The Fork In The Road

Branding Roadmaps - The Overlooked Path

More than 10 years ago, I canceled merging my consulting practice with another successful boutique consulting practice.  We had already met with the attorneys twice and were about to start drafting the agreements.  I did this when it hit me what the new company would mean to my personal brand.  Frankly, the other managing partner had a habit of fighting with everyone: her own consultants, vendors and even clients.  In fact, my role with our joint clients was already starting to be “the fixer.”  

Canceling the partnership after we had already met with attorneys was a little expensive and a little painful.  I’ve never regretted it.  If we had gone forward, it had the potential to be very expensive (potential lost clients) and I’m certain very painful.  More importantly, I was in danger of having my personal brand damaged with negative general statements about the firm.

Brand perception, whether personal or corporate, is hard to change.  It is doable, and I’ve spent much of my career changing perceptions, but it is so much easier to get it right the first time.  Too often, companies think they’ll get their product where they want it and afterward possibly think about their brand.  Knowing what your brand is doesn’t mean you ignore the product; in fact, it supports the product roadmap.

Your company’s brand must be about the value and emotion you provide now as well as what it will be in the future.  If you plan to make a major switch in your product offerings, you need to build that into a brand roadmap so you don’t make a bold claim now that will come back to bite you in the arse later.

I’ve found people are much more forgiving – within reason – with product features needing to evolve.  But if your stated brand stands for one thing, but everything you do implies something else, your prospects and customers either won’t believe you or will assign their own definition of your brand.

The most successful companies boldly define their brands, then all company actions and marketing efforts support that positioning.  It doesn’t need to be overthought, but someone needs to be the company’s internal voice that says Does this make sense if we are an X company? For example, I couldn’t tell you what Burger King’s brand positioning was during The King advertising phase a few years ago, but I’m fairly certain it wasn’t “Creepy Fast Food Company.” Clearly, its advertising didn’t match what the company wanted its brand to project.

Another question to ask is Should we be doing this if we know in a year we will be doing Y?  Some companies, particularly tech companies, have the wrong assumption that you don’t need to transition brand positioning.  “Today we are this.  Starting tomorrow, we will be this other thing.  Don’t mention what we were before.”  This is confusing at best.  It’s possible to go from point A to B, but you need to connect the dots.  Just like with a product roadmap, you need to show the evolution, even if it is onto a new plain of existence.   

If you cringe when you meet with a company that doesn’t have a product roadmap or plan for how future offerings will be developed, what do you think of companies who haven’t defined who they, what they stand or where they are going?

 

Why I Like Targeted Advertising

There has been a lot of talk lately about privacy and advertising lately. Some of it has been about what happens to collected data – a la Facebook and Apple products. Occasionally, someone crosses the line and confuses targeted advertising with a breach of privacy. There is a clear difference between knowing what might interest me and knowing everything about me.

This week, I received a tweet about an old article blasting AnchorFree for not protecting privacy because it is advertising supported. A comment to the article accused the company’s products of being spyware, one of the things it promises to protect against.

If you aren’t familiar with AnchorFree, it sells a product called Hotspot Shield. This is used by people who want privacy while online such as for shopping. It is also used by people in regions that regularly censor communications and access to the internet. My understanding of how it works is because Hotspot Shield uses a double-blind approach to communications, you cannot link back to the end user. As you can imagine, what could be an added protection against fraud in the US, can literally be a lifesaver in other parts of the world.

The complaint, and misinterpretation I believe, comes from a wrong assumption that it is a violation of privacy to target advertising. If everyone in advertising went along with this line of thinking, companies would experience significantly lower sales because their messages would not hit the right audience, and consumers would miss offers that are relevant to them. Frankly, I would rather see something I might be interested in purchasing than an approach of spraying advertising wildly and hoping something will stick. Case in point, no matter how many times I see a Viagra commercial, I am not the target audience and will never purchase it.

In addition to a growing number of Freemium services that have some level of advertising, whether it be banners or pop-ups, there are also companies which are delivering advertising with your expressed permission. Although seen less in the US, in Europe where countries such as the Netherlands require opt-in only for email marketing, this is much more the norm.

In March, the British mobile telecommunications company O2 announced more than two million people had already subscribed to O2 More, the company’s opt-in advertising platform. There are thousands of advertisers lined up to take advantage of direct and approved communications with O2 More subscribers.

In the European Union, tracking on your own website and across others is a sticky situation at best, opt-in advertising better targets advertising to visitors about whom there is relatively limited information. When customers care about the advertising they are seeing, the response rates can be incredible.

The next phase is opt-in advertising with consumer preferences. Simply said, if I tell you what is of interest to me and you present relevant advertising, I’m more likely to buy. This also implies I’m less likely to see advertising that doesn’t interest me. I don’t know if I will ever totally lose those annoying Viagra ads, but maybe I can overlook them if I see a few more ads that seem to have a clue I’m a professional woman.