Musings

Reflections on life lived by a coast

  • Home
  • Travel
  • Yoga
You are here: Home / Archives for Brand Matters

Marketing to Women: 2 Examples

November 12, 2009 •

After blog­ging about “the female econ­omy” as the world’s biggest untapped mar­ket oppor­tu­nity, I’ve been on the look­out for evi­dence that com­pa­nies and brands are mar­ket­ing specif­i­cally to women. I’ve seen a cou­ple of exam­ples recently, an encour­ag­ing sign.

Both offers focus on help­ing women over­come the gaps in our under­stand­ing of mechan­ics – things most fathers don’t teach their daugh­ters. [Read more…]

Falling Out of Love with QuickBooks

October 30, 2009 •

For years I’ve loved Quick­Books – a tool that made man­ag­ing my company’s money remark­ably pleas­ant. I used to rave about it to col­leagues. But over the past sev­eral prod­uct releases I’ve become dis­en­chanted; I think Intuit has lost its way, and has lost sight of whose inter­est it was pur­su­ing.

No longer cus­tomer cen­tered

With its most recent release, Quick­Books Pro 2010, Intuit has con­vinced me they’ve decided to walk away from their ori­gins as a cus­tomer-focused soft­ware provider. [Read more…]

Visualizing Your Digital Persona

October 13, 2009 •

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have released an online tool that  attempts to char­ac­ter­ize your dig­i­tal per­sona based on data min­ing of online resources.

Right now the tool is in the fun and exploratory phase, but it offers food for thought. Have you ever won­dered what your dig­i­tal fin­ger­prints might look like, if there were a way to rep­re­sent them?

For exam­ple, here’s an expres­sion of the dig­i­tal per­sona for Chris­tine Thomp­son (cour­tesy of Aaron Zin­man of MIT Media Lab):

christine-thompson-persona

This visu­al­iza­tion con­veys the impres­sion that there are many facets to Chris­tine Thomp­son – too many to be cred­i­ble, or rel­e­vant to me. The spe­cific facets of the per­sona shown here result from lim­i­ta­tions in this beta-stage tool, which casts too wide a net.

Why? The dig­i­tal per­sona shown above is actu­ally a com­pos­ite of the many peo­ple who share the name “Chris­tine Thomp­son.” This com­pos­ite set of impres­sions becomes very clear when you watch the data min­ing process in action (assum­ing your name is not unique to you). It’s amus­ing to see ref­er­ences to many other peo­ple who share your name, if not your per­sona.

The per­sona looks a bit dif­fer­ent when fur­ther qual­i­fied by the name of my con­sult­ing firm:

christine-thompson-ia-persona

But this rep­re­sen­ta­tion is still not accu­rate, due to the rel­a­tive impor­tance of news and music as key dimen­sions of this fic­ti­tious per­sona. Because I’m nei­ther musi­cal nor news­wor­thy, this must be a con­se­quence of my firm’s use of com­mon Eng­lish words in the com­pany name.

I wish there were a way to cal­i­brate and focus what dri­ves MIT’s data min­ing per­sona tool. If results were more accu­rate, it might be inter­est­ing to track progress over time to changes in your dig­i­tal per­sona. These changes might reflect shifts in the rel­a­tive impor­tance of key aspects of your online per­sona, based on the foot­prints you leave through blogs, prod­uct reviews,  news­wor­thy activ­i­ties, online com­ments, tweets, what other peo­ple say about you, and so on.

But for now, it’s just amus­ing.

Source (Cre­ative Com­mons license): creative-commons-license-aaron-zinman

Aaron Zin­man / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Managing Your Personal Brand

July 5, 2009 •

My friend Shiv­onne Byrne has just posted a won­der­ful entry on how to man­age your per­sonal brand. Check out her blog: Mar­ket­fu­sions: Every­thing is a Brand, Includ­ing You.

She encour­ages peo­ple to think through:

  • Their per­son vision
  • Their fun­da­men­tal pur­pose or rea­son for being
  • Their val­ues
  • Their pas­sion

and then develop a per­sonal brand plan that will help them rec­og­nize won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ties as they arise.

I for­get which philoso­pher said this, but I’ve always found this to be true:

Chance favors the pre­pared mind.

Lululemon: Cult-like Loyalty?

June 9, 2009 •

So how does Lul­ule­mon inspire such cult-like loy­alty among its cus­tomer base (prin­ci­pally yoga prac­ti­tion­ers)? They do the basics really well — for both in-store and online shop­ping. It’s clear they’re pay­ing atten­tion to cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment across many dimen­sions.

A Well-Designed Experience Playbook

Here are some of the things they get right: [Read more…]

Business Purpose – Brand Context

April 27, 2009 •

Last month I blogged on the pur­pose of a busi­ness and the prob­lems that can arise when orga­ni­za­tions lack a clear sense of pur­pose, or when they define suc­cess nar­rowly in finan­cial (share­holder-cen­tric) terms. Today’s post focuses on busi­ness pur­pose and its links to cor­po­rate brand strat­egy.

In the con­text of brand strat­egy, pur­pose ener­gizes the organization’s “heart” — the inter­sec­tion of cor­po­rate strat­egy, the organization’s shared val­ues, and its fun­da­men­tal rea­son for being. Pur­pose is the “zen of the brand,” in com­pa­nies wise enough to define and be guided by a clear sense of cor­po­rate pur­pose.

What Is Purpose (brand context)

Purpose as the Essence of Corporate Identity

Pur­pose ani­mates the brand, infuses it with mean­ing, shapes and inspires the moti­va­tions of employ­ees. When employ­ees iden­tify with the organization’s pur­pose, when it gives mean­ing to their work, cus­tomers ben­e­fit.  The brand promise will be grounded in some­thing mean­ing­ful and endur­ing – some­thing that should out­last the cast of char­ac­ters who lead the orga­ni­za­tion at any given point in time.

For the world’s best-loved brands, employ­ees who closely self-iden­tify with the pur­pose become pas­sion­ate brand evan­ge­lists; the com­pany, its prod­ucts and the peo­ple behind them inspire cult-like loy­alty among the cus­tomer base. [Read more…]

When Advertising Misrepresents the Brand, Who’s Accountable?

November 19, 2007 •

A while ago, For­rester Research ana­lyst Brian Haven asked who’s at fault when there’s a seri­ous dis­con­nect between the brand promise con­veyed by the adver­tis­ing cam­paign, and what a per­son expe­ri­ences later. Is it the agency or the com­pany (brand owner) that’s account­able?

[Read more…]

Why I Love My iPhone

October 22, 2007 •

iPhone-image

I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the expe­ri­ence of using it is so plea­sur­able, so much of the time. [Read more…]

Diluting the Brand

October 22, 2007 •

The brands I admire most have a long-stand­ing com­mit­ment to their core prin­ci­ples, the things the brand stands for in the mind of con­sumers. Whether you like the brand or not, you know what it stands for.

I sus­pect that one of the rea­sons brands tend to zig and zag so much is the impact of orga­ni­za­tional dynam­ics, or the human desire to make a mark — what hap­pens when a com­pany changes its mar­ket­ing agen­cies, swaps out Chief Mar­ket­ing Offi­cers, or lacks a brand stew­ard… [Read more…]

The Cost of Individual Expression

October 22, 2007 •

There’s a real ten­sion in Cor­po­rate Amer­ica between the indi­vid­u­al’s desire for cre­ative expres­sion — to make a mark — and the cor­po­ra­tion’s desire to cut costs.

When that indi­vid­ual hap­pens to be a prod­uct man­ager, a mar­ket­ing or brand man­ager, or a “cre­ative,” it’s not uncom­mon for them to drive new vari­a­tions in how the brand is expressed. These vari­a­tions tend to crop up in con­junc­tion with new prod­uct launches or line exten­sions. As a result logo treat­ments and other aspects of visual iden­tity can vary all over the place.

The Octo­ber 2007 issue of Fast Com­pany makes this point all too clearly. The story opens with HP’s new CEO, Mark Hurd, ask­ing his senior design team why they were both­er­ing to meet with him (so early in his reign…) The arti­cle goes on to say:

The pony­tailed Sam Lucente, who’d become HP’s first-ever vice pres­i­dent of design two years ear­lier, was in the hot seat. He flashed a slide that showed dozens of HP logos, each cre­ated by a dif­fer­ent team within the com­pany. The next slide was of a sin­gle logo, crafted by his cor­po­rate design crew, that could be used every­where. Lucente pre­dicted that when 500 mil­lion of the new “jewel” logos were shipped, the com­pany would have saved roughly $50 mil­lion in devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing costs.

As the Fast Com­pany arti­cle goes on to say, orga­ni­za­tional dynam­ics and cul­ture can make it dif­fi­cult to achieve brand con­sis­tency, even when vari­a­tions are costly:

But it’s one thing to win back­ing for a big design ini­tia­tive from the CEO, who is think­ing about the entire com­pany. It’s some­thing else to get exec­u­tives and man­agers who run spe­cific busi­ness units to embrace cor­po­rate design edicts. HP has scores of busi­ness units orga­nized into three main divi­sions — per­sonal sys­tems such as desk­top and note­book PCs; imag­ing and print­ing; and soft­ware and servers — each with its own P&L. The com­pa­ny’s 250 design­ers report to the heads of their par­tic­u­lar busi­ness units, who are used to oper­at­ing inde­pen­dently. Lucente may want to cre­ate com­pa­ny­wide stan­dards, but he can’t nec­es­sar­ily enforce them.

Stay tuned. It will be inter­est­ing to see how effec­tive Lucente can be at rein­ing in HP’s inde­pen­dent thinkers and prod­uct man­agers.

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

Recent Posts

  • Wet Sand, Wet Boots, Birds
  • Living with Vintage Items
  • Slowing Down
  • Reflections on My Camino
  • Going Off the Beaten Track in France

© 2020 by Christine Thompson. All rights reserved. • Log in