branding | speaking in clicks

Posts Tagged ‘branding

Sep

Advertising Craft and the Metrics Epidemic

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: advertising campaign, branding, marketing, metrics

From time to time, despite advances in psychiatry, an insidious strain of ideological nonsense starts weaving its way through the corridors of advertising and marketing communities. It’s a destructive threat no amount of practical experience can curtail for long.

I’m talking about the multilevel delusion that advertising exists to increase sales by measurable amounts.

At this late stage in the most recent outbreak of this pandemic, I know it will be hard for some of you to read the previous sentence. If so, I urge you to seek medical attention right away.

This rapidly mutating ideological virus has a cascading effect on all aspects of the advertising/marketing industry. Once unleashed, it turns even the savviest minds into anxious, literal, perfectionist Golems, perpetually clinging to their “precious” metrics.

Confusion.
“How can you guarantee my customers will open this envelope?”

I heard one afflicted brand manager shriek this gibberish, during the height of the outbreak of 1997. Very sad. Yet so infectious is this delusion, it caused several of my colleagues to dismantle the entire conceptual array for a direct mail piece, just to splash “SEE INSIDE TO SAVE 10% ON YOUR NEXT PURCHASE” in big red letters across the envelope.

Recently, I realized another outbreak had taken place. I feared the worst when I learned that a client had vetoed a set of robust creative concepts simply because his sales reps didn’t understand them.

Well, of course not. An advertising concept isn’t fundamentally about sales. So where does this confusion start? Like most of its kin, this profound distortion of the truth is based in ignorance. For in this jumbled world, advertising must necessarily sit shoulder-to-shoulder with sales promotions, catalogue space ads and supermarket circulars. No wonder people with an MBA in “Will-this-be-on-the-final?” get confused.

Nor should it surprise anyone if many a car brand manager, in the grips of Delusio Metriciencis, will demand an ad campaign set in a car dealership. If you’ve seen any one Volkswagen “Sign Then Drive” TV spot you know what I mean. If you haven’t, and wish to research this topic on YouTube, I suggest you wear dark glasses to ward off contagion.

In a world without branding …
Anyway, an ad set in a store is the epitome of the confusion of advertising with sales. In reality, advertising exists only to create the emotional, cultural and societal context in which a sale can occur. It’s the very reason, when you set out to by a cellphone, you arrive with a clear conviction about whether you want to go with IOS or Android, Apple or Samsung.

Otherwise, in a world of nothing but sales messages, you’d walk into a store filled with identical cell phones and simply pick one from the price-bin you’re comfortable with. In that context, the first marketer to offer a red cell phone would create a sensation. And the first to say: “Your lovely spouse deserves a lovely red phone,” would own the market within the first week.

Not because of price points or sales messages. But because the Red Phone company had invented branding — a cultural environment in which consumers can perceive your product, value it, distinguish it and identify it.

… a mindset ruled by rulers.
In light of these simple realizations, it’s painful to watch a marketing manager’s spiraling descent into the kind of short-term thinking that de-brands a product. You can almost hear his or her fevered dreams:

“Hey, love your new $55.47.”
“Thanks! It’s so much better than my old $59.95.”

“You are so lucky. My $72.19 is so much more expensive.”

I know. Marketing is hard. You have to distinguish between one aspect of your annual spend and another. And towering over you is Metrics, an ogre with hypnotic powers, who convinces you his slithering percentage points are endowed with meaning.

Wake up! Spend a few hours in a decompression chamber. Do whatever it takes to flush out the ideological toxins that plague you. Trust me, they’re the only reason you believe Advertising can deliver measurable results.

Ironically, more than one creative director in my career has opined, “Advertising isn’t rocket science.” But my message to you today is more sweeping:

Advertising isn’t science at all.

And no amount of sketchy market research, sticky eyeballs, click-throughs, retweets or “participations” can make it into one.

Advertising is a craft. And its ablest practitioners are people who understand human nature — as expressed in a specific, well-defined target audience. Remember that, the next time someone on your extended team demands proof that a gecko with an East London accent can make cynical Americans warm up to a car insurance company.

Apr

Brand Essence? Essentially Redundant.

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Advertising, Copywriting and Message Strategy
Tags: brand essence, brand purpose, branding

In a common agency scenario, advertising creatives huddle with strategists and account directors with an intimate understanding of the client’s POV—to craft a presentation spelling out the Essence of a brand.

My qualms with this process begin with its redundancy. A brand has always been a summary of the values espoused and the promise made by a company. It’s only recently, when the term “branding” has also been applied to logos, fonts and color swatches—that the cry goes up for a brand to cleave to its essence.

No one who understands what a brand is would allow that to happen. A brand is a distillation of attributes a company, its products and services already exhibits in the real world—not a slogan crafted by committee. It’s an idea, a thought-process, a way of life for the company that owns it. As such, it can’t be made: It must be earned.

Marketers who don’t grasp that embark on periodic quests for the kind of unifying phrase that previous generations would have recognized as a campaign headline—one possible surface manifestation of a brand.

Is it any wonder that this tail-wagging-the-dog effort fails so magnificently?

Senseless…but darn concise.
Compounding the problem is the contradictory intent to be all-inclusive and inoffensive—yet still say something specific, unique and “ownable.” It’s here that the creative torture begins, as anxious marketers attempt to substitute a thesaurus for real creative thought. The search is on for a string of words that say something memorable without deviating into sense.

Yet, once the process is finished, the resulting Essence statement contributes nothing to branded communications. Filtered through its gelatinous mass, even simple phrases abandon all hope of Meaning.

How else explain “The Joy of Pepsi” or statements like:

We are Farmers (Farmers Insurance)
Go Further (Ford)
Get a powerhouse of productivity in your pocket (Windows Phones)

The last example, aside from being socially tone-deaf, conjures up the absurd image of firing up a power plant in your pants.

The others, and there are many others, are merely blank. For instance, while I might experience joy with my family at Thanksgiving, the last thing I’m liable to remember about the holiday is how great the Pepsi tasted. Regarding Ford, no matter how I interpret the phrase “go further,” it rings false.

Because unless I’m a NASCAR driver, my relative success in life won’t be determined by the car I drive. At the same time, this slogan is linked to a PR campaign revolving around the theme of empowerment. But as much as Ford deserves credit for even entering this arena, this campaign needs to be utterly separate from the idea of buying Ford cars.

Not least because, as with nearly every multinational corporation, the disparity between Ford’s C-level compensation and pay for the rank and file is a major contributor to dis-empowerment.

Again, because a brand is a promise, the credibility of that promise is an essential component of any branding exercise. Go further? Only if you’re a member of the 1%.

As such, Ford’s latest branding blunder is another triumph of marketing/PR ideology over common sense. Somebody sold the car maker on mounting a “purpose-centered” campaign, because such campaigns are very chic right now. They just forgot to check if their high-flying rhetoric actually had wings.

The committee-process ate my thought-process.
If the taglines above appear to make sense, it’s only because they’ve been cast in the form of a brand essence statement. Now, I know how such shallow phrases are produced. It’s a painstaking process, involving many late nights, hundreds of pounds of ugly wrap sandwiches and a headache-inducing stream of jargon-encrusted e-mail.

And in that horribly attenuated process, a kind of groupthink evolves. Trouble is, the final result is a phrase or phrases with countless unspoken associations that, unfortunately, “you had to be there,” to understand.

Paradoxically, the current obsession with Big Data, and its presumption of reality-based messaging, has been accompanied by a withdrawal from the real world. If the only requirement to attaining joy were buying Pepsi, don’t you agree life would be a tad simpler? Yet many other brands also think nothing of expecting consumers to associate their products with life’s greatest achievements, its loftiest feelings.

Want to speak to the essence of your brand? Keep your messaging in bounds. Pepsi as a universal metaphor for life’s great moments? Ford cars as a conduit for self-fulfillment? Please. Once and for all, dump the data, burn the research and just get real with your audience.

Mar

Website Optimization: Beyond the Code. Behind the Words.

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: brand loyalty, branding, creative strategy, digital marketing, optimization, Web design

If you’re engaged in digital marketing, I invite you to try a simple experiment. In a rare quiet moment,
sit back, close your eyes and ask yourself if you actually like your branded website.

That’s “like,” as in actively enjoy using it, as in looking forward to its latest updates, as in almost feeling sorry for your competition because your website is way cooler.

If I had to guess, your answer will be, “Well, it could be worse.”

Having looked at branded sites in many different categories over the last decade, I can’t help thinking this is the likely answer at least 80% of the time. Part of the problem is expectation.

Fact is, website design, execution and maintenance has been so mediocre for so long that few people expect a website to be more than a collection of boxy stock art captioned with rigidly standardized “copy tone.”

Sure, maybe there’s a marquee on the home page. Maybe there’s a quiz, contest, video link or embedded e-marketing platform. But what’s missing is the one thing consumers care about: themselves. No wonder the garden-variety branded website gets ignored: It’s about a brand instead of a person.

The distance between consumer and brand is nowhere more apparent than on e-tail sites that engage in price-point jockeying instead of providing meaningful shopping advice. Despite oceans of market research to the contrary, most people realize that making shopping decisions based on peer reviews is tantamount to opening their souls to the jaws of Hell.

Looking past the code…
Now, ranting aside, it’s obvious that even utterly functional e-tail sites manage to sell stuff. So why bother building a website you can be proud of? The answer lies in how completely you want to discourage brand loyalty.

After all, if your business is based on being the low-cost leader, you can always be undercut, especially by a company who offers a feeling of belonging. How many people, for example, can’t do a “hat trick,” yet crave a pair of Jordan Super.Fly4s? Or, by the same token, will never own a Winchester XPR, but are hooked on the classic style of LL Bean?

Consumers can get sneakers or flannel shirts for the same price or less all over town. But people who get hooked on a feeling will bookmark, tag and share your site over and over again. Why? Because human beings are inherently, intrinsically, insistently emotional. Our motivation to act depends on an established emotional connection. Do you really need to attend another Webinar to know that?

All you need is to walk away from the rigid conventions that have grown up around digital marketing and talk to people in a real voice about themselves.

…to a distinctive thought process
Now, you’ll notice that neither LL Bean, nor Nike piles up its web pages with conventional marketing trash like “Our Promise to You, the Consumer.” You won’t find any talk about “fine quality” in the upfront. It’s just that the products themselves, lovingly photographed, have grown out of a thought process, an ongoing communication with an audience segment each brand understands. The advertising works because the brand works.

So if you’re answer to my initial question is an unwavering “Meh,” you may need to look way deeper than whether or not a flat design makeover is in your future. You may need to start at the root of your problem —the lackluster emotional appeal of your product. Want to fix your website? Start by fixing your brand.

If your primary marketing message:

…revolves around price, you can be undersold
…includes buzzwords like “quality,” you’re generating background noise
…is a celebrity endorsement, what happens when the celebrity melts down?

But if your message speaks directly and honestly to the identity your audience wants to claim for itself, an identity with a sharp emotional hook, you can generate loyalty on a scale a flood of coupon offers can’t match.

And in case the point is lost on you, a website built around that hook will come as close as any can to driving sales and fulfilling the promise of digital marketing. Not because your programmers have mastered HTML5, but because you, amigo, have mastered branding.

Jul

Hotel Web Sites: Too Checked Out for Branded Messaging.

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Advertising, Creative Development, Digital Marketing and Message Strategy
Tags: branding, Creative Development, message platform, message strategy

As travellers know, hotel Web sites are among the most functional e-commerce sites around. Yes, most of them feature the ubiquitous marquee, but that’s as close to any kind of high-level messaging you’re liable to see. And that messaging is itself ultimately offer-driven.

Can anyone tell the difference between Sheraton and Ramada? Not online. Between the input boxes and those tidy little retouched jpegs of the rooms, the only thing you have to go on is the logo. Yes, they use different color schemes and, yes, different fonts. But this ladies and gentlemen, is not branding.

A brand, after all, is a promise. Yet the only contract any of the hospitality giants makes with consumers is:

“We’re a hotel. With rooms. Which you can stay in. For a fee. Pick a date and enter your credit card number. Don’t keep us waiting.”

Keeping in mind that many business travelers stay at hotels prescribed by their companies, some differentiated attributes ought to be selling these hotels to whomever’s in charge of hotel bookings at XYZ Corp. And, of course, you might reasonably expect that leisure travellers would like to feel they’ve chosen a hotel chain for a reason.

Especially, that is, if they’re planning a stay in a major US city where the options are all over the map in terms of price, features, location, etc., etc. But by remaining so blank, these Web sites are not only tarnishing their brand’s image, they’re damaging the image of the entire industry.

“Who cares where I stay?” is the question anyone would be tempted to ask after visiting these sites. “All hotels are the same. Same disappointing “Continental Breakfast,” same stodgy furniture, same prohibitive minibar. Same iffy cable service.

Offline, on it. Online, off it.
Ironically, one of the few travel-related brands to have an advertising concept is hotels.com. Yet, as memorable as the Captain Obvious campaign is, it has nothing to do with the service the Web site provides. Even if I stretch my imagination and conclude that the message is, “Hotels.com is the obvious choice for travel reservations,” the concept spoils itself by simultaneously making the obvious look ridiculous.

Booking.com, at least in TV spots, is much more convincing, even if their Amy Schumerish play on their name’s phonetic similarity to an indelicate word is a bit limiting. More successful is their other play on their name, “Booking.Yeah,” which effectively uses something approaching millennial diction to hippify a boring topic.

Offline, these two brands have done something to transmit a message, a promise, a statement of purpose. But there’s no trace of that messaging on the Booking.com Web site, which might as well be a site for Orbitz or Travelocity for all anyone would notice—logos aside.

Where, I can’t stop wondering, did anyone get the idea that “Buy Now” is a brand identity? On the other hand, you may wonder why I find this so irritating.

Schlock and loaded with clichés.
Despite having survived for over a century in one form or another, through many ups and downs, advertising and marketing are fragile things, whose immortality you cannot take for granted. Mail boxes, airwaves and screens crammed edge-to-edge with schlock are as deadly to the psychological ecosystem of sales as CO₂ is to the lungs. Every year that we crank out crap is another year we erode our audience.

Meanwhile, gloom and doom analysts continue to have a field day at the supposed demise of the traditional :30 TV spot. But the real reason people click away is that TV spots and all of traditional advertising went into an accelerating decline after the ’60s. A TV spot today is, with few exceptions, a dreary landscape of tedious clichés. No wonder people reach for the zapper.

Let no one think, however, that digital advertising is “inherently” better. Sites like these from the travel industry, which are only the tip of the iceberg in the schlockification of the Web, will inevitably have the same effect on digital space.

The issue is not the medium, but every bit the message. Remember: the bad work you post today is the baseline you’ll struggle to rise above tomorrow. Because if this trend continues, the much-vaunted “impact of digital media” will be the fond memory of a few archeologists, only a couple of dozen years from now.

Dec

Effective Web Design: Sliding Into the Psyche

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Creative Development, Digital Marketing, Message Strategy and Web Design
Tags: branding, digital design

In the last few decades, the design aspect of consumer electronics has taken on more and more importance. Today, people buy their technogear as much for its look as any real understanding of what’s going on inside. That’s not surprising really, considering that’s how most people get into relationships and have for countless centuries—all those volumes of chicklit to the contrary.

So in a world more dominated by looks than ever before, it’s hard to understand the discrepancy that occurs so often, between the design of a product and the design of the Web site built to sell it.

“Submitted for your approval,” as the man used to say, are two contrasting sites: BeatsByDre.com and Bose.com. The site developed for Beats is well synchronized with the style of the products themselves, whose clean lines derive from geometric shapes, softened with a biomorphic aesthetic appeal. The flat digital design complements product design nearly perfectly and leaves plenty of light and air for copy to work its motivating magic. That image and text both have room to breathe on what is, essentially, an e-tail site, is an understated triumph I can only wish would be more broadly imitated across the Web.

That this wish of mine is likely to remain in the provenance of magic lamps and the genies who inhabit them is borne out by the site developed for Bose speakers. Ironically, here is a product many people would agree achieves a high watermark in design and technological efficacy. And yet its Web site design harkens back to the deep dark ages of supermarket circulars.

Grabby hands.
Splattered with price bursts, slathered with iridescent colors and embedded in one of the cheesiest background images I’ve seen in a decade, you’d think Bose products were, in fact, the cheap knock-off version of some other brand. In a prime example of the devastation wrought by Marketing Anxiety, the image on the left depicts the arm and hand of a sedate listener, enjoying a game of scrabble over a glass of wine—while the image on the right depicts a cartoony “bopper,” looking for all the world as if she just stepped off the set of the ’60s TV show The Mod Squad.

Thank you, Bose, for reminding us that the world is diverse, i.e., full of sedate white people and people of color who love to rock out, even at the risk of traumatic neck compression.

The only thing missing here is the “Why Pay More” sticker or “The Perfect Gift for the Holidays,” although the latter is fairly well covered by the unsubtle subliminal snowflake bursts. Red snowflakes, at that.

Now, even if you were to conclude that this is a matter of taste, you’d have to concede that the Bose site suffers from metastasising visual clutter. It’s the classic example of a site that makes users say “Better come back later when I have more time.” And it’s easy to see why. A user’s eyes are drawn nowhere, precisely because they’re drawn everywhere.

Pushy talk.
To look at the Bose site is to instantly lose a bit of faith in the quality of the product. This is irrational but true—even for someone like me who actually owns and likes a pair of Bose speakers. A site so heavily layered in cheese makes me wonder if I’ve made the right choice.

Why? Because advertising design of any kind, but especially the digital variety, that’s so jam-packed with marketing messages, is inherently manipulative. The site says “Hey, why don’t YOU buy a product, ANY product from us RIGHT NOW?

Instead of giving me a reason to fall in love with the brand, the brand is reaching for my wallet on the first date. Even in today’s “benefit” oriented dating culture, this is not anybody’s idea of a smooth come on.
And that’s the gross error Bose’s marketers have made.

Know that if you shove me against a wall and say, “You want a speaker. Come on, you know you want it,” you’re not getting the sale, even if your product’s all sparkly and shiny.

But if you create an environment where I feel safe discussing my speaker needs openly and without shame, I just might grow to think you’re the best speaker company in the world. I might even come over and help you rework your Web site.

That’s because—hello, pleased to meet you—I’m a person, not a consumer. And until brands get this into their heads, we’ll see more of this garish, loud and demeaning approach, as we slide into the next half-decade of “the millennium.”

Nov

Consistency: Mythical Beast, Real-world Tyrant

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: branding, creative process, messaging

When it comes to messaging, the word “consistency” is the consistent favorite, as a way to describe the messaging goals of many a brand. It consistently wins the prize for the most overused word in the business.

Not that I don’t understand the impulse. With today’s top-heavy staffing, it takes so many hours to reach common ground on the simplest decisions that there’s little incentive to evolve consumer messaging once the latest tagline passes in committee.

It’s so bad that the very idea of a consistent style of communication is too radical to contemplate. In a know-nothing world dominated by the best-practice undead, being consistent means saying exactly the same thing over and over and over and over and…

While this phenomenon is disturbing enough, the origin of the consistency bug is, as I see it, far more troubling. It stems from a deep-seated fear, born of deep-seated ignorance: The horrifying realization that one has neither the training, instinct, or talent to approach advertising and marketing creatively.

Of the many excuses for this decidedly aberrant behavior, none is less convincing than the all-time favorite, “The client made me do it.” Let me go on record as the first person in the history of advertising to assert that the client can’t make you do anything.

Occult powers.
If I’m not the first, I see no evidence of that principle at work anywhere I look.

Your CEO might “make you,” for no other reason than that your
agency’s market niche is only one notch over from Upstairs Maid
Your creative director might “make you,” because it means less
fuss and bother with image searches and font choices
Or your Account Supervisor might “make you,” because it’s
scientifically proven to guarantee getting to Pilates class on time

But never the client, no matter how many implied client directives you choose to divine, using the mind-reading skills you learned in your MBA program.

To the client, one can always say “no.”

Not flat-out no, by the way. Not scary, lose-the-account no, I’m talking about a no that’s demonstrated, taught, presented and, most important, accompanied by alternatives.

Why is this worth the bother? Because, like any sane person, you’d like your 60-hour work week to add up to something—as opposed to a pile of conventionalized drivel that will one day be cranked out by a Google subroutine.

Myth making vs….
As I see it, the Myth of Consistency also has its origins in a misunderstanding of Brand Identity. At one end of the spectrum are people who believe any ad-like object with the “approved logo lock up, font and color palette” is branded. At the other end are a large group of brand managers who believe nothing is branded unless it conveys exactly the same message each time, word-for-word like a parrot and pixel-for-pixel like a child’s paint-by-numbers book.

But none of this micro consistency is real branding. That’s because branding is a promise of value. Not a promise, mind you, that the headline of every print ad will have 5 words and be in 24-point type. Not a promise that that the logo lock up will never appear on a colored background or that gradient color washes will anchor every background.

And, for heaven’s sake, branding does not mean using the same stock art everyone else is using, the same grinning, proto-orgasmic customers enjoying the same perfect day. Or their opposite, the sad sack, frowny-faced types who telegraph “Before [PRODUCT_NAME].”

…real brand building.
Branding, to the extent that consistency is involved at all, is bound up with the idea of trust. A branded message is a promise to deliver service or function reliably. And contrary to today’s obsessive practice, there is—yes there is—more than one way to make that promise, keep it alive and make your audience’s perception of its value grow.

Because that’s the mistake consistency hawks continue to make. If your message isn’t constantly evolving to reveal more and more of your value to consumers, your branding efforts are all for naught.
You become like that annoying friend we’ve all had at one point who does one tiny favor for you and never stops reminding you, word-for-word, of that favor every time you run into them.

Branding, then, is not about piddling details. It’s about being consistently engaging, enlivening and most of all interesting. If Apple is America’s most valuable company, it has everything to do with its ability to capture the Thought Leader title over and over again on a variety of issues. The apple logo, the color white, those annoying, cloying, smarmy, smug and grotesquely self-congratulatory voiceovers they crank out “consistently”? Not so much.

Dec

Bullets Under Branding

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: branding, copy development, messaging strategy

“Just the facts, ma’am…”

If you’re a fan of classic American TV, you recognize this quotation as one of a handful of signature catch phrases from Dragnet. Sgt. Friday’s no-nonsense attitude to crime investigation left no room for emotion, inference or induction. He was objective, y’all.

But if you’re not a fan of classic TV, you probably still recognize the quotation as something else: The subtext for a vast quantity of marketing/advertising speak. Surely, the fact that, in either scenario, a lot of your attention would be taken up with “bullets,” is just kismet. At least I hope so.

After all, I’d hate to think the real reason behind the ubiquitous use of bulleted copy in advertising is to beat the consumer into submission. I mean, it would be like saying:

“Get in line, I’ve got bullets here.”

If you think I’m over the top with this analogy, I’m willing to bet you will agree there’s something kind of controlling about a bulleted list. Such a list leaves consumers little room to do the one thing that might make them engage with your brand. That is, come to their own conclusions about the benefits of your product or service.

Now, I get the bit about brevity. In fact,

I
understand
completely

It’s just that the other thing bullet points do is break up the natural flow human communication, by turning language into signage. Worse, their main purpose is to make a brand’s desperate recitation of product benefits more palatable to its customers.

As such, they’re a solution whose chief function is to mask a deeper problem. If you actually believe your value to consumers is a set of features, rather than a measurable uptick in quality of life, you’ve gone beyond selling the wrong way.

You’re selling the wrong thing.

What matters to Jill42.
At issue is not how to communicate more briefly but how to craft a global message succinct enough to be expressed in a few words. These days, especially, when consumer behavior is heavily influenced by online peer reviews, they’re more likely to see product features as a point of entry rather than a point of sale. Their inner dialogue runs:

“Hmm. 39-inch LED TV. Name brand. HDMI ports. What are my friends saying?”

Far better than chopping your prose into meaningless nuggets, is making an emotional connection—by telling your audience how your product will improve their lives, match their self-image and fit into their personal narrative. Not to mention crucial considerations like “Will my mom like it?”

Keep in mind, however: there are no shortcuts to making those emotional connections. Once you gain a useful consumer insight, it’s no good peppering your ad with bullets like:

“Great for moms!”

“Your mom will love it!”

That’s because, in 2013, when a typical American’s every nerve ending is already tingling with marketing messages, you have to communicate the old fashioned way, with believable anecdotal evidence. In this world, sticking to “the facts” won’t cut it.

Instead, you need a message so clear, so memorable and so tickly that consumers will wonder what Jack24 said to Jill42 about “what it is with your mom liking that TV or whatever on Facebook.”

Knowing the essence of essential.
How do you create such a message? Start by realizing what most people learn in middle school (or, in some cases, 40 years later). Want a response from someone whose attention you desire? Don’t be desperate, and let your innate good qualities speak for themselves. If you’ve no good qualities, you’re simply not ready for market—and should focus on “product development.”

On the other hand, the metaphor continues, maybe your problem is a failure to recognize where your true qualities lie. If anyone, at this point, thinks Apple could boost unit sales of iPad Air by listing more technical details, they’re mistaken. Visit Apple.com and see for yourself: the message is “Lightness.” Even the site’s technical drilldown simply lists more reasons the product is light.

Every “bullet point” in other words, is a restatement of one bullet point, a message you can’t forget even if all you remember is the product name.

And lest anyone miss the obvious, there’s very little more essential to human life than “air.” With messaging like this—that radiates out from core product attributes—Apple’s product leaves the world of facts far behind and enters the consumer narrative whether we want it to or not.

That, amigo, is branding. Anything else is just words, pictures—and tears-on-the-pillow desperation.

Oct

Context as Conduit for Branded Communication

By Mark Laporta Leave a Comment

Categories: Message Strategy, Creative Development, Copywriting, Web Design, Digital Marketing, Advertising
Tags: branded communication, branding, consumer marketing, content development

In many ways, reaching people with a motivating message has as much to do with the context you create as with the substance or the medium of your talking points. That’s not to say that “the context is the message”— merely that context has an inseparable impact on how you’re received by your audience.

A case in point, perhaps, is the user experience Whole Foods creates for its hungry, quality-conscious shoppers. Created, I assume, with an eye toward evoking the breezy, offhand style of Pinterest or Tumblr, the focus is on the experience of delicious, well-prepared high-quality foods, rather than on price, discount-shopping or numerical measures of value.

Rather, the market’s sales, specials etc. are integrated into the total picture, in a section called “The Whole Deal.” In general, the site is an exemplar of the difference between marketing by bullet vs. marketing by message.

Nav floats free of restraints.
A major contributor to the site’s successful UX is a subnav that appears as a link-filled pop-up instead of a cluttered accordion drop-down. You get the overview fast. This approach also seems to free navigation design from the straight jacket of grid formations and mindless “consistency.”

And in a telling decision, the first nav item is “Healthy Eating,” which appears before either the redundant “About Our Products” or the doubly redundant “Mission and Values” section. That decision begs the question: Why, even here, on a site so clearly organized to deliver brand value, the specter of Marketing Anxiety still looms large, demanding the explicit, mechanical statement of that value in literal terms.

Anxiety’s sway.
Apparently, some worried soul feared that people informed enough to absorb the points expressed elsewhere in the site need aggressive hand-holding to get the message. As with most discussions of user experience, at issue is the native intelligence of an imaginary subset of the American population known as “The Average Person.” It’s the same subset, I’m often told, who “won’t get” the simplest of digital interfaces without a 500-page guide book.

Strangely, despite mushrooming sales in smart phones, tablets, despite the coming new generation of wearable tech, the myth of a large, technologically clueless sector of the population persists. Makes you wonder why some brands even bother to build a digital presence—considering how hard it is for Imaginary Bob Neanderthal to put down his stone tools and lumber over to the Kompoodoor.

That it’s to everyone’s benefit to bury this myth is everywhere in evidence on a site that includes not one single instance of “Click Here.” For, as it should be obvious to everyone, users who can’t identify a text link on a Web page without a sign post are users who can’t navigate the Web, period.

Any part of your audience in that category needs to be addressed through Direct Mail—assuming, you can verify they grasp the function of an envelope. Of course, considering the number of times I’ve been directed to add the phrase “See inside for details” to a #10 OE, I wonder how many marketers are willing to take the risk.

Better play it safe then, and revert to door-to-door sales-mongering, even if arriving with a truckload of organically grown produce proves a tad awkward.

A victory for honest, human emotion.
Ironically, one of the major achievements of the Whole Foods user experience is a feeling of genial intimacy—exactly the sort of thing you used to get from a well-trained sales rep, in the days when a brand’s business model involved more than a series of stratagems for raiding your wallet. It’s a welcome relief from the smarmy, self-absorbed tone adopted by so many “this changes everything” marketing campaigns.

For if anyone’s looking for a model of what “thinking different” looks like, it starts here with a communications strategy that takes as its first principle that consumers deserve to be sold on the merits, not manipulated into co-dependency by “you-can’t-be-cool-without-it” toxic branding.

In this instance, the site itself refutes the need for the anxious steps it takes to make clarity clear and communication communicate. That it does so by creating a distinct, ownable and evocative context for its message, points the way, as I see it, to a refreshed definition of what branding means in the post-iPad era.