PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Not more than 90 minutes left of 2006, and already the prognosticators are delivering some staggering predictions for the upcoming four quarters. Online worlds will proliferate. Avatars will grow more popular. People will pay to have their cell phones and PDAs locked up on vacation. And most staggering of all: brands that keep it simple will punch through the static. Read about it in the Times article or consult that god-given resource: your common sense.

Happy New Year.

References to the presidency of the late Ronald Reagan aside, the comingled idea of Teflon and brand has come up several times this month for a PJA client. Despite its best efforts, in fact despite its five-star ethical performance and voluntary reporting of its own statistically significant negative scientific results to a government oversight agency, the company cannot catch a break. What’s doubly frustrating to the company is watching its key competitor grab the spotlight for cherry-picking its data and using its marketing machine to move the needle with some very tough customers. Even worse: watching warnings and bad press slide off its competitive nemesis like so much warm soapy water.
What’s the second company’s secret? Brand equity. Which is the pull a brand has among its stakeholders based on all the qualities (longevity, products, philanthropy, marketing) that come to bear in what the CIO of Proctor & Gamble once told me they called a ‘moment of truth,’ that magical extension of consumer’s arm to P&G product on vendor’s shelf.

In the B to B world, brand equity is harder to build and harder to measure, but every bit as hard to work against if you’re not the top dog when it comes to perceived trust. What we tell clients at PJA is that if you don’t have longevity, substitute constancy. Get into the marketplace and don’t disappear. Build a reliable presence, online or off, small as it may be, and if it’s effective, stick to it. Here’s how one of our creative powerhouses, Rebecca Rivera, describes the phenom:
“Imagine you have an old friend, who you’ve been in touch with and in constant conversation with for 10 years. You’ve stayed in touch when when they’ve moved, had a child, switched jobs. When things have gone well. And when they haven’t. If you hit a bump in the road of your relationship, it’s no big deal. The bump doesn’t become a mountain, because of the trust you have and because of what you’ve shared over time. Take the same situation with an acquaintance. You might’ve known this person the same period of time. But you rarely heard from them. In fact, they only contacted you when they needed something. Perhaps they needed your support. Or they wanted you to buy something they were selling. Or to provide them with a contact. When something went wrong with the relationship, you didn’t have as much invested in the relationship. Bottom line, you felt no brand loyalty. The acquaintance didn’t get the benefit of the doubt. In business, as in life, it’s all about relationships. It’s hard to fire a friend. Easy to fire someone you hardly know.”

Rebecca goes on:
“It’s not enough to be forthcoming when there are issues. You can’t afford to “go dark”. You need to keep a dialog going. Keep your company front and center at all times so that when you hit the proverbial bump, the time and money you’ve invested in your brand will pay off and the slings and arrows will slide off like, well Teflon.”

Good thoughts, I think, not only for companies, but for our relationships as well. Happy holidays, stay visible and present to your aspirations, and stay true to who you are.

Although Cymfony may claim a higher-level algorithm developed for the government (whatever that is), Nielsen’s new BuzzMetrics is generating more, well, buzz. Bring together MBAs, 2.0 specialists and algorithm developers, and you get BuzzMetrics (and a big story in this Sunday’s Times). Like Cymfony, a PJA partner, BuzzMetrics claims to be able to sweep through the exploding mushroom crowd of chat rooms, blogs and boards and produce a tonality map of competitors, products, concepts and brand attributes. As the three top dogs claimed in the Times article on the topic, they are relegating focus groups to their proper status, something “going the way of the buggy whip.” (Perhaps that phrase ought to meet the same fate.) The article also notes that in addition to Cymfony, BuzzMetrics competes with BrandIntel, Biz360, MotiveQuest, and Umbria.

Over the past year, companies like Dell and Toyota have discovered the respective downside and upside of online buzz, and compaies such as Jupiter predict online monitoring of brands will double in 2007. Apparently, 90 percent of consumers trust word-of-mouth suggestions and make purchases (such as stocks?) based on such input, the “radar” of how consumers now fly. Toyota’s Lexus division, in fact, pulled a gay-neutral ad on the basis of right-wing nut job input via traditional channels before discovering that viewers actually liked it. Imagine.

Some of the uses of buzz measurements:

• Track technology trends
• Anticipate lifestyle trends
• Track interest in new products
• Gauge responses to social media-styled content placed online
• Track the effect of advertising

The most interesting development, though of questionable use on a per-company basis, is Floodgate, a Google Earth of blogging, which creates a constellation of thoughts and desires, clustered by themes, that allows the user to click on a star of output and see the full post.

Interesting, I suppose, but if every member of the chattering masses takes charge of marketing, who will be left to advertise to? And for the record, I still tend to get a hell of a lot out of focus groups, providing they’re done well.

The term “social media” has been in the modern marketing lexicon for a little over two years, with what I would deem an explosion of sorts over the last year. During this period, many of the old guard media - particularly in the newspaper industry - have been loathe to change their ways, and as a result have suffered drops in readership and advertising dollars, as well as the slings and arrows of the blogosphere. Bloggers and podcasters have leveraged the low barrier to entry with current technology and have created mini media empires of their own, in some cases completely outpacing Old Media.

But the behemoths have begun to realize that this shift in communications is not simply a blip on the radar, but a sea change in how readers gather and disseminate information. An early adopter of this mantra was Washingtonpost.com, which incorporated Digg links in September 2005.

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I recently participated in a measurement panel discussion and it reminded me of the unique measurement needs of BtoB marketers. All marketers need to measure their campaigns for two important reasons:

1. To measure effectiveness
2. Communicate internally

Measure Effectiveness
Good measures of effectiveness use relevant comparisons to tell marketers when their dollars are well spent. Many marketers start by looking at broad-based tactical benchmarks; banner click-through rates, email campaign interaction rates, rich media interaction rates, etc… They then gauge their campaign’s success in comparison to those benchmarks. The problem with this approach is that benchmarks are based on BtoC campaigns and/or aren’t always relevant to your business goals.

An awareness campaign, for example, may employ a banner campaign that achieves a 4% click-through rate. In comparison to the industry benchmark (.25%), the CTR is considered phenomenal and worth a case study in Marketing Sherpa. The problem is that the high CTR doesn’t have any relationship to the campaign goal: increase awareness by 7%. Industry benchmarks are a place to start, but marketers need to establish benchmarks that are relevant to:

• Audience - Who are you trying to reach? CXO’s behave differently and respond to different messaging than managers.
• Call to Action - What action do you want them to take? The effectiveness of “Learn more”, “enter to win”, “get involved with the conversation” are measured differently.
• Products and Services - What are you selling? Software is sold differently than hardware. Medical services are promoted differently than medical equipment.
• Channels - Where are you reaching your prospect? The proliferation of channels means that you need to know where and when to present your message. The objective is to meet people where they’re most ready to hear your message.
• Costs - How much does it cost to get a lead or create a conversion? A conversion may be things like downloading a white paper, watching a video, registering for a demo. How much does it cost to stimulate a given conversion?
• Sales process - How do people make a purchase decision? The sales process tends to be long in BtoB and there are a lot of touch points. There a lot of opportunities to connect with prospects during awareness, consideration, and purchase.

Measurement benchmarks are meaningful when they’re tied to the program strategy and campaign goals. For example, a media plan that supports an awareness campaign may include print advertising, banner advertising, and an eMail campaign that all drive users to a landing page to download a white paper. The primary measure of success on this campaign will be pre- and post-benchmark surveys that segment the audience. Secondary measures, however, will look at how each channel is performing against the stated Call to Action.

Communicate Internally
The second objective of measurement and reporting is to communicate internally. Effectively communicating the impact of a campaign requires an integrated, 360 degree view of the campaign in the context of each group’s business needs. The executive team wants to know how a campaign is impacting sales, the marketing team wants to know if it’s reaching the right channels, the agency wants to know how best to optimize the program, the interactive team wants to know where they can optimize the user experience. Marketing campaign dashboards should strive to consolidate all this information and highlight a key performance indicator that answers the audience’s question: is the campaign achieving my goal and is there anything we should do to improve it?

For the people reporting on a campaign a lot of vital information is locked inside CRM systems, telemarketing reports, sales figures, and past performance numbers. Those data are an important dimension of a campaign report and its ability to communicate the importance of marketing.

Marketing reports that communicate the importance of marketing start with a commitment to measuring and reporting on a clearly defined, relevant set of Key Performance Indicators. The time spent up front defining KPI’s that reflect the strategy, goals, data sources, and audiences is well spent.

More to come…