With the addition of cable television, streaming video services, internet radio, podcasts, social media streaming platforms, Periscope, and a whole host of other choices, the media landscape for marketers has become crowded, fragmented and multi-fold – which is the good news! You now have a plethora of choices when making media selections that allow you to not only narrowly target your exact audience, but also get near instant feedback in terms of engagement and viewership in real time, and enrich your data stream for further refinement of your selections based on actual purchase or engagement levels. Miraculous!
So where does that leave Network television and terrestrial radio? Right there in the fight, according to special guest media expert Karl Minacapelli of CK Westbury Media in Towson, MD.
Learn about how:
TV can narrow cast to your audience
Radio can do real time feedback on day part and web engagement
Cable can be a bargain if you want to laser focus your buy
Radio can be a bargain if you want to own the category
The best 30-minute education on media buying available, right here from the doctor and his colleagues!
There is a LOT of chatter and conversation centered around the concept of Brand, so there’s not much original thought around it, mostly rehash from some of the advertising greats of the 50s and 60s. I’m not promising this is new, but it may be new to you, and it seems to work very well.
Think of your brand as a path.There are seven characteristics of brand that can be likened to a path in the woods – learn them and live them and your brand will flourish!
It seems that “Experts” are everywhere theses days. In the old days, to become an expert, one had to devote years to building credentials, through education, publishing, speaking at conferences, trade events, peer-reviewed ideology, and to show some success using your chosen theory or practice concept, to be an expert.
Today, with everyone allowed access to the public via the Internet, everyone’s a publisher, there isn’t much peer review or curation of any kind, and with far less than the “10,000 hours” required to master something, one can be considered an expert. So how do you position yourself as a credible expert?
Our guest, Luke Harlan, of Aspire Strategic Marketing, will show you how to put all the modern tools to use, how to build the credentials, how to craft a platform to properly and permanently position yourself as a real expert. You’ll learn:
How to get started
What elements you need to put in place
How to build a platform to launch your idea
How to build a funnel to monetize your expertise
How to scale up by extending the ideas you already have
Learn how to position yourself as a true expert in your field in less than 30 minutes!
You worked hard on your visual identity, your brand has been time tested and focus grouped to death, but do you know why it works (or doesn’t) in some formats or in some contexts? The answer is likely involved with Neuromarketing Science.
How the brand appears, how it’s used in advertising in print on television, or online, affects buyer perception of the product the company and the brand. It’s one of the reasons brand standards and usage guides evolved, to help maintain consistency of presentation from usage to usage, to give to structure and control flexibility of the various uses and appearances of the brand. That usage manual, in a perfect world, was also backed up by Neuormarketing science, the science of perception with regard to persuasion.
[pullquote align=”left or right”]That usage manual, in a perfect world, was also backed up by Neuormarketing science, the science of perception with regard to persuasion.[/pullquote]
Perception can be shifted based on a number of characteristics of the product the packaging and the brand usage. How the brand appears, where it appears, it’s placement in-situ for packaging, advertising and other outlets, and other factors. Here’s four ways you can make your brand more powerful using this brilliant perception science.
Give It Weight – positioning of the brand on packaging and in advertising can affect the perception of the weight (both literal and figurative) of the product. Studies have shown that product logos positioned at the bottom of the page or the lowest part of the package are perceived as heavier than those where the logo or product squib is placed near the top of the package or the page. If you want to be taken seriously, let the weight do some work for you (if weight is a positive attribute for your product), and put your product logo toward the bottom.
Let Color Work For You – Weight and credibility can also be inferred, and therefore manipulated, through the use of color. This one is more specific to product advertising, but many brands can take advantage of this attribute. Studies have shown that a lighter color can indicate a perception of lighter weight. How many times have you seen a product logo appear in one color for the “standard” product, and a lighter version of that same color appears on their “light” version (low sugar, low fat, low calorie, low density, low carb, low gluten, take advantage of this perception). Studies showed however that this only works on versions of the same color – putting your product in a black box won’t be perceived as any heavier than in a white one, but light red or pink is perceived as lighter than dark red or scarlet.
Pay It Forward – The brand’s place on the perceived time continuum can be positioned for the purpose of creating a specific impression. English speakers and Romance language users perceive time as moving from left to right, while other languages and their users perceive time in the opposite direction (Hebrew, for example). If you want it to appear that your brand is older and more established, place the brand or product depiction on the left, and it will read as more traditional, nostalgic, or time-tested. Place the brand on the right side of the page, the closer to the right edge the better, and it will be perceived as fresh, modern, forward-thinking, high-tech. This effect can also be embodied in the brand itself. Logos that show motion or direct the eye to the right tend to be perceived as more progressive, skew younger and more active, more advanced. The NIKE swoosh moves to the right showing speed, advancement, direction, purpose, forward motion.
Avoid Dissonance and Negativity – Sensory inputs should work in harmony for the best results, both in use of the brand, and in where it appears – context matters. Color, sound, small, ambient lighting, all play a part in the perception of the product, and these elements need to work together to get maximum impact from the brand. A bright colored package, with an astringent or citric aroma, with fast blaring music, will all work to create the perception of youth, vigor, action, engagement, high-energy. A pastel colored package viewed under diminished lighting, with soothing music and the scent of lavender will evoke relaxation, solidity, kindness and positivity. Mixing the elements creates dissonance in the mind of the buyer, and generates insecurity and indecision.
Additionally, negativity in imagery or brand context can drive down sales behavior. Studies have shown that uncomfortable situations or depiction of negativity or sadness, however brief, can cause an overall negative perception of the brand, enough to depress buying behavior. Keeping a fully positive outlook, use of positive and uplifting imagery has the opposite effect, engendering a sense of trust and wellbeing, and driving buying behavior upward.
Is your brand being used in its most powerful context to build the right perception? Test these four elements, and see if you’re sending the right message . . .
Most businesses we encounter in our practice appear from the outside to be “doing fine”, and its only after a few pointed key questions of the senior management do the challenges and problems surface. Most business owners feel that they “know their customers” and understand them sufficiently to serve them and sell to them. Yet, when we initiate some customer insight research, we inevitably find that there are many facets to their customer base, some of whom are being served well (the Core), some of whom are being served peripherally (the Fringe), and some of whom are being completely ignored, if not disenfranchised (the Outliers). If our research is structured correctly, we can uncover areas of growth potential in all three groups, providing tremendous opportunities for most businesses to significantly move the needle on sales and revenue. These are five ways our results can be directed toward growth:
Tighten the focus on the Core. While these folks are generally repeat customers, long-terms clients and loyal to a fault, they can always increase their numbers, frequency and volume, often by tightening and focusing messaging, narrowing media choices to those that are most effective, and “clipping the menu” of benefits, product offerings and services to those that they frequently enjoy.
Uncover Opportunity Within The Fringe. Infrequent customers, on and off clients, low-volume buyers, those with a high browse-to-buy ratio, are where the greatest opportunities often lie. There is the largest potential for growth among this group, to bring them up to the level of the Core group and beyond, by tailoring the product, packaging, messaging, media selection, and benefit focus to their needs. Now you have to uncover those real needs and cater to them to beef up the volume and frequency of their behavior.
Learn About Off-Label Uses From the Fringe. Occasionally, our research will uncover a related, but not fully realized, use for a product or service, one that the product wasn’t designed for, but that customers saw as a functional substitute for something else. Sometimes this warrants a small product or packaging change to accommodate and expand upon before offering it to customers. Sometimes this reveals co-packaging, or co-marketing opportunities previously not realized, which lead to whole new revenue streams. These can also present opportunities to bring the Outliers in closer and boost their volume using the new product usage as a lever.
Call In The Outliers. Discovering the resistance points and friction points in doing business with you or buying your products often presents itself most readily when speaking with the Outliers. These folks bought from you or worked with you for one or a couple of several real reasons: you were the only game in town at the time; you were the least expensive; you were the most convenient to their current circumstances; they were pressed for time and didn’t want to make a conscious choice. These are targets of opportunity, but they will show up where your customer interface is weak, where there are barriers to convenience, obstacles to purchase, price sensitivity, weaknesses in package focus, product size, and a host of small deficiencies that these casual buyers won’t surmount to buy from you. Something as simple as a slightly smaller size for sale at convenience outlets, or a reduced service package for smaller customers, can boost sales noticeably at minimal cost, and keep margins intact.
Find A New Sector. Within each of the other sector targets there will be clues as to a new customer sector that’s out there being ignored or forgotten, and they will reveal themselves through the conversations with both Outliers and Fringe customers. They answer questions about current behaviors beginning with “Well, I used to do ____, but now . . .” They refer to a previous reason to buy that may or may not currently exist with the current product or service, or that existed with another brand they bought before switching, and that’s where the opportunity lies. Ferret out those differences, those “old” reasons and see if they still exist, you might have turned off a whole sector of customers and didn’t know it by making a change earlier that you can now revisit and capture them back.
The name of the game is knowing your customer base better, segmenting your offering appropriately, and hunting for clues of things that turn them on and off and using that knowledge to your advantage in the marketplace to approach each group as efficiently and effectively as possible.
If you think your business can benefit from knowing your customers better for any of the above reasons, or something entirely different, you owe it to yourself to investigate further. The costs are far outweighed by the benefits in both the short- and long-term.
Size matters, right? In some things, that’s certainly true. In the start-up phase of a business, its more like “Scale Matters,” as the mantra driving pixel-based and other start-ups is “Does it scale, and how well?” This avoids the trap of essentially creating a job for the founder, instead of a business primed for success and growth. If the founder is a limiting factor, because he can only be in so many places at once, that’s a problem with scale. It’s a structural issue, one that needs to be addressed at the earliest stages, so the business can pivot around it and grow.
Agility is the biggest single advantage small business has over their larger industry-mates, and to give that up with layers of bureaucracy, rigid policies, staunch and robust process guidelines with little room for innovation seems counterintuitive. However, there is one area where acting like a bigger company can pay much bigger dividends – Marketing.
Most small companies suffer from a couple of similar ills when it comes to marketing themselves:
Small companies typically focus on sales rather than marketing anyway, laboring under the misapprehension that if they can just sell enough widgets, software licenses, land enough accounts, find enough clients, the marketing will take care of itself. As a consequence, most underspend, in some cases drastically, on outreach marketing activities. Oddly, these are the exact type of investments and activities that will position them for the growth they so strongly desire. Most founders are so fearful of waste, or of appearing to make a mistake, that they play everything close to the vest, making only incremental advances, taking the safe route and only repeating the actions they “think” worked the previous year. This leads to small, defensive thinking and limits growth like a vice squeezing the business until it’s frozen in place.
Spending on the “wrong” things. The old saw still holds that ”half of our advertising works, we’re just not sure which half.” In today’s data-rich, public-sharing society, there’s almost no excuse for not knowing which half of any activity drives revenue, some types of activities are just harder to connect directly to sales growth than others. With that said, businesses who have never advertised or done any real organized, planned outreach activity almost universally find a significant uptick in sales revenue when they decide to start. But that glow is short-lived, as they try different things on an ad hoc basis without a plan, and spend themselves out of all the revenue gains they made at the beginning.
Now What?
What to do? Modern marketing is about agile, “spend, fail, learn, repeat” cycles. You’re not going to hit the target on every activity the first time out, and there’s a learning curve for every business, regardless of how many consultants or agencies you engage. You’re going to fail at some point, better to accept it, get used to it, use it in a positive way and get past it. One now-famous CMO of a large consumer products company had a philosophy about how to “do” agile with a variety of marketing ideas – if you throw ten ideas at the wall, and 6 of them stick, you’ve broken even and paid for the bad ones. If you hit 7 or more, you’re up for the year. Take the education from the 4 failures and commit those resources to the other six, and double down. This creates a culture of upwardly-spiraling innovation, one that rewards success while negating the suppression and stigma of failure. Failing fast and cheap works in your favor over making big bets on untested ideas and misplacing resources at a loss.
Where small business can think like a bigger business is in their attitude toward spending on marketing activity. Small-minded miserliness is self-defeating. Do a quick cost-benefit analysis, allow founders to have the courage of their own convictions, and take a calculated risk on some outreach activity that’s informed by solid, hard-won research.
4-Step Process To Improvement
Get to know who your customer really is, spend the time and money on research.
Find the company’s “why” early on and use it like a weapon against your competitors.
Differentiate the small business from their market-mates, and exploit the difference
Designate a real, realistic portion of your sales revenue for marketing activity.
Once you reach that spending level, you’re done for the year, limiting your losses by putting a stop order on funding ideas that haven’t borne fruit. Now you have a system for testing ideas, limiting downside of investing in ideas that don’t generate revenue, and have a back-stop for using the education to apply toward the ideas that do work and drive revenue upward. This kind of test, fail, learn, repeat cycle is innovation-friendly, and can spawn all sorts of new ideas, new products, new angles, new customer segments, all of which lead to the type of rapid growth start-ups are known for.
You’ll be surprised at the benefits that the courage to innovate can generate in the long- and short-term, and the gains that can be had by simply thinking and acting bigger than you are as a company. Size does matter, most importantly, in the realm of perception.
Many thanks to the Insight Association for putting this together – we’ve been using this same logic to explain the value of research to our clients for years, but this is so clean and well-written I had to share it with you . . .April 15, 2015
In a competitive market, for-profit ventures are only successful when they are efficient and make the wisest use of their assets. Due to this simple economic truth, every activity and decision an organization makes hinges on return-on-investment (ROI). For corporate researchers, marketing research (MR) is a means to an end and does not generate revenue unto itself. Therefore, research professionals in these organizations face an important dilemma in measuring their ROI.
Why Calculate ROI?
On top of justifying marketing research as a critical investment, measuring return-on-investment can help organizations in other ways. ROI allows managers to:
Understand the optimal scope and size of MR activities
Develop and defend budget proposals
Measure, track and improve performance
Explain the tangible value in MR to stakeholders
It is difficult to judge whether time, money and resources should be devoted to an activity if there is no objective evidence to support the contributions of that activity to the organization. Further, it is difficult to budget if there is no understanding of how changes to the funding of MR activities will ultimately affect the company as a whole[1].
Difficulties in Measuring ROI
Despite the importance of measuring ROI, the marketing research profession has no gold standard approach to the dilemma. This is in large part due to the difficulty in quantifying the value of what MR provides. Dr. Chuck Chakrapani, President of Leger Marketing and Visiting Professor at Ryerson College, offers the 4 reasons, cited below:
1. “Marketing Research Can Produce a Return Only If Someone Acts On It”
It’s necessary to know (1) whether the MR resulted in an action and (2) the costs and revenue of that action in order to calculate ROI. Further, MR may result in a decision to take no action.
2. “The Same Marketing Research May Lead to Different Actions”
MR is subject to the action of decision-makers. Given the same research findings, different decision-makers may take different actions with different revenue results.
3. “In Some Instances, the ROI Is Not Worth Calculating”
It is difficult to assign ROI to MR in certain cases. For example, how should ROI be assigned in cases where decision-makers are simply using MR to confirm something that is fairly obvious?
4. “Marketing Research May Be Used As an Input to Many Decisions”
MR findings may be used by many departments, to different degrees, over a long period of time. It is difficult to unpack the ROI MR provided in each of these cases over time. [2]
Marketing research is often a critical part of business actions. However, there are many factors that contribute to success or failure, including context (e.g., confirmation of an obvious fact or business-saving insight), alternative courses of action, management deliberations and cost of inputs (e.g., advertising, sales). Despite this difficulty, numerous researchers and professionals have developed metrics in order to provide at least a reflection of the value that MR brings to an organization. Popular ROI metrics are summarized below.
[1] Chakrapani, Chuck. “the basics of marketing research roi.” Vue September 2006:12-14
It’s 2017, and so much in marketing practice has changed since we opened our doors in 1997. The range of disciplines has widened beyond print, radio, TV, Outdoor, PR, product placement, sampling, and direct mail. Now the list should include e-mail, SEO and Search, web optimization, social media platforms without number, mobile, YouTube and related channels, Netflix, Amazon, and a host of integration and planning options to tie all of that internet activity together and use customer information to market products and services more effectively, more selectively, more tightly targeted, more high-impact.
There is very little left in marketing today that is not fully digital or directly stems from a digital source. Even the old stalwarts, like outdoor and newspaper, have gone fully digital. Digital signage has replaced movie lobby cards and wall posters in retail. Digital billboards aren’t yet ubiquitous, but will be soon, once the larger screen costs come down and the weatherproofing is perfected. Print? Ha! The files are digital in origin, the plates if used for large runs are digital, the output printer for smaller runs and standard substrates are digital, large format banners, billboards, fabrics and textiles, construction wrapping, you name it, all digital.
Images originate in digital form almost exclusively, and they travel digitally as well. They are taken with a digital camera, edited in a digital editing platform, transmitted digitally to the destination for use digitally or for output to paper on a digital printer or press. Video is shot on digital recorders, digitally edited, transmitted digitally, for display, rebroadcast, download and “sharing” on digital media platforms – ones and zeros from end to end.
E-mail has in part replaced direct mail and originates digitally, is delivered digitally, is consumed digitally, is acted upon (clicks or form completions, electronic purchase) digitally. Even in direct mail, the letters are written and edited digitally, often the order form is merely a link or PURL to drive traffic to the web to interact with (remember struggling to fit all the response form info on a single two-sided page?). With no Internet, (digital) there would be no “search” to optimize, so everything to do with the internet is digital. Cookies, remarketing, banner ads and display campaigns, Google AdWords, all digital.
Television and radio are completely digital, nearly end to end, with the exception of the voice over (recorded digitally), and the actors (recorded digitally and edited with CGI). Often the product itself in TV ads is digitally generated, which gives producers and directors more flexibility to execute, saves time and money creating physical mock-ups, and eliminates things like prototyping and food stylists.
Promotional branded products? Sure, designed digitally using a CAD program, can even be printed digitally using a 3D printer, but if not, the molds are rendered digitally, using a computer to guide the cutting head with digital precision through the metal, and the resulting molded product is branded using a digital ink jet printer.
In-store display for retail? Sure. The boxes and stands are digitally printed, and often include a video screen for displaying digital video talking about the product, some with interactive capability, also digitally voiced and activated. PR is nearly completely digital, as releases and announcements are written and originate digitally, with interviews recorded on a digital recorder. Placements are made in digital media, transmitted and read in digital form, even the story ideas and go-to experts for articles, blogs, and newspapers are communicated electronically in digital form.
So at this point it seems clear, nearly everything to do with marketing is digital. So why, in position descriptions, media requests, consulting reports, research requests, management recommendations, internal and external memos and announcements and the like, do we insist on specifying “digital marketing”? It’s redundant at this point in history, and will likely take a while to drop from use entirely, but to my way of thinking, we no longer need it – it’s just marketing. We can assume that it’s digital, since there’s very little that isn’t. Art has given way to science, “feel” has been usurped by a mass of data (digital), and insight comes not from knowing how your friends and neighbors react to a product, but to scientifically-derived and researched customer insights and virtual focus groups. Tactile has been replaced by visual, and customer experiences have less to do with brick and mortar, with lighting, displays, music, and paint schemes, and more to do with how many clicks to reach the product you desire, and how easy it is too find the shopping cart, to complete the credit card form, to calculate your postage and shipping rates, to understand the return and personal information use policy.
Time to drop the digital and get on with the mission – reaching customers and prospect in a timely fashion, with the right message, at the right time, and making it easy to buy from you.
We’ve been using In-Depth or Personal Interview techniques to uncover customer insights and consumer behavior triggers for years with great success, using the outcomes to inform creative executions and boost effectiveness of marketing efforts – the big agencies have some catching up to do . . .
Trump’s win spurs concerns that ad agencies are out of touch with consumers
By
Alexandra Bruell and
Suzanne Vranica
Advertisers are grappling with a stark realization: After spending years courting U.S. consumers with aspirational images of upscale urban living, they may have misjudged the yearnings of much of their audience.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president with a wave of support from middle American voters, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch with the same people—rural, economically frustrated, elite-distrusting, anti-globalization voters—who propelled the businessman into the White House. Mr. Trump’s rise has them rethinking the way they collect data about consumers, recruit staff and pitch products.
A few days after the Nov. 8 election, the chief executive of the ad agency giant McCann Worldgroup summoned top executives to discuss what the company could learn from the surprising outcome. One takeaway for him and his staff was that too much advertising falsely assumes that all U.S. consumers desire to be like coastal elites.
“Every so often you have to reset what is the aspirational goal the public has with regard to the products we sell,” said Harris Diamond, McCann’s CEO. “So many marketing programs are oriented toward metro elite imagery.” Marketing needs to reflect less of New York and Los Angeles culture, he said, and more of “Des Moines and Scranton.”
Some marketers, concerned that data isn’t telling them everything they need to know, are considering increasing their use of personal interviews in research. Meanwhile, some ad agencies are looking to hire more people from rural areas as they rethink the popular use of aspirational messaging showcasing a ritzy life on the two metropolitan coasts. One company is also weighing whether to open more local offices around the world, where the people who create ads are closer to the people who see them.
“This election is a seminal moment for marketers to step back and understand what is in people’s heads and what actually drives consumer choice,” said Joe Tripodi, chief marketing officer of the Subway sandwich chain.
Even as many ad agencies try to improve their gender and racial diversity, industry executives say they also need to ensure their U.S. employees come from varied socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds.
A diversity hire “can be a farm girl from Indiana as much as a Cuban immigrant who lives in Pensacola,” said John Boiler, chief executive of the agency 72andSunny, whose clients include General Mills Inc. and Coors Light. The agency plans to expand its university recruitment programs to include rural areas.
‘[A diversity hire] can be a farm girl from Indiana as much as a Cuban immigrant who lives in Pensacola.’
—John Boiler, chief executive of the agency 72andSunny
Given how polling underestimated Mr. Trump’s support, the election underscores the limitations of “research methodologies that even in the era of big data are subject to human bias,” said Antonio Lucio, the chief marketing officer of HP Inc.
As a result HP, the personal computer and printer arm of the former Hewlett-Packard Co., is re-evaluating its reliance on research techniques like online polls and seeing if it needs to increase its use of personal interviews and ethnography, which is when researchers try to understand how people live by visiting them in their homes or work environments.
David Sable, global chief executive of Y&R, a creative agency owned by WPP PLC, said the election is a lesson for marketers and agencies that have become too infatuated with big data. Mr. Sable said that Y&R will “double down” on its eXploring program, which involves spending time with consumers in their own habitats. For example, the agency has in the past done laundry with families in London as part of its research for a packaged-goods company.
“If you want to understand how a lion hunts you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle,” he said.
David Droga, creative chairman and founder of Droga5, whose clients include Yum Brands Inc.’s Pizza Hut and J.P. Morgan Chase, said the election validated its immersive approach. The shop this year sent employees to Johnsonville headquarters in Wisconsin to interview many of the sausage company’s employees for an ad campaign. “We really want to make sure we not just understand our demo, but the mind-set of our demo right now,” Mr. Droga said. (Droga5 also did work for Hillary Clinton, including a TV spot that depicts her fighting for children throughout her public life.)
A scene from Droga5’s Johnsonville ad campaign. Droga5 sent employees to Johnsonville headquarters in Wisconsin to interview many of the sausage company’s employees for the campaign. Photo: Droga5
Advertising executives also said the surprising outcome to the election would likely hamper advertising spending next year, as marketers try to figure out what implications the new administration’s decisions will have on businesses.
“I believe there will be a slowdown” in the first quarter as marketers take a “wait and see” approach to Mr. Trump’s policies, said Maurice Lévy, chief executive officer of Publicis Groupe SA.
WPP’s GroupM, the largest ad buying firm in the world, had been anticipating U.S. ad spending would grow 3% to $183.9 billion next year. Kelly Clark, global CEO of GroupM, now said he anticipates ad spending growth in the U.S. will likely decline a few percentage points over the next six months. “We do believe that investment decisions will be delayed,” said Mr. Clark.
If agencies internalize the societal changes the election reflected, the content or tone of advertising could change, some ad executives predicted.
“The election will have spooked the liberal elite away from high concept, ‘make the world a better place’” advertising to “a more down-to-earth ‘tell me what you will do for me’ approach” said Robert Senior, worldwide chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, a creative firm owned by Publicis Groupe.
Mr. Senior said the change will likely manifest itself in less use of fantastical imagery and escapism and more real world and real people in ads.
Mr. Tripodi of Subway says marketers are too focused on aggregating people into broader groups and painting them with the same brush. He said global marketers such as Subway should try to do more local marketing and advertising that can better reflect the concerns of specific communities.
Mr. Diamond of McCann says the ad industry’s move to have regional hubs servicing large patches of the world is now out of sync with movements in many countries—the U.S., U.K., and China, for example—where citizens seem frustrated with aspirational globalism. He said McCann, which has offices in about 90 countries, had been moving toward more regional hubs. It now wants to beef up its local creative teams.
In a world “demanding local distinctiveness, you have to have creative that reflects that,” Mr. Diamond said.
Some advertisers weren’t caught off guard. Susan Credle, global creative chief of ad agency FCB, relayed a conversation she had before the election with a marketer who felt that an aspirational message would hurt its business.
“If we were having that conversation today, it would be an even stronger point,” she said.
Mitch Vandiver (at mitch@strategiescorp.net.) and The Strategies, Inc. Team put this together, and I thought it was perfect for my readers – it’s all about asking the right questions . . .
Michael J. Marquardt, author of Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask says, “You don’t have to have the answer to ask a great question. A great question will ultimately get an answer.”
A school teacher shared this story. One day, as the children played at recess, a usually very calm, good-natured little boy hit a little girl, who was his best friend. The playground monitors rushed over as the little girl stood crying. One monitor immediately reprimanded the boy in an angry voice, “You can’t hit other people. That’s wrong! What were you thinking?! And, boys don’t hit girls!”
Now, both children stood sobbing. The other playground monitor sat down with the children and asked only one question of the little boy, “Why did you hit her?” Through tears, he explained, “There was a bee on her and I didn’t want my friend to get stung.” The monitor glanced down and, indeed, laying on the ground by the little girl, was a bee.
What a difference a great question can make! This true story is a brilliant metaphor for the times we should have asked more questions and didn’t.
Effective and empowering questions serve several proposes:
1. They create clarity – What did you learn about the little boy through one question?
2. They construct better relationships – How did your opinion of the little boy shift when you understood his reason?
3. They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways and encourage breakthrough thinking – What would you ask the little boy to help him find other solutions to protecting his friend from bees?
4. They challenge assumptions – What assumptions did the first playground monitor make? How did those change with one question?
Open-ended questions do not seek specific answers. They allow curiosity and exploration. Good opened-ended questions can start with what, how, when, where, who, tell me, or I wonder.
Great questions benefit organizations, teams, and employees by minimizing miscommunication from making assumptions, changing points of view, stimulating creativity, engaging critical thinking, developing ownership of issues, and encouraging problem solving ability.
What great questions will you ask of others today?
