Category Archives: Marketing

It’s good to know

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Update: Seth Godin on trade marks

A couple of days ago I bought a kit-kat. (Wait a second, I swear this isn’t turning to THAT kind of blog)
While munching on it, getting my chocolate fix (I’m a hopeless sweet-tooth), I suddenly noticed on the back, hovering between the nutrition table and the contact info, was a sentence.

it's good to know (tm)

“It’s good to know™“
click the image to see it full size)Now, I’m not saying it is not good to know the nutritional price of a kit-kat, or to have someone to talk to about it, or other kit-kat related issues.
But trade marking “it’s good know”?!What’s that about?
How did this idea came to be?
Who supported it? Actually thought it was a good idea? (Good? Great, otherwise – how would you justify the legal costs?)
Who was the one to apply and trade-marked it?
Successfully?!
Is that a world wide trade mark?

It’s good to know truth is still stranger then fiction.
It’s even better to know the output of corporate culture is often stranger than both.

Damn, I hope I haven’t infringed on Nestlé’s trade-mark, their corporate reputation hints they are not to be messed with…

Update (Nov 7th 2006): Richard Veryard points that Rabbi Friedman also says it’s good to know(TM). Religion using knowledge as trademark makes sense in weird way.

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Marketing-stories, and stories about stories

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52379795_ef6c266af6_m.jpgMany traditional branding methods, rely on values & attributes to define brands, but these tend to be similar in competitive markets. “Innovation” and “Simplicity” come to mind as current popular values. “Empowerment” and “Enabling” were very strong about 5-6 years ago in the bubble days.
Values & attributes also tend to be limiting when things get intricate, they start to merge or contradict, broaden their meaning to the point they become useless at creating focus, or worse turn to generic clichés.
Often they will just float out there in their pure bright solitude, increasingly disconnected from your organisation, your brand, what you meant for them to do. From meaning.

Stories are closer to the way people interpret, articulate and communicate (complex) meaning in most contexts.
That’s another reason one-word-equity (whether you refer to the “new” concept or the “old” one) just can’t work – The association networks people have about brands are tangled, fluid, complex things. Trying to introduce focus using this “laser” approach is hopeless – the mind will (and should) resist. Telling a story influences perception in a much subtler way.

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Let’s get it right, your brand & “your brand” aren’t the same

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19750840_ce169b72a6_m.jpgBefore we go on to discuss “advanced storytelling” among other things, I would like to make something clear:
Your brand in not “your brand”.

To some of you this may seem as stating the obvious, but as my years in marketing go by, again and again I find this confusion at the centre of many branding projects. Quite often, the same team in the same room will talk about two different things. Continue reading →

Sinfully late appendix and summary

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90738738_7a0f35b343_m.jpgA late but warm thank you to people adding sins to the list:

Shawn Callahan

I would add to your list a reluctance by gurus to reveal their sources. Miraculously great ideas materialise from nowhere.

Ed Omeara:

Failure to Validate: I can’t tell you how many of these folks come up with some statistically valid observations based on a qualitative study or deep dive on internal data, but never go to the trouble of validating it. “We interviewed 150 people and found these three factors were most important to them in the way they buy X”…but then they never go to the trouble of hypothesis testing or examining the variables in the real world! They just write-up a new book, register a trademark, develop a few seminar slides, and hit the speaking circuit.
Testing for Scale: And how many times have we read recently that Webinars are more efficient than trade shows? PR is more efficient than advertising? Blogging is more efficient than PR? And, then read sweeping declarations, quoted in all the best magazines, that obviously the leader on that function should “have a seat at the table”, and how every company should move all their wasted Wannamaker money into these more effective “strategies”? Yet, how many times does someone say, Gee, how much can that idea scale? or at what point doesn’t it work? How many email blasts are too many? Will 1000 more pr people really increase our revenue? How many blogs can a company meaningfully produce before everyone is stepping all over each other?

Cool follow-ups included David Maiser (strong comments in the discussion over there), and an interesting off-topic musing by Ken Boasso.

And in case you’re wondering about the Kawasaki Effect – in the two weeks following Guy’s post about 7000 new people visited this blog.
An unpredictable but awesome side effect also that this list was translated to other languages!
What can I say? The two years and a bit it took me to move from decision stage to actually getting this blog online are probably the most irresponsible thing I have done throughout my career.

Long term effect – the RSS counter broke the 200 barrier, which is really the highest compliment I could hope for.
Thank you for your attention, I will do my best to make it worth your while…

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The top 12 sins of Marketing Gurus (and their books)

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yoda.jpgI thought I’d help Guy round up his Lies series, by writing about my top 12 favorite sins of marketing gurus and their books.

  1. Anecdotal evidence: Guru’s are always telling nice (even great) stories, giving lots of examples and anecdotes. Those can be a lot of fun and quite educational, but most are too specific to work for you, and when you want a more thorough justification it’s not necessarily there, thanks to the invention of best practices…
  2. Best practices: best practices are a result of reverse-engineering, so it’s like trying to figure out a cake recipe by using a lab analysis of its ingredients. Most are either too generalized to be helpful with specific problems, or too atomized to be restructured practically.
    “Best Practices” actually means: building on experience in a world of disruption and fluid rules ; Building on gut feelings on subjects that are built on complex, contradictory or just messy theoretical disciplines ; Using imitation in a world where very few players actually know what they’re doing and even they use a lot of trial and error.
    And when best practices are not powerful enough you can make them into rules… Continue reading →