Paul Isakson

Give Them Something To Believe In

Flickr / Daniel Y. Go

In last year's "What's Next" presentation, this was (a version of) one of the closing thoughts for how brands need to start behaving differently. I was reminded of this a week or two back when the NY Times ran a piece on figuring out how much of your income should be given to donations.

In the article, they shared that Americans donated $229 billion in 2009, with about half of that going to religious institutions. Consider that for a moment.

People openly gave over two hundred billion dollars to organizations because they believed in what the organizations are doing and because of the way helping those organizations makes them feel. Not because of a product they took home to use. Not because of a service performed for them. They gave simply because they wanted to support something that they believed in.

I bring this up because it's part of how I think and talk about the "commit to something bigger than yourself" idea.

The talk around this slide wasn't about committing to adding a cause or charity to your business. It was about committing to being about something bigger than making a profit—it was about focusing on doing good things for the people who buy your products or services, not only for yourself or your shareholders.

As I look back at this now, I still agree with this but I do think it isn't worded quite right. It leans too much towards causes and charity. Not that those are bad things, but we've got several major brands around who weren't built on these principles and in trying to pull them in now, they come across as shallow ploys to try to get more people to buy their products.

I think the way I would word it now would be something like, "Give people something to believe in." It's really about committing to doing things for and with people, and then living out those commitments every day. In doing that, you're showing them that they can believe in you; and as the donations numbers show, people like to support things they believe in.

Maybe still not quite right and certainly needs more work. Would love to hear your thoughts...

Yves Behar's Clever Little Bag for Puma

Yves Behar and fuseproject spent the last three years working with Puma to rethink the shoe box. The results? A design that reduces the cardboard used by 65% and water, energy, and fuel consumption during manufacturing by 60%.

"Rethinking the shoebox is an incredibly complex problem, and the cost of cardboard and the printing waste are huge, given that 80M are shipped from China each year," Béhar tells FastCompany.com. "Cargo holds in the ships can reach temperatures of 110 degrees for weeks on end, so packaging becomes an enormous problem. This solution protects the shoes, and helps stores to stock them, while saving huge costs in materials.

After spending 21 months studying box fabrication and shipping, Fuseproject realized that any improvement to that already lean system would merely be incremental. So instead, the "clever little bag" combines the two packaging components of any shoe sale--the bag and the box--with high-tech ingenuity."

While overall this is a fantastic project and idea, there are two things that strike me. The first is the time it took and Puma's dedication to sticking to it. In today's ADD world, many companies give in to pressure to push for fast answers and short-term results. Rather than caving to that pressure, Puma gave Fuseproject the time and resources they needed to really dig in and solve this problem.

The second thing that stands out is (according to Fast Company) that this is the lead project in a complete brand overhaul. Not too long ago, another global brand decided to invest a few hundred million dollars in redesigning and implementing their logo as a start to overhauling their brand. I like Puma's approach infinitely more.

For more on this, here's an interview from Contagious with Yves Behar:

Sources: Fast Company, Contagious

A Brand's Most Urgent Questions

Flickr // e-strategyblog.com

“Life's most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The above quote came up a few times last Monday over Twitter in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I found it very appropriate in relation to some thinking I've been kicking around about the state of business and what needs to change in how we view and build brands in today's world. Here is where those thoughts are now. They lean heavily to the idealist side of things, but I think that's o.k. Why aim for anything less than the ideal, right? Anyway...

A New Era For Business
The recent era of business has largely been defined by how much one could take, buy, own and grow. Bury the competition at all costs. Put them out of business and take their market share. Grow, grow, grow. Take, take, take. To a large degree, the only "others" brands cared about doing things for were the investors and analysts. Nothing is as important as the quarterly earnings statement being well received.

I am hopeful that a new era of business is coming about. One where brands realize that they have the power, money and ability to help create real, positive change in a world that is in dire need of it and act upon that realization with conviction. It's not about beating the competition, but about beating a massive problem facing humanity. The more massive the brand, the more massive the problem they should be focused against.

Now, don't take this to mean that it's all about giving and that means that they can't make money. By all means, that's the point of business and always will be. It just means that they now recognize and respect that the shareholders are only one third of the equation they have to satisfy. They realize that they also have to look to the people who actually buy their products and services to find new and better ways of serving them and they need to consider how to do something good for planet that we all live on.

Finding Your Massive Problem(s)
With this as a starting point, a brand needs to be able to answer to Dr. King's question, "What are you doing for others?" Only for brands, the answer can't be given in the same old generic product benefits. In addition, the brand needs to think bigger. They need to ask themselves, "What are we doing for the world?"

For several companies, the best answers to these questions are likely to be found from within their own walls. A good start can be as simple as doing some soul-searching and digging into the company's roots. Another is looking into what's going on in the culture surrounding their brand(s) today. What massive problems have they helped to create and how can they now work to repair the damage? What bigger human problem/need does their product solve/address?

The Modern Brand: Defined by Purpose and Action, Not a Position
Once the brand defines its massive problem to solve, they then develop a very clear point-of-view on how they believe this should be done, which becomes exactly how they do it. The brand then is based on the combination of its point-of-view for how to solve their massive problem(s) and its actions for doing so.

Rather than being based on a position, the brand is based on purpose and action. So, instead of being built around the idea of giving you the "whitest whites", they are about cleaning up the world and having their own view and actions on how they do this.

With its clearly defined view and direction, the brand works diligently to make sure that every action they take reinforces their purpose, using their core beliefs and values serve as their guide. It's no longer about being the biggest. It's about vigilantly doing the best they can at fulfilling their stated purpose of doing something for the world and the people who use/buy them.

In doing this, I believe that these brands will be able to thrive. You don't have to be the biggest to be enormously successful. You just have to be relentlessly focused on doing something meaningful for others and/or the world.

So, what are you doing for others? What are you doing for the world?

Intentions and Actions

image via notebookdoodles

Sometimes the most simple statements speak quite loudly. The statement that "intention without action is useless" is an example of such a statement. It's striking me in a couple of ways today.

First, I think it is what's largely behind the steady demise of message-based advertising. Too many companies communicated (overtly stated or implied) intentions that they never acted upon or even worse, acted counter to.

One of the best examples of a company communicating intentions and acting upon them is the famous "We Try Harder" campaign from DDB and Avis. Avis believed in this mantra so much that they trained their employees to live up to it before the campaign launched. Even their CEO got involved in making sure the statement was true.

If you believe that a modern brand is defined by the sum of its actions, not its messages and images (which I do), then it's critical that your actions reflect your intentions.

The second way this statement rings true for me is specifically when it comes to developing and implementing strategy.

Somehow, I ended up in the "Strategy Professionals Network" on LinkedIn. For the past month, a discussion based on the question, "Should we spend more time and effort on developing strategy or focussing on implementation?," is the most commented on discussion in the group. It seems that this question has sparked quite the debate.

In some ways, I can see why. It can be easy to get caught up in thinking about things and then thinking about our thinking about them. I know I have been guilty of this more than once or twice.

As Adrian has pointed out recently, and others along the way, we've got to be about doing things just as much as (if not more than) planning things. We can create plans upon plans of intention (strategy), but without implementation, we'll never know if they're brilliant or broken.

Not only that, but doing things to see what happens instead of spending weeks-upon-weeks of planning them is critical in today's business climate. As market, social and cultural factors change at an increasingly rapid rate thanks to the deeper integration of technology into our daily lives and the objects we use, we don't have time to sit around and plan things. We've got to get out and just do them at some point (hopefully sooner than later in the process).

Adrian identified Noah as one who is quite good at this. I would agree. This is also one of the things that I've always admired about Russell. Often he tinkers with things to see what they're about and what happens when he tries something new with them. This is also what was behind the existence of @don_draper. There wasn't really much of a plan there as much as there was just a burning curiosity to see what would happen if I began tweeting as him.

Anyway, just a couple thoughts around intentions and actions that were triggered after seeing the wonderful doodles on photos by notebookdoodles and having this one in particular grab me. Oh, and thank you to notebookdoodles for letting me use this image...

How to Create Advocacy and Conversation (via @FrankInLalaland)

Frank is presenting a great take on creating advocacy and conversation at Planningness - well worth the view and discussing with colleagues and clients.

Especially useful (in my opinion) is the advocacy model/tool beginning on slide 30. In an age of conversation and transparency, brand behavior is far more important than brand language. Having tools to help us figure out how brands should behave instead of how they should talk will help us all move the industry forward faster.

As always, would love to know your take on this. Rather than sharing your thoughts here though, put them in the comments on the SlideShare page so the discussion can be held in a broader forum for all who view it...