Recap: Holland-Mark’s branding approach is based on the observation that people have a tendency to boil things down to One Simple Thing™ (“OST” for short.) We do this not only for brands (Volvo = Safety,) but for movies (Rocky = Inspired,) musical artists (Elvis = Rock & Roll,) and even political candidates. If you buy that theory (and let’s face it, you really should,) it’s important to remember there’s an upper limit on the complexity and nuance of any brand positioning strategy. Put simply… If you don’t choose an OST for the market, the market chooses an OST for you.

In this corner, Fairness

Barack Obama worked hard to own Change in an election where that was what people wanted, and as a result became the 44th President of the United States. As the incumbent this time around, he needs a new OST, and in last week’s State of the Union address we got a preview of where he’s headed in the re-positioning of Brand Obama.

President Obama painted himself as the optimistic populist last Tuesday night, but since those are both words only East Coast Intellectuals use, I’m going to go with Fairness. Where things have gone wrong, the President implied or flat-out stated that unfairness was to blame. Hapless consumers sold mortgages they couldn’t afford? Unfair. China keeping out US goods and services? Unfair. Billionaires with lower tax rates than their secretaries? Unfair, unfair, unfair.

Unfair is nice because nobody has to be the bad guy. Fairness is also a deeply held American value, and a concept just one heartbeat away from what the Obama camp expects to hear trumpeted from the other side: Competition. And on top of that, solving Unfair is pretty straightforward. Somebody powerful just needs to make things Fair, and that’s in many ways how Obama sees the role of the President.

Fairness is also a positive value, and the President was careful to strike a tone of optimism and confidence in touting his administration’s successes in stopping the economic death-spiral he inherited, the surging US auto industry, a breadcrumb trail of dead terrorists, and the ongoing inevitability of American exceptionalism.

And in this corner, Wrong Track

I was stricken immediately by the contrasting negativism of the GOP response, as offered by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. Where Obama’s wordcloud featured “right,” and “work,” and “new”; Daniel’s showcased ”wrong,” and “government,” and “must.” Such is the nature of the opposition, I guess, and there’s a pretty strong case to be made that America is in dire straights right now.

It’s also unclear whether the eventual GOP nominee will adopt the party’s OST, and depending on how things go in Florida today it might be a while before we even know which team will be choosing that OST.

History shows that in a struggle between an optimist and pessimist in an American election, though, the optimist usually wins. My bet is that the Republican nominee will be smart enough to know this, and that the obsessive Obama-bashing and doomsaying that’s characterized the primary will give way to a more positive message in the general election. This is especially true if the Spring and Summer bring a continuing thaw in consumer confidence, unemployment, and the economy as a whole.

But what will that message be? And will Obama need to pivot from Fairness in light of that challenge?

Stay tuned, sports fans. Stay tuned.

This post originally appeared on Bostinno.com on February 1st, 2012

We even do it for political candidates.

If you’d asked people immediately after the last Presidential election why they voted for Barack Obama, few would have cited specific attributes, anecdotes, or policies. Most people would have said one word: “Change.” Change was what people wanted after 8 years of George W. Bush, with the economy in shambles, our civil liberties in peril, and our reputation in tatters around the world. You can of course argue with that characterization, but you can’t argue that Change is the single idea the Obama campaign spent every nickel and minute on from the time he announced to the time he won. It was who he was by that November – an almost perfect vessel for the Change “One Simple Thing” (“OST” for short) – and as a result he ran away with the election against a man with objectively superior qualifications, who’d lacked focus and communications discipline from the word go.

Now we find ourselves 4 years later, and as a sitting President, Change is off the table for Barack & Co. So where will they go, re-positioning brand Obama for a weary, divided, and universally troubled electorate? How will the opposition respond? What will each side choose as their OST, or – in the case of candidates who lack the insight and discipline to choose – what OST will we the people assign to them?

This will be the first in a series of posts trying to answer these questions, and perhaps more importantly, to use this archetypal and epic battle to explore the power of positioning, the role of emotion, and the power of brands in the way YOUR customers “vote” for you, or somebody else.

Round I: The Early Republican Primaries

Let’s start with the drop-outs:

• Michelle Bachman shot for Conservative, but ended up Crazy thanks to that Newsweek cover shot. Buh-bye.
• Rick Perry’s OST? I’d say Texas. The Texas Economic Miracle, Texas social policy, Texas accent, Texas lack of squeamishness over killin’ bad guys win they jus’ need killin.’ This was dumb on a few levels, not the least of which was Ol’ Dubya himself. More than that, the rest of the country is a little dubious on Texas, so soon after Rick’s media close-up… adios, amigo.
• Jon Huntsman’s failure was never getting to an OST, never focusing his message enough to break through the noise. As a result he left himself open to the OSTs his rivals painted on him, the most sticky and deadly of which was, sadly for Jon, Moderate. And how’d that turn out? Zai zian, Jon.

This last dynamic is common in a political fight, and we’ll see it repeated over and over in the race this year. The game is not only to paint the right OST on yourself, but to paint a deadly OST on your opponent. More on this in later posts.

Winnowing of the above got us to the current field, which I’d handicap as follows:

• Ron Paul. Tricky, but I’d say he’s shooting for True, and ending up in the neighborhood of Purist. True doesn’t stick because most people don’t understand what he’s talking about. But you know he believes it, that he always has, and that he’s in no mood for compromise. Ron believes, whether he’s right or not. Hence Purist, which I don’t think is going to serve him well. We’ll see.
• Rick Santorum - Conservative. Period. We’ll see how that goes down in the GOP, but it’s a guaranteed loser in the general election. You heard it here.
• Mitt Romney’s OST is the easiest of the bunch, and it’s CEO. Mitt’s kind of come to terms with it, and is trying to leverage it as a credential for getting us out of the mess we’re in. Trouble is, most Americans don’t like CEOs. And most Republicans, it seems, don’t like Mitt.
• Newt Gingrich is another easy one: Fight. Newt is just spoiling for a fight, always. And you know… so are a lot of Republicans these days. It’s the only explanation for the Newt phenomenon, which the mainstream media seems still trying to unpack.

Getting the flow here? Am I right? And either way… What’s your take?

Stay tuned for next week’s installment: Round II: The State of the Union

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on January 26, 2012.

If your CEO is something short of Lauzon-esque in his or her mastery of the medium, here’s the best advice we have.

1. Start with empathy.

Business is tough on us middle-aged white guys these days. We’re just cavemen. We don’t understand your “retweet,” or what all this “Like” stuff is about. Facebook is something we worry about our kids using. Your ways are strange to us.

But we’re not about to admit that to your punk-ass. Remember that odds are you’re dealing with somebody who’s just a little embarrassed to be out of the loop at this point. Make them feel at ease. Take the edge off by breaking the ice in private, offering to sit down over coffee, and just help get them “set up.”

Be helpful, and be patient. Don’t judge.

2. Build a personal channel.

Social media starts with listening, and one key to getting a CEO rolling in it is to create a feed worth listening to. We start with and focus on Twitter, just because it’s easy and the behaviors are so universal once you adopt them.

So what’s your CEO interested in? What magazines does he/she read? What celebrities is he/she into? Which competitors is he/she worried about? Ask a bunch of questions like that, sit down together at a conference table, and after creating a basic profile just start following the best sources for that information. Make it easy, demystify the process. But really focus on creating a feed they see value in, and want access to.

3. Get the plumbing sorted out.

Next up is to provide that access… from their browser, and from their phone. Not “a” browser, and not “a” phone. Modify their browser home page to drop them in every day. Add a Shareaholic plug-in to it, and make sure the username and password are stored in it. Do the same with the phone, even if it takes some fumbling and effort.

Stupid little problems with the plumbing of social media end up derailing senior people from the medium, because they hit a roadblock – a forgotten password, an unknown function – and have no idea how to get around it. Anticipate and neutralize those problems, before they happen.

4. Help do it, do not just watch it.

Remember not to show him/her how to do things, but to let him/her struggle with the little details about how to tweet, reply, DM, RT, use hashtags, indicate location, and post a picture. These things seem easy because you’ve done them a thousand times, but you’ll need to coach your CEO through them patiently, and resist the temptation to take over the keyboard.

5. Reinforce the behavioral change.

If you take this approach, I promise you’ll have a great meeting, and that all will be unicorns and rainbows at the end of it. But as is so often the case… if you don’t follow up, the fragile sprout of social proficiency will perish in the stale manure of old habit.

Promote your CEO’s new Twitter address across the company, so he/she starts to see people following. @ and D him/her periodically, and check in if you don’t get a response. Ask for questions, ask how things are going. Suggest topics, and reinforce the idea that in the end it’s just about sharing whatever he/she finds interesting during her day, in a way that benefits the people interested in her.

It ain’t rocket science, people. But it is a change in behavior, and as any Biggest Loser contestant can tell you, changing your behavior takes some work.

If you need a little more help, check out the below, which we produced for our CEO Series a few months back. And if you’d like a printed copy, hit me up on Twitter.

7 Habits of Highly Effective CEO Tweeters

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on January 24th, 2012.

The CEO as Brand: 7 Principles and Platitudes to Elevate You and Yours

For CEOs interested in attending the next CEO Series event, “Innovate or Else,” please contact Heather Ward, the CEO Series program coordinator, at hward@holland-mark.com.

We’ve been trying out a new approach lately, uncovered in close collaboration with our client Kibits.

The essence of it is to recognize positioning as a moving target, and adapt to that reality. Instead of periodic meetings and checkpoint, for example, we actually live on site with the client for a while, to get a sense of things as they unfold on the ground. Instead of engraving One Simple Thing™ candidates on a stone tablet, we focus on moving quickly and writing everything in pencil until we learn what works and what doesn’t in the real world. We ideate together, focus, test, learn, adopt, and lock things down before moving forward.

We’ve centered (for now) on a 5-step process that looks like this:

1.     Immersion – We start with a positioning workshop, then live on site for a week. We also assemble a quick-and-dirty Listening Station, to plug into the conversation about the brand, its competition, and the problem it solves online.

2.     Hypothesis – From there we brainstorm OST candidates with the client, and work our way down to one that meets the standard of being our best guess based on what we know now.

3.     Prototype – Next we use that OST and Message Model to drive a rapid cycle, tactical deliverable… maybe an ad, maybe a PowerPoint deck, perhaps even a 2 or 3 page web site. The operative word here is FAST, meaning we want something professional enough to meet the minimum standard, but not so elaborate it takes a lot of time (and money) to build and launch.

4.     Refinement – Next we release that deliverable into the wild, and listen hard to see how the world responds. We collect the data we can – quantitative and qualitative – and come back together to discuss and agree on what we’ve learned, and how our positioning might be refined to be more effective.

5.     Realization – Finally, with an OST and Message Model in hand that have already been field-proven, we turn to the development of a more elaborate and polished final deliverable.

It’s a different way of working, and the key is that everyone on the team (us and the client) have the right expectations and willingness to “open the kimono” and share. I’d be lying if I said it came naturally to everyone on our team, or that this process won’t continue to evolve as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

But that’s kind of the whole point. We’re all startups now… the winners will be the ones who learn to adapt to a world where change is the only constant. We think this is a step in the right direction.

Job’s legacy while seeming to be about innovation really is about his ability to see a good idea and make it better, much better.  And for that he was supremely talented and supremely right.   Gladwell’s depiction of this is crystal clear as is his depiction of Jobs’ tweaking methods, which is where our 21st century mini-messiah went extremely wrong.  He tweaked by shoving, demanding, demonizing and humiliating people.  Getting it right, as he defined right, was worth any cost.  And perhaps the most alarming part is that our culture has come to celebrate and revere the consequences of that abuse while overlooking the abuse itself.

Imagine any other CEO, military leader or even college coach who belittled and brutalized all who worked for them?  How long would people stand for it?  Apparently as long as the perceived value of the right exceeds the actual value of the wrong.

Related articles

• In Praise of “Tweakers” (coordinationproblem.org)
• Steve Jobs More ‘Tweaker’ Than Inventor, Gladwell Says (inquisitr.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell On Steve Jobs’ Perfectionism: The Genius Is In The ‘Tweak’ (mediaite.com)
• Malcolm Gladwell Gets Steve Jobs Wrong (forbes.com)
• Getting Steve Jobs Wrong (daringfireball.net)

Having just finished it, I don’t have a good answer to either question. In fact both seem foolishly simplistic given this rich, sweeping, detailed, and intimate depiction a truly remarkable man’s life experience.

What I learned about Steve Jobs is that he was very good at some things, and very bad at others. Among the things he was very good at, his true genius lay in his ability to develop products people love at the intersection of engineering and humanities. Later in life he shifted more of his energies toward building a company that institutionalized this genius, though it will be a while before we learn whether he succeeded.

What I learned about life – or about business, anyway – is that both our strengths and our weaknesses shape the things we create. What’s remarkable about the life of Steve Jobs is how the psychoses and eccentricities of his personality, when channeled through his defining product genius, created the world’s most valuable company. His story is not of a man overcoming the limitations of his worldview; it’s the story of a man who changed the world itself to accommodate it.

You are not Steve Jobs, as Allen Kelly pointed out in his insightful blog post a few weeks back. But maybe there’s a lesson for all of us in the story of a man who brought some beauty into the world not just because of the gifts that made him a genius, but because of the flaws and idiosyncrasies that made him a person.

This content was originally posted on bostinno.com on November 27^th, 2011

Back in the day you became an executive over time, carefully cultivated in the corporate hierarchy like a meat-eating houseplant. But that’s all changed now. Corporate hierarchy ain’t what it used to be, and if you go off and start a company, you get the title overnight.

But the title is all you get, and having the hat doesn’t make you a cowboy. When I was coming through the ranks executives who’d earned it the hard way taught me a few things about what it meant to be an Executive, and even as tastes and sensibilities have changed, I continue to find their lessons useful.

Boiling them down to a blog-size nugget, here’s what I’d offer up to those of you still listening.

At the start of your career, you rise through the ranks by recognizing three important ideas:

1.    Management – Which is developing the skill set to organize the work of others toward a common goal,

2.   Authority – Which is a tool provided by the organization to those who demonstrate the potential to manage effectively, and

3.   Working Hard – Which is what it takes to excel among a peer group of people who are just as smart, charming, and experienced as you are.

These three ideas frame the professional experience of most people, who think being an Executive is about attaining some kind of black-belt status of managerial competence, then being given a boat-load of authority by The Company, then working harder than everyone else until they retire, or drop dead on the golf course. I see people act in ways that indicate this worldview every day. They long for other people to teach them some management parlor trick they assume they need to succeed. They bemoan the lack of authority afforded them by their short-sighted and “political” organizations.  The best of them work very hard indeed, although that’s another rarity among the more entitled generation.

If you aspire to be the Junior Vice President of So-And-So, then you should continue to pursue Ninja status on all of the above. If you want to be an Executive, though, you need to focus elsewhere.
Being an Executive is about 3 very different ideas:

1.    Leadership – Which is a set of personal qualities which encourages others to follow you,

2.   Power – Which individuals create for themselves to better accomplish their objectives, and…

3.   Results – Which are – in the end – what being an Executive is all about.

Great entrepreneurs learn the importance of these qualities the hard way, but it’s worth highlighting them and their differences from their more common roots.

Management is a craft like carpentry or plumbing. It can be learned with a little effort, but while essential to well-functioning businesses, there is no Ninja status at the top of the curve.  The French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupery pointed out the distinction in my favorite quote about leadership (and marketing, for that matter): ”If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” That’s what leadership is about.

If you ever catch yourself saying you can’t do X because your company won’t give you Y, drive out to the nearest Home Depot, grab a 2×4, and hit yourself in the forehead with it. Seriously. Quit whining, and go make it happen. Or shut up. Not sure how to accumulate power? Watch the Godfather parts I and II, and pay close attention to how Vito goes from being a sickly kid on Ellis Island, to being Robert DeNiro, to being the most powerful man in New York. Hint: He does it by helping others, not by killing them.

Finally, when it comes to being an Executive, results are what count. The Great Jack Welch once said that if he couldn’t leave the office consistently at 6pm, he knew he’d made a bad personnel decision somewhere along the way. In the end his board didn’t care what time he went home, they cared about whether earnings-per-share had risen or fallen. If you want to be an Executive you should start by making sure you understand the result you’re responsible for, and doing whatever you need to do to exceed others expectations of what that result should be.

Being an Executive is important in an economy where jobs are important, a worthwhile aspiration for good people who want to make a difference in the world. It’s not a dirty word; not about vanity, privilege, or greed. Executives make the world go round, and it’s time we gave the designation its due respect.

This content was originally posted on bostinno.com on November 9^th, 2011

Tangential as it may seem, the point is to bring to light the importance of recognizing what delight means and then recognizing the people and things that deliver them. Affecting delight is a key driver of business satisfaction and brand loyalty; however it’s a state of existence for business that requires constant attention.

So enough of the delight soapbox. It’s story time.

I don’t want to have to wear fancy gym clothes, but the truth of my life (and likely self confidence) is that the days of grabbing a tshirt and gender neutral mesh shorts are over. There are too many mirrors. Too many people I know. (Lest we forget the occasion appearance by Ryan Reynolds or his mini-friend Mila Kunis.) Not to mention, all the people who should look terrible enough to motive me are clad in incredibly figure flattering outfits. Not gym clothes. Outfits. It’s a nightmare. An expensive nightmare. And just when you imagine it can’t get worse, you go to shop for these gym outfits and find out that the stores selling theses wares combining the lighting and mirrors of your gym with a confined space and Lycra.

And the stores, save the banner few like Lululemon and Lucy, don’t seem to acknowledge a problem. Despite selling to a female market, they are largely run like sporting goods stores. Expertise, but very little understanding of human psychology.

So imagine my surprise… no, delight, when I entered the CitySports on Boylston Street in Boston to discover that they had undergone a rather extensive remodel/reorganization to create a mini “boutique” within the clothing department. Rather than rack after rack of pants, they’d created a simple wall system (very similar to the kind Lululemon employs). You could look at the style, read about the fit and length, and then grab a size. Everything about it was so… reasonable. They installed two new fitting rooms exclusively for the new area– big fitting rooms. The lighting and colors didn’t highlight how ridiculous I looked, but rather made me feel like I could sit down on the handy bench and think about what other things I wanted to try on. It was elated. I emailed friends about it…from the fitting room.

After reflecting on it for sometime, I realized that even though I acknowledged it was a smart business move, it felt like it was made in the interest of the client. I genuinely felt that someone with good sense and a good head on their shoulders made a decision to do what was right for all of us ladies, and the result added a tremendous amount of value to my experience and perception of CitySports.

To come full circle, CitySports found a way to create delight. For five years I lived around the corner and while it’s a lovely store, there’s never been anything delightful about it. It’s a good place to buy the athletic and outdoorsy things I sometimes need. But that experiential tweak changed the game. I want to go back. It’s now part of my go-to inner circle for new apparel.

So many businesses turn to marketing to solve a problem based on a set experience, but today’s marketing is about so much more than that. It’s about understanding the critical importance of delivering value and affecting customer delight and then making that experience known and desired by others.

Marketing isn’t a thing, it’s a psychology of business interaction and outreach.