Thursday, October 30, 2008

How Knowledge Turbo-Charges the Growth – And Value – of Your Brand: Pt. 2

We put forth in Part 1 that knowledge is marketing, and knowledge is products. But how can knowledge turbo-charge your brand? Let us consider Google, the game-changer in the world’s economy and the altar of the “surprise and delight” school of marketing-think.

As a brand Google really doesn’t advertise. They have people advertise through them. Google (very clearly) never had a study done to determine what their positioning should be or how their logo should look. Instead of announcing new products with a big roll-out they simply post them online and let the audience do the work for them; they succeed and fail and succeed again in public, all in full visibility, something that no other major brand would ever countenance.

Yet Google’s brand is currently #10 among all global brands (up from #20 in ‘07). By comparison, Kraft — a $37B company — does not have 1 brand in the top 100. In less than 10 years the proper noun “Google” has become a gerund in English vernacular.

Even the most basic research on the company shows that Google excels at capturing, repurposing, and applying knowledge. Then they deliver it freely to the public. In exchange for having use of Google’s continually evolving knowledge, the public lets Google into their lives as a trusted resource on the Web (and increasingly in the mobile space). As a trusted resource, Google serves the most eyes trained on any given a screen. This screen has a finite live area, and a highly individualized viewing audience, which rewards targeted messaging. Google uses its relationships with - and observations of - the public to increase the value of its advertising.

In effect, Google uses its knowledge to increase the value of its real estate. While it’s difficult to know exactly how to value knowledge, almost anyone can understand how to value real estate.

Google’s success as a brand has nothing to do with the web being “hot” and “new;“ think about Yahoo, Netscape and AOL: all more venerable, and all either in deep trouble or already gone. Nor does it have anything to do with “content” except that the “product” of knowledge often manifests itself as content. What SISU has been telling our clients is that, in today’s digital environment, the first step to driving the growth of your brand is to capture and repurpose the knowledge that is created in your halls, through e-mail conversations, and by the discovery that goes into creating new products and services (even if they fail), and then feeding it back into your company for enhanced effect.

That’s why we refer to it as “turbo-charging” your brand.

It has been written many times that Google’s offerings “surprise and delight” customers. This is way off-base. Google works harder than any other company to accelerate the evolution of its thinking. Pursuing a “surprise and delight” strategy de-emphasizes the foundation of knowledge that drives their product development. Google does not have a negative perception they struggle against (unlike the hospitality industry), so there is no need to “surprise and delight.“ For Google, all they do is deliver, setting a very low expectation (“Hey, it’s free!“) and then listening to the audience and themselves. They collect all the inputs and feed them back into the company to enhance what’s there or create something new.

For us, the concept of “surprise and delight” is as invalid a strategy as “shock and awe.“ Imagine any brand saying, “We’ll run a Superbowl ad and millions of people will see it and then we’ll be successful.“  Has that “shock and awe” tactic worked very well for any of the now-dead dot-coms? Or, for that matter, has it proven to be a good ROI for Budweiser or any of the car companies? What about the US Government?

As Google has shown us, turbo-charging a brand today does not require an insane investment or even decades of visibility. It’s not about surprising or delighting or shocking your constituents. It’s all about knowledge, embracing your businesses uniqueness and turning that on to your distinct advantage, and making your stakeholders all partners in the success. It’s a steady, patient, informed, inclusive pursuit. But it works.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

How Knowledge Turbo-Charges the Growth – And Value – of Your Brand: Pt. 1

In the course of any given day, companies of all types generate a lot of information, whether in the form of a memo, a Blackberry reply, a hallway conversation or a conference call. In this increasingly mobile world, more notes are taken and more conversation threads are stored than ever before. Information, like prehistoric mosquitoes in amber, is preserved, giving us a glimpse of a situation as it existed in real-time.

Overlay this with the fact that many companies pay good money for electronic and/or physical storage of information and records. Put another way, companies unflinchingly take knowledge assets — which have already been paid for in time and salaries — and return them to a cost line-item with a meter running.

To go further, many of these same companies create all-new content for a brochure or collateral piece while they shy away from blogging, or (worse yet) pay to create new content for a blog. They add to the overall cost of doing business without maximizing the value of existing, paid-for knowledge assets.

Think about your own company / division / office: what kinds of information do you and your cohorts generate on a daily basis? Can this knowledge be fed back into your company for enhanced effect — in effect, turbo-charging it?

Yes it can. And it must.

Taken in a vacuum the first step to driving your brand forward might seem surprising but it’s actually quite logical: you must stop wondering if your knowledge assets can be repurposed, and determine how they will be repurposed. Think about the steps that go into generating revenue and how you communicate, then determine how the information that results can be rewoven into something new to either sell or give away. This is not a distraction from your business; it is an integral part of your business.

One Example — “Cool Knowledge Assets”
In recent experience we worked with a well-recognized brand on an interactive project and discovered by accident that there was a treasure of “cool” knowledge assets sitting in a row of file cabinets in the warehouse. The client viewed these assets as by-products. But we could easily see that there would be great interest in them among a small but active group of current and potential customers. We arranged to make these assets freely available in exchange for these users identifying themselves to the company and participating in free online focus groups. Not only did the client learn a lot from this group (i.e., build more knowledge) but the entire exercise was paid for with a 7.5% increase in sales directly attributable to this program.

Distilled from all the details from this project was this realization: “knowledge” is marketing, and “knowledge” is products.

It has been our experience with both established brands and start-up concepts that success follows organizations that capture and repurpose and redistribute knowledge. It is a relentless pursuit that demands transparency and intellectual rigor. But it’s the best way to turbo-charge your brand.

Addendum 4/30/09: Google’s brand is now estimated to be worth $100 billion…they top the list for the 3rd year running…and they still don’t advertise in any meaningful way. Check out the story here.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Free!

Textures and Backgrounds (a list of links):
Smashing Magazine

Typefaces (though some may not be of the best quality):
Dafont

Vector Images:
Vecteezy

Photoshop Brushes:
Brusheezy

High-res Images:
Stock.XCHNG

Preexisting Trademarks (in vector files):
Brands of the World
and even Logotypes.ru

Monday, October 06, 2008

Why WAP?

WAP (in this case) stands for Wireless Application Protocol, and it’s what the vast majority of mobile phones use to access “the internet” (excepting, of course, the iPhone and Google Android). WAP is surfing the old fashioned way: text-based, choice-driven navigation, linear in execution, and mind-numbingly SLOW!!!

But, like weight training, the passive resistance of low-tech surfing makes you stronger. Planning a WAP-based offering forces you to boil your brand strategy down to the fundamental question: What one service can I provide that would be so useful that someone will endure the pain of mobile internet just to access it?

In the same way that tinsel distracted Frank Costanza, sometimes the graphics and animation of a web site distracts from the core deliverable of your brand. WAP is not a long-term strategic consideration; the iPhone and new Android-powered devices point to a much better-quality mobile internet experience just around the corner. But thinking in terms of WAP now can help you to help your customers now, and be better positioned to know what to do with all that mobile surfing power when it becomes available.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

It’s A Wednesday…

Right now, there are a bunch of kids waiting to be released from school. Right now economic worries are adding to the pressure of running a business for hundreds of thousands of company owners. Right now, people are starting to face the holiday season and jockey for earlybird deals online and in the stores. Right now there are planes, trains, ships and trucks filled with stuff that people will buy - or that people will use to make stuff that people will buy - criss-crossing the globe, trying to make a schedule. Right now, Steve Fossett’s plane wreckage has finally been found.

And right now, we here at SISU Marcom are going to start publishing our discoveries and thoughts. In our nearly 20 years of business we’ve addressed a lot of challenges from our clients, converted a lot of meetings into results for their brands, and - in general - tried to make everything “better.“ We’ve had fun and have learned a lot, so why not share?

And we hope that you’ll share back.