found here
Behavioral, not Attitudinal
Don't look at the date - there's no hot new stuff on this blog. Rather think how they might have gotten to that idea. What kind of talks they might have had with the management... Why Fun? Why legal driving? Why behavior change?
Strategy Quotations - Behavioral Creativity & Brands as Platforms
"They start thinking 'What kind of behavior do we want to own?'. And by 'owning' I mean 'What sort of behavior do we want to make better? What kind of behavior do we want to transform?"
- from a presentation given by Ana Andjelic, planning director at HUGE -
- from a presentation given by Ana Andjelic, planning director at HUGE -
McKinsey's Alternative to the Purchase Funnel
Here is the link to the article and educational videos on McKinsey's website. Just register, it's for free. http://bit.ly/mW8nQF
A simplistic insight paradigm that rocks: "jobs to be done"
The "jobs to be done" or "products hired to do the job"
paradigm seems very old. But something strange
happens when you rather use the question "what job
does the product do for them?" instead of "what do
they want?" or "what is their benefit?".
Soon I will post something about how this paradigm
leads to different results compared to benefit-thinking or
consumer-expectations-thinking. Listening to this talk
helps to get a first understanding for this very simple
but effective way of thinking.
Here is a link to a short article in HBR: article
An here is a link to Professor Christensen's book on how innovation becomes successful when jobs-to-be-done-thinking is applied:
The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Digital vs Analog Creative Brief - Different Key Questions
This is a slide shown at an APG conference in Germany. It features different approaches to planning of Digital and Analog disciplines. Basically, there is nothing new, but a lot of symptomatic stuff to say about it. But first of all, let me translate briefly into English. This scheme juxtaposes Key Questions to be answered:
Analog: What is the consumer's motive (to buy/use)?, What is the message of the brand/ad? Why should she believe us? How do we stay recognizable? How do we gain attention?
vs.
Digital: What is the user's behavior (in the digital space)? What is our offer/experience? Why should she take part? How do we make space for sharing & for new stuff to be created? What do we offer to make them spread our story?
While this really is a helpful introduction into basic differences between digital planning (experience planning) & analog planning (brand planning), there's a gap that always strikes me. And I mean not the one between digital & analog but the one between digital & purchase. The digital planner - at least according to the scheme above - does not explicitly ask herself how the digital experience connects to purchase or usage motivation for the PRODUCT to be sold. It starts off with the question about user behavior in the digital media space rather than in the product usage space. Of course, some digital experiences are directly related to purchase or usage like it is the case of e-retailers, airlines, etc., but clients like e.g. detergents, burgers, canned soups, etc. are not used or even bought online. So how would this kind of planning actually plan for purchase?
The major challenge for digital planning is to show how this non-message- & non-motive-approach is connected to purchase. Classical brand planning or account planning connects to purchase via a model of consumer motivation which the communication tries to evoke or to alter. What is the purchase influence model used by digital planners? I'm sure there is one - but has not been formulated clearly, yet. Up to now it seems that the mere fact of brand exposure & experience as such is supposed to drive propensity to buy. This well may be the case but on the other hand it would mean that it makes almost no difference what exactly the experience elicits in the minds of the users as long as the familiarity with the brand increases. In other words: "As long as people are engaged in any kind of experience - it sells". Is this true? Has this been researched properly? This is a big opportunity for academic studies to come.
Communication objectives that help and those that don't
Objectives give direction.
Giving direction is crucial for marketing and communication strategy. It's obvious why:
1) it helps people understand, what they have to develop in terms of ideas & actions
2) it provides a basis for evaluating the success of those actions.
Now, as a planner I have been searching for an answer to the following question for a long time: How to set objectives so that they help people to develop their marketing activities? A simple question - in theory.
Common but futile knowledge:
Most of the pieces of literature and informations on the internet I've found refer either to the notion of SMART objectives (see graphic) or to the difference between marketing and communication objectives. There's nothing wrong about both of these notions. But they did not really help me. While I was mainly developing communication objectives with marketing objectives already set by my clients very I rather wanted to know:
A) how are communication objectives set best = so that they help?
B) how can communication objectives be derived from marketing objectives or "goals"?
SMART doesn't work very well:
A) I tried to apply SMART criteria to communication objectives - e.g. in a creative brief. This was not wrong, but it was not the right thing to do as well. Why?
Yes, "Specific" is crucial, "Realistic" is important, "Achievable" is great, but things get worse for most planners when they come to "Measurable" and "Time-Bound". The problem about these criteria is that they seduce the planner's brain to think quantitative. The next thing that happens to a lot of people is that they state the communication objectives in terms of impact on certain dimensions tracked by the brand management. Most often these are brand awareness, brand likeability, brand preference, certain - not insightfully chosen - image dimensions etc. Again, this is not exactly wrong - measurement is good - it just doesn't help to understand what exactly to develop! What would help is to know The How of "Achievable"! "How can we achieve whatever needs to be achieved?" is the question creative and account people want to be answered - and they don't care, actually, about the market share or brand awareness figures. Why should they? These don't help them.Marketing goals don't help much:
B) What about deriving communication objectives from marketing objectives? It happened to me - so I guess it happens to other people, too: I really believed for a while this might be possible. It is not! Why?
It's simple: because marketing objectives in most cases are built as SMART objectives and focus on the evaluation of actions. There's no way to derive a helpful communication objective form a marketing objective described as "increase market share to 45% in the SME-segment in the next 12 months". The only things you can derive from such objectives is the target segment and the offerings to be marketed. This helps you to conduct market research with the right respondents or to buy the right media and target the right people at the right time. But it doesn't tell you (directly) what kind of communication and message is needed. Now I believe that there's no direct if-then-relation between marketing goals and communication objectives. Not even the slightest! But there might be one between communication objectives to be set and the problems ON THE WAY TOWARDS the marketing goals proclaimed by the client.
Conclusion & Proposal:
Overall I learned that there seem to be two types of objectives: those to evaluate how things went in retrospective and those that really help a planner.
The problem is: nobody will tell us the objectives. We have to set them ourselves. But the questions remain: how do they have to be if not SMART?
I believe that one of the simple ways to think in a more helpful way is to ask "what to change?" instead of "what to achieve?". Even if it's true that sometimes change is not required, still this perspective helps in most cases when planners are involved.
I believe that choosing a certain form of statement helps a lot. So here are some useful ones.
A communication objective is more helpful when it is stated e.g. in the form of
"from ... to ..." or "convince them that ..." or " or "dissolve the connection between ... and ... ".
Branding vs. Communications Planning
Sometimes people don't quite get the difference between a brand strategy as fixed in a brand book and a workable idea for communications.
"We had that whole brand thing already with another agency. Some brand guys - Soandso and Soandso. So we know perfectly well what our brand is. We have to use what the brand bible says. So why are you telling us we need a real idea, now. Are you crazy? We have it already."
So this is how I once tried to explain why there are two views on "doing the brand thing" and why the brand book doesn't always give you the strategic campaign idea - not even for an image campaign. Not always? I mean almost never.
"We had that whole brand thing already with another agency. Some brand guys - Soandso and Soandso. So we know perfectly well what our brand is. We have to use what the brand bible says. So why are you telling us we need a real idea, now. Are you crazy? We have it already."
So this is how I once tried to explain why there are two views on "doing the brand thing" and why the brand book doesn't always give you the strategic campaign idea - not even for an image campaign. Not always? I mean almost never.
The Mechanisms behind Emotional Propositions in Advertising (2)
A quick follow-up on my post on emotional propositions and why they might be good for. I just found this interesting insight from McKinsey. Sorry, the pic is in German. It basically says that emotional beats rational in the consideration phase of the "lifecycle", whereas rational rules in the purchase phase. The curve is not the same in each product category, obviously. This one here is calculated for health insurance.
How to Define Problems
Sample text from the article:
"1. Rephrase the Problem. When an executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions. Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem."
(click here to read full article)
"1. Rephrase the Problem. When an executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions. Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem."
(click here to read full article)
Single-minded Propositions vs. Brand Sustainability
I got inspired watching a documentary about the nature of money & currencies. An economist who develops new currencies for the world quoted an insight from sustainability research:
"While efficiency is highly appreciated in our world, it's not very good for the sustainability of a system if it goes too far." In his field this means that different, only partially exchangeable currencies would make the financial systems more sustainable and crisis-resistent.
So I just transformed the diagram he has drawn to explain this into one that is rather about brands and their sustainability. So if we see brands rather as "meaning systems" and not as "meaning points" the curve goes like this:
Brand sustainability is highest when there's enough diversity in the brand's "meaning layers". Single-mindedness as an absolute goal of brands kills them in the long run.
Well, obviously, this is merely hearsay and just a hypothesis. But it's nice to see it as a simple curve.
Tell me what you think...
Sinus Milieus in Germany
While all planners in Germany have seen the graphic of the new Sinus Milieus very little is really known about those new clusters. Maybe this transition chart I found on the net helps a bit. However, the Sinus institute definitely needs to explain all this in more detail and also in a more scientific manner.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)