David Michael Rich

Experience Marketing is Social Media of the Deepest Reward

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:25:00 +0000

We know about the power of online social media to connect people of mutual interests and passions with each other to exchange ideas, innovate, and celebrate... creating a type of consumer value that, when it's done well, builds communities, brings people closer to brands, and drives sales. Got it. Love it. Use it.

Experience marketing, meaning all early types of face to face engagement from conferences and trade shows to entertainment and sports marketing, proved the core value of doing this ages before the online version of social was a gleam in anyone's eye. Experience marketing is the original social media, and continues to provide power, especially in the contemporary form which retains the types of the past just mentioned but adds to it types such as Pop Up, user-generated, and virtual/in-person hybrid, to name a few.

Experience marketing then, since by definition a form of communication, is a form of media. Experience is media. But it's a specific type of media. It's media that drives participation and delivers rewards in the deepest ways possible. The act of consuming experience marketing is actually participation. It's participation in the brand. It is satisfying to consumers in that the participants get the opportunity to freely try on aspects of brands emotionally and psychologically. They get to imaginarily experience how their lives can be improved by the brand if it is new to their lives as in the case of demand generation marketing, or how it can be further improved by going deeper with the brand if the participant is already in the fold as in the case of marketing designed for retention and loyalty deepening.

When done really well, experience marketing persuades consumers by offering an experience that brings tantalizingly close a vision of a person's changed self-estimate. As their participation in the brand helps them experience a vision of their improved lives, the brand becomes a part of consumers selves they don't want to live without. When I choose to participate in a brand (its offerings, its community, its values) all at once I'm adding value to my life, but also to my sense of self because the way I measure myself is in many ways the result of how I measure the choices I make and their consequences. Which means it alters my self-esteem, good or bad.

If the brand choice in the aspirational stage seems to be a good one and turns out to be so in reality, it enhances my self-esteem. In some way, either small or large, it makes me a bigger hero in my own story, and we're reluctant to let go of things so fundamentally (psychically) rewarding. 30 second commercials have often attempted to cause this effect but the limitations of time and distance are hard to transcend. Experience marketing, with it's face-to-face, often in-person, multi-sensory, user-directed, and time extended form is the one that puts at the marketer's disposal all the conditions and elements necessary to make this vision of self-enhancement happen most powerfully. Experience marketing is social media of the deepest reward.

5 “i’s of Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:50:00 +0000

Sure the "Ps" of marketing are a great foundation, but when marketing is tasked with driving the creation of the core offering, add 5 I's:

Irresistibility: In order to guarantee the ability to break through the clutter most powerfully and achieve dominate shares of market – especially but not exclusively in high involvement categories -- there has to be something about the product and marketing that is truly irresistible. Without irresistibility, you’re going nowhere. For different segments, what drives that irresistibility will be different. The combination of Apple brand values built into nearly every one of their products has indeed created a high degree of irresistibility in their category: unprecedented capability-extending convenience for every day tasks, elegant design, intuitive operability, high quality, etc. Who wouldn’t want to have a question answering personal assistant built right into a device you can hold in your hand? The advertising for the iPhone has been irresistible too as it focused on the capabilities and personal enjoyment to be gained from them. Irresistibility results in "I want it."

Irreplaceability: This is no small task in a world abundant with options. Still, driving ourselves to create moments of engagement that can’t be easily obtained by any other means provides the differentiation brands so ardently seek. This is the argument for marketers to be central figures in the innovation efforts of companies, not just the leaders of communications. CMO's keeping an eye on how the product, the packaging, the purchasing and on-going usage experience is part of brand management can use their customer centric orientation to help spur development of authentically unique offerings. That then makes the comms task a whole lot easier because then it is about emphasizing truths rather than spinning desirability out of "me to" sameness. (Anyone remember "Zune"?) That said, dimensionalizing the brand values in the marketing is just as important as influence on product development. I give an example below but for now, let's recognize that irreplaceability results in "I want your version of the product and no other substitute will satisfy as powerfully."

Indelibility: Much has been written about ideas that stick and the first two "i's" are critical qualities in the product/service development effort. The requirement is doing that consistently in every single product and aspect of the purchase/use experience. When it comes to the communication of this -- the part of the exercise traditionally thought of as "the marketing" -- the challenge is reflecting the irresistibility and irreplaceability of the brand through a marketing experience that is also unique in itself while putting the brand values into high relief. When this happens, the experience of that outsized satisfaction implants deeply in the psyche of the consumer. It results in the brand equity that allows one to cash in on the efforts behind Irresistibility and irreplaceability at the moment of consumer choice rather than lose out to a competitor over brand confusion.

Example of all three “i’s rolled into one experience? The combination of brand experience communicated in the ad campaign contrasting the Microsoft based technology world vs. the Apple one -- one world in which things never work simply enough compared with a world in which things work intuitively -- supported by the Apple products themselves, the ability to try them in the store easily and with the aid of knowledgeable brand ambassadors pre-purchase, and the Genius Bar at the stores to take care of us post-purchase. Together, we get an irresistible, irreplaceable, and indelible brand experience. Why? It's irresistible through its answering of a strong "want" with ease. It's irreplaceable until a competitor finds a way to surpass it. And it's indelible due to the powerful integration of brand values built into the product, the service and the advertising. This integration gives the brand its fourth "i", Integrity.

Employing the first three “i’s isn’t easy, especially doing it consistently to the point of achieving the fourth one. It requires an unrelenting pursuit of high standards and the courage to hold out for the achievement of them. That means Job’s actually left us a fifth “i” to consider: “Insistence.”

Spotify: The New Frictionless Experience Champion

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 14:29:00 +0000

I've written before that one of they keys to great experience driven brand engagement is the elimination of friction.

My brand new friction fave is Spotify. (Thanks Padmasree for the invite.) Half asleep this morning I downloaded the app from the invite link. I clicked it open. I chose "get started." I typed in my first artist's name, "Lori McKenna," so I could hear her original version of the stunning Keith Urban cover "Luxury of Knowing." Bam, there it was in an instant! (That's a top of the category user experience.)

Now I'm off and running. I'm headed out to the gym for a quick work out, but I'm going with the anticipation (get it?) that when I get back, I will be able to effortlessly create (sounds like "engagement" doesn't it?) my own "afternoon-out-on-the-deck-doing my-homework" playlist, all built from music I haven't had time to download from iTunes or... remember those days now... go out to my favorite local bricks and mortar music hang, Newbury Comics, and buy as CD's. While on the site, I will be exposed to whatever advertising is there, and I won't mind a bit because I will be getting more value than I'm asked to give. (Sound like a leverage principle?)

Check out Spotify with the idea of understanding how the frictionless engagement creates an irresistible user experience, and hold this up as a benchmark against which you measure the creation of all moments in your brand experience marketing work.

It's going to be a great afternoon of music.

Hail to Spotify. The new "Frictionless Experience" champion.

Let's see, I want some Urban, McKenna, Springsteen, Emmylou and Mark Knopfler...

Success in the 2010's? Try The Power Triad

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:32:00 +0000

As the world changes and marketing with it, everyone from CEO's and CMO's on the brand side, to business, creative and strategy execs on the agency side, are left scrambling to figure out what to do.

One day you're creating what you think are killer marketing tactics that take 6 months to develop, the next day you wake up to find will.i.am has just lapped you through the TV commercial work he's wedged into his spare time between prepping for the Super Bowl, releasing a new album, touring, and producing tracks for several of the hottest acts in music. It feels like it's no longer enough to be just one person; to succeed you have to be several. That's the point. It's time to be your own best mash up: The Power Triad. Jealous of that certain musician who seems to be doing everything and better than almost everybody? It appears he's leveraging The Power Triad to the max.

What "The Power Triad"? At base, this isn't a new idea, it's the hyphenate. In Hollywood, the writer-director-producer is almost cliché. In sports, while there's certainly a history of famous specialists like home run hitter Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio was lauded for his excellence in all the major playing skills and became known as "the Greatest Baseball Player Who Ever Lived". And good marketers have always been a combination of social scientist, creators and business people. This is so true that when Frans Johansson came out with his book, "The Medici Effect" a few years ago -- as good and valuable as it is -- why it was being touted as "breakthrough" was a mystery. As he freely admits right in the title, the idea of combining proficiencies from a variety of disciplines has been around since, well at least as far back as the Medici. Still, it's a worthwhile read.

What's changed though is the absolute need to pursue the approach with unerringly well focused intent, and at every level, from how we approach job role success to single project results. A lot of Johansson's efforts are soundly focused on innovation. I think the application of the multidisciplinary principle is also valuable more broadly.

I'm calling this hyper cross disciplinary approach "The Power Triad." The idea is that when planning your approach to succeeding, you break your task down into the three most important components. Then, for each of the three components you ask yourself, "what disciplines or professions do this kind of thing really well?". Next you place them into a triad action structure that helps you prioritize your focal points for the greatest results.

Here's an example we used at a recent event marketing conference session:

If you're creating a virtual marketing experience intended to move people to some specific action, break that task down into its three most essential elements.

1. Asking yourself who understands motivation best, you select the field of psychology as the first discipline required to tap in order to succeed.

2. You identify that a virtual experience plays out on media screens, and select movies as a discipline that understands how to keep people engaged over extended periods of time while giving them new perspectives through on screen experiences, and that producers make this happen, on budget.

3. Given the newness of virtual events, and the inherent political risks in driving that kind of change in an organization --especially in the context of a down economy in which every penny spent needs to yield results -- you identify that the event needs to be measured in a way that's beyond reproach. Since the metrics of the finance team are gospel in most organizations, you choose this as the third discipline in the triad, and the standard bearer of this function, the CFO, as the focal point.

With your three disciplines chosen, you roll it all up into an articulated Power Triad by marrying one or more verbs with each discipline. In this example we would say that in order to produce a successful virtual event one needs to:

"Think like a psychologist, manage like a movie producer, and measure like a CFO."

Then you follow through by studying what top professionals in those three disciplines do in their work to succeed, and adapt those best practices to the specifics of your situation. In this way The Power Triad helps you focus on the three most powerful things you can do to optimize results. Try it. The more you do it, the faster you'll be able to develop more -- and more powerful -- Power Triads until it becomes your standard operating procedure. Use it for everything from isolated tasks to your approach to job role success.

Do it now. Will.i.am is gaining on you. What's your Power Triad?

Paul McCartney and Tim Sanders Are Still Right: Love Is the Killer (Marketing) App

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 05:01:00 +0000

Tim Sanders' insightful, best-selling book, "Love Is The Killer App" is written as helpful guidance for individuals looking to advance their own brand, careers and the companies for whom they work. First published in 2002, it’s even more relevant today and just as useful for organizational brands as it is for personal.

Hopefully we’ve all already accepted that the marketing clutter is deafening and the challenge in cutting through it is enormous. Turning up the volume in pursuit of effective marketing can be a fool’s errand. There are other means much more effective; love chief among them.

Tim promotes three specific ways of expressing love in the work setting that drive results. For the details, you’ve got to read the book, but to simplify the idea, I can tell you that he promotes the concept that those who give love -- in the various forms appropriate to each situation -- often get it in return. If you want to connect with people, love can be the shortest distance between two points, even when we’re not talking about the romantic kind.

What does this mean for brands? If I may put my own spin on Sanders’ guidance and expand it, it doesn’t mean giving the product away for free. This isn’t a product sampling or “tryvertising” concept, although doing that in the right doses, in the right ways, and at the right times, can sometimes be an effective component of this approach. Rather though, this is all about giving away some kind of other value that’s helpful to the prospect and fits to the brand context. For instance, manufacturers of smart phones with video cameras might offer free online modules about taking, editing and posting videos optimized for the third screen. Want to make it even stronger? Provide a way of interacting while learning, perhaps by allowing the user to post their videos with questions that get expert responses.

Through this interactive love sharing, the prospect gets the sense that the brand cares about them, and the experience of mastery the brand provides fosters a sense of potential for self-accomplishment and maybe even a little self-esteem. It offers consumers a chance to engage with and get to know the brand in a non-obligatory, feel-good setting through which the brand builds credibility. If repeated often enough, a bond can be established. Once bonded people are more likely to purchase. This cuts through the clutter like no slogan or funny commercial ever could, because it goes deep and resides in the hearts and minds of the market.

The trick though for marketers is to remember that, just like romantic love, if this expression of caring is too infrequent, the bond eventually dies. This means that marketing love has to be constantly worked in order to keep it fresh, or the customer falls prey to the seduction of other suitors.

Paul McCartney said it best when he wrote: “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” John Lennon said it was the best lyric Paul ever wrote. Tim Sanders gives us the valuable "how-to" details in his book. I can think of no better gift you can give yourself as a marketer on this Valentine’s Day than a copy of Tim’s “Love Is The Killer App.” Read it and as you do, ask yourself how its concepts can translate towards creating great brands and organizations, and you’ll see that love is in fact still the killer (marketing) app. Thanks Tim, and Paul.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Two Big Lessons from CES 2011: Friction and Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Every year the hope about CES is that it will be a sea of innovation. It usually is. The only question is whether it will be a sea of big waves of industry changing breakthroughs or small waves of incremental improvements. This year we saw small variations on Apple's iPad (in some 80 tablets), and similar size advances in touch and gesture control, large scale advances in image quality and more strides in changing dimensions; thinner and bigger flat panel TV's, and ever smaller devices that fit in our pockets.

The most prevalent innovation theme that ran through the show this year though might have been "convergence." For instance:

1. AMD introduced Fusion APU which combines the capability of powerful GPU's (graphics processors) with computing capabilities of CPU's for amazing visual and functional results. See AMD Fusion at CES

2. Motorola introduced the Atrix phone, essentially a computer in a phone that converts to a laptop experience and also acts as a media server driving home TV's. (See the video below) It allows us to consume media seamlessly from mobile phone activated outside the home to TV inside the home, to laptop-like device everywhere in between.

3. LG showed off its Touch TV with which you can "draw" on the TV screen with a stylus creating art, interacting with programs and games, and navigating the web.

These particular forms of convergence draw us like a magnet. Why? Two reasons: Reduction of friction, and increase of Inspiration:

1. Reduction of friction: our lives are full of tasks large and small, with each one having it's own outline or perimeter around it. Erase the lines between two or more tasks (like talk on the phone while shopping for whatever it is we're discussing with our significant other) and we're eliminating some of the friction of life. A lot of what we saw at CES this year was about eliminating friction. Eliminating friction creates ease, and the more ease, the more that attracts us. Perhaps no example was more stunning than Motorola's Atrix smart phone. For underlying technology that reduces friction for better computing experiences, AMD's Fusion APU is equally note worthy.

2. Increase of inspiration: Inspiration often occurs when suddenly we can do something we've never been able to do before. Take LG's touch TV; it allows us to draw right on the televised image in a nearly limitless range of creative and interactive experiences. In the beginning of TV it was often called the electronic babysitter, but in a derogatory way; children watching mindless programming designed to sell them sugary treats. Now, with LG's touch plasma TV, the device can babysit while educating through hands-on interaction that allows kids to play games that teach them math. Brilliant, and but one example of what they've packed into this device.

What do these two principles offer experience marketers? Two things.

First, spend some time thinking about how you can use the above named technologies in staging your experiences. Technology can be a powerful enabler of media in marketing experiences and when they are as smart as those mentioned here, the technology disappears (just like the seams) and the subjects of the media are free to shine. If "innovation" is one of your brand attributes, just providing the media experience through innovative means starts to embed this attribute in your audiences' mind as one that's true about your brand.
Second, ask yourself what you can do to eliminate the friction in your marketing experiences while enabling new activities. Count the steps it takes from the start of your experience to the finish and see if you can reduce the number. Ask yourself how you can give people the experience of something about your brand they've never had before. A simulated but authentic experience of life improved by your brand? A live data map of an improved transaction process? A live video chat with other users of your product? Reducing friction and increasing inspiration creates impact and buzz, the kind that generates tons of earned media. It's a great way to create experience-driven brand engagement.

What are your favorite brand experience or brand experience marketing examples of reducing friction and increasing inspiration? Share your comments here.

Ralph Lauren Uses Live Experience to Celebrate Online Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:01:00 +0000

In what is yet another demonstration of the complementary nature of digital and face2face experience (digitalive) Ralph Lauren celebrated the 10th anniversary of it's online presence through an extraordinary live experience in London and New York. It's a brilliant execution of a great clutter-busting strategy that proves at once that a brand can sell tradition in the most innovative ways and that nothing breaks through like big idea live brand experience.

You can see the action here, but don't forget to check out how Lauren is promoting the videos at the link provided below because their staging of the video on their site is equally brilliant and a key part of the strategy. See that not only do they feature vids that capture the action in both cities, they also provide a look behind the scenes at how it was all created, taking one more step to sell the 10th anniversary of ralphlauren.com one more time: http://bit.ly/f2fcelebratesdigital.

Ralph Lauren 4D Experience from F.TAPE on Vimeo.

5 Questions to Make Your "Brand Experience Identity" as Strong as Apple's

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 05:01:00 +0000

Whether you own an iTouch, iPhone or iPad or have just seen the commercials, online videos, or others using these products, you probably have seen people touching, tapping, and making pinching or reverse pinching and flicking motions across screens. This “Touch/Tap/Pinch/Flick” (TTPF) is the new experience vocabulary of commands for Apple, but it’s so much more; it's a powerful enhancement of their brand experience identity.

I remember when the Mac was born because I started to use one almost right away. It was easy to see that the mouse/screen icon oriented interface was much more intuitive than that of the dos system, the prevailing computer OS of the time (which wasn’t intuitive at all). But to use that first Mac interface you still needed some instruction. After all, no one had ever seen anything like it or the functions it could accomplish. By comparison, the new interface Apple has based it’s latest products around is so simple to use that seeing it once, even just on a TV commercial, is enough to teach you to do it yourself.

This simplicity makes this interface the killer interface of screen experience. How do I know? I heard a teenager asking her mother why the phone she had didn’t work that way, and "Mom, why doesn’t everything work that way?" Game. Set. Match. That kid didn’t grow up on this interface; it’s too new. But she adopted it as the standard for “how things ought to be” in record time. This interface has set a new bar for ease of use.

So then this isn’t just the standard by which all other screen-based products will be judged going forward. It’s the standard by which all product experiences will be judged going forward. And I don’t mean that people will necessarily expect, say their cars to be operated through these same three motions, although if one could, that would be brilliant. (And it probably will drive at least how some people will expect the nav/info/entertainment device embedded within their cars to work.) What I mean though is that the incredibly intuitive, natural simplicity on which Touch, Tap, Pinch, Flick is based is now the standard by which people will come to expect everything to work. And in that one motion (or set of motions) Apple has upped the brand experience identity game immeasurably.

So here are five questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Is your brand’s interface this simple?
2. Is it this intuitive and natural?
3. Can consumers learn to use it without any depth of instruction?
4. Is it instantly responsive and satisfying?
5. Does it possess any of these qualities to such a high and differentiating degree that it can be a major contributor to creating or enhancing your brand experience identity and brand preference?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s time to find out. And if the answers are “no,” then it’s time to re-engineer, using TTPF as your benchmark.

Story Telling or Story Building, McKee has the Keys

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:01:00 +0000

Story-telling has been an accepted marketing discipline for a long time. A recent article in Fast Company suggests that the future of advertising and marketing is in "story-building," an activity that unfolds real time in which social media audiences co-create the story with the brand. Wherever you sit on the story marketing spectrum from "telling" to "building," understanding what makes a great story is critical, and one of the best articulations of this discipline is "Story" by Robert McKee. This well-known script writer/doctor and screenwriting teacher offers many keys to the art.

One of the most effective keys McKee gives us is the understanding that the more (and more artfully) we contrast the protagonist and the antagonist and the other positive and negative values, the more compelling the story. (I'm simplifying.)

Sometimes the antagonist in our marketing story is a condition or environmental factor such as duration of time, or distance, or complexity. For instance, a media outlet might emphasize the degree of information complexity and even the ever rapidly increasing rate of it in contrast to its ability to distill all of that into a small number of clear and concise insights delivered on a timely basis. Telling the story of doing that has to be approached artfully, but a basic design can be put in place and then followed repeatedly in a series of advertisements.

Getting your audience to co-tell or co-build that story with the brand (as Fast Company suggests) can take this into a higher level of power. One idea is to provide an online space in which people are invited to respond to a question such as "How has X Media's insights improved your on-the-job performance?"

In treating this concept with an experience marketing approach this can be pushed to yet an even higher level of power by inviting the authors of the best responses to tell their story live at face-to-face events which also gives the opportunity to stream the experience live and on-demand over the web. While doing so we can put McKee's concept of high contrast to use by putting the presenter on stage in a director's chair, to the left of which can be an ever-building mound of newspapers, magazines, print reports, TV's and computers that builds over the course of the presentation, dramatizing the complexity of information. The contrast between that complexity and the clear insights revealed in the user's story can be further emphasized by projecting those insights onto a screen just to the right of the presenter as she reveals them in her story. The juxtaposition of the spoken and projected clear insights and the mound of complexity provides the kind of visual disparity that puts the positive and negative aspects of the story into high relief, and in this case, also creates a compelling visual that implants in the viewers mind.

There are many other points in McKee's work that are useful in marketing. We will look at more of them over time. And there are other storytelling masters do draw from too. What are your thoughts?

The Hardest Working Brand in Show Business?

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:01:00 +0000

I grew up on the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. He was also known as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. Does he matter today? There never would have been a Will.i.am. or Michael Jackson without him. Every half funked musician knows this truth. Every funked out star has cited him as the heaviest of influences ever since being funked out was cool, which is since the beginning. So why was he, is he, such a domineering influence still? Precisely because he really was the hardest working man in show business.

No lie. No other musician, not even Little Richard (although he was close) rhythm and blues’d it, rocked it, funked, it, danced it, screamed it and sang it as hard as James Brown. And everyone knew it because all you had to do was listen to the godfather, look at a still of the godfather, or watch a film or TV clip of the godfather of soul and you knew he was the real deal. Why? Because you can’t fake it.

Know any brands that work that hard today? I can think of only a few that come close. Apple is the most obvious. And while there’s lots of talk about how hard it is to work for Steve Jobs, maybe that’s partly because when it comes to the details, it appears that he shares more than a little of the obsessive gene with the godfather of soul. He fusses, he approves, he fusses some more. Not good enough. Not good enough. Try harder, start again, he tells his people. He’s taken the mission of one man and turned it into the mission of a company. And it’s hard to get a lot of people to tow the line unless you hit the point every minute of every day. It’s no coincidence that he’s the biggest shareholder in Disney. Disney was known for being a pain in the ass too. “You’re just not getting it” he was known to say to his people. He might not have always been able to give them the specific instruction to take them into the clarified state that would enable them to fix whatever they were working on, but he sure knew enough not to settle. He never did, and his product showed it.

And what’s the reaction of the marketplace? We love the brands that work hard for us, that work hard to be the values we’re so desperately seeking. We love Apple and BMW and James Cameron, and, at least before the scandal, Tiger Woods, because all of these brands (and people) work it to death. Experiencing this makes visible and real the inspiring capability of the human mind. These brands and the experiences they create are live examples of what the mind can achieve when it’s working at its best.

Owning some of that, whether for an instant (as in listening to a James Brown track or buying a ticket to Avatar) or for an extended length of time (as in owning a BMW) reminds us of our own capabilities and potential, inspires us, and often sparks us to greater levels of our own achievement. In this way, these brands contribute to our life force so we affiliate with them, nurture our connection to them through usage and purchase, and end up in a state of loyalty that gives those brands power in good times and resilience in challenging times.

Where is your brand experience on the spectrum between hardly working and working hardest? If it’s not close to working hardest in its category, it’s soon going to be hardly working.

Experience Marketing: The New Crisis Management Communication Channel

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 23:19:00 +0000

Crisis management may be the trickiest of all the corporate communications professionals’ challenges to master. When you’ve got this one down, you’ve reached "master" status.

Mastering this one though has gotten both harder and easier than ever through two major communications channel breakthroughs in the past couple of years.

Social media makes it harder than ever because of the lack of assurance that all voices in the dialogue will be authentic. If your product is allegedly defective, it’s pretty much guaranteed that people will be talking about it online. That’s expected, and authentic discourse actually benefits everyone, including the brand. The downside though is the me too effect of deranged hangers on with too much time on their hands; whacko’s of a sort who although they may not have had any real experience with the brand, get a vicarious thrill from falsely fanning the flames and piling on through made up stories of disasters experienced at the hands of the corporation. Dealing with that is a whole ‘nother seminar. Obviously, a groundswell can help drive in the other direction too.

Also on the positive side, the rise of Experience Marketing offers crisis management a newly powerful communications channel to integrate into an overall approach. When the media frenzy around Toyota’s alleged safety issues reached its peak, this leading brand did a lot of things right, but one of the most interesting things it did was to go experiential.

Observing their play from a distance, one could imagine their communications staff wondering what to do at a time when people might be reluctant to visit dealerships and might be skeptical of paid advertising statements. So rather than waiting for people to come to the brand, they brought their brand to the people by setting up test drive stations in shopping mall parking lots.

The experience that I saw first hand was really “experience smart.” It was confident, subtle, and inviting. The environments were branded but very simply, leaving the emphasis on the brand ambassadors and the cars themselves. This gave consumers a chance to do something that experience marketing provides better than any other marketing channel; a chance to "look the brand in the eye" and judge its authenticity and values for themselves.

This approach enabled conversations with brand ambassadors who simply offered people a chance to take a short drive and to ask questions. All the hype of the media fell away and what remained were one-on-one conversations and interactions that showed the brand’s sincere interest in the concerns of consumers regarding the safety of drivers and quality of the product.

No doubt that all the other tactics Toyota deployed around that time helped send the right message to the marketplace. But there’s equally no doubt that the one-on-one experiences of consumers had to register high on the persuasion scale. This demonstrated a brilliant command of the medium as applied to crisis management. Masterfully done.

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem and Their Relevance to Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:57:00 +0000

This brilliant book by the equally brilliant grandfather of the Self-Esteem movement, Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D., is his masterpiece encapsulation of a lifetime of work developing the most cogent understanding of this important psychological concept. The six pillars he mentions are like six keys to life. Get it, read it, learn it, and then apply the ideas in it to the marketing programs you create. What? Well making the bridge between the concept and marketing takes some thinking, and over time you'll find a growing conversation about it here on this blog, consolidated under Disciplines and Dimensions for your convenience.

You can check out the book at Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, but this is why it's relevant:

In the beginning, marketing was about using any means possible to convince people that buying or using the product would endow the owner with qualities they couldn't otherwise hope to posses. In the age of authenticity, marketing is about helping audiences see the real ways in which brands enable people to exercise values they hold dear. One's values form one's self identity. Enabling and reinforcing that identity is a powerful means of building affiliation. In short, it's about authentically helping people become bigger heroes in their own story, a phrase I borrow from Branden.

Branden posits that Self-Esteem is the single most important human psychological need as it both drives and is a reflection of our ability to cope with the challenges of life. It drives all our decisions such as who we choose to marry, what jobs we find worth having, the ways in which we pursue our work and achievements, etc. It naturally follows that our view of ourself also colors our purchase decisions, good and bad. This being the case, it seems there must be an abundance of power inherent in the concept for marketers to wield in service to brands seeking to connect deeply with audiences. The key is in understanding what Self-Esteem is, what principles and actions enhance it, and how it serves as the driving force in our life, and then translating all of that into strategies for unlocking the promise of it in the brands we're serving.

Watch this space for a growing conversation about how the principles of growing healthy Self-Esteem can be purposefully put to work in service to marketing that stays true to the spirit of authenticity. In the meantime, you may be interested in exploring the concepts of Self-Esteem on your own. Start with the book mentioned above. For more information about the man behind it, check out www.nathanielbranden.com

Customer Surveys: Are You Joking?

noreply@blogger.com (David Michael Rich) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:01:00 +0000

It’s a fact: marketing agency life = road warriordom. No worries. Got it down. Eyes closed. Tumi zipped.

But as an inveterate observer of my life while simultaneously living it, I’m fascinated by the alienating misuse of customer surveys in the hospitality industry that is so much a part of this daily battle.

Screaming kids on air planes? NP; Noise cancelling headphones. First time airport security line explorers? (“Oh, I didn’t realize when I was getting dressed this morning I’d have to take it all off at the airport!" Where have you been since 9/11 Sparky?) NP; frequent flyer status fast lane. Etc. Still there’s lots of little annoyances, but of all the frustrating aspects of road warriordom, the single most ridiculous one – in a near violently heavy competition for this honor – is the over use of the customer service survey.

As a marketing guy, I’m hot for customer data like Lohan is for self-destruction. But I’m just as big on brand experience. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out how it is that brands that in many other ways at least profess to care about customer experience, fail to understand that asking people to fill out a survey is part of the brand experience itself. And since brand experience is all about the value of the interaction, I am equally amazed at the lack of attention to the timing, construct, and most of all, the quality of intention behind this practice in far too many cases.

On the road you literally can’t turn around without being offered the chance to participate in some kind of customer service survey. If you’re not careful, instead of actually getting work done, you could spend all your time filling out the damn happy sheets.

How does this color the brand experience? Example: I walk into the hotel room and all the wires to the nightstand lamp and clock are sitting on the floor in front of the furniture, ripped from the wall in a spaghetti mess instead of neatly snugged into their sockets, effectively disabling two of the most critical functions of the room. I crawl on my hands and knees to sort it all out. The need to do this already puts this particular brand on the edge of the brand damage zone, as if standing precariously on one foot in the open doorway of a single engine plane with a freshly packed chute strapped to its back and the wind increasingly threatening the resolve to hold on.

Then I find that the nearest outlets have no power. We’ve now slipped out of the doorway of the plane and into a full on brand damage free fall. And then the dreaded call to the “customer service/service-in-a-flash/service-first, service-with-a smile/pleased-to-serve-you/service whatever, phone line”. I punch up the speakerphone button as if pulling the rip chord to stop the fall. It doesn’t work. We’re now headed for a double chute malfunction in which the brand plants itself face first into the unforgiving expectations that come with a room rate well past the couple hundred-dollar mark. So I pick up the desk phone handset, asking the disembodied voice for help, only to hear a cheerful promise of a quick resolution. It never comes. Splat!

And then on the way out the next morning, a “won’t you take a few minutes to fill out our customer survey and gain the chance to win a free night” offer? No thanks Sparky. If a few minutes were enough to explain how incredibly bad the service is and how little I want a free night in this Bermuda Triangle of bad brand experience, I just might do it. But when I realize that the intention behind this particular use of a customer service survey is to substitute true brand management (like paying the housekeeping department based on how many rooms are in perfect condition when guests move in) for a feigned interest in my experience, I’d rather, and quite happily, watch your brand splatter into the Rothko like Rorschach brain blot that so indelibly impresses on my subconscious that the next time my assistant says “I’ve booked you into X hotel,” I remember to tell her to call the travel desk and suggest they never book anyone into that brand.

Why? I never stay at hotels that ask me to work harder than they do at maintaining their brand experience quotient. Customer survey? Are you joking?