• Brand is everywhere

French On Brand

~ by GroPartners Consulting CEO Greg French

French On Brand

Monthly Archives: October 2016

Instantly Align Stakeholders with Edutainment

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by French On Brand in Branding, Financial Literacy

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Tags

B2B branding, Engagement strategies, financial education, Financial Literacy, investment education, life insurance education, retirement eduation

Edutainment style video makes it easy to get your ducks in a row.

Edutainment style video makes it easy to get your ducks in a row.

Herding cats. Boiling the ocean. Kicking whales down the beach. Aligning employees and customers to the brand.

Easy to say. Tough to do. And it’s not just a job for HR, Training, or Organizational Development alone. Marketing and brand have untapped power in this arena.

Alignment is a topic of endless discussion, with no definitive solution. But organizations spend billions on it because at the end of the rainbow is a legendary pot of ROI. You’ve heard it all before: Employees who are aligned with customer and company goals automatically collaborate better. They make better, customer-driven decisions that ultimately cut management costs and raise revenues, engagement, and retention.  In essence, aligned employees make it their mission to close the gaps between customer and company.

Excuses, Excuses

So why do organizations continue to communicate differently with employees and customers using Internal Communication and External Communication, respectively? It ultimately costs more money, causes unnecessary complexity, and inherently tells two different stories or evokes separate motivations, or at least presents different postures.

There are some types of internal communications that customers don’t want to be bothered with. But on the other hand, there is a litany of excuses not to use the same communications for others that promote transparency. The bottom line is many organizations don’t know how to be truly customer-driven. So they default by adapting the internal story of (profit focus) “you have a sales quota to meet” to the external story (customer focus) “trust that we’ll do the right thing for you, our customer.”

Among the “good reasons” internal communications need to be different from external, we’ve heard:

  • The internal story and external stories are just different
  • If customers knew how messed up we are on the inside they’d flee
  • It’s too technical for consumers to understand
  • How we do things internally is no one’s business but ours

… there are probably at least 100 more

The Payoff

Transparency builds trust with every stakeholder so, think of alignment as one complete story. The internal folks need the whole story. External stakeholders (distributors, customers/consumers) many times don’t need to hear the details, but should be entitled to hear the entire story as they become closer to the brand.

Imagine a poster with big headline type and smaller body type, graphics illustrating various details, and maybe even some smaller caption type. Employees and customers should all see the same poster. An employee, who works near the poster every day, sees all the details and words clearly … although it’s good for him to read the large headline type every day as he walks in the door. The consumer is passing by on the sidewalk. She can clearly read the headline and sees the same graphics the employee sees. As the she becomes a customer, she moves closer and begins to see more of the same detail that the employee sees. There’s nothing written on the back of the poster, hidden from the consumer or customer. Everything is transparent and therefore everyone is working on the same issues: how to make life better for customers.

Using different versions of the same marketing and educational assets for all stakeholders makes life simple for marketers and reduces skepticism among customers. Combining education and entertainment allows it to be multi-facing, showing ideal interactions and true sentiments. In fact it can turn the tables for a selling monologue to a buying dialog because you’re feeding both sides verbal and non-verbal information they need to do business.

Edutainment: A Tool for Alignment and Engagement

Financial Literacy Blog Post Image 2Edutainment is particularly well suited to high-involvement products and services and web applications like videos, interactive infographics, and gamification. It presents the same information in different levels of depth and focus aligning all stakeholders simultaneously. Wrapping education in well-produced assets can present an approachable brand personality with a customer-driven mission in real-life context. This is where the rubber meets the road; where customers see how employees should behave, and employees see how customers react. Brands that have a lock on this are famous: Apple, Southwest airlines, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon. Some lump it all under “culture.” But how is the culture created and sustained?

Aligning through a stream of multi-facing assets—especially those with an appropriate sense of humor—creates brand transparency. They automatically align, reduce marketing friction and management costs, and accelerate innovation.

GroPartners Consulting creates edutainment assets for several industries, including financial, insurance, and retirement products and services.

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For more perspective on bridging strategy and execution, including practical tools and processes for brand operationalization, get a copy of Getting There From Here: Bridging Strategy and Execution, by Greg French, founder of GroPartners Consulting. E-book at iBooks or hard copy from Amazon.com.

http://amzn.to/1Jcli0A

Extreme Branded Entertainment

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by French On Brand in Branding

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Tags

brand experience, brand marketing, branding, Engagement strategies

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Brands are getting close to out-and-out owning music entertainers. What’s next?

In a promotional age more complex than any time in history, brands continue to look for ways to capture consumers at the visceral level. This is a tall order in societies like ours that splinter out consumers into ever-narrowing segments conditioned to deflect promotional messages as a default behavior.

In contrast, the music industry’s heritage is built on understanding and appealing to values, attitudes, interests and lifestyle. Music genres span every taste for every mood. So it’s no wonder that over the years, brands and bands have enjoyed a cozy fit: brands provide the money, bands provide the cache and association with lifestyles and values. Think Jimmy Buffett and you instantly taste the salted rim of a seaside margarita (Sandals Resorts?). Think Pink and you might get the urge to work out till you drop (Under Armour?).

A June 2016 Huffington Post blog packages the symbiosis well, citing three factors that attract brands to sponsor bands:

  • Compelling content
  • Cultural relevance
  • Authentic connection

Bands Forced to “Sell Out”

The balance between the non-conformist, no “sell-out” image of bands, and the opposite commercially-driven essence of brands has always been tricky business, but recently has become totally one-sided. As reported in a NY Times article, streaming music services have crushed the revenue structure of the music business, leaving bands with only touring and brand sponsorships to put fuel in the bus and pay for new guitar strings.

Now deprived of revenues formerly generated by record sales, music entertainers are broke without sponsorships. Brands have poured buckets of money into live music sponsorships to the point they’re literally taking over the show. For example, an entire tour of Lady Gaga shows actually integrated Doritos product placement on stage and around the event. So where does all this lead? It seems as if brands are getting pretty close to out-and-out owning music entertainers.

Pure Branded Entertainment

That scenario might not be too far off the trend. Since consumers drench themselves in music every day and position it as a mood identity device in their lives, what better way to entrench in consumer value systems than for brands to develop bands and solo artists of their own that write and perform songs projecting the values created by the brand. Not to suggest Mickey D’s Fat Pack or The Viagras as band names, but rather real bands with real names and real music and lyrics that never (or rarely) mention the brand name. The difference between this concept and blatantly sponsored bands of today is that the band/entertainer would be developed from the ground up by the brand that owns exclusive sponsorship rights. The music, lyrics, and image would project the brand’s values and image (Brad Paisley and Dove Men?). The original “values-aligned” music could be leveraged (instead of licensed) for brand advertising, events, videos, internal morale and alignment, and many more applications limited only by the boundaries of creativity. A hit song could mean a boon for the brand. And vice versa. If the music is good, does it make any difference how it’s funded?

Would the market buy into this kind of low profile “brand-backed band?” What do you think?

 

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For more perspective on bridging strategy and execution, including practical tools and processes for brand operationalization, get a copy of Getting There From Here: Bridging Strategy and Execution, by Greg French, founder of GroPartners Consulting. E-book at iBooks or hard copy from Amazon.com.

http://amzn.to/1Jcli0A

Recent Posts

  • Instantly Align Stakeholders with Edutainment
  • Extreme Branded Entertainment
  • Color Creatively Inside the DOL Rule
  • ‘Edutainment’ is the New Financial Marketing
  • Cause-Driven Business: Galvanizing the Value Chain

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