davidpoulos.com

Tag: experience

  • If Your Brand Was A Person, Would You Date Them?

    If Your Brand Was A Person, Would You Date Them?

    Brand gets defined in many different ways depending on the source, the context and the scope and depth of the investigation and the purpose of the definition. We’ve found a great way to help simplify this definition process and allow marketers to cut to the heart of the brand and incorporate that insight into all of their marketing efforts more seamlessly and easily.

    Brands function as an identity for companies, just like a name does for people. Brands have a reputation, just like people. Brands have a personality, just like people (brandinality?). So why not examine your brand as if it were a person? Brand personalization is a great way to help your company’s employees and associates think of your firm in a consistent, easily-relatable fashion, one they can tell others about quickly and easily.

    It’s also a way to get to know your brand better, because people are hard wired to humanize inanimate objects in order to better understand and relate to them, a fact that is a founding principle of the Disney company, and the basis for their movies and animated features. Think talking tea kettles with a British accent, and you get the picture.

    [pullquote align=”left or right”]Brand personification is “a Projective Technique that asks people to think about brands as if they were people and to describe how the brands would think and feel,” according to mktresearch.org.[/pullquote]

    The process is fairly straightforward, and we use it to help define customer’s perceptions of brands for client companies. Start off by asking a few basic questions:

     

     

    • Is the brand male or female?
    • Is the brand smart like school, or smart like a poker player?
    • Is your brand a slob or a neat freak?
    • Is your brand a jock or a nerd? Cheerleader or Goth?
    • Is your brand trustworthy?

    Now that you have some basics, flesh them out by asking yourself or your subjects “Why do you think that?” Those “why” responses are critical to keying on central core attributes or characteristics about the brand, be they experiential, visual or verbal. From those why responses, you can tease out various aspects of the brand that reappear across responses as more central to the identity. Those are the pillars of the brand and should be adhered to in all brand-relevant activities.

    Now that you know it’s personality, it’s time to think about appearance. What does your brand look like – not the logo or visual identity, although that will come along a bit later. This relates to if this brand was a person, how would those key personality traits be revealed at a cocktail party or in their dating website profile photos. Visualize how they might represent themselves, as a person. Start with a name, (is it a Gary or a Lawrence, a Wendy or a Sahara) then flesh out the appearance of the person – are the clothes clean and do they fit well, are they age appropriate? Is this person kinetic and high-energy, or more laid back and laconic? Are they credible in speech, manner and appearance, or are they overblown or timid? Are they solidly in a category, like a surfer dude, or a Wall St. guy, or a coal miner, or a tire store manager? This can go on for quite a while, until a fully-realized person presents themselves to your vision. Now ask yourself “is this person a good representative to relate to our target audience?” If you’re selling amps and road cases, the laid-back rocker might be perfect. If you’re selling securities and annuities and other financial services and products, maybe not so much.

    Now the big question: Now that you have created the brand personality, fully formed in front of you, would you spend time with this person? Would your target audience find him attractive and credible? Would they take him/her home to meet Mom?

    Creating a brand personality does more than provide a short hand way for you as a marketer to think about your brand – it’s also a great way for you to explain your brand to colleagues and to get to know it more intimately, and allows you to improve the effectiveness of your brand marketing across all channels and media, company-wide.

    Would you date your brand? If not, it might be time to make some adjustments . . .

  • Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    We’ve long advised companies who want to be market leaders to adopt a customer-centric stance in their internal and marketing attitude. That advice has been well received, but often reluctantly implemented, due to the complexity and length of time involved in properly instituting a sea change in their organizations. While we admit, thoughtful and well-considered moves of this magnitude do not happen overnight, they can be implemented incrementally, and start showing results sooner than a cold start.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you – they’ve received their product, paid the invoice, shaken hands after the exit interview, whatever trigger ends an interaction cycle with your firm. Now, ponder for a second what happened, how was that customer feeling at that last few minutes of interaction? Were they thrilled to receive their product and can’t wait to use it, were they a little disappointed because it took longer than expected to arrive, or didn’t live up to the expectations you set for them, did they care at all, or did they just put it aside until a more convenient time?

    If you’re a service provider, what feeling or sentiment preceded that last handshake or interaction (not counting the invoice, we’ll get to that in a moment)? Was it buoyant that they got what they needed from you, were they excited about the next time they worked with you, relieved they had gotten a good outcome without getting scalped, happy to be out of your clutches? Behind that smile and that handshake is a wide range of emotions and feelings that those clients or customers will carry with them for quite a while, and the next contact they have with you, including any further marketing or follow-up efforts, will trigger a somewhat milder version of that emotion, guiding their next response to you.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change. Now that you have some idea of where to start in examining your customer experience, backtrack through your engagement with that customer in your mind, go through the steps that lead up to that final feeling. Work it over logistically, reverse-chronologically, and see if there are any snags, bumps in the road, places where communication status dipped, where the customer might have felt anything negative, like abandonment, uncertainty, fear of the unknown, or experienced something negatively unexpected. Those are your trouble spots, and in the journey of customer experience, those are the places where you can negatively affect your customer relationship and their likelihood to return to you the next time they need something you offer.

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change.

    Even marketing can REALLY benefit from this process. Work through the attendee experience minute by minute. Review your program from the time the attendee hears about the event, what triggers them to register, what do they experience once they’ve registered, how often do they hear from you, what kinds of information do they receive from you, or what do they go searching for in your materials or online? How do they go about booking travel if any is required, do they look for a deal or the flight and hotel that most readily meets their limited schedule, or a combination of both? Do they stay in the host hotel to be “close to the action” or somewhere off-site to maintain privacy and corporate security?

    What do they encounter upon arrival? How did they get there? What do they see first? Are they run down endless hallways before they encounter anyone officially connected with the event, or are they greeted by someone clearly in-the-know that they can ask questions of right away? Is there a place to “unburden” themselves, divesting their arms of coats, bags, luggage, umbrellas, etc, before they get a badge? Is everything conveniently located, and labeled in large, unambiguous letters with pictograms for international attendees?

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom . . .

    Work through the whole meeting, trying to empathize with the attendee from the time they see your first e-mail announcement until the time they get back to their place of origin, and include your post event survey if that goes out beyond the 24-hour post event mark. Now you have a basis for evaluating your customer experience from an attendee-centric point of view. Using that as a baseline, try and separate the logistical, intellectual experience from the emotional one. Tease out those feelings as the flow from one to another and try to envision an overall emotional response to the event, and connect the emotional changes to each major logistical challenge they face. You now have a roadmap to isolating the negative emotional contexts in your meeting and either mitigating them or eliminating them, to provide your attendee a positive customer experience end to end.

    Now that you’ve done the ground work, how do you use that knowledge in your marketing efforts to attract more attendees the next time? Pull out the outreach materials you used to promote and raise awareness of that meeting, the elements that drove attendance. Do they highlight all the customer experiences and benefits you experienced mentally? Do they convey the emotional punch, the triggers to emotions you felt when you entered the meeting? Do they walk the attendee through what they will experience, show the benefits of those experiences, make it easy, painless and simple for them to experience them? Do they set accurate expectations for the attendee that you can always live up to in real life? If the answer to any of these is “no,” then those are the areas that need some work in your programming, planning and marketing efforts, to align the real experience with the “paper” version your espousing in your marketing efforts.

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom – but once they enter your meeting venue, they are your responsibility, and taking that seriously can mean the difference between a one-time attendee and a lifetime cheerleader for your events. Pay special attention to the way they feel when they leave. Did they learn something valuable, did they meet someone important to their professional growth, did they learn something about a new subject or a different culture? What feeling are you leaving them with, what will they remember when they complete that online “satisfaction” survey? Hopefully the emotion won’t just be satisfaction, but something stronger and more positive – the one you planned to leave.

  • Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    For those of you who are marketers, or if you’re a business owner or solo practitioner who acts in a marketing capacity (and who doesn’t), here’s a few things I’ve picked up over the years – they don’t have anything to do with social media, channel support, SEO or anything to do with a particular media.

    10) If you’ve worked hard to evoke an emotional response to your product in an ad or direct mail piece, for goodness sake give people a way to actually buy it! Make the response mechanism obvious, it avoids delay in responding.

    9) Put your address and phone number on your website, in an obvious place – not everybody trusts everything they see on the internet, and sometimes you just want to send somebody something or talk to an actual person. Why make me work at it?

    8) ASK for the order. Don’t assume that the audience will understand what you want them to do, no matter how obvious you think it is.

    7) Take the offer seriously in your ads and direct marketing communications – the audience will, and they will hold your feet to the fire for every possible interpretation you can imagine. The more transparent and clear you make the offer, the less confusion you’ll receive from the audience, and confused audiences tend not to buy things.

    6) Treat your house list like the gold that it is – you’ll never find a more receptive set of eyes and ears for your message than someone who is already predisposed to hear it. Respect the power it represents, and the people behind it.

    5) You can never know too much about the people you’re trying to reach – but you can interpret data incorrectly. Trust but verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, and vet your data with real people and anecdotes – you’ll be glad you did.

    4) Make your copy simple enough that your 80-year-old grandmother can understand it. People’s attention spans are increasingly short, and they don’t have time to analyze your obtuse copy to extract your message.

    3) Sales letters should be long enough to compellingly tell the story, and not a word longer.

    2) Lists, design, artifice and devices don’t sell products and services, feelings do. Evoke an emotional response in your audience and you’ll move the needle.

    1) A target audience never bought anything – PEOPLE buy goods and services – whether it’s online, through the mail, over the phone or from a billboard. Reach out in an accessible, human way, meet a need or solve a problem, and the sales will follow.

    Seems like basic common sense, but ignore such simplicity at your own peril. You’d be amazed how many top flight professionals can’t apply these basic tenets to their everyday work and score a good number.

    If you found this helpful and would like to read more like this, subscribe to this blog above, and be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    As business people and entrepreneurs, most of us don’t like failure in general, and largely feel that failure is bad. True entrepreneurs, however, often tout great failure in the past as the driving force behind their current success. They’ve looked at their past objectively, dispassionately, and impersonally, and taken strong lessons from the failures and used the knowledge to fuel success. A very healthy approach, but one that is often difficult to adopt in other circumstances. If you’re not the boss, continual and ongoing failure in your work will not likely lead to a long career, unless you work at a Wall St. bank!

    Failure is a terrific teacher. It shows you when you should have zigged when you zagged. And often, the ultimate failure of a business enterprise is not caused by any single event or decision – its usually a cascade of seemingly small, inconsequential decisions and actions that take you down a path leading ultimately to collapse. If you could review any one of those decisions separately and out of context, you’d be hard pressed to find logical fault with it, taking into account it’s isolation and the information available at the time. But couple it with incomplete or inaccurate information that fills in or corrects later, and couple that with other seemingly innocuous decisions, and when you step back you can see a pattern developing. You can almost watch the slide in the wrong direction, but at the time you can’t see it and are powerless to stop it.

    Someone smarter than I once said, “it’s not what knocks you down, it’s how you handle getting back up that shows your true character.” I firmly believe that to be true, being an optimist, and believe that this kind of thinking is what powers the entrepreneurial spirit that makes this great country what it is. No matter what obstacles people put in your way, no matter how many times they knock you down, if you just get up, brush off, restore your dignity, regroup and come out swinging with a new action plan, you’ll eventually be alright and prosper. To do that repeatedly and not be insane, you have to examine the failures and learn from them to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure.

    We closed down an ancillary business unit this year, as it produced insufficient revenue to be self supporting after 2 years of investments in time and money. The research told us we were right to launch it, the market should have been there, our advisers and others told us it was a great idea, but in the end, not so much. Now it’s time to do the autopsy, find out what went wrong, and file it away so we don’t repeat it in the future. Without this final, often painful, step, the failure has little positive value. Simply chalking it up to experience and loss without the analysis only yields negatives. Eventually enough negatives can weigh your efforts irretrievably downward to the point of being unable to recover.

    What’s the recovery plan? Once the analysis is done, the lessons learned, the mistakes and missteps identified, we move forward in a positive fashion, richer in the knowledge that we can apply that learning not only to our own endeavors, but apply it on behalf of our clients as well. That’s progress.

    In short, don’t hide from failures or hide the results when they are less than optimal. Own them, learn from them, use them to your advantage. Those who say they only succeed are lying or selling something.

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