer service is not what you strive for; it has become basic hygiene. (Yes, some companies still don’t brush their teeth.)  The goal of every interaction between a person in your company and a customer is to make sure that the relationship with the customer is better at the end of the interaction than it was at the beginning.
• Stop shouting already! People hear Brand Harmony. This is the worst time to dial up the brute-force marketing techniques, trying to out-shout, out-promote and out-sizzle your competition.  The world is way too noisy and your customers are way too scrutinizing.  Interact with customers in a way that matches how they form impressions of you: By creating a strong sense of Brand Harmony that communicates a clear, compelling, comprehensive story.

How much better would your business be if your organization, with the talent of virtuosos, adhered to these principles?

Posted in Brand Harmony, Customer Encounters, Recalibration, Thrive in a tough economy | 2 Comments »

The Great Fallacy of Marketing

The great fallacy of marketing is that it can be delegated to a few people in your company and to inanimate objects, such as ads, brochures and web sites.

The most effective marketing is human to human; everything else is a compromise.

Advertising should be the last thing you consider in your marketing plan.

Think Brand Harmony, not brute force.

(This isn’t my opinion.  It’s your customers’ opinion.  It’s how they evaluate you.)

Recalibrate your approach to marketing.

Posted in Brand Harmony | 4 Comments »

It’s the Brand Story, Stupid!

One week later, the Big Branding Story from the election is so obvious its not worth much more ink.  Even more than the branding disparity between Clinton and Bush in 1992 (”It’s the economy stupid” vs. a mish-mash of who-knows-what), McCain’s pathetic use of Brand Harmony gave the hyper-clear Obama story lots of room to take root.  (For more, see the New York Times Magazine story on October 26, “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain)

So, let’s not waste more time on the obvious.  Instead, let’s focus on what we can learn from it.  I see hundreds of executives every year in workshops, where I ask them to evaluate their brand stories.  I can’t tell you how underwhelmed I usually am. Is there a more important question for a business than, “What do you want your customers to believe about you?”  Well, my empirical evidence shows that most brand stories are as loose as that of 2008 McCain or 1992 G.H.W. Bush.

So, no matter who you voted for (i.e., does this situation make you gloat or vomit), I encourage you to see the power of a clear, compelling story, communicated with a fully-integrated sense of Brand Harmony. Your customers’ lives are so busy and crowded, and your customers are so savvy and discerning, that you can’t not create powerful relationships with them without a solid brand story.

To paraphrase the Clinton campaign in 1992: “It’s the story, stupid!”

So, what kind of shape is your brand story in?

Posted in Brand Harmony | 2 Comments »

What Colin Powell says about McCain’s marketing efforts

This is not a policitcal blog.  It focuses on connecting with customers, forming strong customer relationships, and related marketing issues.

So … read this as a marketing commentary.

One of the pillars of my beliefs about marketing, as captured in my book Brand Harmony, is that today’s customers are too savvy and self-reliant to believe everything they are told in marketing messages.  Marketing communication isn’t about what you say.  It’s about what people believe after you say (and do) it.

Yesterday, Colin Powell credited the negative tone of the McCain campaign and specious claims McCain’s team has made about Obama as key drivers in his decision to endorse Barack Obama.  He also criticized the McCain campaign’s lack of clarity and consistency in their approach to the economy, saying, “Every day there was a different approach.”

In addition to other, policy-driven reasons, which are not my subject here, Powell’s endorsement reinforces this key idea of modern marketing.  Customers are highly scrutinizing, and all aspects of your message need to blend in Brand Harmony if you hope to create a powerful, motivating message.

McCain should have looked at the key marketing lesson of the 1992 Clinton-Bush race: “It’s the economy, stupid.”  By having an incredibly clear focus, Bill Clinton out-marketed Bush Sr., whose messages were more muddled and harder to hold in your hand.

Maybe this is why an Ad Age poll selected Obama as marketer of the year, beating out Apple, Nike and, yes, McCain.

Posted in Brand Harmony | 6 Comments »