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The things they say ...The things the've said in the past:
1) "The average American family hasn't time for television."The New York Times, 1939
2) "It's a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?"President Rutherford B. Hayes after a demonstration of Bell's telephone
3) "The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most."IBM to the founders of Xerox, 1959
4) "There will never be a mass market for motor cars - about 1,000 in Europe - because that is the limit on the number of chauffeurs available!"Spokesman for Daimler Benz
5) "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.
The things tehy're saying now:
6) "I think if I was Procter & Gamble, I'd be buying billboard space. A lot of it."Professor Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994
7) "Supermarkets have replaced TV as the delivery channel for a mass audience. If I want to get my message across to 70% of British households it is obviously going to be more cost-effective to run display ends in major retailers than to purchase overpriced breaks in a soap."Andrew Harrison, Marketing Director, Nestle Rowntree, UK, September 2002
8) "It [the Internet] is, beyond question, the fastest growth curve of a fundamental change in society. And almost everybody will have to get used to it."Bill Gates, April 2000
9) "The web is a very socialistic, almost communistic force. It attacks traditional ways of doing things and elites, and this is very uncomfortable for traditional businesses to deal with."Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP, UK, April 2000
Monday, December 11, 2006
Empathy for the Brand
Just the other day in class as I was lecturing this word struck me as being very profound despite the fact that we hear it so often. That word was Empathy. There is a saying: Never criticise a man till you have have walked a thousand miles in his shoes." I think this one word sums up what Brand Experience is all about. It is about really understanding what your target audience wants, needs, desires and doing something about it. Very profound indeed ... Empathy.
I will be speaking at the Special Events Congress 2007
I will be speaking at the 2007 Special Events Congress on the area of Brand Experiences in Asia. With over 6000 people attending the congress, this makes it one of the largest conventions ever. Watch this space for more information and Congress highlights.
Sunday, December 3, 2006
The 5th P of Marketing - People - Create Brand Ambassadors of your people
The name of the game for any brand manager today is romancing the customer with a view to establishing a long-term relationship. Relationship, not product, is key. Relationships bind, have duration, foster loyalty, create repeat sales. The sum total of millions of relationships is a priceless asset that never appears on the brand balance sheet, but given the tremendous cost of customer acquisition, it is a foundation of profitability. One-night stands are expensive; companies need to marry customers, preferably for life.
Marketing 101 reduces the main determinants of customer loyalty to the familiar Four Ps: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. These are all critical factors, but marketing orthodoxy is myopic, for reasons that are often lodged right in the structure and culture of corporations. The result is that a fifth P is typically left out of the reckoning: People. Specifically, I mean the people who actually deal with the customer during any part of the transaction. The delivery of the brand promise often happens by human agency at the point of sale and proceeds through service, complaint and resale. Yet marketers, who have the bottom-line responsibility for brand health, rarely focus on the Fifth P.
Why this neglect? In part it's because this Fifth P manifests itself far from marketing headquarters, and a corporation's customer-facing employees are not often the responsibility of brand managers but are instead relegated to what is usually called human resources.
Adding a fifth P may sound easy, but organizational rigidity stands in the way. The CEO must demand that top-level marketing and human resource teams share insights and develop a permanent program that accounts for the employee in the brand equation.
If you need help aligning people to your Brand, contact Jerome@thebrandtheatre.net for help with your internal branding process.
Marketing 101 reduces the main determinants of customer loyalty to the familiar Four Ps: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. These are all critical factors, but marketing orthodoxy is myopic, for reasons that are often lodged right in the structure and culture of corporations. The result is that a fifth P is typically left out of the reckoning: People. Specifically, I mean the people who actually deal with the customer during any part of the transaction. The delivery of the brand promise often happens by human agency at the point of sale and proceeds through service, complaint and resale. Yet marketers, who have the bottom-line responsibility for brand health, rarely focus on the Fifth P.
Why this neglect? In part it's because this Fifth P manifests itself far from marketing headquarters, and a corporation's customer-facing employees are not often the responsibility of brand managers but are instead relegated to what is usually called human resources.
Adding a fifth P may sound easy, but organizational rigidity stands in the way. The CEO must demand that top-level marketing and human resource teams share insights and develop a permanent program that accounts for the employee in the brand equation.
If you need help aligning people to your Brand, contact Jerome@thebrandtheatre.net for help with your internal branding process.
Friday, December 1, 2006
Beyond Customer Satisfaction
In his groundbreaking research, management consultant and author, Fredrick Reichheld, discovered just how customers react to their
suppliers today. Reichheld’s research is summarized in the book Beyond Customer Satisfaction to Customer Loyalty and points out the following dramatic economic impact, both negative and positive, that customers have on the financial success of the firm:
• 15 to 40 percent of customers who say they are “satisfied” defect from a company each year
suppliers today. Reichheld’s research is summarized in the book Beyond Customer Satisfaction to Customer Loyalty and points out the following dramatic economic impact, both negative and positive, that customers have on the financial success of the firm:
• 15 to 40 percent of customers who say they are “satisfied” defect from a company each year
• It costs five to seven times more to find newcustomers than to retain current customers.
• 98 percent of dissatisfied customers never complain – they just switch to other competitors.
On the up side:
• “Totally satisfied” customers are six times more likely to repurchase a company’s products over a span of one to two years
than merely satisfied customers.
• A 5 percent reduction in customer defection can result in profit increases from 30 to 85 percent.
• If companies increase their customer retention by 2 percent, it is the equivalent of cutting their operating expenses by 10
percent (Bhote, 1996).
Based on Reichheld’s research across a variety of industries, businesses should be pinpointing that which satisfies its customers – on an
individual basis. But this level of satisfaction is difficult given the individual values and needs of each person with whom a company has an
interaction. I believe, however, that there are a few key areas that a business can focus on in order to more effectively manage its
customer relationships for the overall success of the business – and for the total satisfaction of the customer.
• 98 percent of dissatisfied customers never complain – they just switch to other competitors.
On the up side:
• “Totally satisfied” customers are six times more likely to repurchase a company’s products over a span of one to two years
than merely satisfied customers.
• A 5 percent reduction in customer defection can result in profit increases from 30 to 85 percent.
• If companies increase their customer retention by 2 percent, it is the equivalent of cutting their operating expenses by 10
percent (Bhote, 1996).
Based on Reichheld’s research across a variety of industries, businesses should be pinpointing that which satisfies its customers – on an
individual basis. But this level of satisfaction is difficult given the individual values and needs of each person with whom a company has an
interaction. I believe, however, that there are a few key areas that a business can focus on in order to more effectively manage its
customer relationships for the overall success of the business – and for the total satisfaction of the customer.
When a customer buys a good or service,many factors certainly influence that purchasing decision. The bottom line is, however, a
customer buys a product or service when his or her expectations have been met, or exceeded, in terms of the offering and the personalized attention of a firm’s employees.
Businesses that do not meet customer expectations on a consistent basis do not survive in the long run, especially in this day and age of competition and advertising clutter.
Create a Branded Differentiation for your Customer Experience to create a memorable and differentiated brand that will turn customers into advocates.
For more information on my Branded Customer Experience Programs please have a look at www.brandone.us or contact me at jerome@brandone.us
Mirror Mirror on the Wall
I did an interesting debate in my lecture the other day. I asked which is the most powerful Communication function. This are the results. Out of the 30 students. 10 voted Advertising, 10 voted PR, 5 voted Events, 3 voted Direct Marketing, 2 voted Sales Promotion while 1 was undecided. This is my take. All these tools are powerful. A marketer has to adopt a Strategic outlook ... which tool will best serve his needs to achieve maximum ROI.
My class however persisted. Pick one, pick one. So I told them. If it had to be 1. I would pick Internet Marketing as the most powerful communication tool right now. More thoughts on this later ...
Cheers
Jerome
My class however persisted. Pick one, pick one. So I told them. If it had to be 1. I would pick Internet Marketing as the most powerful communication tool right now. More thoughts on this later ...
Cheers
Jerome
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Question – what makes experential marketing different from other marketing?
Question – What makes experential marketing different from other marketing?
My friend Tim Roux from Mud Brand Community asks me to critique this article and this is the final result. Here is the final article for you to read which can be found Tim's MV site.
Experiential marketing is so named in that it taps all the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, movement, linguistic etc.) at the same time in order to impart a profound communications experence to a selected, influential audience.
Key action pointsExperiential marketing is what B2B marketers do naturally, and what consumer marketers are catching onto, with the realisation that you only need a few highly influential people to get your message across.In their ordinary marketing activities, B2B marketers will talk to customers, visit them, set up trade shows and live new product launches, do exhibitions within customer sites, promote themselves within the trade press, and cultivate key influencers (such as government officials, NGOs etc.).Which is as easily said as done if you are only addressing a limited community, but what happens when you are a consumer brand marketer addressing millions? You cannot meet all your customers!However, if you learn from the disciplines of NLP (neural linguistic programming) and The Tipping Point, you can potentially get the same effect by engaging some critically influential people in a truly memorable experience.
The psychological NLP school is the one that publicised the notion that only 10% of the impact of a communication is based on words. 90% of communication relies on other communications channels, and especially body movement and posture. For instance, where you look is important. Looking up suggests intellectualism, looking directly forward is assertive, looking down suggests shiftiness and/or depression. If you speak in short, crisp sentences, you label yourself as a leader. If you speak in long, articulate sentences, you position yourself as an academic.The Tipping Point argued that only a very few people are needed to spread an epidemic. Its author, Malcolm Gladwell, cited several small-scale actions that have had global effects, such as the spread of venereal disease, the Paul Revere’s ride to spark the American Revolution, and the sudden resurgence of Hush Puppies.
Marrying these two thoughts with experiential learning, experiential marketing attempts to identify the key influencers on your target customer audience, and to involve them in a live real or virtual event which energises them to spread the word to thousands and millions of people.It is therefore also closely related to the concepts of “viral marketing” and “buzz marketing”.In more detail ….NLP research suggests that although we all want to describe our products & services in interminable and loving detail, few people are willing to read it, and even fewer are capable of doing so.
The same thing goes for presentations. From a presentation lasting 1.5 hours, we will take away, at most, three thoughts.In order to get your message across memorably, you need to use a blend of channels. As human beings, we like pictures and visual imagery (thus all the “visual candy” on TV, websites and magazines). We also like people’s voices and other enticing sounds (try watching a film without a soundtrack, e.g. the recent “War of the Worlds”). We memorise smells, without much ability to analyse them (e.g. essence of roasted chicken wafted around supermarkets). Our brains are instinctively attracted to movement.So, if you want to get people up and motivated, bombard them multi-sensory inputs, preferably in an appropriate context (memory is context-dependent). That is the live event accounted for.But you cannot get all your millions of consumers into one event, typically, although Live Aid!, “Run the World” and “Make Poverty History” did just that virtually.What you need to do, therefore, is to select for the event those few people who will get your message across effectively, efficiently and economically to the millions.
According to The Tipping Point analysis, you need three types of people:“Mavens” – thought leaders (e.g. celebrities, journalists, fashionistas)“Connectors” – people who know lots of other people, and make it their pastime to talk to them (bloggers would be one example)“Salespeople” – people who are good at persuading others to try thingsGet these types of people to an event, fire them up, and set them loose. That is the fundamental concept of experiential marketing. You then want to keep them informed of developments through repeat events, websites, magazines, e-mails etc..Another, old-fashioned, example of experiential marketing, is the massed rally – a march, food and drink, speeches, and entertainment. Participants to the rally then go off and tell people all about it, write about it, and the event itself provokes news coverage and punditry.The bonus is that those people attending an experiential marketing event are also considerably more likely to buy your product / service, and more quickly.
Some tips on developing an experiential marketing event:
- define your target audience
- define your objectives for the event
- decide how to measure/track your objectives
- identify the people who are most influential with your target audience:thought leaders socialisers persuaders
- develop the strategy for the event, bearing in mind the full range of your brand identity:central organising thought of
personality
Values
Stories
Culture
emotional benefits
hard benefits
- develop key messages for the event, based on both rational and emotional persuaders. These messages must be absolutely authentic, and enthuse the target audience to evangelise your brand and its messages on your behalf .
- decide how the key messages and brand identity can be communicated multisensorially
- define the event, ensuring that the location/space is the most appropriate for the target audience(s)- pre-publicise the event in the national/trade press, on the web, through PR etc..
- manage the event- publicise the event- follow up the event with mechanisms to keep people informed of developments
For more information on experiential marketing please contact me or if you want Tim's email I would gladly provide it to you.
My friend Tim Roux from Mud Brand Community asks me to critique this article and this is the final result. Here is the final article for you to read which can be found Tim's MV site.
Experiential marketing is so named in that it taps all the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, movement, linguistic etc.) at the same time in order to impart a profound communications experence to a selected, influential audience.
Key action pointsExperiential marketing is what B2B marketers do naturally, and what consumer marketers are catching onto, with the realisation that you only need a few highly influential people to get your message across.In their ordinary marketing activities, B2B marketers will talk to customers, visit them, set up trade shows and live new product launches, do exhibitions within customer sites, promote themselves within the trade press, and cultivate key influencers (such as government officials, NGOs etc.).Which is as easily said as done if you are only addressing a limited community, but what happens when you are a consumer brand marketer addressing millions? You cannot meet all your customers!However, if you learn from the disciplines of NLP (neural linguistic programming) and The Tipping Point, you can potentially get the same effect by engaging some critically influential people in a truly memorable experience.
The psychological NLP school is the one that publicised the notion that only 10% of the impact of a communication is based on words. 90% of communication relies on other communications channels, and especially body movement and posture. For instance, where you look is important. Looking up suggests intellectualism, looking directly forward is assertive, looking down suggests shiftiness and/or depression. If you speak in short, crisp sentences, you label yourself as a leader. If you speak in long, articulate sentences, you position yourself as an academic.The Tipping Point argued that only a very few people are needed to spread an epidemic. Its author, Malcolm Gladwell, cited several small-scale actions that have had global effects, such as the spread of venereal disease, the Paul Revere’s ride to spark the American Revolution, and the sudden resurgence of Hush Puppies.
Marrying these two thoughts with experiential learning, experiential marketing attempts to identify the key influencers on your target customer audience, and to involve them in a live real or virtual event which energises them to spread the word to thousands and millions of people.It is therefore also closely related to the concepts of “viral marketing” and “buzz marketing”.In more detail ….NLP research suggests that although we all want to describe our products & services in interminable and loving detail, few people are willing to read it, and even fewer are capable of doing so.
The same thing goes for presentations. From a presentation lasting 1.5 hours, we will take away, at most, three thoughts.In order to get your message across memorably, you need to use a blend of channels. As human beings, we like pictures and visual imagery (thus all the “visual candy” on TV, websites and magazines). We also like people’s voices and other enticing sounds (try watching a film without a soundtrack, e.g. the recent “War of the Worlds”). We memorise smells, without much ability to analyse them (e.g. essence of roasted chicken wafted around supermarkets). Our brains are instinctively attracted to movement.So, if you want to get people up and motivated, bombard them multi-sensory inputs, preferably in an appropriate context (memory is context-dependent). That is the live event accounted for.But you cannot get all your millions of consumers into one event, typically, although Live Aid!, “Run the World” and “Make Poverty History” did just that virtually.What you need to do, therefore, is to select for the event those few people who will get your message across effectively, efficiently and economically to the millions.
According to The Tipping Point analysis, you need three types of people:“Mavens” – thought leaders (e.g. celebrities, journalists, fashionistas)“Connectors” – people who know lots of other people, and make it their pastime to talk to them (bloggers would be one example)“Salespeople” – people who are good at persuading others to try thingsGet these types of people to an event, fire them up, and set them loose. That is the fundamental concept of experiential marketing. You then want to keep them informed of developments through repeat events, websites, magazines, e-mails etc..Another, old-fashioned, example of experiential marketing, is the massed rally – a march, food and drink, speeches, and entertainment. Participants to the rally then go off and tell people all about it, write about it, and the event itself provokes news coverage and punditry.The bonus is that those people attending an experiential marketing event are also considerably more likely to buy your product / service, and more quickly.
Some tips on developing an experiential marketing event:
- define your target audience
- define your objectives for the event
- decide how to measure/track your objectives
- identify the people who are most influential with your target audience:thought leaders socialisers persuaders
- develop the strategy for the event, bearing in mind the full range of your brand identity:central organising thought of
personality
Values
Stories
Culture
emotional benefits
hard benefits
- develop key messages for the event, based on both rational and emotional persuaders. These messages must be absolutely authentic, and enthuse the target audience to evangelise your brand and its messages on your behalf .
- decide how the key messages and brand identity can be communicated multisensorially
- define the event, ensuring that the location/space is the most appropriate for the target audience(s)- pre-publicise the event in the national/trade press, on the web, through PR etc..
- manage the event- publicise the event- follow up the event with mechanisms to keep people informed of developments
For more information on experiential marketing please contact me or if you want Tim's email I would gladly provide it to you.
Great Experiential Ideas 1
Recently saw some great Experiential Branding Ideas in play. Whats so great about these ideas is that there are cheap, creative and engaging.
2. Ribbed Condoms Anyone?
Cheers
Jerome
1. Trying out a Watch
2. Ribbed Condoms Anyone?
3. Say Ahhhhh!
Cheers
Jerome
Experiential Brand Strategist
Welcome to my blog where I will share with you my ideas on Branding, Experiential Branding/Marketing, Strategic Brand Communication both on a consultancy level and training level.
My Name is Jerome Joseph. I am the author of 3 books on Branding. One book focusing on Experience Branding, one on Personal Branding and the last one on Branded Customer Experience. I am an experienced practitioner and trainer in this area. My Training topics include : Internal Branding, Personal Branding, Branded Customer Experience & Experience Branding
Have a look at my agencies & personal site:
My Brand Consultancy- The Brand Theatre: www.thebrandtheatre.net
My Corporate Brand Training agency - Brand One: www.brandone.us
My Personal Site: www.jeromejoseph.com
Here is a quick Summary of Me:
About Jerome Joseph-
Over the last few years, Jerome has been a key catalyst in expanding management focus to Branding and to wider and strategic issue of Brand Experiences. He has developed some of the latest thinking and practice around this subject, focusing in particular on how organisations can achieve brand differentiation and long-term customer loyalty through brand experiences.
Having consulted more than 1000 organizations and speaking to companies around the world, Jerome preaches bold, innovative "out of the box" experience marketing and integrated brand communication strategies to build and grow your brand both externally and internally. Jerome Joseph works with management teams to grasp the nature of the emerging functions of the Experience Mindset and envision their role in it - whether it be staging brand experiences or guiding brand transformations. Jerome has worked with global companies like DHL, Standard Chartered, Great Eastern, Microsoft, Singtel, AIA, Montblanc, Spring Singapore, National Speakers Association of America, Civil Aviations Authority Singapore, Scanteak, Sky Blue Airlines, Malaysian Airlines among many to create unforgettable brand experiences.
Over the last few years, Jerome has been a key catalyst in expanding management focus to Branding and to wider and strategic issue of Brand Experiences. He has developed some of the latest thinking and practice around this subject, focusing in particular on how organisations can achieve brand differentiation and long-term customer loyalty through brand experiences.
Having consulted more than 1000 organizations and speaking to companies around the world, Jerome preaches bold, innovative "out of the box" experience marketing and integrated brand communication strategies to build and grow your brand both externally and internally. Jerome Joseph works with management teams to grasp the nature of the emerging functions of the Experience Mindset and envision their role in it - whether it be staging brand experiences or guiding brand transformations. Jerome has worked with global companies like DHL, Standard Chartered, Great Eastern, Microsoft, Singtel, AIA, Montblanc, Spring Singapore, National Speakers Association of America, Civil Aviations Authority Singapore, Scanteak, Sky Blue Airlines, Malaysian Airlines among many to create unforgettable brand experiences.
Jerome Joseph is part of the International Speaking Federation and conducts keynotes, customized training programs and seminars on a regular basis for organizations around the world focusing on Experience Marketing, Customer Experiences, Internal Branding, Personal Branding, Brand Strategy workshops and Integrated Brand Communication Strategies.
Jerome is also a visiting lecturer for Communication, Marketing and Business programs at Thames and Management Development Institute Singapore as well as for various universities such as Edith Cowan University (Australia, Perth), Southern Cross University (Australia, Victoria), University of Southern Queensland (Australia, Queensland), Oklahoma University (USA).
Key Areas of Knowledge
1. Brand Research/Analysis – Creation of Proprietary Brand Audit Tools, Analysing Data, Brand Discovery Workshops
2. Brand Strategy – Implementing Brand Platform/Strategy/Positioning/Identity
3. Experiential Marketing/Branding – Proprietary Experiential Filters
4. Internal Branding – Development of an Internal Branding Process/Training
5. Customer Experience Management
6. Strategic Brand Communication –
a. Advertising – TVC, Print
b. Public Relations/Promotions
c. Experiential Events
d. Design
e. Interactive Online/Multimedia
f. Promotions
g. Video Production
h. Guerrilla/Ambient Marketing
You may contact me at jerome@jeromejoseph.com for more information or enquiries.
Speaker Insights on the Global Brand Forum
Just wanted to Share some insights gained at the Global Brand Forum. I have included this information in my next ezine which goes out but I thought you might like to have a look at some of their content.
The speakers included David Aaker (my idol), Jack Trout, Faith Popcorn, Martin Lindstorm as well as some industry speakers.
Professor Aaker
Speaking Style: Academic, Lecture driven, Content Heavy, Monotone
Key Learning Points:
Aaker spoke about Brand Imperatives to Build your Brand. He focused on 3 key areas:
1. How to Differentiate your brand
Here he provided suggestions such as creating differentiated personalities, how to use People, programs and values to create differntiation as well as introducing the tactics of Branded and Co-Branded Differtiators.
2. How to Energised your brand
In this area he talked about Branded energisers. A branded energizer is a sub brand or brand that energisers or enhances a parent brand. Some suggestions included new energizer products, programs and external brand energizers. Brand Energisers look at developing a brand long term that is part of the product portfolio that can create energy and link them with the Brand. He talked about using the right Brand Extension to leverage on the Brand and provide visibility for it.
3. Relevance for your target
He then focused on relevance and stressed the importance in making something your customer wants to buy. He talked about Trend Drivers and Trend Neglectors as ways to be in touch with your target market.
Jack Trout
Speaking Style: Hard Hitting, Brash, Dramatic
Key Learning Points:
Trout talked about Positioning. He focused on the importance of positioning and perceptions. He then focused on differentiation. Some strategies he provided were:
1. Diff via attributes
2. Diff via Source (how it was created)
3. Diff by being 1st
4. Diff by being the Latest
5. Diff via Leadership
6. Diff as a "Specialist"
He then went on to talk about Strategy and he focus on War methaphor in Branding Strategy. Some ideas he had were:
1. Defense Warfare to defend your Number 1 position in the market and to block competition.
2. Offense Warfare to focus on competitors weakness and exploit it
3. Flanking Warfare where pursuit is critical. You can flank by price, distribution, size etc
4. Guerilla Warfare where you find a segment and defend it, be felxible and set your own rules.
1. Diff via attributes
2. Diff via Source (how it was created)
3. Diff by being 1st
4. Diff by being the Latest
5. Diff via Leadership
6. Diff as a "Specialist"
He then went on to talk about Strategy and he focus on War methaphor in Branding Strategy. Some ideas he had were:
1. Defense Warfare to defend your Number 1 position in the market and to block competition.
2. Offense Warfare to focus on competitors weakness and exploit it
3. Flanking Warfare where pursuit is critical. You can flank by price, distribution, size etc
4. Guerilla Warfare where you find a segment and defend it, be felxible and set your own rules.
Hope you found this useful. For more information contact jerome@brandone.us or jerome@jeromejoseph.com
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