Opportunities for Brand Building via Social Marketing...
...seem to be bigger when ...
1. Potential to improve your offering digitally is high
2. Sales happen online
3. People talk about your brand already
4. Your brand is well known enough to be talked about
5. Your brand is not well known but the awareness figures you need are minute compared to those of
mass marketing brands.
6. Your brand can't afford classical mass media
7. Involvement with the product category is high
8. Involvement with the brand is high at least in some TGs
9. The brand's or its products' benefits are not trivial for people & society
10. The focused TG is highly digitalized
11. You explicitly & deliberately want to loyalize and emotionally bind of your fans / most valuable clients
12. Your brand's image would be rather damaged by not taking part in new media / new trends
13. ...???...
1. Potential to improve your offering digitally is high
2. Sales happen online
3. People talk about your brand already
4. Your brand is well known enough to be talked about
5. Your brand is not well known but the awareness figures you need are minute compared to those of
mass marketing brands.
6. Your brand can't afford classical mass media
7. Involvement with the product category is high
8. Involvement with the brand is high at least in some TGs
9. The brand's or its products' benefits are not trivial for people & society
10. The focused TG is highly digitalized
11. You explicitly & deliberately want to loyalize and emotionally bind of your fans / most valuable clients
12. Your brand's image would be rather damaged by not taking part in new media / new trends
13. ...???...
Jobs-to-be-done Paradigm: A Typology of Sub-Tasks in Every Human Behavior
Analysis of hundreds of jobs has revealed that all jobs consist of some or all of eight fundamental process steps:
- define
- locate
- prepare
- confirm
- execute
- monitor
- modify
- conclude.
The Role of Advertising in High-End Luxury Marketing. Is great advertising any good?
"You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation. - Begin your own tradition."
Now, this is obviously belongs into the planners' Hall of Fame. At least 3 great insights can be detected here in retrospective:
1) Buying a watch for $70.000 can make you feel guilty, thus needs to be justified.
2) Really good watches have a really long life - longer than your's is.
3) Most millionaires are self made men. But they long for some sort of dynastic touch to their family.
Apart from the execution style this is really great work. If I would have done this one I wouldn't question my capabilities ever again. Well, I haven't. Next time maybe.
You see, we are not talking about a bag for $3000,-. These products cost up to $300.000. They really are luxury. They are so luxury that they even wouldn't use the word luxury because this sounds cheap. These brands (Patek Philippe, A. Lange & Söhne, Breguet, etc.) have an average price at least 3 times higher than a Rolex. Can you raise their perceived value through adding a psychological twist to it? Does the twist itself (the ad idea) have an impact on their propensity to want or buy the watch?
Maybe you think "Yes, where's the problem". Well, the problem is: the strategy techniques used are absolutely borrowed from premium-price or even mid-price products like let's say a Nissan:
1) There is a positioning thinking behind this ads: "Patek Philippe. The Inheritance."
2) There is an appellative lifestyle claim that tells you what to do: "Begin your own tradition"
3) There are models depicting "You" as the brand thinks you are
4) In some of the executions there is even an attempt to trigger your love for children visually (= "to emotionalize the brand")
This is almost perfect - say- for a Nissan. Or Nike. But this is exactly the point: don't people who pay 80,000,- for a watch simply feel that this is "just advertising" - or even mass advertising? And can you sell absolute exclusivity with a mass advertising appeal? What does this tell them about the brand? That they "need" advertising, an "advertising trick"?
Just in case you think I'm advocating some sort of "new, 1on1, digital whatever conversations" as opposed to mass advertising principles - not at all! At this prices, conversations are face-to-face and carried out by professional jewelers in suits we could probably never afford. There is enough conversation going on about Patek. Online as well. The difference being: those who blog and talk about watches don't have the money to buy them - at least not 1st hand from Patek. And besides: the whole conversational, digital etc. marketing is even more typical for mass-market brands.
Let's rather stress some strategy concerns rather than channels & mechanisms.
Is the notion of "positioning" or "proposition" applicable here?
Should a brand like Patek talk to "you" and "your life" overtly?
Should Patek "emotionalize"?
Can or should Patek "add" anything to what they already are?
I guess the problem is that enhancing product perceptions through an emotional proposition or some sort of life style promise to some degree implies that there is room for improvement. If it really is the absolute high END of luxury and quality - why do they advertise? Isn't an emotional promise rather there for brands that need to promise something more than the product delivers? Coca-Cola needs an emotional promise because it's caffeine water and sugar. How can the most perfect mechanical jewelry need an "added value"?
I don't know if my concerns are justified. What do you think?
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.
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