Let your competitors paralyze themselves…

…with reams of research and analysis, while you execute immediately on information that’s “good ‘nuff to run with.” Build the plane while you’re flying it. Test and validate assumptions with small customer samples and “micro-win metrics.” But be sure to iterate often and course-correct as needed to align with your goals.

The key is to be directionally correct, instead of exactly correct. Be 60%-70% certain of your direction instead of waiting to be 100% certain while the ship sails without you. Trade the balance of your research security blanket for spot-on market timing and iterative course corrections. We live in a real time world that won’t stand still while you try to snap a clear photo. If you run alongside it, you get a much sharper picture and share a common perspective with your stakeholders.

Case in point: Russ Klein, Burger King CMO 2003-2006, now Executive Vice President and President, Global Marketing, Strategy and Innovation. Russ has built a fast-food legacy with being “directionally correct.” His “60% rule” is now viewed as not only more “responsible” than missing market trends in deference to 100% certainty, but also as a breakthrough strategy with proven fiscal results.  In FY 2008, Burger King increased revenue by 10% to $2,455 million from $2,234 million the previous year. Revenue similarly grew by approximately 10%, or $148 million, in FY 2007 from FY 2006. Increases in revenue were a direct result of Burger King’s successful advertising campaigns as well as the tendency for consumers to seek lower-cost dining alternatives during stagnant economic conditions (immediate relevance). Net income also experienced rises over three years, from $27 million in 2006, to $148 million in 2007 and finally $190 million in 2008. Not bad for a 60% “guesstimate.”

While periodic in-depth studies are indeed valuable, (though not always entirely reflective of truth – must add experience), quick course corrections can be made with relative confidence by validating assumptions with customers. I use directionally-optimized decision processes such as “quasi-quant” research (quantifying qualitative research) and pre-launch validation to help our clients get to market faster for bigger market share opportunities.

My “quasi-quant” approach is a two-step research process you may find very useful, practical and relatively inexpensive. It is especially useful for niche markets in which the entire market size is too small to justify statistical confidence.

You don't have to count all the jelly beans to know there are approximately the same number of each color...though a little shy on the black ones.

First, do a series of interviews or focus groups (if you have time and budget) with a small representative sample of your target audience. You can even conduct simple phone interviews if they are structured well.

Using learnings from the interviews, craft a web survey to validate the findings. You don’t need 5,000 completed surveys – or even 500 – to get directionally correct information. If you can come up with 50 or 100 replies to your survey of people in a representative sample, you’re golden! Though your statistical confidence is low, you’ll be able to see patterns upon which you can overlay your experience (directional decision making is far more rewarding for the more experienced decision maker).

Though research purists may cry foul, this method is very practical, and the remainder of the risk can be mitigated with a good test marketing plan (which, in my opinion is worth more than any research result).

What are your opinions and experience with directional decision making?

Today, it’s not enough to create the high-impact headline that grabs attention. Creatives are now on the hook for real results in a world of fragmented media and messaging. The incessant rumble of change is shaking up marketers at our very core, particularly affecting creative teams and the new strategic demands placed upon them.

Yes, breakthrough, knock-your-socks-off concepts still matter. But the proliferation of digital media and communication channels demands a more strategic approach to campaign development. In our short-attention-span world, marketers must find ever-more diverse and engaging ways to forge and maintain a connection with their customers. The old campaign model of TV spots supported by print ads in traditional print publications has gone the way of…well…traditional print publications.

Even the web isn’t hot anymore. Now our creative has to be effective on the tiny screens of our smart phones. And campaigns like this past summer’s Old Spice viral videos and other social media-driven “events” present new challenges to traditional creative thinking.

The traditional creative team is also getting a makeover in the wake of this continuing media quake. The traditional art director/copywriter creative team approach is no longer relevant, notes Sean Duffy of The Duffy agency. “Our campaign solutions must do more than combine words and images to inform, inspire, and motivate. They must deliver business value in new ways that maximize the potential of digital media as well as traditional media.”

So the new media era has ushered in a new model for the creative role, one in which strategy is imperative. The term “creative strategy” itself has taken on a new shade of meaning. It’s not just about the great concept that pulls all the right emotional strings; it now must link directly to business results.

Meanwhile, social media is giving us more customer feedback, on a faster track. That means we have to be faster to react so we can control the conversation with messaging that corrects potential social media distortion (digital lynch mobs and the like). And THAT elevates the importance of brand messaging and the need to maintain messaging control and consistency across this evolving media frontier. So message control, creation, organization and access—that messaging governance thing we’ve been talking about—becomes more critical than ever.

The messaging governance best practices we’ve outlined earlier, including having a “designated driver” (brandmaster) can keep your brand messaging on the right trajectory as it makes its way at light-speed across the digital universe. And you can make the process more seamless for your organization by employing the right technology for the job. That’s why 9align (a business unit of StudioNorth) developed Message Mapper.

Message Mapper is a content strategy tool that unites business and creative processes. It doesn’t replace creative people—instead it focuses their efforts, helps their creative become more results-centric, and frees up creative time for more breakthrough thinking. Message Mapper’s role is to provide the business due-diligence, process, and governance framework to ensure that creative is built on a solid architecture that delivers real business results.

The messages that come out of the Message Mapper process still need to be finessed by professional communicators. Ideally content professionals can play a key stakeholder role in the process. Taken a step further, in fact, it empowers them to create more polished voices for the masses, feeding back their wants and needs in the form of branded solutions.

At the end of the day, the tools may change, but the craftsmen will remain the same.

Lifting marketing ROI is top of mind these days in Corporate America, and reducing redundant costs is one key way to help achieve this goal. When applied to messaging, this means not having to start at square one with each new project.

Here are a couple of tools that can reveal whether your brand messaging is in a state of order or chaos:  Take an inventory of the messaging points you use in every communication vehicle in your current marcom portfolio. Everything from brochures to banner ads, PR, web copy, print ads, signage, broadcast scripts, even your company email signature line. Is the language and phrasing consistent? Are you seeing messaging consistency by audience? Or is your messaging all over the place? If messaging chaos is your reality, think about the impact that could be having on your brand equity.

Then poll ten internal stakeholders, from the stockroom to the boardroom. Ask them what your brand stands for. Do the same keywords and phrases keep coming up? Or not so much? Repeat your poll with ten customers.

Now step back and look at the picture that’s emerging from these exercises. Does it resemble a painting in the modern art wing, the kind that everyone interprets differently (or perhaps they just shrug and say, “I don’t get it.”)? If so, you may need to do another exercise to realign your brand. And there’s a new tool for that. It’s designed for the job and affordable for even the smallest organizations.

Message Mapper 2.0  from 9align (https://www.9align.com), is the only web-based tool that helps you perform a message alignment exercise in the most effective way possible. This streamlined version of the original web-based tool helps organizations develop powerful brand messaging and keep it consistent throughout all stakeholder groups, media channels, and marketing projects.  It culls best practices from the best-of-breed branding experts and presents it in an easy-to-use, wizard-driven path, with plenty of room left for creative expression.

Message Mapper helps brand managers and marketers identify, organize, prioritize and communicate compelling stories that project a difference to their audiences. It provides a flexible, yet stable platform of messages that can be used by marketing staff, their agencies, freelances and other vendors. Instead of beginning each project having to first figure out the benefit or copywriting angle, Message Mapper helps you side-step this part of this process. It presents a centralized messaging roadmap on a single page, shared by everyone, so no one ever starts from a blank page again. And because it’s web-based, Message Mapper provides a centralized governance aspect to brand messaging to keep it consistent and under control throughout even the most volatile organizational or environmental shifts. That protects the brand from waffling, often the death knell of modern brands.

By providing strategic brand messaging expertise—on demand—for deadline-driven marketing, Message Mapper gives you the benefit of reduced costs and improved ROI, through more disciplined—and results-driven—communication with your customers. More than just software, it provides thorough process and best practices for developing effective, validated brand messages that will be more readily adopted by internal and external stakeholders.

Because the process makes sense to executives and marketers alike, Message Mapper simplifies internal buy-in of proposed brand messages. It removes subjectivity and replaces it with a process that ultimately improves brand and marketing performance. This is particularly important for businesses that don’t have messaging expertise available on staff.

Message Mapper has been adopted by organizations of many sizes—from SMB to enterprise—to successfully launch corporate and product brands, rebrand products, realign brand portfolios, raise funding for start-ups, and a host of other results-oriented outcomes. See Message Mapper’s web site, https://www.9align.com, for a video overview of how the software works, as well as user testimonials citing outcomes and real business results.

Ever wonder what’s behind messaging experts’ brilliant ideas? How do they come up with those shiny silver-tongued strings of syllables that make customers feel they could betray their mom and hand over their firstborn if they had to, just to buy your brand?

For over a century, messaging experts protected the creative “black box,” that internal voodoo magical, mystical “process” that commanded huge fees and commensurate reverence for ad agencies and messaging consultants. Then, as marketing and advertising became more and more accountable for its spend, brand managers and marketers began to demand a process-driven approach to message development they could understand. This trend led to agencies “positioning by process,” whereby their differentiation was tied inextricably to process and results.

With as many “proven processes” today as there are promotional agencies, it would seem that these processes have commoditized themselves into oblivion. Yet when the best of breed are closely scrutinized and compared, a pattern of best practice begins to emerge.

Message Mapper Message Map

Over the last 11 years, I took it upon myself to reverse-engineer the creative brand messaging process, overlaying the business end of marketing, in a quest to produce a universal process for message development. I studied the most mystical of messaging gurus, reread the classics (Porter, Stone, etc.) and pored over the new classics (Davis & Dunn, Godin, Aaker, etc.). Finally I landed on a process that’s pretty simple, but requires discipline and a bit of data management.  I tested and refined the process with nearly 100 brands and launched a software version that was successful, but relied on expert facilitation and needed a database management component to make it easy to use. So, to make it more accessible to more people, Message Mapper online message development software was reconstructed to include built-in facilitation and a visual database tree to help users see brand stories come alive.

I’ll delve further into how Message Mapper 2.0 can bring order to the chaos of developing marketing messages in my next post. In the meantime, you can explore this new offering at https://www.9align.com. And check out the current promotion that lets you try Message Mapper 2.0 for just $1.

How do you ensure that the voice of your brand speaks consistently across media channels and stakeholder groups, transcends changes in leadership, and keeps your sales force from wandering off the reservation…so to speak?

Messaging governance is an essential component of any well-structured brand governance system (see our blogpost “Brand Governance — what’s all the buzz?). Simply put, governing your messaging means establishing practices and procedures to ensure all your organization’s communications stay on point. So what would such a system consist of, exactly?

First, you need a process for creating and managing a messaging platform. Ideally, a process-driven approach with task-specific technology would make it easier to develop, validate and track messaging for every key stakeholder group—both internal and external.

You’ll also want to monitor ongoing shifts in market conditions, composition or sentiment that may trigger a need to refresh, add or change messaging.

The proper care and feeding of your messaging platform requires someone in your organization, maybe even a team, to ensure ongoing administration and enforcement of messaging governance – a shepherd who can keep all those cats (or sales guys) aligned.

When there is a formal corporate messaging platform owned by the brand and not by a single person or department, the likelihood of coherent brand messaging succession increases significantly.   That translates to stronger, more consistent brand loyalty – and that’s what messaging governance is all about.

Using the latest messaging technology can make message creation, organization, consistency and access much more manageable for everyone involved. And it helps to operationalize and elevate messaging to its proper place – transcending departmental boundaries, and even surviving changes in management – all in the effort to increase or preserve brand equity.

Next time you’re feeling like you’re alone on the range, in search of a brilliant way to share the right messaging with the team… know that you’re not alone. There’s a wrangler on the horizon, with the technology to help you reign in the right message.  Check out 9align Message Mapper (9align.com) for a glimpse of technology specifically geared for messaging governance.

If your brand offering is not clear and compelling from your customers’ point of view, you may have a Brand Portfolio Problem. Brand guru David A. Aacker, in his book, Brand Portfolio Strategy, identifies a number of potential brand portfolio problems we should all be looking out for.

What are some other key indicators that you may have a Brand Portfolio Problem?

You may have a Brand Portfolio Problem if:

• You’re not providing adequate brand-building resources to those brands with potential to drive future profits, while overfunding your mature brands.
• Your current business and marketing strategy is being paralyzed by uncertainty regarding the future role of your key master brands.
• You don’t have the proper brand assets in place to support your business strategy moving forward, nor do you have a plan in place to remedy this situation.
• You’re watching your margins erode because of difficulty in identifying or achieving differentiation.
• Your key brands need an image makeover, or at least an energy transfusion, because they’re starting to feel dated, old and tired.
• Your organization isn’t responding nimbly to changing market dynamics because it lacks governance, resources or brand power. (Could a brand alliance be the answer?)
• Your brand assets are not being intelligently leveraged in order to turn around unsatisfactory growth.
• You’re missing the opportunity to leverage corporate brand assets such as your unique heritage and values.
• You’re not participating in a growing super-premium subcategory with high margins and product vitality, while your core market is turning hostile.
• You have more brands and offerings than your brand-building resources can support.
• Your offering is so confusing that customers can’t figure out how to buy what they need—and even your employees aren’t always certain how to guide them.

Does any of this sound familiar in the context of your organization? What brand portfolio problems are you struggling to overcome? Post a comment below sharing your top two issues and we’ll discuss strategies to help resolve the most common brand portfolio problems in future posts.