The Write Way

Archive for December, 2009

‘Touched for the very first time’

Call it what you want, but few pop stars and fewer businesses have understood the intricacies of Madonna’s genius of reinvention and the inevitable end of the business cycle. Learn from the branding expert.

While Madonna soars, everyone else seems to stumble, bumble and disappear down a deep, dark hole.

So, what is it about Madonna Incorporated that has allowed it to consistently reap profits for over 18 years on the trot? And is there something we in business can learn about branding from the chameleon of pop music?

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What Madonna Learned from Houdini
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Gasp! That’s what the audience would do, every time Harry Houdini cheated apparent death. Except that death was a deliberate stroke of genius to keep the name of Houdini alive forever.

Madonna seems to have used the same bag of tricks. Reinventing herself in almost clockwork fashion, she has transmogrified herself successfully into virgin, material girl, boy toy, dominatrix, media maven to working mom. And made big bucks all the way.

Out with the Cabbage, In with the Tomatoes!

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Bring out the fertiliser, Madonna’s here!
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With green-fingered precision and lots of tender loving care, she plays along with Mother Nature. In every phase, Madonna has realised that things change with the season and accordingly dug deep to replant new shoots.

Summer plants die. Shrivel, shrivel, it’s a fact of life. You can whine and whimper but if you understand the basis on which Mother Nature works, you can pretty much put it to work in your own business.

Most businesses experience growth both intellectually and physically, yet every business seems to run on summer growth. Never changing, never evolving, they hope Jack Frost will give them a wide berth when the cold days roll along. That doesn’t always happen and when the business peters down, it’s let’s blame the economy time, when all they’ve done is failed to plan for the end of a business cycle.

Take for instance a big law firm in Auckland, New Zealand. Lots had changed within the firm. It had grown considerably over the years and believed that its outdated logo was the hallmark of the firm.

Simple research showed otherwise. The clients hated it. Fuddy-duddy, they called it. Yet, it had nothing to do with the law firm. The partners and the lawyers were as competent as ever, if not more than before. A simple logo change, some internal and external fix-its and Voila, they could do little wrong!

It had nothing to do with the firm or the quality of its lawyers. They had simply failed to track public opinion that had gone against them. Once they realised it, they could mend it. Once they fixed the logo (among other things), they were reborn.

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Replant the Garden, Don’t Chop the Trees!
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Are we suggesting you reinvent the wheel? Madonna doesn’t think so. Like a hardcore brand specialist, Madonna has actually stuck to her brand like glue.

If you look carefully, she stands for RADICALISM. Everything she’s done has taken her one step higher on that scale. Every time someone screamed blue murder, Madonna was in the thick of it. She hacked the lawn, and replanted all the flowers choosing shocking pinks and bright orange, understanding all the time that it stayed in line with her true brand image.

Coke, too, tried to reinvent itself, but failed miserably. Why? Because Coke owns the word classic. People loved their Coke. It was owned by us sugar-water drinkers and no one, not even Coca Cola Inc., was going to change it. In short, that’s why they failed.

Yet Coke has reinvented itself in several other ways. Its packaging has gone from sexy bottle to cans and then to 2 litre PET bottles without much drama.

It has reinvented convenience, much like McDonalds reinvented their snack to combo lunch. Realising that customers were after a better deal and their accountants were after better profits, the combo managed to put gigantic smiles on both faces simultaneously.

Let’s face it. It’s not just about reinvention. It’s about realising WHICH PART of your business needs to be reinvented and then having the common sense to leave the rest alone.

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Don’t Reinvent the Goodyear!
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Chinese gooseberries were going nowhere till they were renamed Kiwi fruit. With this re-baptism of sorts, this humble, nondescript looking fruit somehow took on the flavour of an exotic, lush green country. The reinvention wasn’t earth-shaking; the results were.

Madonna does just that. While her radicalism has seen an outward change in every avatar, the core change isn’t overly dramatic or complex. Every reinvention has caused her to add bold yet simple colour to her garden.

Too many marketing people change twenty things all at once. Confused customers don’t care. Gradual progression they can handle and want. Dramatic change scares the heck out of them, often causing them to switch brands suddenly and permanently.

Even hardcore Madonna fans found the leap from music to movies too complex. She flipped and flopped her way through the popcorn aisles and came out triumphant on the Evita side. Yet, you’d prefer Julia Roberts to do the drama bit instead of doing a Grammy number, wouldn’t you?

Simple snip-snaps you and I understand. Which is why even Einstein kept it down to E=mc2 despite reinventing everything science stood for.

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Can You Carry it Off?
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Hey, Frank Sinatra was a great singer, but he just didn’t have Madonna’s figure and he’d look crappy as a blonde. Which is pretty much the crux of the issue. If you don’t have the ability to carry it off, you don’t. Not at least in the glare of the spotlight.

Madonna’s outward reinvention is her most dramatic feature, but at the same time she’s plugging away at her new spiritualism and lifestyle and hopefully it reflects in the lyrics as well.

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Sting is a good example of a parallel Madonna run backwards
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Starting out like Billy Idol, he has wound his rock roots down dramatically and enriched his music to encompass several genres and languages. It’s a quiet manicured reinvention, that his fans lap up in eager anticipation

Sometimes the reinvention is loud and sometimes its soft but it’s never non-existent. Pop stars are good examples because it can often take one album to make or break them. You can serve twenty shoddy meals at your restaurant and still get away with it, but they can’t. Even the stars that appeared to exude stillness like Frank Sinatra, were actually living very close to their brand image and their noun and adjective.

Frank was a Coke– He stood for classic. Likewise, that’s what his music had to do. Elvis was a white singer singing black music and that’s radical. Which is why his gyrations on stage fit in perfectly with his uh-huh style. On the other hand, you could only take so much of Boy George. Know why?

At the end of the day, the calories are the proof of the pudding. If you don’t stand and deliver, you can reinvent to death without any change in your bottom line whatsoever.

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How Does your Garden Grow?
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For your business, there are several avenues that you need to magnify and reinvent. The main areas that you need to look at are:

1) Your Communication: Logos, Newsletters, Emails, etc. Do they really meet your clients’ needs? Have you got so busy doing things that you’ve forgotten to reflect your true worth to your clients?

2) Your Customer Loyalty: Are you stretching these parameters? Are they getting less or more loyal? If yes, why? If no, why not? What do you need to reinvent and re-analyse? And do you have a customer loyalty program at all?

3) Your Failure Analysis: This is a biggie. If you’re not analysing and welcoming failure, you’re going to be stuck on your island for so long, that you’ll sink once global warming gets worse. If you want to double your success rate, you’ve got to double your failure.

The Key to Reinvention is Simple
a)You’ve got to die a thousand deaths and come out on the other side. b)Simplicity is the key.
c)Your brand image is money in the bank. Don’t ever change it.
d)Wear the mini only if you can carry it off. Remember there’s a market for minis and gowns simultaneously.

While you’re reading, Madonna will be hard at work on the next step. Isn’t it time you got to work too?

About the Author
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas onmarketing strategy,psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com#smallbusinessideas today and judge for yourself.

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Like a Virgin– Is Your Marketing As Fresh As Madonna’s?

It might be almost blasphemous to talk about letting go of old brand equity and laying an old brand to rest, but there are times when change is needed. Reformulating and re-designing, or even overhauling an old brand can be a wise decision. If sales are flat and show no sign of growth, you’d better stop kidding yourself and hire a branding consultant.

Brands are an extremely vital element in your product and corporate value proposition. With communications so pervasive today, corporate branding and product branding are becoming fused as one. Corporate brands are increasingly powering product brands and product sales and that poses some substantial risk as those sub brands can’t be as easily re-positioned when they falter.

Brand Culture

As time passes, culture changes, new technologies and new competing brands appear and they change the perception of value that is available in a marketplace. Old sales propositions won’t fly in the face of 20 or more other competitors offering the same benefits and features. With cultural, economic, technology changes, and corporate changes, your aging brand image and brand equity may end up doing more harm than good. Your former branding successes could leave your brand and company stuck in the past.

A good example of age related branding problem is in the realm of computer products. I recently bought a new laptop computer because my old one just couldn’t keep up with my multitasking and other work needs. At the retail store, there were computers with Intel or AMD microprocessors to choose from. The key matter wasn’t really microprocessor speed or capability. In the past, the Intel logo would have compelled me to buy only computers with their processors regardless of what other features were available in the computer. The Intel brand was clearly in a class by itself. Not this time. This AMD powered computer was low priced and had the memory I required along with other features such as a 100 Gb hard drive, high resolution screen, numerous ports and adapters and a long lasting battery. It only weighs a couple of pounds and the AMD logo seemed to look better too. It says: AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology. 64 bits and mobile compatibility. Why doesn’t Intel mention that on the computer they have their products in?

Laptops are hot and prices are falling. My 15 year old nephew just bought his first laptop on eBay, since they are cheaper and more accessible. So the whole “culture” of shopping and purchasing computers has changed.

Everyone is buying high resolution screens and I was eager to ease my eye strain from long hours of viewing everyday. The huge hard drive was great and the laptop looks good too. The old Intel brand just didn’t have the effect it once did, and their competitor, AMD, just sold one of their processors. The laptop is working great and now Intel processors don’t dictate which computer I’ll buy.

To me, the Intel logo and brand brings back memories of old Pentium computers. This is worsened by the fact that today’s processors have changed and they are running at lower speeds. This confuses the speed benefit that Intel had its brand positioned around. The technology change in viewing screens, memory, and processor use in the computer has moved the market away from where Intel was positioned. The Intel corporate brand powers sales of their new processors, but they can call those new products anything they want and it won’t effective my decision.

What Intel needs to do now, is to associate its processors with the features and benefits that consumers and B2B buyers make decisions upon. Computer branding is not all about the processors anymore and the old Intel brand image is deeply tied to old technology. Even the brand name Pentium is associated with the computer culture of the 90′s.

Here’s the issue: the old Intel brand was so successful in 90′s that it’s trapped Intel in a time warp. Intel needs new branding that ties it to the future, not the past. To get there, they are probably going to have to jettison the past.

Google is a good example of modern branding and a brand that is not tied solely to web search engines. The brand is now diversified strategically to associate it with everything people are doing on the web. Google is omnipresent, and its brand image is solely in its relevance to the current Internet culture. Google won’t let its common search engine role diminish its branding power.

Hanging onto to Old Branding Concepts

There’s a lot of reason why brand managers, CEOs, and marketing managers resist rethinking their branding and redeveloping their brands. Most often, they don’t want to leave their comfort zone and risk a short term blip in profit. Some don’t want to make an investment in hiring a branding consultant to look at the options. Branding experts examine a brand to discover its current problems, the culture of the marketplace, and to determine if a new brand identity or brand positioning would be fruitful. Some old brands are doomed, but most are just stale and not in tune with the target market. A branding consultant can provide crucial insight into market perception, brand value building, brand loyalty development, and to discover the brand value proposition that could breathe new life into your brands.

From product branding, to corporate branding all the way to extending brand reach on the Internet, Brand Identity Guru provides corporate clients with brand audits, new brand designs, corporate communications strategies, brand boosting web design, and even powerful search engine marketing services. BIG has the complete branding solution for modern e-enterprises. Reach plus relevance. That’s a hard combination to beat.

About the Author
From product branding, to corporate branding to extending brands on the Internet, BIG provides corporate clients with brand audits, brand design, brand web design, and search engine marketing services.

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Brand Development – You Should Improve Your Branding

Years ago, at a Self-Improvement workshop by Jerry Stocking, participants were asked to listen to a children’s rhyme and repeat it. It was a rather long rhyme and everybody lost track of the sequence of events and stopped in embarrassment.

A tense and nervous atmosphere built up in the room as one person after another failed to recite the entire rhyme. People began to feel that they just had insufficient short term memory to recall and repeat the whole thing.

Then a NASA Aeronautical Engineer, with numerous pauses, got it!

His secret was that he paused. During those pauses, in the space between words, his subconscious mind prompted him with the next line of the verse.

“This,” said Jerry Stocking, “was the secret–because the space between things allowed intelligence and creativity to emerge.”

Both Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer are equally enthusiastic about this space between thoughts. They call it “the gap.”

Deepak Chopra says it is a contact point between our mind and the quantum field of all possibilities.

Wayne Dyer believes that for a moment, one actually touches the divine before springing back into our consensus reality, which is kept alive by a constant stream of limiting thoughts.

Echart Tolle has earned fame and fortune teaching others about this space. He is famous for his long silences, during which he is merely being aware, and devoid of thought. When he, by example, induces this state in his audience, they feel a sense of deep peace and “a fullness of being.”

Similarly, when I was studying art, learning how to draw people, horses, dogs, still life objects, barns, and open spaces, the space between my sketches were the most meaningful. With those spaces, my images came to life.

I love classical music, and it is for the same reason. The space between the notes is where the magic lies.

I have noticed a new surge of creativity in my online endeavors as well, when I respect these spaces.

When I am writing a sales letter, my thoughts become very intense, and after a while I suffer from information overload. When I take a break and come back, all the sentences flow perfectly, and I convey my message the way that I had hoped.

The same amazing thing happens after studying. If I spend a lot of time researching something, then give it a break, which may last for as long as a day, all the elements of the project become very clear to me.

The other day, I was listening to a David Valleries interview and I had to smile when he said that his most creative ideas came after he had quit pursuing them and did something utterly mundane instead.

There is a magic to the space between images, notes, streams of thought, and information gathering. Respect those spaces and confusion dissipates. Then the mind becomes very clear and action becomes efficient and precise.

About the Author
Saleem Rana would love to share his inspiring ideas with you. Hunting everywhere for a life worth living? Discover the life of your dreams. His book Never Ever Give Up tells you how. It is offered at no cost as a way to help YOU succeed. http://www.theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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The Secret Of Creativity In Business, Art, And Life