My Nominations for "The Five Deadly Brand Disconnect Sins" of Oscars Acceptance Speeches

When a brand positions itself one way and then acts another we call it a “brand disconnect.” It’s an integrity failure, meaning, a failure to integrate one’s professed values into one’s actions.

It’s more true than ever that we are each our own personal brands, and that needs to be kept in mind at all times, but even more so when we’re figuratively or literally on-stage in front of our key audiences. In the show business industry where it’s hard to get jobs even when you are one of the best, it’s interesting to watch how some who make – or seek to make – their living in the communication arts fail to show their craft in front of their biggest audience of potential fans and employers. I’m not at all suggesting that people hide their emotions. I am suggesting that they channel them into consumable, authentic, skilled communications when it counts. 

So while it’s all still fresh in our minds, here are my nominations for the “5 Deadly Sins of Oscar Acceptance Speeches”.

1. The Slow Walk: Hear your name in a ceremony known for running too long, and fail to run up to the podium. Some of these people get up from their chairs with such a look of dazed astonishment that their name has been called it's as if they're surprised that the announcer knows they're in the room. Their initial launch from their chair looks like cheap imitations of slowmo scenes from “Chariots of Fire.” Don't be a dufus. Hear your name and get your ass to the podium as quickly as possible.

2. The Slow Talk: Yes, you've been given an award many dream of and few ever realize, but you haven't cured cancer. Drop the over serious slow talk and give us an upbeat celebratory message that sounds like a celebration so we can be happy with you. See Daniel Day Lewis’s speech for Best Actor, “Lincoln,” to get a good idea of the right balance.

3. Confused Talk: Unless you're accepting with someone else and they've eaten up all your time and thrown you off your game, don't get up there and talk so incoherently that everyone starts to wonder how it is that you even got a job in the story telling profession let alone an award for doing it. Everyone in the business has to explain his or her ideas to someone else. Do that here. Otherwise the appointments your agent wants to get for you this week based on this good news are going to be a lot harder to secure.

4. The "I'm Surprised " Talk: Again, sort of like the Slow Walk perps, you knew it was a 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 possibility that your name was going to be called, how freaking surprised can you be? Sure half the free world has been asking themselves since the day the nominations came out how your name got on the list, but as uncomfortable as that might be for you (well it is the industry based on faked sincerity, isn’t it) it means you must have known it was there. If all the media carping didn't telegraph it to you, the luncheon you were invited to for all the nominees should have been a dead give away. Leave the "this is my 'I'm surprised'" audition piece at home.

5. The "I Can't Remember Who to Thank" Talk: Really? You've lived with most of these people in some remote location for three months and the rest of the people you ought to mention were somehow responsible for you having the gig, and just a year or two later you've forgotten who they are?

Here's an idea: Go to the Super Bowl of the Communication Arts with a script memorized, and then tuck it in your pocket, just in case. You get the idea of a script: it's lines written when the writer has the time and privacy to think what ought be said. Then these carefully crafted text guides are memorized so the intended words are actually the ones spoken at Go Time. Hollywood has been using this little device since the advent of talkies. You're no Charlie Chaplin. Act like you're part of the communication profession and communicate… so you don’t commit a brand disconnect.

Experience Marketing is Social Media of the Deepest Reward

We know about the power of online social media to connect people of mutual interests and passions with each other to exchange ideas, innovate, and celebrate... creating a type of consumer value that, when it's done well, builds communities, brings people closer to brands, and drives sales. Got it. Love it. Use it.

Experience marketing, meaning all early types of face to face engagement from conferences and trade shows to  entertainment and sports marketing, proved the core value of doing this ages before the online version of social was a gleam in anyone's eye. Experience marketing is the original social media, and continues to provide power, especially in the contemporary form which retains the types of the past just mentioned but adds to it types such as Pop Up, user-generated, and virtual/in-person hybrid, to name a few.

Experience marketing then, since by definition a form of communication, is a form of media. Experience is media. But it's a specific type of media. It's media that drives participation and delivers rewards in the deepest ways possible. The act of consuming experience marketing is actually participation. It's participation in the brand. It is satisfying to consumers in that the participants get the opportunity to freely try on aspects of brands emotionally and psychologically. They get to imaginarily experience how their lives can be improved by the brand if it is new to their lives as in the case of demand generation marketing, or how it can be further improved by going deeper with the brand if the participant is already in the fold as in the case of marketing designed for retention and loyalty deepening.

When done really well, experience marketing persuades consumers by offering an experience that brings tantalizingly close a vision of a person's changed self-estimate. As their participation in the brand helps them experience a vision of their improved lives, the brand becomes a part of consumers selves they don't want to live without. When I choose to participate in a brand (its offerings, its community, its values) all at once I'm adding value to my life, but also to my sense of self because the way I measure myself is in many ways the result of how I measure the choices I make and their consequences. Which means it alters my self-esteem, good or bad.

If the brand choice in the aspirational stage seems to be a good one and turns out to be so in reality, it enhances my self-esteem. In some way, either small or large, it makes me a bigger hero in my own story, and we're reluctant to let go of things so fundamentally (psychically) rewarding. 30 second commercials have often attempted to cause this effect but the limitations of time and distance are hard to transcend. Experience marketing, with it's face-to-face, often in-person, multi-sensory, user-directed, and time extended form is the one that puts at the marketer's disposal all the conditions and elements necessary to make this vision of self-enhancement happen most powerfully. Experience marketing is social media of the deepest reward.

The Most Important “i’s Steve Jobs Left Behind

Much has and will be written about what Steve Jobs left us generally and through his business record-shattering  Apple products, especially the "i" line of devices that have changed the way we use technology to manage and enhance our lives. Impressive as the iPod, iTouch, iPhone and iPad suite is, there are five even more powerful “i’s he left us to which all marketers ought to pay attention. 

A lot of product and offering development and brand marketing work is focused on developing customer, marketplace and brand insights, and from that, formulating engaging concepts (products and campaigns) that will gain attention and move people to action. With so much focus on the day-to-day doing of all of that, it’s easy to sometimes lose sight of what it all has to add up to: manufacturing time the consumer spends in positive experience with the brand.

Yes, the currency of effective brand engagement is time; the thing that is most precious to the consumer, is available in finite quantities, and in the information overloaded, high pressure 2010’s, is the hardest to win… at least in a positive context.

Jobs had this down and it can be codified into three “i’s. Apple products and much of Apple’s marketing have embodied these characteristics consistently:


Irresistibility: In order to guarantee the ability to break through the clutter most powerfully and achieve dominate shares of market – especially but not exclusively in high involvement categories -- there has to be something about the product and marketing that is truly irresistible. Without irresistibility, you’re going nowhere. For different segments, what drives that irresistibility will be different. The combination of Apple brand values built into nearly every one of their products has indeed created a high degree of irresistibility in their category: unprecedented capability-extending convenience for every day tasks, elegant design, intuitive operability, high quality, etc. Who wouldn’t want to have a question answering personal assistant built right into a device you can hold in your hand? The advertising for the iPhone has been irresistible too as it focused on the capabilities and personal enjoyment to be gained from them. Irresistibility results in "I want it."


Irreplaceability: This is no small task in a world abundant with options. Still, driving ourselves to create moments of engagement that can’t be easily obtained by any other means provides the differentiation brands so ardently seek. This is the argument for marketers to be central figures in the innovation efforts of companies, not just the leaders of communications. CMO's keeping an eye on how the product, the packaging, the purchasing and on-going usage experience is part of brand management can use their customer centric orientation to help spur development of authentically unique offerings. That then makes the comms task a whole lot easier because then it is about emphasizing truths rather than spinning desirability out of "me to" sameness. (Anyone remember "Zune"?) That said, dimensionalizing the brand values in the marketing is just as important as influence on product development. I give an example below but for now, let's recognize that irreplaceability results in "I want your version of the product and no other substitute will satisfy as powerfully."


Indelibility: Much has been written about ideas that stick and the first two "i's" are critical qualities in the product/service development effort. The requirement is doing that consistently in every single product and aspect of the purchase/use experience. When it comes to the communication of this -- the part of the exercise traditionally thought of as "the marketing" -- the challenge is reflecting the irresistibility and irreplaceability of the brand through a marketing experience that is also unique in itself while putting the brand values into high relief. When this happens, the experience of that outsized satisfaction implants deeply in the psyche of the consumer. It results in the brand equity that allows one to cash in on the efforts behind Irresistibility and irreplaceability at the moment of consumer choice rather than lose out to a competitor over brand confusion.

Example of all three “i’s rolled into one experience? The combination of brand experience communicated in the ad campaign contrasting the Microsoft based technology world vs. the Apple one -- one world in which things never work simply enough compared with a world in which things work intuitively -- supported by the Apple products themselves, the ability to try them in the store easily and with the aid of knowledgeable brand ambassadors pre-purchase,  and the Genius Bar at the stores to take care of us post-purchase. Together, we get an irresistible, irreplaceable, and indelible brand experience. Why? It's irresistible through its answering of a strong "want" with ease. It's irreplaceable until a competitor finds a way to surpass it. And it's indelible due to the powerful integration of brand values built into the product, the service and the advertising. This integration gives the brand its fourth "i", Integrity.

Employing the first three “i’s isn’t easy, especially doing it consistently to the point of achieving the fourth one. It requires an unrelenting pursuit of high standards and the courage to hold out for the achievement of them. That means Job’s actually left us a fifth “i” to consider: “Insistence.”

Meryl Streep’s Sage Advice for Marketers Wanting to Make an Impact in 2012

The new year has started. Here we go; another round of objectives, re-brandings, launches, re-launches, campaigns, and… for agency siders… impossibly deadlined pitches. These will make up our day-to-day while we all also undergo the perennial restructurings, realignments, and reassignments, not to mention the odd marketplace disruption or two.

A year from now, if among the more routine accomplishments of boxes checked, work delivered, and results achieved, we want to feel we’ve made a real difference, whether in how we've led our teams, or in the work itself -- from the more modest assignments to the ones potentially truly transformational -- we might look at the words of Meryl Streep. She's someone who clearly knows a thing or two about excellence, impact, and transcendent work.

In her December 16^th Entertainment Weekly perspective on actress Viola Davis, Streep writes: 

“Her heart and her skill are married… she’s a pure actor… (she has) a quality that brings more light around the characters than lights regular human beings, an aura almost… It’s like they broke into the electrics truck and brought their own key light, only lit from the inside. Where does it come from? Nothing phony, nothing unfelt, unearned… She works hard at her craft… Her humanity marches out in front of her, her kindness, her fierceness, her unwillingness to compromise, her stubbornness makes me love her too. But none of this explains the special empathy she sets up between us and the women she brings us close to, so close we breathe with them. You don’t watch Viola, you live it with her.”

One could likely write volumes drawing parallels between the observations Streep makes about Viola’s acting and the requirements for being a great marketing leader, a great marketer, and the characteristics of powerful marketing. The real magic though may be found in how we as individuals interpret these sign posts into our own contexts.

I’m thinking it's worthwhile to spend an hour or so exploring how Streep’s words can be transformed into guidance and goals for ourselves, our teams, our brand(s), and our work -- before we get too far into the new year -- and then committing to following through on those guiding thoughts for all of 2012.

The degree to which we do this could very well determine the amount of impact we make, and how we feel about it a year from now, when it’s time to assess the then just completed cycle and fortify ourselves for the next one. We're here a short time. Let's make some impact. In marketing we certainly have the opportunity. Good luck to all of us.

Happy New Year!

Spotify: The New Frictionless Experience Champion

I've written before that one of they keys to great experience driven brand engagement is the elimination of friction.

My brand new friction fave is Spotify. (Thanks Padmasree for the invite.) Half asleep this morning I downloaded the app from the invite link. I clicked it open. I chose "get started." I typed in my first artist's name, "Lori McKenna," so I could hear her original version of the stunning Keith Urban cover "Luxury of Knowing." Bam, there it was in an instant! (That's a top of the category user experience.)


Now I'm off and running. I'm headed out to the gym for a quick work out, but I'm going with the anticipation (get it?) that when I get back, I will be able to effortlessly create (sounds like "engagement" doesn't it?) my own "afternoon-out-on-the-deck-doing my-homework" playlist, all built from music I haven't had time to download from iTunes or... remember those days now... go out to my favorite local bricks and mortar music hang, Newbury Comics, and buy as CD's. While on the site, I will be exposed to whatever advertising is there, and I won't mind a bit because I will be getting more value than I'm asked to give. (Sound like a leverage principle?)

Check out Spotify with the idea of understanding how the frictionless engagement creates an irresistible user experience, and hold this up as a benchmark against which you measure the creation of all moments in your brand experience marketing work.

It's going to be a great afternoon of music.

Hail to Spotify. The new "Frictionless Experience" champion.

Let's see, I want some Urban, McKenna, Springsteen, Emmylou and Mark Knopfler...

Success in the 2000's? Try The Power Triad

As the world changes and marketing with it, everyone from CEO's and CMO's on the brand side, to business, creative and strategy execs on the agency side, are left scrambling to figure out what to do. 

One day you're creating what you think are killer marketing tactics that take 6 months to develop, the next day you wake up to find will.i.am has just lapped you through the TV commercial work he's wedged into his spare time between prepping for the Super Bowl, releasing a new album, touring, and producing tracks for several of the hottest acts in music. It feels like it's no longer enough to be just one person; to succeed you have to be several. That's the point. It's time to be your own best mash up: The Power Triad. Jealous of that certain musician who seems to be doing everything and better than almost everybody? It appears he's leveraging The Power Triad to the max. 

What "The Power Triad"? At base, this isn't a new idea, it's the hyphenate. In Hollywood, the writer-director-producer is almost cliché. In sports, while there's certainly a history of famous specialists like home run hitter Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio was lauded for his excellence in all the major playing skills and became known as "the Greatest Baseball Player Who Ever Lived". And good marketers have always been a combination of social scientist, creators and business people. This is so true that when Frans Johansson came out with his book, "The Medici Effect" a few years ago -- as good and valuable as it is -- why it was being touted as "breakthrough" was a mystery. As he freely admits right in the title, the idea of combining proficiencies from a variety of disciplines has been around since, well at least as far back as the Medici. Still, it's a worthwhile read. 

What's changed though is the absolute need to pursue the approach with unerringly well focused intent, and at every level, from how we approach job role success to single project results. A lot of Johansson's efforts are soundly focused on innovation. I think the application of the multidisciplinary principle is also valuable more broadly. 

I'm calling this hyper cross disciplinary approach "The Power Triad." The idea is that when planning your approach to succeeding, you break your task down into the three most important components. Then, for each of the three components you ask yourself, "what disciplines or professions do this kind of thing really well?". Next you place them into a triad action structure that helps you prioritize your focal points for the greatest results.

Here's an example we used at a recent event marketing conference session: 

If you're creating a virtual marketing experience intended to move people to some specific action, break that task down into its three most essential elements.  

1. Asking yourself who understands motivation best, you select the field of psychology as the first discipline required to tap in order to succeed. 

2. You identify that a virtual experience plays out on media screens, and select movies as a discipline that understands how to keep people engaged over extended periods of time while giving them new perspectives through on screen experiences, and that producers make this happen, on budget. 

3. Given the newness of virtual events, and the inherent political risks in driving that kind of change in an organization --especially in the context of a down economy in which every penny spent needs to yield results -- you identify that the event needs to be measured in a way that's beyond reproach. Since the metrics of the finance team are gospel in most organizations, you choose this as the third discipline in the triad, and the standard bearer of this function, the CFO, as the focal point. 

With your three disciplines chosen, you roll it all up into an articulated Power Triad by marrying one or more verbs with each discipline. In this example we would say that in order to produce a successful virtual event one needs to:

"Think like a psychologist, manage like a movie producer, and measure like a CFO."

Then you follow through by studying what top professionals in those three disciplines do in their work to succeed, and adapt those best practices to the specifics of your situation. In this way The Power Triad helps you focus on the three most powerful things you can do to optimize results. Try it. The more you do it, the faster you'll be able to develop more -- and more powerful -- Power Triads until it becomes your standard operating procedure. Use it for everything from isolated tasks to your approach to job role success. 

Do it now. Will.i.am is gaining on you. What's your Power Triad? 

Paul McCartney and Tim Sanders Are Still Right: Love Is the Killer (Marketing) App

Tim Sanders' insightful, best-selling book, "Love Is The Killer App" is written as helpful guidance for individuals looking to advance their own brand, careers and the companies for whom they work. First published in 2002, it’s even more relevant today and just as useful for organizational brands as it is for personal. 

Hopefully we’ve all already accepted that the marketing clutter is deafening and the challenge in cutting through it is enormous. Turning up the volume in pursuit of effective marketing can be a fool’s errand. There are other means much more effective; love chief among them.

Tim promotes three specific ways of expressing love in the work setting that drive results. For the details, you’ve got to read the book, but to simplify the idea, I can tell you that he promotes the concept that those who give love -- in the various forms appropriate to each situation -- often get it in return. If you want to connect with people, love can be the shortest distance between two points, even when we’re not talking about the romantic kind.

What does this mean for brands? If I may put my own spin on Sanders’ guidance and expand it, it doesn’t mean giving the product away for free. This isn’t a product sampling or “tryvertising” concept, although doing that in the right doses, in the right ways, and at the right times, can sometimes be an effective component of this approach. Rather though, this is all about giving away some kind of other value that’s helpful to the prospect and fits to the brand context. For instance, manufacturers of smart phones with video cameras might offer free online modules about taking, editing and posting videos optimized for the third screen. Want to make it even stronger? Provide a way of interacting while learning, perhaps by allowing the user to post their videos with questions that get expert responses.

Through this interactive love sharing, the prospect gets the sense that the brand cares about them, and the experience of mastery the brand provides fosters a sense of potential for self-accomplishment and maybe even a little self-esteem. It offers consumers a chance to engage with and get to know the brand in a non-obligatory, feel-good setting through which the brand builds credibility. If repeated often enough, a bond can be established. Once bonded people are more likely to purchase. This cuts through the clutter like no slogan or funny commercial ever could, because it goes deep and resides in the hearts and minds of the market.

The trick though for marketers is to remember that, just like romantic love, if this expression of caring is  too infrequent, the bond eventually dies. This means that marketing love has to be constantly worked in order to keep it fresh, or the customer falls prey to the seduction of other suitors.

Paul McCartney said it best when he wrote: “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” John Lennon said it was the best lyric Paul ever wrote. Tim Sanders gives us the valuable "how-to" details in his book. I can think of no better gift you can give yourself as a marketer on this Valentine’s Day than a copy of Tim’s “Love Is The Killer App.” Read it and as you do, ask yourself how its concepts can translate towards creating great brands and organizations, and you’ll see that love is in fact still the killer (marketing) app. Thanks Tim, and Paul.

Happy Valentine’s Day.