The Dominant Selling Idea

Social media has many benefits, but sometimes it seems to try just a bit too hard.  Especially when it bypasses a basic understanding of human needs and wants.   Just as in architecture where form should follow function, social media is at it’s best when technology follows human wants, needs and desires—especially when it comes to when, where and how we choose to interact with each other.

Witness KLM’s new Meet and Seat service that “intends to improve the flight experience by pairing seats according to shared interests, as travelers choose to link their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to their check-in information.”

Some people will, but I’d argue that most won’t, want their flights, perhaps one of the last bastions of personal privacy, interrupted by someone schmoozing them, giving a sales pitch or even trying to pick them up.

Because we’re human, we all know the risks of what could happen if we were to participate in KLM’s new social media experiment.  So unless entertaining such personal intrusions holds appeal, most people are unlikely to participate.

Fact is, most of our “friends” on Facebook and “connections” on LinkedIn are unlikely to be people we want to spend two to three uninterrupted hours in close quarters with.  No offense, but that privilege is probably reserved for close friends and business associates.

It’s hard for airlines to differentiate themselves these days.  And quality customer service is certainly a way to win hearts and minds.   So KLM gets points for trying something new.   Question is:  does it help the brand?  Does it attract business customers, most airlines bread and butter?  Does it build brand loyalty?

For now,  I’d argue its  a newsworthy tactic of questionable brand and businesses building potential.  Because what most travelers still need and want is a little privacy, peace and quiet.

Of course, as with all internet based initiatives that speed up the learning cycle, we’ll find out soon enough whether KLM is onto something.

Most people don’t really want to “engage” with brands, even self-proclaimed “fans.”  That’s the finding of a recent study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute as reported in Ad Age.

According to the research, just 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging (defined as likes, posts, comments, tags, shares and other ways a user of the social network can interact with branded pages) with brands.

Said one of the researchers, “Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media.  It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

Social media is a powerful new medium, and an increasingly important component of most any integrated marketing communications plan.  But clearly, it’s still in its infancy in terms of how it can go beyond traditional media in getting people to actively participate with brands.

For now, it’s important to keep in mind that most people, contrary to what many purveyors of social media would have us believe, prefer to consume content passively—primarily one-way.  In-bound.

Books, movies, TV shows, plays, even amusement parks are enjoyed passively.  You get taken on a ride.  Told a story.  All you have to do is strap yourself in, open your eyes and ears, and be educated or entertained.  No effort required.  Like it or not, that’s how most of us prefer our media engagements and relationships.

That goes for how we “engage” with brands, too.  Served straight up.

Behavioral economics is based on the principle that people reason on the basis of self-interest.   How else to explain why so many people don’t view downloading copyright protected music, movies and books for free as an illegal act?

It’s this mind-set the movie, recording and publishing industries will need to address as they attempt to regroup and recover from the defeat of their anti-piracy bill by on-line proponents of SOPA  (Stop On-Line Piracy Act).

Perhaps the bill was too narrow in how it addressed the issue by granting the Justice Department the power to order websites to remove links to sites that are suspected of pirating copyrighted materials.   But the principle behind the bill is still legitimate.

The fact remains:  it’s illegal to download material for free without the consent of the copyright holder.  Most people wouldn’t think of walking into Wal*Mart and leaving with a DVD without paying.  How is downloading a pirated movie on-line any different?

For the content creators to secure the legal protections they seek, they’ll need to reframe the debate to win the hearts and minds of the public, especially the powerful, community-minded web public whose on-line belief system runs more towards sharing than owning.  At present the battle is perceived by the public to be between old vs. new, freedom vs. oppression, empowerment vs. profits, cool vs. stodgy.    Guess which side the content creators fall on.

If content creators want to succeed the second time around, they’ll need to change the way the world sees on-line piracy by presenting it as a moral issue—a matter of immutable human values.   Not simply breaking the law.

First they need to change the language.  “Piracy” almost sounds swashbuckling.  And “stealing” and “thievery” are something other people do.

They would be better served to focus the argument on our nation’s strong sense of “fairness,” and that we all need to be protected equally from having it eroded.    Because without fairness there’s no opportunity, and without opportunity there’s no prosperity.

It’s sad to see Kodak filing Chapter 11.  Such a venerable, deeply engrained cultural icon that’s been a part of so many people’s lives for so many years. Until the 1990s it was rated one of the world’s five most valuable brands.

Hopefully, they’ll successfully rebound when they emerge from creditor protection.

Of course, it won’t be easy.

One of the reasons is that they lack a clearly defined and articulated future, one that’s visionary and inspiring, one that has the power to motivate and direct employees and partners and galvanize consumer passion and loyalty.

The company did a nice job of getting in front of the bad news using social media.  In a broadly disseminated company video, CEO, Antonio Perez, explained that Kodak was still in the midst of a business transformation that started in 2004, that it simply needed temporary protection from creditors while it got its financial house together, that its focus would remain on being an imaging and material sciences company, and that in the meantime it would be “business as usual.”

All well and good.   But hardly words to stir the troops.

In the words of Michel de Montaign:  “ The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to know how to live to purpose.”

What is Kodak’s purpose?  Its higher order reason-for-being?  What does it intend to do to improve the quality of our lives, as it once did by bringing our “memories” to life?

If the recent aimless “So Kodak” advertising is any indication, the company isn’t yet close to answering these questions.

Of course, it’s not entirely  too late.  But it better move quickly.   As was recently noted in The Economist in an article titled “The last Kodak moment?“:  ”After 132 years it is poised, like an old photo, to fade away.”

Few would be surprised to learn that companies with the strongest financial growth are also those that have the greatest depth of customer relationships?

What may be a bit more surprising is that there is now empirical evidence that these deeper customer relationships derive from an inspiring idea of a higher-order ideal or purpose.  Which is another way of saying that a clearly defined brand positioning that connects emotionally, deftly executed enterprise-wide. is a cornerstone of business success.

That’s the essential finding from a new study conducted by Jim Stengel, former global marketing director of P&G, in conjunction with research agency Millward Brown.   It’s also what Mr. Stengel’s book, Grow:  How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, is all about.

Regardless of the size of the company or category, the fastest growing brands, b-to-b and b-to-c alike, are all built on a higher-order purpose of improving consumers’ lives.  A purpose driven brand is one that transcends product-based attributes or benefits alone and positions itself on a higher human level around how the company is going to make a positive impact on the world.

Here are a few examples:

Coke’s purpose is to inspire moments of happiness.

Starbucks purpose is to connect people over coffee.

IBM’s purpose is to solve big business and societal problems by making the world smarter.

Secret deodorant’s purpose is to inspire women to be fearless.

The road to long-term business success takes us down many roads, and sometimes it’s inevitable that we’ll make a wrong turn.

That’s what happened to BMW when it abandoned its powerful and iconic brand positioning, “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” in favor a much softer and generic promise of bringing “Joy” to drivers lives.

That was two years ago. And BMW was heavily, and rightly, criticized for getting all squishy, and walking away from one of the sharpest, most recognized and adored taglines of all time.   People inside BMW behind the “Joy” campaign claimed that they weren’t giving up on The Ultimate Driving Machine.  But how were we to know based on what was presented to us? Of course, The Ultimate Driving Machine is more than just a tagline. It defines the company’s purpose.  It’s what motivates, guides and brings pride to employees, and what compels consumers to perceive BMW as a cut above in the luxury car segment.

I wrote about my misgivings about the “Joy” campaign here on 2/19/10 (BMW’s New Brand Positioning), recommending that BMW return to The Ultimate Driving Machine soon rather than later.

Fortunately, employees and consumers alike will now once again find true “joy” in having their Ultimate Driving Machine back.

How do you go about evolving the logo of an iconic brand? Very carefully.  Preferably in baby steps.

Case in point:  State Farm, the “good neighbor” insurance company, has carefully evolved its logo for the first time in 56 years.

The company claims that it wanted to make the logo a bit friendlier, and cleaner to reproduce better on-line and on mobile apps. No doubt, great pains have been taken not to make any significant changes that might lead customers to protest the identity loss of this familiar brand.  Logos are like old friends, the ultimate visual embodiment of how we think and feel about brands.  So, for famous brands, great care must be taken in how they are evolved to keep up with changing times. State Farm got it right.

If you’re dynamic, have communication skills, a problem solver, motivated, have extensive experience, innovate, effective, have a track record, organizational and creative then chances are you’re not standing out on LinkedIn.

These are the year’s 10 most over used professional buzzwords, culled from profiles of 135 million members.

Of course, they sound pleasant enough, but don’t do anything to help you stand out and position yourself apart from a very large and ever increasing crowd of other global professionals.

If you’re as unique as you think you are, then do yourself a favor by getting away from overused buzzwords that are devoid of meaning and distinction and finding unique language to describe yourself.

As LinkedIn’s connection director put it, “Use language that illustrates your unique professional accomplishments and experiences.  Give concrete examples of results you’ve achieved wherever possible and reference attributes that are specific to you.”

The New York Times reported yesterday on the power of Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” slogan, noting how it has penetrated the national psyche and become broadly used shorthand—among politicians and the public alike—for the nation’s income disparity.

So what is it about this “99%” slogan that’s so catchy?  And what can brand marketers learn from it when creating slogans or taglines for their own products and services?

It all boils down to these four key elements:

1) The slogan is grasped in its simplicity.

It’ll come as no surprise that social and behavioral scientists have discovered what most of us know to be painfully obvious:  human beings gravitate to what’s easiest to remember.  We’re inherently lazy.  We don’t want to work too hard.  There’s too much going on in our lives.  Too many re-runs of Law and Order to watch.   If it’s not simple, the synapses in our brain won’t register it.

2) It launches a story in your head—one that you’ve already got tucked away.

There’s an aspect in the study of human behavior commonly referred to as “heuristics,” which is just a fancy way of saying that we all rely on rules of thumb, educated guesses or well-engrained biases to make day-to-day decisions.   In other words, most of what we remember and choose to act on is already largely parked somewhere in our heads in the form of a pre-existing mental narrative. We just don’t always have the language to articulate it.  The reason “99%” sticks and resonates is because it taps into an inherent belief most people have that there is a mounting unfairness in America.  When we hear or think about the “99%” slogan, we internalize this unfairness in ways that are most personal and meaningful to ourselves—it activates our own narrative in our heads.   When a slogan does this we call it a “micro-story,”:  a few choice words with the power to launch a relevant story in your mind.

3) It gets to the core of what you want to stand for.

Occupy Wall Street has been accused by some of failing to articulate it’s goals, but never of what it stands for, which is to challenge the wide and growing disparity of wealth in this county.  The “99%” has played an important role in clearly communicating this.  For brand marketers, it’s important that their slogan or tagline capture and reflect the essence of their core brand positioning.

4) It’s memorable and repeatable.

That probably goes without saying, but the important point is that if it’s easy to remember, and launches a motivating story in your head, then there’s a greater likelihood it’s going to be easy to retrieve and that you’ll want to repeat it to others, which is where the real power of slogans resides.

Consumers expect companies to give back.  Increasingly, all things being equal, we choose brands that demonstrate commitment to a cause that contributes to the betterment of society, socially, environmentally or culturally.

P&G, ever the marketing leader, understands this, perhaps better than anyone.  The company now insists that all brands have a “purpose statement,” to ensure social responsibility and cause marketing are built into the core fabric of their businesses.  Indeed, improving the lives of others is written into the company’s corporate “Purpose” statement, and also one of the 10 core leadership values of P&G’s CEO Bob McDonald:

Companies must do well to do good and must do good to do well

For example, Dawn, an excellent cleanser for animals caught in oil spills, contributes to wildlife organizations via their “Everyday wildlife champions” program.

Importantly, from a branding perspective, Dawn’s cause marketing efforts fit seamlessly with the dish detergent’s tough-on-grease brand position (as I suspect will all of P&G’s brand specific social responsibility programs).

As reported in Advertising Age, there are a number of other companies doing a good job of closely linking their causes with their core brand promises.

Green Mountain Coffee is an advocate of free trade because, as a spokesperson for the company claims, “Fair trade is important to us because we feel that the highest quality coffees comes from the communities with the highest quality of life.”

UPS offers humanitarian relief and disaster preparedness, leveraging its expertise in logistics.

Building on its core purpose of “delivering better food for a better world though outstanding crop solutions,” Syngenta supports food banks in the US with its “Weeding Out Hunger” program.

Supporting a cause is good business.  Linking your cause with your core brand promise is even better business.