As an outside consultant in Digital Strategy, I believe that sometimes my role should be the Question Asker, not the final provider of answers.  And so, especially during the early stages of an engagement, I find myself asking the following questions:

1. Is the organization as ready to digitally transform itself as I think it is?
2. How can we accelerate the growth of the company by transforming the “how” of what they do and not just “what”?
3. By focusing on human beings and user experience, can I help reduce the uncertainty in the client’s business?
4. Do the people who work at the client company believe they know more than the CEO does?
5. Do they actually know more than CEO does?
6. What will help the client company grow faster:  more control or more value creation?
7. Should people who create value be governed by people who control it?
8. Is the client company C-suite too focused on control?
9. Are they obsessed with control?
10. How can I encourage giving more control to others in the organization, especially employees who create value?
11. What rules could the client company get rid of today that would increase their ability to create value?
12. Could we throw out the entire company rulebook?
13. Would my (hypothetical) children want to work in a company like this one?
14. Would the C-suite’s children want to work in their company?

Any suggestions for other questions?

A big problem with most marketers is that too much time is spent on familiar territory… rearranging the deck chairs rather than looking for new worlds to conquer.  When a new CMO is appointed, and his/her first six months are consumed with reviewing agency assignments, refining media mixes, and touting brand-perception levels and “likes” on Facebook, this executive is probably headed for trouble.  Making matters worse, marketers seem to be in a parallel universe when it comes to communicating with top management, not to mention the sales operation.

CEOs and sales have little patience for the soft and fuzzy yardsticks marketers use to measure their progress.  As an example, the new CEO of IBM (who came from the marketing department), Virgina Rometty, has built a career on pushing herself into unfamiliar territory.  “Growth and comfort do not co-exist,” Rometty told Bloomberg Business Week.  One reason Ms Rometty made it to the top at IBM is that she had broad enough strategic responsibilities to make things happen.  In 2009, she was appointed Senior Vice President of Marketing, Sales, & Strategy, and a big part of her job was to bring software and consulting services to emerging markets, where growth is a lot more robust.  “Whatever business you’re in, it’s going to commoditize over time, so you have to keep moving it to a higher value and change,” says Rometty.

The marketing function, strange as it seems, is oftentimes not as connected to the sales function as it should be for optimum results.  The metrics that marketing people use are not in sync with how salespeople measure themselves, and sometimes it seems marketers want to abdicate their brands’ destiny to forces beyond them.  Sales guys don’t understand talk like “empowering the consumer.”  Therefore, sales and marketing should sit under the same strategic corporate-messaging and consumer-facing umbrella so that both sides can communicate for a common goal.  By combining sales and strategy with marketing, companies can not only align all the revenue-producing components under one roof, but can create clear-cut goals that everyone understands and buys into.

excerpted from Rance Crain’s Opinion article in November 7, 2011 issue of Advertising Age

What does “communiting” mean?  whatever you think about the future of business…  whatever you think your brand means to the masses…  whatever your strategy is for marketing to youth…  one thing is certain…  we are in the midst of a major shift…

In some ways it’s like we’re back in the 1600s when everybody was racing to discover the new world…  google is the french…  twitter is the spaniards…  facebook is the english…  microsoft is the dutch…  freakin’ apple is the portuguese…  the ocean is the internet and computers and software are the ships…  and they are all sailing to find and conquer new land…

New times call for new thinking…  looking to the past is no way to secure a future…  look at the movies: there’s a new “planet of the apes,” a remake of “conan the barbarian…”  while on TV, there’s a new “charlie’s angels,” and a new “hawaii five-O…”  it’s as if we aren’t imagining anymore…  where have all the creative minds vanished to… or…  who stopped investing in the dreamers???

today is all about accessing the physical representation of collective consciousness.  before… collective consciousness was a concept…  now… it’s on your smartphone and it’s called twitter…  twitter is a physical representation of collective consciousness where you can tap into the consciousness of millions…  you don’t have to guess what’s on the minds of people today…  people are connected…  to stay relevant, you or your business or your brand need to be part of the connection…  you need to be part of the conversation…  or start conversations…  you need to invent, or amplify culture…

brands need to listen to community…  there is a whole new concept of brands and businesses that bring community together…  you don’t have to go about the traditional way of marketing and advertising…  today, you need to turn a moment into momentum and momentum into a movement…

i think we need to go from marketing to COMMUNITING…  we have marketed so much that we have killed communities…  we have marketed so much that we have harmed our customer…  we need to conduct business in a manner that enables and sustains communities…

COMMUNITING is about COMMUNICATION between people and companies that enables or sustains a COMMUNITY…  in the intersection of people and company’s in a conversation is where COMMERCE is found.  COMMUNITING will be the new standard.

Excerpted from October 17, 2011 issue of Advertising Age, Opinion column by guest author, Will.I.Am (Ad Age copy desk deferred to the author’s preferences on style and punctuation.  Over two years ago, Wendistry posted another piece of marketing brilliance from Will.I.Am:  ”The Continuous Marketing Campaign” and chooses to defer to his style as well.) 

“You can make a speech with wonderful facts, figures and data.  Ten minutes later, a person will have forgotten 99 percent.  But, tell a man a story, and twenty years later he can come back to you and recount every word you said.”  Guru Mahatma Maharesi “Mahesh” Goldberg

All great communicators tell stories.  Great salespeople, great teachers, great speech makers, and great leaders all routinely tap into this universal connective mechanism.  Ronald Reagan, nicknamed the Great Communicator, didn’t start an important policy speech with oratorical prose, facts, and figures.  He’d tell you a story about a little girl in a yellow dress, living in Communist Poland.  Within minutes, he had the crowd mesmerized.

The hypnotic power of story draws people into a world of emotion, color, and familiar experience of their own making, creating irresistible identifications.  And, the inherent associative structure of a well-crafted story makes it the most efficient way to package long strings of information for indelible input into the memory.  People not only love stories, they literally crave stories- like a basic mental foodstuff for proper mental nourishment.  Just look at the billions of dollars worth of stories that are consumed worldwide every day in the form of movies, television, magazines, books, and other entertainment.  It’s obviously more than a luxury.  It’s a need.

Every brand is like a story, too.  It’s the story of what you stand for, why you stand for it, how you got to the point where you stand for it better than anyone else, and where it’s going to lead you.  It can be explained with a beginning, a middle, and an end, starting with “There was this problem.  Then, a company decided to help people with this problem by creating a new and better solution.  The solution helped people no only in one big way, but lots of little ways as well.  Now, the world is a better, happier place.  Maybe we can help you.”

A brand story will be like the “executive summary” for your brand.  As it evolves over time, it should house the key selling points and messages gained from continuing consumer dialogue.  So, consider the brand story a living document.  Add to it, improve it, and constantly check it for freshness as your company continues on its path.

excerpted from Why Johnny Can’t Brand, Bill Schley & Carl Nichols, Jr. 

Despite the glamorous, sexy, and dramatic adventures of TV’s “Mad Men,” most marketers in the ’50s and ’60s didn’t have the wildly imaginative, four-scotch meetings that resulted in revolutionary creative.  Marketing then was still a young practice, and most advertising of the day was simply “explaining” the features of a particular product, and then “pushing” the viewer/reader/listener to buy.

Today, most marketing strategies used then would probably feel a little stilted, formal, and alien to us with the “sell-as-much-as-we-can” philosophy and a complete disregard for establishing any kind of relationships for the long term.  In Don Draper’s work on the TV show, we see start to see a rise in the idea that advertising should be less about arguing the virtues of a product and more about having some sort of emotional connection to it.  For the ’60s, that really was a revolutionary idea.

We all know that marketing has been undergoing fundamental changes over the last few years.  The explosive growth of digital — and specifically the social and mobile trends within it — has made relationship building and emotional connections the primary driver of marketing strategy.  To achieve true “the brand is a part of our lives” integration, the consumer must trust your brand and feel an emotional connection to it.  People become emotionally connected to a brand for a number of reasons:

• The brand stands for something important to them.

• The brand is intense and vibrant. It connects with people on multiple levels across several senses.

• The brand is unique.

• The brand is admirable.

• The brand consistently interacts with them. It never disappoints them.

• The brand makes them feel good.

So instead, we’re becoming the storytellers we always wanted to be and most marketers probably doesn’t have a marketing degree.  If you do, then you’re the exception, not the rule.  In fact, according to some studies, 10 percent of the profession are English majors that — well — didn’t make it with that novel or screenplay in our desk.  The shift of marketing into developing “stories” is a big one — and it’s one many of us wanted to explore in our careers to introduce true relevance of message and connection to consumers.

Yet, in reality, we’re making it up as we go.  The bad news for marketers is there’s no map, template, or formula for success.  The good news? There’s no map, template, or formula for success.  As marketers today, we get to “MacGyver stuff together” in all new, innovative ways to achieve marketing success.

Today, the marketing role within the organization has expanded.  In many cases, not only are we working on customer relationships, we’re responsible for building evangelists, for building corporate communications, for feeding back information into product development, and for making sure that our CEO doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth.  In many ways, content and communication is one of the single most important determinants of our company’s success.  We can have a great product or a crappy product, but if we don’t have a good story to tell, tell it well, and build relationships with our consumers, we will fail.

I’ve seen it more times that I can count.  Whether for a web site or a mobile app or a Facebook fan page, the Franken-brand:  that thing that happens when strategists, creatives, designers and developers present 3 to 4 options to the client, and the clients says, “Wow!  These look great!!  How about we take (this) from this idea, (that) from option 2, and (the other) from option 4.  If we combine it that way, I know we’ll have a solution that our CEO will love.“  Ugh.

Branding and positioning require decisive commitment to a single path, and that means risk.  The positioning paradox is that the power of your message is directly proportional to how simple you can make it and how few words and images you can use to say it.

Amateurs are petrified not to list every possible feature and benefit in every communication, afraid they’ll leave something on the table and miss some fraction of the market.  But by saying everything, they heave themselves upon the clutter-pile and end up saying nothing- too afraid to do the one thing that they must do: choose

Professionals know branding is about relentless focus on the most singular message, always.  They narrow the story all the way down to the one big idea and its key associations to create a trim, lean, idea-centered brand.  It takes guts. The courage to know that, whether the audience loves you or hates you, at least they’re passionate about you.  In other words, be like this:

Brand equity is a set of assets, and liabilities, linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to, or subtracts from, the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers.  Sources of brand equity are:

• brand recall
• brand recognition
• types of brand associations
• favorability of those associations
• strength of those associations
• uniqueness of those associations

which leads to:

• brand image
• brand awareness

and, ultimately:

• brand knowledge

Why measure brand equity?  First, to understand the drivers of brand value in order to support strategic decision-making.  If you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to decide how to get there.  Second, to evaluate efficacy of brand value building programs, ROMI (return on marketing investment).  If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

Understanding customers’ decision drivers gives companies insights about how to influence customer choices.  Decision drivers may include customer values, self-image and personal goals.  So, what are the key measures?

The “usual” approaches and metrics are:

• changes in brand awareness
• changes in market share
• changes in consumer attitude toward the brand
• changes in purchase intent
• return on objective
• lifetime customer value
• changes in financial value of brand equity

So, what’s wrong with these metrics?  First, we need to begin with a clear definition of the construct we want to measure.  Definitions of ROMI include:

• incremental sales revenue generated by marketing activities
• changes in brand awareness
• total sales revenues generated by marketing activities
• changes in purchase intention
• changes in attitudes toward the brand
• changes in market share
• number of leads generated
• ratio of advertising costs to sales revenue
• cost per lead generated
• reach and frequency achieved
• cost per sale generated
• changes in the financial value of brand equity
• increase in customer lifetime value

Brand equity can be defined as loyal behavior plus psychological preference.  Positive equity results in customer behavior that benefits the brand through purchase frequency, brand loyalty, price insensitivity and willingness to recommend.

The right approach to measuring brand equity is to link customer perceptions and market performance to impact on financial value to assess ROMI.  Activity and program metrics influence customer perceptions and behavior (brand awareness, customer retention) which drives market performance (sales, market share, profitability) and results in a reportable financial value (stock price, P/E ratio, market capitalization).

Strong brands never happen by accident.  Yet, many firms say they don’t have a long-term brand strategy in place.  Often, what’s missing is a shared set of tools for creating and implementing an effective brand strategy.  Brand strategy has become even more complex in the era of social media as brands become more humanized, and expected to interact directly with consumers.

A brand strategy is simply a plan for developing a comprehensive and cohesive brand.  It provides the means for systematically creating market differentiation and consumer appeal by empowering better brand decisions across the organization.  An effective brand strategy influences the total operation of a business to ensure consistent brand experiences for the customer.  Brand strategy provides the foundation for sustainable differentiation.  It allows the organization to view brand as a strategic asset to be managed and enhanced, not just an outcome of marketing.

Building brand equity requires thinking of the different ways a brand will connect with consumers and add meaning.  A brand strategy supports the overall corporate mission and marketing objectives by building strong customer relationships that deliver revenue and profits to the company over time.

And yet, the marketing context is changing.  Media consumption is become more mobile and ubiquitous.  Brands must adapt to an evolving media landscape where lines between paid, earned and owned media are blurring.

Brands are evolving from corporate assets to be managed for return to shared platforms to be co-created for mutual benefit.  Key forces are impacting these shifting strategies:

1.  Empowered Consumers:  Self-aware consumers are nimble, adaptable, frugal and looking for “better,” not just “more.”  Motivated by “green” and altruism as well as core benefits, consumers are managing their personal reputation and brand image by engaging with companies, not just products, through a user experience that is a journey… not a purchase.

2.  Interactive & Mobile Media:  Two-way media encourages individual conversations through the new ways to interact with customers and prospects in real time.  Context and location are the new relevance.  Time shifts as personalization is expected, and competition is greater than ever.  Consumers trust peer-to-peer communication more than paid advertising.

3.  Caring, Sharing Brands:  It takes more to earn loyalty than just better value.  Word-of-mouth endorsements are critical, and sentiment (liking) places an important influence on brand perceptions and purchase.  Brands are now broad platforms for ideas, products and services, plus they are seen as members of larger society, good citizens and community members.  Consumers are looking to align with brands that share the same values.

A brand is a customer’s understanding about a product, service or company.  It’s not what you say it is, but what THEY say it is.

Throughout his tenure as Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs would often send personal messages directly to his customers.  Whether he was expressing admiration towards a nine-year-old girl who used her iPad to combat a vision disorder or defending himself against a harsh critic, the message was always honest, clear, and humorously succinct.  To a 300-word diatribe on a new app that measures mobile radiation levels, he responded: ‘No interest.’  This is and of itself is a brand statement.

Contradictions like these explain his allure.  He works tirelessly to please his customers but has no patience for them.  He led a company many would kill to work for, but operated it like an autocratic micro-manager.  He changed the way human beings interact with technology but (allegedly) can’t program.  He made no corporate contributions to charity but ran what was, for a few moments, the most valuable company on Earth.

Lesson 1 – “Market research be damned, full speed ahead.”  How many times have clients asked a brand consultant to produce complex and costly research “because our management team is numbers oriented”? I’m positive Steve Jobs will not be remembered for his reaction to “the top two boxes” in a consumer survey. As the Wall Street Journal reminds us, Jobs built products “that hundreds of millions didn’t know they wanted until Apple created them.” His vision and instincts, not his research prowess, drove his success.

The old line from Henry Ford springs to mind: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Lesson 2 – “Collaboration be damned. Here’s how we’ll proceed.”  We know that Steve built a talented team at Apple and did not personally design and assemble every iPad.  But on good authority, we know that the only car in the Apple parking lot that was maliciously keyed was Jobs’ – so unloved was he by colleagues he overrode and diminished.  Respect for others’ opinions is the hallmark of some leaders. Not for Jobs.

 Lesson 3 – “Marketing jargon be damned. Speak of machines and people.”  I doubt you’ll ever be quoting Steve Jobs on how to “build brand equity” and or to “turn employees into brand ambassadors.”  He commanded the stage with authoritative conviction about what people want and how astonishing his products could be.  Skipping the marketing drivel that populates slide shows and annual reports, Jobs’ language has been about the wonderful machines he envisions and the joy they create.  He is first a user advocate.

Lesson 4 – “Design matters – a lot – okay, more than anything.”  How important is design to the creation and delivery of any brand experience? Just compare the look, feel, touch, texture, color and sound of Apple products to those of competitors. ‘Nuff said.

Lesson 5 – “Compromise be damned. Never give up.”  Creating and developing brands can be tedious. In a big organization, getting ideas accepted requires consensus, often achieved via a painstaking process that can lead to improvements but just as often to dilution of excellence.

I don’t know what Jobs’ departure will mean for Apple, yet I suspect that enough of his vision has permeated its walls to ensure continued success for a very long time.  However, when Steve Jobs moves off-campus, Apple will have lost something far more important than a ‘visionary leader and CEO’ – it will have lost its biggest fan.  And, if there is one thing to learn from his success, it is that we cannot afford to be doing anything but that which we love.  Whether we are brand-builders or school-teachers, we must strive for congruence in who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

… is change.  And, as I embark on a brand new career as head of Marketing and Social Media at Bottle Rocket Apps, I am completely THRILLED about where my personal brand is going.

Moving forward, Wendistry is evolving yet again to give you the “Wondrous World of Wendi” with more commentary about digital marketing, branding, social media and, of course, “pretty products.” (Those things that catch my eye, and hopefully, I can afford!

Check back here often and Find/ Follow/ Friend me… you know where to go and I look forward to the conversation as we transform together!