And the more feeling and emotion you express, the more attention to small business brands. And the more influence it can create. Not rocket science is it? Is improving attention to a small business design brand a high priority to you?
As long as it’s positive, there is no such thing as too much attention for your brand. If you play your cards right, you can roll all of that great attention into more success and growth for your company.
Here are some of the best and most creative steps to get people to notice you and your brand.
The other day one of my readers commented I was the oldest person she knew creating social media content all the time.
Then she said it was a compliment.
We both laughed.
Then there was an awkward pause.
While her statement clearly wasn’t true, being relatively seasoned in business means I HAVE learned many valuable brand lessons that would have been great to know when my business career started.
That’s how it has always been.
Here are 13 simple steps we recommend to clients to improving attention and awareness of their small business brands:
Design brand … listen well
Learned this step quite early in my marketing and management career. Remember your first step in online marketing is not broadcasting messages.
Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to tell your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about.
Brand perception … be consistent
Always be consistent in the subjects you choose to talk about. Select the subjects and then stick with them.
Use tone to reflect brand’s personality
Every successful brand has a specific tone of voice. One that relates to the brand’s personality. And yes, of course, a brand has a distinctive personality. Decide what personality you want for your brand and let your tone consistently reflect it.
Keep it simple
It is difficult to be heard above all the noise in the marketplace. So grab attention and hold it with simple messages. The simpler the better.
Relationships are key
Social media is all about building and exploring customer relationships. Continually look for new ways to engage and remember engagement is a two-way street.
Now more than ever, things are changing at blazing speed. There are only two ways to keep up. They are continually learning and applying what you learn.
Spend time understanding changing trends and patterns. Apply them as often as you can. Think of what you apply as experiments and learn from the results.
Time and effort
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of being social online. Building an effective network takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. Schedule time to make it happen. And be persistent and patient.
Keep ahead of new things
Familiarize yourself with new tools and applications that can help you and your customers. Consider carefully what platforms are best for your customers. You can’t do them all.
Be relevant
Derive timely and valuable insights into customer wants and needs. Talk about useful, helpful topics on these insights. Give your customers good reasons to return.
Start small
Social media takes a lot of time and energy. And there are no shortcuts. So start small and grow a little at a time. Be patient, it takes time for good results.
Quality over quantity
It’s not about the number of followers you have. Nor is it about the numbers of people you follow. Forget about these numbers and concentrate on the engagement of customers and making friends.
The bottom line
How many of these ways for small business brand awareness and attention are you employing? What is working best for you?
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.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising 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.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
As marketing types, we confess to having an obvious bias when it comes to an expression of a brand’s story. We tend to experience a brand primarily through our eyes, watching how it draws us into its world. This is all about how Zappos builds brand identity.
And when we are creating a brand identity with a client, one of our first steps is to create a book of selected pictures and graphics that create a feeling of the brand’s character and personality.
Brands are not built through gimmicks or sleight of hand. The consumer can not be fooled for long. Great companies build great brands by valuing their customers and wanting to make their lives better in some way.
In the end, despite all the gimmicks and tricks that gurus use to sell books and seminars, it comes down to one simple equation: Brand Value = the value of promises kept. Everything else is just optimizing efficiency.
Keep learning: What to Expect from a Creative Advertising Strategy
Creating a brand identity
The next step though is the expression of the brand through words.
The message, we feel, is just as crucial and maybe more so.
How Zappos builds brand identity … employs creative branding
Why are brand stories and brand messages so important? Simply because of your website, your brochures, your advertising and social media are all opportunities to draw customers into your brand world.
They represent your ability on how to build brand identity. That is to influence how people see you, feel about you, and talk to others about you.
The words you use, then, should reflect who you are and what makes you distinctive.
And it is not rocket science. Take something as elementary as how you describe your customers. Marriott calls them guests. Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters’ Tournament is played, insists on calling them, patrons. Most professional firms use the word ‘clients.’
The decision to use those terms is the first step on the way to creating a corporate story that differentiates and distinguishes.
It’s just that most companies never take the next step and end up sounding like every other company in their communications.
Any effective marketing campaign whether it’s a series of Web videos, direct emails, magazine display ads, banner ads, outdoor billboards, television and radio spots, or any combination thereof, will only work if it focuses on a single message.
At the heart of all advertising is the promise you commit to delivering to your clients. No matter how clever or memorable your marketing, if you fail to comply with that pledge, you will fail.
Learn a lesson from the politicians. The general publics’ opinion of politicians is about on a par with having a prostate exam.
Politicians can’t help themselves; they promise the electorate what the electorate wants to hear, and then fail to deliver on promises that can never be kept.
Consequently, people become cynical and distrust everything politicians say.
Failure to deliver on your promise to be the cheapest, the best, or the guy with the most features, is like a politician promising no new taxes.
Read my lips! Those kinds of promises are a prescription for a marketing disaster.
Taking the conceptual approach requires a certain degree of confidence and an understanding that you are going to have to give something up to get something in return.
If you present your identity as the Timex of widgets, inexpensive and ubiquitous, then you are giving up the audience looking for the Rolex of widgets, expensive and exclusive.
This list could go on, but I’ll end with one last powerful principle that is useful in reshaping opinions and getting people to rethink brands or categories — one of the best reasons to invest $5 million in a Super Bowl ad in the first place.
How Zappos builds brand identity … creative branding examples
In early 2011, selling an American car was a tough ask. Most people still associated Detroit and American automakers with failure and bailouts.
The principle of “two-sided messaging” was brilliantly used in Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit”(No. 13). We are more likely to engage with a message that fits with what we already believe.
If someone feels negatively toward a brand, they’ll be resistant to hearing a direct, positive message. By first acknowledging a few of its flaws, they’ll be more open to changing how they feel and what they believe.
The Chrysler spot tells us that, yes, Detroit has been through some tough times, but it’s also strong, resilient and knows a thing or two about art and culture and luxury.
By validating the viewers’ impressions of Detroit and, by reflection, Chrysler, the brand was able to turn “Imported from Detroit” into a “hell yes!” rally cry for the Motor City everyone felt proud to get behind.
Whether or not any of these ads were developed with the intelligent use of behavioral science, it’s clear to see that when ads work the way our brains work, they capture our attention and make a lasting impact.
Think how much further ahead you can be if you start your ideation with behavioral science in mind.
Brand identity process.
How Zappos builds brand identity … designing a brand identity
Given that you have a unique story to tell when you use the same phrases and thoughts as everyone else to express it, you’ll sound the same as everyone else.
Zappos doesn’t tell me they’re creative, they show me how. Don’t tell me that you value your employees, tell me why.
Designing.
Don’t say you go the extra mile, take me on the trip with you.
When you tell your original branding story, create a distinctive voice with unique images … dare to create different feelings and emotions with your communities.
The bottom line
A significant portion of a company’s value is intangible, so a strong brand is a great competitive advantage. As Philip Kotler wrote:
The art of marketing is the art of brand building. If you are not a brand, you are a commodity. Then the price is everything, and the low-cost producer is the only winner.
Brands, marketing, and communication have long been highly related. From TV ads and press releases to events and endorsements, the way consumers view a brand will influence their decision making, so crafting and reinforcing a brand image has long been a top priority for marketers.
To be useful in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.
We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the firm.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences. That will make the difference, won’t it?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that 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.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your advertising design?
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation 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 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 marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Creative Secrets from Budweiser Advertising Examples
Prudential Ad Makes Visualization Design Central to Story
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.
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.
Do you make continuous improvement a focus of your marketing strategy? Most of the best marketing strategies we study and follow certainly do, and that is an awesome way to do marketing. Yes, the innovative Disney marketing strategy is making their business better and better all the while.
And their growth is all about their marketing strategy. Of course, if you are a family with children or grandchildren you certainly know this.
Too often we obsess about using digital techniques to DRAG customers to our website or social media accounts. But it’s so much easier to show up where they already have an established community — in real life or on the web — and just be a helpful, friendly human being in that environment.
Have you noticed? It is hard not to notice, isn’t it?
Let’s examine the reasons their marketing strategy is so effective:
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.
Here is an interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes.
As the story goes, Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman spotted him.
She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper, and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”
Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.”
“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”
“My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.” [1]
Picasso isn’t the only brilliant creative who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many creative geniuses. Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice.
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?
Some excellent examples are shown here.
Brand identity
Youthful, magical, fun, and family-oriented, and true to the brand.
While establishing a differentiated meaning for a brand is tough, perhaps the greater challenge facing marketers today is the growing number of places consumers touch a brand. It’s become incredibly more complicated to execute a brand promise. This is what we call bringing the brand to life. Consumers are interacting with brands in myriad new ways, but brand organizations have to move much faster, with greater agility and responsiveness to consumer actions and reactions, which can be at warp-speed in this rapidly changing environment.
The heart of Disney’s marketing strategy is their brand. The brand is built into and reflected by its tag line … the happiest place on earth. They clearly understand that their brand is not about them. Rather it is about how the potential client community sees them, feels about them, and talks about them. They realize that their brand represents their current and future relationships. Their goal is to deliver emotional connection to their services. And they are doing it very well.
Build excitement: Let’s face it; Disney is not a low cost vacation. By providing custom touch points filled with useful and exciting content, unique to each families’ post-purchase, Disney is helping to build excitement. It works, and it’s brilliant.
Personalize: All customers are unique, have different needs, especially in travel. Since this is not a one-size-fits-all world, what everyone needs is different from just about every other person. Disney knew that and deliver a book that is unique for each family. They send a book that was specific to their hotel and reservation details … all the information needed in a custom 15-page book. It works, and it’s brilliant.
Times have changed since Walt Disney’s days but his marketing ideas are still amazing. Let’s take a look at a few of Disney tactics:
Continuous promotion – If there was one thing Walt Disney did well it was promoting his business. And he did so continuously. He made sure he kept his organization in your mind. When it came time to think of going on vacation, to a movie or any of a number of other things Disney always came to mind.
Build lifetime value – Go to a Disney attraction today and find people who have been coming back for decades and many times at that. Disney keeps their customers so happy that they keep coming back, again and again.
Web site
The Disney web sites are the physical center of this firm’s marketing. Their designs are very user friendly, yet contain the means to integrate all the strategy elements we discuss today. They encompass several ways to allow two way client engagements, including live chat, email and telephone.
Again little to no selling, as they let their products do the marketing. Their strategy reflects the belief that pushy sales pitches turn customers off, but personally relevant and interactive engagement switches them on. You can’t help but notice that all the material is put into the language of the client community.
Innovative Disney marketing … it’s the stories
The story is king – Walt knew that the story was the real reason people enjoyed his attractions. Even today, every Disney feature has a story behind it. People relate to these stories. It’s just part of the human condition. They are great at engaging people on a human level. Their stories abound at every turn.
Customer immersion
Always something new: Disney fans keep coming back because there’s always more to see. Disney’s motto isn’t “Lots of Rides”—it’s “The Happiest Place on Earth”. And Disney maintains constant interest by making sure there’s always something else to notice.
Interesting, interactive queueing areas for the rides.
Sporadic “spontaneous” performances by Mary Poppins or Alice and the Mad Hatter at various times of day.
Rides like the Jungle Cruise that are strikingly different at night.
Holiday theming. Different fireworks displays. “Limited-time only” eatables.
In the experience
Continuous theming: If you take away the theming, there’s nothing particularly special about Disneyland’s rides. Tame roller coasters, generic log flumes, perfectly ordinary carousels—off-the-shelf mid-range rides you could go on at any theme park. In fact, several nearby parks have far more extreme and exciting rides.
The thing is, Disney’s theming isn’t just slapping a few cartoon animals on the sides of rides. It’s all about the unique experience, complete and, in its own way, classy.
Engage customers directly: Disney was often seen walking around Disneyland talking to visitors. At other times he’d go to see a Disney movie and get people’s reaction to the picture. This was one of the ways Walt did his market research. You can follow this model also. Don’t always use a marketing research firm or some kind of online research tool, such as Google Analytics. While these are very worthwhile, there’s no substitute for interaction with customers. Get views about your products and services straight from the people who use them.
Details and more details: Enter any Disney property and you will see attention to detail everywhere. You know that something special is ready to happen. This is a key element of any content marketing campaign. Even the street signs on Disney properties pay attention to detail. They are rabbit ears with arrows on them. The company could have used normal street signs but where’s the magic in that?
Adapting to change
Disney parks are in a state of continual change with new entertainment. A very progressive company that keeps up to speed on consumer trends and needs. Certainly always eager to adapt their parks expertise to new areas. And certainly always looking to try new things, including marketing.
Can you change? Of course, you can. Everybody changes every day. But how versatile, agile, and quickly can you adapt yourself and your organization to stay relevant in today’s society?
Organizations are always evolving. What’s different now, is that we set a new speed record of change on a daily basis. Technology gives us unprecedented possibilities. And this sea of opportunities is pushing the traditional bureaucratic, controlled and hierarchical organization into an identity crisis.
Social media
Disney utilize all the main social media channels/platforms to engage potential clients. All channels are used to engage and share all their material in a conversational manner. They always looking to engage and learn and serve customers.
Short and sweet messages
80-90% of Disney marketing messages are short and to the point. As we said previously, many topics are used to produce many messages so as not to over saturate the market with the same messages.
Integrating the elements
All of these strategy elements complement the firm’s brand and messages. The integrating elements? The brand and the client educational element. The key is to have a central theme to the brand. In Disney’s case, the themes are all built around a family focus, fun, dreams, and happiness. Integration of all elements is the most important part of the strategy.
Walt Disney was a genius in many ways. His technological prowess is storied but it was his marketing genius that set him apart from everyone else.
Use a little of Walt’s business insight in your content marketing campaign and enjoy renewed and continuous business success.
Here’s the thing, the Disney dream isn’t just a new way of marketing, and it’s really a new way of running a business. They certainly understand this concept well and are using social marketing to rapidly promote their business.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? 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.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to 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.
