Reflections on life lived by a coast
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…]
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.
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…]
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):
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:
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): 
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:
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.
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.
Here are some of the things they get right: [Read more…]
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.
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…]
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?
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…]
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…]
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.