How to Make Brand Strategy Useful: Beliefs in Action

HOW TO MAKE BRAND STRATEGY USEFUL -- Beliefs in Action

Does the brand you work for need to be a publisher/TV production house? Does it need to make content?

Does your brand lack engagement? and does engagement mean the brand has to give you entertainment, information, or otherwise publish information and insights for you to consumer (aka CONTENT)?

PR agencies are getting into the media business turning brands not into the underwriters of articles and video but as publishers (Content Marketing Craze with PR agencies). What is old is new again. Sponsoring scripts and building shows to embed ads into is how the whole TV ad business got going.

There was a time in the late 1990's every brand felt it needed it's own free-standing website. There were a lot of people ready to capitalize on this need. I remember well when saying the following back then: "Does this cracker/laundry soap/toothbrush have something to say on this site that will make people come and what will keep them coming back?" -- well this sounded a lot like "not getting it" to the people with a passion for their own brand site.

Context is everything is an adage we should pay a lot of attention to in these "comms planning/channel planning, path-to- purchase, mobile-marketing, GPS timed offer" days.

Can't a brand find a world to be a part of and to underwrite? Does it need to create a world to be in and underwrite? 

Maybe a cracker wants to raise it's importance and engagement. That's understandable. But can't a low interest thing like a cracker brand engage and really shine in the right context? I think so. A cracker or any brand can be engaging if it finds actions to be of use. A cracker is not unimportant, but it may not need to be a publisher -- it can be embedded in a world of parties, food programming through product placement, recipes, and in a context where a cracker can shine an be useful.

Does it need to write and produce this content to have a context? 

Instead of asking this question, what I really want to ask is where is the filter? I need a filter. I'm drowning in content. Aren't you?

Express Your Ideas Clearly At Work More Visually

Story-telling in new ways demands new tools. To express your ideas and yourself, wouldn't it be great to get past the clunky powerpoints we so often generate at work to a whole new format? Maybe with tools like Mural.ly people who aren't designers (like me) can do more with our stories visually. Will Wright the author of SimCity, launched  Spore at PopTech in 2006 saying we all have design aspirations and that most people want to express themselves, but what they make isn't too attractive. He said what people need is the tools and computers are great tools to amplify our abilities and to help us tell stories. How true. So true I never forgot it and have looked for tools to help me and everyone I know to tell their stories better ever since.

Will said back in 2006, "The tools we surround ourselves with are an expression of our identity." It's almost non-news that we are getting those tools faster and free now-- from Pinterest to Instagram to Facebook Timelines -- we have more and more tools to express ourselves beautifully (hurrah!). Mural.ly might be something to help us tell our stories better at work. It's in beta so we'll see. If you check it out (and I think you should), take my advice and watch the videos. Sign up for the free account and watch first and then click about. I thought I could just click around and get going and I accidentally clicked on something that took me to a full screen photo of a guy staring at a wall of inter-related stuff-- straight out of the TV show Scandal or the Unibomber's shack. Clearly this tool could help detectives or conspiracy theorists, but I think the makers intend it for storytellers like you and me.I will continue to look for more tools like it and pass them on. Work presentations should all be more like Will Wright at PopTech and less like 18 pt typeface crammed into 5 bullet points a page. We'll get there.

Brand Yourself -- What's Your Story?

Interviews are story-telling sessions.

To give a great interview, to be a great candidate, you have to have two things: great experience and a great story. Great experience without the ability to pull together a coherent tale to contextualize that experience, will at best position you as a do-er, not a leader. Contextualizing experience and making it relevant is how you help someone see why you are better for the role than someone else. By the time you have an interview, you have been filtered for broad experience, the context of that experience and how you present your unique story and its relevance is what you have to do to get the job.

Context is everything.

Great brands are not great because they represent great products and have great features and benefits. Lots of products have great features and benefits just like lots of people have an education and skills. A great brand connects. This connection happens through value proposition that makes you care.

Your story can express your value proposition which is more than a list of skills and experiences. Making a connection between a brand and people is not done through a list of anything, it's done by connecting on an emotional level. How can you connect yourself to the interviewer and to the kind of role you want next?

Passion with reasons to believe.


Let's assume you're smart, educated and have worked at great places. The next thing you need to is passion. Passion -- really caring -- makes other people care too. If you are passionate about your work,  it holds a lot of sway on how people will feel about you as a candidate. But where passion can hurt instead of help is if you fail to marry passion to context. Interviewers don't want to just hear how you love something, but why exactly you are great at it in a way we can believe. Really being passionate about the role you're interviewing for is great, but only if you can be persuasive about how it fits with your previous experience.

Reasons-to-believe is where the rubber hits the road.

Passion without reasons to believe is like someone being excited about the prospect of winning the lottery -- unrealistic and tedious to listen to.




Shannon Mullen Copyright ©

 

Can LinkedIn.com get me great senior talent?

If you are recruiting inside an organization +LinkedIn might have seemed like the answer to your recruitment problems just like +Monster.com looked the answer 12 years ago. But some things don't change. No matter how many people I know through Linkedin, (my 1st degree connections are now in the many thousands) a shout out there doesn't work for senior searches for three reasons:

 

1. Unemployed people and junior people respond to shout outs

If you want strong senior talent, you have to know where they are and you have to actively seek them out. They are busy working somewhere and while they may be open to a new challenge, they are not going to put their name out to HR departments all over town in most cases.You need to locate them and understand them.

 

2. Check-lists don't work with senior talent

A check-list of skills works well for delivery role jobs. Do you need a social media analyst who can use Radian6? Someone who can use InDesign to make you better presentations?Then you can hire someone to troll around and find someone who matches a list of criteria or post a job and see what comes back. Senior talent don't conform to check lists of skill lists. Innovative talent is even less linear. Where they worked, what they accomplished in that time, the range of experience they've developed by working across a range of brands, target audiences and media situations, is what you can use as indicators before meeting someone.

 

3. Senior talent needs to be attracted to a new role

Talented marketers don't make a move to do what they've just done. This means you need to make a leap in judgement to even locate who you could attract to the role. If you go looking for people who are currently doing a very similar job, you will only attract people in fear for their current role, or people without the talent to go onto a new challenge. Recognizing what kinds of experiences would make someone an interesting candidate for a new challenge both from the organization's standpoint, and from the candidate's standpoint it the trick to senior recruitment.