Marketing Playbook

Being Yourself and Still Doing Marketing

Crossroads Dispatches: We Lived in a World of Cultured Messages Really provoking thoughts by Evelyn Rodriguez about genuine communications vs. put ons. Worth chewing on whether you are talking to a customer, vendor, employee, boss, spouse or your kids.

And she had a great quote:

"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday."
- Jonathan Swift

Naming Basics Again

Naming is key. I love naming. And if I do say so myself the basics of naming that I've outlined before came in handy again with a company we work with. Just really helped them stay on track so worth looking at again.

Kryptonite disaster

I'm sure that the Kryptonite people haven't slept for days. Someone on the Internet figured out that you can open one of their locks with the cap of a BIC pen. You just take a $100 lock that has a $5,000 equipment guarantee on it, shove a BIC pen into the key and then wiggle it.

What a nightmare. Your core value proposition attacked by a $0.59 pen. So what to do. Most folks would duck and cover and say it ain't so. But in the world of instant Internet information it takes 48 hours for it to propogate everywhere and think of the lawsuits.

So what to do? Deny is one thing, but Kryptonite did the right thing, offer a free exchange for all the locks. Put it at the top of your website in _RED_

Nice job Kryptonite and I hope your engineers are working like crazy right now!

The Science of Listener Attention

Was watching a re-run of West Wing and was struck by some stuff that my favorite character, Toby Ziegler said about oratory. He called it the Science of Listener Attention.

"You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That’s ‘cause I’m a speechwriter and I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with ‘lowers’ and ‘raises’ there? It’s called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites and now you end with the one that’s not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace. I’m sure I’ve seen that on a sign somewhere."
Sounds like the art of persuation or marketing to me. Repetition sounds like what we call the Rule of Three (keep your benefits/claims to just three - awesome, awesome, not screwed up). Floating opposites sounds like what we call the Rule of Pardox (e.g. Tastes Great, Less Filling).

Smart for any kind of campaign, product or political.

Not All Proof is Created Equal

Making a bold claim is important to get an audience's attention, but supporting it is even more critical if you want to convert that attention into action. You can support a claim at three levels:

. Functionality and Features: What you have.
. Needs and benefits: Why they should care, what's in it for them.
. Evidence or Proof: Why they should believe you.

And in our calculus not all support it equal. Features are great but not as important as the benefits they provide to customers. Benefits are the center of all good messaging. But proof speaks the loudest. Therefore Proof>Benefits>Features.

Beyond that, not all proof is equal. Depending on where you are in the market, you can leader with weaker or strong proof of your claims.

The strongest is when you can say you are number one overall. The next strongest is when you can claim leadership of some subset of the category (e.g. "choosey mothers choose Jif"). The next best is individual endorsements from folks your audience trusts. And the weakest (but still essential at whatever stage of market development you are in) is simply to show how you are better.

Proof may be the most powerful marketing but always make sure to engineer your proof to put the strongest foot forward. End of soapbox.

Pitching to VCs

For many, if not most companies, investors are a very important target audience. Here is a short guide from Northwest Venture Voice on how to persuade them in your pitch. It's very good (because it's by me ;-)

Winners - Fast Company Better Brand Contest

The Fast Company "This Brand Can Be Better Contest" has a winner. And it isn't us. But hey, we were one of TWO honorable mentions. Pretty cool.

The winner was Dan Limbach of Siren Interactive (who also has some pretty intriguing thoughts on topics from advisory boards, to krispy cremes and books). He won for his really smart thoughts about Brooks Brothers. In sum that Brooks Brothers should own ambition, focus on loyalty with the most pivotal target and the pivotal moment - collegue students and the job interview and surround this with help for that target inclusive of but beyond just "dressing for success."

The other honorable mention was Christy Saito of Nike for her right-on input for McDonalds. Stay focused on the kids (and their parents). "If McDonald's encouraged and promoted actual physical activity and exercise for kids in their product marketing programs, it would not be so bad for an active child to indulge in a Happy Meal every now and then."

We got our mention for our thoughts on Radio Shack. To see our thoughts on all the brands Fast Company suggested could be better, see entries I, II, III, IV, V.

Hey, get with the program

Talk about a call to action. How about this slogan for Expo 2010 - on the front of the City Planning Department in Shanghai:

Keep pace with the time
Blaze new trails in a pioneering spirit

Aristotle and Powerpoint

beyond bullets: Aristotle's Top 10 PowerPoint Tips Great post about Aristotle's Rhetoric and how it applies to PPT (and frankly any kind of communication). Just goes to show you how few new ideas there really are and how useful it is to look at the old ones over and over again. Here are Aristotle's tips and tricks:

1. Be logical.
2. Think clearly.
3. Reason cogently.
4. Remember that argument is the life and soul of persuasion.
5. Study human nature.
6. Observe the characters and emotions of your audience, as well as your own character and emotions.
7. Attend to delivery.
8. Use language rightly.
9. Arrange your material well.
10. End crisply.

Not always easy to do but boy these make sense.

Fast Company Better Brand Contest - Part III

Below is the third installment of our attempt to use the Marketing Playbook ABCs answer the question Fast Company posed recently posed in its contest – how to make these brands better (see also parts I and II)

Brand 7. Microsoft – More Wealth by Sharing It More
A. Yes, the most recognizable, cash rich, powerful brand in technology today.
• On almost every computer on every desk and every home
• And incredibly cash rich
B. But, competing with nearly everyone they used to business with.
• Getting into every single business there is
• Or believed by most to get into them eventually
• Thereby making partners less and less happy and incented to work with them
C. So, go back to being a true platform for others to make money.
• Not just operating system as platform, company as platform
• Not just dividends to shareholders
• Real incentives, openness and benefit for tons of partners, developers etc to make lots of money by using Microsoft.

Brand 8. Office Depot – A Depot for Offices, Actually
A. Yes, great job becoming a mass market category killer.
B. But, what category are they actually killing now?
• Seem to offer everything to anyone who has a job
• (from snack food for the kitchen to office chairs to games)
• How do you compete with Costco/?
C. So, be a Depot for Office services, physical and virtual
• Stop trying to be a consumer business, embrace that you are selling to business
• Use your locations more effectively, be even better bricks and clicks solution
• For any business service – daily replenishment, business services directory, meeting rooms and of course a depot for pick up.

Brand 9. Old Navy – Salute Your Own Colors
A. Yes, Old Navy stands for nice casual clothes for not too much money.
B. But, what really is the difference between Old Navy and the Gap?
• (and the Gap and Banana Republic for that matter)
• Other than a little price differentiation, it feels like they buy their stuff from the same place and from a very similar design template.
C. So, Let Old Navy Be/Buy Old Navy.
• Set the buyers and the designers free for each store
• Let us consumers have a real choice to make.
• And let Gap be Gap, Let Old Navy be Old Navy and Let Banana Republic be Banana Republic.

Fast Company Better Brand Contest - Part II

Remember, Fast Company is doing a contest on how to make 15 “brands” better. We're entering using the ABCs (see Part I). Here are our thoughts on the next set of brands:

Brand 3. Fast Company - Faster/Safer Company
A. Yes, Fast Company broke through, survived, and thrived post the bubble burst as one of the very few most compelling new magazines to make it in the tough business category.
B. But, the Fast Company generation is now at least 5 years older
• We were pulled in by the desire to be "in fast company"
• We've been through a lot since then and are hopefully a bit more mature, humble, realistic and prudent.
C. So, Be Faster Company/Safer Company – The Volvo of Business
• Move (like we did) to the Volvo Turbo Station Wagon - with tons of airbags and all the power and speed a grown up could want, responsibly.
• Be Faster - Put the wheel in the hands of your drivers.
• Give every subscriber their own blog as part of the subsription, make them editors, contributors, etc. to Fast Company itself.
• Be safer, follow the Fast Company generation and our needs as we grow up.
• Ask the hard questions of us, like how to make your brand better (whoops, I guess you're doing that with this contest and in other surveys)

Brand 4. Kmart - Kbazaar
A. Yes, well, Kmart is still alive. It is a brand that everyone remembers, it still has lots of real estate.
B. But, it's getting totally squeezed.
• It can’t compete with Wal-mart or Costco on plain pricing (it’s not a warehouse) and it’s too late to compete with Target on design.
• It seems to have lost track of it's customers, now mostly imigrant and ethnic folks in suburban stip malls.
C. So, Throw Open Your Doors and Floors
• Don’t try to beat either Wal-mart or Target. Number 3 or 4 is no good.
• Embrace who's really shopping there, fully• Appeal to the Latin, Asian and Indian immigrant communities who go there.
• Take a cue from Uwajimaya or the Great Wall Mall here in Seattle. You have all these stores and floor space, become a mini-mall with lots of smaller stores and brands that have it all: groceries, clothes etc AND a great ethnic food court.
• And let others do the job for you, become a platform for lots of other small retailers (many of them your customer base) to succeed inside.

Brand 5. Martha Stuart - Martha Twelve Step
A. Yes, Martha evangelized a new generation of the perfect "homemaker".
• She built an amazing brand on creating/managing the perfect home
• She did this by demonstrating and inviting emulation of her own ability to make life and home perfectly lovely and well organized.
B. But, she screwed up, big time.
• She never really accepted her audience's weaknesses (no one was ever as organized or perfect as Martha seemed to be),
• Or her own. Well, now she is going to jail and her perfection has cracked.
C. So, embrace the ordeal and sell it.
• Build a brand on how you fell, accepted your faults and rose again.
• Martha as 12 stepper. Martha as born again, self help evangelist.
• Step One - repent, Step Two - get out and renew, Step Three- tell everyone else about it in your magazine and shows

Brand 6. McDonalds - Eat Your Own Lunch
A. Yes, MickeyDees is one of the biggest brands in the universe• They still sell more burgers and happy meal toys than most countries’ GDP.
• They are a cheap place to eat for families for families of all income brackets.
B. But, the Golden Arches have kind of lost their way.
• It's not really a very upbeat or happy place to go.
• Maybe Ronald and his kids are eating more at Taco Time , which doesn’t have toys that are as cool but boy they are clean and the food is really healthy.
C. So, Quality is it. Get back to it, for real.
• The new exec team at McDonalds needs to look back to their basics. Food Folks and Fun - McDonald's stood for dependable, quality food and experience.
• They need to do what Gordon Bethune did with Continental when he flew all the time on his own planes anonymously. They need to eat there with their families – everyday. And improve it based on their first hand experience.
• They need to do what Les Schwab did, get their owners/employees excited about quality and service.

More to come soon.

Positioning is a stand not a statement

Radio Marketing Nexus: "Positioning" is not a "Statement"

Nice entry from Mark Ramsey. Positioning XYZs applied to everything, including politics!

Fast Company Better Brand Contest - Part I

Found this on Fouroboros, Fast Company is doing a contest on how to make 15 “brands” better. The 15 brands are Barbie, Brooks Brothers, Fast Company, Kmart, Martha Stewart, McDonald's, Microsoft, Office Depot, Old Navy, Radio Shack, Starbucks, Tide, Tiffany's, The United States of America and Virgin. You can focus on one or do them all.

Heck, we figured there's nothing the Marketing Playbook System can't handle. So, we couldn't help ourselves, we decided to enter and to do them all. We just had to look at the ABCs, gap analysis of each one of these brands. It was fun. Three common themes arose: decide what you really stand for and do that, get back to your basics and refresh/embrace them more fully, or expand what you are already doing well to new areas.

Here’s what we had to say, in 5 parts….

Brand 1. Barbie - Boutros-Boutros Barbie.
A. Yes, Barbie is a huge brand with awe-inspiring longevity.
B. But, is she really the great kids will hope to grow up to be?
• For all the “dolls of the world” and Career Barbies, her image remains superficial and materialistic.
• She’s the “Everything Girl.” Everything pretty and nicely dressed, that is.
C. So, stay cute but become someone kids that inspires kids to strive for greatness.
• Be more like “Legally Blond” - beautiful and perfectly accessorized but a fighter for what is right.
• Embrace a bigger set of values. Be more active, involved, responsible and ethical and invite kids and parents to participate.
• Barbie as Aid Worker, Charitable Girl , Barbie Foundation, Barbie University, Barbie World Schools, Barbie Womens Rights Around the World. Go Barbie and all You Girls Who Love Her. Save the World. You Can Do It!

Brand 2. Brooks Brothers - Grown Up Garanimals
A. Yes, it's a great, long lasting clothing brand, with great, classic quality (I love their no iron shirts!), that you can always rely on.
B. But, they're stuck between stodgy (for your Dad) and hip, slick (for emaciated models in the NYT Sunday Magazine), and between snobby boutiques and massive department stores/warehouses.
C. So, Dress By Numbers For Serious Businesspeople
• Appeal to the majority of business people esp. men who need to look good but who suck at dressing ourselves
• Make it super simple for everyone to always look professional
• Be the antidote to being overwhelmed by the selection of men’s warehouse or intimated/put off by the queer eyes for the straight guys at Barney’s
• Take a cue from Garanimals, the kids clothing brand with a color coded system for mixing and matching outfits. Provide a simple, can’t fail business dress system using great Brooks Brothers Brand clothes.
• And once you’re personally sized and flesh/eye/hair color schemed at a Brooks Brothers store subscribe to this system online with a personal-business-meeting-requirements configurator a la Blue Nile for Rings.

More soon. Love to hear what you all have to say!

Positioning Statements: A loaded gun

In a recent entry, Market Ramsey at Radio Marketing Nexus asks "Do Positioning Statements Kill?" To which I respond (not trying to sound like the NRA): Positioning is like a weapon, in the wrong hands it can kill, in the right hands it can save your life. That said, Mark Ramsey and Tom Asacker have an important point... that beautifully written slogans are really not the answer. They can be the bane of good marketing, and a huge waste of time. Which made me think of this week's quotes:

"The best ad is a good product."
- Alan H. Meyer

"A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."
- Bill Bernbach

Nonetheless, I think it's important to make a distinction between "positioning" and "positioning statements." Frankly, if you don't figure out your positioning (unique promise, to a select target, relative to alternatives) before you do a bunch of marketing, you are bound to fail no matter how good your product is.

The Potential Power of Being Number 2

I love this entry from The Origin of Brands Blog: What should you do if you are #2?

I've alway's found #2 positions really interesting opportunities. They can be the best thing for driving attention and eventually winning a dragrace. By contrasting and picking on the big guy you have a lot to gain and they a lot to loose.

As Laura Ries points out,

"A strong #2 brand needs to position themselves as the opposite of the leader.

Republicans: conservative
# 2 Democrats: liberal
(Rank determined by which party is defending the White House)"

This strategy can work great - look at Microsoft Word and Excel (in the old days) picking on WordPerfect and Lotus123 (#1 Established, complex key strokes, # 2 GUI and easy to use). And of course look at how long Avis has used it's "We try harder" position to good use.

The importance of words

Marketing is, at least in part, the art of persuation. And words are - along with pictures, sounds and other sensory, intellectual inputs - a central tool to any marketer or communicator. Easy to take for granted (just look at how some of our political figures use the language), words are powerful, words are cool. For those of us who love words here are some really beautiful cool word tools.

I know I am always looking for other words that better express the meaning I'm trying to put across. The visual thesaurus from ThinkMap has been around for a while, but boy is it neat. Maps the word you chose to all other related words.

Snarkhunting recently highlighted another cool tool. It's called WordCount™ from the really interesting marketing "lab" at Benneton called Fabrica (at which I really need to spend some more time). Anyway, type any word into WordCount™ and it will visually show you where it ranks in frequency of use relative to just about every other word. Neato.

Ries and Trout

I remember the first time I read Positioning, really made clear so many of the core challenges of marketers. Well, Ries (and Ries) and Trout still at it.

Al and Laurie Ries' have a new book, The Origin of Brands. Looks really intriguing. And Laura Ries has entered the blogsphere with her new blog. And she's already generating a lot of attention. Her most recent entry on Positioning Alive and Well covers some key levers/strategies for positioning from "the prospect's point of view"
1. pricing (the open hole) - going premium or discount
2. creating a new category you can be great in
3. go for the number two spot
4. the specialist
5. the channel brand
6. the gender brand

Brand Mantra likes the number 2 strategy. In his very good interview with Laura, BJ Olin highlighted on interesting tidbit about the importance of focus, not just for startups but for all marketers pursuing any of these strategies. Here here.

Meanwhile, the book and blog sparked a different kind of discussion at Radio Marketing Nexus, where the opinions ranged from re-hash to dangerously out of date. Hmmm..

Personally, I'm ok with rehashing. Basics are good to take a fresh look at. But, what the heck, I can't help but try to relate all this to the 5 Plays.
- Going for number 2 feels like a classic way to win by direct comparison - which you do in a Dragrace.
- Filling the pricing hole is something you can do in both a dragrace (as a tool for winning or in a Hi-Low Play where you are trying to get both margin ends of a market.
- creating a category is something you kind of do when you run best of both by collapsing two opposite ends, but I guess we have conservative bent to avoid telling people it's a revolutionary, new category but rather an improvement of an old one (the old horseless carriage vs. automobile play)
- the channel brand is at least in part what becoming a platform entails, although it seems to cover other scenarios too
- and both the specialist and gender brand concepts feel to me like they at least start out as stealth or add-on plays where rather than confronting the biggest competitors head on you slice of niches (by the way, I think ethnic is as important as gender as a brand play).

Seperately, Jack Trout recently gave a pitch on positioning to the AMA (check out the slides here). One of the main points was that strategy = survival. Well, as you might have gathered from previous posts, we just couldn't agree more.

Jingle all the way

Radio Marketing Nexus: Jingle all the way

Love the notion from Mark Ramsey that jingles are not ear candy but "Memory Food"

PowerPoint: Prison or Pallette?

This week's quote supports where I come out in the recent heat around PowerPoint:

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action... Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
- Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971), Poetics of Music

There seem to be four basic views on this very simple product that we helped launch ages ago. Let's look at each:

1. PPT is evil, it is turning minds to mush and worse
Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune looks at all the arguements that PowerPoint is dumbing down the world and making us all superficial. Kinda like calculators allowing us to forget math but worse. Hightext also sees PowerPoint as evil and as really monocultural, derived from and pushing a purely Western, American way of thinking and expressing. While Paul Kedrowsky points out that all this sublimation of our brains by may not be such a big deal, just slowness of innovation.

2. PPT is bad communications and should be replaced
This is typified by Edward Tufte's view in the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Smart guy, terrific influence on UI design. But made my brain hurt.

3. PowerPoint is a canvas, good or bad because of the painter
Hey, if David Byrne uses PowerPoint to make art, it can't be all bad. And besides, it can be supremely funny. Just look at the Gettysburg address or Clinton's recent book as PPT (in one case at least PPT may have forced an improvement).

4. PowerPoint is a fact of life, deal with it. Get good at it.
Most others see PPT as a tool that can be good or bad depening on how you use it. And a bunch of great entries have strong guides to help. Here are a few:
Beyond Bullets is chock full of strong suggestions but here is one I really like. Peterthink and Michael Hyatt has a great list of resources to help you. Brad Feld and Oliver Thylmann offer some strong tips if you are pitching to a VC.
Business2.0 highlights the secrets of PPT "KungFu Masters" my all time favorite of which is Jerry Weissman.
And of course, Seth Godin offers some great advice on how not to creat really bad PPT (but remember to buy his book before you get this free prize).

For me, I clearly net out on the third and fourth points. I love PowerPoint. It helps. Why? For the same reasons as Stravinsky.

I'd like to teach the world to... jingle

In all the talk about the end of mass marketing and marketing as we know it, I've been wondering where has all the music gone? (Sorry for the strained references, I'm just full of them)

I mean jingles. Maybe I'm dating myself again, but I think...

Jingles are great. Jingles are powerful. Jingles are memorable. What has happened to them? Music is such a powerful, emotional conduit. It's also tuned for all media, internet included. Why don't we see more of this integrated consistently into campaigns?

Anyway, check out this terrific site from American Food Century. It's got the actual audio and lyrics of a ton of terrific jingles.

Also AdAge, has a very nice site called Advertising Century. It has a cool timeline, and lists of the top slogans, campaigns, people and yes, the top 10 jingles:
1. You deserve a break today (McDonalds)
2. Be all that you can be (U.S. Army).
3. Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot (Pepsi Cola).
4. M'm, M'm good (Campbell's).
5. See the USA in your Chevrolet (GM).
6. I wish I was an Oscar Meyer Wiener (Oscar Meyer).
7. Double your pleasure, double your fun (Wrigley's Doublemint gum).
8. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should (Winston).
9. It's the Real Thing (Coca Cola).
10. Brylcreem-- A little dab'll do ya

A lot of fun to browse through all this and jog your memories. And to wonder at some of their rankings. For example, my favorite, most moving, most highly manipulative but eerily timely campaign - Coke's I'd like to teach the world to sing - is strangely missing.

McDonalds: WHO'S Loving It, Really?

McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light's recent comments in AdAge about McDonald’s move to “Brand Journalism” have set off a large flurry of blogmentary. (Hey, if he can push a new phrase why can’t we?)

Across all these comments there seem to be three basic threads:

The Death of Mass Media
· Buzz Machine sees that McDonalds is only now catching on to what has long been inevitable. McDonalds is just one more of the big brands to shift away from broadcast.
· Pheedo agrees and sees finding these niches in blogs (look for an at least semi-official golden arches blog soon?)

The validity of McDonalds' message/real value proposition
· As usual Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void, cuts through a lot of this and just wonders what the heck the Brand Journalism buzzword really means.
· AdRants shares this confusion, notes that this really adds up to abandoning the whole concept of a unique selling proposition and doubts whether adding hiphop music to the I'm Loving It campaign is going to make McDonalds any more relevant.
· Seth Godin, as always, challenges us to think a bit deeper and look at the real value. Taking a page from Starbucks book he suggests moving the Golden Arches from just the home of the Big Mac to a real meeting place.
· Robert McLaws/The Bleeding Edge agrees but kinda wonders why, if "you can get a Sausage McMuffin with Egg, hash browns and a cup of OJ for the same price as a Tall White Chocolate Mocha," that more people hanging out there.
· Finally, Planet Brand, also agrees but gives Larry Light some credit for progressive thinking.

Our two cents:
· First, seems like diversification away from mass media, just makes sense. So here here. Just because it's inevitable doesn't mean it's not hard to do.
· Second, all the buzzwords aside, the real issues all seem to center around Positioning. What the heck are their XYZs?
· What's their Category X? Is it a fast food place? Or is it a meeting place? Which is more relevant, which is their strength?
· Who is their Customer Y? Yuppies who want to hang out or budget conscious families?
· What is their uniqueness Z? Their menu?? Their decor? Or their happy meals?

Seems to me that for all the talk about trying to target, to adapt and evolve, it might make sense for them to look to and to refresh their strengths. Maybe I'm dating myself too much but I really remember the jingle "McDonald's is our kind of place." It was a great expression of thier value. Which went way beyond burgers. It was a fast, clean, affordable place for families who didn't want to cook at home. And it was so memorble that the take-offs on it were endless and fun.

Maybe they should look back to that simple target, understand their wants and desires (I've got kids and they still love to go, get their happy meals and play on the indoor playground). Maybe rather than a place for business people to meet, it should be a place for parents and kids to meet. Maybe, instead of starbucks they need to study folks like Chucky Cheese and offer conference rooms, support groups, massages for parents, and the equivalent of slot machines for the kids. Just a thought.

Starbucks knows what they are doing

Strategize: Lessons from Starbucks' Howard Schultz Nice entry on Howard Schultz lessons from Starbucks. Here are a few, they are pretty darn good.

- Think like an athlete. Keep pushing yourself.
- Dream big but stay small (feel small).
- Customer loyalty is not an entitlement
- Great brands aren't built on ads or promotions.
- Stay humble. There is no room for arrogance.

What does your brand add up to?

Brand Autopsy: Brand Mathmatics. I really like this concept and Paul's adjustment of it:

Awareness x Reputation = Brand Relevance

He illustrates with Starbucks. Sometimes the answer is really clear. Most of the time that is really positive - Southwest Airlines, Costco, Dell, etc. But what about Enron?

What about your company's brand? What about the brand of you? How much does your reputation and your awareness add up to?

One or two things of importance

Strategize: Two Things. Glen Whitman says ""For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important." His examples are compelling.

We like to think that when it comes to communicating in marketing (from soda, to software to presidential candidates), it all comes down to one thing - your promise. One promise. Loud, clear and repeated often.

More on naming

Naming is a huge topic, never ending. Some interesting new thoughts out though. One is from a recent RedHerring article. They talk alot about how important a company name can be to your success. They interviewed a bunch of naming companies and got these guidelines
1. Find your focus - Figure out what you want to communicate
2. Think different - A good company name is both familiar and refreshingly different.
3. Watch your mouth - Check that the ideals behind your new name won’t get lost in translation abroad.
4. Don’t rush it - Investing time in making sure your name doesn’t violate any existing trademarks can save headaches later on.
5. Make it an inside job - if you don't have the money, keep it simple and use services such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Nameboy.
6. Look ahead - think Company, not just your first product or category.
7. Stay out of the box - don't be generic. Too dangerous.
8. Stand out - go beyond descriptive, to memorable
9. Beware the verb - Having a name that is used as a verb, may lose you control over its use.
10. A name’s not everything - It’s the values that you build into the name and brand over time that matter.

We like these, but admit to our own bias toward the more straightforward, easy to spell variety (especially when it comes to product names).

Don't forget to check out Igor's guidelines too.

Marketing Yourself, and Breaking Through

Seth's Blog: Needles, haystacks & magnetism points how rising above the noise is even more critical when it comes to finding a job. A resume is not enough. I agree.

Reminds me of how I got my job (in the Mezazoic Era) at Microsoft. It was in response to an ad for a job for which I had no qualifications at all. The headline of the ad was "No One Wants to Be a Cog in a Machine."

My response, along with my irrelevant resume, was "NO COG AM I" and an incredibly cheeky note about how although I had no qualifications for the job I could do 18 million even more important things. A testament to the company that they actually hired me (or an indictment, depending on your POV of my subsequent contribution ;-)

What else is in a name...

While we're on the the perennial and often painful topic of naming, here are some recent entries that hit the spot:

With their normal sense of humor and snarkyness, Snarkhunting highlights a recent naming doozy...
"We utilize our proprietary Ideonics™ process which encompasses BrandVision™ phase, strategic ideation, market feedback, analysis and refinement, cogent presentation of actionable results, and brand roll out assistance." Nice, really nice...

The namergods at Wordlab highlighted the lovely lawfirm name (thought it was from CarTalk) of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe (ha, ha) and how these kinds of names can get you in trouble (also noted by the busy bloggers over at startup skills.com)

Mercury radio highlights this very comprehensive naming guide from the branding/naming folks at Igor (Seth likes 'em so they can't be all bad ;-) It's 51 pages long but it's a lot more than just creative guidance. It's really about strategy and positioning. Which you had better do before you create a name you wish you could uncreate.

What's in a name

Recently, I was working with a company on both their product and company naming. Here was some of the basic guidance used to guide the decisions:

Some naming realities :
. Names are for people outside your company
. Names are things you want an audience (i.e. people) to remember
. Names are things you brand and even trademark, they are things you invest in, if you don't they are just words
. Names communicate and simplify

Some people realities:
. People are easily confused - complexity does not work well in names
. People have a limited cache - they can't digest too many names at once
. People forget - they need to be reminded over and over again of the same one or very few names

What is "naming convention"? A basic framework that...
. allows you to know WHAT you are actually naming and not naming,
. helps keep these names consistent and compelling, and
. makes it faster and easier to name each time.

Keeping things straight. Generally the things you name are as follows (make sure you really know the difference between them and how they relate to each other):
. the company - this is the longest lasting name you have to have. You pour your values,
personality, mission, vision etc into this brand (e.g. Microsoft)
. the product line - a family of mulitple products that are related to each other (e.g. Office)
. individual products - the products within a family, either different variations or component
products of the core family (e.g. OfficePro)
. product versions - as the specific individual products evolve, this is the means of keeping track
(e.g. OfficePro 95)
. ingredient names - the green crystals or Secret Sauce. These should be lasting technologies or
concepts that cut across more than one product (e.g. Intellisense, Retsin)
. feature names - usually version specific functionality, that you want to highlight in promotion but
not in packaging (e.g. Pivot Tables, the Blue Dot)
. program names - not products, but supporting efforts that are worthy of naming, putting
marketing investment behind. Often at the corporate vs. the product level (e.g. MSDN not Visual Studio Developer Network)

Some ground rules for a good naming convention
. Names should either be memorable or meaningful
. They should create the right emotion or communicate/imply the actual thing they are naming
. Company names should be flexible and bigger than the names of the products, they are receptacles that you put meaning into. They don't have to be as concrete as the product names (Salesforce.com is kicking themselves, they are going to have a hard time launching an ERP product)
. Invest in very few core names, build the rest of your convention around them
. Do not name stuff you are not going to support or invest in over the long term
. Don't work too hard. Even if you don't love the name, even if it doesn't make sense, if people already love it and are aware of it, keep it.

Also wanted to make a quick plug for Susan Giordano and Christopher Ireland who have done a bang up job for us on a number of corporate ID and naming efforts.

Simplicity in email

Boy, everyone is on the simplicity/brevity soapbox. It makes sense given all that we are bombarded with. See John Porcaro: mktg@msft: Don't Make Me Read for a good discussion of the importance of brevity in email.

Actually, this is the origin of our Marketing ABCs™ formula. We had to figure out a simple, standard way to keep our emails to Microsoft execs and teams short, simple and effective. And this was before spam.

It became a really simple equation. Three lines only:
A = the situation (quick explaination/assessment)
B = what's the issue with A (why it's urgent)
C = is what action you require of the reader (approval, resources, input, etc.)

Because it was simple it worked. This has now become a technique we and tons of others we know use to simplify the process of thinking about and communicating tons of things from market analysis, to your vision and mission to your investor pitch.

In defense of simplicity

Keep It Simple Redux (Signal vs. Noise)

Nice note and discussion here from Signal vs. Noise. The kick off is from Dr. John Maeda, from M.I.T. Media Lab, and his one-word vision of the future: simplicity. How to get there?
1. Heed cultural patterns. (don't fight them)
2. Be transparent. (easy to understand)
3. Edit. (get rid of feature clutter)
4. Prototype. (make sure it works)

One great point was "what works best is an outer simplicity coupled with access to inner complexity." No matter how much complex stuff is going on under the hood, the outside has to be clear and simple.

Now most of the discussion in the SvN entry is around web and software design, but this point is totally true when it comes to marketing. Too much is overcomplicated. As a marketer, planning is hard, research is hard, campaigns are hard, creative is hard. All of these are supposedly the private realm of "experts." I say bunk. At least as far as your own judgement goes.

At the end of the day, if you can't figure it out with some simple ABCs and XYZs then it's not going to work. No matter how sophisticated all your experts are, if you can't keep it simple, the team won't execute and the target audience won't get it. I'll get off my soapbox now.

Positioning XYZs

The heart, soul and mind of any campaign, any persuasive communication is your positioning. It is also one of the most hotly discussed topics in marketing. For us though, it's simple.

Your positioning statement is just the logic, the argument for choosing your offering over everyone else's.

But believe it or not, in our little Marketing Playbook, we once again have a handy shortcut for this too.

It's called the Positioning XYZs™.

This is another little tool you will see us refer to all the time. It's a super simple logic.

We are the only X that solves Y problem in Z unique way." Where...
. X is the category of company, product, service or other offering you've chosen to win
. Y is the unment need of your target audience, and
. Z is the differentiation, advantage, or key positive distinction you have over your competition.