We thought we’d take you on a brief tour of four proven strategies for sustainable brand growth, as illustrated by MLC members:

Establish a repeatable brand-building framework. Think about it: a lot of dominant brands in various markets are dominant not necessarily because of planning and business acumen, but tradition and accidents of history.

American spirits manufacturer Brown-Forman, famous in particular for making Jack Daniels whiskey, arrived at a set of tools and processes to establish and build on a meaningful and differentiated brand position. MLC members, for more, click here.

Develop a marketing and brand plan that supports overall corporate strategy. It’s vitally important that your brand resonates with your actual consumers, yes. But almost as important is whether it resonates internally – if marketers can’t communicate their contribution to the corporate bottom line, it makes it pretty easy to cut a popular brand from the market.

One MLC member solved this problem by creating a purpose-built dashboard that shows exactly how marketing and branding initiatives align with and contribute to corporate goals. MLC members can see the whole case here. We’ve also blogged about this case.

Develop a clear, differentiated brand strategy. Many of our readers and members work for mature brands – ones that have been around for decades or centuries – and in the intervening years, brand promises and strategies can get muddled to the point of ineffectiveness.

Recognizing the problem, Clorox (which will be 100 years old next year) launched a study into what made brands consistently outperform their categories, and found that each had a single-minded growth strategy that all activities aligned with. They then created the HighFlyer program that helped brands find that growth strategy. MLC members can see the whole case here, our toolkit here, and we’ve blogged about it before, too.

Focus on consumer focus. Ultimately, we marketers are here because of customers and consumers, but the complexity of many firms’ business, our marketing plans often revolve around something else – the demands of television partners, for instance.

Kellogg’s, recognizing this, refocused its planning process to concentrate on measures of customer engagement and focus, leading to stronger, more sustainable brand growth. MLC members can see the whole case here or listen to a webinar replay.

Go ahead, curse me for getting the song stuck in your head. But there’s something important here that I think many marketers don’t realize or understand, and that’s that all this social media stuff may in fact be weakening your brand.

Typically, we hear the refrain that channel proliferation and the more information-dense lives of consumers offers companies an opportunity to reinforce – not dilute – their brands. Consumers spend greater chunks of their life connected to various information platforms and, at least so the story goes, this offers brands three things: more screen real estate to do branding, better data about which consumers to target with which branding initiatives, and more “dense”, interactive ways to experience the brand.

So, what could go wrong? One clue comes from a recent paper by Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca, who examined the effect that Yelp has on the restaurant market in Washington State. First, the good news: he found that a one-star bump in a restaurant’s Yelp rating led to a significant rise in revenue (between 5-9%). The bad news: he found that that effect did not apply to chain restaurants, and that as Yelp usage has proliferated, the market share for chain restaurants has declined.

What’s driving this? My theory is that the informational power of a strong brand is declining. Look at these two signs:

The one on the left is only a stylized logo and six words, but it tremendously information-dense. One glance at that sign, and you know almost everything about the restaurant underneath it: the menu, the best things to order, how healthy the place is, how quickly you can get in and out. You have a pretty good sense of the restaurant’s hours. Several commercial jingles pop into your head, as well as at least one cartoon character. And that’s just the beginning. That one logo communicates a massive volume of information.

But look at the one on the right. Four letters, severe font. The name is vaguely foreign, but impossible to tell from which language; could be Japanese, could be Korean, could be Greek, could be African. The table, with the vase and the white tablecloth, gives some indication that it’s a sit-down restaurant. And that’s about all the information you can glean from this restaurant’s brand alone.

For a long time, big brands have kept the little guys down by leveraging their reach and ability to do big media spends to create huge brand-related informational asymmetries like this one. But information proliferation – as well as the greater opportunity for consumers to share directly with one another – has clearly, if Luca’s results are to be believed, led to an interesting effect: consumers are able to rebalance the information scales by talking to each other. It can no longer be taken for granted that, because consumers know more about big brands than smaller ones, they will naturally gravitate towards what they know; many consumers simply correct for their lack of knowledge by using Yelp and other technologies.

Obviously, it’s time for brands to stop banking on consumers being unaware of alternatives, and start competing on brand attributes other than sheer information volume. Here are a few thoughts on how to tackle the challenge:

• De-commoditize. A benefit – and perhaps now a liability – of a big brand is the fact that consumers know what they’re going to get inside the package, no matter where in the world they are. Playing with those expectations a bit can take away a key advantage that smaller brands have – the perception or reality of greater individual resonance. If you’re a chain restaurant, maybe its a local item on the menu; if you’re a CPG, maybe its an amazing unboxing experience or a focus on shared values.
• Get customer-centric. If you’re the only provider of X, and X is something consumers want, sliding informational advantages become much less important. Figure out your consumers’ desired outcomes – for instance, do they want to get in and out of a restaurant fast? Do they want a better way to spend time with their family? – and build experiences that lead to those outcomes. Instead of being a computer brand, for instance, be a family experience brand.
• Differentiate along areas of core competency. The power of brands in general might be on the wane, but they still have a serious role in consumer decision heuristics. Strengthen yours by focusing and amplifying key differentiators – if your brand is known for fast, efficient service, amp that up, for instance.

So, how should marketers expect their jobs to change? We came up with a few ways; let us know more in comments!

A (gradual) shift from patient acquisition to patient education. Marketers in the health and pharmaceutical space already do a lot of education, both to comply with regulations as well as to improve patient understanding and compliance. But in many parts of the business, particularly in mass-market consumer drugs and health plans, companies are still doing a lot of patient acquisition. My educated guess is that the mix of acquisition and education will shift decidedly towards the latter in the next 10 years or so.

Why? First, there is enormous pressure – political, legal, and economic – on healthcare organizations and pharma manufacturers to begin aggressive moves to control costs. Patient education can help lower those costs, and a decrease in patient acquisition – for instance, a dip in advertising spend – can lower costs as well. Second, there’s some anecdotal evidence that pharma pipelines are slowing, and as medicines come off-patent, margins will dip – making acquisition a lower-ROI activity. Finally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of tightening of DTC rules in the next few years. Everything seems to add up to future with less traditional consumer marketing, and more activities that support other business goals – like cutting costs.

Less intervention, more prevention. Going along with the political mandate and economic necessity to cut costs, we’re already seeing insurance marketers, in particular, going the extra mile to emphasize the importance of healthy lifestyles. Providing content for employer health-related newsletters and internal communications portals, direct mailing preventative health pamphlets to consumers, and other marketing activities will definitely play a role in companies’ efforts to lower costs while improving or keeping health outcomes steady. More promising are efforts to incentivize better health – both for employers and consumers – but I’m not sure what, if any, role Marketing is playing in developing those programs.

Will these programs work? I’m skeptical that they will, to any broad, systemic degree. Financial incentives tend to work when the incented activity is very beneficial and easily accomplished; plastic bag taxes, for instance, work because it’s quite easy to bring reusable bags to the store. Incentivizing weight loss is something else entirely, since the American obesity epidemic has roots in systemic factors, not personal choices. If insurers can drill down to the level of individual choices – for instance, a micro-incentive for eating an apple, rather than a candy bar – I could imagine a higher degree of success, but I doubt we’re anywhere near that point.

Greater leeway with technology. As one of the most regulated industries in the world, the healthcare space faces significant limitations on consumer communications. The most visible of these regulations are those surrounding side effect disclosure and “adverse event” reporting that I discussed last year – the result being that pharma companies can’t meaningfully participate in social media activities other consumer brands take for granted.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates brand-to-patient communication, is apparently considering revisions to rules requiring companies to report adverse events and to adequately disclose side effects, giving brands a better opportunity to reach customers via social media. Hearings were held almost two years ago on the subject, but the agency has repeatedly delayed issuing new guidance.

Although the agency can be slow to respond to marketplace developments, they can’t ignore social media forever, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a significant loosening of adverse event and side effect reporting – offering marketers a greater opportunity to connect with customers. When that happens, the industry will have a lot of catching up to do.

MLC members, what do you think the future of marketing will be? Let us know in this survey we’ve developed.

Activate your advocates. Disney encourages its most loyal fans to apply to be a part of the Disney Moms’ Panel and other interest-group-related panels.  Not only does this allow your most avid consumers an opportunity to share their personal experiences, it also helps build trust in your brand because potential vacationers can find a panel member whose needs and interests match their own.  Like Disney, Ford has also used brand ambassadors to share more about a product; MLC members, click here to learn about how the Ford Fiesta Movement helped launch the American model of the Fiesta.

Make your product easy to buy. With Disney’s Vacation Package Guide, prospective vacationers can plug in their budget, dates, travel party size, and vacation styles to get recommendations on what type of Disney package is best for their needs.  This eliminates the need to conduct intense research on each of the resorts, ticket options, and dining plans.  This simplification allows guests to research their vacation options quickly yet efficiently, allowing them to find an option that meets their vacation and budget needs.

But provide detailed information for those who want it. Disney also realizes there are some people who love to research their vacation options, intensely looking at every hotel, menu and ticket option (I’m incredibly guilty of this).  For these vacationers, Disney offers web pages on every on-site resort (all 21 in all) that feature picture slideshows, restaurant menus, and links to TripAdvisor reviews.  The high-involvement resort guest can look through all of these sites before deciding whether her family would most like to vacation at an African-themed lodge or a Boardwalk-style resort.

Make your product easy (and fun) to use. Disney makes vacationing at Disney World incredibly simple through easy transportation and dining.  Disney offers a free shuttle from the airport to a guest’s hotel (aptly named the Magical Express) and then from the hotel to all of the parks and shopping destinations.  This ease of transportation (no need for a GPS or a rental car) allows guests to have a less stressful vacation, which encourages them to keep coming back.

Give reasons to keep buying. There are so many seasonal activities and little details that it is impossible to do everything in one vacation at Disney World.  Even though I’ve been to Disney World a lot of times, in my upcoming trip in December I’ll be staying at a new resort, dining at new restaurants, and even riding a new ride.   Because Disney World has so many choices, it is possible to have a new experience with each trip.

MLC members, for more on creating unforgettable experiences, check out our resources on branding and customer experience.

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations:

• Tactic: Create such attention-grabbing ads that consumers stop and watch or even actively seek them out (the Old Spice strategy). Limitation: There was only one Old Spice campaign last year. There’s just no process for reliably producing viral hits.

• Tactic: Encourage consumers to sign up to regular targeted communications e.g., email newsletters, mobile alerts, Twitter feeds, Facebook news feeds. Limitation: Marketing message saturation is hitting consumers’ inboxes and news feeds.  Soon it’ll be just as hard to stand out there as it is elsewhere.

• Tactic: Hyper-targeting, i.e., send such super-relevant messages that consumers take notice. Limitation: Marketers often underestimate the bar for relevance that has to be met before a consumer actually clicks on an ad. Even with new data and automation tools, hyper-targeting is still pretty hard.

Leading marketers realize this and are adding an extra strategy to the mix. Instead of doing more to get consumers’ attention, they’re doing more to get through to consumers WITHOUT their full attention.  MLC members, we recently added a set of tips on low-attention branding to our website. Here are the basic steps to take:

Redesign ads/packaging to maximize unconscious information absorption. Consumers do absorb some information even when they’re not really paying attention. Marketers are now turning to new technologies, e.g., eye tracking, pulse/sweat sensors and even brain scans, to help present information in the most compelling and natural manner.

Establish routines around product use. Product routines secure repeat purchase without the need for in-your-face reminders.  The problem is, disrupting existing habits and cementing new ones is incredibly hard.  See how one CPG managed it here.

Publish useful or entertaining content on consumers’ interests with subtle branding in the background. Instead of forcing consumers to pay attention to explicit ads, brands are creating interesting/fun content and hoping the subtle background branding will create positive associations. Learn more here.

Identify and activate consumer cravings. Better understanding of cravings also helps boost product use without the need for explicit messages around product benefits etc. Some marketers of consumable products are turning to fMRI brain scans to identify the precise moment of consumption that provides the biggest dopamine hit. Creating ads focused on these moments improves effectiveness when consumers are only half-listening.  See  how a CPG used brain scanning to identify and activate consumer cravings here.

MLC members, learn more about low-attention branding, and consider taking this anonymous 7-minute survey on future trends in marketing. We will share aggregate results with all survey takers to give you a sense of how your peers think marketing is evolving. Thank you!

Editor’s note: We put this up (and in our member newsletter) prior to last night’s news that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. We’ll have thoughts on his legacy later this week.

The following is a guest post from Robert van Alstyne, a media and technology analyst with our sister program, Iconoculture.

It’s a testament to technology’s ascendant role in pop culture that today’s Apple press conference had more consumer buzz than any new TV show this fall season. With media-saturated consumers’ tastes increasingly splintered, gadget lust is now one of the last common denominators uniting the masses.

Heading into today’s press conference, professional pundits and John Q. Public speculated wildly, debating what new treats Apple would unveil. Would we get an iPhone 5 or just a new iPhone 4? Prior to the event, rumors of a slimmer, 3X-faster iPhone 5 reached a crescendo. By the time new Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage this morning, online chatter had reached such a pitch that one colleague speculated on Twitter, “I wonder, did America stop what it was doing in, say, 1953, when the next model *car* was announced?”

In a move that disappointed some true believers, there was no iPhone 5 announcement, “just” the iPhone 4S, which will hit stores October 14. The new phone still boasts impressive hardware advancements. Among the iPhone 4S’ selling points are the ability to switch intelligently between two antennas to transmit and receive (thereby doubling data download speed), along with a serious camera upgrade. Initial online reaction was “meh,” but we’d be shocked if the 4S doesn’t sell extraordinarily well, just like its predecessor.

Right now, Apple’s main selling point is its image as a cutting-edge company, so the product details matter relatively little to the average consumer. By tirelessly turning their brand into an essential emblem of digital savvy, Apple has carved out both a cult-like following and an ever-broadening base of users. Apple’s old-guard faithful might be disappointed, and they might not “need” the latest iteration of the iPhone. But whatever the specs, in a growing number of consumers’ eyes, Apple’s latest remains a cherished status symbol, broadcasting to all that they’re in step with our fast-moving information-driven world.

MLC members, for more great Iconoculture insights, check out the selected pieces we publish each week on the latest consumer trends.

Even though the weather and leaves are just beginning to turn, and we still have to get through Columbus Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving before turning our thoughts to visions of sugarplums and eight crazy nights, marketers are hard at work figuring out ways to close the year off strong with a good holiday season.

But how should they do it, while stengthening their brand positions for the year to come? We’ve got a few tips below:

Find ways to lighten the load. For kids, the holiday season is a magical, wonderful time of presents, candy, and sometimes magical elves. For adults, though, it’s probably among the most stressful times of the year – even if the stress is likely to pay off in the form of fun with family and friends.

Great brands recognize that not only is the season particularly hectic, the very act of brand interaction might be, too. Finding ways to save consumers time and money, as well as raising the chances they’ll make the right choice when it comes to gifts, can pay dividends throughout the rest of the year.

So how does this play out practically? Offer your consumers some measures of assurance that they’re making the right choices. Some brands we’ve studied have done this through transparent buying guides – presenting consumers with a range of criteria and offering relevant gift ideas for each – while others have gone the technology route, using social networks to make gift recommendations.

Clarify the brand promise – and deliver it, 100%. There’s no better time to make sure brand promises are airtight – and delivery consistent – than the holidays. The uptick in shopping offers brands an opportunity to make a positive imprint on the consumer, but if crowd-weary shoppers aren’t satisfied with what they get, you may suffer the consequences the rest of the year.

MLC has a wealth of material designed to help companies consistently deliver their brand promises: for instance, here’s how Exxon Mobile motivated employees to consistent brand delivery, how Starbucks ensured consistent brand delivery across all touchpoints – human and not human, and how we recommend brands ensure consistent brand delivery across geographies and segments.

Find avenues of emotional differentiation. Here’s the place where brands – particularly consumer and retail brands – have a golden opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition: finding areas of shared values and ways to emotionally differentiate themselves from competitors. We’ve found, for instance, that brands that align with consumers around emotional values perform at a much higher level than brands that emphasize functional differentiators.

Luckily, emotions are running high during the holiday season, and there are a number of brands that have particularly strong associations with the holidays. Macy’s, for instance, is associated in my mind with the holidays: their sponsorship of the Thanksgiving Day parade and the movie “Miracle on 34th St.” form that association in my mind, and I’m much more likely to shop there during the holidays than at any other time.

Understand and fit into seasonal routines. Routines shift a bit during the holidays for a lot of people and families. I’d say that, on average, one is more likely to bake cookies on a random Tuesday night during December than in other months; one is more likely to visit a mall in December than in other times, one is more likely to drive around looking at tacky Christmas lights – all sorts of things.

Brands that unearth subtle shifts in consumer routines during the holidays can capitalize big on them. For instance: there’s the classic case of General Mills’ Betty Crocker brand figuring out that parents often spent the first week of the holidays doing nothing special, then felt guilty about doing so. So the brand targeted cookie-baking in the second week of the holidays, figuring this was an easy way to assuage parental guilt about not being festive enough.

MLC members, how are you shifting your brand communications mix for the holidays? Let us know in comments below.

But the most fireworks happened around a discussion on mobile marketing.  Sean Bartlett, the director of mobile strategy & platforms at Lowe’s, presented on recent mobile activity by that company.  What they’ve accomplished is great mobile work for marketers to emulate. The new Lowe’s app, which has been on the top download boards in the App Store, scores very well against MLC’s 11 criteria of a world-class mobile execution.

Why the fireworks? One marketing leader in attendance asked a simple question: how does Lowe’s measure the ROI on its mobile efforts?  The assumption behind the question was that Lowe’s is spending well into six digits, or even seven digits, and so how to justify the resources internally?

(light fireworks here)  The discussion quickly bounced back and forth between various other retailers in the room, several of which stated that the ROI discussion is over—that was for 5 years ago.  Consumers are moving so quickly that it’s not a question of if, but how.  One retailer shared that it had just launched m-commerce the week before, and watched as its mobile sales ticked up to 3% of total–in just 3 days!!  The CMO indicated customers must have been wondering what took the retailer so long to offer mobile purchasing.

The discussion took on a life of its own, and ultimately landed in a place that struck me as a turning point for retail marketers—if you’re obsessed with ROI to the point that it’s hampering getting some big mobile bets up and running, you’re moving too slow for your consumer.  I’m sure there are exceptions in categories that serve older generations, but by and large, the mobile train has left the station.

MLC members, score your mobile concepts against world-class criteria using our Mobile Execution scorecard.

Last week, Target generated so much buzz that increased traffic shut down its website and some stores sold out of new merchandise within hours.  Surprisingly, this wasn’t a big Black Friday-style sale – it was the introduction of a new clothing line.

With e-commerce sites increasingly encroaching on bricks-and-mortar sales, retailers are being forced to innovate to keep consumers coming back to their stores.  From 2009 to 2010, e-commerce revenue increased 15.8%, while general merchandisers’ revenue increased 2.9% and department stores saw a revenue decrease of .8%.

A major factor in this shift to e-commerce is the rise of price transparency.  Before the rise of smartphones and price trackers, consumers would have to either go to many physical stores or leaf through many weekly circulars to know which stores offered the lowest prices.  Since both of these methods are incredibly time-consuming, though, consumers didn’t research the products and prices as much.  This gave retailers some wiggle room to offer slightly higher prices without alienating their shoppers.

But now, price trackers and smartphones abound.  Consumers are able to research products in-store, getting historical price information on sites like camelcamelcamel and finding cross-store location-based price information on sites like Goodzer.  And since so many shoppers have smartphones, they are now able to do this anywhere – even while standing in one retailer’s aisles, examining the product.

So what’s a retailer to do?

Make stores more of a destination experience.

One way to do this is to make the shopping experience incredibly fun, like I wrote about earlier about the American Girl Place or the World of Coca Cola.   Retailers are making their stores more novel by pursuing strategies like launching lines of unique merchandise (like Target’s Missoni example above), while others are hosting classes and events (like Home Depot’s Kids Workshops).  These unique products and classes can intrigue shoppers enough to get them into the store, and they will often buy more things once they are there.

Several retailers are also adding departments that feature products that can’t be or aren’t yet often purchased online.  For examples, health clinics can encourage shoppers to come to the store.  Since most visitors to a health clinic will pick up little things like cough drops and medicine on their way out, these health clinics can help increase both foot traffic and sales.  Groceries, too, can help increase foot traffic.  Since most grocery products have relatively short shelf lives, most consumers go shopping on a weekly basis, boosting foot traffic.

Use technology like mobile alerts and coupons.

New technologies like Shopkick can reward consumers for going into a store by providing points and coupons.  These points for checking in may be enough to actually get to the store, and the coupons may be enough to get them to buy more once they are there.

Take the store to the shoppers.

This summer, H&M successfully took its merchandise to the consumers by building a beachfront pop-up store that sold summer clothes and accessories, like shorts, swimsuits, and sundresses.  Shoppers were able to buy the beach gear and use it almost instantly.  This model increases foot traffic by significantly reducing the effort shoppers must exert to get to the store.

Other retailers are doing this by building smaller locations that cater to local shoppers.  This is taking the form of City Target, a store under construction that will be in a historic building to blend in with the nearby streetscape, and it will feature products like apartment furnishings to cater to neighborhood shoppers.

We have just begun our 2011 research on ways to boost foot traffic.  If have any ideas on how retailers should do this, please email me at colong@executiveboard.com to get involved!

One could argue that technology has become omnipresent and all pervasive in our lives, and it’s natural that technology brands are likely to enjoy higher brand equity. On the flip side, technology brands also operate in an environment of fast paced competition, shortened product life cycles, and a lingering threat of obsolesce. The intense rivalry among technology companies today makes it ever harder for these companies to compete on product attributes – the conventional approach used earlier.

The question then arises, how can technology companies differentiate their marketing and stand out? I examined 4 successful global campaigns from the world of technology, and here is what we can learn from them:

Make it about the customer, not you: Technology companies may be tempted to over-emphasize the technical aspects, and superiority of their products. While this serves good fodder for the tech-geeks, the average buyer is often unimpressed. Through their More You campaign, Dell computers have helped buyers understand what their product can help them do. The practical approach has pushed up Dell’s brand perception to the top spot in the 18-34 year age group.

Ensure your tagline is what you really do: When recession hit, IBM suffered reduced business growth. Conventional technology marketing didn’t get the company new clients. Introspection of what the company really did, helped IBM come up with Let’s Create a Smarter Planet campaign, which reflected the business IBM was really in. The upfront value proposition had high resonance, and won the campaign a Gold Effie Award in 2010.

Empower the customer: Technology buyers may feel threatened and overwhelmed by the uses they can put the technology to. With its Power to You campaign, Vodafone lets customers take charge of their phone, and allows them the flexibility of designing their own experience on its network. Vodafone presents an empathetic human face to an essentially technical offering. In many markets, such as Ghana, the campaign won Vodafone new customers.

Transcreate (not translate): Apple’s simplistic messaging in all its campaigns has a universal appeal, ever wonder why? Definitely not for minimalistic jargon, and powerful use of simplistic imagery, but for using these in a way that connects the audience to it. Apple transcreates it’s messages, and not just translates them. Transcreation is a process of capturing the essence and spirit of a message, transforming it into one that is locally relevant and meaningful (see an Apple example here).

These campaigns would have never been possible without a strong global marketing organization. MLC members, our work on Structuring for Global Success provides guidance on organization design for global marketing success.

But evidence is emerging – not the least of which, from our 2011 B2C research – that paid media is becoming less and less effective in terms of driving sales and positive brand sentiment. It’s up to marketers to find the channels that consumers trust most, and re-optimize spend for those platforms.

Just as a review, here are the three broad buckets of media spend we’re thinking about:

Paid Media: Channels that you pay for (TV, radio, print, billboards, retail displays, online ads)

Owned Media: Channels that you own (website, blog, building, uniform, vehicles, product itself), or partially own (facebook page, twitter page, YouTube channel)

Earned Media: Consumers become the channel (PR, WOM, mentions in blogs, tweets,  or product reviews), which you can neither buy nor own

Typically, marketers use a PEO framework, where they start with Paid media first, then look to Earned, and put least focus on Owned. Some of the beliefs that drive them to do this are:

Myth #1: We don’t have budgetary limitations, so we don’t require earned media.

Some marketers and agencies put most of their resources on paid media and the leftovers are spent on earned media. Only when they’re tight on budget, they plan their entire or most of their marketing strategy around the earned media. In effect, they push down earned media’s status to a “media of last resort.”

Reality: While it’s easy to “buy” media, it’s not really easy to create the “buy-in.” With so much information overload, consumers have become highly insensitive to traditional media (Kogi BBQ learnt this the hard way). What they actually value is information that comes from credible sources. I’m sure when Mercedes-Benz wanted to capitalize on Google executive’s testimonial, cost-saving wasn’t the motivation. Rather, it was the credibility of the source that Mercedes wanted to leverage.

While earned media is relatively cheaper than paid, it is certainly not free. Nor it is easy or quick. The cost of buying media gets shifted to cost of creating and managing content. Even if the companies now will need to become creative thinkers to develop and plan content, the ROI is still better compared to paid media.

Myth #2: Earned media can’t be controlled, so there is no point planning for it.

Some marketers fear that since they don’t have any control over the reach and impact of earned media, they’ll end up wasting dollars, or probably even worse—earning negative WOM.

Reality: Though the control may not be “completely” in your hands, but with some thoughtful planning, you can initiate and drive the conversation in your favor. Generate curiosity (Kaizers Orchestra did it by launching a record on paper), create value (Best Buy’s Twelpforce), empathize (J&J’s Baby Center), or just challenge the conventions (Men With Cramps! Really?), and Voilà! You’ve influenced the influencers.

Further, owned media is a low-hanging fruit that can play a significant role in driving your influence. Brands use their website, twitter page, facebook page, or YouTube channel to seed content. Even the product (customized M&Ms), the packaging (Bronx shoes), and the distribution (Coke’s uVend) can be creatively utilized.

Are the flaws in PEO apparent now?

Imagine turning the PEO framework upside down and making it OEP. That is, try to capitalize on Owned first and use it as a driver to initiate Earned, then focus your strategy on increasing and sustaining Earned, and if necessary seek Paid support.

Earned media should play a “central role” in the marketing strategy, while owned and paid play “supporting partners.”

By the way, while you were reading this post, the brands mentioned above just earned some more media for themselves. So next time you meet your agencies, ask them (a few weeks ago, we wrote about how agencies should transform in the new advertising landscape) to utilize your budget in a way that gives you more dividends, and that too, sustainable.

In an effort to channel Africa’s love of soccer into a greater love for Guinness, the beverage company created “The Guinness Football Challenge,” a TV game show that incorporates physical challenges with trivia in a competition to win prizes.  First kicked off in Kenya, the television program is expanding to Ghana and Cameroon in hopes of turning passionate soccer fans into Guinness fans as well.  So, besides sponsoring the game show, how did Guinness actively engage its audience?  Simple.  Before the first 10-episode season of the popular African game show aired, Diageo handed out Guinness bottles during filming that contained a text code under the cap.  Not only was the audience given beer (read: free beer!), but users could then text in for a chance to win a lump sum of money.

It was a win/win situation for Guinness.  The company was able to deliver its product into the hands of consumers quickly and efficiently, while at the same time capturing phone numbers of users that texted in and storing them in a consumer database.  Diageo also maintained its “Reach for Greatness” slogan and brand message for Africa to allow consumers to easily recognize the brand and to help Guinness easily transition from an old campaign to a new one.

As with any mobile marketing initiative, however, Diageo also faced risks in implementing its “Guinness Rollout.”  To see these risks, along with the final results of the campaign and other campaigns, visit our Mobile Marketing Resource Center.

Rather than trying to out-discount the discounters, or compete with the scale on which Amazon and other online retailers operate, I think retailers should be reevaluating their value propositions, both to their customers and to their consumer manufacturing partners. How do retailers in general, and your retail chain in particular, bring value to business partners and consumers?

I think the key to this is taking advantage of the two things retailers have in spades, and that all manner of disintermediation and price undercuts can’t take away: knowledge and space.

Focus less on selling, more on educating. Retailers looking for an edge over online and discount counterparts can find it in the on-demand knowledge of their employees. Online retailers like Amazon have some degree of product knowledge, but they don’t have the ability to tell whether individual consumers are actually looking for it – risking cognitive overload in the process.

On the other hand, retailers have extensive product knowledge, and sales reps to deliver it exactly when the customer wants it – and not a moment before. La-Z-Boy’s  simple in-store segmentation method, designed to figure out what kinds of sales expertise different customers are looking for, is an excellent example of how frontline staff can be trained to recognize the optimal way of delivering product knowledge.

Revive – or establish – emotional connections. It’s standard advice to companies and brands fighting commoditization and discounting: figure out the way your brand makes consumers feel, and pull on those heartstrings to shore up margins and marketshare. It’s a strategy used by businesses both tiny and gargantuan: for instance, Ukrops’, a family-owned grocery store in my hometown of Richmond, VA, dominated the grocery market in that city despite maintaining higher prices, refusing to sell alcohol, and being closed on Sundays. Why? The chain had a long association with the city of Richmond, such that shopping there was almost an exercise in civic pride.

We’re not all family-owned grocery stores, of course, and most of us can’t pull the heartstrings of civic pride convincingly. But we can figure out ways of plugging into our customers’ emotions: our study on Accelerating Loyalty can get you started.

Sell services, not products. Leveraging product knowledge by service selling is usually a B2B affair. But if your product is or has the potential to be confusing, service sales can be a great way to keep the customer happy, reinforce the brand promise, and fatten up margins a bit at the same time.

Best Buy’s Geek Squad, as well as similar services offered by other electronics big-box stores, is the quintessential example of this, and I think other retailers will get into the game as disintermediation begins to affect their core businesses.

Embed into routines. Retailers may be threatened by cheaper shipping and the ubiquity of computing platforms, but the one thing they have a ton of that online retailers can’t match is space. Physical space, that is – retailers occupy a dominant place in the built environment, and are fixtures in the midst of human routines. By piggybacking onto an unassailable part of people’s daily lives, retailers can give value to the customer in ways online stores can’t.

Redbox, for instance, has monetized the routine of stopping off at the grocery store to grab something for dinner on the way home from work: customers grab a bite to eat, pay for their purchases, and walk directly by a vending machine offering cheap movie rentals on the way out. 7-Eleven is trying to monetize the pre-work rush by offering gourmet, ready-to-eat snacks. And in a lot of places around the world, Starbucks has monetized the mid-morning work break.

MLC members – how are your companies shifting your value propositions to take advantage of the new normal? Let us know in comments.

So, we’ve put together some principles that should guide green efforts, particularly in the auto and broader manufacturing sectors. Read on for more:

Be (emotionally) real. Consumers still aren’t terribly sophisticated about what constitutes a “green” product and what does not, and a lot of sustainability-related purchase decisions are emotional – we can’t really expect consumers to investigate the global supply chain of everything they buy.

The problem with the emotional heuristic that many consumers employ is that it’s not particularly accurate – at least, in a factual sense. Many auto companies, for instance, have introduced hybrid versions of mid-sized and large SUVs. The fuel economy of those vehicles might not be impressive in the absolute sense, but relative to their non-hybrid siblings, they often represent a big percentage increase in MPGs. But many consumers panned those vehicles, some for good, logical reasons, but many more because the cars didn’t “feel” green.

The idea isn’t to stop counterintuitive green projects – but be aware that sustainability-focused consumers might react with skepticism to things that might not ring emotionally true.

Get specific. “Green” is a notoriously non-specific, ambiguous label. For some consumers, “green” products are ones that are carbon non-intensive – essentially, ones that don’t exacerbate climate change. For others, “green” means “free of artificial chemicals”. Still others are focused on more traditional pollutants or cost of ownership, and “green” has even begun to refer to concepts like fair-trade agriculture – something not necessarily related to the environment at all.

Since it’s almost impossible to guess what your customers want when they ask you to be green, brands that are successful in this regard focus on a number of concrete, discrete projects to reduce their impact on the environment – things that align well with the brand promise. We profiled Timberland’s efforts to simplify their sustainability programs.

Be an educator. We can’t expect consumers to have well-developed climate models in their head,  nor can we expect that they’ll have the ability to analyze complex supply chains in search of environmental deficiencies – but we marketers can explain these things to them. Brands that are making headway in environmental perception are recognizing the information asymmetry and teaching customers how using their products can decrease their environmental impact.

This can be done during the buying experience or as a feature of the product itself – for instance, Ford’s new EcoMode delivers real-time feedback on fuel economy, actively teaching drivers which habits correspond to gas savings.

Dig deep. The end product is only one stage of supply chains and corporate processes, and most companies have significant room to decrease their impact on the environment through shifts in manufacturing and logistics practices. Don’t be afraid to tout efforts made on these levels – while your primary audience won’t be the broader consumer set, educated sustainability-oriented consumers can and do appreciate how manufacturing changes can make as much or more of an impact than more visible product shifts. Further, since the popular conception of what qualifies as “green” is still in flux, making inroads with sophisticated, sustainability-oriented consumers can trickle down in the form of general brand perception.

MLC members, for more on effective green strategies, see our resources on avoiding greenwashing and green marketing for B2Bs.

Marketers and advertisers have spent over 100 years trying to communicate with customers in modern, recognizable ways, and during that time the language we use to do that has evolved. Customers now don’t need everything spelled out – they react instantly to small symbolic cues, rich images, and a memorable tagline – but consumers of previous eras didn’t have the rich symbolic vocabulary necessary to do that. The result was advertisements that are much more literal – and maybe more informative, in a strict sense – than the ones we have today.

We’ve collected ten of the coolest vintage magazine and TV ads we could find. Have others? Post them in the comments! And make sure to check out our resource center on getting the most out of agency partnerships, so maybe your company will be on a list like this in 2061.

1) Lincoln Cosmopolitan

Have you ever seen anything so evocative of the 1950’s? Newfound wealth, garish colors, a gigantic convertible – this ad has it all.

2) Western Electric – Colorful Phones

I’m too young to know much about this, but apparently phones used to come in one color – black – and the introduction of different colors was a Big Deal. This piece from Western Electric is way ahead of its time – it uses infographic-like techniques and social proof to sell a rainbow of telephones.

3) Old Spice – 1957

My favorite things about this one? First, how radically different it is from…more current Old Spice commercials. Second, the hilarious tone of the announcer, reminiscent of old public service announcements. Finally, the veneer of scientific precision – “from the laboratories of Shulton”.

4) Air Canada – Rainbow

This is a great ad, mostly because it eschews the practice of including paragraphs worth of copy along with the visuals. The rainbow is a great touch – it says that when you’re on Air Canada, you’re going somewhere good – and the overall design is delightfully retro.

5) This Calls for Budweiser

Have beer marketers always been the best in the discipline? This piece from Budweiser gets a key thing right: it takes a universal experience – hanging out with your friends – and deftly associates the brand with it. They aren’t selling the beer, per se – they’re selling the experience of being with friends. And who doesn’t like that?

6) Tide – Laundry on the Beach

A few thoughts: first, this is another nice bit of positive-experience association, with the added benefit of the juxtaposition of the naturally clean beach. Second, in fifty years, are people going to cringe at the music I love as much as I did at this ad’s?

7) Ouija – Questions

Now we’re getting into the “we couldn’t run this ad today” territory, with this ad for Ouija featuring a young woman asking silly things about flying saucers and the prom, while the guy contemplates weighty issues like college and “going steady”. And Vintage Santa carrying the game? Subtle, Parker Brothers – subtle.

RCA – Table-Top TV

Our ancestors were so inventive.

9) Alka-Seltzer Takes on The USA

A few thoughts: first, how creepy is that talking doll? I feel like it’s going to come to my house if I don’t take Alka-Seltzer. Second, it’s remarkable how long these commercials go. 30-second ads feel long today, and we’re slowly transitioning to ads a quarter of the length of these spots.

10) Dr. Pepper – Charge

This one did its job – I now officially want to go to the beach.

One way that all brands are having success in engaging consumers is through providing extra value.  By giving the consumer something she wants, the brand can insert itself into the conversation in a meaningful way.  Here are five examples of how brands have created extra value for consumers:

Memories. American Girl Place allows families the opportunity to share experiences while shopping for historical-themed dolls and era-specific accessories.  This mecca for tweenage girls features doll hairstylists, historical-themed parties, and matching dresses for girls and their dolls.  It even has a cafe where families can share a meal, complete with doll-sized food and chairs.  By developing a space where girls and their families can create memories, American Girl has built a successful shopping destination.

Community. Nike created a program – Nike Plus – that runners can use to track and share their runs.  (We wrote about it a few months back.) This has allowed Nike to build a community of runners who sign up for challenges and comment on each others’ runs.  By building a community, Nike has created an online destination where avid runners can share their experiences with like-minded people, amplifying the experience.

Unexpected Value. The ING Direct Cafe offers tasty and low-priced drinks that compare to fancier coffee shops.  While enjoying their drinks, patrons can surf the internet and learn more about accounts with ING.  Since ING charges a competitive price for each drink, the bank is able to introduce potential customers to the brand without making huge investments in media.  Customers seem to be happy as well – the bank’s cafe in Chicago has 4.5 stars on Yelp (a score half a star higher than a nearby Starbucks).

Entertainment. The World of Coca-Cola provides an incredibly fun experience.  Between a minigolf course and a tasting room where a visitor can sample drinks from around the world, guests at this Atlanta attraction are able to experience branded fun.  Like American Girl Place, the World of Coca-Cola focuses on providing an entertainment experience that links consumers to their brand.  Since the Coca-Cola brand represents happiness, this attraction does a great job at tying itself to this emotion.

Pure Utility. Needing to use the restroom is a fact of life, and it can be hard to find a clean restroom when out all day shopping.  Charmin realized this, and built temporary restrooms in Times Square during the holiday season.  The restrooms were cleaned after each use, guaranteeing a good experience for all users.  These restrooms were a success because they found a consumer need and then leveraged the brand to create a solution.

For brands, especially CPGs, sampling can still be a very important marketing tactic (after all, having a taste of a food product can be a great experience), but expanding beyond this to provide an extra value can be great for boosting brand health.

Brands have a role and responsibility to their communities in times of trouble. Leading companies engage in Corporate Social Responsibility to promote the human face of their corporate brands. But response to natural disasters should be quick, and have a high impact in relatively short time duration. Companies need to weigh the decision points for building a Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy that embeds a culture of philanthropy and creates a ready infrastructure to respond during times of need.

After you’ve setup a relief effort strategy, follow these steps to position it for maximum impact:

Be useful, not charitable: Remember, your audience for is already overwhelmed with impact of the disaster. Device tactful ways of aligning your brand promise to initiatives which provide a helping hand to affected people. Procter and Gamble’s Tide Loads of Hope campaign and Duracell Power Relief Trailers helped Joplin residents overcome their tornado misery by offering laundry services and power in their times of distress.

Don’t forget your employees: Employees form the backbone of your relief efforts. Employee welfare activities and assistance to distressed employees will not only provide much-needed assistance, but also lend strength to your broader relief efforts. Hardee’s chain of restaurants tracked the wellbeing of each of their employees, before starting relief efforts with their support.

Be generous, it pays: When Walmart invested $38 million in Hurricane Katrina efforts, it allowed employees to take charge, and “do the right thing”. Employee derived local knowledge of supply chains, coupled with employees’ freedom to act, made Walmart the an important part of Katrina relief efforts, and won it loyal customers.

Go social, everyone’s talking about it: Social media plays a more important role in than traditional media  for disaster updates and assistance. During Hurricane Irene, many brands invested in twitter update handles to be a part of the consumer interaction. This provided them with contextual brand touch point to consumers searching for particular items. But be careful not to clog up official channels for disaster information – for instance, don’t use disaster-related hashtags unless you’re sharing good, useful information.

MLC members: If you haven’t already got a CSR strategy in place, we recommend a list of cause marketing agencies which could help you do so.

So what are beleaguered marketers at these once revered institutions to do?  In addition to the critical fundamental changes banks are making to correct the fissures in their underlying structures, marketers can take action to repair and rebuild trust.  The first step is to have a plan – a real, written, institutionally-approved plan – for dealing with reputational challenges.

Faced with a lack of visibility into reputation-harming incidents and a lack of consistent response to problems that did arise, TD Bank took the guesswork out of the problem by codifying guidelines for reporting issues into a simple scorecard. Standardized evaluation criteria helps staffers at all levels of the organization determine whether an issue needs to be escalated and proscribes clear next steps.  As a result, TD Bank saw the amount of time between awareness of a threat to its resolution drop as much as 70%.

TD Bank was proactive about being reactive – they knew issues would arise and readied themselves to respond quickly and effectively.  Given today’s heightened skepticism amongst both consumers and business customers, it can also be beneficial to tackle potential reputation damagers head-on.  In the course of part of this year’s first-half research project, Influencing the Newly Empowered Customer, we found that messaging about risks or perceived weak spots before they are actually raised by customers gets marketers paid in the end.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you may be thinking, “isn’t bring up risk kind of risky?”  Not if you do it the right way.  The trick is to pick the right problem areas to message about based on how likely they are to be surfaced by customers or consumers and how confident you are as an organization to address them.   Our risk mapping tool can help you get started figuring out which areas are best to get in front of based on intel from people inside your organization.  And to be clear, we aren’t suggesting banks, or anyone else for that matter, start talking about all that could go wrong.  The point is to acknowledge that you understand customers’/consumers’ worries, have dealt with the internal root causes of those worries internally, and have contingency plans in place to mitigate the effects should anything go wrong.

These approaches can be used in tandem to get out in front of the reputation risks banks can expect to face and to have a plan in place to react to those that arise anew.

Marketing’s a complicated business, and, as such, it’s easy to tell ourselves lies – whether we know it or not. We talk to marketers every day, and here are some of the biggest, most persuasive whoppers in the bunch. Got more? Let us know in comments!

1) Our customers want to be engaged, and we want to engage them. Customers (and consumers!) claim to want to be engaged, but the proof is in the pudding: in the consumer space, brand loyalty and purchase stickiness is negatively correlated with high-information “engagement” strategies, and business customers are eschewing Sales contact until nearly 60% of the purchase process is complete.

What’s the message that purchasers across the economy are sending? They don’t want to talk to you – at least, not until they’re ready. Across the board, customers and consumers are simply more trusting of third-party information than they are of “engaged” brands, and who can blame them? The key isn’t “engagement” per se – it’s useful engagement that helps people live their lives and do their jobs. Consumer brands can use their knowledge of the market to guide customers to better decisions, and business brands can leverage industry expertise to help business purchasers get the job done.

2) We need a social media team, but let’s just hire some young people – they know how to do that Twitter stuff! It’s a rational first response to a disruptive new communications technology: surely the demographic that uses the technology the most (in this case, young people) are the best possible people to help brands and companies adapt.

But doing this confuses the medium with the message, Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding. I think it’s broadly true that, as you go up the age continuum, you’re less likely to find folks familiar with the mechanics and culture of social platforms like Twitter. But this stuff is really window-dressing on a broader reality of changed consumer expectations around service and responsiveness – and customer understanding acumen isn’t a function of age. The fact is that new communications platforms are going to continually emerge, and the actual operation of those platforms are not particularly important for businesses – what is important is the big picture of a changed consumer environment.

That doesn’t mean that managing social doesn’t require a unique skillset – of course, it does – but that skillset can’t be had by hiring a bunch of interns or entry-level folks.

3) In these tough times, we need to focus our efforts on high-ROI investments and innovations. In every economic environment, we’re looking for high returns – that’s the ultimate reason we do what we do. But there’s a difference between the concept of “returns on investment” and the metric known as “ROI”. “Returns” are conceptual – they’re a reasonable, qualitative assessment of whether the cost of an investment or innovation is worth it. “ROI”, on the other hand, is a number spit out of a spreadsheet model that implicitly relies on existing market information – and, as such, is poor at assessing disruptive innovations or channel investments. When bad information goes into a model, you can expect bad information to come out – and the result is distorted decision-making, passed-up opportunities, and slow growth.

For innovation decisions, we recommend following a framework similar to Philips’ Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap – one that privileges equally-tangible considerations like team enthusiasm, strength of segment need, and brand equity instead of focusing on the ROI question. In terms of channel investments, we’ve also observed that ROI is a poor guide to decision-making, particularly when it comes to social media. Here, we recommend an approach based on bridge metrics, not strict ROI.

4) Having more data to make decisions will remove the subjectivity from marketing. Throughout our current research on marketing automation and marketing analytics, we’ve heard one thing consistently from members: a pervasive belief that data and automation is capable of transforming marketing into a Taylorist function – one that merely processes inputs and spits out outputs in the form of automated campaigns, insights, and innovations. The abundance of data – as well as the increasing capability of automating campaigns – will allow leaders to make decisions beyond reproach, ones that don’t even involve the application of creativity – at least so the story goes.

But the reality is different. As Ana explained in this post, the proper role of data is a complimentary tool that supplements – not replaces – the exercise of judgement, creativity, and experience.

Got more lies? Fess up in comments below – we won’t judge too harshly!

As I read, the key dynamic that I think was being captured is how unsettled the retail market is – and what a giant opportunity marketers have to experiment with product, customer experience, and market research strategies. China’s middle and wealthy classes – the groups most amenable to western-style consumer culture – are growing at phenomenal rates. That means, every year, millions of new consumers enter an environment where they have little in the way of habits, routines, or loyalties. That’s reflected on the retailers’ end, too: Chinese grocery market share, for instance, is remarkably diffuse. The leading chain – Shanghai Bailian – only comprises 11% of the total grocery market.

Given the relative parity between retailers, and the relative lack of hard-wired brand and experience preferences, retailers in China are experimenting with different approaches – some with the opportunity to make their way back to the US, Europe and Australia.

For instance, the US has evolved a certain notion of what a supermarket should be – big, clean, well-lit, and fully-stocked. This varies a bit in big cities – for instance, the omnipresent bodegas in New York and much of Washington are home to a fair amount of grocery shopping – but for the most part, all of our competing supermarket chains look more or less alike. Not so in China, where grocery stores aren’t afraid to be a little more chaotic. The Economist frames the issue as one of Walmart vs. Wumart, a “dirty”, “shabby” chain featuring a “heap of raw chickens” without “protection against passing sneezers”. But the prices? Rock-bottom, compared to the upmarket Walmart. Would US consumers trade down in the experience department for lower prices?

What about stretching the definition of product categories? Here in America, Barbie is a doll brand for young children – but in Shanghai, Mattel attempted to re-launch as a clothing brand, as well. One floor of Shanghai’s 6-floor Barbie Store was devoted to adult-sized versions of Barbie fashions, aimed at consumers with growing disposable incomes in the city. The experiment didn’t work – the Barbie store closed this March – but it was a bold move, possible only in a market without much in the way of preconceived notions about the brand.

Marketers catering to wealthy consumers have also reintroduced China to milk and cheese – the consumption of which is complicated by a lack of many Chinese dishes featuring dairy, former lack of wealth to buy those products, and a higher degree of lactose intolerance. But government messaging is encouraging citizens to consume dairy products for health reasons, and, according to McKinsey Quarterly, the in-store channel is most likely to have the biggest impact on sales. As marketers are asked to push higher-margin milk products, what kinds of cool shopper marketing innovations will we see?

As consumers continue to move into the middle class, it’ll be interesting to keep tabs on the kinds of marketing experiments brands do to shape the buying and consuming habits of these groups.