The silver bullet to a successful marketing campaign

Jennifer Broman

What is the silver bullet to creating a great marketing campaign?  Is it leveraging flashy creative or implementing the newest technology?  How about defining the most effective value proposition? Or maybe if your marketing team could create “an app for that” then maybe, your marketing message would truly take off. However, from experience working with clients as they craft their next ad campaign, it is clear that the silver bullet to any marketing campaign is a focused, clear and simplistic message.

I know many times with the beginnings of a branding campaign or launch of a new product, you may want to yell from the mountain tops everything that your brand has to offer the consumer. Yes, it can give you better X or help you be more effective at Y, which can translate into Z… divided by 2, then multiplied by the square root of 34. Even through my poor example, you can see that a complicated message always gets confusing.  Remember, the consumer engaging with your marketing message doesn’t have time to break down the complicated algorithm surrounding your product. Instead, they want a simple value equation—what differentiates your product and what does this mean to them.

Additionally, it becomes necessary to view the campaign itself as a sprint, not as a marathon. With campaigns, the reality is that you need to communicate simplicity with focus on 1-2 brand or product attributes that differentiate. As I’m sure you’ve heard before, it’s not worth throwing in everything plus the kitchen sink—and this is especially true when crafting an ad campaign.  Although there are many incremental messages you may be tempted to touch on, those additional insights can wait until the next campaign. Your current campaign should only be running for 1-2 years, don’t treat it like a never-ending marathon!  Overall, the reality is that too much information will cloud what you’re really trying to communicate to consumers. 

So, when planning your next campaign, try to go back to your marketing roots when crafting your marketing campaign and use the silver bullet of a focused, clear and simplistic message for your next marketing endeavor.

Jennifer Broman is an Account Manager at Hunt Adkins, a full-service advertising agency in Minneapolis.  Currently, she is serving as the MN AMA Blog Content Manager. 

Owning Your Brand: The Conundrum of Situational Positioning… The Paradox of Authenticity!

Ann Ulrich

Let's talk brand. Your brand. The importance of owning your brand. The conundrum of delivering your brand consistently when real life demands you jockey for position. And the paradox in all that: remaining authentic.

Let's make it personal: Your brand plays out externally, only after it's fired up and fueled internally. It's up to you!

Let's keep it simple: Who are you? What do you stand for? What do you want to be known for and remembered by?

Owning your brand involves: Mindfully and consistently bringing the best of who you are, positioning to best fit the situation you're in, while remaining true to what you stand for.

(Be authentic or risk imposter syndrome. If you no longer fit - or no longer want to fit - the situation you're in… what are you still doing there?!)

Why care about owning your brand?

You'll get what you want by earning it. You'll get to where you're headed through and with others you've earned respect, trust, and top of mind positioning with. You'll impact and influence people who become drawn to you, want to champion you, and want to create new success with you… business and life!

When you know who you are and bring it(!), remaining authentic even as you adjust to appropriately fit the situation, you can positively influence what you become known for and remembered by.

This is how you create your own repeatable, deliverable, consistent and lasting circle of success via brand ownership.

Own it! 

Ann Ulrich, 18yr owner of The BOLD! Factor and Fit Model Agency, is shifting her own brand, leaving her business (on plan at this exciting stage of life!) to create new success when she discovers the right-fit sales or business maximizing opportunity in the right-fit *wow* company.

 

Building a data-driven brand

Mark Price

Last week, a prospective client challenged me about the relationship between branding and database marketing: “I am worried that we will lose our brand by customizing marketing around customer data,” he said, “Our brand could end up standing for nothing.”

The challenge exemplifies the paradigm change that data-driven marketing presents to traditional brand managers.  After the focus groups, the creative development with the agency, and the spending – they fear that personalization will make their efforts (and perhaps their jobs) obsolete.  And that fear is not unreasonable.

Increasingly, “brand enhancing” mass media spending is being replaced with direct-to-customer and social media marketing.  If these trends continue, then many brand specialists could find themselves working at the local convenience store. That is, if you define the “brand” as a package of static benefits targeted at the lowest common denominator customers (usually something like “women 25-54”).

However, if you are willing to reinvent your concept of brand, then customer data becomes a huge asset that will revitalize products and ultimately your company as a whole. If a brand “identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association), then the key aspect of a brand is competitive differentiation.   

Database marketers have the same goals as brand experts -- make the business distinctive from the competition – so distinctive that customers will reduce their clamor for discounts and instead go out of their way to purchase your products/services.  If not, customers will price-shop you to death, reducing margins and your ability to sustain a growing business. Why risk being treated as a throwaway commodity?  Database marketing will position your business with meaningful benefits.

Here are three ways that brand managers can immediately leverage database marketing:

•  Understand customer segments.  Your business is NOT a single, homogenous” group of customers who all behave the same.  Database marketers have long understood the value of segmentation – grouping customers by behavior patterns and attitudes.  Use that insight to craft brand promises that appeal to each segment. For example, the promise of free returns appeals to customers who are newer to your company and may not be comfortable yet with your products.
•  Test and measure the “authenticity” of the brand.  By identifying specific customers in each segment, you can better target your research and testing exactly to the right people, which increases the accuracy of measurement (while reducing the costs as well!)
•  Provide tangible business results (return on investment).  Build your brand promise, customized to the segment, into tests that database marketers frequently conduct, and measure the incremental results.  The incrementality of your branding efforts will speak to executives in terms of dollars, building credibility for the brand and for you.

Ultimately, customers are seeking brands that meet the fundamental promise, “you know me.”  You know who I am, what I want and where I live.  You respect my time and go out of your way to make a difference in my life.  Brands that meet THAT promise are destined for higher levels of customer retention, profitability and sustained growth. 

Build your brand around that promise, customized to segments, and you will see greater results in the business and in the boardroom.

Mark Price is Managing Partner of M Squared Group, a consulting firm focused on understanding and building customer relationships, and the author of the blog “Cultivating Your Customers,” where he writes about practical approaches to improve customer retention and overall customer value.

Brand Transparency and Trust

Ashley Haugen

I am a chronic product-reviewer before shopping. Even if it’s just picking up another toothbrush, I run to the internet before running to the store. Usually there is a review somewhere online, and the allure of getting the “inside scoop” on my prospective purchase is enough to keep me googling “Crest vs. Colgate”

I am not alone. According to a new study from Alterian (via eMarketer), 51% of consumers always compare products and services before making a purchase. The survey also shows that only 1% of respondents (made up of Internet users from the United States and United Kingdom) never compare products and services before making a purchase.

That’s a whole lot of people typing into a search engine your product or service. What’s going to pop up? Sponsored ads? A corporate website? Or perhaps a negative review on Yelp, or a glowing fan base on Facebook.  The wealth of outlets now available for consumers to voice their opinion is large, and that has given power back to the consumer to scope out the “truth” about a brand.

Social networking and DIY media-exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase as consumers become more comfortable with their power to get the true story on products from total strangers. Rather than simply trusting experts or putting faith in brands, consumers expect to do their own research and comparison shopping using many sources. In fact, just behind friends and family, people trust web reviews of a company or product the most, according to the same study from Alterian.

In the survey, respondents were asked who they were most likely to trust for advice when researching a product or service. In answer to that question, only 13% said they trusted what a company says about itself or advertising or promotional features. The results of the survey are as follows:

• 40% trust friends and family
• 28% trust professional reviews on web sites, newspapers or magazines
• 19% trust reviews from people “like you” on web sites
• 8% trust what the company says about itself
• 5% trust advertising or promotional features

With the boom of social media and online consumer review sites, it all comes down to one thing: there is no longer anywhere for shady business to hide. If a brand stretches the truth, handles negative feedback poorly, or doesn’t deliver on a promise, consumers have a very public platform to call it out. Now-a-days, playing fair and honest is the only way to stay in this highly visible and un-censored “game.”

After all the events of 2010-banks collapsing, economies faltering, bailout packages-people need something to believe in again. This is why transparency and trust are so important for brands in 2011. People always love something to believe in. Create expectations for your brand in consumers’ minds that they can trust and rely on. If you are able to do that, you will find a “Tweeting,” “Facebooking” and “Yelping” bunch of brand loyalists who can become your most powerful source of word-of-mouth marketing, brand advocacy and brand guardianship.

Ashley Haugen is a Gustavus Adolphus College alum. She has had Marketing experience working with such organizations as the LOFT Literary Center, and the Gustavus Marketing Department. She is currently a marketing intern at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul. 

Where are the Marketers in the Employer Brand Conversation?

Heather Polivka

 If you are like most marketers, including yours truly before I entered this field, you probably just asked yourself “what is an Employer Brand?”

As someone who was in product management & marketing for many years, I had no idea that this field existed when I was first approached about my current role as the Director of Employer Branding & Marketing for UnitedHealth Group.

What is an Employer Brand?  It is the image of an organization as a “great place to work” in the minds of present, past and future employees as well as other key stakeholders in the external market such as clients, customers, stockholders, competitors and more.

The Employer Brand is closely associated to, and should be aligned with the Corporate/Organizational Brand as well as its Consumer Brand(s) to be authentic.  Yet the Employer Brand is distinct.  An Employer Brand essentially communicates that if the people of the organization help deliver on our promises to our customers (consumer brand), and realize our reason for being as an organization (corporate brand), then here is what the people of the organization can expect in return (employee value proposition).

Wal-mart.  They have had numerous lawsuits associated with their alleged employment practices.  Those lawsuits have an impact on how the customers and the communities they operate within perceive them. Thus profoundly impacting their Employer Brand and what present, future, and past employees think about the company.

Southwest Airlines has long been a case study for how the Employer Brand impacts the quality of the customer service delivery and the overall operational performance of the organization, resulting in an organization that is the exception to many airline industry performance metrics.  In this case, the Employer Brand positively drives both the consumer and corporate brand realization.

Given recent events, what has been the impact to the Employer Brand of companies like BP, the coal mining industry, General Motors, Toyota, or financial institutions?  Furthermore, what is the impact to the consumer brand at companies like Nestle, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Estee Lauder given recent lawsuits related to alleged unfair employment practices?

What’s my point?  It actually leads to more questions:  Why are Human Resource conferences, webinars and leaders the primary ones engaging in the discussion, development, and ongoing management of the Employer Brand?  When will our Marketing conferences, webinars, and leaders be equal contributors to the conversation?

If you are a marketing, PR, and communications leader, I invite you to set up a meeting with your HR leaders to discuss your employer brand, employer marketing, social recruiting strategies, and mobile recruiting strategies.  You might be surprised what you’ll learn.  And I know they’ll be appreciative and relieved at the value, knowledge, and experience you bring to the equation.

As social media continues to rise to the top of the food chain as part of many marketing strategies today, the evolving roles of our employees as brand ambassadors make the alignment between what we promise our shareholders, our customers, and our employees more important than ever. 

The time has come for us to join the conversation.  Not because it’s a nice thing to do. Because it’s the right thing to do to effectively manage our brands, drive business performance, and impact results. 
  
Heather Polivka led the development of the UnitedHealth Group Employer Brand, from the methodology, through the research and discovery phase, to the creative execution. Most recently, she launched the company’s social recruiting strategy as a key communication vehicle of the brand and continues to apply leading consumer marketing practices to United Health Group’s Employer Marketing and Talent Attraction strategy. Her passion for driving innovation, and her understanding of consumer behavior, was fueled by over ten years of product management with Target Corporation and as Managing Director of Product Marketing with Lenox Group, Inc. "At the end of the day, it is the authenticity and integrity of the brand that will determine the outcome."