Tuesday 27 March 2012

The Future of Profit is Brand Purpose

What’s the secret to successful brand engagement you may ask?   It’s less about the moment and more about the movement.  Meaning, social media is simply a tool set that amplifies and extends your brand where your constituents (and prospects) are online.  

The challenge that most brands are facing today using social media is that their brands don’t stand for anything.   Certainly they make something or provide a service – but they don’t stand for anything.   Bottom line is that your own brand ‘movement’ needs social media, but more than that it needs a higher purpose.  At its core this is our modern reality. 

You’re dealing with a new, wired, evolving, empowered consumer.  Your brand’s success today depends on whether it is perceived as having a social purpose.   It’s increasingly the reason consumer’s select one brand over another.  Customers are no longer satisfied with just lodging complaints or casting opinions. Instead, they are voting with their social capital and turning away from companies that fail to listen and respond. The consumer is able to drive the conversation with or without the brand’s input – therefore only brands that are authentic and transparent will succeed.

In this rapidly changing landscape, marketers are challenged to humanize their brands and seize opportunities to engage customers across a multiplicity of touch-points and channels.  Want to build a future-proof brand that stands for something? Here's a few hints:

1. Be Engaging
Brands that create rich, engaging stories will build relationships. Authentic brand stories are retold by fans and become viral. If you address your customer’s needs, it will foster brand building.  Meaningful and advantageous engagement will shape your brand’s message. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn will give your brand an authoritative voice and build communities. Consistent engagement will increase your visibility, influence and make your brand profitable.

2. Be Relevant
A strong brand must be relevant. Brands that are viewed as “relevant” can go a long way toward making their competitors irrelevant. Instead of focusing on achieving brand preference, it is possible to reduce or make other brands irrelevant. A brand that offers something so different and special will create its own unique category and customers will perceive those as the only option, with no alternatives.

3. Be Accountable
In the future, brands will be held accountable for the good things they do (or do not). For example, Nike is highly engaged in efforts to demonstrate corporate accountability. Employing over 800,000 people worldwide, Nike was once criticized for employment practices of some of its suppliers in developing countries. Now, Nike posts results of external audits and interviews with factory workers at www.nikebiz.com.  Brands build equity by pursuing a customer-centric brand strategy. Companies that reflect their target market’s beliefs, mirror them and link their brands to people’s feelings will succeed.

4. Be Collaborative
Technology now shapes the entire customer experience and has transformed marketing. There is a need for more collaboration between marketing and IT. Your customer is a moving target. It is critical for CMO’s and CIO’s to take leadership roles to align and form a partnership with a definitive plan for marketing transformation. There are riches to be won for brands through this partnership.

5. Be Creative and innovative
Brands must aspire to be creative and innovative to win customer loyalty. Even successful brands can become complacent over time and have tunnel vision. CMOs need to take a disciplined and decisive approach and tap into the company’s core strengths.

6. Be Purpose driven
The future of profit is purpose.  Consumers want a better world. Brands that recognize the importance of doing good deeds will be rewarded with increased sales and market share. So, marketers must ask themselves: What is my brand’s purpose? If the answer is, “I don’t know,” there are agencies that can help. (Wink, wink.)

7. Be Responsible
Businesses are increasingly becoming part of the solution rather than the cause of the problem.  What’s clear is that Social responsibility is a differentiator for products and brands that create economic value through corporate social responsibility.

8. Be Simple
Businesses that simplify products and provide clear, transparent, user-friendly communications enable customers to make informed decisions. These are the businesses that will succeed.

9. BE A GOOD ListenER
Aka "Give a shit". ;) We know as Marketers that the better we understand our target consumer the easier it is to engage them. Brands must listen to customers today and build strategies that respond to their needs in real-time. Listening enables the ability to infuse data-driven insights into every customer interaction, thus personalizing communications.

10. BE ONE WITH THE Crowd
Innovative marketers are turning to crowdsourcing.  A crowdsourced campaign might include hundreds of creatives generating hundreds of ideas.  It’s about asking your constituents to offer feedback and input into driving your brand direction (and success). 

One cannot underestimate the importance of having a brand purpose or ideal, a shared goal of improving people’s lives. A brand ideal is a business’s essential reason for being, the higher-order benefit it brings to the world. A brand ideal of improving people’s lives is the only sustainable way to recruit, unite, and inspire all the people a business touches, from employees to customers. It is the only thing that enduringly connects the core beliefs of the people inside a business with the fundamental human values of the people the business serves. Without that connection, without a brand ideal, no business can truly excel.

The business case for brand purpose or ideals is not about altruism or corporate social responsibility. It’s about expressing a business’s fundamental reason for being and powering its growth.  It’s about linking and leveraging the behaviors of all the people important to a business’s future, because nothing unites and motivates people’s actions as strongly as ideals. They make it possible to connect what happens inside a business with what happens outside it, especially in the “black box” of people’s minds and how they make decisions. Ideals are the ultimate driver of category-leading growth.

A viable brand purpose or ideal cuts through the clutter and clarifies what you and your people stand for and believe. It transforms the enterprise into a customer-understanding machine, personalizing who your best customers are and what values you share with them. It helps crystallize your business’s existing and potential points of parity and points of difference with the competition. It illuminates your organizational culture’s strengths and weaknesses, so that you can see what needs to change and what doesn’t, what’s negotiable and what’s not, what can be outsourced and what is core.

Highly adaptive and flexible, a brand ideal is not tied to a particular business model and has no expiration date. It generates effective new business models, strategies, and tactics before the current ones have lost their freshness and begun to produce diminishing returns. Most important, a brand purpose or ideal enables leaders to drive results by being absolutely clear and compelling about what they value. 

Follow along in this blog or on our Facebook page for daily examples of social brand storytelling that effectively demonstrates that - to succeed today and in the future - brands need to demonstrate that maximum growth and high ideals are not incompatible, they’re inseparable.  The good news?   The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it.   

Welcome to the brave new world.  Let us know if you need any help.









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Sunday 25 March 2012

SOCIAL MEDIA CASE STUDIES [GB_V74.0]

Ferrari is promoting their new microsite with photos of their new F12berlinetta model on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ -  Luxury Daily

To rally support for the British Olympic athletes, Cadbury has created a virtual parade on Facebook that lets fans create an avatar to join in on the march -  Digital Buzz Blog

The new Facebook timeline offers new ways to tell brand stories (and a new paradigm to engage a community.) Here's a helpful #infographic to use in the development of updated brand styleguides – Infographic

Aussie beer brand XXXX GOLD has actually bought a 15-acre island on the Southern Great Barrier Reef designed to be a 'getaway for mates'. There's nothing on it yet but the idea is that men get to decide what goes on the island by visiting the island website and (social) voting on what activities the island should offer and what should be built  - Website

The True Value of the Facebook ‘Like’Article

Frito-Lay thanked their Facebook fans with coupons for chips after the five-day live event showcasing their flavor development kitchen in Times Square drew over 1.5 million new likes -  Chief Marketer

This certainly isn't a 'first' (see Intel’s ‘Museum of Me’) however Microsoft's 'A year in the Like' app gathers all your Facebook comments and images and posts them into a movie starring YOU – Website
 
McDonald's encouraged fans to show their love for Shamrock Milkshakes and submit photos of themselves doing an Irish jig with hashtag #Shamrocking - Ad Age

Toyota has added a fun virtual game board to their YouTube channel to engage fans in their new "The Game of Life with Prius c" campaign -  Brandchannel

Guess is teaming up with a few of their favorite fashion bloggers to judge a Pinterest contest that requires fans to create boards based on the colors of their new line of denim - FashionablyMarketing.Me

Mercedes-Benz is helping fans find a parking spot by syncing Twitter in their "Park Assist" feature and crowdsourcing the nearest parking -  PSFK

What better way to motivate your morning jog then to make you think you're being chased by a pack of Zombies!? Described as 'an ultra-immersive running game and audio adventure' - the game places you in a Zombie story where you're given various 'missions' to escape from the hordes of undead – App 

The American Red Cross has launched a Digital Operations Center to better respond to disasters and help track public conversations -  Information Week
 
Taco Bell shares how their new augmented reality app allows fans to see live tweets about their new tacos on their packaging.  (Now if they'd just use 40% actual meat in their meat) -  ClickZ

An emerging class of “social discovery” apps—which monitor your location and alert you when you’re in close proximity to people who have similar social media contacts or interests - Article 

How Powerade, Kraft Foods, KLM, and more are using Twitter in new and creative ways to engage fans -  Simply Zesty

Social Media Content Strategy Redux – Article

Dos Equis is running its own version of March Madness (or as we call it – crowdsourcing their next ten ads) with fans competing on Facebook. The challenge is to write a witty line about ‘The Most Interesting Man in The World.’ – Contest

Domino's Pizza (Australia) is creating the world's first Social Pizza. Over 7 days the Domino's Pizza Australia Facebook community will be able to vote for their favourite crust, sauce and toppings, with the most popular selection from each day added to the pizza - the final product will also be featured on the Domino's menu. Fans will even have the chance to name the pizza – Video 

Envisioning the near future of technology - Infographic

Whether you belong to one or ten social networks, you’ll likely appreciate ‘Bliss Control.  Building on the popularity of Notification Control, developers took the one-stop settings shop idea and expanded it to cover every possible setting on 13 different sites – Website

NOTE:  FOR MORE ARTICLES AND POSTS FROM THE LAST WEEK PLEASE VISIT US ON TWITTER @GOODBUZZ.  IF YOU HAVE INFO, ARTICLES, CASE STUDIES, OR OTHER EXAMPLES OF (TTL) PARTICIPATORY MARKETING BLISS - PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EITHER POST VIA FACEBOOK OR SEND VIA E-MAIL AND WE’LL TAKE CARE OF IT FOR YOU. ;) PLEASE IDENTIFY IF YOU FIND A DEAD LINK (AS THEY WERE ALL LIVE AT THE TIME OF THIS POSTING)