Making Marketing Happen Blog

Did you realize that Brand Ambassadors are working at your company? In fact, it’s filled with them. While no one at your business may hold that specific job title, every employee holds that role. The responsibilities associated with being a Brand Ambassador are unlikely to be listed in many, if any, job descriptions. Yet willingly or unwillingly, you and your colleagues have implicitly taken them on.

When you hear the phrase “Brand Ambassadors,” you may think of a celebrity who become the advertising face of a company, such as Mariah Carey for Jenny Craig, or Ashton Kutcher for Nikon. Or, perhaps you think of the marketing and sales people whose job it is to promote the company’s brand through campaigns they deploy and the interactions they have with customers. Either way, you are right. But these people are not the only Brand Ambassadors that a company has.

In this era of social media, people throughout a business are promoting their companies’ brands in ways they may not realize. Employees who are tweeting and blogging about company happenings are de facto spokespeople. The way that people represent themselves on Facebook, especially if they post about work, influences how their Facebook friends view their employers. Merely listing a company on a LinkedIn profile has an impact. Fairly or unfairly, the public’s perceptions about businesses’ brands are influenced by these mediums.

Brand perceptions are also shaped by every day interactions that happen between employees and people outside the company. What they say, the tone they use to say it, how responsive they are and the quality of attention they give to customers all impact brand perception. If a customer service representative is not helpful enough, the brand is tarnished. If a delivery person driving a truck with a company’s logo on it cuts someone off, the brand is tarnished. If a CEO falsifies his resume, the brand of the company that hired him is tarnished.

A brand’s perception has an endless number of vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s important to train your employees so that they understand the role of Brand Ambassador.

Hold a formal brand training class. Educate all employees that they need to embody the brand that they are representing. Make sure everyone internalizes what the brand stands for, including the brand promise, its essence and the benefits that it strives to deliver. Share email and phone protocols with them. Have them acknowledge that when they are wearing company logoed apparel, they are walking billboards for the company and that they shouldn’t act in a way that will damage the brand. Encourage them to embrace the role of Brand Ambassador and to travel wisely.

Pinterest, the visual pinboard site, is all the buzz these days. This online platform  that enables self-expression through images is clearly in sync with today’s zeitgeist. Millions of users are active on Pinterest, “pinning” images that have meaning to them on virtual bulletin boards for others to view, repin, like and comment on. The momentum behind this invite-only community continues to build. Marketers need to become familiar with Pinterest and evaluate whether to incorporate it into their marketing strategy.

Based on Pinterest’s current popularity trajectory, after the beta period ends it’s likely to become one of the premier social media services. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” Given that we live in a consumerism society, the “things” that people find interesting and post on their boards are often products that they have bought or would like to buy.

Users pin images that they respond positively to from websites or upload photos they’ve taken. Anyone who spends time on Pinterest will notice that lots of the images come from online clothing stores, shoe stores, home stores and other retail sites. That’s largely because Pinterest is very popular with women, who make up 58% of its user base, with 59% being between the ages of 25 and 44 years old.

Pinterest has become one of the top referral sites for Etsy.com and other apparel retailers. But, don’t get the impression that it’s a place where just food, clothing, animal, home improvement and child images are shared. It’s much more than diverse that. All sorts of images can be found on Pinterest. In fact, many professional sports teams  are either evaluating or getting active on Pinterest. The Pittsburgh Penguins and New York Giants are among the early adopters. Pinterest is clearly a work in progress, with the public still in the early stages of figuring out how they want to incorporate the site into their social media activities.

Marketers need to be attuned to Pinterest. Spend time checking out peoples’ boards to get a feel for the site, if you haven’t done so already. If the site resonates with you personally, submit a request to join, which will likely be accepted within a few days, or have a friend who’s on it invite you.

Next you should evaluate whether Pinterest is right for you company’s brand. If you feel that it is, think through very carefully how to go about participating in Pinterest. An overt sales approach that makes your boards mere extension of your e-commerce site may not be a successful strategy. The site is a medium for self-expression through images and you want the tone of your boards to be in sync with that spirit.

Here are some suggestions that marketers should consider when building a Pinterest strategy:

Make Your Company Website “Pinable” –  Your company wants to have its website’s images shared on Pinterest. To enable that to happen, you need to make sure that the images are your company’s website are in the correct format so that they can easily be pinned. Pin-friendly formats include .jpgs, .pngs and .gifs. Then test out how they look. If you’ve joined Pinterest, try pinning some of your images onto your boards to see if you are happy with them.

As a Pinterest user myself, I was surprised when I tried to post an image of a product a like from a food company’s website and I couldn’t! The image was imbedded in the web template, which made it unpinable! Big mistake on their part – it may have cost them web traffic that would have come from visitors to my Pinterest page. Opportunity missed.

Add “Pin It” to Your Website – If your company has an e-commerce site, it is probably chalk full of  images of the products for sale. Place a “Pin It” button on each product page, as you would a Twitter or Facebook Like button, to make it easy for shoppers to add the product images they like onto their Pinterest boards.

Regularly Review Your Web Analytics - Pinterest can be a source of traffic to your company’s website and of new customers. The images that people pin from your website can be viewed by other Pinterest users and when the image is clicked on, they are taken to your company’s site. New visitors mean more awareness, which could turn into more customers.

There isn’t much publicly available data yet about conversion rates, so  I can’t cite stats about sales revenue driven by Pinterest. But without a doubt, it does fuel website traffic. And traffic is key, because no one is going to buy from your website if they don’t know it exists.

When you review your site’s web analytics, monitor the referral sources to see if Pinterest is one of them. If it currently is or becomes one, identify the images people are attracted to and then create additional images in the same genre to raise the probability that more of your content will be pinned. Read this Mashable article to get tips on how to track traffic coming from Pinterest.

Create Pinterest Boards for Your Brand – If you feel that Pinterest is the right place to promote your company, then set up a page. Be clever about the boards you create. Don’t just build boards that show the products your company sells. Think about other ways to express your brand. Consider building boards that showcase how customers are using your products in their daily lives. Also, consider building boards with images that evoke your brand’s promise. For example, if your brand promise is to help people live a healthier life, create a board that has images of people who are engaged in healthy activities, such as being outdoors, hiking, exercising and eating nutritional foods.

Get Pinterest Users to Participate - Brainstorm about ways that you can incorporate Pinterest into your marketing initiatives. Does your company have a product in development? Is it highly visual? Could you use input on some aspect of it? Then post some photos of it and ask for people to like, repin or comment on the one that they prefer. How about holding a contest? You could ask customers to photograph themselves with the product they’ve bought from your company and then award the person whose photo get the most repins.

Be creative. Have fun with it. Like most things in life, Pinterest is what you make of it.

The previous post discussed how marketing campaigns that are inspired by company visions are not prevalent these days. A company vision is a business’ forward-thinking declaration of its aspirations for the future.

“Promote Your Company Vision – Part I” provided tips for how to market your company vision as a means of promoting your brand, attracting and retaining customers and differentiating your business. Here are two more marketing tips:

Bring It to Life

The saying “a pictures is worth a thousand words” conveys the notion that complex ideas can be conveyed more easily with images. That adage definitely applies to company visions. Video is a fantastic tool to use for this purpose.

Videos are less expensive to produce than they use to be. They are easily to distribute via YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing platforms and they go viral faster than most any other medium. Why not create a company video that captures your company’s vision for the future?

Interviews are one approach to take. You can film executives sharing how the company vision guides their business decisions. You can also feature employees discussing how they are personally inspired by the vision.

Some corporations have the financial ability to produce high-end films that portray a world in which the companies’ visions have become a reality. Here are two superb examples of company visions brought to life via videos.

The first is by Corning, the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. It is called “A Day Made of Glass.”

The second video campaign is by Honda. It consists of a series of short documentaries titled “Dream the Impossible.” This dream-based thematic complements Honda’s current vision-inspired tagline, “Powered by Dreams.”

Talk About It

Your company has a vision for a better future that it wants to help shape. Get out and tell the world about it! Does your business have an evangelist or executive on staff whose job it is to share this message? Have him/her blog and tweet in support of the vision. Create a speaker series and arrange for executives or evangelists to give lectures or participate on panels about relevant topics.

Are there other experts in the market whose research or interests support your company’s vision? Hold a series of webcasts or in-person events featuring these subject matter experts. Record the talks and then package them as podcasts. Put the podcasts on your website and market them to existing and prospective customers.

Actively promoting your business’ vision will give the public greater insight into the essence of your company. People who find your company vision compelling will have another reason to believe in your brand and become loyal customers.

A company vision sets a business apart from all others. What is a company vision? It is a business’ forward-thinking declaration of its aspirations for the future. It is the image it has of its goals before plans are laid out for how to achieve them. Company visions often are a declaration of a business’ desire to innovate and change its market for the better.

The vision is also a foundational component of a company’s brand. The most compelling ones inspire employees and endure as a business grows. Yet, many businesses don’t actively communicate their visions. Companies that don’t promote their visions are missing a marketing opportunity.

Why do it? A business that actively promotes its vision is positioning itself as a thought leader and innovator in its market. Touting its vision is also a great way for a business to differentiate itself from it competition.

If a company doesn’t have one, it should write a vision statement. Once that is done, it is time to share it with the world. The following are suggestions of ways that a company can market its corporate vision.

Unbury It

Many businesses have their company vision statements listed on their websites. But the statements are usually buried somewhere deep in the site’s “About” or “Company” sections. Liberate your vision statement! Highlight it in appropriately-placed callout boxes. Or go for the gusto and place the vision on the home page so that every visitor can easily grasp the business’ reason for being.

Does your company produce an annual report? Incorporate the vision into the CEO’s letter to shareholders. Have executives discuss it at the annual shareholder meeting. If your company publishes a newsletter, include mention of the vision in it. As progress is made, write articles and updates about it.

Incorporate It into Your Tagline

A tagline is a means of communicating a brand-based message. It should be changed over time as a business evolves. Taglines are another way to promote a company’s vision. This strategy is especially appropriate if a company’s marketing objective is to establish itself as the thought leader in its category.

Some examples of past and present vision-inspired taglines are: “Think Different” (Apple), “Imagination at Work” (General Electric), “The World’s Networking Company” (AT&T), “The Power of Dreams,” (Honda) “The Next Stage” (Wells Fargo) and “The Power of Human Energy” (Chevron). Can you think of others?

The next post will provide additional ways for companies to promote their unique visions.

The popular wisdom among many marketers has been that consumers want a sense of control over the brands they use. Brands are getting on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms partly to provide customers with that capability.

But hold on! A new report by Razorfish that looked at how consumers want to interact with brands finds that control is actually the least important of six Engagement Elements. What do consumers want most from their engagement with brands? They want to feel valued.

The study, titled Liminal, was designed to define brand engagement from the consumer’s, not the marketer’s, point of view. Through its research, Razorfish discovered that “consumers’ six Engagement Elements – the needs they have when they interact with a brand – are feeling Valued, Trust, Efficiency, Consistency, Relevance and Control.”

Feeling valued, trust and efficiency were the top three brand engagement priorities across all consumer segments. Consistency, relevance and control ranked at the bottom.

This study also looked at the channels that are the most important and the least important for consumers when it comes to engaging with brands and which channels did the best job and the worst job at meeting consumers’ brand engagement expectations.

The findings are that “the most important consumer engagement channels are transactional email, company websites, traditional word-of-mouth and face-to-face conversation with a company representative.”

What channels do consumers regard as the lowest in importance? According to the study “social networking services were the least important, be it LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or the even newer location-based social networking services”

Moreover, “the least frequent actions taken on individual channels were participating in a company community site, looking up a company on YouTube, posting a review, reading or participating in a company community site and sending an email to a company. Twitter and Facebook didn’t even make it into the top nine in terms of importance or frequency of use.” Surprised?

When it comes to meeting expectations, consumers felt that the channels that did the poorest job of meeting their brand engagement expectations were postal mail, print ads, mobile applications and real-time chat with customer service representatives.

Now, what are marketers to do with these provocative findings? First off, conduct an assessment of all of your company’s customer contact points. How do they measure up against the six Engagement Elements? Are your external interactions designed to evoke feelings of value, trust and efficiency in your prospects, installed base and partners? If not, improve existing processes. Focus on personalization. Modify call center scripts. Write new website text. Revise your salesperson training. Further customize the emails and direct mail that you send out.

Are you missing opportunities to provide positive brand engagement? Brainstorm and implement new ways to interact with your customers that deliver a respectful, highly responsive and efficient experience.

Even though social media ranked low as a preferred channel, stay with it. Use the six Engagement Elements as a litmus test for your social media initiatives. Implement changes that make your brand seem more attentive and responsive to customers.

Creating brand affinity and loyalty is a critical imperative for marketers because strong brands enjoy dedicated customers, repeat sales and competitive barriers. Take the insights that this study provides and use them to advance your brand building efforts.

The dust is now settling on the Gap re-branding fiasco. The classic Gap logo has been reinstated on the company’s website and shoppers need not update their collections of Gap branded t-shirts and sweatshirts. Now that a few days have passed, let’s consider some of the marketing lessons that can be learned from Gap’s logo blunder.

1. The adage that “all publicity is good publicity” is well known. But does this episode support or refute it? This marketing scandal got peoples’ attention around the world and put Gap’s brand front and center in their minds. Yes, that’s certainly a benefit of free publicity. However, the public’s ridicule of the new visual identity and Gap management’s misguided handling of the launch backlash damaged the company’s brand image. They did recover somewhat by listening to customers and reinstating the classic blue icon. Still, jokes continue to appear on the internet about the Gap brand snafu. It is too soon to tell whether this will all quickly be forgotten. Even so, I posit that, when a company claiming to want to make its brand “more relevant to our customers” misses so badly that its solution is resoundingly rejected by the public, the fallout is not good publicity.

2. Whether you are launching a refreshed brand, introducing a new product, or kicking off another type of marketing campaign, always have a “worst case scenario” plan developed just in case things go awry. Gap clearly didn’t. When the controversy broke, first the company’s management responded by saying that “we love our version.” Soon after they announced they were going to do crowd sourcing and invite new design ideas. Then they turned around and declared that the previous logo would be reinstated.

Their behavior seemed highly reactionary, indecisive, frazzled and fickle. Such erratic actions cause customers to wonder about the quality of the company’s management, which in turn can make them question the quality of the business’ products. Don’t make the same mistake. Use your back pocket and have a backup plan in it.

3. If you are going to re-brand an company that has been in business for many years, tell someone that you are doing it. Issue a press release. Post on Facebook or tweet about it. Don’t just put a new logo up on a website and see what happens. It may not go well. In Gap’s case, it went horribly. Customers don’t want surprises. They want to understand the rationale for the change. They are invested in the brand and should be brought into the conversation so they can buy into and embrace the brand’s evolution.

4. Customers want their opinions heard. The Gap episode made that crystal clear. Brand marketers should regard themselves as curators for their brands, not their brands’ outright owners. Even if you work at a small or mid-sized company, when you re-brand, let your customers know that you value their input. If they have passion for your brand, they will want their voices to be heard.

When you develop a new logo as part of a brand identity update, solicit customer feedback long before the final selection is made. Use a social media platform to share the logo finalists with your customers. (Gap would have been wise to have done this.) Ask your customers to vote on their favorite design. When the voting is over, tell them which visual identity was selected, even if it was not the top vote-getter, and the reasons why it was chosen. You’ll learn a lot from your customers along the way and they’ll likely feel even more loyalty for your brand for having been asked.

These are some of the lessons learned from the Gap-lash episode. What other takeaways do you have?

Have you heard? Last week Gap Inc. quietly debuted a new logo for its leading store brand. But these days, with the internet bully pulpit available to all, changes as significant as that one don’t stay quiet for long. Gap customers took a look and the resulting outcry echoed across Facebook, Twitter and beyond.

The posts on Gap’s Facebook page make it clear that people did not like the “updated” interpretation of the Gap logo. A classic, international icon had been desecrated and the public let management know it.

What happened next? Close to end of business today, the Gap did an about face and announced that it is keeping its 20+ year old iconic brand, as is. The customer spoke loudly and the company listened. Bravo to the Gap for being responsive to its customers. Some people accused Gap of engineering a publicity stunt. We’re assuming that what transpired was a gaffe and not ploy. So, what could have been done to avoid this episode, which is all too reminiscent of the New Coke debacle?

This post is not about whether the new, but soon-to-be-history, logo was brilliantly designed, or whether it was something that any of us could create in PowerPoint using Helvetica font in less than five minutes. Instead, it’s about the realities of brand management today and how Gap’s team could have made the logo project a positive experience for the company and its customers.

This episode confirms that brands matter to people. Brands are intangibles that live in customers’ minds. Consumers are very passionate about brands whose promises they believe in and they can feel a sense of ownership for those brands.

Gap’s actions show that their team hadn’t fully realized that brand management today is about consumer engagement and participation. The days of one way communication are over for established brands. By changing the Gap logo and then unveiling it to the public, Gap’s one way communication path ran straight into a brick wall. Then the internet amplified the negative response into a loud roar. The brand was tarnished and the company was scrambling.

Gap should have incorporated its customer network into the company’s internal logo discussion. It missed an opportunity to gain more evangelists by publicly soliciting customer input about the Gap’s updated logo concepts early on.

At last count, the Gap has 722,402 people liking it on Facebook and 35,618 following it on Twitter. The company should have used social media platforms to dialogue with its customers openly about its logo plans, and gained their feedback long before it was launched. Had they done so, Gap management would have had a better gauge of the public’s response and could have redirected, or aborted, the logo update process.

Brands are defined by how well a company responds to moments of truth. Gap just lived one of those moments. Consumers and their cash will determine how well Gap’s management handled this marketing mess.

Many small businesses have so much to do to keep their operations humming that before they know it a few years have gone by and their websites are out-of-date.

Whether the website’s content is stale, its navigation is clunky or its look and functionality are from before the social media era, the site is likely not helping the brand’s appeal and may even be tainting the company’s all-so-important first impression.

It’s true that refreshing a website can seem like a daunting undertaking. But don’t fall victim to website paralysis. Rest assured that a few straightforward preliminary steps can put the project on the right path.

Before beginning the search for a web agency, designer or developer, businesses should implement these five steps:

1. Print out every page from the existing website.

2. Read each page carefully. Highlight the text that is still current. Strike out the messaging that is no longer relevant. Identify the blocks of content that are missing.

Takeaway: This step provides an initial feel for the amount of new content and number of new pages that will be needed, as well as what should be eliminated.

3. Review the site’s web analytics reports. What pages are visitors viewing? How much time are they spending on each one? What critical content should they be reading that they are not? Is the site producing the desired conversion actions?

Takeaway: Determining what areas of the current site are appealing to visitors will help decide what sections to keep and expand upon and what sections to revise or retire.

4. Determine the business’ objectives for the website. Is it awareness? Lead generation? Closing sales? Or, is it some other type of conversion?

Takeaway: The refreshed site should be designed to meet the organization’s goals. Decide what those goals are before the project gets underway.

5. Select up to three audiences that the refreshed site will be targeting. Build a profile of those target segments, including age, gender, income levels, likes and dislikes and why they buy the product or service.

Takeaway: Design and develop the website with the target visitors in mind.  Craft messages that speak to their needs and interests and they are likely to want to learn more.

Once the five preliminary steps are completed, the organization will have assessed its current site and started scoping the new site. This information will be very helpful to use during the web developer vetting process. Now it’s time to contact those agencies.

The previous post highlighted how NOT to manage the email opt-out process. Yes, by law all companies are supposed to follow the CAN-SPAM rules. But that doesn’t mean that your business can’t try to win its email subscribers back.

Why not seize the opportunity and make the opt-out process a positive brand experience?  A company that does an excellent job of this is Groupon.

Groupon got creative. They make a clever attempt to retain the unsubscriber immediately after a person has clicked on the unsubscribe link. Groupon’s unsubscribe confirmation page reads “We’re sorry to see you go! How sorry? Well, we want to introduce you to Derrick – he’s the guy that thought you’d enjoy receiving the Daily Groupon email.” On the page the unsubscriber sees a video image and a button to click on that reads “Punish Derrick.”

When you click on it, you watch a short, funny video showing two employees supposedly squabbling about how you joined Groupon and then decided to leave. When the video ends you are asked if you “want to make it up to Derrick” and resubscribe.

I don’t know what Groupon’s resubscribe rate is, but the company seems to take life-cycle marketing really seriously. Or, someone with a good sense of humor came up with a clever idea and voila! Either way, Groupon’s marketers do a wonderful job of attempting to engage and retain their email subscribers, legally. See for yourself and then implement a re-subscribe appeal as part of your company’s email marketing campaigns. What do you have to lose?

Companies need to take the CAN-SPAM rules seriously.  If you’re not familiar with the law that governs email marketing, here is a summary of it. Back in 2003 Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act. It sets the standards for bulk emails and commercial messages.  The central provisions are that the sender must provide the recipient with instructions on how to opt out from future communications and needs to “honor opt-out requests promptly.” (The FTC’s words, not mine.)

Legitimate organizations that don’t follow these rules risk seriously tarnishing  perception of their brands. I should know. I experienced an opt-out mini-saga with the US’s leading marketing association and it definitely changed my view of that group.

I went through the marketing organization’s email unsubscribe process THREE times and each time the confirmation page said that I had been unsubscribed successfully! Still, the promotional emails kept coming! It was only after I sent multiple emails directly to the support department that I was finally removed from the email list.

This association exists solely to educate marketers. But, what do you know? It turns out that they neither follow the law, nor practice what they preach to their students. This “do as I say, not as I do” episode has forever damaged my affinity for this brand.  I won’t be signing up for any of their marketing courses, ever!

The takeaway? Companies need to regularly check that their email opt-out processes are working properly. Is the opt-out server integrated with the list server? Does a script run automatically that removes names from the master list or re-tags them properly?  Companies that manage the opt-out process manually should access the removal list and pull the addresses from the master distribution lists at least twice a week and more often if they are frequent emailers.

People who keep receiving unwanted emails get annoyed. The last thing a company wants is for these recipients to mark their emails as “spam”. That can lead to the company being blacklisted by ISPs, an outcome that gets complicated and ugly. So, follow the rules and you will make marketing happen!

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