Paul Isakson

The 2010 Planner Survey Is Here

Heather has announced that the 2010 Planner Survey is ready to go. All the info is here.

How Many Slides Does it Take to Train a Planner to Write a Creative Brief?

If you're JWT, it takes 66 apparently.

via Colectivo Planner / Scrapbook

Why So Serious?

Flickr // AJoelle_xo / CC BY 2.0

In reading an article earlier today on the alleged death of method acting, I was reminded of Russell's thoughts on pretending and of an observation I've noted repeatedly as it relates to the business world.

As marketers, we can often take ourselves and what we do far too seriously. When this is true, in many ways we become method marketers. We begin living and breathing our roles and the challenges we face in them at home, at the grocery store, in the bar, at the coffee shop, etc.; always looking for ways to sell more of whatever it is we sell. We forget how to have fun in our work and that people may actually do fun things with or around our products and services.

I realize this might not sound like a problem to some, but what's wrong with this is that it far too easily becomes about us and how well be play our role instead of being about the people who actually buy our products and services. We get focused on how well we can assume the identity of the character we think we should be to impress our boss/clients, get a promotion or maybe win an award. We get very serious about digging into piles of data and creating more piles of data to support that data so we can prove we're right.

All the while, we should be considering how we could better engage and inspire the people using our products or services. In the absence of actual observation, we should be pretending we're the person who buys our product or service and think about what their life is like. We should pretend we're at home watching TV when our commercial comes on and ask ourselves, would I actually watch this if I were our customer? We should pretend we're having a problem with our product or service and find out how easy or hard it is to get a satisfactory solution.

All this to say that there are times to be serious at work but we should never do so at the expense of remembering who actually is on the receiving end of the marketing we create and what they do with the products and services we sell. And, as Russell noted, there is a lot of power in pretending and we should use that more often. Not only in putting that power to work in the work, but also in our approach to creating it.

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...

Bits and Pieces and Brands, Oh My!

Flickr // paulisakson

Every time I pass by the Walker, I look at this phrase on the wall and instantly think of it as a very nice definition for what a brand is. When you consider it, really a brand is the collective bits and pieces of our own and others experiences with a product or service over time. This is why I think John Grant's Brand Molecule idea is a great way to look at a brand.

Along this line of thought, back around when I gave my talk on modern brand building, I was thinking about how to define a brand's strength. The thought ended up taking shape in the form of a formula of sorts that looks like the following: (I realize that this is probably bordering on being a bit ridiculous, but just blame the time I spent in engineering classes early in my college years...)

 

In this instance, appropriately enough, Bs is Brand strength; T is Time; P2 is the total number of people who hold the same belief of the brand's reputation, which is derived from E+P1, where E is a person's experience with the product or service and P1 is the perceived personality of the product or service.

So, the more people you have who share the same beliefs about a product and the longer they have held those beliefs, the stronger your brand is. Conversely, the fewer people that share a belief about your brand and/or the shorter amount of time they believe that, the softer your brand is. Or something like that.

Why this matters is that the stronger your brand is, the more forgiving people will be when you happen to make a little mistake or slip-up. The softer it is, the less forgiving they'll be and they'll have a much higher propensity to walk away from you.

If you think about this as a person, as we so often like to do in our silly marketing games, it really makes sense. A person's reputation is largely built upon other people's experiences with that person over time. That reputation is stronger as more people believe the same things over longer periods of time.

The inverse is also true. The less people that know you and the less time that they've known you for means that your reputation is still pretty soft and making slip-ups here and there will lead them to think things of you that may not be true ultimately, but they have nothing else to go by, so what can you expect?

Anyway... to come back to why this matters... as companies get more and more involved in social media and start trying to have real relationships with people, it's important to do everything you can as a brand manager and/or partner on the agency side to create coherent brand experiences over time. The more you switch things around on people, the less they'll feel like they can trust you, which means they'll have softer ties to you and will more easily jump to a competitive product.

Furthermore, when you do make a wrong move here or there, the people that love your brand will forgive you and help you move on from it. And should that mistake be loud enough, those same people will defend you against those who don't know you as well.

To wrap this all up, what it comes down to is that thanks to social media and it now being possible for anyone to broadcast a message about your brand to the world, it's never been more important to make a commitment to what you stand for and believe in.

If you're constantly changing things on people, you'll never build the kind of trust and loyalty you'll need to make people want to stand up for you when it's needed most. And who doesn't want more people willing to do that?