We run across so many people that are trying to be all things to all people. I love this article written by Maria Ross, because it gives great advice on determining your target audience. There’s also a link to watch an interview with marketing guru Seth Godin…and yes, it is remarkable!
By Maria Ross
Oct 18, 2010 -
Small business owners are ambitious. You want to capture as many sales as you can — and want to build a brand that will get you there. You drool with envy at big businesses like Apple or Nike who can rally their “tribes” with ease when they introduce new offerings.
Wouldn’t it be great, sigh, if you I could just launch and the masses come running, Twitter lights up like a house on fire, and the launch video I created with my Flip camera and my dog goes viral?
This is what I love about creating brand strategies for small businesses. They are hungry and they are “biased towards action,” as an old manager of mine used to say. That’s exciting.
What becomes less exciting is being the headmistress forcing them to walk before they can run. That kind of brand loyalty can’t be “created” overnight. It’s not about slick ads or cool logos. It’s not about how many hits you have on YouTube or the catchiness of your tagline. Brand runs deeper. It’s the core and the essence of who you are, what value you provide and to whom you provide it. Good branding starts with crafting a strong brand strategy first that addresses three dimensions:
Visually: What do you look like?
Verbally: What do you sound like?
Experientially: What does doing business with you actually feel like?
Building your loyal tribe means communicating a clear and consistent message across every single customer touchpoint. It means walking your talk and proving yourself over time.
Seth Godin has talked in the past about building tribes. In a 2009 video, he explains that in order to create this zealous following, you need to be specific versus general. That translates to, “You can’t be all things to all people.” I advise small business clients to create a persona of their ideal customer — not average, but ideal — so they have an actual living, breathing person in mind to which to direct all their brand communications. If they target a few types of customers, then it is okay to create two or three personas, but a small business with a small marketing budget can’t afford to market effectively to 20 different audience types. They are better off directing their precious time and resources to really “going deep” and connecting effectively with two or three.
Some small business owners, scared that this means turning down money, refuse to target an “ideal” customer. “But what if someone outside of that ideal wants to buy from me? And someone from this random demographic bought from me once, so we should do a whole marketing campaign for them.”
Hold on. Creating a brand that targets an ideal customer does not mean you create a checklist and turn non-ideal customers away like a nightclub bouncer. If someone wants to buy from you who you didn’t intend to attract, then you can still sell to them. It’s not about who you will sell to; it’s about where you will proactively focus your marketing time and effort.
It’s like Nordstrom and Walmart. At the very basic level, both companies are retail shops that “sell things to consumers.” But Nordstrom goes after a higher-end customer with a quality and customer service brand promise. Walmart goes after a customer for whom low-prices and convenience matter most. Does this mean Walmart is “rude” to their customers? No. It just means they know who they are and who they are targeting, and they don’t try to attract everyone in the retail market spectrum. It doesn’t mean someone who shops at Nordstrom won’t pop into Walmart every now and then for something when the need arises. It just means Walmart is not necessarily spending time and money making a brand promise that speaks to people who care more about high-end customer service and less about price.
Think about your authentic brand: Are you set up to deliver what you promise? And for whom does that promise matter the most? Then use your imagination and market knowledge to build an ideal customer persona so you know who you are talking to:
Give them a name, an age, an occupation. What are their demographics? What is their household income, where do they live?
Walk through their day. Where do they work? Do they commute to work? If so, by what means?
What is their family life like? Do they have one?
What do they do in their spare time or for fun? Do they like team sports, or solitary activities? Are they foodies or do they mostly just grab fast food?
What magazines do they read? Where do they get their news and information? Or do they just care about entertainment? If so, what do they watch on TV or what films do they like? Are they active Internet users or strictly offline?
What groups or associations do they belong to? Could these be places you could join to network with your ideal customers or groups you can partner with to do events or presentations and reach these folks?
Once you create this one- or two-page profile, you can start to see what their life is like — and what problem your products or services might be able to solve. You can then speak about benefits in words they care about. You can also find creative ways to market to them that you may never have thought about. More importantly, this can help you avoid bad investments on marketing activities that seem amazing on the surface but that will never attract this target customer.
Again, this is not a checklist. If others get caught in this net and are attracted to your brand, then great. Something about your message must resonate with their lifestyle or needs and, therefore, they can be great tribe members. What you want, though, is a brand that connects with a targetperson, not just a generic, average composite of someone who doesn’t exist in real life.
Once you start focusing on an ideal customer, you will be speaking their language and they will care more about what have to say and sell. Quality is what makes a tribe successful for your business and brand — not just quantity.
Maria Ross is the founder and chief strategist of Red Slice, a branding and marketing consultancy based in Seattle. She has advised start-ups, solopreneurs, non-profits and even large enterprises such as Microsoft, Discovery Networks and Monster.com on how to craft their brand story to engage, inform and delight customers. Maria is the author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press).
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Like many successful brands born of the digital age, Google hasn’t been known for advertising, and certainly not TV advertising. So its appearance in this year’s Super Bowl was something of a surprise. This is, you’ll recall, the company whose founders vowed that it would be a cold day in hell before they’d do a TV commercial and whose chief executive called advertising “the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.”
What Jesus-like figure at which of Google’s ad agencies had converted the company to a big-ticket TV advertiser? Had Google started to work with McGarryBowen?
Erin Mulvehill
Google Five: (l.) Tristan Smith, J. Smith, Anthony Cafaro, Michael Chang and Johnathan Jarvis.
No, the Super Bowl spot, “Parisian Love,” was created in-house by the “Google 5,” a handful of students recruited from ad and design schools. The 5 program is an experiment launched last year by the Google Creative Lab and its executive creative director, Robert Wong. The company sent a call out to 12 schools searching for interesting talent who would work inside the Creative Lab for a year and then be sent out unto the industry. So, with the Google 5, the company gets new creative blood and the industry gets young talent that is schooled in Google, and, by extension, the post-digital/new advertising way — tech-forward, open-source, collaborative, and smart.
Mr. Wong says the 5 initiative was motivated by two things: “getting fresh, awesome talent in the Creative Lab,” and “fueling the ecosystem of the industry.”
“It feels like every agency I talk to wants more digital expertise,” said Mr. Wong. “The thinking was that, ‘Hey we have great talent that can come in and play with all the tools here and then agencies will get people that feel confident about all the tools at their disposal.’ And of course it works for us because that way they know our tools and we can participate in the whole ecosystem.”
Mr. Wong and the Lab team received around 400 applications for the five spots in the program. The original plan was to recruit a designer, an art director, a writer, a filmmaker and a programmer, but after vetting the candidates in a process Mr. Wong likens to “casting a reality show,” the team selected two writers, Tristan Smith and J. Smith; two designers, Anthony Cafaro and Jonathan Jarvis; and a programmer, Michael Chang.
The team stood out for being talented and “multidextrous” and, in some cases, for their self-initiated creations: Mr. Jarvis wrote and directed an animated web film called “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” that explained the Wall Street meltdown in a simple, graphically compelling way and that’s been viewed over a million times online; Mr. Smith, while nominally a writer, impressed with a series of 3-D photographs he created as a side project. But the whole team demonstrated the key characteristic of, er, “Googliness,” which Mr. Wong describes as an amalgam of “ambition, humility, altruism, entrepreneurialism and sense of scale — big thinkers who feel like they can really impact a lot of people.”
In June 2009, the 5 arrived at Google and were immersed immediately in every project that the Lab had cooking and in the aggressively open, collaborative Google working style.
“It wasn’t like, ‘OK, here’s your little project and we’ll work on the important things,’” said Mr. Jarvis. “They were like, ‘We need minds on this problem, you guys come and work on it.’ So we were working on the same projects as the creative leads and working right alongside them; it was up to us to sink or swim, and to contribute as much as we could.”
Within the group and in the larger Lab environment, “there’s very little screen privacy,” Mr. Cafaro said. “There was always someone over your shoulder saying, ‘Ooh, what if we tried this?’” Fresh out of school, the 5 noted that this kind of collaborative environment was a significant change from their experiences to date. “I think ad school trained you to be very competitive; there’s this kind of killer instinct they try and create in you,” said Tristan Smith. “You’re always pitching your work against teams. I sort of had to reprogram myself here.”
The 5 ended up working on a wide range of projects, from launching the Nexus phone — contributing to all facets of the product including packaging, pre-roll ads on Hulu and the boot-up animation on the phone — to the Google Christmas card (”everything here scales!” said Tristan Smith).
And, of course, search.
How it all began
What eventually became “Parisian Love” and a Super Bowl hit started out as a key Google brief, to “remind people what they love about Google search,” but also to showcase some engine particulars they might not know about. “There were all these features that the engineers showed me that I think no one really knew about, like being able to type your flight number right into the search bar without going to an airline’s site,” said Mr. Wong. “So it was about showing people how they could search in other ways and how empowering that could be.” Mr. Wong said several different ideas were floated until something caught — the idea that it wasn’t just one search and one answer, but a lifetime of searches. The 5 team ran with the idea of a search as representative of a moment in a life, inspired by Mr. Wong’s maxim that “the best results don’t show up in a search engine, they show up in your life.”
They worked to keep the idea pared down to keep the resulting spot “like theater of the mind,” and presented it to the search-marketing team. Mr. Wong said, “Everyone loved it and wanted to share it.” The spot appeared online in late 2009. It was an engineer who originally suggested putting the ad on the Super Bowl. “For Google, it’s a crazy idea,” Mr. Wong said. “At the end of the day, the founders loved the spot and they were excited by the idea of more people getting to see it. It was a one off, it was random. But it was surprising and that’s what made it so cool.”
The tenure of the original 5 came to an end this June, at which time the Lab ended up hiring Tristan Smith. Messrs. Cafaro and Jarvis. J. Smith got a job at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland and Mr. Chang is a free-agent programmer who recently created the much-discussed “Google Doodle” that augured the September launch of Google Instant. He is currently working on projects for Barnes & Noble.
Up next: another group of “talented and nice” polymaths that includes Grant Gold, a designer out of School of Visual Arts; Chris Trumbull and Natalie Hammel, writers from VCU; George Michael Brower, a technologist from UCLA Design Media Arts; and Chris Lauritzen, a designer/”wild card” from Art Center College of Design’s Media Design program.
Mr. Wong says the fresh 5 have been thrown into a range of projects covering search, Google TV, Chrome and other undisclosed ventures.
“The Lab is very flat and open,” said Mr. Lauritzen, “which gives it a kind of chaos that can feel a little overwhelming at times. It’s also what makes it such a cool place to be, especially for someone learning how the creative industry works. There is a lot of amazing stuff going on, and it’s all accessible.” Already, Mr. Brower has contributed to one of the creative highlights of the year, interactive video “The Wilderness Downtown,” a collaboration between director Chris Milk and Google’s Aaron Koblin, The Lab, B-Reel, Radical Media and designer/developer Mr. Doob.
The Arcade Fire coup and the Super Bowl spot are part of a growing body of work out of the Lab created in collaboration with an array of partners, agency and otherwise. The Lab built on the success of “Parisian Love” with more Search Stories, working with Pixar to create a “Toy Story 3″-themed spot and launching a web tool allowing the public to create their own search story.
Quite a track record
Much of the Lab’s recent work has centered on the Chrome browser. In May, the group worked with BBH, New York, on “Speed Tests,” which pitted the browser against the likes of sound waves and a potato-gun-fired potato in a series of real-time, in-camera demonstrations.
It’s an admirable track record for a creative entity just 3 years old. Former Ogilvy co-President Andy Berndt was recruited in September 2007 to build the new unit; Mr. Wong, an ex-Arnold exec creative director and VP-creative at Starbucks, joined in 2008. But this is Google, after all, so when Mr. Wong tells you the ultimate goal for the Lab is to “win the Nobel Peace Prize,” both of you can keep a straight face.
The Lab is now a 50-person unit, working closely with Google marketing and with a growing roster of agencies including BBH, Cutwater and Johannes Leonardo among others.
Mr. Wong offers a long and a short version of the Lab’s mandate. “The Google Creative Lab is a small team that strives to rethink marketing across every kind of media, currently existing or not — with Google as its sole client. Our mission is to ‘remind the world what it is that they love about Google.’ Our job is to manage and steward the brand, find new ways to communicate the company’s innovations, intentions and ideals, and do work of which we can all be proud. We want people ambitious and crazy enough to think we can actually change the world.” The short version: “Do epic shit.”
The part about reminding people why they love Google, though, can be considered one of today’s more interesting brand challenges: to take a company that was built on and whose name represents one thing — search — and craft a brand persona as the company expands in size and scope. And occasionally scares people. “It’s human nature to root for the underdog,” said Mr. Wong. “When you become successful, it’s about, how do you exceed people’s expectations?”
The Lab, said Mr. Wong, wants to take the processes and philosophies that made Google’s engineers successful — intense focus on the consumer and user experience, flat operating structure, focus on prototyping and on an iterative process, scale and tech innovation — and apply them to the marketing process. If Mr. Wong could push further, industry-wide, he said it would be toward “more listening, less talking; more feeling, less thinking, more doing, less promising, more inventing, less polishing.”
Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles Rock Twitter! (Along With Lost Powerpuff Girl Lady Gaga)by Simon Dumenco Published:September 17, 2010
A few notes about this week’s Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart, a collaboration between Advertising Age and What the Trend:
Sports brands dominate our list this week, with three of the seven spots going to, basically, balls in flight. The NFL and European soccer (football) loomed large, while the U.S. Open became a global Twitter obsession as well with a lot of help from Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal.
The MTV Video Music Awards top our list this week. The VMAs got a huge boost from the raw-meat-dress-wearing Lady Gaga as well as a couple of other pop-cultural icons who sort of became a meme of their own, namely …
An Indonesian TV station helped set off a surge of Powerpuff Girl memories.
Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Both performed at the VMAs, which caused endless speculation about potential backstage weirdness between them, given that Kanye notoriously interrupted Taylor’s 2009 VMA acceptance speech. Kanye renewed the controversy by apologizing (”I’m sorry, Taylor”) on Twitter recently, and now I just wish they’d hook up already and make adorable, arrogant babies together.
You’ve gotta love the Twittersphere for its left-field obsessions. Supercute superheroes the Powerpuff Girls — Blossom, Butttercup and Bubbles — improbably make our Top 10 this week thanks to people tweeting their favorite memories of the iconic cartoon series in the wake of its airing on Indonesian TV. By the way, effective immediately, I’m launching a new meme — #PowerpuffGaga — in an attempt to spread the word that Lady Gaga was a Powerpuff Girl in her youth, but was cut from the team. It’s true; I swear!
People are tweeting about their favorite memories of the Powerpuff Girls and their favorite characters from the show. It originally started trending over the weekend because the show aired on TRANS7, one of Indonesia’s TV stations.
Subtrends include: Powerpuff
6
Google
1
2,529
Google has launched a new Doodle on British and Irish platforms to celebrate the 120th anniversary of mystery writer Agatha Christie’s birth. Google also just implemented various ajax features, including instant search (as you type) and ajax paging.
Subtrends include: Agatha Christie, Google Instant, Agatha
8
Restart
1
2,153
As a reaction to Restart trending, Twitter users are expressing their dislike of the Brazilian band. “Cala Boca Coloridas” means “Shut Up, Colorful Girls” in Portuguese. It refers to the mostly teenage fans of Restart, which is part of a new “colourful rock” movement whose fans wear gaudy clothes and weird haircuts. Meanwhile, fans of the band are expressing their appreciation for it and its members.
For more information about What the Trend, visit the WTT FAQ. And check out WTT’s Week in Review, compiled by its in-house editors and covering an expanded general list of Top 20 trends (including hashtag trends) here.
Simon Dumenco is the “Media Guy” media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter@simondumenco.
Besides his over all yumminess, yes, I said yumminess, and I feel okay with it being tied to Don Draper and Mad Men ! There’s enough crushes including “man crushes” to make it okay!
New Insights: ‘Mad Men’ Is Tops In Q Score Report by Wayne Friedman, Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 4:13 PM
More emotional/involvement measures for TV shows reveal new insights not provided with standard viewership numbers. A new metric from two media research companies — The Q Score Company and General Sentiment — says AMC’s “Mad Men” is tops among all TV shows when it comes to “involvement.” Fox’s “Family Guy” follows in second place.
The report, titled “The Prime-Time Television Audience Evaluation Report,” ranked “Mad Men” with a 7.5 “involvement index score” to the 7.3 for “Family Guy” for the week of Sept. 6-12.
Heavily factoring into the score is online buzz, social networking messaging and other TV viewer-generated digital content. The data combines General Sentiment’s Involvement Index, which measures the online discussion/word-of-mouth generated by prime-time TV shows, with Q Scores’ Emotional Bonding Q, which determines a program’s ability to hold onto its most important viewers over time.
After “Family Guy” came CW’s “Gossip Girl” and NBC’s “The Office,” both with a 7.1 score. Fifth and sixth place went to Fox’s “The Simpsons” (6.9) and ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” (6.9), respectively. Several cable shows followed after this: HBO’s “Entourage” (6.5); TNT’s “Leverage” (6.2); A&E’s “Obsessed” (6.1); and Comedy Central’s “Futurama” (6.1).
Overall, the report says 12 of the 13 highest-ranked shows were from broadcast networks. The average for prime-time broadcast shows was a 4.4 involvement score; for cable prime-time, a 3.1.
George Zoeckler, senior analyst at General Sentiment, stated: “It will be interesting to see what happens when the broadcast shows premiere next week. I’ve been especially surprised by the strong response to CW’s “Nikita.” It’s generating a remarkable amount of discussion for a new show and has a real chance to be a breakout hit this fall.”
Just one year after spurning the Super Bowl to focus on online social media, Pepsi will flaunt its struggling Pepsi Max product in TV ads — with a strong social-media tilt. The PepsiCo-owned cola giant will use the consumer-generated Super Bowl ad strategy that’s been so successful in recent years for PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay Doritos snack brand.
Three 30-second Pepsi Max spots will air, along with three spots for Doritos in the Feb. 6 game on Fox. The six spots for the two brands will make PepsiCo one of the game’s biggest ad spenders.
PepsiCo is “doubling down,” says Rudy Wilson, marketing chief at Frito-Lay. PepsiCo bought three slots for Doritos last year (and snared a last-minute fourth).
The move signals how competitive it is for ad time in this Super Bowl. Fox has sold more than 90% of the ad slots, says Lou D’Ermilio, senior vice president at Fox Sports Media Group.
D’Ermilio declined to say how many slots remain or name other advertisers, though Anheuser-Busch, GoDaddy.com and Hyundai have said they’ll be in again.
For now, Pepsi’s return stands out as the Super Bowl’s most compelling marketing story.
“It’s a very big deal that Pepsi’s back in,” says Beverage Digest editor John Sicher. “The campaign will automatically get tremendous exposure.”
It has to be a relief for the National Football League and its partner TV networks, shaken last season when perennial Super Bowl ad powerhouse Pepsi abandoned the game for online social media.
“We’ve always said the Super Bowl makes a ton of sense when it’s right for your brand,” Lauren Hobart, CMO for sparkling beverages at PepsiCo Beverage America. She said the importance of social media to Pepsi remains huge and the “Pepsi Refresh” campaign will go on.
For its ads, Pepsi Max will join Doritos in offering up to $5 million in prizes to consumers who create ads that win, or finish high, in USA TODAY’s annual Super Bowl Ad Meter that tracks and ranks the real-time responses to ads during the game by a panel of consumers.
For Pepsi Max, the high-profile move is about focusing its somewhat confusing image. A new campaign has helped sales, but it still lags behind more successful rival Coke Zero. Pepsi Max’s challenge is marketing itself as a diet drink without using the word “diet,” off-putting particularly to males.
“We’re trying to drive awareness that this is a zero calorie drink with maximum taste,” Hobart says.
With the ADDY season just wrapping up last week, I’ve had more of an eye for great creative as of late. I caught this spot several times during last night’s NBA All-Star Game on TNT. Sprite is a regular in the NBA advertising scene. This spot featuring Drake, a popular rap figure, combined a brilliant insight with some amazing artwork. The final product is a truly unique spot that inspires viewers to ignite their inner-creative sparks….via Sprite.
A cool Behind the Scenes video (below) shows just how much went into creating that 30-second spot. Honestly, I don’t think the Behind the Scenes clip really gives justice to the amount of hours and detail the went into the commercial. I’m very impressed by the final product - not only because it is visually striking - but, because the message is so well illustrated and directed. Great work.
So, yesterday America watched the AFC and NFC Championships as the Colts and Saints punched tickets to the Super Bowl. The games were great, but so were some of the ads. At one point, the top google search in the nation was “Walmart Clown Commercial”. If you watched any football, odds are you saw this spot:
Anther campaign that caught my eye (actually my ear) was the new Dodge run featuring Michael C. Hall of Showtime’s ‘Dexter’. His low, almost eerie voice jumped out immediately and I actually like it. Here are a few of the spots + a cool version I found on YouTube for you die-hard Dexter fans.
So, I know this campaign has been around for a while, but I really like it. Just caught a spot randomly and thought I’d throw it up here. Love the music and those fun icons.
