Especially in hard financial times it is important to remind ourselves that marketing is NOT about selling stuff, it’s about giving the participant a reason to buy stuff:

Two things:

1. It’s not about selling, it’s about buying.
2. There has to be a reason to buy something, an incentive. The incentive is the brief.

So start using your most important tool: Ask why? According to Charles Tilly, in his book “why?” Toyota has it in it’s strategies to ask why? Five times to get to the core of things.

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.

Marketing needs to extend the notion of value. In the event of adding smaller initiatives to the marketing mix moving customers one step closer to the till, or exploring social media to recruit participants, recognizing that value is much more than the final “sale” is important.

This might seem over evident, but in my experience, it often isn’t .

Patrick reminded me of this in a comment to my last post. Writing that it needs to be a “win win” situation between the brand and the customer.

Companies tend to view value as monetary, the final “sale”, but money is only the end result after several transactions with the customer, each taking her on step further along the snakes and ladders game board. Moving the customers from start to finish. Each of these transactions require communication, and in the event for them to be measurable and effective we need to define a richer set of success metrics.

The nature of Digital makes this especially important:

- As communication becomes a larger set of smaller ideas spread across a wider range of cooperative platforms, it’s important to recognize that each individual initiative is working on it’s separate goal. It is the totality of these initiatives that is working towards the final “sale”, but to measure for the success of the smaller ideas we need to give them different metrics than the final sale.

- Engaging participants through social media or starting a conversation are all parts of loyalty strategies. Getting people to purchase more than once, but the strategy itself is not focused on sale, it’s all about connecting with participants. There needs to be clearly defined wins along this axis to.

It is important to stay patient, to invest in initiatives that hasn’t got “sale” as its end goal, to be honest and measure correctly for we are building to achieve. If marketers aren’t relying on competitors to drive the category for them, then the marketing strategy is getting people from start to finish. This will mean at least 99 steps to make before customers can reach their final goal.

There seems to be a more “direct marketing” effect from social media than brand value and loyalty. According to Razorfish the engagement from social widgets and applications directly correlates with purchase behavior.

I would like to relate two strands to this:

1. Social media is a conversation, not a media channel. So old hat thinking where companies try to interrupt the reader won’t work. Creating valuable interactions with your participants requires that companies become a part of the conversation.

2. The web is a set of cooperative platforms, this means that you don’t have to see a solution on the same platform where you create engagement. You have to see how you can create a pattern, where the result of the interaction between platforms leads to the definite success.

With this in mind, the Razorfish “Social Media Measurement: Widgets and Applications” survey gives us some interesting facts:

“purchase behavior directly correlates to how deeply a consumer engages with a piece of social media *and* where they discover the media.”

I would say this, to some extent, proves that social media, widgets and applications are successful if implemented correctly. Not only for brand building and participation, but for direct marketing as well.

Just wanted to link to the presentation on Nike+ by Michael Tchao, General Manager of Nike Techlab, from Picinic 08′.

For anyone certain that the Nike+ case isn’t relevant to smaller, non-global brands. These 23 minutes will hopefully change your mind, as Michael discloses a lot of the thoughts and ideas that in the end led to the Nike+ phenomenon.

Michael Tchao at PICNIC08: Commercial Collaborations: Tools, Things and Toys from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

Understanding collaboration through the lens of Itay Talgam and a collection of the worlds foremost conductors.

The best event I attended last year was the Picnic Conference 08′ in Amsterdam. Filled with interesting people and invaluable insights. Now they finally put the presentations from the main hall up on Vimeo, and I recommend most of them :o) – Thanks to Putting People First for “finding them”.

I’ve picked out Itay Talgam’s presentation on Conducting Creativity as my favorite, not necessarily because it contains a lot of relevant technical stuff or hands out project experiences. It doesn’t, Itay’s focuses on putting great conductors into context under the goal of teaching his listeners about creative collaboration.

This ads to the content on this blog, because.. carrying on the theme from some of the previous posts; in order to see solutions we need to understand humans, and the interaction between them.

This would have to go without saying when we’re trying to figure out the drivers and incentives for collaboration, community and participation. And is essential in order to understand what this would mean to your company and the amount of control one protects or releases to the public.

The talk creates a beautiful and valuable perspective, touching on a range of different features related to collaboration and creativity. And… it was the only presentation I can remember that got an almost never ending standing ovation!

Here is a selection of three quotes by Itam, or him quoting others, all found in the presentation:

“It’s not only about personal style, this is a part of it, and I think an interesting part. but it’s about creating a certain set of culture that enables certain modes of collaboration between people”

“Without order nothing can exist, without chaos nothing can grow”

“The worst damage I can do to my organization is to give them a very clear indication. Why? Because that creates a one on one relations between me and the players. Which makes the ignore the ensemble and work directly with me”

Have a look at Picinic’s Vimeopage for more videos from Picnic 08′.

Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

Digital marketers and advertisers need to resurface. We need to get back in the game where the participants are, and transform our language into one where we can understand the customers, not talk right passed them.

As Jonathan Graham of Anamoly UK pointed out in the “Good Ideas & Mobile” panel of friday’s PSFK Good Idea Salon London:

It’s the terminology that gets us into trouble. There is no “Digital Revolution”, there is no “New Technology” there is just stuff.

Backed up by Jenny Owen of Ruby Pseudo who stated:

“I had to stop asking people about Brands, they were going, “What is a b…?” They call them companies”.

In a different panel “Good Ideas and Mobile”, Jonathan MacDonald pointed out that talking about technology and applications makes no sense, the future opportunities will be discovered when exploring people, how they act, their activities and motives, and as a concept of “every single one of us”, his personal project.

Personally, as I have understood it, this has also been the intention of Mark Eearls’ January B*** project. Where the goal is to stop talking about the a B**** and start creating true and real meaning.

But of course there is a hitch. A specialist vernacular is something that develops over time, some of it due to the eagerness to coin new stuff, but also some of it to create discussion about a subject with greater ease and richness. Specialist terms are developed to ad more context and meaning to discussion without using as many words :o) and as a result these terms become laden with value and meaning. Just removing them will become problematic.

But the point I think I’m trying to make is that we might need to resurface, we are starting to create a toxic relationship to our subject, where the topic itself becomes more important than the people we are working for.

If January was the month of the b****, then February is the month of resurfacing.

According to the panelists Matt Jones of Dopplr and Jonathan MacDonald of Ogilvy at PSFK’s Good Idea Salon London, mobile is all about a patchwork of situated software solving people’s personal and local desires.

Matt Jones spread the concept of Mobile being all about Place, and place is where culture meets location. The future mobile landscape will be a range of small ideas, small applications all working together to create a global mesh - as in contrast to many of today’s developments, where the focus is on solving massive global solutions.

Jonathan MacDonald added that we need to de-silo mobile and start talking of what it does, not what it is. We need to think about what people do in their lives, it’s about every single one of us.

I couldn’t agree more, and found Matt’s additions to the panel remarkably refreshing, putting a lot of stuff into context. Trying to build it into a more commercial articulation I would say that:

1. Mobile is about people, and they stuff they do, where, and how they do it. It’s not about technology, handsets or applications. As I have personally experienced, it is through being inspired by the customers and participants that the really groundbreaking revelations happen. Not through workshopping with clients or reading quantitative analysis.

2. People care about what’s closest to them, this also goes for the situations products and companies want to be a part of. Massive solutions, solving problems on a global scale, will not be as relevant or as interesting as tailored and local stuff.

The patchwork part is also very interesting but probably not from a conscious consumer point of view. The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

As a result one can say that Mobile will be about combining people and their ideas (culture) with their location. This doesn’t mean serving me coupons when walking past a Starbucks or sending me an SMS telling me to watch a TV program in the evening because some products will be featured. It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

I’ve included this interview with Jonathan MacDonald, by Intruders.TV, for your viewing pleasure. :o)

As participants worlds fragment across a range of platforms, arenas, channels and screens, companies are met with an opportunity to build behind bigger ideas.

This means both the opportunity to move the marketing from messaging, to content to context. But also to explore the Brand Situation. Where the brand fits into the lives of their participants, and facilitates the situation relevant to the product, in order to create value and become invaluable.

This slideshow is a follow-up to my last one, Three Major Changes In Digital Marketing, and it tries to put these three changes into a bigger, relevant context.

I’ve added some voice-over to this one as well, even though it’s not earth shatteringly brilliant :o) It hopefully ads more value to the experience.

Find it on slideshare.net/helgetenno, or below.

To anyone planning to attend Scandinavian Futures this tuesday. Hope to see you there as I am doing a 30 minute presentation on The New Brand Landscape.

This will be an updated version to anyone listening at the INMA Autumn Conference. I will be taking out almost all of the consumer insight content and adding a bit of the new stuff I’ve posted about on this blog in 09′. In other words, it will be even more about the new landscape, and less about the customers (as other speakers will cover that to an extent in their presentations).

Haven’t bought a ticket yet? Find one here. Mark will be putting out his valuable thoughts as well.