David Young | Branding Blog - Marketing Advice and Advertising Strategy for Local Business Owners

Finish Lines or Milestones?

[Craig Arthur does a great job of taking Roy's best writing and making it accessible to more than his clients and partners. If you're not subscribed to his blog, you're missing out. -Dave]

From the Wizard Tower Chronicles by Roy H. Williams

A bank once informed their advertising consultant they had written a mission statement, developed a five year plan, and agreed upon a goal that would be the focus of all their concerted action. The directors of the bank had decided their goal would be 100% Customer Retention. A worthy goal, right?

The bank told their ad consultant they were willing to do “whatever it takes” to be certain they never lost a customer to another bank. The consultant was told his job would be to determine how to best accomplish this goal. After several weeks of gruelling research, the consultant addressed the bank’s board of directors. He said he could guarantee the bank 100% Customer Retention if once a year, they would give every customer of the bank a new convertible.

At Wizard of Ads, we ask all our clients to determine their North Star, (their destination), Uncover who they really are and develop business plans, because without them, you’re simply “flying blind.” How can you tell the public who you are when you, yourself don’t know? The bank’s mistake wasn’t in developing a mission statement or a five year plan, it was their selection of an unrealistic goal. The goal of “100% Customer Retention” sounds great, but is it really a goal, or is it just brave talk? Sure, the goal can be accomplished, but is it worth what will be required?

A goal is like the finish line of a race. Once you reach it, the race is over. I prefer to think of business as a race without a finish line, but with dozens of milestones along the way. Milestones let you know you are still on the right course, and they help you mark your progress. Milestones give you cause for celebration and encouragement at regular intervals along the way.

Take some time to consider the course ahead, and identify the milestones you will celebrate when you reach them! Milestones shouldn’t only be related to increase sales volume. A milestone might be a move into a new location, recognition by a trade association, or an invitation into a prestigious group. A number of years ago, a client told me he was looking forward to the day he could start dictating to the bank the terms of doing business with him. His favourite fantasy was of the meeting where he would tell the bank what they were going to have to do to keep his business. (We celebrated this milestone with him in early 1994.) I know a sculptor who wants to have one of his monuments become such a landmark the city would feature it on the cover of the phone book.

What are the milestones which will be meaningful to you?

© 2004 Wizard Academy® Press

Making Ads Work: Finish Lines or Milestones? Craig has a pdf version available here.

Ageless Marketing: The Art of Conditional Positioning

David Wolfe finished up a series called The Art of Conditional Positioning today. I really enjoyed the series and I think that Steve Rae's recent posts about "Customer Experience Equity" really address the same basic issue with some terrific anecdotal evidence as well. Great reading all around.

Here's an excerpt from Steve's Post:

The service we have received at the Holiday Inn has not been good enough to build enough equity. They have been missing the boat by being just average. Up until now, that was okay because we hadn’t had a poor experience. But once a bad experience happens, you need to have built up some equity with the customer to assist you in keeping them coming back.

So, if the service you’re providing is only average, please consider what it will take in your business category to do something better and build Customer Experience Equity.

WonderBranding: Marketing to Women: My Kingdom for a Brain

I can't think of one pithy comment or stab or observation today.

So, I'm sending you over to Wonderbranding, where Michele has a great post on the use of fMRI imaging.
Read it. Learn. If you own a business, hire Michele today. Seriously.

WonderBranding: Marketing to Women: My Kingdom for a Brain

Ageless Marketing: The Case Against Perfection

More good stuff (this time with a zesty citrus aroma) from Ageless Marketing.

Oranges are right-handed. The fragrance of an orange comes from limonene, the same chemical that gives lemons their distinctive odor. However the molecular structure of an orange’s limonene is the mirror image of "left-handed" limonene in lemons. All of nature, from spinning electrons to spiraling galaxies, seems organized by left- and right-handed preferences. Biasing entities toward the right or left is Nature's way of avoiding symmetry, indeed, of avoiding perfection. Natural diamonds are more scintillating than human-made diamonds because the latter are structurally perfect.

Ageless Marketing: The Case Against Perfection

HispanicTrending: Changes in Rhythm for Florida

I love the way my friend Juan Guillermo writes from his big Guatemalan heart. If you want to understand the Hispanic Market in the U.S., a good first step is to understand JG, by reading his blog.

[Sidenote advice for dealing with your Hispanic Friends: Stay away from them when you have a bad sunburn on your back. Unlike your stiff white buddies who are happy with an arms-lenth handshake, your Hispanic Friends want to hug you and pat your back like JG did to me at least three times last week in Austin.]

I have seen it first hand: 1st generation Latinos going back to their home countries after a couple of years of living in the United States; the obvious difference is their accent: it definitely differs from the one they had prior leaving, it has a little bit of Mexican/Cuban/Puerto Rican, depending on where they moved to, along with a mixture of couple other Latin American accents intertwined with English. Then comes the words they use… i.e. they begin to refer to a “picop” (pickup truck) as “troca”… They don’t feel it, but they have “drank the Kool-Aid” sort of speak, of the U.S. Hispanic/Latino Community.

It was interesting on a personal level, but it was not until I had spent some time living in the U.S., that I realized that never before had I been so proud of my Latin American heritage, as now that I had been away from what I’d called home all my life. Before there were Mexicans, Argentineans, Cubans and Peruvians; now I only see Latinos/Hispanics; even given the differences among us, there is still a vast common ground that holds us together.

HispanicTrending: Changes in Rhythm for Florida

How Websites Learn | Acts of Volition

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this link to a blog post about the parallels of architecture and web design. It's a helluva good read, so I'm not going to dissect it for you. Read it yourself. If you care about brands, like I do, you'll see some great advice for building them. Just keep your brand in mind as you read some fascinating advice about buildings, web sites and beetles in giant oak beams. Enjoy.

A look at how Stuart Brand’s classic work of social and architectural criticism, How Buildings Learn, applies to web design and development.
How Websites Learn | Acts of Volition

From Sam Decker: The Imitation Age

Sam Decker starts out with some quotes from the latest Harvard Business Review, but the golden nuggets of wisdom are all his own...

Here are three principles where I believe imitation is good…

Good imitation is looking for parallels. Parallelism is when you take a principle from elsewhere and apply it to a different situation, perhaps differently. Perhaps it can be called ‘inspired imitation’. Ex: Henry Ford applying the division of labor from slaughter houses to the car manufacturing. Roy H. Williams calls it Business Topology. Jay Abraham calls it something else.

Good imitation is when being unique negatively impacts your customer. For example, there’s no need to get clever with standard navigation nomenclature (i.e. ‘Home’, ‘About Us’, etc.), checkout forms, etc. Copy the online leaders where the majority of shoppers have learned from.

Good imitation is invisible to the customer but adds value to your proposition. For example, I think there are best practices in supply chain and manufacturing. Dell is recognized for this. That simply leads to lower costs for customers. What company would not want to lower costs so they could invest margin in other ways to differentiate, or pass savings along to the customer? Or investing in standards that save money and widen applicability – such as programming in .NET or JAVA.

Decker Marketing: The Imitation Age

The HooK: THE BRAZEN CAREERIST- Branding U: Find your wider base

Great advice from Penelope Trunk. This story reads like a letter from dad.

During the roaring '90s, you could jump from job to job without help from anyone else. Now, you need staying power since you're going to be at the company a while. The easiest way to stay a while is to make sure you feel connected to the people you work with.

So make some friends. And even when you can't be friends, be nice. Work late on your boss's stupid pet project without complaining. Give a sympathetic ear to an annoying co-worker. Mentor someone who you think is hopeless. Respect the fact that each person in this world has something to offer; you just never know when it will reveal itself.

The HooK: THE BRAZEN CAREERIST- Branding U: Find your wider base

Ageless Marketing: The Criticality of Brand Personality

I came across Ageless Marketing this weekend and immediately subscribed to the RSS feed. I think we could all learn something by sitting at David Wolfe's feet and listening very carefully.

Drawing on extensive quantitative analysis, Mark and Pearson illuminate the qualitative aspects of brand personalities. They infer that brands fall within 12 archetypal personalities, ranging from Pepsi’s and Harley-Davidson’s Rebel archetype to Hallmark’s and Victoria’s Secret’ Lover archetype.

Consumers evaluate brands through human personality traits, whether you’ve imputed traits to the brand or they’ve done so because you haven’t. Of course, this is largely an unconscious evaluation.

He goes on...

A Duke University study found that brands, somewhat unique among proper nouns, are processed primarily in the emotional right brain. That and other research indicate that brand loyalty depends on emotional arousal. As with humans, we will reject brands that lack attractive and consistent personality characteristics.

Ageless Marketing: The Criticality of Brand Personality

Learning Opportunity: Roy H. Williams will be in Australia in July. Find out how you can spend a day with him learning about brands and advertising.

Advertising Reality Show

I need an agent. If I can't play the part of Guy Swift, maybe I can land a spot in this '70s based reality show. I have a killer fake British accent. I've played Henry Higgins in two different productions. Any agents out there?

For two weeks, the ad execs will live and work without any trappings of 21st century technology. The '1970s Office' will see the ad execs taken back to a time when there were no computers, mobile phones, internet or even motorcycle couriers -- things today's everyday creative takes for granted.

Brand Republic