Category Branding/Thought Leadership

Entries 46 Total

Know thyself: Discovering your Brand Essence

Jun 23, ’11 1:00 AM

[This is the second in a commentary series on our Groove Brand Training Course, an internal workshop in which Groove's creative leaders teach team members branding philosophy and strategies. Read Emily's introductory post here.]

Before anyone can care about your brand, your company, or even you as a person, they have to know who you are. But do you know?

The first and most important step in developing a brand is making that discovery. This is the goal of the Brand Setting Workshop ― to take key members of your organization, lock yourselves in a room, and hash out the nitty gritty details of who you are, what you do, and why anyone should care.

Ever try describing yourself in three words? Then you know this is no easy task.

In the Groove Brand Training Course, we found it takes some good, deep ― and slightly heated ―  conversation to develop a brand’s core words, or its Brand Essence.

In this training session, we worked to develop the Brand Essence for one of our clients (who was not present). As we got closer and closer to narrowing down the core descriptors, we found that we were stuck between two sets of words: one that was aspirational and inspirational, and one that was analytical and realistic. We had to go back to the client to see how they felt about these two directions. Funny enough, they came back to us with nearly a split vote themselves; but eventually were able to reach agreement.

The Brand Essence exercise is the necessary first step in creating a strong brand. There is power and deep gratification in identifying a simple three-word essence, or mantra, that fully encompasses who you are. And this clarity of Brand Essence is the solid foundation upon which you (or we, as the case may be) will build your brand’s story.

My three observations for the week:

1.    Disagreement is the answer.  It is so important to have a mixed group of participants in the Brand Workshop. Disagreement creates dialogue; dialogue garners results.

2.    It is amazing, the weight of three little words. Take your time, and try not to get overwhelmed. You really can find the right three words that say it all.

3.    There is a beginning, middle and end: who you are, what you do, and why anyone should care. These are the three components of great brand building.

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From impulse decision to brand reinforcement: transforming a winery brand

Jun 8, ’11 6:31 PM

Wine is, in many respects, a cottage industry. There are prohibition era regulations that have allowed brands to exist for more than eighty years without developing brand-driven customer relationships. The three-tier sales mechanics lay responsibility for brand relationships at the feet of distributors, trade partners, and powerful influencers; creating brand awareness gaps that make wine selection intimidating and undifferentiated. For the first time, wineries are struggling to build authentic brand relationships outside their tasting room experiences; they are trying to learn traditional “brand building” mechanics at a time when all of the mechanics are transforming.

Forced transitions

In some ways their job is easier.  They’re not forced to dismantle decades of infrastructure, processes and career trajectories breaking apart at the seams. However, in many more ways, they are being forced to transition from “producer and promoter” to “customer engagement architect” at all levels of a three tier system (distributor, account and consumer). By the way, the rules at all three tiers change from zip code to zip code; requiring complex, heavy lifting in all segments of the business.

Battling “In the aisle” decision-making

Groove 11 is helping our wine clients make the transition at all three tiers. From a distributor and account level, it remains true that a vast majority of buying decisions are made “in the aisle” — meaning that a vast majority of the marketing spending decisions are trying to influence consumers’ impulse decision moment.

With little differentiation in the aisle outside of price, promotion and label, it’s a branding nightmare to constantly depend on winning the moment — why do you think Kendall-Jackson and Gallo spent so much money fighting each other over copyright infringement of the color and angle of a leaf? Nuts, right? Imagine gaining deep and broad expertise about your product or service; spending endless hours (even years) honing your craft, putting blood, sweat and tears into making it real; raising funds and building an organization to take it to market; and then having no real brand voice at the point-of-sale. I don’t mean to under-value POS — it is an important piece in any buying decision — but, holy mackerel, what a crippling and debilitating sensation!

Does all that work as a wine producer come down to a label and offer in the aisle? Many people will tell you this entire industry is driven by that exact reality. By contrast, buyers could walk down a cereal aisle and provide you basic knowledge of the brand promise for Wheaties, Shredded Wheat, Total and Cheerios. And you would probably know a little bit about what Budweiser stands for, versus Heineken. But get to the wine aisle, and for many consumers (and by “many,” I mean the consumers who have never heard of Robert Parker and don’t care who he is), what they see is just a bunch of dark or light bottles with pretty labels, promotions and pricing. That’s it.

Changing the game

So, what’s a quality wine producer to do? Groove set out to flip the conversation on its head by designing comprehensive customer engagement strategies that reach consumers before they hit the aisles. We’re driving an aisle transformation from impulse decision to brand reinforcement — converting the aisle into a confirmation of what the brand already stands for to that customer, with clear differentiation and value. How, you ask?

First, we’re flipping the conversation from horizontal to vertical. In the wine business we’re not talking about tens of millions of consumers “per brand,” because we don’t have tens of millions of SKUs to sell them. We’re not beer or spirits; we can’t turn on a spigot if a product gets hot. No, we’re talking about building real relationships between tens of thousands of people and a few hundred wines brands. It’s a sifting of the digital landscape, not a land grab. Programs need to be focused on a specific target (and, by specific, I do not mean the same target every other wine brand is chasing) and need to find that target where they live. Field of Dreams is dead; if you build it, they will not come.

Second, you need a multi-channel digital ecosystem — based on combinations of “push and pull” touches (our secret process) and a healthy combination of “paid, owned, earned and organic” engagement.

Finally, you need to work it — constantly, everyday, with every potential customer. If you digital ecosystem is going to be a virtual tasting room, it needs to be open for business whenever someone wants to try your wine. We’ve been able to create a repeatable methodology for building customer engagement and we’re experimenting everyday with new ways to build brand relationships so that our fans are not making impulse decisions in the aisle for much longer.

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3 things clients request, but don’t realize what they’re asking for

Jun 3, ’11 7:28 PM

The formula for building a successful online presence has become much more complicated over the last few years. It’s no longer sufficient to create a brochure site with no user interaction. We’ve all heard the mantras of this new era: Engage your users. Join the conversation. Measure your results.

However, when it comes to living these mantras, there’s still quite a bit of confusion about what tools to use and how to use them. As a Web developer and a relatively knowledgeable tech guy, I am often asked to help implement strategies that deliver this next level of Web experience.

The problem is, most of the time, people don’t really know what they’re asking for. They want something, but they don’t know the details. And sometimes those details include complications or commitments they don’t anticipate. It’s my job — and the job of anyone in a technology thought leadership role — to explain these important details to anyone involved in selling or planning digital projects.

Here are three things people ask for, but often don’t really know what they’re asking for:

1) SEO
Improving the ranking of a Web site within search engine results is much more work than most people want to believe. I typically give the advice that there are two tiers of SEO efforts:

The first tier involves basic best practices and can be done without much extra work. It mostly involves tasks that a Web developer should be doing by default when building out a Web site: using standard HTML that degrades well if styles or Javascript is turned off, proper use of header and title tags, creating and submitting a sitemap.xml file, etc. Basic best practices also means the copywriter needs to focus the content on each page around as few keywords as possible; preferably one.

The first tier, as I have loosely defined it, really only plants the seeds for SEO success. If you don’t do anything else the seeds will just sit there. The second tier of SEO efforts requires much more time and effort; it can be tantamount to a full-time job. This is the side of SEO that’s often surprising to people. A Web page is never going to find success within search engine results unless other sites are linking to it; and it usually takes a lot of work to get those links. Someone needs to be putting in time, finding relevant sites, building relationships with bloggers and other content creators, and earning those links. There’s also competitive analysis to be done, metrics to be monitored…

2) Social Media
Adding social media to your online presence is another undertaking whose difficulty is often underestimated. It’s fairly simple to set up Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts and to add widgets to your site; but these actions alone will not bear much fruit. Like basic SEO best practices, these are merely the seeds.

Also similar to SEO, taking social media to the next level requires a full-time, dedicated resource (or resources) to truly engage your customers and create a community that thrives. Finding people who want to join your conversation and maintaining that connection are time-consuming, strategic duties that can’t simply be tacked on to an already busy work load.

Successful social media programs require a multi-faceted approach. Executed correctly, they will generate real, personal relationships. These relationships must be nurtured by a team with clearly defined roles — even if that team is a single person. Social media is far too important today to be an afterthought.

3) Analytics
Measuring the activity and success of your online presence falls into the same pattern social media and SEO do: the basics are straightforward, but the real benefits are only found by putting in work. Setting up a Google Analytics account to monitor a site’s activity is very simple and the out-of-the-box results are surprisingly sophisticated. It’s easy to take this low hanging fruit and feel like something significant has been accomplished.

The fruit filled with jewels and other treasures, however, is at the top of the tree (You didn’t know that?). You’ll need to spend some man-hours to really exploit the power of analytics. Goals need to be set, user activity needs to be tracked at a more granular level, and you need to experiment – continually tweaking to improve results.

If you weren’t overwhelmed by all the fruit and seeds metaphors, hopefully you’ll see a common thread: creating a thriving online presence requires dedicated resources. It’s too much to ask a sales person, a project manager, or a developer — let alone a CEO — to perform these tasks on top of their daily duties. They won’t be able to put in sufficient time, they’ll be unhappy because they’re putting in extra hours, and the project will suffer at the hands of unfocused brains. You must find people who can focus on these tasks every day.

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Welcome to Brand Training: Class is in Session

Mar 18, ’11 11:11 AM

Over the next 12 weeks Groove 11 is going back to school. Well, at least a few of us are. The second round of the Groove Brand Training Course is officially in session. This internal training was designed to share our language and philosophy on brand to the entire company through a Groove-teaching-Groove approach. We have teachers and students from across the agency, and a real client to work with for a true hands-on learning experience.

To capture the Brand Training in all its glory, I’ll be taking notes and posting updates on how and what we’re doing.

Our first class met this week with lots of coffee and our client in-house to learn about the process of the Brand Workshop, a facilitated workshop with client stakeholders designed to get them to arrive at their brand essence. Each slide of the presentation sparked a new dialogue, and we continually became side-tracked discussing our client’s business. Luckily, one of the most important elements of developing a brand, or of participating in the Brand Workshop, is conversation. While the lively conversation resulted in our not getting through the entire agenda of the meeting, the information we gained from our client was well worth the slightly diverted lesson plan.

I’m looking forward to next week when our internal team will meet again to debrief on this week’s information overload and work through the next steps for the course.

My three observations for the week:

1.  I’ve missed school: reading assignments, vocabulary terms, intelligent conversations. It’s refreshing to be visiting academia again, even if it’s only for a little while.

2.  Step one: listen. The best way to find out about a brand is to ask the right questions and have the client start talking.

3.  We have some wicked smart folks here at Groove. From Rainey Straus, Design Director, who was our tour guide and teacher for this week’s class – to Chris Schmidt, fellow contributor and Director of Digital Strategy here at Groove. I’m excited to participate in this course and learn from some of the best.

More soon. I’m off to do my reading homework!

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Value-Driven Culture: How to activate your culture and ignite your brand

Jul 23, ’10 3:14 PM

This is the second in a series of blogs about creating and empowering a value-driven brand. To see the first blog in the series, go here.

One of the key decision points for Groove in designing our Values process was to invite participation from all employees and even key partners. Our research revealed that more often than not upper management would typically identify the organizational values and then introduce and sell them across the organization via an internal campaign or change management effort.
So why did we buck the trend?

First, we are all small business. From a practical standpoint our entire organization (about 40 people) could participate in the entire process without any real roadblocks.

Second, we leaned on one of our pillar mantras: “right answer” plus “buy in” equals results. In other words if the majority of our organization was not participating in the process it was likely we a) may have not identified those values that the majority believed to be true (right answer) and b) had they not participated in the process their likely would have been less “buy in” simply because they did not participate.

Third, and most important is this: values are not aspirational in nature. They are not goals. They are already engrained in our day-to-day behavior. Since our organization is comprised of 40 individuals it makes sense that each and every part be listened to and observed to get a full understanding of the whole. The idea is not that we would be doing a makeover of the organization by defining new aspirational values; but rather, that we would be revealing and identifying those values which we already shared.

To do this we framed the program in the following way:

“This off-site is the beginning of a process to explore and articulate our values; the values we want to hold up as we ignite Groove 11 for the future. Put another way, these values will articulate our beliefs and commitments around what is worthy, important and desirable to show up in our work lives. This includes the actual work we do, our attitudes as we do it, and the guiding principles (individually and agency-wide) that inform it all. By defining these, we can ensure our brand is alive. We call this inside-out branding, and as something we preach to clients every day it’s critical we put it into practice ourselves.

Once values are set and understood, we’ll have a framework for driving outcomes at Groove so that we can:
• Be a great brand-driven organization, able to scale and live our Vision
• Create a guide for actions and a filter for decision-making
• Make “agreements” within the agency that will align and connect us
• Attract great A-list talent
• Enhance our ability to “walk the talk” and obtain a competitive advantage”

Next we sent out a survey requesting that people organize a pre-defined set of values into the following five categories: “Always Value,” “Often Value,” “Sometimes Value,” “Seldom Value,” and “Least Value.” Each person did this exercise through two lenses. First, through the personal lens. Second through the agency lens, specifically framed this way: What values must the agency live in order to truly express its brand promise. Finally, every person was asked to identify a top 3 set of personal values and a top 3 set of agency values.

So before stepping into the off-site the pre-work had introduced the connection between personal values and agency values, defined the goal of the initiative and given us the data that would be the launching point for the exercises at the off-site. With the stage set and this information in hand we were able to put finishing touches on the off-site design, which I will share in the next blog.

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The State of Flash and HTML5

Jun 29, ’10 12:37 PM

Flashlogo122The Flash plugin is nearly ubiquitous on desktop personal computers. While installation stats are not easy to come by, it is estimated that between 90 and 97% of browsers have the latest version installed (v10 at the time of this writing). [1,2] When the previous – and very capable – version of the Flash Player (v9) is considered, the percentage of browser penetration gets closer to 99%.

If you’ve been reading technology news lately, however, you’ve probably noticed more frequent discussions about how Flash will soon die, or that it’s at least not looking as hearty as it once did. Most of this discussion centers around Apple’s refusal to allow the Flash plugin or apps created using the Flash IDE on the iPhone, iPod Touch and, more recently, the iPad. Over 85 million iPhones and Touches have been sold [3] and none of them can play applications created in Flash, nor can they play videos in the very popular Flash Video (FLV) format.

So is Flash a dead technology, or is the threat posed by Apple not as dire as it may seem?

I think the answer tends toward the latter of those two options. As mentioned above, nearly all desktop and laptop computers can play Flash applications and Flash videos. By one estimate, the number of Internet users worldwide is approaching 2 billion. [4] Using conservative numbers, assuming 1 billion desktop and laptop users, if all 85 million iPhones and Touches were online they wouldn’t comprise 1% of Internet users. Granted these numbers are rather fuzzy, but it still holds that Apple mobile device users make up a small percentage of all Internet users.

Moreover, Apple mobile devices are the *only* devices that plan to exclude Flash like this for the foreseeable future. Windows and Linux machines, non-Apple smartphones, and even Apple desktops and laptops continue to play Flash content without difficulty (or will in the near future [5]).

The Apple user base is a vocal minority and they’re technology trendsetters. Apple’s defensive stand toward Flash has some content providers, developers, and agencies (including Groove 11) considering the alternatives [6,7].

For most non-video content, however, the issue is not simply Flash vs. an alternative. Most Flash animations and interfaces would not work on the small form factor of *any* smart phone, not just the iPhone. Disregarding the iPad for a moment, the real issue then is small form vs. large form content. For the most part, "small form" = mobile devices (smartphones, Touches, etc) and "large form" = desktop devices (desktop computers, laptop computers). Content needs to be structured so it works on mobile devices and desktop devices. Typically this will just mean separate CSS for the mobile version of a Web site and alternative content (a static image, JS/HTML/HTML5 animation, or simply text) to replace any Flash.

If a Web site is built entirely in Flash or perhaps has a tool built in Flash, it will probably need to be re-imagined without Flash in a more compact layout for small form devices. This will mean time and money to create a second interface.

So was your investment in a Flash-heavy site or tool wasted if it needs to be recreated for mobile devices? Ask the question another way: If the mobile devices you are considering could play your Flash application right now, would you want them to? Some applications are simply built to be experienced on a bigger screen. Conversely, if you had accounted for small devices from Day One, you wouldn’t have tried to build one application that works on mobile and desktop devices, you would have built two separate interfaces for the application.

If you’ve a) built a site with a lot of Flash and it doesn’t currently work on an iPhone, and b) determined that it’s worthwhile for your site to be tailored to the portion of your audience that owns an iPhone (certainly not automatically true), you’ll need to build a second interface. If you had planned for the iPhone from the outset, you would have done this work earlier, so you can simply look at it as a task that’s been deferred until now.

[1]: http://www.riastats.com/
[2]: http://www.adobe.com/ … /flashplayer/version_penetration.html
[3]: http://metrics.admob.com/2010/05/april-2010-mobile-metrics-report/
[4]: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
[5]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/30/adobe-cto-says-flash-10-1-for-android-in-june-will-froyo-foll/
[6]: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/introducing-youtube-html5-supported.html
[7]: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/?newsID=3222690

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Value-Driven Culture: How to activate your culture and ignite your brand

Jun 2, ’10 8:47 AM

First in a series describing how Groove defined its values and put them into practice.

Coming into 2010, the Groove leadership team made a decision to focus our annual strategic off-site around values. It made sense because we had recently completed a brand refresh, which gave us more clarity than ever around our brand identity and the direction of the business. We are very excited about our positioning statement:

Groove 11 is a brand experience agency with an unshakable belief in the power of meaningful, sustainable brand relationships. To develop these, we architect conversations that create unforgettable emotional experiences, inspiring audiences to feel, learn, do, or be. As trusted partners, we offer intelligent brand and cultural strategy, strong creative, a nurturing style, and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We use these to design, execute, and cultivate relationships, ensuring that the essence, promise, and personality of the brand has real meaning and, through it, enormous business value.

As you can see, we are in the relationship business with a strong focus on people. Of course, I consider our people to be the most important assets of the agency. It is people who deliver the client experience and the work product; people who deliver our brand promise. And as we know from the brand work Groove does via our Brand Essentials™ practice, the clarity around our essence and core identity needs to translate from the written word to our day-to day-behavior.

This is where the strategic off-site focused on values comes in. In keeping with our Aaker-driven brand philosophy, we started with his definition of values: “Values are principles of beliefs that guide the organization’s work and staff’s behavior toward stakeholders to ensure that the brand is lived – to determine how we act. Values are the foundation for a way of being.”

From here, we immersed ourselves in the question of what principles and beliefs were in place at Groove 11. And, how does the current value set support the essence, mission and vision of our agency? We did this through an exercise in advance of our off-site in which everyone in the company identified two sets of values: First, those that guide behavior outside the office, and second, those the agency needed to live day-to-day in order to “be the brand.”

The thinking behind this approach comes from Ken Majer, a foremost authority on value-based leadership, who says, “You are the same person at home, at work, and at play. You take you—and your values—with you wherever you go.” Another of his pillars is: “The secret to building a winning team is helping team members discover their own set of values and helping them to act on them.”

Combined, these played a significant role in how we viewed – and view – the importance of understanding and valuing the individual, while designing a set of shared values for the organization. In other words, we made a conscious effort to tap into the personal as it can directly apply to, and be in support of, the brand identity work. With the brand already established, the art moving forward was in bubbling up and tying into the juice of each and every employee – their personal values that are the fabric of the organization’s values.

In the next blog I’ll be writing about the specifics of the methodology in gathering values data in advance of our off-site.

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Groove Move

May 26, ’10 10:16 PM
youarehere 747270

Welcome to GrooveLab’s new home!

Everyone at our brand experience agency thinks you’ll find this a user-friendlier place to Get into it with us. Even Robin, who usually doesn’t weigh in on these kinds of things. Ok Robin, you can get off our backs, now.

Enjoy, and let us hear from you!

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What Happened to Originality?

May 19, ’10 11:43 PM

Amazon started selling the Kindle a few years ago and made a few videos to show its features. This is the opening screen.

Amazon

Today I saw a TV spot for a new e-reader on the market, Barnes & Noble’s nook. Here’s a still from their spot:

Nook

Now, if you were introducing a new product that was very much like an established one, and wanted to tell people why yours was better, or different, why in the world would you do this? Wouldn’t you want every one of your very expensive 30 seconds to showcase your product in an original light?   sigh…

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A lesson in branding from Coco

Apr 27, ’10 2:44 PM
Coco

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know what’s going on with Coco, aka Conan O’Brien. Unceremoniously canned from his dream gig on The Tonight Show, his exit contract stipulated that he wasn’t allowed to be back on the airwaves until September. The late-night-talk-show-hosting equivalent of a non-compete clause.

Through it all, Coco [how'd he get that name anyway?] has been completely up-front about it. Always the first to make fun of himself ["I'm freakishly tall!"], his tweets and sound bytes have kept him relevant and entertaining while managing to deflect snide comments to the network that done him so wrong [NBC].

I suppose he had no choice. It’s not like he could deny what happened to him in front of millions of people, or pretend it wasn’t embarrassing. Besides, we wouldn’t want it any other way. Coco is a case study in how to mine comedy from what was probably a personal tragedy.

Since he’s forbidden from the airwaves for a few months yet, he just launched a national tour with the catchy name "The Not Allowed to Be Funny on Television Until September Tour." Gathering from the reviews, the premiere in Oregon was a smash.

I’m not surprised. One of the pillars of the Coco brand has always been self-deprecation. It’s a credit that he has stayed true to it. I hope, and expect, that when his newly-announced TBS talk show debuts in the fall, his commitment to his Brand Essence and the fact that he knows his audience so well, will pay off.

Go, Coco!

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