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The brand strategist who knew too much.

Monday, March 8th, 2010

I was recently in active conversation with the founder of a really smart, interesting start-up about hiring Otherwise to build their brand. We had a number of long, lively meetings and conversations about virtually every aspect of the business, and it became absolutely clear over the course of our exchanges that I had powerful insight into the business and that Otherwise would make an ideal strategic creative partner.

And then the trouble began. Just as we were finalizing a scope of work and budget, instead of enjoying the prospects of kicking off amazing branding work, the client grew resentful. Not with the marketplace or capital sources or competing traditional business models, but with me! Of all things….So, when in the process did I become a threat instead of an invaluable resource?

The turning point in this story of a prospective client relationship going sour was the moment when it dawned on him that I knew too much.

Too much about the business. Too much about prospective customers. Too much about likely market barriers. Too much about the gaps in funding and strategy. And it make him angry and competitive.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve been down this road.

Out of this and other dramas with entrepreneurs, I have come to understand that being an experienced brand strategist is oftentimes more of an irritation than a source of peace of mind to an insecure business founder. After all, what’s the point of starting your own business if you can’t exercise all of your personal agendas and indulge your idiosyncrasies? Who wants to be surrounded by people who are smarter or have more (or simply different) experience? What fun would that be?!

In case you are wondering what happened….I told this entrepreneur to take a hike. I avoided the temptation to lecture him on his inadequacies, or warn him about the real possibilities that his new venture would fail if he couldn’t take sage advice. Without acrimony or vindictiveness, I simply suggested that he didn’t seem quite ready to undertake one of the most important aspects of breathing life into a new idea—engaging with peers.

In the end, I wish this rejected client all the best. I figure that if he can learn to get out of his own way, the business has a fighting chance to succeed. And for me? It’s just another day in the life of a brand strategist as I continue to seek out entrepreneurs who are wired to work with their equals.

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Beyond empathy: is “reciprocity marketing” the ultimate therapy for brands?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

The other day I was in the locker room at my health club when one of the masseuses from the club’s spa approached.  She is someone I’ve had treatments with in the past, and she said, “Are you looking forward to Member Appreciation Week next week?”  Being polite, I of course said that I was.  She went on, “It’s great because all of the spa services are 20% off.”  I smiled and nodded.  Then she leaned closer, looked me straight in the eye and said, “You know, business has been incredibly slow and I’d really appreciate it if you would consider booking an appointment with me.”  I was flabbergasted. I was uncomfortable. I felt guilty. I felt a surge of compassion.  And then I rushed to the appointment desk and booked an hour massage with my errant messenger/promoter.  I felt as though I had just done a good deed, not purchased a spa service.

Am I a lone sucker or did I stumble upon empathy marketing on steroids?

So here’s how I imagine it might work.  Instead of simply trying to engage with customers by walking a mile in their shoes and then selling them air soles (aka empathy marketing), you blur the hard lines between peddler and buyer, making the sale by explaining that the profits you enjoy will help pay your child’s college tuition or your elderly mother’s medical bills.

Huh? Does this really make sense?

Clearly, the challenge with “reciprocity marketing” is that it requires authentically interdependent peer relationships.  For example, what do you give back when you buddy up and get someone to buy the air soles? Is there a quid pro quo factor that grants the air sole buyer a chit, redeemable at some time in the future, for a good deed or other consideration, from you?  Is it preposterous to imagine a marketplace where a buyer has the right to come back to a seller and ask for something in return?

How would “reciprocity marketing” work with consumer products? Houses? Consulting services?  Would we spawn an industry of good deed couponing and redemption?

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If you don’t love coffee, don’t bother to open a café.

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

After months of buildout and “Opening Soon” signage, a new café opened around the corner. It’s situated in a fabulous location in my bustling, hip neighborhood, and I waited impatiently for the paper to come off the windows and the lights to go on. I imagined walking a short block to a buzzing, cozy little spot where I could grab a great morning coffee, satisfy my evening sweet tooth with my family, or sneak in an hour of emailing on a Sunday afternoon.

Boy, was I off base.

Imagine a coffee house without a shred of sincerity, and you can catch a glimpse of my neighborhood dream gone sour. The place is completely devoid of personality, and doesn’t even smell like coffee when you walk in. The physical space is three times bigger than it should be, filled with strange arrangements of uncomfortable wooden tables and chairs. The few upholstered pieces are backless, stiff stools that are impossible to sit on. They use coffee from Costco (displayed prominently on a shelf) and don’t know how to make a latte or a cappuccino (let alone a macchiato or something more exotic). Their cakes are decent, but are outrageously expensive and previously frozen. There is no station to lighten and sweeten your drink–you only get one of those little plastic buckets of cream, a packet of sugar, a packet of artificial sweetener and a cheap swizzle stick–but only IF YOU ASK FOR THEM! The café is open the most inconvenient hours imaginable (open at 11; closed at 8). This way, they miss the early morning work crowd, the mid-morning mom crowd and the evening crowd….

And perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that when I enter the café, there is no joy in the staff, and I don’t immediately know who the owner is (that’s assuming that he/she is even there….). Quite the contrary. I always feel that I am a nuisance, and that the people working behind the counter are intimidated and slightly annoyed by customers.

So what’s the point here? The point is: why in the world would you bother to open a coffee house if you don’t love absolutely everything about coffee and the people who drink it? Here we are back to the brand discussion again….in other words, how can you build a brand that resonates with a group of passionate consumers if you don’t share the passion? Isn’t authenticity at the very core of creating a powerful experience?

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Mind the (marketing) gap.

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

While I have been out in the world of start-ups and early-stage companies of late, I have been struck again and again by the lack of attention to branding and marketing. So just to test my assumptions, I informally surveyed a number of ventures that have received $1-$7 million in funding in the past year and found, to my shock and surprise, that relatively few of them have any senior marketing talent involved in their businesses.

Actually, I’m not surprised.

We all know the profile of archetypal entrepreneurs–driven, committed experts focused on using their scarce resources to build their products and services. And of course, if they are really worth their salt, they ARE creating products and services that everybody wants, so why would they need to concern themselves with branding and marketing?

The truth is, upon closer examination, that driven, committed personality often reveals a kind of blindness or arrogance. It’s the if-I-build-it-they-will-come mentality that dismisses the need to do anything other than hang out a shingle and wait for customers to line up.

You can see where I’m heading with this….It’s a principle I call Minding the (Marketing) Gap.

The Marketing Gap is that narrow space that exists between your business and your customers, and it’s just wide enough for them to trip or stumble or lose their balance on their way to/from your brand. Metaphorically speaking, it is the place where you can (and should) provide a secure foothold and safe passage to your brand by helping the consuming public understand what you do, why you do it, what you stand for, and what’s in it for them. That secure foothold and safe passage is your brand experience, and your single best way to establish an authentic connection with customers. Give people an easy way to climb on board your brand and the ones who choose to, will. If you leave the gap open, you increase the chances for people to simply avoid your brand, for fear of falling, or taking a risk they aren’t prepared to take.

So here are some pointers for all of you emerging entrepreneurs. Don’t assume that branding and marketing happen magically on their own. Don’t assume they are simply tricks to get people to buy things (specifically, your things). Don’t assume that because your resources are scarce you can hold off creating an intentional brand until your pockets are deeper. Don’t assume that branding and marketing are a waste of time because you already know everything you need to know about your customers. And most important of all, don’t assume that the world is waiting on the platform for your train to pull into the station, and everyone will jump on when the doors open. If they don’t feel comfortable traversing the gap, they will simply wait for your train to leave the platform and another one with a more manageable gap to arrive.

And one more thing. If you don’t have the expertise on your team, get help. Early. Bring inspirational, inventive, seasoned marketing expertise into your venture as you are creating it, so the spirit of the brand becomes an integral part of the business, rather than trying to plaster it on after the fact.

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Popcorn as metaphor.

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

For the holidays this year, we sent our clients a simple gift: popcorn. Not the fancy overpopped variety housed in a ridiculously-large tin, but a 2-pound bag of small unpopped kernels from K & K Popcorn in Shellsburg, Iowa, tucked into a simple kraft carton.

You’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you that this is the best popcorn I have ever eaten. Indeed, the kernels ARE small compared to commercially-grown, genetically-altered varieties. But the combination of textures and tastes delivers the most authentic popcorn-eating experience imaginable. And within the story of K & K Popcorn we found a metaphor that has set the course for Otherwise in the coming year.

On the K & K Popcorn website (kandkpopcorn.com), they tell their story:

“K & K Popcorn is native to the prehistoric Americas. It was shared by American Indians with a pioneer family in the 1850’s and enjoyed for generations. But, by the mid 1970’s it was nearly forgotten. A family member returning from a career in the army discovered the last remaining popcorn in a fruit jar. He saved a handful for planting and popped the rest.

“In the early 1990’s Gene Mealhow, a farmer and soil consultant, was brought in to develop cultivation techniques that would make the ancient popcorn commercially viable. Through the project the Mealhow family developed a true passion for the popcorn – so they bought the business. Under the careful control of Gene, his wife Lynn and the family, popcorn lovers around the world are rediscovering real popcorn taste.”

So here are our watchwords for twoohoheight….

Look to preserve what is authentic and true. Marginalize impostors.
Find the new in old places. Make new places, too.
Collaborate and incubate whenever possible.
Use the power of provocative visual design to foster change.

And pop a bowl of K & K Popcorn whenever you need a boost.

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Just because you have a website doesn’t mean you have a brand.

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague–the CEO of a technology startup recently funded by vcs–that sounded eerily like other conversations I’ve had recently with other successful entrepreneurs. This seasoned business person was lamenting the fact that the website his company paid $10,000 to build when he launched the business “isn’t working.” What exactly does “isn’t working” mean, I asked? According to my colleague, it means that traffic to the site is anemic. Site stickiness is nonexistent. No qualified leads are currently being generated, in spite of a business plan that anticipated a significant pipeline….

The CEO is frustrated that he wasted precious capital, that he doesn’t have a site that functions as the productive centerpiece of the business’ marketing efforts, and that he has failed to differentiate his company in a sea of competitive suppliers.

So, I spent some time browsing the site and immediately began to feel my colleague’s pain. To be fair, the site looks reasonable at first glance–clearly it has been built using one of the thousands of website templates floating out there in the cyberealm. But the more time I spent, the more I came to realize that it is a canned container with little value in its contents. There is no articulation of the company’s value proposition. There is no brand voice. The site is visually organized, but lacks a sense of design. And the narrative content is overwhelming, poorly written and unstructured to the point that I wasn’t able to discern what the products and services actually do and who might possibly want them.

I returned to my colleague with my observations. After asking a number of pesky questions, I came to understand that this entrepreneur–like so many–is a fiercely independent do-it-yourselfer and a marketing skeptic to boot. So, he found a web developer who built the site cheaply, without the ability to offer any strategic insight into the website-as-brand-reflection. The CEO and his technical team then dictated the site architecture and provided the content, which the developer dutifully plugged into the page templates, working from the assumption that buyers would flock to the site through paid search links and telemarketing. Simply stated, the CEO saw the business as sales-driven, one-dimensional and transactional, not strategic, multi-dimensional or user-driven. And certainly not as a branded entity.

So, now that the CEO has been flummoxed by initial failure, we are having a different conversation. It’s about the power of a brand and the mandate to connect with the demands of consumers of his company’s services. We are talking about taking a strategic step backwards to develop a value proposition, identify prospective customers, define their needs, determine how to best reach them, develop the marketing messages that will resonate with them, and build the tools to deliver the messages in ways that are most engaging, efficient and convenient.

Let’s see how it goes.

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