Michael Deiner, Brand Activation Manager at JPL in Harrisburg PA, writes in the Brand 3.0 Group in LinkedIn: "Every time I read an article, white paper or blog about brand strategy development, the term “Differentiation” is featured as one of the key elements. Yes, differentiation is a key element in building an effective brand strategy, but it doesn’t stop there. Simply saying the same thing in a different way does not create the required space between your brand and your competitor’s brand. http://tinyurl.com/yf3ae3v"
To which I add:
The issue of differentiation in branding reminds me of what William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, notably said about style:
"Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance—and with a toupee there is always a second glance—he doesn't look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn't look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker's almost perfect skill. The point is that he doesn't look like himself."
Other words, the differentiation is either there or not. It can't be embellished into reality. Michael, your advice – research your competition, your market, your own offering – will reveal what differentiation exists and can be reinforced over the long haul.
Conveying this differentiation is all about achieving clarity. Really, this is what good branding people get paid for. In most cases, effective branding is closer to sculpting than building. The essence is already in there. To produce, you chip away the unneeded material rather than assembling something from parts.
One could have expected the mea culpa ad from Toyota to be a well-crafted piece. Like the company's response to the quality concerns motivating the recalls, it might have been slow in coming, but the rollout shows poise and competence. In communications like these the implications and subliminal signals mean as much as what's stated. That's what got me thinking that one of these signals is amazingly cynical. Here's the ad:
Already the news shows are replaying (and thus conditioning us with) the lines, starting at approximately 0:13 in this YouTube stream, "In recent days, our company hasn't been living up to the standards you've come to expect from us, or we expect from ourselves." This is pitch and tone broadcast at a master level.
Then, "That's why 172,000 Toyota and dealership and employees are dedicated to making things right." The production lines will stop, the fixes to affected cars made . . . and so on. We'll earn back your trust! Very earnest.
BUT. Note the imagery when the narrator is delivering these lines. It's factory workers. The ad is signaling to us (or maybe just me) that the assembly workers are the face of the problem and by extension the source of the buying public's disappointment. Not the design engineers, not the procurement people who sourced manufacture of Toyota parts to the fringes of the global supply web, and especially not the executives who heretofore have been under scrutiny for sitting on the quality problems long after they were made aware of them. We don't even see a suit and tie in the ad.
In the first act of this morality play of commerce and hubris – about a week before the TV ad began its run – Jim Lentz, head of Toyota Motor Sales USA, ventured out to take the spears, notably going on the Today show and taking questions via YouTube. And in the days before the ad debuted, Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder, went before the cameras to take personal, public responsibility in the Japanese manner. But these are one day's NPR moment, the messages that senior executives in government need to hear from their private-sector peers during this kind of high-magnitude shitstorm. The ad is the thing playing into living rooms at peak viewing times and ultimately positioning the public reaction.
Is it just me, or is this one of those dastardly Abu Ghraib plays where confoundment from on high quickly gives way to fixing blame on underlings? Yet more cynical: in this case, the line workers we see in the commercial had nothing whatever to do with the problems being acknowledged by Toyota in its ad. It could be argued that the ad's strategy is simply to humanize the company and remind us that Toyota is composed of our friends and countrymen. But that's still my point. The story occasioning the ad is one of poor executive decisions by "The Company," of corporate action and inaction, of bean-counting and, for a while there, attempted avoidance. Not of line workers screwing up. So why do these brown-baggers have to get spun into the works?
I'm hoping it was RLM, Toyota's overachieving stateside PR firm, that thought up this device to mitigate scrutiny of their clients in the executive suite. As opposed to someone inside Toyota's leadership. And as opposed to the alternative that the signal I received is not the one being sent.
Maybe it's me. Could I be calculating enough to read more into the situation than the kings of crisis management? It should be noted I'm no ideological foe of globalism and all that. Rather, I'm a fan of the communications profession. So much so that I must acknowledge evil genius (or maybe it's just me) for the genius it is.
A decent snapshot of ad spending trends by media and region. And some ammunition for those of us who are bullish on a future in which the web unequivocally supplants print as the main platform for the professional news industry.
On his Duets blog, brand attorney Stephen Baird gives a guest spot to strategist Jack Cuffari, who elaborates on the often-misunderstood definitions of planning terms. It's quite an extensive primer, and here is the comment I offered to it:
Strategic planning is both the basis of my communications practice and the siren's call that threatens to crash good ideas on the rocks of abstraction. Accordingly, I try to reduce the operative terminology to its most actionable essence. The main thing is the components of planning should fit clearly into a delivery system.
Vision: What is the big-picture opportunity and how will it make an impact?
Mission: Defines how you intend to realize the vision.
Goal: Defines success for a mission-driven initiative.
Objectives: The results necessary to achieve your goal.
Strategy: The game plan for executing a mission and the rigorous justification for trying. Defines cost-benefit of the goals, objectives, tactics.
Tactics: Specific approaches/techniques for meeting objectives and thus fulfilling the strategy.
Via the reformist economics blog The Baseline Scenario comes word of the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act" introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT). "Baseline" blogger James Kwak offers this policy analysis: "The bill says that Treasury can break up [dangerously over-sized financial] institutions any way they want to, so long as the resulting entities do not individually threaten the financial system (and thereby our economic well-being)."
My epistemological analysis: In this historical moment, Congress is trying to scale an 1,100-page health care bill that is giving literal meaning to the phrase "landmark legislation." The brevity of the "Too Big" Act is a signal call for clear thinking that must pierce the political/bureaucratic static. Here's how you can read it in its 250-word entirety and join the petition to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner requesting its immediate enactment.
An interesting discussion started today on the LinkedIn Digital Publishing Network. From New Delhi, feelancer Devaki Khanna pings a Reuters article that digs into the slow market penetration of the e-book. Commenting from Ireland, Karl Capp, Managing Director at Rolonews Limited, attributes the slow sales to uncoolness and ungainliness, arguing, "As soon as Apple properly address e-readers there will be no hesitation."
Here's what I had to add:
Seems to me that the main delta to overcome here isn't technology, content, cost, sticky branding, or even interface. It's perceived value.
Today you have to pay upwards of a couple hundred bucks to get a basic e-book reader. The price tag by itself is a factor, but the main barrier occurs because people compare this to the cost of a printed book, or even a notebook computer.
Cognitive dissonance: A reader is not a book. Functionally it's so much more. But still. A tablet reader is not a notebook computer. Functionally it's a different animal (it's about display rather than activity). But still.
I think a fitting product analogy to e-readers is the cable modem, the little box needed to get Internet via cable. Initially, when marketed as a purchase extra in a subscription service model, the value was hard to grasp and it was a barrier to entry. But when it was absorbed by the Internet company (subscription provider) as a loss leader, the value delta closed. Today, Internet aficionados can still buy premium cable boxes. But most people get theirs on lease from the cable company and pay a little bit a month for the privilege and don't even notice. The cable companies reap multiples of the purchase price of the modem over time.
My guess is that e-book providers will adopt this model.
In the October 29 New York Times, Dave Eggars gives us a loving review of "Look at the Birdie," a collection of previously unpublished short stories by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. A joyous read for those, like me, who also looked to Vonnegut as "our sage and chain-smoking truth-teller." The review will particularly reward that subset of readers that prizes the canny and ascendant writing of the American Mid-Century.
I was whiling away a Sunday evening with an amusing Salon.com article about knuckleheads in the US Senate. Then a commenter bracingly reminded the blogosphere of the serious public-affairs moment we're in:
Is the civil war over yet?
I couldn't even be bothered to read the article-we have, as a country, bigger fish to fry. I received an automated phone message from my daughters' school earlier tonight telling parents that they will not allow Obama's insidious "stay in school and work hard" address to be broadcast.
I have never been more ashamed of, or afraid for, my country than I am right now.
I'm a veteran educator, and despite my political leanings, I never censored an address to my students by George W., nor was I ever instructed to. His views were appropriately the subject of intellectual discourse between a teacher and her students. They never knew who I voted for...instead, I thought my job was to guide them to analyze the current issues seriously without imposing upon them my own opinions.
And now this. I'm disgusted and I'm frightened. Frankly, I think it's all about race. Maybe we are as stupid, and as racist, as the rest of the world thinks we are. Shame on us.
Fears of leftist indoctrination? – A commonly stated point of opposition by the no-Obama-in-school crowd. Since when has the American left been skilled enough with indoctrination to warrant fear? I'd argue that in the last 50 years the left's one prevailing effort of national-scale youth indoctrination has been civil rights and racial tolerance.
A disruption of school time? An unprecedented use of the presidential bully pulpit? – Won't even dignify these. Thankfully, others have been willing to do the thankless debunking work.
It pains me that parents protesting the speech have said they'd take their kids out of school on September 8 in order to keep them from being exposed to a direct address from the president. Even worse is their (in many cases successful) pressuring schools not to show the speech. A crushing rebuttal to this strain of thought(lessness) can be found in a quote from Alan K. Simpson, the former Republican senator of Wyoming:
“Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.”
The "liberal" Simpson refers to has nothing to do with US politics. He's talking about exposure to the world of ideas, not a cherry-picked subset.
Bottom line: I just don't believe the Obama school-address protesters who say it's not about race. At the depths of it – maybe so far down it's hidden even to the people who say it's not about race – it's about race.
For various reasons – including my own reason, the wish we'd just get past this crap – most of us don't want to put race front and center of public affairs. But, reading between the lines of the national discourse, I think race is the big complacency-shattering issue bubbling up beneath a bunch of platform issues such as the economy, health care and the environment.
Got into an interesting LinkedIn conversation, excerpted here. If you are in non-profit leadership, this is good reading. The question, posed by brand strategist Colin Dowling, is this: "What's your thoughts on the importance of branding for non-profit organizations?"
"The term Not for Profit has no meaning in the world of business, only in the world of taxation. Each and every NFP is competing for the recognition and the pocket of a consumer, just like any other brand would do. And therefore, branding is essential in the NFP world, especially when many similar causes are represented by so many different organization." – Ilan Geva
"Branding is essential in the world of Non-profit. But, the two greatest impediments to branding in the NFP world are budget (which tends to be non-existent) and discomfort with the concept of branding itself. Many folks enter the world of non-profit with a desire to escape the negative aspects of the for-profit world, of which they perceive branding to be a part." – Phil Granoff
"Branding should be viewed as an essential aspect of reaching your audience, not as a trick of the corporate world. If you do not have a brand image, how do hope to stay in the minds of the people you hope to serve and the people you hope will fund your efforts?" – Michelle Johnston
"For the NFPs I've worked with - I am on the board of one now - branding has traditionally been viewed as an expensive nice-to-have. In my work, I try to explain that building a brand need not be expensive. In fact, it already exists - the choice is not whether or not to brand the organization, but rather whether to try to control/enhance the brand image or not. The investment of time spent thinking through the brand fundamentals pays back enormous dividends." – Peter Sonenstein
"When done well branding can be a key difference and core asset for a not for profit organization . . . . increased donor support and loyalty, enhanced volunteer and board recruitment and greater awareness to name but a few." – Stephen McGill
Underlying the consensus here on the value of branding for NFPs is a related need my company is now discussing with foundations: the need to be a lot more clear about goals, metrics and outcomes.
Many endowments have taken a significant hit in the fiscal crisis and will be slow to recover. Among foundations, the funding engine for most NFPs, the new chatter is "How do we get more impact from our resources?" I see this as a cultural change: the foundation as investor rather than as funding provider. Meaning, "How do we do better with return on investment?" Returning to the underlying need, foundations tend to think and communicate in terms of intentions. But they're soft on describing the outcomes they're seeking. And if they've not defined expected outcomes for themselves, so how can they enforce accountability on the nonprofits they fund? This is a vicious cycle in the NFP world. Research, metrics, efficiencies? From what I've seen, most program officers are too busy managing grant requests to tackle these challenges in a substantial way.
Clarity on outcomes will help foundations tighten their brands. Among other virtues, tighter brands can lower the volume of applicants, freeing foundation resources to focus on efficiency and accountability.
Comment I left at Randall Beard's blog in response to the question, "Is the New PR really just the New Marketing?":
PR, marketing – these are professional systems that grew up in the Midcentury era. Today these industries are being reformulated to address the huge Millennial impacts of the web, globalization of media, the resulting emerging markets and consumer behaviors. PR and marketing are big industries that carry water for even bigger industries – the castles of the macroeconomy – P&G, Amex, etc. All that structure does not bend and twist easily.
Yet change is the supreme law of commerce. The methods for generating commerce have always been about whatever works. Today there's more whatever and, as noted in your blog post, the mass media have become more democratic. Whether in response PR is functioning more like marketing or marketing like PR, I see this discussion as a snapshot from the evolving art of persuasion. How do we persuade people to buy in the digital age? My question is, what are the consequences to the PR and marketing industries in changing their definition? How does this affect the way they compete?
"Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance—and with a toupee there is always a second glance—he doesn't look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn't look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker's almost perfect skill. The point is that he doesn't look like himself."
