Wow Brands Episode I: "How to Score a Date "

Asking my collegues and friends which brands they are attached to and they actively and passionately promote to others I came up with brands like Coca Cola, Apple, Starbucks, Nike, Mini, Sony, Johnny Walker, Mercedes, Google, etc...So this probed me the question what really a WoW brand is? How do some brands succeed to score a date with the consumers? and then turn this into a successful relationship? and how do they manage to stand still against the test of passing decades... Could there be an analogy between building successful brands and building successful and long lasting relationships? 

So the muses in my spirit revived and forged me to ponder a little bit...Let's see if we will be able to solve the riddle behind love marks and find a guiding path to build equities that steal hearts ...By the way I'll skip the boring video posting step so bear with my boring content:) Let's start with the first step: "How to Score a Date"

If you are having trouble scoring a date and i believe it’s not through a lack of available resources.  Forget the advice of friends or online dating services; just typing the word “dating” into amazon.com spews forth 33241 books on the topic. My research has led me to conclude that if you want to write a book on dating, the title is important.  It has to be confident, like Mr Right, Right Now, or How to pick up Beautiful Women.   Ideally it should have both a title and a subtitle:  Understanding Women: The Definitive Guide to Meeting, Dating and Dumping. It should assume the opposite sex is an animal, just waiting to be trapped: Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man.  And finally, it has to have an angle; that hook that makes the reader want to skip all the others out there and just date the writer, like Rachel Greenwald’s Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, which offers tips like:  “Market Expansion:  Cast a wider Net” and “Packaging:  Create your best look”.   I’m sorry – that’s not sexy.  That’s sad.  

But I got to thinking…maybe there is something in Ms Greenwald’s approach.  Are there strategies that will score you a date?  But I am not here to advise you on your love life but to offer brand builders advice.  So, perhaps the pertinent question becomes “is there a type of communication strategy that will help your brand score a date with the consumer?’   (The more pedestrian amongst us would call that date “trial” in our so called disposition funnel) 

Yes, I want to talk to you about good communication strategies. What are the characteristics of strategies that will help your communications score dates with the consumer?  But before you despair too much, feeling that I have just teased the lovelorn amongst you, the good news is that the principles of these consumer-date winning strategies pretty much hold for scoring a date out there in the real world of relationships:) 

Before I get into the principles, let me tell you two things.  First, what a communication strategy is.  It is that portion of a brand’s marketing strategy that deals with the content of the message in the brand’s conversations with the consumers.  Said another way, it’s the benefit (what we promise the brand will do for the consumer), reason-to-believe (an optional element that might be used to increase the believability of the benefit) and the brand character (the long term personality, image or attitude of the brand.)    

OK, on with the consumer Dating Tips.

In a nutshell it all comes down to Four “D’s”.

1.       DESIRABLE – substantive, meaningful and relevant.

Guys -ladies forgive me in this because my chromosomes are XY in nature:),  if you are going to win a date with that truly gorgeous woman sitting across from you on the train or in the club (or even at work, although I don’t encourage that, as it will only end in tears), you’re going to want to be desirable, no?  You are going to want to approach her with something that would make her choose you in preference to that other, potentially better looking guy sitting near you.  You are going to want to say something that is substantive and meaningful and relevant to her life, yes?   “Did you see that V12 engine in the latest Trucking Life magazine?’ is not going to cut the mustard.  Really, I’ve tried it. Not a good memory:)  

      It’s no different to your communication strategies.  Your benefit needs to offer the consumer something they want; something that you know will help them choose you in preference to the other brands out there.  We put unrealistic pressure on our communications when we ask it to be built on strategies that are boring, or, worse, irrelevant to the lives of our target consumer.  Conversely, a highly desirable strategy almost sells the brand itself.

     Of course, strategies that promise something desirable to the consumer come about when you have a terrific understanding of your prime prospect.  We should have enough research and consumer knowledge to confidently say, even before we brief the agency, that we have a strategy that offers the target consumer exactly what she wants.   In this way, MR&I collegues are like our dating coaches.  Think “Hitch” with BAT business cards. 

The parallels with dating are again obvious.  While too much research into someone is spooky and a little too like stalking, aren’t the chances a girl will say yes to your request for a date increased if you offer her something relevant to her life?   “Hey, you clearly have an eye for fashion.  I swear that’s a Stella McCartney design you’re wearing.  Would you like to go to her catwalk show?  I’ve got tickets.’  Mmmmmm…you are one smooth dog.   

DISTINCTIVE – relative to the competition

The following will NEVER be a real conversation between girlfriends.

 “I got swept off my feet last night by an amazing guy.’

“Tell me more, tell me more, like does he drive a car?”

“No.  Actually, he was kind of boring.  Nothing different about him.  Nothing different at all.  In fact, there wasn’t anything about him that you would say was the least bit surprising.  He was just like any guy I suppose.  But he asked me out on a date and I said yes!”  (Giggles with excitement)

“Well-a, well-a, well-a..huh?! “

If you ever hope to win a date, there has to be something about you that the other person finds different and intriguing. This holds true for your brand; only the word we use is “distinctive”.   Your communication message strategy needs to capture that aspect of your brand that sets it apart from competition and provides a meaningful basis for consumer preference.  We know for a fact that distinctive strategies work, and that great strategies often have two or more areas of distinctivity.  Where the distinctiveness comes from is less important.  If you’re lucky, it may be straight out product performance superiority.  It may be a distinctive twist on a usual benefit or via an emotional benefit tied back to your functional benefit, or by a unique and compelling RTB or even by a distinctive brand character, which, by the way, if your brand doesn’t already have then you are cheating your brand out of a lot of potential first dates with the consumer.  (Push for something distinctive, like Kent's “Click & Change” or with benefits which resonate with unmet consumer needs susch as longer lasting smoker through LIP or LSS in KS formats .  Wouldn’t you rather date someone like that than a “trusted expert?”)  Net, ensure your strategy is distinctive versus your competition. 

3.       DECISIVE – clear and simple

For most of us, there is nothing more nerve-racking than asking someone out on a date.  Your heart feels like it’s in your throat and sweat drips from places you didn’t know you had glands. The strong become meek and the meek become weak, and all that nervous energy tends to make us verbose beyond description.  We can’t seem to get one word out, so instead we put out three hundred.   We ramble, kind of like I’m doing now…

The dating game belongs to the decisive. 

Just make the proposition clear and simple (oh, and a little bit romantic).

I think we must be nervous when we write communication strategies to woo our consumers, because those strategies are so often verbose and unclear as well.  Simplicity works.  In fact, it’s critical.  I cannot stress enough the importance of simplicity in your strategies.  It is simply impossible to communicate more than one cohesive thought and hope that consumers will digest it and run with it. ' Simplicity = Success square' where even Einstein throws his weight behind the importance of simplicity in communication.

4.       DIVIDEND PAYING TO YOUR EQUITY

Before we get back into the relational dating tips, here’s a question for you.  Are communication strategies there to build your sales, or your equities?  Or both? 

Hint:  both. 

Good strategies drive sales but also pay dividends to your brand equity, in that they are born out of, or are consistent with clear equity choices your brand has made.  If they aren’t, rewrite the strategy.  Now, that all sounds very black and white; but hey, I believe in moral absolutes.  There should be a direct link between your brand’s promise to the consumer and one of your equity building blocks.  When there isn’t, you fail to build equity for your brand.  In cases where your brand has well established equities, not being consistent with them just risks leaving the consumer confused or unable to recall that the promise is actually from you.

The analogy with dating is again helpful.  Yes there are obvious cases where you are asking a complete stranger out for a date, and I guess that in those circumstances you can be whatever you want to be, but in most cases we are asking friends or acquaintances if they want to take the existing relationship a little deeper.   In those cases, they already know a little of what you are about – what your personal brand equity is, if you like.   What is more likely to work?  To be your normal wonderful self, or to suddenly become someone you are not, hoping you’ll still be able to make a connection?  Well, the poet of a new generation, Avril Lavigne (1984 - ?), sums it up well in her song “Complicated”

You're tryin' to be cool, you look like a fool to me. 

Tell me why you have to go and make things so complicated?

I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else gets me frustrated

In summary a good strategy matters.  It really does.  Building great brands likens it to the ground upon which you build your house.  If it is strong, it’s like building on a rock.  It will inspire great work that will create an emotional connection with your consumer.  If it is weak, it is like building on the sand.  Nothing will remain once the tide of competition sweep over you.

So go ahead and have your brand ask the consumer for a date, but do it with a communication strategy that is desirable, distinctive, decisive and dividend paying to your equity. The 4 D’s of dating.

Who knows, do those successful may turn into a relationship, and the relationship into love? while those things must be progressively harder to navigate - Amazon has 167962 books on “relationship” but 262612 on “love” – you will never know unless you first get a date.

Now it is late and some well deserved break for a movie before sleep time. Just inserting the Conan 3D in the BlueRay drive and to test my new Sony LED screen.

No no  no...My girlfriend is now with me -she was supposed to be asleep- and we are going to watch an Anne Hathaway movie...Subtitle is "Twenty Years. Two People'

Maybe it is written in today's stars int the sky and my destiny is really about WoW brands, lovemarks and defenitely about romantic movies:) 

Sinan Seha TURKSEVEN