How to be heard in a world too busy to listen and with too much to hear. Have you ever defined your favorite brands and questioned why? It is a key exercise we often use with our clients. It helps to evaluate what should be the heart of your company’s strong brand identity.
We believe the heart of all killer brands is the promise they commit to delivering to their clients. No matter how clever or memorable their brand marketing, if they fail to deliver on that promise, they fail.
And those promises represent what the brand stands for and their strong brand identity.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for your branding design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by us and our readers.
The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.
Related: Secrets to the Remarkable Innovative Lady Gaga Brand
Failure to deliver on your promise or be that strong brand identity is like a politician promising no new taxes. Mark my words. Those kinds of promises are a prescription for a brand marketing disaster.
Here is a short video that will refresh a brand for you:
We like to quote from the book Funky Business Forever when we discuss brands or branding with our clients:
The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality.
It is not easy being different, is it? But all the more important.
The key to a good brand is being different. There are 4 critical things to remember about brands and branding:
Every business has a brand, whether explicitly defined or not. The important question to be answered is how good is the brand?
Brands deliver an emotional connection to a business’ products and services. Most purchase decisions have critical emotional components.
Your brand represents a collection of your customers’ perceptions of how they see you, how they feel about you, and what they say about you.
Your brand communicates every time it touches a customer. This makes you, as a marketer, responsible for this communication ‘moment of truth’.
Most brands sell products or services. GM sells cars. Borders sell books. Real estate brokerages sell homes. A strong brand identity, however, satisfies a desire to get at the emotional heart of the matter.
Let’s review 8 strong brand identities and what they promise … what they stand for. This is the best way to appreciate the importance of branding.
JetBlue’s brand success centers on the achievable – the simple things – they knew would make a difference for their guests. This set the stage for direct TV and XM radio, the provision of first-class seats to everyone, more legroom, great snacks and high-end service at lower end pricing.
No other airline others these value propositions. They are different and their brand stands out because of those differences.
Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.
Solving customer problems
Best Buy ’s marketing team, led by Drew Panayiotou, senior-VP marketing, worked to reframe the retailer’s brand proposition. Best Buy’s new tagline, representing its brand identity is ‘Making technology work for you’. A strong focus on solving its customers’ problems.
Ben and Jerry’s have a progressive, nonpartisan social mission that seeks to meet human needs and eliminate injustices in local, national and international communities. They do this by integrating these concerns into their day-to-day business activities.
Their focus is on children and families, the environment and sustainable agriculture on family farms.
uch has been made of corporate America’s propensity for internalizing the fruits of doing business while socializing the costs. Ben & Jerry’s, by contrast, is dedicated to what they call “linked prosperity”, which essentially recognizes the possibility that business can and should be a powerful force for the betterment of society.
Delivering happiness
They don’t sell shoes. They deliver that extra dose of love we all need from time to time. There is no secret here. Zappos became Zappos because of the fanatical customer support it offered. That is the company’s brand.
As Hsieh puts it, “Back in 2003, we thought of ourselves as a shoe company that offered great service. Today, we really think of the Zappos brand as about great service, and we just happen to sell shoes.”
Building trust
Look inside to find the best processor technology, the Intel tagline. The trust mark symbolizing customer trust and faith they are receiving the best in technology. Technology that is life-changing.
Product presentation
Lifestyle brands march to a different drummer. They have a clear and distinct point of view, are outspoken, and inherently polarizing. For many brands, this polarizing effect is very risky, but for brands seeking to be disruptive in mature categories or sectors, it can be the path to huge success and bear great dividends. Whole Foods is a textbook case.
When brands have a clear, distinct point of view it forces choices that may forfeit short-term gain for long-term benefit. It is a conscious decision to invest in the brand. The values of the brand permeate the behavior of the organization, the customer experience and, ultimately, public opinion. The result is a very powerful appeal to a much smaller audience.
Strong brand identity … customer experience
Customer experience brings us space rather than a product. Some would say that it fills a psychological need that other companies have not had to do in quite the same way.
The emotion is all about uplifting moments and daily ritual. Something definitely worth remembering.
Customer immersion
Disney is all about magical, fantasy entertainment. Being bringers of joy, to be affirmers of the good in each of us, to be — in subtle ways — teachers. To speak, as Walt once put it, “not to children but to the child in each of us.”
They do this through great storytelling, by giving their guests a few hours in another world where their cares can be momentarily put aside, by creating memories that will remain with them forever.
So is this what killer branding is all about for companies?
We think so.
Making promises and keep them.
Some organizations work very hard to weasel in the promises they make. They imply great customer service or amazing results or spectacular quality but don’t deliver. No, they didn’t actually lie, but they come awfully close. The result: angry customers and negative word of mouth.
It’s very easy to overpromise. Tempting to shade the truth a little bit, deliver a little bit less to save a few bucks. Who will notice?
The customers notice. If you need to overpromise to make the sale, don’t bother. It’s not worth it.
The best way to generate a strong brand identity is simple: know the key requirements and over deliver.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your branding and brand marketing. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Do you have a lesson about making your brand marketing better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on brands and branding from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Remarkable Branding Design: Spanish Bank Example
Secrets to the Remarkable Innovative Lady Gaga Brand
Here’s How to Make Your Brand Awesome
Branding Lessons Learned from the Beatles Brand
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by Jeff Bezos’ vision. We write a lot about him and Amazon.
They are a great company to follow because of the Bezos’s vision. And his ability to make good bets on his vision.
Everything may seem rosy at Amazon these days. But for years it was amazing to see just how much criticism there was towards some of Bezos’ decisions.
For years, the company focused on growth and expansion over profitability. This strategy earned many complaints from investors.
More recently, it’s done things that left many scratching their heads, such as the whole Amazon Web Services (AWS) effort. And yes, even the Kindle effort. Yet both have proven to be quite successful.
Geekwire noted that at an Amazon shareholder meeting, an interesting question came from Evan Jacobs. Jacobs asked if Amazon was taking enough risks.
Probably the most persistent — and damaging — myth about innovation is that it’s about ideas. It’s not.
Tremendous amounts of time and energy are wasted thinking up radically new ideas that never end up going anywhere. Middle managers never seem to tire of complaining that their ideas are ignored by the powers above.
The truth is that nobody cares about your ideas. They care about what problems you can solve for them. So if you want to innovate effectively, don’t go looking for a great idea so that you can dazzle others with your brilliance, look for a meaningful problem and get to work on solving it.
Bezos’ answer is all about his innovation vision. And how he considers his business vision and his ability to act on the vision.
Here is Bezos interesting response to the Evan Jacobs question.
In a way, that is like the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten.
First of all, I think we have gotten pretty lucky recently. You should anticipate a certain amount of failure. Our two big initiatives, AWS and Kindle, have worked out very well.
Ninety-plus percent of the innovation at Amazon is incremental and much less risky. We know how to open new product categories. We know how to open new geographies. That doesn’t mean that these things are guaranteed to work, but we have a lot of expertise and a lot of knowledge.
We know how to open new fulfillment centers, whether to open one, where to locate it, how big to make it. All of these things based on our operating history are things that we can analyze quantitatively rather than to have to make intuitive judgments.
When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. There you just have to place a bet.
If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long.
If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.
AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds.
And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.
But, if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing to invest a lot of money in this. And it’s not working. We have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this.
On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?
So, my mind never lets me get in a place where I think we can’t afford to take these bets. Why? Because the bad case never seems that bad to me. And, I think to have that point of view, requires a corporate culture that does a few things.
I don’t think every company can do that, can take that point of view. A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent. We are willing to think long-term.
We start with the customer and work backward. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
But if you hold back and you say, ‘No, we believe in this vision.’ Then you just stay heads down, stay focused and you build out your vision.
That idea of staying the course for the long term has been the key to Amazon’s success. Vision requires the long term. As does innovation.
There are many great business growth campaigns we can learn from.
The bottom line
Innovation is extremely essential to any organization, especially in today’s hyper-competitive business market. The successful exploitation of new ideas is critical to a business’s ability to improve its processes, bring new and improved products and services to the market, increase its overall efficiency and productivity, and, most importantly, improve its profitability.
Please post your comments below, offering questions or your own great examples of business growth strategies.
If you are looking for additional resources in innovation, one of my favorite experts is Tim Kastelle. You’ll find lots of good stories and examples tolearn from his blog.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Ever read Augustine’s Laws of Defense Contracting? In the book, Norm Augustine codifies the rules of defense contracting. And gets you thinking as Schlosberg says.
Listen carefully:
Great Stories and Storytelling Can Have a Very Healing Influence
A very satirical read with pseudo-technical commentary and charts, written in 1983. Most of the laws are even more applicable today.
Norm Augustine
Norm Augustine was an aerospace businessman before his retirement. He served as President and CEO of Lockheed Martin during several of the years I worked for Lockheed Martin. I will remember him most for his book Augustine Laws.
Here are my favorite 10 of the 52 laws described in his book:
Law Number V
One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output.
Law Number X
Bulls do not win bullfights; people do. People do not win people’s fights; lawyers do.
The Augustine laws.
Law Number XIII
There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.
Law Number XV
The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.
Law Number XVI
In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
Law Number XVII
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.
Another resource: Never Give Up Your Dreams
Law Number XXII
If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice.
Defense contracting … Law Number XXV
A revised schedule is to (an Aerospace) business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.
Defense contracting … Law Number XXVI
If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
Law Number XLVIII
The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to spend doing what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally, you spend all your time talking about nothing.
His most cited law?
That would be number 16, which shows that defense contracting budgets grow linearly but the unit cost of a new military aircraft grows exponentially. This law led to his humorous conclusion about sharing planes.
In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
Norm didn’t take himself too seriously, did he? That is a great trait for an effective leader like Augustine.
The bottom line
Leonardo Da Vinci’s life as a creative thinker provides inspiration and lessons to learn for individuals and companies working such as Norm Augustine’s. in the creative sector. The lessons above have a direct relationship with the design and innovation process inside companies.
Also, they are linked with different creative thinking and problem-solving tools and methods which can be implemented to connect between different patterns to reach creative ideas and solutions.
Do you see? Very, very few of Da Vinci’s and Augustine’s abilities are in the populace. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to be creative as they did … it can be learned.
Can you use these lessons to learn to see or see better? Give it a try. Practice and be persistent. Stick with it, and over the long haul, you will see some good dividends.
Another story you may like: The Story of Tank the Dog or Is It Reggie?
Do you have any experiences similar to these laws to share with this community?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing or advertising campaigns? Looking for creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enthusiasm?
Do you have a lesson about making your motivation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More inspirational stories from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
How do you know who your customers are and what their interests are? One way to do this is using target market segmentation and target market examples.
More to think about: Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?
Market segmentation permits a business to better target its customers, as we discussed in an earlier post on market segmentation (Why Customer Segmentation Is a High Yield Activity and Target Market Segmentation Improves Marketing Effectiveness).
As we discussed in those articles, targeting permits better focus on relevance and relationship building to improve customer engagement. There are many ways to define your market as segments, such as behavioral, psychographic, demographic, and geographic … all of which were discussed.
We recently read a very interesting article: Four New Approaches to Consumer Segmentation by Joel Rubinson.
The thesis of his article: consumer segmentation is at the heart of marketing practice, yet it simply does not work that well because it is rarely very actionable. This article describes how that can change using these four approaches to customer segmentation. Let’s examine his four approaches:
We are much more interesting to Ford or General Motors when we are looking to buy a car then right after we make the purchase, correct?
When we are dieting makes us much more interesting to Atkins, Dukan and Weight Watchers than when are not dieting. In this age of digital and social commerce, moments become directly targetable because our current goals give out great out forensic signs as we travel the internet world. We seek out different content, search for different terms, like different things on Facebook, and different products show up on our frequent shopper data.
Related post: Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?
All highly targetable without needing to water things down with demographics. (For an example of moment segmentation on understanding smartphone use and motivations, click here.)
A segment for ad targeting on brand loyalties
Increasingly, we can merge digital and social data with frequent shopper data for ad targeting. So what you may ask? Simply that a marketer can now target their advertising to “switchable”. Who are they? The consumers who buy your brand occasionally but not most of the time.
Why is this significant? We receive a much higher response to advertising and promotions from switchable than from those who are completely loyal to either you or some competitive brand.
Target market examples … segment people as shopper types
Plan purchases or decide in store? Explore to find new meal ideas? Like to sample new products? Can we assume you have an infant at home given diaper and formula purchases? All of these have clear action implications for product placement, store layouts, and specific shopper promotions delivered in customized ways. This is increasingly accomplished via mobile apps.
Segment people based on targetable interests and values
Rather than creating a battery of questions for segmentation and HOPE that we can target segments, why not flip this around? Why not analyze the interests, cultural values, and lifestyle characteristics that are available via Facebook or Google profiles and create segments on factors that reflect those actionable characteristics?
That way, you can take your segmentation and be much more proactive. Furthermore, every ad campaign becomes a test of the specific targets because they should exhibit a greater response.
What do you think? Convinced enough to give these approaches a try? We certainly are.
Can you spot any of these customer types in your store or online?
Do you know your best customers and their shopping patterns and practices?
And then design your customer experiences and marketing to these patterns and practices?
Please share a target market segmentation design experience with this community.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Are your elevator pitches exceptional? Is it useful for marketing networking? Do you often bump into potential customers on the go? Like in an elevator. Find an excellent elevator pitch example that will help you build yours.
Elevator pitch example.
Elevator pitches that are remarkable get talked about.
How would you convey, in less than 30 seconds, the value proposition of your company? Does it say why they need to buy your product or hire you?
This is what a basic elevator pitch is all about. You have to be quick, concise, and in tune with the cues of the customer in front of you.
Of course, it’s not easy. That’s why you have to practice until your pitch has become second nature to you.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for value propositions in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
Here is a 4-minute video that will help refresh for this subject:
This is the 30-60 second business description of what you do and why someone should work with you.
It’s called an “Elevator Pitch” because it describes your business.
“How would you explain your business and make a sale if fate placed you in an elevator with your dream prospect. Note that you only have the time it takes to get from the top of the building to the bottom?”
Why is having an elevator pitch so important?
You only have 30-60 seconds to make a powerful first impression. The attention span of the average person is just 30 seconds before their mind starts wandering.
The other reason is people have less time today. You need to grab them quickly or lose them forever.
I’ve found many elevator pitch examples that are very effective.
They are different than the boring 60 seconds “talking brochure” because they are:
Conversations
The goal is not to deliver your 60-second advertisement. The goal is to have a two-way conversation.
A successful pitch is where the other person relaxes and says “Interesting. Tell me more.”
Short
60 seconds is a long time to talk uninterrupted. An elevator pitch is NOT a sales pitch. Think 30 seconds, not 60!
Everyday language
Avoid words like “synergy”, “optimize”, “efficiency”, “ROI” and so on. These words SCREAM “sales pitch” . They will have your panicked prospect looking for the exit signs.
In fact, here’s a tip. Write out your pitch, then take a red pen and cross out all the clichés and marketing-speak. Replace them with one-syllable words.
Here are a handful of elevator pitch examples, starting with mine from Digital Spark Marking. Can you spot the design elements of a successful pitch in each of them?
How would make them better?
Elevator pitch examples for business … Digital Spark Marketing
Good afternoon, my name is Mike Schoultz. I am a digital marketing strategist with a knack for creative marketing campaigns that customers remember.
Additional specialties include innovation, customer experience/service, as well as leadership/teamwork coaching.
Does your company recognize that customer service is growing to be one of your most important marketing vehicles? If so, you’ll want to check out several of our campaign designs and client referrals.
If you have a business card handy, I would be pleased to send you our free white paper that illustrates some of our designs.
Elevator pitch example … an employee benefits consultant
Let me tell you about some of the work I’ve done for a recent client.
A property and casualty insurance broker referred us to a 100 person company buying themselves out of their New York parent.
In creating their benefits from scratch we had to make sure that their employees were educated about the new packages. We needed to ensure that the company staffed up to prepare for administering those benefits. We took them through our 2-month process and rolled out their new benefits plan smoothly.
My name is Tom Jennings. Are you are interested in avoiding the top five mistakes companies make when changing benefit plans? If so, please hand me your card, and I will email you our free white paper.
You’re at a personal branding conference, and you bump into Katie. You ask her what she does, and she says…
I’m a communications professional with a knack for persuasive storytelling. Considering my colleagues often complimented me for my thoughtful and engaging presentations, I’m looking for insight. Insight as to how I can best position myself for a role in production or videography at social impact start-up.
Because I’m inspired by documentaries, I want to help companies express their missions. Told in compelling and relatable ways in the age of social media.
You’re on the subway, and you are sitting next to James. You ask him what he does, and he says…
I’m currently working as a Human Resources Manager at Smith Industries. My supervisors frequently commend me for being able to weigh multiple perspectives and negotiate conflicting views.
I’m looking for suggestions/advice on how I can further cultivate my expertise in this field. Why? Because my ultimate aim is to help organizations develop more inclusive workplace cultures.
You are an interior designer who has just met a young couple looking to remodel their bathroom
I work with people who are renovating their bathrooms. I create shower enclosures, sinks, and backsplashes made entirely of glass.
If you’re wondering what a glass sink looks like, please come ask me to see an example. My name is Jenny Johnston, and I design renovations in glass.
As you exit an entrepreneurial conference, you meet Sonia. You ask her what she does, and she says…
My core skill sets are civil engineering and psychology. I’m endlessly curious, and all my friends, family, and colleagues look to me for answers on everything from mood swings to mind craft.
As I’ve always been exceptionally passionate about social issues, I’m seeking to write for publications/websites focused on climate change.
I’d like to make a difference by creating campaigns urging others to increase sustainability in future generations.
Looking for a summer internship
Dear Mr. Miller,
My name is Josh Paul. I am a graduating senior at Salisbury University. I am looking for an internship in a law firm this summer.
I have had an active interest in the law since I first enrolled in college. I have participated in several seminars on the constitutional and corporate law.
Although those seminars were ungraded, I have maintained a 3.4 GPA. All the while participating in several extracurricular activities including the Pre-law Society.
If your firm offers internships, I would appreciate an introduction to the people in charge of that program.
Alternatively, I would appreciate the opportunity to give you a call and meet with you in person to discuss your career path. I like to learn from great opportunities within the legal profession.
This example could be used as in email introduction, cover letter, conversation or even in an elevator. The entire pitch is under 150 words.
This does not mean that your conversation, email, or cover letter would only include this text.
You might also include how you were connected to this person or why you are interested in his particular company. This is the perfect foundation from which to build, isn’t it?
The bottom line
The best elevator pitch is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer will get from using your products or services. Its outcome focused and stressed the business value of your offering.
Are you wondering where to put your marketing energy to optimize winning customers from your competitors? If so, focus on defining and delivering a winning elevator pitch to start an active relationship.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential clients?
Call today for aFREEconsultation or aFREEquote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on value propositions from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
11 Creative Tips to Build Small Business Differentiation Strategies
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
That’s the Bezos quote and philosophy we really need to learn from. It’s the philosophy that has made Amazon so successful. It is the one philosophy that makes the Amazon business model really stand out.
And the one that more American corporations need to embrace and understand.
Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.
–Jeff Bezos
Most of us are familiar with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, their CEO. Amazon is an e-commerce company in everything they do. They have developed all their expertise in the full support of e-commerce. In fact, they now do e-commerce for many other businesses.
Leading disruptive innovation and change involves leapfrogging—creating or doing something radically new or different that produces a significant leap forward. People who possess an unyielding desire to create a breakthrough ensure that everything they do focuses on adding a whole new level of value to customers, the market, and the organization.
Amazon has existed in the e-commerce technology world since its inception. They think like a technology company and agile innovators. Only they are innovative in everything they do, not just technology.
They are not afraid to try new things and they can get things done quickly, thanks to the culture their CEO Bezos has instilled.
Bezos’ vision
For years, I’ve been fascinated by Jeff Bezos’ vision. We write a lot about him and Amazon. They are a great company to follow because of Bezos’s vision. And because of his ability to make good bets on his vision.
While everything may seem rosy at Amazon these days, it wasn’t always that way. For years, it was amazing to see just how much criticism there was towards some of Bezos’ decisions.
For years, quite by design, the company focused on growth and expansion over profitability. This earned them many complaints from investors. They are still focused on the future more than the present. That is why they are such good innovators.
More recently, it’s done things that left many scratching their heads. Things such as the whole Amazon Web Services (AWS) effort, and even the Kindle effort. Yet both innovations have proven to be quite successful.
Size and breadth of enterprise
Consider the size and breadth of the Amazon enterprise in three ways, what they are building, what they are buying, and how they are partnering with others.
Amazon is going great guns in all three areas. Let’s consider some examples to illustrate:
Building
Amazon is building its own unique brands and has 4 to date:
Amazon Basics – which represents its own electronics products. The Kindle and Kindle Fire are good examples
Amazon Fresh – which sells and delivers groceries.
Amazon Studios – an online social movie studio.
Amazon Warehouse Deals – a discount warehouse on refurbished products.
Buying
Amazon has brought almost 30 companies in thirty years. One of their most recent buys, ComiXology.
ComiXology offers a well-designed app for buying and reading comic books from more than 75 publishers. It makes it easy to see new comics, which sell for the same price as in-store. And it’s easy to buy back issues, too.
There are also always comics on sale, including collections for a great price.
Did you know that Amazon owns Zappos, Pets.com, and Diapers.com? All purchased to become part of the Amazon enterprise.
Partnering
They partner to offer their e-commerce services to make other companies better at on-line business. Sometimes it’s just providing the service, other times it is to combine products, like they have done with Toys Are Us.
Amazon’s growth is a relative measure. Here are several comparisons that will surprise you.
In the first 5 years of their existence, these are revenue comparisons:
EBay .4B
Google 1.5B
Amazon 2.8B
Information technology is a core competency
Amazon is very aware that information technology is at the heart of their most important core competencies. Here are several that they use and also source to other businesses:
Cloud computing
Unless you work in technology or corporate logistics, you might not have known that Amazon was ahead of Google in the cloud business. Most consumers will have encountered the cloud in the form of services where Google is strong. Such as email (Gmail), document storage (Google Drive), and the like.
To understand the scale of the war brewing between them, it helps to understand that where Amazon and Google are really competing. That is, who gets to eat a bigger portion of the total corporate information-technology pie.
Included are all the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide. All of these, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research. This is some six times Google and Amazon’s combined annual revenue last year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet. The most central and well-known of these services are the simple storage service (S3) and the elastic compute cloud (EC2).
In 2010, Amazon launched 61 new services and features. In 2011, that number was 82. In 2012, it was 159. In 2013: 280.
They are also expanding their geographic footprint, with 10 current AWS regions around the world, These regions include the East Coast of the U.S., two on the West Coast, Europe, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Brazil, China, and a government-only region called GovCloud.
The development teams work directly with customers and are empowered to design, build, and launch based on what they learn.
Prime Instant Video
Prime Instant Video was launched in 2011 to provide customers streaming video on demand, analogous to books. In 2011 with 5,000 titles, they’ve grown selection to more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes.
The Amazon Studios team continues to invest heavily in original content and will compete in the new TV market of the future.
Fire TV
Recently, the Amazon team launched Fire TV. Not only is Fire TV the best way to watch Amazon’s video offerings, it also embraces non-Amazon content services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, VEVO, WatchESPN, and many more.
In addition to Prime Instant Video, Fire TV gives you instant access to over 200,000 movies and TV episodes available a la carte. As a bonus, Fire TV also lets you play high-quality, inexpensive games on your living room TV.
Amazon, we believe, is the most innovative company in America in an industry built around constant innovation and change. Why, you may ask?
We believe there several good reasons. First, as one of the creators of the e-commerce industry, they well know the industry is in its infancy. They know it is built on a foundation of new technology and constant introduction of new ways of doing things.
Second, they know their future is based on those trends. They also know to do new things well; they must be good at trying new ideas in many areas as experiments.
These experiments, they realize, will not all work as planned, and some percentage will fail. They know and accept this without worry.
Innovative vision. We are always fascinated by this skill. It is one of the best business skills to have in our view.
Does it mean you see everything? Certainly not. It does mean you have the ability to see what many cannot. And then act on these items.
That is what makes for the most innovative company, in our minds. Lots of experiments and exploring. Innovation doesn’t work well without experimentation and lots of action.
And Amazon is the best of the best, in our opinion.
Keys to business strategy
Priority 1
Focus on on-line business … it has far fewer limits than the brick and mortar space.
Priority 2
Control customer accounts. This means to own the cash register, and to build customer trust and confidence.
Priority 3
Establish an ecosystem around Kindle and Kindle Fire products. Their goal is to achieve digital supremacy on the order of Apple and Google.
As an example, they view Kindle as a service and not a device. They view the Kindle Fire not as a low cost iPad, but a high quality digital device dedicated to the digital content experience (music, apps, videos, and of course, books).
Interesting perspective, isn’t it?
Related post: Game Changing Capabilities for In-Store Retail Business
The future?
Thinking about these areas above, it is not too hard to imagine the following future business goals for the Amazon enterprise:
Expand Kindle and Kindle Fire Ecosystem
Both of these have enormous growth in services and future applications yet to be discovered.
Same day delivery
Win the logistics war on delivery to make the on-line business bigger than brick and mortar.
Create Amazon supply
Their goal is to supply small to medium size businesses. Look out FedEx and UPS.
More digital product focus
They want to be on the leading edge with all digital products. This is especially so in products with the most business potential, as the new TV technology.
The bottom line
Prognosticators and futurists try to predict what will happen through some combination of extrapolation and supposition, but the truth is the future will most be shaped by the choices we make. We could have chosen to make our society more equal, healthier, and happier, but did not. We can, of course, choose differently. The future will be revealed in what we choose to build.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.
It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on business technology from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
I like to read … why? To be entertained, to learn new things, and to stimulate thinking. Jack Welsh is a favorite author of mine, especially when the book deals with business leaders and with employee development. I have a set of five authors that I selected over a decade ago to be my silent mentors … they mentor through their writings and presentations. Jack Welsh is one of my five mentors.
Yes … they all do stimulate a lot of thinking and learning, but they all have a great knack for entertaining while they teach and silently mentor. They also share many other common attributes that makes them such successful mentors for me.
It probably is not necessary to tell you a little about Jack Welch. Welch is the former Chairman and CEO of General Electric who served in this capacity between the years 1981 to2001. The two decades when GE was one, if not the top brands in the world. He gained a solid reputation for uncanny business acumen and unique leadership strategies. He remains a highly regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative management strategies and leadership style.
There were two major eras of innovation in the 20th century. The first hit its stride in the 1920s and the second had its biggest impact in the 1990s. We’re now on the brink of a new era of innovation and its impact will likely be profound. Though much like Drucker back in the 1930s, we are still unable to fully grasp what is yet to come.
In this blog, we have selected 7 favorite topics of Welsh and used quotations and a compendium of ideas from many of Jack Welch’s books, articles, and presentations to focus on what Welsh teaches on each. We use these thoughts regularly in our work with our client teams.
Leadership
Managers turn the crank, leaders inspire. Leaders are people who share their vision of how things can be done better.
What we are looking for are leaders at every level who can energize, excite, and inspire rather than enervate, depress, and control.
Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance. Getting employees excited about their work is the key to being a great business leader.
We now know whereproductivity – real and limitless productivity – comes from. It comes fromchallenged, empowered, excited, rewarded teams of people.
Business leaders … reality
Face reality, and then act decisively. Most mistakes that leaders make arise from not being willing to face reality and then acting on it. Facing reality often means saying and doing things that are not popular, but only by coming to grips with reality will things get better.
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
Change, BEFORE you have to. Change is a big part of the reality in business. New ideas are the lifeblood of business. And the basis for creative change.
Willingness to change is strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for awhile. Keeping an eye out for change is both exhilarating and fun.
The operative assumption today isthat someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is tofind out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action – fast.
Famous business leaders of all time … competitive advantage
If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
It doesn’t get any simpler than this. This concept resulted in GE selling those businesses they owned that were not number 1 or 2 in there respective markets.
Business leaders who changed the world … learning organization
Turn your company into a learning organization to spark free flow of communication and exchange of ideas. Create a truly confident workforce. Confidence is a vital ingredient of any learning organization. The prescription for winning is speed, simplicity, and self-confidence. Self-confident people are open to good ideas regardless of their source and are willing to share them.
Just as surely as speed flows from simplicity,simplicity is grounded in self-confidence.
The desire, and the ability, of anorganization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere – and to rapidlyconvert this learning into action – is its ultimate competitive advantage.
An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.
A business leader focuses on teamwork
Managers must learn to become team players. Middle managers have to be team members and coaches. Take steps against those managers who wouldn’t learn to become team players. And the sooner the better.
Business is all about capturing intellect from every person. The way to engender enthusiasm it to allow employees far more freedom and far more responsibility.
Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do because then they will act.
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
Globalization
Globalization has changed GE into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talent and greatest ideas.
GE’s tremendous growth in the two decades of Jack Welch’s leadership can be attributed to the search and development of talent, more than any other factor. Particularly leadership talent. Just look around at all the GE senior leadership that are now CEOs of major US companies.
Yes, there are probably many, many current great authors and leaders with these attributes, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better leadership silent mentor than Jack Welsh.
The bottom line
You can’t make anything or anyone grow; you can only provide the right conditions. Jack Welch as a mentor selection is very effective at providing components of the right conditions. Employee growth and development were two of his key interests.
So, who are your favorite silent mentors, and what sets them apart for you? Any comments or questions to add below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your management and leadership skills. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your leadership better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
Check out these additional articles on business lessons from our library:
We often like to look for lessons learning the hard way in areas outside our normal areas of expertise and then draw analogies. We like to draw many different analogies, as different perspectives help our thinking. What about you? Here is an article created by looking at our favorite sport from a different view.
The NFL has recently gone through its annual purging of disappointing coaches. Already, we have seen close to a record lose their jobs because their teams failed to perform at an expected level. While it might not be so obvious on the surface, there are compelling similarities between business organizations and the NFL (not so surprising, is it?).
While replaced coaches race to update their resumes, I believe all business leaders can learn these five key lessons from their failures.
Related post: 9 Secrets to the Chipotle Culture and Employee Engagement Success
Team motivation
Consistent among this year’s unsuccessful teams and coaches is their lack of ability to motivate the team. Some coaches have gone down on record as saying it is not their job to motivate the team, noting that NFL players are high-paid professionals and should be intrinsically motivated. While that is logical, it simply is not true.
The situation is the same in our business organizations: Motivation is critical. We are often faced with tight timelines, shifting priorities, changing goals and diverse teams. A paycheck is simply insufficient to motivate a team to excel. Talented people prefer organizations where they are recognized have a clear understanding of their role and work with others that are held accountable for peak performance.
Inspiring a team is more difficult than it sounds. All team members should have a clear understanding of goals, roles, strategies and tactics. Successful team members need to be praised. Wins, even small ones, while expected, still need to be celebrated. Most importantly, this effort must be sustained. It’s easy to keep it up for a month or two, but championship teams have it wired into their DNA.
Do you know your clubhouse leaders?
Selecting clubhouse leaders
Strategy and skill are not the only makings of championship NFL teams. Culture is critical to success. The mood of an NFL locker room can make or break a season. Coaches make tough decisions that are frequently unpopular. To help with positive energy both on the field and in the locker room, great NFL teams leverage captains and de facto leaders to maintain the team’s ethos.
Likewise, businesses are incredibly social and have many areas that are similar to the locker room, including meetings, briefings and email. This free-flowing communication has the ability to make or break a team much like a locker room. Like NFL teams, great organizations need to foster leadership among the team, not just from the top executives. This is successfully accomplished through a leadership team that is formally designated, trained and cultivated.
Learning the hard way … playing as a team
Most NFL teams are stronger in either offense or defense but rarely in both. Teams can win with silos, but championship teams get their offense and defense to work together and strengthen each other by sharing knowledge.
When leaders focus excessively on one silo rather than develop processes that break down walls, organizations and their leaders fail. More than ever, it is critical for organizations to develop synergies across team members. Tools and technologies have blurred historical departmental definitions and teams can no longer operate in silos.
Lesson learned the hard way … making good decisions
With the advent of advanced statistical analysis, the NFL is currently going through many of the changes experienced by Major League Baseball … more decisions based on statistics and probabilities and less based on emotions. One of the changes taking place based on this statistical analysis is that teams recognize that going for it is frequently a smarter maneuver than automatically punting when facing fourth down.
Like NFL teams, organizations also have a vast amount of statistics and new technologies available to help them make informed decisions. We need to learn when to go for it on fourth down by implementing high return technologies and when to punt on an opportunity to reduce risk. Like NFL teams, statistical analysis is a powerful tool for identifying opportunities that will impact the bottom line. Analysis takes time, patience and a willingness to embrace the mathematical aspects of decision making, but it often is the difference between a major win and a major loss.
Learning the hard way … master special teams
NFL coaches come through the ranks as an expert in one specific discipline, typically offense or defense. They all initially focused on a more granular skill-set, such as linebacker or quarterback. Many of the recently failed coaches and teams failed to become true generalists — experts in offense, defense and special teams.
Related post: Competitive Growth Strategy … the Story of In-N-Out Burger
The same is true of our business organizations. Leaders must be competent in virtually all facets of the business and their interrelationships. The discipline that got you to where you are is probably antithetical to what is critical for your organization’s success going forward. The key for leaders is to become a generalist; to have a solid understanding of a broad range of skills and disciplines.
Key Takeaways
Don’t let what you know … limit what you can imagine or maybe even dream. Confidence never comes from having all the answers. It comes from being prepared for, and open to, new ideas and questions. Prepare your mind for new ways of thinking. Only then will you take advantage of all the business lessons learned.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Do you have a lesson about making your lifelong learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on business challenges from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Double your business? Just thinking what that would take is scary, isn’t it? Almost regardless of whom you are or what you do, you have competitors that have good to great business slogans.
The market leaders. And if you have no competitive advantages, you really will have a difficult time competing.
Lots of our clients confuse a unique selling proposition with a business tagline. But they are not the same.
Marketing is often confused with promotion, but it’s more than that. As Peter Drucker put it, “the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” In truth, marketing is about insights more than anything else.
A tagline is a simple representation of the brand. One whose objective is to draw attention.
A unique selling proposition, on the other hand is a business differentiation that is designed to be the reason a customer will want to buy your product or service.
It’s objective is to market in a way that makes the product or service stand out, pure and simple.
The art of tagline development is to distill the meaning of a big idea into a cogent message that’s easy to say, easy to understand, and easy to remember.
Ensure your brand expression is impossible to forget. Use the following checklist to avoid the most common mistakes that plague aspiring taglines.
Tagline, strapline, slogan. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s all the same. It’s the key phrase that identifies your business by capturing the essence of three elements:
Your mission
Your promise
Your brand
Coming up with a great tagline is a struggle many people face. More often than not, they get it wrong by focusing on what their product or service is. They often neglect what it offers.
Taglines can help or hamper your marketing efforts. They must be clear and relevant. Some taglines make you scratch your head. Some don’t make you think at all. And some, the ones that work, make you think.
Here is a 3-minute video that will refresh you on value propositions:
You know what’s insanely difficult? Being succinct. Seriously. Being succinct is ridiculously hard. But do you know what’s even more difficult?
Expressing a complex emotional concept in just a couple of words. In other words, coming up with a tagline. Yeah, it can be a head-scratcher.
But that’s why we have a lot of respect for these brands that did it right. So if you’re looking to get a little tagline inspiration of your own, take a look at some of our favorite company taglines. Taglines from past and present!
To ensure your brand expression is impossible to forget, use the following checklist. It will help you avoid the most common mistakes that plague aspiring taglines.
By your value promise
The most useful definition of a good tagline is the why people should notice you and take the action you’re seeking. Be clear, not clever.
This way, it guides your decisions much more clearly. When done right, it can be used as the basis for marketing messages.
For example, if your online bookstore has average selection, decent prices, delivery, a guarantee, good customer service, and a website, why would anyone buy from you?
There’s surely a competitor who beats you in at least some of those aspects.
You don’t have to be the best in every way. Sure, it’s great if you are. But realistically, it’s difficult enough to be the best couple of ways.
However, if you’re the best in at least several ways, you’re the best option for the people who value those promises.
You must have some promise that you can make that is unique. Something has to make you the best option for your target customers.
Otherwise, they have no good reason to buy from you. And that is NOT where you want to be.
The heart of a winning tag lineis the end result value a business intends to deliver to its target customers. The end result experience. Ask yourself this question: “So what?”
The answers you’ll come up with are the benefits a visitor (or potential customer) receives from staying on your site
How to make a slogan … articulate for customers
A unique tag line needs to be articulated for customers They are not for your products, services or business processes. Products, services, processes are the vehicles for your tag line delivery.
Ways to double sales … Become your customers
“Become” your customers instead of just asking them what they want from your business. Listen, observe and study to creatively infer from what customers DO.
Their actions to help derive your unique promise.
Utilize a tag line properly
People won’t ever buy from you if they don’t even understand why they should pay attention to you. And they notice you only if you have a unique tag line.
The usual definition of a unique tag line is incomplete. It is a promise of something the competition cannot or does not offer. It must be strong enough to move the masses, i.e., attract new customers.
A unique tag line becomes is the internal tool that guides your decisions to the best direction to maximize your customer utility.
Business slogans … demonstrate the proof
If your tag line states you have the best pizza in the state; will people flood your restaurant? No. They won’t believe the tag line.
Without proof, you can’t say much before it starts to sound like marketing talk. No one pays attention. Or remembers. They just don’t believe. No believing, no trust. It is all downhill after that.
For example, I recently saw a digital marketing competitor site where there tag line claimed to be the secret weapon of digital marketing for the most successful companies in the world. Needless to say, we doubt anyone can take that seriously when nothing supports the claim.
As long as you don’t prove your claims, people are unlikely to really believe them. And your tag line becomes just another short sentence.
Use studies, testimonials, and common sense, among other methods, to prove your claims. Impressive numbers can be the right choice, but they not always effective.
Instead, a few expert testimonials make the idea credible. They can even take away the need for you to make any claims’. Why?
Because the testimonials can make the claims for you. Similarly, you can use testimonials to build your products’ overall perceived value.
Figure out how to take away the last doubt people might feel about your promises.
Many businesses don’t help people see what sets the company apart from its competitors. This always amazes us.
They are better than others, and they could prove it. They just don’t do it.
Instead, they try to persuade people with general promises, corporate babble, and feature lists.
If your website doesn’t clearly tell visitors what makes you worth their attention, they won’t spend the time to figure it out on their own.
Be clever in communicating your claims
It’s your job to hit people in the head with what makes you different and worth attention. Clever ways to communicate your claims. In believable ways.
When people understand why they should buy your product instead of any other, they’ll do it.
So, if you were wondering where to put your marketing time and energy to optimize how to win customers from your competitors, focus on defining and delivering winning tag lines.
We have a lot of respect for these brands that did it right. So if you’re looking to get a little tagline inspiration of your own, take a look at some of our favorite company taglines.
See Food Differently
I see food differently. The tagline for this campaign is Sea Food Differently. I think this is tagline writing at its best: clever, play on words, and RELEVANT.
They are saying that Red Lobster does seafood differently (presumably better) than other restaurants. Perfect.
The uncola.
Tagline design … The uncola
A brave and somewhat bold way 7-Up’s tag line distinguishes its product from the cola competition. Taste wise it’s not cola, and that is 7-Ups promise.
Snap, Crackle, Pop
Kellogg’s Rice Krispies’ fantastic tagline that doubles up as a jingle. It is also descriptive – they actual do Snap! Crackle! and Pop!
This is more of a slogan, a classic slogan example really. It’s very advertising orientated and very product specific / descriptive! And the promise is freshness as the sound says.
Where dreams come true
This is just one of many from the dream makers at Disney. They have so many elements and areas of operations, from Disney World to a range of other media and wonderful creations.
Disney is a dream company, whilst the word dream strikes similarity with DreamWorks. It works best for the Disney promise.
We make IT happen
IBM’s clever use of playing on IT (Information Technology) doubling up as IT (as in that’s it). Makes you think, doesn’t it.
Just do it
Instantly, Nike’s tag line’s message began to resonate. It is no longer about just a shoe or a pair of shorts; it is about a state of mind.
You don’t have to be an athlete to be in shape or tackle an obstacle. If you want to do it, just do it. That’s all it takes.
The ultimate driving machine
For BMW, the fact they call their vehicles “machines” shows a real truth. When it is coupled with the word ultimate, the tagline is a well-oiled machine that works!
We try harder
This is a really strong tagline for Avis. It differentiates the brand as “going the extra mile” (this would be a relevant but more obvious tagline). It evokes that it genuinely does try harder
The bottom line
Marketing always has been and always will be about telling stories… stories that influence behavior and convince people to act. Make sure your social media content tells a story and that your story is compelling and relevant–especially your headlines.
So, if you were wondering where to put your marketing time and energy to optimize how to win customers. Winning away from your competitors, focus on delivering dramatic tagline design.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
More reading on value propositions from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
The customer never buys what you think you sell. Great quote from Peter Drucker. Have you ever stayed at a Ritz Carlton hotel? Attracted by the Ritz-Carlton marketing strategy?
Do you agree with Peter Drucker in thinking that the Ritz-Carlton doesn’t know what its difference-maker is? More importantly did you decide to stay with this hotel chain because of its difference maker? Not sure? Maybe you will be more certain after you read this article.
Marketing strategy and the Ritz Carlton?
When choosing to learn from other companies’ marketing strategies, it is always helpful to choose one of the unique approaches to marketing.
It’s been nearly half a century since Philip Kotler first published his Principles of Marketing, which has defined the practice of millions of professionals worldwide ever since. It’s no stretch to say that before Kotler, there were no true marketing professionals.
What made Kotler different than what came before is that he took insights from other fields, such as economics, social science, and analytics, and applied them to the marketing arena. Although that may seem basic now, it was groundbreaking then.
Today technology is transforming marketing once again. Although up to this point, most of the impact has been tactical, over the next decade or so there will be a major strategic transformation. This, of course, will be a much harder task because we will not only have to change what we do but how we think.
Marketing, at its best, is about the future. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time stuck in the past. We research what already happened and extrapolate forward to produce a plan. It’s not that we’re lazy, we simply know a whole lot more about the past than the present or the future.
We already know that marketing is becoming more social, local, and mobile, just as we know that big data and new interfaces such as touch, voice, and gesture are becoming increasingly more important. What comes next?
Meet Ritz-Carlton. They have been successfully executing their marketing plan since the early days of their existence. Their strategies have played a significant role in their growth.
An introduction to Ritz-Carlton is perhaps unnecessary. But we’ll give a little refresher just in case. The Ritz is a big brand name for luxury hotels and resorts all over the world.
With 77 locations in major cities and 25 resorts in countries worldwide, they are featured on Zagat Top Survey Lists for dining, hotel, and services. They represent the top brand in the Marriott International list of brands.
What are their secrets to marketing strategy success? It’s pretty simple. It is it’s exceptional customer service and unparalleled hotel experiences. Their goal is to create customers for life.
Here’s how they strive to achieve this lofty goal, with some great examples.
Brand identity at marketing core
The heart of the Ritz-Carlton marketing strategy is their brand. The brand is built into and reflected by its tag line. It is ‘memories by the Ritz-Carlton’. The brand image is the number one factor that drives business.
Since brand image is so important, it’s crucial for you to cut through the clutter and differentiate your brand. Make a difference as an organization that is truly relevant to consumer needs.
If you want to improve the public image of your brand, then what better way is there to do so than by defining it yourself? The Ritz-Carlton does this by telling stories about the hotel through its online content strategy.
Their Stories that Stay with You page elaborates on ways in which their employees and the greater hotel have gone out of their way to ensure a great stay for guests.
The Ritz-Carlton is excellent at not only framing their stories, but in behaving in such a way. That is by providing great customer service at every level. That is where their that great stories happen.
Ritz-Carlton marketing strategy … understand the value of every employee
If you’ve ever held a job where you didn’t feel appreciated, you understand how frustrating it can be. Well, the Ritz-Carlton avoids this pitfall by valuing every employee.
By empowering the employee, the hotel creates a staff that is passionate about the hotel, its services, and its success. Furthermore, happier employees mean happier guests.
In fact, the Ritz-Carlton has empowered employees so much that they have the ability to spend up to $2,000 to ensure guests have an enjoyable stay without seeking permission from management. Wow, now that is impressive, isn’t it?
In Robert Cialdini’s famous book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, he notes that:
The impressive aspect of reciprocation with its accompanying sense of obligation is its pervasiveness in human culture.
It is so widespread that, after intensive study, Alvin Gouldner (1960), along with other sociologists, reported that all human societies subscribe to the rule.
The point is straight forward: Reciprocity is likely something that has evolved in the human brain in order to keep a majority of transactions “fair”.
We often feel obligated to return favors, even if they are unasked for.
This is the ultimate reason why great customer service has such a fantastic value to the marketing objectives.
The research points to this being a universal truth in social interaction and reciprocity.
Small surprises that feel like they were “just for you” can spawn some incredibly strong goodwill from the receiver.
Go the extra mile
Here is a great example of how this hotel staff goes the extra mile for its customers.
A family with three young children arrived at the hotel for a business/leisure weekend. On the last night of their stay, they dined in the hotel’s signature restaurant.
Upon closing of the restaurant, the server attendant found a small stuffed animal tucked underneath a seat cushion. The server immediately recognized that the stuffed animal belonged to one of the young children who had dined at the restaurant earlier that evening.
It was too late to return the stuffed animal then, so they planned a fun way to present the toy the next day. They grabbed the community camera behind the front desk and positioned the stuffed animal to look like it was dining in the restaurant, playing the piano and cooking in the kitchen.
At each location, they captured the moment on camera, and then made a storyline to go with each photo. They then printed all the photos and created a book of “animal adventures” for the young guest.
The picture book and stuffed animal made its way to the guest’s door at 9 a.m. the next morning. The young boy was jumping out of his skin with excitement when he saw his lost companion.
His mother responded, “The Ritz-Carlton always goes that extra mile. This is exactly why my family will only travel to your hotels.”
Ritz-Carlton employees are trained to anticipate the unexpressed wishes of their guests. Frequently the receptionist called early departing quests to ask, ‘We see that you are scheduled to leave very early tomorrow. Can we leave a pot of fresh, hot coffee outside your door?’”
This sort of planning helps employees remember key touch-points with customers. This will in turn aids their ability to provide exceptional service more consistently.
Related post: Social Media Campaigns to Stimulate Learning
Be prepared
One lesson that you might not expect to find, however, is how proactive Ritz-Carlton employees are in planning for mistakes and accidents. Since complaining customers are unavoidable in totality, Ritz-Carlton always focuses on being prepare and ‘planning ahead’.
One of my favorite examples is their practice of “resetting a customer’s internal clock” when the service is taking too long in delivering food orders.
Here is an example. A customer and his wife were staying at the Ritz-Carlton and having dinner at the hotel restaurant. Just when they were about to ask about their order, the waiter appeared and gave them a tomato and mozzarella appetizer.
Notice how this tactic works: With a relatively small gift, the staff can reset the internal clock with a customer by establishing a new time reference point.
While it’s not as the entrée early delivery, it’s certainly better than a waiter returning to a table multiple times to say ‘I’m sorry’.
Perform the unexpected
Here is a great example of doing the totally unexpected. In this case well beyond what was anticipated.
Because of their son’s food allergies, a family vacationing at the Ritz-Carlton, in Bali, was always careful to bring their own supply of specialized eggs and milk.
In this particular instance, however, the food was ruined en route. The Ritz-Carlton manager couldn’t find any of the special items in town, but his executive chef recalled that a store in Singapore sold them.
The chef contacted his mother-in-law, who lived there, and had her purchase the items, then fly to Bali (about 2.5 hours) to deliver them.
The bottom line
Marketing always has been and always will be about telling stories… stories that influence behavior and convince people to act.
Make sure your content tells a story and that your story is compelling and relevant–especially your headlines.
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
Do you have an idea that will change the world? Well, it’s not worth anything unless you can turn that idea into a reality. So take the plunge and see just how far that idea can take you. Or, you can sit around trading advice over the internet.
Wow, talk about unexpected service. Have you ever received an unexpected service from a business that you would share? Do you have any comments or questions to add below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
