A quick reaction to news that relates to your brand can spur exceptional results. After all, your customers are already tuned into the news. All you need to do is weave in a relevant story about your brand. Procter and Gamble, for example, immediately responds to oil spills by donating Dawn dishwashing detergent. The community relations effort drives millions in free publicity while embedding a key brand message about Dawn’s cleaning power.

You don’t need a billion dollar advertising budget to harness the same concept. After Sony announced that it would cease floppy disk production, Ideopia pounced on this news to unseat one of its client’s competitors, whose medical device is dependant on floppies. Yippee!

The Advantage of News Tie-ins

• Built-in and sensitized audience
• Credibility of third party endorsement, e.g. “Silicon Valley News says the floppy is dead.”
• Relevancy. It’s happening now, not six weeks from now when your next ad campaign launches.

Unearth News Tie-ins for Your Brand

• Monitor keywords and trending topics in social media
• Track online publications using Google Alerts
• Keep micro audiences in mind. It may not be news for June and Ward, but it could blow the top off your industry.

Develop a Quick Response Mentality

• Create an infrastructure that can think and act quickly.
• Social Media and Web: 1-2 hours
• Print: 24 hours
• TV and Radio: 12 hours

1. Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing  mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it’ll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a teradactyl is downright dangerous.
2. Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
3. Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women’s Suffrage and the internet, they’re all fads anyway.
4. Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
5. Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. Afterall, it’s your job to cultivate talent internally.
6. Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you’re on top of this new fangled stuff, but don’t do anything about it.
7. Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
8. Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency’s job is to suck up and take orders.
9. Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
10. Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.

Would you buy a bottle of wine from this hairy humanoid?

I admit it. I am a Neanderthal when it comes to wine. I like my vino cheap, and I make my decisions based on cool graphics and interesting names more than woodsy aftertaste. This is how I came in possession of a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon ($4.99) from Sasquatch Cellars. Afterall, who better to be an expert vintner than a large, hairy humanoid.

Brand myths, like Sasquatch, can differentiate products in a commodity market. Add a clever back story, which Sasquatch Wine Cellars takes a shot at, can capture a loyal and profitable cult following. Presumably the tin foil hat crowd in Sasquatch’s case. Here’s the upshot: when you uncork your Cabernet for a romantic evening, it cannot smell and taste like benzene. It doesn’t matter how sturdy and robust the marketing is if the product stinks.

There’s nothing like the term “Tone of Voice” statement in a creative brief to set off a bullsh*t detector. Why? Because most tone statements are written by account executives aiming to placate a client, top managers, and frequently family members. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Just like your mom screaming at you after painting your face in peanut butter, the sound of your brand can speak volumes about your brand if managed correctly.

For example, a computer company may show how easy its products are to use through minimalistic designs, humanistic typography, and friendly TV characters that don’t use scary technical terms. The tone created by these elements could only be Apple. The secret, we believe, is creating a feel, a look and a tone of voice after a creative exploration of a strategy. Tone is something to be discovered not dictated.

Imagine your brand is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
The choir is singing a big,
ripe chord, and it’s so “in tune” that it makes your head vibrate. Then
member 292, a bass, starts thinking about his cactus terrarium
and his voice slips a quarter of a step. No one in the audience
notices, but a few of his choir mates shoot disapproving looks. Soon,
291 seems to think 292 has the right pitch. The conductor’s ears start
twirling like radar. The new
corrupted pitch starts to spread like wildfire. Now the whole bass
section has adjusted to the corrupted pitch. The conductor has gone to
Devcon 5. Wolf Blitzer and Barry Manilow have taken over the CNN’s
Situation Room for ongoing coverage of the crisis. And the audience
grows restless. They start to wander out, like disappointed fans at a
football game where the scores screams futility. “Guess the MTC
isn’t what it used to be.”

Planned dissonance can help spark new life in a brand, but sour notes can just as easily suck it out. Ask Susan Abramovitz for more
about Harmonic Brand Stickiness, or email us your name and address to receive the Harmonic Brand Stickiness brochure.

Early in my career, I managed promotions for a classical music
station. One of our most popular promotions was a live jazz program
broadcast from the Hyatt Regency for 13 weeks in the winter. By all
accounts, “Jazz Live from the Hyatt,” was a huge success. Every week,
the atrium was packed with jazz fans clinking glasses of chardonnay, a
sprinkling of local celebrities, and a drooling drunk or two. Life was
good, or so I thought.

The net effect on our brand was decidedly negative. Because of the
event’s success, the station invested heavily in on- and off-air
promotion of the series. Too many people, we became the “Jazz Life from
the Hyatt Station.” The rationalization was that jazz, which has
roughly the same demographic as classical music, would entice new
people to try classical music.

All of the assumptions turned out to be wrong. The Denver Audience
Research Project was the first torpedo. It showed that while jazz and
classical music listeners were similar in demographics, education and
income, their preferences in music listening could not be more
different. In fact, of all the various radio formats, a jazz listener
was least likely to listen to classical music. We might as well been
pitching Cabbage Patch dolls in Muscle and Fitness magazine.

Arbitron data was just as bleak. Keep in mind, due to available
listeners, there isn’t much radio listening on Saturday evening anyway.
There was a significant blip in listenership during the broadcast that
disappeared immediately after the show. Remember, jazz fans aren’t so
keen on Boccherini. As for other parts of the day and days of the week,
there was no measurable increase in listening.

After a few seasons of “Jazz Live from the Hyatt” focus groups
showed that existing, loyal listeners to the station were confused
about the presence jazz program. Meanwhile, fringe or non-listeners had
high awareness of the Jazz programming but not much else.

While JLFH created community goodwill and heightened awareness of
the station, it was an abject failure from a marketing standpoint. Does
this mean that you should stay focused exclusively on the core of the
brand? Absolutely not. Risk taking is key to bringing new customers
into the fold, building loyalty among existing customers, and staving
off dry rot.

Photo of Khevan Onaje by Dizzy, San Francisco