The david ID blog

BMW has evolved its brand positioning.   In case you haven’t noticed their most recent advertising, the brand is now espousing the “Joy” that comes from owning and driving a BMW, while stepping away from the brand’s well known focus on driving power and performance, famously captured in the slogan “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”

As reported in the Wall Street Journal on 2/14,   according to Jack Pitney, vice president of marketing at BMW for North America, “the new ‘Joy’ campaign is a big departure for us . . . We hope to really add some humanity to our brand.”   BMW also hopes to show the diversity of its owners, including Moms, and its accessibility for everyone. 

We hope for the company’s sake that the shift to “At BMW, we don’t make cars, we make joy” is a temporary advertising maneuver intended to address the current economic climate in which consumers are more frugal and value conscious, and that they’ll eventually return to their roots – in a contemporary way.   After all, there are many ways to bring “The Ultimate Driving Machine” to life in advertising with modern relevance without having to go all the way to something as seemingly generic as “joy.”

There is hope.  BMW advertising still retains it’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” slogan in small type.

We want to thank Sterling Publishers in India for the honor of entering the Indian/Asian market– the biggest business book market in the world. The Asian edition will be titled:  The 8 Week Brand Secret: How to discover the Big Idea. Expect it out this spring.

It’s quite a day for a couple of itinerant brand gurus to get their book on a list on Amazon.com with the likes of the Brand Titans, David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins and Victor Schwab. But thanks to Diane Durante and her excellent blog, we did.  Diane is a copywriting expert and teacher www.versaquill.com who appreciated the “How-To” quality of our book Why Johnny Can’t Brand: Rediscovering the lost art of the Big Idea. And there’s more Why Johnny Can’t Brand news…

Seth Godin just wrote a post on ‘cliches’ which gets him into Micro-Script territory–our territory. See “How to Use Cliches” at http://sethgodin.typepad.com. True, many of what we call cliches are so tired, they don’t mean much any more and for a writer, they can just be lazy speech. The empty language ones that is. Like “Artsy-fartsy” and “it’s an ace in the hole.”

But clichés represent some of the most effective Micro-scripts of all time. A great many clichés are just a Micro-script invented somewhere in history that was so popular and true that it became a platitude. Anything can be a cliche, not just words. Like a famous historic site. The leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a travel cliche. But the reason it became one is that it is so incredible, everybody had to see it and tell others about it. Go see it if you think I’m wrong.

I say, a writer should be so great as to create phrases that are so succinct, memorable and repeatable, that they become clichés. Fact is, millions of people including you and me only know them because they’re brilliant. A lot were invented by wise men like Ben Franklin, Bill Shakespeare and the writers of the Bible. The good ones are often verbalized Rules of Thumb, a.k.a. mental heuristics to cope with everyday living. Parents teach them to us to install conventional wisdom. I taught them to my little kids because I want them to remember instantly: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Live and let live. No pain, no gain. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And how about this little cliche: Do unto others as you’d have others do to you. As one of the great Talmudic scholars said: “That’s the entire Bible in one sentence. All the rest is commentary.”

Pretty good one, huh. I’d like to be able to write cliches like that.

Much has been written and speculated about the crisis at Toyota due to its foot pedal malfunction, and its slow and underwhelming public response to the problem.

Despite the magnitude of the crisis, we suspect that Toyota will come out on top in the long run – stronger as a company and a brand. 

Here’s why:

1.  Although every company’s defective product crisis is different, just two years after it recalled 6.5 million tires, and was the poster child for crisis MIS-management, Bridgestone returned to profitability and infused its brand with renewed vitality.  

2.  While no one likes recalls, consumers know that they do happen to all automotive companies.    Toyota has built up enormous brand equity in the areas of quality and reliability.   While these equities will be temporarily strained, overtime, as the company reinvests in product quality and safety and marketing, they will return.  Consumers have short memories.

3.  Toyota has a huge war chest of $24 billion in cash.  Investing some of this back into product quality and image improvement marketing will go a long way. 

4.  The company is learning, albeit slowly, how to be more open and forthcoming with the public about its performance problems.   Although it hasn’t been easy for them, Toyota has learned the hard way how to admit errors, apologize and rectify the problem.

We keep reading that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is seeking new ways to get his minions back to the basics that made them great entrepreneurs once upon a time–before Starbucks got so big and mainstream, that it became ‘the man.’ It’s not news that Starbucks has had its share of business and brand setbacks in the past few years. And it can no longer be entirely blamed on the bad economy that’s forced the closings of a few stores. Starbucks should have been realizing that a brand essentially built by performance and thus Word of Mouth, not big advertising, would be dismantled by Word of Mouth if they ever started doing things like making Lattes by machine (ohmygawd, like Dunkin Donuts). Which they started doing. Still for $4 bucks a pop.

So now three years after we made a speech at Starbucks world headquarters based on our book Why Johnny Can’t Brand–essentially to tell them “now that you’ve built one of the modern era’s legendary brands, the hard part is staying there. Look to the truly great brands that have lasted for 70 or 80 years– you need to at least understand what they did to stay on top for so long.”

What we wanted to tell them is what Howard Schultz is telling them: You need to get your hungry entrepreneur’s spirit back. You’ve got to think and act like a challenger again– wanting to change the game, make a big difference with the fewest resources, damn the torpedoes. Change the world, change the game.

At David ID we’ve always defined our mission as finding Dominant Identity for Challenger Brands. We’ve always reminded our clients, even the ones that are global corporations–that the greatest, longest lasting brands never stop seeing themselves as challengers do.

We’re glad Mr. Schultz is finally listening.

The cynical old ad agency joke goes– “what’s the difference between sales and marketing people? Marketing people know they’re lying.”

There’s always been a disconnect at best and a battle at worst between sales and marketing in business organizations. And the inevitable result has been silos, frustratration, distrust and at the end of it all–serious loss of effectiveness. Marketers’ brilliant minds create positioning, strategy and value propositions which somehow fail to be transmitted to sales people in the field. Sales people go around spraying and praying, missing Marketing’s vital message.

We’re finding that the simple exercise of crafting your messages into Micro-Scripts using the creativity  to concentrate your entire selling message into a sentence or less that any person can easily repeat–not only forces you to stay focused on a crystal clear strategy, it becomes a magic bridge that keeps marketing and sales connected like never before.

You’ll find it’s automatic, once you start aiming beyond the strategy statement to the Micro-Script that’s going to make it go viral in your marketplace because now anyone can talk about it. When you understand that in any strategy exercise, your real end game is an actual vivid set of words that can verbalize it into a Word of Mouth exchange across the backyard fence; when you realize that if you can’t make it that simple and compelling, then your strategy’s not simple and compelling enough yet–you’ll be developing marketing that infuses the sales force along with your customer base. And just as important, the sales force will be coming back to you with more astute insights for your marketing.

Micro-Scripts are turning out to be a focuser of everything they touch in the communications process. They force your message to get on track and stay there like few other tools we’ve ever found.

Loyalty to brands has been badly eroded by the recession. And some fear that there is no going back.

In category after category, customers have been forced to abandon habitual buying patterns to seek new alternatives. When they did, they discovered that the alternatives were much better than they thought. According to a recent Mckinsey study, 46% of customers who tried a cheaper product said they performed better than expected with a large majority of them saying it was “much better than expected” (see How the recession has changed US consumer behavior).  Empowered by social media tools,  this army of satisfied customers is spreading the word that these cheaper choices are just as good as the better known brands, further accelerating the shift in customer loyalty .

And this decline in brand loyalty is not a new phenomenon. Forrester has been tracking this decline for the past five years. The recession has only acclerated a long-term trend. The vast number of choices available to customers, the ability to learn more about these “untried” brands, thanks to the internet, and a growing rejection of  big global brands that are trying to be all things to all people are coming together to weaken the hold brands have had on customers.

How should brand marketers respond? First, go back to the fundamentals- make sure your brand stands for something clear, important and differentiating. Second, invest to make sure you can deliver your Dominant Selling Idea, better than anyone else. This is how you will create the next wave of loyalty. This is what P&G is doing (see How Proctor and Gamble Plans to Clean Up) and while their brands may take their share of lumps in the recession- they will do just fine in the long run. And third, make sure your Dominant Selling Idea is being translated into meaningful customer experiences, that reinforce the purchase decision.

Customer loyalty is not gone forever. Brands just have to be more focused and deliver better.

I have to admit up front that I’m a big fan of What Matters Most, Seth Godin’s new eBook,

But perhaps not for the reasons one might think.

The eBook is a large compilation of blog postings from all kinds of different people that Seth believes offer fresh, new ideas worth spreading.  Though not all of them, he freely admits, will appeal to everyone. 

What struck me most about this compilation of blog postings had less to do with new ideas (there aren’t that many), and more to do with seeing the reemergence of ageless humanist ideas in fresh new ways.   As Rodin said, “I don’t invent, I rediscover.”

Courage, persistence, honesty.  Who can argue with any of these admirable human qualities?  How about generosity, avoidance of fear, dignity.  Not bad either.  Or maybe it’s time to stop and smell the roses, stay connected, or stay focused on a vision you believe in.    

 All sound familiar?  They’re all in the book.

But here’s the intriguing part.  These human qualities have been absent or scarce from too many of our personal, business and marketing lives for some time. 

 This eBook is a helpful and inspiring reminder that we ought to try and get back on track—that being a better person or businessperson really requires the exact same values and ethics and compassion and truth that we’ve always admired in others.  So what the eBook does, in essence, is reignite a path to a future that’s built on all the things we sort of know we should do each and everyday–but all too often fall short, by reason of nothing more than innate human weakness.  

If we all applied the thinking in this eBook, built it into our personal philosophies and behaviors, oh my, what a better world…

And who can argue with that?

I picked up Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free,” from the library this weekend. 

 The book is mainly about how things “made of ideas” are getting cheaper and cheaper to produce and distribute on-line, and that as Steward Brand famously declares:  “information wants to be free.”

 Because on-line storage, processing and bandwidth have become so inexpensive, companies can now pursue new business models that offer stuff for free.  They can simply make up the lost revenues elsewhere like Amazon does when it offers free shipping if your purchase is over $25 (they know you’re more likely to buy more).  Or when Google gives away its search and email and makes money on its advertising. 

 Anderson believes this is the new order of business—that the downward pressure on digital-related prices will affect most, if not all, on-line businesses.    He likens it to the law of gravity.  You can fight it for a while but eventually you must succumb.

 Like his book, “The Long Tail,” “Free” presents an interesting and provocative premise which forces us to rethink the nature of business on-line in ways no one could have imagined even 10 years ago.  It is especially relevant to struggling media companies, like newspapers, network TV, commercial radio, magazines, publishers and the like, all of whom need to, and, of course, are,  rethinking  their business models.  The idea of giving their intellectual capital away is a hard pill to swallow, but there are many valuable suggestions in the book on how to make it up elsewhere.  

After all, Free doesn’t mean not making money.  Free means making money by giving stuff away.   Of course, promotion companies have practiced this for ages.   But, it’s now, according to Andersen, worthy of a  higher level of business consideration and capable of creating much greater sustained commercial value.   It’s no longer tactical, but strategic.  

In essence, if you build a popular brand, you can extract value…somewhere.  You just have to be a bit more imaginative.  

For interesting and opposing points of view on “Free,” check out Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin’s  excellent reviews.