Breathtaking.
That's the feeling you get when you see a designed artifact out in the market, whether logo or advertisement or Web site, and you can see right through it to the marketing strategy.
Why would your company put your marketing strategy into plain view?
Preparing comps with Letraset and rubylith. Shooting the pasted-up layouts on the stat camera. God, some days I really miss you.
A month ago, my band decided to break up. I was tasked with making the poster for our final gig. As we played through songs at practice, I couldn't get a feeling out of my body: the idea that as this band would be no more -- torn asunder, in a sense -- the poster would need to be made of torn type and imagery, which I would then photograph and throw out. The act of performing music, the making of the poster, and the end of the band would be one and the same in the design.
Of course, the final design didn't express all of those qualities -- that would be impossible. But the act of making the poster, layer by layer, was cathartic. Especially because in the end, I was my own client and could do away with the materials as I so chose, without fear.
And my bandmates thought the poster was good. Except, of course, they wanted to know if I could make a revision and remove the words "final show" from the poster. Which, of course, was impossible. I would need to create an entirely new poster to accommodate the change. A serious lack of foresight on my part, not assembling the work within the computer to allow change.
Or, if looked at in another way, I had chosen that working process in order to (subconsciously) avoid change entirely.
The good old metaphor of the blind men and the elephant works in a pinch, but I think it's played out. With the advent of social media, we're sharing enough information about crappy brand experiences that you can see the whole elephant, and you know what? It's not an elephant. Elephants are big, hungry, fast-roaming, vegetarian, and kind of cute. It's more likely a DogCatCow. Today's poorly maintained brands are made of expressive mishmashes of competing behaviors that hide the true wonkiness within confused corporations. If your company barks like a dog, eats like a cow, and scratches at you mercilessly like a cat... then you know something is really wrong.
I was strolling through the mall above Shibuya Station in Tokyo when I took this photograph. This was not the first time I had seen this logo, in more ways than one.
Brandcuffs: Working within a style guide that's so tightly defined, the grid of every brochure must not deviate one millimeter from the provided templates and if you even consider a photo or illustration that doesn't exactly match the provided disc of examples, their branding group will effectively fire you. (I didn't come up with the term... I stumbled across it on Chris Korbey's portfolio site.)
I'm a very big believer in brand guidelines, and spend a lot of time working with clients that have extraordinarily articulate brands that have been around in some form for 20 years or longer. The amusing thing about working with such brands is that client groups within those companies are always asking in meetings for work that skirts along the bounds of the brand in some way they can't articulate with mere words. "Show me something I haven't seen before," is usually the rallying cry.
The trick, in such situations, isn't to throw the brand style guide away and just start dreaming of crazy-cool ideas. You've got to inhale the brand book and the words describing the real brand essence, consume it voraciously, look through examples of what other designers have done with the brand (if any exist). Then, throw it all away and meditate on the real core or spirit of what the client wants to tease out of the brand essence. This is concerted, thoughtful effort. It prepares you for the creative journey.
Whomever left a stack of "I'm a PC" stickers on my desk has no idea who they're dealing with.
Thanks to Brian M. for being such a great sport and being such a fabulous model.
And, of course, the obligatory "this is how the campaign was meant to be seen" photo.
[EDIT, 12/1/08: They announced today that the WaMu brand will be retired and replaced with Chase, so this post is pretty moot.]
There are many sad things about the distress that's currently working its way through our financial system: the loss of jobs for many of our fellow Americans, the threat of implosion of our securities market, the billions of dollars in mortgage (and shareholder) value evaporating like so much smoke from an unfiltered cigarette.
In the aftermath of this threat of financial armageddon in the United States, where none of us know where to go and whom to trust, the question -- painful as it is -- must be asked: who will save the brands?
That's right. With the seizure of my hometown's Washington Mutual, I'm seeing a dark period for some of our nation's top brands.
WaMu had invested countless billions of dollars to paint a perky, friendly face on money. The WaMu marketing machine had been laser-focused on less-sophisticated, higher-risk consumers, putting forth a friendly facade that was dubbed by their former CEO, Kerry Killinger, as the “Wal-Mart of Banking."
If we've learned anything from Wal-Mart, it's that it isn't what your name is, but the following: 1) what you sell, 2) how you sell it, and 3) how you get what you sell to the place where you sell it. Banks are always good at #1 and #3. They take your money, they lend you money, and they give you your money when you need it. #2 is where the magic happens.
So, how did WaMu sell it? WaMu's core offering, from the banking side, has always been about making basic services free, then hyping the quality of service that you'd receive in the branch and online. Underneath that promise of "Free Checking!" and "More Human Interest" and "Another Revolution in Banking" and "The WaMu Way" was a very deep portfolio of shaky mortgages. These products were serviced through their lending arm, which was very adept at hoovering up mortgages from other banks. The mortgage interest, as well as heavy service fees on low- or no-cost accounts, were two of the major sources of revenue for their banking services.
You can get that top-line summary from reading the press on WaMu and sampling some of their campaigns over the years, but I'd like to throw a different perspective in here.
I had serviced them as a creative for a few years while at a large marketing firm, and after eating and sleeping with them as a client full-time for a year -- I mean that figuratively, of course -- I can tell you that this whole "seized and sold by the government" thing may not destroy their brand.
A caveat, however. JPMorganChase may choose to swallow the brand up wholesale and remake them in their own image, but there's also a counter-argument as to why the WaMu name and ethos should stick around. But this would take real risk, and I assume JPMorganChase has already taken on plenty.
For the moment, indulge me in this little dialogue I've concocted:
WaMu. Sir. I'm assuming no one has called you sir until now, but I'm testing it out, so you can get used to it.
Instead of being that happy-go-lucky, a little quirky, PG-13-movie-loving knucklehead we so love and admire, we need you to, well, grow up. Just a little. We need you to acknowledge the reality of what's happened over the past few years between you and I. Yes, I can forgive you for the college years, the dark nights of the soul characterized by the barbaric yawp of "Whoo hoo!" that we could hear from your frat house, where the parties seemed to be endless and the promise of champagne was always buzzing through the thronging crowd.
The sad truth is, those days are over. You've failed out of school -- and at the ripe old age of 119, more or less. Now is the time to forge on, with a sense of optimism, but no longer with that boyish, devil-can-care attitude that carried me through many a night of balancing my checkbook. No, sir. I want to see the scars on your knuckles, as you run them through your sandy blonde hair. I want to hear you speak in a tone of voice that's two notches below sassy. I want you to say the following:
"We've been through some rough times, old friend, and now we can move on to a new phase in our relationship. One where we can whisper real secrets into our ears instead of sweet nothings."
"And the first thing I want to share with you, David, is that I made a big mistake. I didn't listen to you, way back when you closed your account with us because we held your $260 cash deposit for 7 days before crediting it to your account, causing you to bounce two checks, and waive the fees. I didn't try to stop you from closing that account, or stop sending you mail about starting a mortgage with us. I didn't treat your friends very well in their mortgages with us, and many of them refinanced with other providers because we kept losing their mortgage payments and threatening them with foreclosure."
"All of that is in the past now. I've learned my lesson now. No more commercials about day-old sushi and bald men that dream they've grown hair and banks that treat people like cogs in a gigantic machine. From now on, I will put your money where my mouth is. I will treat you with respect and dignity for banking with me, and only spent a small portion of my free time wallowing in base humor to gain people's attention about my Free Checking product. The rest of the time will be focused on your needs, citizen of Seattle. You have my word."
You may consider this a cheap shot. There are billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake here. I have friends that work at WaMu whom I want to see happily employed. Our local economy hinges WaMu, which is a cornerstone bank of the Pacific Northwest.
But I've spent enough time with the WaMu brand, and seen the level of thought that goes into its expression through their marketing and advertising, to see that it has a reasonable facsimile of a human voice beneath all that posturing. It's just yearning to come out in a more mature expression, and in a way that can bring a human face to a ruined corporation. Sure, in the past few years, that WaMu brand personality has been trampled and stomped all over, and now the brand will likely be kicked to the curb. But at least let it have its last moment in the limelight, singing its sad song.
So I say, friends, that we allow WaMu its chance at redemption. Much like our Uncle Fred, who has seen his life destroyed by addiction and is now going through his 12-step recovery, WaMu has a chance to heal its wounds, and our own.
Whether this will happen has yet to be seen... but I'm idealistic enough of an American to dream that we could try to afford a teaspoonful of grace to a failed banking institution with a legacy of funny ads.
That's more than we can say for those other banks out there that are, well, banks.
While resting at the top of Whistler Peak a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but notice how good the Vancouver 2010 Olympic logo looked as a 15 foot statue. Good enough to try to put in my pocket and take with me... although a two-ton pile of rock may be hard to strap on the car roof and drive down the Sea to Sky Highway to Seattle without dramatic consequences.
Back at home, staring at my photo of this gigantic logo -- especially after spending this week working with my designers on a bunch of fun logo concepts -- made me think about how the process of great logo development is often comparable to stone carving, though initially at a very small scale. You bring out the raw material from your sketchbook and pare away at a tiny rendering within the computer, chipping away at an idea until the unnecessary elements fall away to reveal something meaningful. In that organic, poetic process, even the cast-off shavings can be formed into compelling designs. Various half-ideas fuse into new wholes.
But after all of that work, you make the logo bigger. Much bigger. If you can't blow your logo up to fifteen feet scale, then stand back and feel like you want to grasp it in your hand, you probably haven't fulfilled your task to a level of great satisfaction.
Download a one-page summary of this post, showing the charts in landscape format.
Great customer experience depends on a number of crucial variables: having products that foster emotional connection through positive interaction; having marketing, sales, and other support functions for purchasing the products be as effortless and useful as possible; and by ensuring that word-of-mouth communications aren’t held with too tight of a grip, i.e. left free to flourish on existing online and real-world communities.
Truly great companies understand how to “pulse” their experiences, so their customers experience above-average products, services, and marketing experiences across the board, punctuated by frequent bursts of high-quality brand interaction that help customers to overlook any hiccups in the relationship. They also understand that there is an ideal method to how they operate their businesses, and flex their control over various channels to make sure that any potential failures are immediately countered by exceptional customer contact.
Great Customer Experience: The Ideal Pulse
The following illustration shows a potential customer interaction over two months with a chain of clothing stores. The numbers below each customer touch correlate to metrics that can be measured regarding customer satisfaction through online, in-store, email, and word-of-mouth communications:
The value of planning the best possible experience provides the strategic advantage of fostering long term repeat business instead of forcing marketers to always seek quick wins.
For each experence that your audience has with your products or services, you have an opportunity to further cement customer loyalty and increase the chance of a referral or a repeat sale. A fumble like the one shown above, handled with grace, can make a major impact on the lifetime value of your customer.
And seeing that single failure in the context of the above storyline highlights how rare it is to have uninterrupted quality of service with graceful recovery -- unless you're shopping at the highest-end retail establishments.
Common Customer Service: The Unsteady Pulse
Can you remember the last time you received an apology in the mail for a company mistake? (I got one last year, but it was only because someone stole a laptop with 4 million customer names, including mine...)
Customers take note of the consistency of a company’s actions, both consciously and subconsciously -- sometimes within microseconds of each interaction. If they feel that the company is not in control of their own actions in more than one channel, they’re more likely to find another company that satisfies their needs in a more stable manner. Things end up like this:
Many companies falter in providing consistent customer experiences because their internal policies and bureaucracy inform the structure of a customer’s experience. Internal divisions built around maintaining channels, instead of fostering a blending of customer knowledge through all channels, can have a major toll on marketing quality. It takes extraordinary effort and a truly holistic attitude to mold all company behaviors and activities around customer desire.
We've all felt the instability inherent in our interactions with a company that has poor customer experience. What tools can we develop, as both creative thinkers and business strategists, to defibrillate the pulse of corporate brands?
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy. Let's talk about how you apply your marketing strategy and your audience insights to generate tactics that sing.
Based on how you answered your top three questions in Part 4 of this series, you have the answers that you need to select your tactics. So, let's flip those questions around and use them as the proper guide to discuss the thinking that should help shape your tactical marketing approach.
Tell your audience what they want to hear, based on how they feel.
You've determined some key understandings about your audience base. Now distill that material into one key insight that will make them pay attention. Ideally, you have to be able to say this in one sentence (or less) to succeed in selling your client and your shareholders.
In the realm of financial services, think about MasterCard: "Priceless." Or Citi: "Live Richly." Or way back when Washington Mutual knew what they were doing: "More Human Interest." Each of those key insights was an embodiment of how they understood their audience needs. They are all ways of making a dull, droll, somewhat cutthroat industry foster a human connection with their audience. (Reading that previous sentence over again, I'm sounding pretty jaded.)
I'm not saying you always need to come up with some catchy phrase for your client. You just need to know what human insight drives your tactics. Some clients can hand the appropriate insight to you on a platter, and save you plenty of work. If you have a less sophisticated client, or you're being hired to generate this insight, you will need to include this key insight in the brief, or you're taking a big risk.
Talk to your audience where they'll pay the most attention.
Once you have the insight nailed, you go back to your research about where your audience lives and breathes.
If they're business travelers, you could hit them in the taxi, in the airport, on business television, on those little coffee cup sleeves.
If they're consumers, you may recommend redesigning their packaging based on behavioral research and focus groups.
If your audience likes to spend a ton of time online, you could develop a seeding strategy for bloggers, fostering two-way communication between your corporation and your customer base.
Of course, all of these thoughts will dovetail with previous efforts your client has made, and the statistics about how they have performed.
In the good old days, we used to talk about "above the line" communications (a.k.a. television, print, and other high-profile awareness-generating mediums) and "below the line communications" (direct mail, in-store sales, training, anything focused on fostering sales). Nowadays, there is no line. Since we're talking about fostering great customer experiences that lead to long-term relationships with brands, every single customer interaction could lead to a positive or negative impression of a company and its products and services. If a client comes to you saying they want to sell 100,000 more bags of chips a month, you can't just say to run some ads and call it a day. Your approach needs to be multilayered and more sophisticated, taking into account both traditional one-way media communications (such as advertising, collateral, branding) and two-way media communications (such as compelling interactive, social networking, blogging, thought leadership, in-person dialogue).
So while it's easy to tell a company that they need to get in front of 1 million eyeballs to generate 10,000 sales, it's not the appropriate answer anymore. I can't imagine walking into a client's office and advocating that kind of solution without being roundly laughed at. As consumers, we expect dialogue with brands. We know we're in control of the game and have a real voice in the marketplace. Online, your voice can carry just as much weight as 100,000 impressions of a banner advertisement, or more.
Assume the audience won't hear it the first time. Or the second. Or...
Another attribute of your audience research should be focused on how you can craft your communication strategy to surround the right people at the right point in the sales process with the right message. It's no longer "one size fits all" communications that can accomplish every single goal with one swing of the hammer. Be smart about how each touch fosters progress through your sales process, while at the same time, being aware that your customers may only get message 2, 4, and 7 out of your grand media scheme -- meaning that each creative communication should always hit home the key insight and provide some of the support necessary to foster the right kind of experience and prompt some level of future interaction.
Test, test, test. And then test some more.
Return on investment should dictate every move you make in the marketplace. Don't ever put a tactic on the table, such as a long run of television spots, or a grandiose series of online ads, without factoring iteration and improvement into the process. Due to up-to-the-second metrics on interactive properties, clients expect adjustment on the fly. And be prepared to kill a buy midstream or shift media or money to other channels if they don't perform at the right cost per acquisition. Unless your goals include some measure of thought leadership or more favored brand presence, don't think about pouring more cash into "love bombs" or other forms of sheer goodwill without the research to back up the long-term ramifications of your actions.
--
In the final part of this series, I'll share some broad guidelines to help your marketing insights take the appropriate form in compelling marketing communications.
Don't associate your products with other brands unless they perfectly mirror a lifestyle.
High-end brands are being extended across categories -- and faltering.
Brands that offer services and brands that contribute to lifestyles (such as Starbucks) can't cross over into luxury goods, and vice-versa, without thinning their brand. Can you imagine a Starbucks BMW? A Godiva Porsche? No way. There's no parity between them. But I believe in the Eddie Bauer edition of the Ford Explorer... barely.
Everyone has their own internal weights and measures when it comes to rationalizing a purchase, but I think it's fair to say this: A jacket is a jacket and is not a car. Don't overreach your category, your brand space, and what your customers will believe. It's better to cross-promote your products to another brand's audience than to badge your products incorrectly or mash your products up to try to be unique.
Don't price based on cost of goods. Price on aspirations.
People are more likely to rocket due to perceived value, not real value.
The luxury category has fragmented by budget. Audiences are asked to pay closer and closer attention to nuanced categories, with the idea that they'll always aspire to a product out of their budget.
This is known as "rocketing" in a product category, see the fantastic book Trading Up for an in-depth treatise about New Luxury or "masstige" marketing and how it differs from the old mindset about luxury goods and how the market is evolving luxury into new forms.
Don't tell a completely new story about your brand when you've already staked your ground.
If you didn't start close to the luxury space, you'll never create cachet around your product without expending a vast quantity of capital to change perception. Start a new brand if you really want to get in the game.
Don't make more! Limited quantity equals controlled demand.
Easy to understand in theory, but very hard to pull off when people start beating down your door waving fat wads of cash. Companies often cave and produce more when they should just have a plan in place as to how they can extend that demand into a new (similar) offering.
And last, but certainly not least:
Don't horse it up.
"Less is more," more or less. With clean design and smart production tactics it's relatively easy to convey an aura of luxury and exclusivity.
This is the expected first route for a designer to take with a luxury product, so don't think you have to beat a path through the weeds to engage your audience and emerge with something too novel from a branding perspective. Does it really convey the right feeling if the design is incredibly busy? Unless you're conveying some level of sophistication, your audience will have trouble understanding why they should pay 2 to 10 times the price of the competition.
I love it when marketing managers talk about how it's their job to help funnel leads to salespeople, and that they can't control anything after that magical transference of responsibility.
I also enjoy it when salespeople talk about how they spend too much time sifting through weak leads from those same marketing managers to close a sale.
Or when I enter a store after being enticed by a compelling marketing promotion and hot price on some product I can't wait to purchase (phone, climbing gear, and chocolate all come to mind), only to be ignored by the salespeople.
The truth is, we're all in this together: designers, marketing managers, and salespeople. And we have to work together to create compelling communications that support our brands, drive through sales, and ensure that our customers keep coming back.
You'd think the big dogs in the consumer marketing space would have wised up to this new truism of the Information Age: you can't assume that people will like your brand if they get stoked by great marketing and let down by poor service in any channel. There was a great post on Ideas on Ideas about this recently, related to blogs and their influence on purchasing decisions, but I think there's a broader point to be made than just bad service = big word of mouth = bad branding. Often bad service can cascade into a larger problem because of poor continuity between sales channels.
I remember being stunned as I walked through Best Buy last month, to be greeted by every single salesperson I passed. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven after so many years of terrible service there. We had dropped in to purchase a microwave for my wife's office, and they were able to direct us to options right off the bat, without having to sit there and decode the boxes to figure out which one would be the wisest purchase. We'd researched the purchase on the Internet, made sure to call ahead and ensure the products were in stock, and then were helped by a real person right on the spot to make a no-pressure purchase.
What made the experience so great?
Every single point, from Internet to phone to in-store, was high-touch. Swift. Too the point. Propelling us to the purchase, no matter where we chose to make it, and with us feeling like we were in control of the situation. In every channel.
This is the holy grail of retail. The ability to cultivate a positive experience that extends across every touch point in the sales process, from consideration to purchase to happy customer to long-term customer/company relationship.
And why is it so rare?
Because there's a weak link somewhere in the chain from product creation to marketing to sales. And most often, this is related to your channel marketing strategy not lining up.
Companies that grok this spend a lot of time refining their business process on a regular basis -- because they know it's the only way to ensure the customer experience is optimal. It doesn't always boil down to a bad marketing promotion or a bad in-store experience. Often the things that can hobble a corporation's branding efforts in the long term are all about how they do business.
Marketers like to segment out Internet, phone, in-store, email, etc. in their marketing plans and focus on increasing the effectiveness of each channel. They think about the synergy of how each channel works together to ensure a continuity of experience until a customer engages in a purchasing decision. Where necessary, they'll work around issues with legacy sales systems, weak infrastructure, wonky in-store policies, and other hurdles in the background to ensure that customers keep getting funneled into a sales decision. And this is where their brand truly suffers.
Usually one channel is less mature than another. Some companies are slam-bang great at Internet, but they are terrible in the store. Others have some of the best phone service around, but the online experience is weak. Some companies like to focus their marketing dollars on the channels that perform best, such as online, often to the detriment of hiring the killer staff that will make their in-store sales rise more swiftly.
But I digress. Let's focus on the places where channel marketing can break down, from the customer's perspective.
Customers don't expect much. But they do have real expectations when it comes to how they'll approach you -- and what kind of behavior they'll tolerate. Let me share some of these expectations with you:
I think most of what I've listed here is fairly obvious and clear to most marketers. But the proof is in the performance: you need to invest in each channel appropriately, and continue analyzing the effectiveness of the customer experience in each channel, to ensure that customers aren't falling out because of inconsistent experience or overcoming your own internal struggles to improve.
In the end, what customers experience in the sales process for a consumer product will likely hold more weight than the quality of your advertising, your marketing, and sometimes even your product quality, if it's on parity with the competition.
Do you really want to risk dragging the equity of your brand down in the long-term? If you aren't retaining your current customers and helping to foster brand loyalty in the long term, then how much money are you really throwing away?
Hypocrisy is something you can't escape when you sell a product or service. You're telling other people to focus their attention on a single element of a complicated product or service, all the while attempting to differentiate your client from their peers. When you look at your marketing message in this way, I think it becomes evident why it's so hard for companies to market charitable initiatives, present themselves as socially responsible, or demonstrate true concern about environmental change. You're asking people to look you in the eye and perhaps smile while you're talking, but they can't help but focus on the spot of blood on your cheek.
The challenge of marketing any product or service that includes a social responsibility message requires you to confront what I like to call "the dot of hypocrisy." Your message won't be effective unless you focus on one idea in each communication. If that one idea is a naked social responsibility message, however, you're in big trouble.
If you lead with a marketing claim that is solely based in a social responsibility message, your audience will pick it apart. This is something that I'll be exploring more in-depth in some other posts, but the short argument is this:
Product claims may seem logical to marketers, but they are emotional in nature to an audience and tied up in a mess of factors that include your brand perception and your product position, value, and quality. You can try to control your brand and your product, but you can't control how people perceive the value of your charitable giving or social responsibility. People nowadays say that they think it's critical for companies to be good global citizens, but that single claim isn't enough to get them to act. Social responsibility has to align with people's purchasing factors to make a dent in the dot of hypocrisy.
Sometimes minimizing the dot of hypocrisy is this simple:
Can you think of any examples of companies that have diminished the dot of hypocrisy in an elegant way?
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