If you ask Ellen Doolittle what her idea of a perfect day is, she’ll tell you that she’d prefer to be relaxing outdoors with a good book or a brisk walk. But when she’s at Doe, Ellen’s working hard as an Assistant Account Manager, handling a variety of clients, including Sun Tan City, Humana, PharMerica and Schott. Prior to joining the agency, she worked as an Account Coordinator at PriceWeber Marketing, as a Marketing Coordinator at Traffic Builders, Inc., and as a Contemporary Marketing Representative at Anheuser-Busch.

What’s her favorite part about this new season? Halloween, of course! “The temperature gets cooler and the bare trees create such a wonderfully spooky ambiance,” said Ellen. “Who can resist candy, costumes and ghost stories ‘round the campfire? Not me!”

Gwen Knapp has worked with many of the most recognizable brands in the world—Fed Ex, General Motors, General Electric and Deloitte & Touche, just to name a few. Not only that, she ran her own marketing firm before joining the Doe-Anderson team—Top Shelf Communications and Public Relations.
As a Management Supervisor for the agency, Gwen is responsible for working with many of the agency’s accounts.

This native New Yorker’s idea of a perfect day would be “flying kites on a windy day with my family, followed by big dreaming around an evening bonfire.”  And when asked what she loves most about the new season,  she gave a rather unexpected answer–”I like the smell of dying foliage–it’s the only instance I can think of where death smells lovely!”

Whether it’s by plane, train or cruise ship, Cordell Lawrence is a man that loves to travel. He’s been to some pretty exotic locations—Marrakesh, Morocco, and Alicante, Spain, are two of his favorites. But Cordell loves the city of Louisville as well and feels that it can compete with other major cities. “We have a great restaurant scene, and the amount of culture, including performing and visual arts, the city has makes it special,” he said. “There’s a lot of diversity in the architecture here, too.”

Cordell’s newest role is that of an Assistant Account Manager, helping to manage accounts like Optima Battery, Laphroaig, Ardmore and Central Bank. His previous positions include Sales Director and Marketing Analyst for English Emprise and Communications Director with the Build the Bridges Coalition.

Cordell is excited for autumn in The Ville, because that means it’s almost time for the St. James Court Art Festival…and, of course, the changing of the leaves.

http://sammyawards.com/

And, just for fun, follow us on Twitter if you aren’t already doing so.

Twitter: DoeAnderson

Michael recently wrote on this blog about how passion powers purchases. The idea of connecting to your brand’s most passionate fans and enlisting them as your marketing team and sales force is a cornerstone of the Brand Enthusion process.

So with that in mind, it’s not all that surprising that we’ve made a solid commitment to providing social media expertise to our clients. We’ve simply recognized that the social Web is where people share their passions at this point in time.

Three years ago, one of our PR team members, Jason Falls, approached me with the desire to start exploring social media and the communication opportunities it offered for our clients. Over the next three years, we added two more social media professionals to our staff: Kat French and David Finch. Each of them came to Doe-Anderson with solid experience managing and executing successful social media efforts.

Even though social media is a relatively new discipline, we’ve gotten the opportunity to do some groundbreaking work for some of our clients in the last few years, refining our process along the way.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done in social media and proud of what we’ve learned over the last few years. Because of that, I’m proud to announce a new Doe-Anderson blog, dedicated to sharing that knowledge toward the goal of building a confident, social brand. Be sure to check out The Social Enthusiast.

Our goal with The Social Enthusiast is to provide practical, actionable advice to marketers about entering social media as a brand. Topics that we cover include monitoring and measurement of social media, effective corporate blogging, social media marketing and managing your brand’s on-line community of fans.

We hope that you’ll find some valuable resources there. And if you’re ready to enlist some agency help, be sure to contact us.

Dan Burgess

Books, blogs, industry journals and business publications have vacillated for years on the role that public relations plays in the overall marketing communications mix. Some authors would have you believe that PR, in its many forms, is replacing big-dollar advertising. It is often cheaper and can be highly effective.

Some practitioners of on-line social media methodologies, on the other hand, contend that traditional PR as we’ve known it is being replaced by powerful, interconnected, fully engaged virtual networks of regular folks resistant to standard marketing tactics. Tweet or die.

So which is it? Is PR dead? Or is it the right path for everyone who doesn’t have a seven-figure advertising budget?

Of course the answer is yes. And yes. Sort of.

Let’s look at media relations, specifically, one of the most basic elements in the PR toolkit.

It’s a worn-out line – albeit true – that no one should be practicing media relations today the same way that they did ten or five or two years ago. Anyone relying solely on the distribution of standard news releases to traditional media outlets should face a tribunal for malpractice. It’s vital to engage the media today in much more compelling, targeted and interactive ways. Social networkers are right in their admonition to find more personal ways to connect with media outlets and contacts.

It’s also important to expand the outlets being targeted in the first place. Individual bloggers, columnists, Tweeters and other on-line networks of people who have gained significant numbers of followers can and should be treated as legitimate conduits of information by PR people, and newer techniques of outreach and involvement are the only way to gain any traction with these audiences.

But let’s not be too hasty in turning all our attention to the bright, shiny object of social networking. It is, indeed, a rapidly developing, vital tool in the marketing communications mix. But there is still a critical role to be played by working the more well-worn channels of traditional media.

Local newspapers, TV stations and magazines; radio news departments; and the national networks and print publications still have a tremendous amount of influence over what the public is talking about. A client recently had a positive story in USAToday and comments came in from people all over the country. When a client is on ESPN or the local 6:00 TV news or a targeted small-town newspaper, those are the times when awareness and conversation noticeably spike. And, client contacts and their bosses and boards of directors, more often than not, are themselves being assessed to a large degree by how broadly visible and measurably successful their marketing programs are, which often translates back to a high profile in traditional media.

A national-level committee of PR practitioners from around the country recently took up the discussion of what role public relations plays in the context of advertising agencies and the emerging fascination with and focus upon social media. Examining the best practices they could find, the group quickly recognized that social media is a legitimate marketing force to embrace as a natural extension of PR methodologies, but that the value of good old editorial coverage in traditional media still reigns supreme in terms of inserting clients’ messages into the mainstream mindset.

So let us, indeed, declare the stodgy PR practices of the field’s original pioneers to be dead. But let us also recognize that the field continues to accomplish its clients’ goals in time-honored ways that are not yet ready to go quietly into the night. Working with traditional media is perhaps at the top of this list.

Recognize that passion unchanneled drives a category choice. But it does not, however, channel a brand choice. To make the brand relevant to the passion, you have to meet a set of physical and emotional requirements.

- Does the product improve the users experience, recognizing that no two users are identical in their physical and psychographic make-up? When we market passion brands, we understand that a buyer will not settle for good enough, they will invest in what suits them the best.

- Do people like me use the same brand? It’s not the label that defines the brand. It’s the community of users that represent the label.

- Are your values reflective of your customer’s values? It’s not simply a feature or a benefit that drives purchase consideration. Culture, attitude, corporate goodwill and community involvement all enter into the buyer’s decision making process.

- Are your distribution points my purchase points? Brand credibility is at stake each time the product is placed in a new location. Distribution points impact brand imagery and identity as much as marketing messaging.

We are fervent believers that every brand can be a passion brand, whether the product is laundry detergent or scuba gear. To quote my old friend Joel Carter, “Marketing is not an after-the-fact tactic. Marketing is the core activity that informs the development of needed products and services.”

Summary:
Identify Consumer need > Develop Defining Product features > Connect with Cultural Relevance > Identify Like-Minded Audience Members >Establish A Right-Minded Retail Network > Position the Brand Consistent with all the Above > Deliver message at Points of Discovery, Purchase, Use and Discussion > Rethink. Refine. Repeat . That’s how to connect with prospective customer’s passion to power purchase.

2. Sustainable brands are built upon a set of principles that are not negotiable.
I suspect that the guys at Apple have developed plenty of innovations that they have scrapped not because the products weren’t effective but simply because they weren’t user-friendly. Establishing both what you are and, just as importantly, what you aren’t is a basic criterion for branding success.

3. Your mission statement and your brand positioning must be aligned.
Imagine for a moment that your mission statement is more than a plaque on the wall – that it is a living declaration of your corporate intentions. Southwest Airlines’ “freedom” brand positioning is a clear outgrowth of a corporate vision that is both clear and in alignment with the corporate mission: the mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit.

4. Successful brands listen to multiple stakeholders but are singular in their direction.
Committees are great for gathering information and sharing ideas. But without a powerful chairperson to establish goals, set direction and manage deliverables, a committee can quickly confuse a company’s true sense of purpose. There are few hard and fast rules to protect a Chief Marketing Officer from intense scrutiny. But if I were to suggest one proven course of action, it would simply be to listen to everyone but take singular ownership of your brand’s identity.

5. Customers discover your brand story like birds build their nests, one scrap of information at a time.
It’s no longer a single-bullet world. We live in an information-rich age. Very few brands today have the resources to be visible at each brand contact point. But maintaining a singular voice at multiple brand contact points is as important today as it has ever been.

Bill Samuels, Jr., the long-time President of Maker’s Mark, has often reminded our creative team that a bad ad is no worse than a bad haircut, it grows back quickly and is soon forgotten. But a bad brand strategy that mismanages all elements – from setting the wrong expectations to wandering from fad to fad chasing stakeholders’ fickle desires – can shut your lights and close your doors forever.

Large budgets have been the cologne that has enabled poor positioning to be overcome by simple tonnage. With efficiency at a premium today, we simply append two ideas to these core principles as we work through marketing assignments.

1. Choose one great idea/execution over the option of doing lots of things pretty well. Fund excellence over mediocrity.

2. No matter what communication tool you are using, make it sticky. It’s expensive to make the contact. It’s unaffordable if that contact doesn’t lead to customer/consumer-driven brand exploration.

The Doe-Anderson Brand Blueprint is an outgrowth of these core ideals. That one wish I mentioned in the subject line: that you will call me to engage us in helping your brand meet expectations.

The silver lining on the previous two year’s sales recession has simply been that they have allowed for a “cleanup” on the marketing aisle. Each budget cut eliminated one more “legacy” program from the marketing plan. Fundamentally, many brands are now spending only on items that have proven to be essential to corporate success. With the recession seemingly receding, the question on the table is “where next?” The answer shouldn’t automatically be restoration of all the old programs to their prior spending levels. Let’s be honest, not every program that we deemed essential proved to be that. In fact, if your market share went up while your spending went down, there is some logic that says less is now officially more.

Here’s the reality. None of us know precisely which part of our marketing budget is producing with greatest impact. Much like with a great meal, it’s a combination of the individual elements that lift our brands. Some of those elements are directed at customer acquisition. Some at customer retention. Some at purchase activation. And others at community building. When we stir the marketing pot, we know we need the alchemy to blend seamlessly together to make the brand message relevant, involving and ultimately persuasive.

Here’s a thought for how to rebuild the marketing program now that budgets are once again flowing more freely (or when the budgets flow more freely).

First, align your thinking along the four core points of contact: point of discovery, point of sale, point of use and point of discussion. Develop strategies and tactics to make your brand most visible at each of these discussion points. Challenge yourself (or your team, or your agency) to develop programs that deliver the brand message effectively at each point. Develop more ideas than you can possibly execute. Forget the budget at this point, just find big honking ideas that make your mouth water with anticipation for sharing them with customers/consumers. Once you have completed reviewing all your “what if’s,” put an approximate cost next to each line idea (line item for those of you who don’t follow my clever renaming ploys). Gather your team and, as best as possible, assign a priority to each line item. Then rank the projects in order of the total points that each idea generated from the response of the team.

Now put the budget next to the line items. Reshuffle the deck to make certain that you have each of the four points of contact covered. If you had a hole, or just didn’t think the ideas generated against one of the four discovery points were strong enough, send the team back to solve that problem.

Then stack the selected projects/programs together for the basis for your marketing budget for the upcoming year. If management asks for reductions, your prioritization of projects should allow for a quick and direct response. If management loves the work and expands the budget to allow for additional ideas, the projects that you left behind from the top of your “ranking structure” can be brought forward with relative ease.

I’ve taken to looking at budget cuts as breath mints. They allow us to get rid of the excess that we allow to build up in the traditional expansion modes. (Do everything we did last year, and then add one new initiative to the plan.) How we rebound from the marketing recession in 2009 is going to tell us how well we do in the expansion of 2010.

Go ahead. Complete that cleanup on the marketing aisle. Instead of restoring legacy programs, reapportion the entire marketing plan based on your best prioritization of new tactics. That way, when the manager comes to review the progress of the cleanup, she’ll find a fresh new merchandising approach that elevates the aisle to a higher level instead of the previous mess.

Initially when I applied the analogy to marketing, I saw the heavens as a metaphor for consumer touch points. Consider each star a point of information about a brand. Each random, each believed to be true at that point. Some points are positive. Some points are negative.  My initial thought was that marketing’s mission was to “touch” the conversation at each point. In short, wherever a person went to gather information, marketing should shape the discussion.

Now when I consider the analogy, I choose to see the sky in clusters or constellations. It helps to keep all these touch points from seeming so overwhelming.  Rather than thousands of touch points, I now visualize four specific clusters, each demanding a different style of communication:

> Points of Discovery

> Points of Sale

> Points of Use

> Points of Discussion

As with the night sky, these are not linear destinations. We find brands of interest to us at each touch point. Brand discovery happens randomly. That said, we can shape the discovery process to lead a potential purchaser to our desired outcome simply by applying the 5Cs (Curiosity, Confidence, Connection, Conversation, Community) appropriately at each of the four touch points.

We can’t be certain when a prospective customer will find our brand, but we do know that discovery should increase curiosity. Once I’ve found a product, I naturally want to learn more about it.  So before I decide if the brand is right for me, I am going to find other people who, like me, have purchased it and speak with them about their experience. When possible, I’m going to try it before I buy it … and many times that will bring me into contact with others who are making the same purchase decision. I’m not just going to evaluate the sales materials that tell the brand story. I’m going to consider the sales environment, the sales staff, and the other prospective customers. When I use the product, I’m evaluating it based on my expectations of its performance, through the lens of my prior brand education.

As a marketer, I want to make certain that the picture is painted consistently. At each of the four contact points, branding elements are going to align appropriately to help define prospective purchaser expectations. When prospects turn to the “Point of Discussion,” I’m going to monitor the conversations, accept legitimate criticism, participate only when invited to or to correct an egregious falsehood.  As a marketer, I simply can’t appear to be big brother. Rather, I have to be a resource for information, as opposed to a brand advocate.

That brand advocacy role switches strongly into gear at point of sale. I can’t afford to bury my message there. Somehow the brand must get elevated above the clutter. That execution changes per selling environment, but if the brand message is lost at point of sale, the risk of losing valued customers is heightened.

There are moments in the process for stoking the flames of curiosity. There are opportunities to build confidence. Participating in the conversation appropriately builds trust. Energizing your brand loyalists to actively promote your brand increases opportunities at every level and ultimately leads to the expansion of your brand community.

As the Marketing Director at Skier’s Choice, I worked through those four points of contact daily.  I questioned my visibility at each point. Were we part of the discussion? Were we participating appropriately? Was our message consistent in each area? Did the messaging reinforce our loyalists’ confidence in our brand? Were our “guys” out there swinging the hammer for us? Had we given them the appropriate tools so that they could steer others in our direction?

Nurturing each of those points of light will lift your brand sales, reduce customer attrition and create a force multiplier on every marketing dollar spent. Extending the analogy, perhaps torturously, when we can connect a brand successfully to even a single consumer, that consumer begins the illumination process for others in his/her immediate sphere of influence. With each connection, your brand star burns more brightly, and the much-sought-after brand community begins to take on its own form without the need for corporate Tweets.

Four communication constellations. One consistent message. Delivered with a different tonality in each area. Ultimately empowering your customers to become your best outside sales representatives. Those are the highlight points from this missive.

Here’s to you lighting up your brand sky.

Lindsey Neely, Amy Bowles, Crystal Peterson, Bethany Stambaugh and Kama Korvela attended last month's Go Red for Women luncheon benefitting the American Heart Association.

Last month, a few Doe employees attended the annual Go Red for Women luncheon, co-sponsored by client Norton Healthcare, to benefit the American Heart Association. Cheers to going red!

Which would likely be true if it weren’t for unforeseeable events that range from the egregious (product failure) to the frustrating (expectation management) to the sublime (boredom).

In many a retail workshop, I have repeated the line “don’t settle for the sale, reach for the relationship.” Why? Product loyalty is easily shifted. But brand loyalty, loyalty to a person or a group of like-minded people, is a much more lasting bond.

To borrow the cliché, “there are only two kinds of people” … Brand Loyalists and Brand Terrorists. The challenge is that those two groups blend together sharing opinions about products that fundamentally alter the relationship between manufacturer/retailer and consumer.

Left unmanaged, your brand simply is left to fend for itself. Which is why the art of managing Connections is absolutely critical to the marketing process.

First lets understand the context for the word Connection. The first level connection is between the manufacturer and the retailer. The second level is between the retailer and the customer. The third level is between the customer and the manufacturer. The fourth level is between the customer and other customers who have made the same brand choice. And the fifth connection level is between the customer and people who have purchased the same category of product/service from a competitive source.

Each connection requires its own contact strategy. In the short format of an e-blast (I fear that I have lost 50% of my readership at this point), I am constricted by common sense not to address each level solution. What is important to note is that these connections between each of the brand’s aligned audiences must be carefully managed. We simply must nurture  these connections to shape the natural free-flowing conversation between each audience.

Here’s the Litmus test for your marketing plan. Have you put a personal face on your brand at each point of connection? Or put another way, how frequently do you carry on a conversation (not a monologue) at each connection point?

For the record, that gives us three measures for marketing success to consider moving forward:

1.  What percentage of people who purchase a product similar to yours are curious to learn more about what you have to offer?

2. How confident are your current users that your product/service is the best answer to their needs?

3. Are you currently joined with customers and consumers at each of the five  levels of connection? Moreover, are you seeking out new and more interesting ways to connect with these people to cement the relationships?

This is the third in a series of five thought pieces about building Brand Enthusion™ through the application of the 5C’s: Curiosity, Connection, Confidence, Conversation and Community. We know that every brand has the potential to spark powerful word-of-mouth referral. Empowering your most loyal customers to become vocal salespeople for your brand is at the heart of all we do at Doe-Anderson: the House of Brand Enthusion.