Holland-Mark » Brand

Startup Positioning Talk

Mike Troiano — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:33:29 +0000

Slides from today’s talk at CriticalMass in the Cambridge Innovation Center. Thanks to everyone who came!

Mike

Selling the Dogfood: Startup Marketing Before & After Product/Market Fit

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Businesses are people too.

caroline b. — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:00:09 +0000

“I don’t know. We think it looks too… consumery. You know?”

There is a constant conversation taking place between marketers, strategists, creatives, and brands about the differences between branding for B2B and branding for B2C. There is the debate about color palette. (When in doubt, go blue!) What colors feel safe? What tone feels “business-y”? Is it okay to be serious and be clever?

To us, the truth lies in answering a question different from whether you’re a B2B company or a B2C company, but rather one that focuses on the individuals comprising the Bs and the Cs. Chris has often been heard remarking about the “magic consumer transition” that we sometimes believe takes place while commuting from home to work. The underlying consideration there is whether we truly do think that a CEO thinks or responds differently to words and visuals whether he’s behind a mahogany desk or taking a call from his (or her) deck on a sunny Saturday.

Focus for a moment on social media and the effect it’s had on the formality of our communication. There are no longer ivory towers or hallowed halls, and the businesses who continue to subscribe to this method of engagement (or lack of) are quickly losing share. As people we value warmth and competency as much in our business interactions as we do in our more colloquial, consumer lives. You may be drawn to the stability of specific bank, insurance company, or institution, but your experience is determined by the individuals you encounter within that organization, whether it be a teller, mortgage broker, financial planner, teacher, professor, or administrator. Individually they may present as buttoned-up business people, but behind the pleats and tweeds they are human beings who have a significant impact on the image and engagement of a brand.

Increasingly, we find that consumer loyalty and advocacy is built upon the relationships to individuals within an organization. Restaurants provide good food and a charming ambiance, but it’s the chef who stops by or the bar tender who chats with you while you wait for your dinner date who create that experience. There is no aspect of big M marketing that isn’t influenced by the blurred line between B and C. The way you position, message, and iterate product should focus on the one thing we all share: being human. Creating value for customers– both in communication and product– hinges upon understanding human nature above the nature of business.

There is no debate as to whether the rules are more stringent when you cross into B2B, but it has less to do with how people make decisions and more to do with red tape and legal constraints. The brand emerges when you find the humanity within your audience and then craft a story that appeals to them and passes the “business appropriate” test. It’s then the job of the organization to empower employees to embrace this balance and create experiences that are at once true to the brand and relevant to the customer.

Anecdotally, I live around the corner from one of the finest hotel chains in the world, the Taj. The brand stands for luxury and unparalleled experience. And while for guests this manifests in exquisite amenities and superb customer service, it’s adapted to meet the needs of the friends and neighbors of the hotel, as well. There’s no caviar offered as I pass by, but on a rainy day the staff is always ready with an umbrella, or a bottle of water when I jog by after working out. And this morning, after trying fruitlessly to hail a cab, it was a ride to work in their car service. So while I may not have the opportunity to lay my head upon those delightful pillows, or experience the luxury of tubs the size of my apartment, the luxury is tailored for me by a staff who knows my life and does everything they can to make it that much more luxurious.

Which Is The Best Business Model For Your Startup – B2B Or B2C? (entrepreneurs-journey.com)
Why does B2B customer experience get the short shrift? (customerthink.com)

Positioning As Startup Hypothesis

Mike Troiano — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:00:06 +0000

Starting a business is betting your livelihood on a value proposition you believe is significant. Given that, it’s surprising how few startups take the time to make their core hypothesis explicit in the form of a written and agreed-upon positioning statement.

The formulation we use includes the following elements:

target – an actionable universe of buyers,
segment – the key, predisposing attribute of likely buyers within the target,
brand – a name you call yourself,
category – a competitive frame that helps the buyer understand what you do,
distinction – what makes you unique within that competitive frame, and
proof – perceived evidence that your claim of distinction is true.

String those things together, and you get a blurb that looks like this:

For [target] who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof.]

Examples from established brands:

- For drivers who value automotive performance, BMW provides luxury vehicles that deliver joy through German engineering.
- For people around the world, Coca-Cola is the soft drink that is the real thing since 1886.
- For industrial manufacturers who are challenged to differentiate, BASF is the raw materials supplier that makes products better through engineering depth.

Can you articulate the hypothesis of your startup – the core value proposition on which you’re betting your livelihood – in the form of a positioning statement like that? If so, can you get your team to agree on it? And if so… Does it hold water?

Give it a shot. Worst case, you’re likely than not to get some clarity from the attempt.

The Facebook Minimum Marketing Protocol

Mike Troiano — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:30:07 +0000

Most fan pages on Facebook never really get off the ground. Those that do either subscribe to a labor intensive set of best practices (nicely summarized in this report by Jerimiah Owyang), or have an intensely dedicated brand zealot behind them. Both are luxuries few clients can justify.

Hence the need for a kind of “minimum protocol” for Facebook marketing, a clear and specific list of the absolute bare minimum you’re going to need to do within the Facebook ecosystem to have a Facebook fan page that does more than check the box in terms of accessibility to your target audience.

Let’s start with the basics… it’s important to get your Facebook profile right and promote your page once you’ve launched it. These issues are pretty well covered on the links above.

As for the protocol itself, here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

Have a Content Strategy – What kind of content is at the intersection of what serves your interests AND what’s worthy of your target users attention? Be honest, or be doomed to obscurity no matter what.
1. 80% curated content, sourced from your Listening Station or Twitter.
2. 20% created content, based on your blog. Queue a post to publish each weekday at 8am local time.
Post 20x week – Post at least 3x/day on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, at 5pm, 7pm, and 9pm. Post at least 5x/day on Thursday and Friday at 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, 8pm and 9pm.
1. Less than 80 characters (27% more effective)
2. Close most posts with questions (15% more effective)
3. Supplement as you’re able to. The more you post, the better your result will be.
Respond to all comments as promptly as possible, and as the brand.
Partner – Identify and leverage a select set of other fan pages also likely to attract your target audience.
1. Comment on these pages as the brand whenever appropriate
2. Offer managers of these pages “quid pro quo” opportunities for mutual benefit
Ask for referrals – Every other week, ask the fans you have to help spread the word to the fans you want. if they’re getting value from your feed, they will. If they won’t do it… see “1.” above.

I’d like to give props to Michelle McCormack and eMarketer, both of whom helped shaped our thinking on this.

We’re having pretty good luck with this approach so far…what’s your take? What would you add, and what would you take away?

Laziness: The Facebook Brand Page Killer (blogs.forbes.com)
Garin Kilpatrick: How To Implement Facebook Open Graph Protocol On your Website Or WordPress Blog | Website Design & Development (websitedesign411.com)
Don’t double down on social media content (convonix.com)
How To: Customize The Way Your Facebook Like’s Look (facebookflow.com)
Adding the Facebook Like Button Revisited (ducttapemarketing.com)
Facebook Now Allows Profile Pages to Become Business Pages (hubspot.com)

The Importance of Brand Clarity

Mike Troiano — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:45:57 +0000

An actual client talks about the impact of our One Simple Thing™ approach to distilling a brand down to an idea regular human beings can hold in their heads:

The project was delivered by our partner Mark Edwards, with great skill and insight. Bravo, Mark.

Top 100 global brands (theworldison.blogspot.com)
When Should You Use Your Own Language (chrisbrogan.com)
What Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk Have in Common, and What You Can Learn from it (techipedia.com)
Brandividual: Passionate, Personal, Connected, Generous, Real (conversationagent.com)
Building a Brand vs. Building a Business (theworldison.blogspot.com)

The Shelf Life of Relevancy

Chris Colbert — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:05:16 +0000

: Image by toml1959 via Flickr

Twenty years ago the shelf life of relevancy was at least a good ten years. If you had a product or service offering that carried even a mildly distinct and relevant value proposition it was virtually guaranteed to produce healthy profits, loyal customers, and decent top-line growth for a decade or more. Polaroid’s shelf life was seventy years. Pan Am’s even more. Hell, Woolworth’s lasted 118 years. Now much has been written about how and why brands die so let’s not tread that well-trodden ground. My point is that the times literally have changed; the shelf life of relevancy is down to years and maybe even months. Any marketer that thinks that some combination of intellectual property, brand value, happy customers, price advantage, etc., serves as long-term competitive insulation is most probably naive and on the verge of getting their clock cleaned.

So the first order of business is to accept that ugly reality.

The second is to look the cold, hard truth in the eyes. To candidly examine where the chinks are in your brand armor and/or where the world seems to be heading in terms of buying or not buying what you’re selling. In Clay Christiansen’s oldie but goodie book from 1996, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he repeatedly suggests that one cause of leading brands ultimately losing to new “disruptive” technologies is that they aren’t willing to embrace the truth and believe that their leadership position is vulnerable to anything. Some call that hubris.

The third order of business is to un-bridle corporate imagination while giving direct consideration to the equity zone. What does that mean? Visioning, envisioning, and re-visioning are the tasks of hope, of possibility, of what if. But they are tasks that must be mindful of the real equities of the brand vis à vis the trend line of social equity. Most brands forget that point, which is why most line extensions or segment expansion efforts fail. Take Oldsmobile. They tried to go younger when their equities were clearly older. And they were going up against a declining social equity trend line, e.g., their demo was dying off and the new generation wanted nothing to do with them. I hear VW wants to go mainstream, pull away from the kids. Uh oh.

Which brings me to the fourth order:

Growth may not always be the right goal. In fact fixation on growth may be the recipe for a rapid demise. For Polaroid to have transitioned from silver halide film to digital imaging probably would have required it getting smaller in order to get bigger. Now the shareholders wouldn’t have liked that message much, but look what they ended up with… The other side of it is that perhaps all brands have a fixed shelf life (religions and nation states aside). Can Corporate America accept the concept of “Inevitable Obsolescence”?

The fifth “to do” is to invest in intellectual and analytical rigor. Because even if you’ve accepted the reality, are in eye contact with the truth, and have concocted a lovely vision of your brand’s next incarnation, the devil (or salvation) can be in the details. And again most brands, big and small, are simply not very good at examining the data and the details to validate or invalidate what they’re planning. And once they execute they tend not to be very good at measuring the results of their efforts. Make data your best friend.

These five orders of business represent somewhere between the requisite cultural mindset and a strategic planning sensibility to extend the shelf life of relevancy. Increasing shelf life, or the “time value of your brand,” demands embracing and responding to the truth of it all, in real time and real ways. It’s not hard, but it can be a wee bit uncomfortable. But so can the alternative.

Posted via web from holland-mark posterous

The Other Side of the Empowered Consumer Sword

Mike Troiano — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:46:57 +0000

Here’s what ignoring your customers on the Web does for your brand.

Good luck fixing this with anything other than meaningful, operational changes.

Maximize The Benefit

Minimize the bullshit.

By Ken Peters, January 2010

Let’s be frank. For consumers, your brand’s value is proportional to the amount of aggravation it adds to or eliminates from their lives. Maximize the benefit and minimize the bullshit or be swept into the dustbin of irrelevance. Today’s consumers are too smart and too busy to waste time with bullshit brands.

Case in point: my recent holiday shopping exploits with two prominent retailers. Never before have I encountered so much – pardon the bluntness – brand bullshit. Read on and you’ll see what I mean. Don’t worry, though, this post isn’t about whining.

You may have to indulge me in a little venting, but you’ll benefit from a critical review of how poorly designed brand experiences can cost sales and send customers running to your competition. Whether you’re selling consumer products at retail or offering B2B services – or anything in between – you can learn from the mistakes of these brands.

Our story begins with my quest for Christmas gifts. First on my list, a Nook, Barnes & Noble’s sleek new entry into the eBook reader category….

via nocturnaldesign.com

Quick eBook Readers Christmas Roundup (geardiary.com)
Kindle is the most gifted item ever says Amazon (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
Kindle is Most Gifted Amazon Item, Ever (dvorak.org)
e-Book Echo: More Kindle Books than Print Versions; Nook and Sony Reader Downloads Overloaded (jkontherun.com)
Nook fails to communicate, download purchased ebooks (Vladislav Savov/Engadget) (techmeme.com)

Domino’s Steps Toward the Truth

Mike Troiano — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:31:14 +0000

When users are empowered to drown out your marketing messages, the nature of marketing changes. It needs to become “Marketing,” with a capital “M,” and bring more to the table than a tagline. As I said in my last post, where once you could focus on driving the product reality by shaping market perception, now you must also gather market perception to shape the product reality.

As if on cue, I came across a brand embracing this ethos in a very visible way.

If you want to understand why Holland-Mark is so committed to having a real impact on what our clients sell, and not just how they sell it, look no further than the changes underway at Domino’s Pizza…

Good for you, Domino’s.

So have you tried the new ‘za? What’s your take?

Domino’s Embraces Negative Thinking! (thepowerofnegativeblogging.com)
Domino’s Pizza Responds To Snooki’s ‘F— You’ (huffingtonpost.com)
How Restaurants used Social Media in 2009 (restaurantsocialmedia.blogspot.com)
Domino’s Pizza drops, despite 3Q profit surprise on cost-cutting (ceoworld.biz)
Social Complaints: How you can help yourself while helping us (jburg.typepad.com)

Holland-Mark 2K10: Capital “M” Marketing in the Imperative Economy

Mike Troiano — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:20:43 +0000

Turns out we had a pretty good 2009 here in the ‘Mark, and closed the year stronger than any of us expected. We’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on this momentum, and on what seems to be working for clients and resonating with prospects. A strategy has come into focus around these ideas, and it’s going to have a big impact on our direction going forward.

So what can you expect from us in 2010?

Well, while we’re still going to call ourselves an “agency,” it’s just so folks have a box to put us in. The truth is we’re becoming something very different than that.

Now… I know you hear that from every advertising agency these days. Next time you do, ask whether they’ve actually turned down opportunities to create advertising for paying clients. We have, and I must say it’s been pretty liberating.

We’ve done this not because we think advertising is dead, although that makes better copy than the truth. We’ve done it because we think advertising is the wrong place to start.

The Imperative Economy

We start with an observation. It is that people — in both their business and personal lives — are only spending money on what they consider imperative. Think about how your own behavior has changed over the course of The Gateway Recession. When was the last time you plunked down the Platinum card on something that was just interesting, or even something with just the potential to influence your life? I bet it’s been a while. We buy what we need now, and it’s the same for the spending decisions we make on the job in the “B2B” marketplace.

Becoming imperative has become imperative. And doing so isn’t about “small-m” marketing, meaning, primarily, outbound marketing communications. Good advertising can make a product more interesting, no doubt. But it cannot make it imperative. “Consumers” — as we used to call them — decide what is imperative, and they communicate with each other at a volume and frequency that drowns out all but a very few deep-pocketed commercial entities.

Reality Is Perception

The implication of this is significant: Where once you could focus on driving the product reality by shaping market perception, now you must also gather market perception to shape the product reality.

What I’m saying is what we all know… that Marketing needs to step up, put the crayons down for a bit, and take a seat at the grown-up table. Getting the topline moving in the Imperative Economy will take more than advertising. It will take “big-M” Marketing, meaning a willingness to tackle the substantive issues related to:

the relevance of your offering,
the clarity of your message,
the consistency of your communication, and
your ability to drive engagement among a group of brand advocates large enough to support your business.

Holland-Mark’s Role

We think our job is to help clients establish that cycle… to “corrupt” their vision with the external reality. In a nutshell, Holland-Mark helps businesses connect with, respond to, and benefit from the truth about their customers, products, and brand relationships.

If you come across someone who needs that — and who recognizes the need to change more than just their tagline to achieve it — please drop us a line. In the meantime, we’d love to hear what you think about our conclusions, our approach, and our prospects.

Look for more details soon right here. Be sure and subscribe to our blog if you’re interested.

How clothing brand transition from wholesale to (recycleemail.com)
1 reviews of Which Is More Effective For Advertising, A Vision Map Video Or Vision Board (rateitall.com)
The Near Future Agency (socialhallucinations.com)
What You Need to Know about Business in 2010 (wordsforhirellc.com)
The future of the ad agency (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
Marketers more likely to recommend their PR agencies than ad and media agencies (mumbrella.com.au)

McDonald’s Social Media Strategy

Mike Troiano — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:09:00 +0000

The inside scoop on how one of the world’s great brands thinks about social media.

Damn smart, if you ask me …

BDI 11/12 The Social Consumer – McDonald’s Presentation

View more documents from Business Development Institute.

4 Rules for Creating an effective B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy (socialwebschool.com)
10 Tips to Integrating Social Media with Marketing (kylelacy.com)
McDonald’s Social Media Marketing Strategy (viralblog.com)
Southern Social Media 11-03-09 (smbconsultinginc.com)
Atlanta Women In Social Media Marketing_3 (marketing.blogtanker.com)
Stop Wasting Your Time With Social Media (ducttapemarketing.com)

Holland-Mark » Brand

Startup Positioning Talk

Businesses are people too.

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Positioning As Startup Hypothesis

The Facebook Minimum Marketing Protocol

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The Importance of Brand Clarity

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The Shelf Life of Relevancy

The Other Side of the Empowered Consumer Sword

Maximize The Benefit

Minimize the bullshit.

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Domino’s Steps Toward the Truth

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Holland-Mark 2K10: Capital “M” Marketing in the Imperative Economy

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