Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

In tough market conditions many brand owners are forced to treat their brands as commodities, pressured by the demand for sales and a focus from the boardroom on buying short term brand loyalty. This has two long term implications for the brand. Firstly it can turn a premium brand in to a value brand that is traded (which isn’t sustainable) rather than positioned, and secondly it makes the brand compete with other brands in the wallet and not in the minds of the audience.

Whilst audiences want brands to recognise and reward loyalty, we as brand owners need to inspire them too. If all we do is reflect and remind them that money is always the key driver in their life, we’re letting them down. The brand owner must focus beyond the effective management of their marketing budgets and simply trying to buy customer loyalty.

We must convince audiences that when value in the economy is shaky the values of the brand remain constant, offer tangible benefits and give them something to believe in and sometimes aspire towards having.

“But the majority of brands have to deal or die” is the answer from many brand owners but this simply isn’t true. Some brands, with very little money, have managed to engage their audience and developed deep emotional relationships that inform, entertain and differentiate.

They have become storytellers, that enable their audience to connect with the values of the brand and absorb meaning through the craft of their brand story.

So what are the components of an effective story:

1) Unlike stories that are fiction brands must tell the truth of their existence. Why do they exist in the world, to serve what purpose for their audience? Here the reason is all important. We want to create (A) because (B) needs it to enable them to do (C). A brand story, in its telling, should smoothly transport the audience from A to C, be utterly transparent and feel right. You know when your been strung a line, you feel it. It you don’t believe it, you can be sure your audience wont either!

2) Frame your story to reflect accurately (without dwelling on it) the pain in your audience’s life you wish to remove with your brand. I use the analogy of people reading horoscopes. Those people that believe them look for themselves in the writing of the horoscope.

If they recognise themselves or a character trait or a situation they are experiencing they instantly develop a deep bonds of trust with the writer because “They get me!” It shows your audience that you understand them intimately. Adversely, if you simply scratch the surface of understanding your audience how can you hope to translate learning into meaningful products or services?

3) Craft your message using all your learning about your audience to be instantly recognisable and understandable. You must speak the same language as your audience or risk them missing the point of your brand.

4) Take your audience with you on a journey that has a clear destination in mind. The characters of a story are all moving toward some desired outcome, every action either positive or negative will move them toward it. So too must your brand story, it must help your audience towards a deeper understanding of the values, benefits and features of your brand and not simply make un-connected statements regardless of them being true.

5) Entertain if possible but at the very least inform your audience so they can differentiate your brand from others. The example I always refer too is Blendtec. Their blender may not be a sexy brand but that didn’t stop them thinking about and translating the values and benefit of their blender into something that is both fun, entertaining and informative.

“Will it Blend” started life as a campaign and has grown into a community where the owner of the company asks the simple question, “Will it Blend?”. It being everything from industrial magnets to hockey pucks! Delivered through YouTube, short video’s of them attempting to blend a whole raft of objects entertains but subtly re-enforces the benefits of the brand that being that Blendtec blenders are very robust, dependable blenders.

Reflecting on the great depression of the 20s and 30s, audiences going to the movies actually grew. People found the money and went to the movies to escape the harsh reality of living and for the 90 minutes telling of a story found a world crafted for them by screenwriters, authors and play writers.

Audience’s today don’t want the constant reminder of the frugality’s of living. They need value of course but they also want to be told a story and believe in something. They want to know we care about them and not just the pound they carry around in their pocket.

With a combination of both inspirational and practical speakers including our very own Marketing Director Declan Metcalfe, Your Marketing Show will provide delegates with worthwhile tips and suggestions on improving their own marketing.

The event will also mark the start to the “80 Days around Marketing” programme to celebrate the 80th birthday of the North East branch of the CIM.

Your Marketing Show will be held at The Radisson SAS Durham in the North East on 3rd March.

If you would like to book for the Your Marketing Show 2010, please book online using the CIM Events Booking System. Alternatively please call The Chartered Institute of Marketing Region and Branch Events team on (0)1628 427340 or by email on cimevents@cim.co.uk.

The edges of our media space are expanding faster than our ability to make sense of them, of new technologies, of how people use them and of the shake out, that will mean some old media will fall by the wayside.

But this is an unravelling story seen from two very different perspectives. The user, swept along by the rush of the crowd to try new media, to make that media fit their lifestyle and the marketer, trying to position a brand where its’ target customer is.

We are at this juncture, living through exciting and yet worrying times because history repeatedly reminds us that the intervening years between the birth of something new and it being fully realised, is a path marked with successes and failures in equal measure.

It is our fear of failure that plays into the hands of those who make their living trying to predict the future we marketers so desperately want to know about.

A recent TimesOnline article has marketers raving about the simple insights of a young man, who whist on work experience wrote a short paper on how teenagers use media. According to him, teenagers (boys mainly) use their games console for conversations, not their mobiles, which incidentally is primarily used for text and music. They don’t read newspapers, preferring instead to get their news online and they don’t buy movies or music, seeing nothing wrong in pirate DVD’s and peer-to-peer downloads.

And what about teenage girls? I speak from experience here as I have a teenage daughter, who has Facebook, MSN and YouTube open simultaneously on her laptop and only uses her mobile or ipod for music / texting whenever she is on the move, and disconnected from her laptop.

What surprised me about this article wasn’t necessarily the insights it revealed, it was the reaction of people to these insights. It was like the volume had been turned up by this young man and for the first time these marketers could hear the authentic voice of a generation.

Who can really know where we’re going; the futurists, the edge dwellers and technology hipsters?

Egos and reputations are at stake, which makes people, who in their time gave us clarity and made sense of where we were, look further and further ahead, not for us this time but to cement their own reputations, their own place in history. They fixate on new worlds, where they can coin new phrases, name new movements and re-claim their place in media folklore. They change the language (For no other reason it seems than that’s what they feel the world expects of them) from social to collaborate to individual and so on.

I don’t have much time for them to be honest. As a user I’m loving living through the revolution and as a Marketer I’m busy trying to make sense of the changing world for our clients and helping them understand how their brand engages their customer across social media spaces.

And what will win through in the end. Which media will still be around when this revolution reaches it zenith? Well history also has a lesson to teach us about this too. New technology is only revealed in retrospect to be turning points in a revolution.

So we need to accept we’re as bound to get it wrong as we are to get it right, so move forward or be prepared to get left behind. Enjoy being part of history in the making, leave the future to the generations to come after us.

I’ve planned a few focus group sessions in the past when I was part of the team that re-branded Frisp Crisps and I have to say I remember them as being interesting and generating some useful feedback, particularly that the crisps were considered as being quite ‘foody’ and filling, more than a snack. That fed into the decision that new ‘foody’ such as Buttered Jacket Potato & Mature Cheddar would fit with our customers’ perception of the crisp brand.

It was also useful to see them place packaging in order of perceived quality, heavy gauge paper type bags being clearly seen as a premium bag and the rather flimsy film packaging of own label brands being a value brand. This was all good stuff for the re-brand, and we felt some real insights into how people relate to products came out of those focus groups.

I can’t help thinking though that 80% of what came out of the focus groups was understanding we already had and that’s the crux for me really. We are taught that to understand we must ask questions which is all well and good but when we consider asking a question we’ve normally considered a number of potential answers and are looking for verification, it’s human nature to do so. Do some of the answers generated by focus group attendees therefore reflect what they think or what the brand manager thinks?

Like focus groups, social networks and communities enable us to observe and engage with our target audience. Some of the biggest brands in the world, Mattel being one, have embraced the principle idea that listening to what their target audience talk about (Manly themselves and their families) will deliver as yet undiscovered insights and prompt questions that the brand team have not yet thought of relating to their products and importantly about their target audiences lives. The community in question for Mattel is ‘The Playground’, a private community for the mothers of young children.

I’d argue that the anonymity of talking freely online empowers people to say what the truly think without the influence of our own ‘self awareness’, of wanting people to perceive us in the way we want to be perceived. This will reshape how we learn about our target audiences but will this replace traditional focus groups or market research? I think not.

Social media isn’t a new broom to make a clean sweep of traditional marketing metrics. It’s offers brand managers another dimension of metrics, that will keep our thinking honest and our minds focused on our audience.

Why do we need a social media presence?

• Increase customer base.

• Build awareness.

• Establish thought leadership.

• Educate customers.

• Customer-source part of your product development to try new ideas.

• Reach new channels of customers.

• Improve internal communication.

Manage Objections. (Thanks to Pistachio Consulting for the following excellent arguments which I’ve used alongside my own thoughts)

Here are five objections (budget, audience size, loss of control, priorities and uncertainty) and ways you can address them:

Budget

Before committing to any budget expenditure adopt a listening strategy to help people understand where conversations are happening online and what topics around your brand and services are being discussed. Arm yourself with evidence that people (Customers) are talking about the services you provide and your company is missing out by not joining in.

Don’t limit yourself to a new “social media” budget, and don’t even remain within the confines of marketing, publicity and other outbound communications. Social tools can make substantive contributions across the organisation —HR, R&D, project management, customer service, administration, IT

Taking this idea one step further, be as clear as you can about the value or potential value social tools can contribute within each of these areas. What can be done less expensively or more profitably?

Audience Size

The audience value proposition just does NOT work the same way old school “tonnage based” advertising via expensive mainstream media buys always did. You’re not just trying to scoop up tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, hoping to extract actual business results out of some crap small percentage of those that you “reach.” Things can be more closely targeted and more tightly mapped onto fundamental metrics of business success. “Tons of eyeballs” metrics at their best are usually just proxies for “a hope of selling more.”Three takeaways about social media/social networking audience sizes:

It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast.

Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable.

Off-platform benefits.You’re not always just trying to reach the direct audience. On Twitter in particular, we see massive applicability and advantages in SEO, market knowledge, word-of-mouth “passability”to others outside of the platform, and as a content-generation engine the pulls together flows of content that can be displayed and syndicated using widgets and other RSS-based tools.

If you want to get a handle on demographics you might try using a profile tool like the one developed by Forrester. You can at least see what percentage of your audience are likely to be Creators, Critics, Collectors, Spectators, Joiners or Inactive and therefore gauge where your company can engage with its audience.

Loss of Control

You can argue that they’ve already lost control. You can argue that they never even *had* control. Instead, underscore the increase in learning. Companies can learn an incredible about of information about their products, their customers unarticulated wants and needs, how to make it easier for customers to buy, how to serve customers better, and THAT’S just talking about the customers. This magnitude and value of learning is also available for the engineers, the researchers, the manufacturers —compare notes, parse problem-solving, crowdsource and figure out more, faster.

Priorities

Get laser focused on management’s existing business problems and pains. Apply the tools and opportunities you know about to the priorities they know they already have. Be very diagnostic in understanding and maturely articulating what could be achieved and how.

Uncertainty

Don’t forget, this stuff can be really SCARY. That’s okay. Encourage them to take a flexible stance, to start dipping their toes in, and to remain learning-focused whether or not they are ready to jump in whole hog.

Yes, ideally, the company should start to respond and manage its message contributions as soon as there are issues to respond to. But I don’t buy that they should not engage in formal listening until they’re ready to engage in formal responding. In many cases, the longer they listen first, the better their response skills will be.

If something major breaks, by all means address it, but it’s MORE important that the listening period not be delayed by fears over how the company can respond. It’s NOT okay to clap hands over eyes and ears just because the mouth – and corporate mind – need more time to prepare.

Why do all of this?

The relationship between you and the reader is one-to-one. In time it creates a bond of trust which over time they share with their peer groups and keeping your customers close to you in economically uncertainty times should be a priority for everyone.

Contact the Better team to discuss how we can support your Social Media project. Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.

Mobile marketing is set to take off as major brands look to invest in the platform over the next five years, according to an independent survey commissioned by O2.

The survey shows brands will have increased their spend on mobile marketing by 150% come 2013 and do not anticipate any impact on budgets as a result of the economic downturn.

The survey, which was carried out by Vanson Bourne in May this year and included marketing and IT directors at 100 leading brands, also found that the personalised nature of mobile marketing campaigns means they generate a higher response rate than traditional advertising.

Of those marketing directors questioned, 60% favoured mobile marketing because it was considered better for close targeting, especially in financial services advertising.

The use of mobile marketing is increasing with specific services gaining in popularity. Text-to-win competitions and text-to-call-back or email campaigns have increased in use by more than 20% each, while retail and financial services ads were judged the most popular mobile advertising areas.

SMS was used by nearly a third of all businesses interviewed, yet half of the marketers questioned who have yet to make use of mobile marketing campaigns claim they are concerned that their customers will view the text messages as spam.

Simon Dean, head of mobile media at O2 UK said there has “never been a better time for brands to engage with their customers via mobile”.

Dean said: “One in 10 of those we surveyed already think mobile marketing has saved their business at least £1m when compared to other marketing solutions.

“With more consumers than ever browsing the web through their mobile handsets, there is a significant and largely untapped audience for brands to target their customers directly.”

View full article and more related articles at http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/852401/Mobile-marketing-spend-rise-150-five-years/

Located on Stokesley Industrial Park, just off the B1257 on the outskirts of the market town of Stokesley, North Yorkshire, the centre welcomes new and young businesses in the high tech, creative and knowledge based sectors. These sectors include; Digital Media, Creative Marketing, Research & Development Graphic design, e-business and e-learning.

Hambleton is a prosperous and vibrant part of North Yorkshire that combines a stunning environment and an exceptional quality of life with excellent facilities for business and enterprise. To further enhance and develop its existing business infrastructure, the Economic Development Team undertake a rolling programme of regeneration projects, often in partnership with other organisations, to hopefully stimulate yet more entrepreneurship, innovation and economic activity. For further information on what the Economic Development Team do and deliver visit the Business & Economy pages.

In 2004 Hambleton District Council commenced the 2.4million managed workspace development – the Springboard Business Centre, which is located on Stokesley Business Park. The development offered a chance for the District Council to build a sustainable building whilst creating a state of the art business incubator that offers 20 individual office suites set around a central atrium with the benefit of meeting facilities, staffed reception, a resident Business Adviser and landscaped gardens.

Better Brand Agency Office - Springboard Business Centre, Stokesley Business Park

The prime aspect of the building for which it can claim sustainability is its environmental engineering. As far as realistically able materials were sourced locally. The concrete blocks, timber and aluminium windows were all manufactured in Yorkshire. The aluminium solar screen material was produced in Hartlepool and panels were fabricated in Teesside.

If you would like to contact us please use the details below:

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The switch, announced by Pizza Hut this week, is intended to flag up its revamped pasta menu, supported by an ad campaign created by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. It is likely, however, that the Pizza Hut name will be reinstated at the 30 outlets after the year-long drive.

by Gemma Charles, Marketing, Brand Republic.

Jim Prior, managing director of branding agency The Partners, described the tactic as ‘boring’. ‘It is a bit of a puerile idea; the sort of thing the chair-man’s wife comes up with at Sunday lunch,’ he said. ‘It is na•ve, too; it is hardly as though the change is from something unexciting to something that is more exciting.’

Vanessa Cohen, partner at branding consultancy Prophet, said the change would garner press coverage, but added: ‘I find it hard to believe it won’t cause confusion and dilute the strength of the brand.’

Pizza Hut’s marketing director, Claudia Nicholls-Magielsen, said the change was designed to alter people’s perceptions of the brand, and denied it was an attempt to target health-conscious consumers.

Feedback from the forums:

It seems like a good idea. People will really notice a name change, and it fits the existing brand. David Parish

I imagine Pizza Hut hopes to gain publicity, then bring the name back ‘by popular demand’. Matt Saunders

I work at Pizza Hut, and I agree with a lot of the comments here; the brand is really confused at the moment. Shib Hussain

Read full article and other related articles by click on the link below:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/851329/Pizza-Hut-name-switch-lambasted-puerile/

Brand Republic took to the streets and found that some members of the public aren’t impressed with Pizza Hut’s rebrand and want more than a name change to persuade them to go in, while others labelled it a good idea….read more…

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/852409/Brand-Republic-Video-Publics-mixed-reaction-Pizza-Hut-rebrand/