This entry was originally posted on May 9, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog.

Over the past few years, Word of Mouth or buzz marketing has had it’s share of promoters and detractors. The rise of WOM marketing has prompted the creation of buzz agencies, a professional trade organization, conferences, books (here, here, and here too), and much more.

So if you’re looking for advice on how to get people talking about your brand story, there are plenty of resources.

Or you can do what Stacy’s Pita Chips (part of Frito Lay) did, and just send a product sample to everyone in the United States. At least, that’s what they wanted to do. But mailing chips to nearly 300 million people, well that’s a little much for even this spunky little division of the snack company to bite off.

So instead, they mailed a sample pack to everyone in the country named Stacy. 133,000 people, most of whom hadn’t heard of the product before. The package included the Stacy brand story and on the back of the enclosed card, said:

“We hope you enjoyed getting your free box of Stacy’s Pita Chips as much as we enjoyed sending them to you. If you did, why not share the joy by sending a FREE gift box to a friend? Since we’ve already sent them to every Stacy, you’re free to send them to Bill or Mary or Cheryl or John—or whoever you think would enjoy Stacy’s chips the most.”

So has it worked? It looks like it. Here are a few Stacys who are now spreading the word: here, here, here, here, and here. Think how many people have mentioned this to friends and coworkers. And how many Stacys have tried, liked, and now regularly buy Stacy’s chips.

That’s not all that Stacy’s does to promote great customer experiences/brand stories that are easy for customers to share with others. Check out what Art Steiber at The Diff has to say about Stacy’s when he wrote to complain about a half-empty bag of chips. Not content to leave him with a negative impression, they went well beyond and sent him a case of pita chips.

This is a brand I like, and I’ve yet to taste the chips.

This entry was originally posted on April 18, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog (link for a limited time).

James Dyson is a failer (not failure). While vacuming his home, he became frustrated with the lousy suction of his vacuum cleaner. The bag and filter clogged too quickly, reducing the suction to the point where it didn’t work. I know the feeling. But unlike me, Dyson decided to do something about it. Over 15 years, he built 5126 prototypes before he found the one that worked. 15 years and 5126 failures. How did he find the solution? “Wrong doing.” Here’s how Dyson describes it:

“When I was doing my vacuum cleaner, I started out trying a conventionally shaped cyclone, the kind you see in textbooks. But we couldn’t separate the carpet fluff and dog hairs and strands of cotton in those cyclones. It formed a ball inside the cleaner or shot out the exit and got into the motor. I tried all sorts of shapes. Nothing worked. So then I thought I’d try the wrong shape, the opposite of conical. And it worked. It was wrong-doing rather than wrong-thinking. That’s not easy, because we’re all taught to do things the right way.”

There’s are plenty of lessons in Dyson’s story. Never give up. Don’t settle for stuff that doesn’t work. But the lesson I like most is the idea of right thinking and wrong doing. Doing things in a different (new or unexpected) way is the crux of creativity.

To get his vacuum to work, Dyson had to do it all wrong. And when he offered his new design to Hoover, they did the opposite—right doing and wrong thinking. They sold bag vacuums. This new vacuum wouldn’t fit their product line. It was too different. They had the market sown up. So they passed on the idea. Dyson went on to sell more than 15 million of his vacuums (for as much as $2000 each). Today he is one of the richest men in Britain.

Inside the box, with every Dyson vacuum cleaner is a small brochure that tells the Dyson brand story. How James Dyson failed more than 5000 times. How his competitors first ignored him, then copied him. And how he succeeded despite the odds. This simple brochure is a great way to reinforce the Dyson brand story with every new customer. Of course, the fact that this is an amazingly good vacuum delivering a great product experience also helps.

This month’s Fast Company magazine features a very good interview by Chuck Salter with James Dyson, covering not just his vacuum story, but also his thinking about design and engineering and his latest invention. Read it here. Don’t miss the second page, which is even better than the portion of the interview in the print magazine. There’s also a podcast interview here.

One more clip from the interview:

“A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that’s the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can’t carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you’ll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.”

This entry was originally posted on March 22, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time). Of the 200 or so entries I posted there, this one got the most ardent comments. For those who care, I have posted the original comments here. They’re long and a little contentious.

Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week recently gave a provocative speech titled, “Are Designers the Enemy of Design?” Very interesting stuff. Here’s how he starts:

“…DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.

This is simply not true.”

Bruce isn’t just talking about graphic designers, but all professionals who design. Read the whole thing.

Let me say that I agree—sort of. I work with plenty of designers who don’t suck. Great talents who understand that non-functional design is called art, not design. Exceptional artists who love to help clients create things they can’t do on their own (at a price that makes sense). Designers who are more interested in the needs of their clients (including sometimes making the logo bigger), than their own needs for aesthetics.

But almost every day, I see designers who treat their customers like morons, or think their clients don’t know anything about their own customers, or the needs of their own businesses. I’ve read comments by designers who have argued that if an entrepreneur can’t afford an expensive logo created by a “professional” designer, they shouldn’t be allowed to start a business. And I’ve read a “Client Code of Ethics” written by designers about how clients should act when working with them.

Designers don’t suck. They offer an incredibly valuable service (regardless of price). But some of them need a reality check.

The value of design is not determined by the price charged by the designer (great design is available at all price points). The quality of design is not determined by years of experience (or advertising agencies would be filled with 65 year olds, rather than 20 year olds).  The acceptability of design is not determined by where you get it (you can get great graphic design at Landor as well as Logoworks [full disclosure: I work at Logoworks]).

Someone once said that politics is too important to be left to the politicians. The same is true of design. Your business/brand is far too important to be left exclusively to the designer. Bruce argues, “People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives.” If you’re serious about the design of your brand, you want to be a part of that conversation too.

Be a designer.

This entry was originally posted on January 25, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time). Of everything I wrote at the old blog, this entry got the most enthusiastic comments. I’ve added some of them at the bottom of the post—sorry I could not port the links to the writers who posted them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about brand voice lately. How companies talk to their customers. What brands sound like. How they read.

I’m not just talking about how a brand sounds to the ear, though that is important for products that communicate with broadcast media: think Tom Bodette and Motel6 or Hal Riney (who voiced Reagan’s famous Bear Ad) and Bartles & James.

There are lots of examples of companies that consistently use identity design to reinforce their brands, but far fewer brands seem to give as much thought to the voice of their communications. Mini does it exceptionally well, across all mediums. The Economist and Apple too. Harley Davidson does a pretty good job (there are exceptions). Saturn used to have unique voice—before it was assimilated.

But what’s the brand voice of Marriott? Cascade? Pepsi? Dell? Citi? Buick? Is there anything unique about the way Kroger, Budget, Hershey’s, or Delta speak to their customers? None of these are bad, but none of them speak in a special way to their customers.

Try googling “Brand Standards.” There are dozens of examples of identity guidelines showing how to use official logos, fonts, and colors. But very little attention is paid to brand voice—the words, phrases, and characteristics that set a brand apart take a back seat to the more “important” visual aspects of the brand.

Why is this? I have a theory. As we grow up and attend school, most of us “learn” that we are not good artists—that is, we can’t draw much beyond doodles. Bureaucrats think of art classes as luxuries, and cut funding because they are not as important as the standard reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Writing on the other hand is more universal. Very few people learn they can’t write in the same way they learn they can’t draw. Regardless of whether you are good at it, writing is required for most classes from math to English, debate to biology. So most of us grow up thinking we write relatively well (even though we probably don’t). Certainly well enough to communicate.

So we don’t trust ourselves with the design of marketing and other important business materials. We hire professionals for that. And we create brand standards to help us when the designer isn’t there. But we do trust ourselves to write effectively enough to get our point across, even though we don’t have the training to create a brand voice. So we create copy. Lots of it. Most of it bad.

Even many copywriters don’t think about copy the way designers think about design—tweaking a few words here, cutting a phrase there, rewriting a paragraph over and over until it sounds just right. And that’s too bad, because when done right, the brand voice is the most difficult part of branding to copy. You can’t fake it.

Have you seen a brand standard recently that includes direction on the brand voice? How well is it followed? Does your business use a unique voice to tell your brand story? Let me know in the comments.

Read a little more about brand voice here.
More thoughts (video) about the failure of our schools to teach creativity by Sir Ken Robinson, here. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to watch this very funny, very insightful video.

Some of the original comments:

Larry Fahey: Good God, it’s like you’re INSIDE my head. I’m a copywriter and brand strategy guy, and this is it in a nutshell: Everyone thinks they can write. When’s the last time you saw a client come in and take the mouse from a designer to fix up a design? Never. But they rewrite copy at will. I wish I had a nickel for every time a client has told me “no one reads the copy anyway.”

I’m a cynic at heart, but if I wasn’t, I would say there’s a bright side: The smart agency (or client) can find a real advantage over competitors by paying attention to the finer points of copy. In a world filled with terrible copy, great brand copy could be a real edge. That is, if you can find a good brand copywriter. Big “if.”

Agent A: We spend so long trying to explain this to clients. Completely agree that it may be a perspective that’s nurtured though. I was in an ad agency recently, and even their own account handling people referred to the “creative” and “the copy” as being separate elements.

This entry was originally posted on January 11, 2007 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

On Tuesday Apple’s CEO and master storyteller, Steve Jobs, announced a “revolutionary” new mobile phone with a wide screen touch pad, Internet browser, built-in iPod, visual voice mail, Google maps feature, and much more. The reviews so far have been very good. Time writes: “Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it’s good news for those of us who use them.”

It’s even better news for Apple’s share holders. On the day of the announcement, Apple’s share price increased more than 8% or $7.10 a share. And shares of both Palm (maker of the Treo) and Research in Motion (maker of blackberry) fell, 5.69% and 7.85% respectively (a collective loss of more than 2 billion dollars).

But here’s the kicker. Apple doesn’t even have a completely functional model yet. Those lucky few who have seen it report that some features are not yet ready for prime time. The demos are cool. The pictures are cool. But Apple won’t have a phone ready to deliver for almost 5 months.

So all Apple really has is a well-designed model and a terrific story, worth more than 6 billion dollars. True, Apple is very good at delivering products that change categories. And that’s what investors are betting on. Given their track record, it’s a pretty safe bet.

But until the iPhone starts shipping, all Apple has is a very impressive, very well-told story.

What’s your story worth?

Hat tip: tuaw.com.

A version of this entry was originally posted on December 26, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

Last week, Martin Conroy, the man famous for writing the “two young men” letter for The Wall Street Journal, passed away (New York Times article). The letter was used by The Journal continuously for twenty-eight years and is revered by writers in direct response advertising for its creativity and success. It is the longest running direct response letter ever used, and has been called the most successful advertisement ever run. I still have a copy of the letter in my swipe file.

Why was this letter so successful? Because it tells a compelling, relevant story. And it sold subscriptions. Millions of them. One source says it was directly responsible for bringing in more than a billion dollars.

The letter reads:

On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.

Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.

They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.

But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.

What Made The Difference?

Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in people’s lives? It isn’t a native intelligence or talent or dedication. It isn’t that one person wants success and the other doesn’t.

The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge.

And that is why I am writing to you and to people like you about The Wall Street Journal. For that is the whole purpose of The Journal: to give its readers knowledge—knowledge that they can use in business.

It was so successful, that it has been copied numerous times (never as well-done as the original).

The Times quotes Direct Response Guru, Alan Rosenspan, who uses the letter in his seminars, saying: “I ask people to read out loud the first paragraph of the letter. And what’s astonishing to me is that they never stop at the first paragraph. They keep on reading. And I tell them: ‘You have just proven why this letter’s so powerful. It’s a story.’ ”

Sifting through the stack of junk mail (credit card solicitations, non-profit fund raisers, cable subscription offers) on my desk this morning, I wish there were more writers like Martin Conroy who believed in telling a relevant story. Sadly, they are, very literally, a dying breed.

This entry was originally posted on December 13, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

You have a story. Or your company does. Or your product does. Everything has a story. But how you tell your story make a big difference. Great stories are heard, remembered, even retold. Lousy stories are quickly forgotten and often dismissed with a nervous laugh and a “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

A few weeks ago Ernie Schenck wrote about two sports writers in 1960. Both watched the same game. Both had the same deadline. Both were hired to tell the story. Here’s how Ernie tells the story at his Squidoo page:

October 13, 1960. Bill Mazeroski hits a home run in the ninth inning to win the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the New York Yankees. With the clock ticking down, every sportswriter in the stadium is furiously pecking out their story, their deadlines rapidly approaching.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the story that ran in The New York Times:

“The Pirates today brought Pittsburgh its first World Series baseball championship in thirty-five years when Bill Mazeroski slammed a ninth-inning home run over the left field wall of historic Forbes Field.”

Here’s what people in Iowa read:

“The most hallowed piece of property in Pittsburgh baseball history left Forbes Field late Thursday afternoon under a dirty gray sports jacket and with a police escort. That, of course, was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal.

“Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10-9, for the title.”

Now ask yourself, is what you tell your customers a story or a chronology? How can your story be made more interesting or more relevant to your audience?

This entry was originally posted on August 28, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

I was catching up on some reading a few days ago and came across this excellent article in the Harvard Business Review: Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers by John Gourville. A very worthwhile read about the tendency of buyers to under estimate their need for new products and marketers to over estimate the public’s desire for the same products.

Marketers spend so much time with their innovations and become so familiar with the advantages over existing products, that the new product becomes their reality. They simply can’t see why people won’t immediately adopt their product. While consumers overvalue the products they are familiar with and see behavioral changes such as switching brands as a major negative. The authors cite specific examples like Segway, Tivo, and WebVan as terrific innovations that have experienced failure or slow adoption rates due to these opposing factors. Here’s the nut graph:

“…consumers overvalue the existing benefits of an entrenched product by a factor of three, while developers overvalue the new benefits of their innovation by a factor of three. The result is a mismatch of nine to one, or 9x, between what innovators think consumers desire and what consumers really want. Left unchecked, this mismatch is a recipe for disaster.”

If you’re involved in creating marketing, advertising, or disruptive technologies, this behavior has massive implications for what you do. Read the whole thing.

This entry was originally posted on June 22, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

Several weeks ago (May 22, to be exact), BrandWeek published a very interesting article called Broken Promises that discussed the gulf between what customers want and what companies deliver. I thought a few excerpt were worth reprinting here:

“The average level of consumer expectation across 35 major brand categories rose by 4.5% from last year. Over the same period, the survey shows, the average ability of brands to keep up with those hopes decreased 9.2%. Put another way, while brands certainly try to meet the expectations of their loyal customers, those expectations are nonetheless growing two times faster that the brands’ ability to keep up with them.”

The article goes on to say that part of the problem is caused by brand stewards who have promised to “delight” their customers continually. Well, it worked. Customers now expect to be wowed at every turn. The problem is, most brands aren’t up to the task. Also from the article:

“Another dynamic is that consumers themselves are more demanding, perhaps unrealistically. Take the bottled water category, one of the most commodified and yet also one of the fiercest fought. The brands have different names and different bottles, but the product is largely indistinguishable. Most customers would likely agree with this logic were it put to them directly. Yet, their expectations for bottled water rose 8% in 2006, mainly because they felt the brands ought to be increasingly ‘refreshing’.”

Imagine the Dasani or Aquafina brand steward responsible for meeting these expectations. What do you do? Triple filter? Reverse osmosis? Vitamins? Flavors? It’s all been done. Now what? How do you make water 8% more refreshing this year. Then do it again next year. And the year after that. At some point, water will be 100% refreshing (if it isn’t already) and then what?

Setting expectations is a critical part of your brand story. It’s easy to make promises (100% money back guarantee, 99.9% uptime, deep cleans in cold water, etc.). It’s harder to accurately set expectations. Again, from the article:

“If there is one take away from the survey, it’s this: expectations need to be as carefully controlled as the promises. It’s all very well to assure your consumers they’ll feel sexy, cool and rich if they use your brand. But delivering on those feelings might mean toning down the guarantees.”

So what happens when your brand story doesn’t match expectations? When the genius at the Apple genius bar isn’t, what happens to Apple‘s brand story? When the service at Nordstrom isn’t over-the-top, what happens to Nordstrom’s brand story? When NetFlix slows down deliver to its heavy users, what happens to their brand story?

The short answer: when the experience doesn’t match the story, the experience becomes the story. And the brand story you spent so much time and effort to create? Well, that just goes away.

This entry was originally posted on June 12, 2006 at the old Brandstory blog (link available for a limited time).

Last week I heard a few minutes of NPR’s On The Media, where Bob Garfield laid out a doomsday scenario for broadcasters (transcript here). Bob said:

“A little over a year ago, we floated a theoretical chaos scenario. It goes like this. Mainstream media, especially network TV, lose so much audience, they can no longer attract the advertising revenue they need to sustain their content, leading to still more audience defection, then more advertiser defection, and so on into the toilet, all before the on-line brave new world is ready to take over. In this past year, plenty has happened to add to the chaos. TiVo and DVR usage is rising, with Forrester Research estimating that by 2008, one in four households will be DVR’ing their favorite shows and skipping past commercials. ITunes has started selling hit TV shows for $1.99, and now all the networks are offering free streaming content on their websites. More options for us, and more jeopardy for the old model.”

Sounds like the premise for Joseph Jaffe’s recent book, Life After the 30-Second Spot, which lays out the same nightmare and about ten different alternatives to traditional, interuptive advertising.

Joe’s not the first person to argue that the 30 second spot is on life support and that consumers are about to pull the plug. Even he admits that the death of the 30 is, by now, a cliche. But it is coming. And marketers who are willing to take a few risks and try new ways to reach their audience may actually look back and agree with Joe that “there couldn’t possibly be a better time to be working in this business.”

Jaffe’s book outlines (in detail) many causes of death for the 30 second spot: fragmentation, commoditization, information overload, clutter, crappy advertising, better educated consumers, and so on. Then he lays out a few ideas for rethinking the way marketers engage consumers. My favorite quote comes from Chapter 9: Re:think Advertising: Make Advertising Relevant Again. Jaffe writes,

“There’s a rather putrid stench emanating from the world of advertising right now. And if you can’t smell it yourself, then you’re either used to it or you’ve lost your sense of smell altogether (in which case, it’s time to consider another career).”

Here, here.

Jaffe goes on to detail newish areas where marketers can get their message and brand in front of consumers: Internet, gaming, experiential marketing (emphasis on physical contact with the brand), search, consumer generated marketing, and more. But Jaffe doesn’t just provide his thinking on the matter. He also includes several short essays by other marketing experts to back up his thinking. Some of these extra essays are better than others, but all provide food for thought. It’s not that there’s a lot new here, but Jaffe wraps it all up very well in one place.

Clearly the jury is still out on the effectiveness of some of these avenues. Do gamers really respond to ads displayed on their PS2s? Do gift bags stimulate trial or simply eat up placement fees?  Did subservient chicken or BMW films really sell anything? Some of the ideas Jaffe lays out will work better than others. But the fact remains, the 30 second spot isn’t working like it used to, so why not try something different (and hopefully effective)?

Overall, this book is a good read. I get the feeling that Jaffe’s just scratched the surface and has even more to say on the subject. If you’re looking for an overview of where advertising/marketing may be headed in the future, check out Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Also of interest:
Joe Jaffe’s Blog, Jaffe Juice.
Get a free chapter from Jaffe’s book, here.
Buy the book from Amazon, here.
The first half of Jaffe’s podcast with American Copywriter.

Full disclosure: Mr. Jaffe practices what he preaches, when it comes to consumer generated marketing. I got my copy of the book on the condition I would read and review it. I agreed, noting that if I didn’t like the book, I would say so (I’ve done that before). Mr. Jaffe had no hesitation, saying, “…all I ask is an authentic review.”