Magic Moments

Loyalty and engagement with all media are built on powerful positive "magic moments."

That time LinkedIn let you know that a longtime friend just received a big promotion.

When Facebook put you together with a high school buddy you haven't heard from in years.

The instant when Twitter let you know the results of your favorite Olympic sport many hours before the event was replayed on NBC-TV.

The more frequently these kind of moments happen, the closer you feel to the medium, the brand, the personality and the more you "use" them regularly.

Then, there are those other moments.  When you get a LinkinIn email saying a business associate wants to connect with you, but when you click on the link it says that the notice was sent to the wrong email address.  When Facebook keeps wanting to reinstall the Android app you just UNinstalled because it eats up too much memory and is too slow when compared to just using your browser to get onto Facebook.  When NBC-TV edited out the very part of the opening ceremonies you wanted to see the most.

Trust gets betrayed.  Usage decreases.  Brand gets tarnished.

What happens when you ask for "caller #9" and you recognize the voice of the regular winner who always seems to get through and win when you have the best prizes up for grabs?  When hundreds of other people get only a busy signal and mutter under their breath that radio contests are all fixed?

When your info update consists of "the news is coming up on the hour" and the listener looks at their smart phone and realizes that their personal information aggregation app has ALL the news for the refreshing at any instant they want it and that they never have to wait for "the news?"

When a radio station keeps pushing "the most music" and automated song-sweeper-song-jingle-song-sweeper hours when listeners voted in at least four different research projects released since the first of the year, including A&O's Roadmap 2012 perceptual study, for "fun personalities who feel like friends and make me feel better when I listen?"

It's easy to do things the way you've always done them and ignore listener needs. 

There's some "magic" in that too.

It will make your audience disappear.

"We Used To Do That"

Looking today at the bats flying over the Halloween-themed branding on the website of Vancouver's new Shore 104 FM, I was reminded back when the internet was a new thing and we all had fresh, topical, clever screen-savers and wallpaper available for downloading to listeners' at work desk-tops.

Whatever happened to that idea? It's a little like giving your at work listeners Post-its with your brand on them. Yes, in many ways, so "yesterday," and yet who doesn't need an extra pad of Post-It's today and a screen saver?

I say these words at least once every day: "The epitaph on the tombstone of many a dead radio station is 'we used to do that.'"

Country Lovemarks

Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising wrote the book "Lovemarks: the future beyond brands" several years ago and has just updated his theories in a new one, "The Lovemarks Effect: Winning in the Consumer Revolution."

A very cool aspect of the book is its companion website, where consumers are encouraged to nominate brands they love and would call their personal lovemarks.

Country artists making the top 100: (43) Keith Urban, (79) Alison Krauss, (93) Reba McEntire, (94) Toby Keith and (99) Patsy Cline.

"At the core of every Lovemark is Respect. No Respect? It’s not a Lovemark. It’s as simple as that."

Put Your Brand To The Test by clicking here

Brand = Experience

A recent study by the Louws Management Corporation, where 80% of 711 advertising and marketing professionals surveyed said they are strongly aware of their company's brand positioning, but only one fourth of them "can clearly articulate (their) company's brand position to... clients, customers or prospective clients."

I think there's something more fundamental and troubling in these survey results. Jakob Nielsen once said that on the Web, branding is much more about experience than exposure. This is true to a profound level that escapes many marketers. In the new world of empowered buyers, they engage with a brand at a thousand different touch points, and every one of those touch points builds a brand "mosaic" -- an image of the brand that the buyers participate in building because the Web has empowered them to do so. Every single member of the company that consumers connect with also helps build this collective brand picture. And that's why the findings of this study are so deeply troubling. If 75% of the people who are the marketing stewards of the brand message can't express it in simple language, what hope is there for the customer service person, in a contracted call center, who, for one customer at one particular point of time, is the entire brand? In this new reality, where brand is built on the front lines, through real contact with real customers, rather than in carefully controlled messaging that comes through a handful of advertising channels, crystal-clear communication within an organization becomes an imperative. In this new definition of marketing, cult-like cultures, an obsessive focus on corporate purpose and company-wide alignment are the prerequisites for success. Brand messaging has to be more than marketspeak, it has to be a mantra, the cornerstone of a strategy that is communicated to every member of the company repeatedly, clearly and fervently. It has to be a concept so crystal clear, so absolutely unambiguous, that there can be no questioning what it means. Every single member of the company has to have it on the tip of their tongue - and, infinitely more important, embedded deep within their beliefs. That's the only way it can be consistently spread through the thousands and millions of interactions and conversations that make up the new brand mosaic. --- Gord Hotchkiss, president of Enquiro, a search engine marketing firm

If I could have said it better, I would have!