Persuasion is a fickle beast. Sometimes its easy, sometimes not so much.
In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Professor Robert B. Cialdini lists six principles that form the bedrock of the art of persuasion.
When we assist new entrepreneurs working on their first businesses, we get copious amounts of questions about marketing and branding. One I want to zero in on is, “What is the connection between marketing and branding?”
According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, “Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements at a profit.”
Marketing can be broken down into three steps:
Segmentation – identifying groups of people with similar needs
Targeting – choosing which groups to focus your business efforts on
Positioning – aligning your business to meet the needs of the groups you have chosen.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and the Tipping Point, among other great books, shares a wonderful story about how a psychophysicist by the name of Howard Moskowitz changed marketing forever in the US food industry.
Before Howard, there was the perception that there was a “best” version of every food; a best slice of pizza, a best chocolate ice cream. However, through his work with Pepsi and Campbell’s Soup, Howard discovered that there is no “best.” Instead, there are different “bests” to different people.
From this we get clustering – where we create groups based on similar likes and needs. This allowed for what everyone in marketing takes for granted today: segmentation. Without segmentation, effective targeting and positioning would be like trying to navigate a 1600’s era ship without a compass on a foggy day – you simply don’t know what you are aiming for.
Thanks to Howard, we know who to look for, but what about branding…
There is a common saying that your brand is the personality of your business. Stephanie Burns, CEO of Chic CEO, takes this a step further, saying, “I look at it as a marriage between a personality (the initial attraction) and creating a relationship (what keeps us in love).”
This makes sense. People are naturally drawn to personalities they like, be it a person or a company, but what makes it last is the quality of the relationship. Stephanie points out that showing your imperfections and creating traditions are wonderful ways to create lasting relationships. This is because they add dynamism to what is too often a flat interaction, or no interaction at all. Furthermore, this builds trust. A good brand will be recognised for certain qualities that customers can count on finding in all offerings. This creates a positive feeling of familiarity, which in turn cultivates trust.
So what is the connection between marketing and branding? In a nutshell, branding is the part of marketing that is focused on making your business appealing to your target segment through showing your personality, creating great relationships, and building trust with them.
Insight and creativity can be hard to summon on demand, especially in marketing and advertising. That is why there are entire businesses built around doing just that. But how can we find more of both with the same tools we have at hand?
In my last post I mentioned the effect that calligraphy had on Steve Jobs, and consequently computers. Calligraphy and computers… doesn’t sound too complimentary. Or are they?
As a student of history, I loved the wide range of subjects that were embedded in my studies. Politics, economics, psychology, leadership, art, culture, geography, business, law – all were woven together to paint a holistic picture of how events unfolded over the course of time.
This interweaving of subjects is known as cross disciplinary learning, defined as involving two or more academic disciplines. Allow me to share an example of cross disciplinary learning done right, and hopefully provide some interesting points on marketing.
Dan Cobley, former marketing director at Google, gave a brilliant talk about how he learned key truths in marketing from the most unlikely of places, physics. Let’s look at three of his main points.
Insight 1
Physics: The bigger an object is, the more it takes to move it.
Marketing: The bigger a brand, the more it takes to reposition it.
Takeaway: Keep your brands specific to your target audience. This is why large organisations will keep many smaller brands for their various products and offerings. Think Unilever, Coca-Cola, or Procter and Gamble.
Insight 2
Physics: It is impossible to measure a particle, for the very act of measuring has an influence on it.
Marketing: Measuring consumers changes the way they behave.
Takeaway: Measure what people do, not what they say they do. This is why online data is so powerful, it tracks what people are doing, what people say they are doing (online), and can tell the difference.
Insight 3
Physics: You cannot prove a hypothesis, you can only disprove it.
Marketing: You can invest a lot of time and money in a brand, but one stumble can crush it.
Takeaway: Be vigilant in avoiding those big mess-ups. Warren Buffet said the number one rule in investing is never lose money, and rule number two is don’t break rule one. In investing you can lose in a moment what took years to build. The same is true for trust in brands.
So, to generate some insight and creativity, connect what you previously hadn’t bothered to connect. Look at some of your areas of interest. What topics seemed too unrelated to even consider pairing together. Perhaps there are gems of creativity and insight waiting to be discovered.
Link to Dan’s TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_cobley_what_physics_taught_me_about_marketing
Entrepreneurial ventures are rarely completely funded out of one’s own pocket. Entrepreneurs are increasingly looking to crowdfunding platforms to to raise the money they need to fund their new products. If you are considering this route, take a look at our list of six top tactics to ensure crowdfunding success:
1. Live, eat and breathe your story
You should be the one person who knows your campaign inside out. Ask yourself what, how and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and be prepared to communicate that repeatedly over a period lasting several months. Positivity, passion and commitment are infectious, so put on a brave face when the going gets tough and you’re more likely to reap the rewards.
2. Know your audience
Whatever you’re raising funds for, you’ll need to understand who will be funding you and their motivations for doing so. A successful campaign depends on these individuals, so nurture your relationship with them. Conducting market research will be imperative to your understanding of your customer, in addition to the ways in which you communicate your offering to them.
3. Reach out
What’s the use of starting a campaign if nobody else knows about it? Reaching out to your audience and potential backers means creating a communications strategy that covers the time periods before, during and after your campaign. Get in touch with everyone and their mother, asking them to share your journey with their own networks as well. Market research should help you decide the best channels to reach your customer segments and communications should be tailored to their interests.
4. Take it offline, too
Whilst crowdfunding can seem like an online venture a lot of the time, offline promotion is equally important in getting your message across. Utilise community groups and consider hosting an event: some campaigners hosting a launch party have got as much as half of their total funding in a single evening!
Be clear on what each piece of communication is trying to achieve, and deliver it with your signature passion and devotion.
5. Create value for funders
The ‘rewards’ feature of crowdfunding sites is an excellent way of creating an ‘exchange’ rather than promoting a purely charitable relationship. Scott Steinberg suggests in The Crowdfunding Bible that incentivising donations by giving funders something attractive, accessible and tangible increases your chances of hitting your target dramatically. Of course, always keep your rewards in line with your budget.
6. Never give up, even if you don’t reach your target
A failed crowdfunding campaign doesn’t necessarily equate to a failed offering or product. Could you have had a more thought-out communication strategy? Were your timings wrong? Was your target too ambitious? Know that if you believe in your story and commit to its success, you will yield results in the long run.
Crowdfunding can be an excellent tool that not only raises funds for your venture, but lifts your brand and enhances your customer relationships for the future.
Photo by Simon Cunningham Flickr/CC/ BY 2.0
Segmenting customer groups in real time is the Holy Grail for marketers. “Every brand wants fast segmentation, the ability to get to consumers in real time, or even to be predictive of what they’re doing next,” commented Shenan Reed, president of digital at media planning agency MEC Global, at this year’s SXSW festival.
Bill Clifford, chief revenue officer at Boston-based mobile marketing agency SessionM, described a future where close-to-real-time segmentation is a reality. Many brands may have data dumps of current consumer information or historical data that isn’t being used in any meaningful way, which they try to harvest for a specific campaign months in advance. In contrast to this slow, outdated model, SessionM’s mission is “to take that down to [a matter of] hours, so segmentation is always happening as consumer behaviour changes”.
What does real-time segmentation look like in practice? For Clifford, it comes down to identifying mobile moments. “[Brands need to understand] what the consumer is doing in that moment,” he explained. “Most people are in entertainment or utility mode. Put fun in front of them when they’re looking for something specific? That’s going to go wrong. Context is really important.”
For brands to understand context, they need to be harvesting data. Reed pointed to US sports clothing brand Under Armour as a brand that builds customer insight around multiple data touchpoints. Thanks to its acquisition of fitness apps Endomondo and MyFitnessPal in 2015, “they know where I’m going, what city I’m in, how many times I’m going to the gym”, said Reed. “The data they’re capturing is interesting – how can I tap into this understanding of human behaviour and use that?”
Under Armour is currently looking beyond apps to connected clothing to make it much easier for consumers to capture performance data.
Close to two-thirds of US adults are now gamers (Nielsen, 2015) – a finding shared by Peter Jonas at this year’s film music and technology festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas (March 11-20). The head of North American games and mobile app sales at Facebook told us the reason the number is so high is because it includes casual mobile gamers, who would not consider themselves to be in the same category as hardcore console players.
The number-one game genre on Facebook is slot machine games played by “mobile whales” (big spenders in-app) – of whom 73% are married with children. “Would these people identify themselves as gamers before they identify as parents, friends, executives?” asked Jonas. “The answer is no. [As a brand], are you breaking out of the stereotypes?”
Kym Nelson, senior vice-president of sales at live-streaming platform Twitch, agreed that games continue to offer huge opportunities for marketers: “[There are] 146 million women in the US who play casual games,” for example. And while mobile gaming is on the rise, it’s not cannibalising traditional console gaming: two out of three console gamers also play on mobile.
As an example of what’s possible when advertising and gaming meet, Nelson talked through the Chappie Challenge, a Twitch campaign promoting Sony’s sci-fi movie Chappie. Over a six-week period, Twitch players were able to challenge the eponymous robot to the game Evolve, with the chance to win $15,000 in prizes. The result was more than one million streams of Chappie content, 24 million impressions, and “incredible chat interaction and engagement” on Twitch.
Utility is the key for marketers when it comes to engaging gamers, according to Nelson: “Brands need to think about what value they’re offering the user playing the game.” She pointed to Covet Fashion, a fashion app that currently boasts more than three million users, as an example of a perfect symbiotic relationship between game and brand, as users “click to buy as they play the game”.
I recently read an article in HBR about how storytelling is a great way to explain a business’s purpose. I couldn’t agree more.
To me, purpose is about understanding and aligning a business’s values (who you are and what you stand for) and value (what you do and how it benefits others).
To activate purpose, you need to set a narrative. As with any good story, you need a beginning, middle and end.
1. Beginning
You need to tell a personal narrative, focusing on real events in the founder’s life and explaining how these incidents established the personal values that will later link to the values of the organisation.
2. Middle
You then need to connect these values with broader shared values of the audience, clients and employees. You can aim to do this through sharing values, experiences, hopes and aspirations. By doing so, you can create a common narrative.
3. End
Once a connection has been established, you then need an urgent call to action for those who want to share the business’s purpose.
A great example of activating purpose can be seen with Kickstarter. They use storytelling as an impactful way of asking people to join their team. Their narrative begins with the founder telling the story of the company. Their website then includes pictures and short descriptions of each company employee. Finally, the narrative finishes with a call to action, asking the reader “Love Kickstarter? You’ll fit right in.”
Although the process of storytelling can seem daunting, it’s a powerful tool that builds passion, motivation and buy-in for the stakeholders of any organisation.
Image: FlickrCC/BY/2.0 Jim Penucci
Ghost writers are essentially writers for hire. They are paid by the named author to write copy but take no credit for the work produced. Books, blogs and social media are all examples of platforms that a ghost writer may be hired to write high quality copy for. According to Ebyline, 80% of published books are ghost written.
As the Washington Post reminds us, ghostwriters have channeled the thoughts of politicians, celebrities and business leaders with little or no credit since the 17th century. Those who hire a ghost writer usually do so because they have neither the time or desire to write. It’s a ghostwriters role to help them convey both the meaning and message of whatever subject is of importance to them.
However, a reader must be convinced that the author has written the copy themselves. Failure to capture the persona effectively can be damaging to the author’s career. Vlogger Zoella’s book ‘Girl Online’ presents as perfect example of ghost writing gone wrong. After failing to capture Zoella’s online identity, readers and journalists hounded the Vlogger on Twitter until she eventually admitted to using a ghost-writer. The scandal forced her to ‘quit the internet’ leaving her 4 million followers behind.
Here are my three tips for successfully ghost writing an online persona:
Who are you writing about?
One of my authors, “X”, is a very successful 62 year old male entrepreneur. I am a 21 year old female graduate who loves a good use of an emoji. Needless to say we have completely different interest, opinions and ways of expressing our thoughts. Understanding the author’s tone of voice is crucial at this stage. If possible, ask to spend time in a meeting where the author will be talking and engaging with others. From this you can begin to analyse their sentence structure, thought processes and expressions.
Understand the purpose.
Whether you’re writing a book, blog or speech you must understand the purpose of the project. For “X” the purpose was to raise the entrepreneur’s profile in order to become a thought leader. For this to be successful, there should always be at least 3 main topics to write around. We sat down with “X” and entrepreneurship, leadership and growth were the topics that were most suitable. I have the general knowledge to write across these three topics, but general knowledge will not convey the appeal of a thought leader. I had to immerse myself in the world of entrepreneurship, leadership and growth in order to not only report on news, but to also have a strategic point of view.
Keep testing.
On a visit to “X’s” offices we had overheard his staff talking about their boss’ great new social media page, that was the moment I realised that I had the tone of voice and topics right. People who interact with “X” all day were not aware that a ghost writer was responsible for the content or activity. It wasn’t an overnight process, we went through vigorous trial and error testing for content, sentence structure and opinion.
The real reward for ghost writers comes in the form of successfully remaining unknown to readers.
Image: Flickr CC/BY/2.0 JulienDft_Photo
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