Does this mean the death of the squeaky toy?

It seems that a lot of the feel-good team spirit that occurs in many organizations around brainstorming is just that. It’s not really as productive as we’ve been led to believe. And a lot of the performance art that is used to make the process fun, silly and good for team spirit may not be the best way to generate new ideas.

What’s the alternative?  Brainstorming that encourages saying anything that comes to mind, but also encourages debate and criticism of the ideas as they are generated. Perhaps surprisingly, brainstorms that allow this kind of debate and criticism are able to produce more ideas.

Having facilitated a few brainstorms, I think that not only is debate okay, but that structuring the brainstorm with models and new theories that may cause some anxiety and disagreement are also highly productive ways to generate ideas. As UC Berkeley’s Dr. Charlan Nemeth is quoted as saying in the New Yorker, “Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.” Moreover, she says that “authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating. It wakes you right up.”

We like to actively challenge our clients in brainstorms. We don’t even call them brainstorms — they are work sessions. Funny thing is, clients still seem to enjoy the process and the results.

Turn around is fair play too. Sometimes great clients are great at challenging a recommendation. They cause all sorts of consternation at agencies and with consultants, but it sure does wake everyone up. The best clients I’ve seen will relent if the idea really is the best one out there, but it ensures that the options have been explored and that less obvious answers were brought forward. Of course, we try to road-test like this internally, before an idea goes to the client.

The only issue I can see with this new learning is that brainstorms can easily get bogged down. You can spend all the allotted time debating one issue and not move on to other ideas. Of course a “parking lot” can help with this, but I wonder if it’s not another technique that moves us away from needed conflict too soon.

Lots to chew on as we develop our next work session.

It’s important to define your voice very carefully before starting a conversation with your consumer today.

There has been a lot of talk about the impact of social media and the online world on brands.  The typical patter goes something like this:

“The conversation is no longer one-way, with marketers sending messages to consumers. Now the consumer owns the brand and can say what he/she wants. Now it’s truly a two-way conversation and that changes everything.”

All true. But many reactionaries take this to mean that the brand strategy needs to be more fluid and less defined because of this new reality. Here, we disagree. Just because a brand is now in a conversation and cannot control both sides of the dialogue, does not mean that it need not know it’s own voice as well. On the contrary, we find that is more important than ever to deeply understand your Strategic Point of View and the implications for your voice in these conversations.

Just because you are in a conversation, it doesn’t mean that you can abdicate defining your own voice. Brands have always lived in the minds of consumers and employees. Now they can tell you exactly what they think at any point in time. And that is incredibly valuable. But, at the end of the day, it’s also important to focus on what you want people to believe about your brand’s reputation at the end of the day and to define your voice in the conversation on that basis.

To do this, we feel that marketers need to work ever harder to understand their brands in a holistic, anthropomorphic way. We eschew “brand personality” as it’s usually schizophrenic list of traits delivered by a committee. Defining the voice of the brand requires a more internally consistent understanding of the brand. For this, we believe archetypes are more useful. They present a consistent notion around who you are and make it clearer how to respond in a conversation.

There are classic lists of archetypes (the Hero, the Magician, the Lover, etc.) that have been referenced in books like The Hero and The Outlaw but we find that there are other useful archetypes that can be created as original thoughts to drive the brand. The “MOA” or Man of Action archetype that we created for Lee Jeans and Buddy Lee years ago is an example of a clear archetype that was brought to life for the clients and various creative teams by showing a reel of Harrison Ford movie characters over the years. Sometimes, archetypes exist in popular culture that are useful. Is this brand more John Wayne or Cary Grant? More Marilyn Monroe or Katherine Hepburn?

Overall, the new world order is not an excuse to make brands more fuzzy from a strategic perspective, but rather a call to arms to ensure your brand is truly and fully defined in a deeper, more nuanced way than ever before.

We humans don’t get to swap out our brains when we go to work in the morning. And decisions are usually made in the part of the brain responsible for emotions.

We’ve been fortunate to work with some world-class B2B brands in the last few years, across a broad variety of categories. But it seems we often go through a rough patch at the start of the relationship because Tait Subler is not a B2B specialist. Many B2B marketers seem to believe that a business brand is fundamentally different than a consumer brand. Consumer brands are routinely cast aside as unfit analogues. B2B is just too… different.

Many of the people who assert this most aggressively have never worked on consumer brands, so we wonder how they’ve come to this conclusion. These same folks often believe that the mushy, emotional stuff that is part of consumer brand marketing has no place in the rational world of decisions made in the work place.

And yes, there are some differences that need to be taken seriously as you address a B2B brand strategy. The sales force is a more important target segment and the decision-making process involves multiple people playing different and important roles. Complexity plays a role. But when we are trying to figure out the most compelling, differentiating way to position a B2B brand, we haven’t seen fundamental differences. Moreover, not all consumer brands are as simplistic as they are cast by B2B marketers. Every brand and every situation deserves its own attention and a customized approach to determining the best brand strategy. That is true of consumer and B2B brands.

We say B2B brands aren’t fundamentally different because they still need to be differentiated and relevant. And they still exist as concepts in the same place – the human brain.

The myth that some B2B marketers hold onto is that decision-making is different in a work context. It’s purely rational. We agree that the pressures and weight of a high-involvement business decision can be different than some consumer decisions, but in very complex decisions the brain science shows that people are more likely to rely on intuition and emotional parts of the brain. This is why we see B2B brands and consumer brands as fundamentally similar.

We humans don’t get to swap out our brains when we go to work in the morning. And decisions are usually made in the part of the brain responsible for emotions (see the work of Antonio Damasio at USC for more on this). This fact of our biology is the same in a B2B decision as it is in a decision about what kind of perfume to buy. Yes, we need to provide a rationale in a business context, but the decision often precedes the rationale. The rationale is used as armor for the decision made in a different part of the brain. And a B2B brand needs to address that emotional part of the brain.

Here’s an example that brought it home for me. We were doing a focus group with physicians (men and women of science and rationality). We showed them all the same data around a particular drug. They fought vehemently around its appropriateness to prescribe for a particular malady. And when we dug to the bottom of their dispute, it had nothing to do with the facts or the science. It had to do with how they wanted to be perceived by their patients and how they wanted to see themselves as physicians. On this they differed and it helped us define meaningful segments – based on emotional drivers. Not unlike how we created segments for Gucci.

A lot of sophisticated B2B brands are beginning to make the same kinds of connections with customers and prospects that great consumer brands do. They appeal to values and emotions as well as intellect. Look at IBM’s smarter planet effort or GE’s Imagination At Work as examples.  Our B2B clients are moving in this direction too.

Of course B2B brands have distinct challenges that need to be respected, but when you get right down to it, the best B2B brands and the best consumer brands are able to make powerful emotional and values-based connections that support the features and functional benefits they offer. And that’s what we set out to do in either case.

Perhaps respect for privacy has become a truly differentiating idea.

I was part of a panel recently at a conference for resorts and casinos. We were speaking on the topic of building greater trust with customers through the use of new technologies, digital media and analytics. My job was to define trust in a brand context. We draw on the work of Lewicki and Tomlinson at the University of Colorado for much of our perspective on trust. Their work has found a distinction between “calculus-based trust,” which is a cognitive, rational relationship based on consistent performance, and “identity-based trust” which occurs when shared values and goals become evident. Calculus-based trust is less resilient and can be shattered by the failure to perform on even one occasion. Identity-based trust, on the other hand, is highly resilient because its intentions are perceived to be good, even if it does let you down once in a while. You forgive brands that have established identity-based trust. This could be called values-based brand loyalty as well.

We argue that brand managers should try to create identity-based trust and loyalty because it leads to higher margins and less churn.  To do this, the brand needs to show how it’s on the side of its customers – holding the same values they do.

After I spoke, three very smart gentlemen on the cusp of technology discussed ways new tools can be used to track where a customer is on a resort property and how to dig deeper into their computers than ever before possible. One person commented on the power of “fingerprinting,” which is far more invasive and harder to remove than the quaint cookie used until now. The potential for more relevant offers and increased revenue seems obvious from this type of technology but I wonder if it can also be seen to cross a line where privacy is invaded and identity-based trust becomes untenable.

Ad Age even had a cover article regarding the way Netflix and Facebook seem to act so cavalierly with customer trust and loyalty.  It appears that the analytics folks are ruling the roost in some cases and it’s not always to the company’s benefit.

Even more striking is the new reality that trust is being defined in a completely different manner. In this technology-driven perspective, trust equals ongoing revenue.  Period. Relationship is akin to transaction.

How much room for error is left to the brand that is based on this kind of relationship? It would seem very little. Will consumers see a brand that is willing to delve way inside their computers (and be highly resistant to removal) as being on their side? Every once in a while we have eruptions of concern around privacy rights in our linked-in world. When customers find out about some of this new technology, will there be a revolt?  Will there come a time when consumers consciously select brands that respect their privacy? Can that become a selling point for a brand intent on developing identity-based trust that is highly resilient and long-lasting?

Perhaps respect for privacy has become a truly differentiating idea.