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5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore- from our friends at iMedia Connection

media planning & buying: IN FOCUS

5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore

By Adam Kleinberg

November 02, 2009

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Article Highlights:

• Savvy marketers are recognizing the impact of mass collaboration and constant connectivity
• The broader trends of globalization and corporate distrust are reshaping how consumers interact with brands
• The global sense of urgency to fix the world's problems goes well beyond the green movement

Next In Focus

Finding the elephants in the room

What's a megatrend, you ask? It's something big. I'm talking really big.

Think of a giant unstoppable tsunami of change transforming society as we know it. Think global warming scale -- then apply it to mass human behavior. Think glaciers carving the grand canyon of consumer sentiment.

Stay informed! For more insight into the fundamental shifts taking place in today's fragmented media landscape, attend the iMedia Agency Summit, Dec. 6-9. Learn more about the iMedia Agency Summit.

Compare and contrast. Here are some regular trends:

"Everyone is on Twitter these days."
"Boomers are investing more in home renovations as they approach retirement."
"Green is 'in' this season."

All of these are important. None are mega.

Here's a megatrend:

"Social media has permanently transformed the way people connect and share information."

See? Big.

Much of the planning that goes into positioning a brand takes into account product attributes, competitive differentiation, and target insights. These are all critically important considerations. But they're not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about what is so often left on the table -- the elephant in the room. Megatrends. Latching onto these tectonic shifts can surge an entire brand strategy forward way ahead of the curve. Google caught on to an access-to-information megatrend. Facebook caught on to people connecting. Yet, these megatrends are rarely leveraged by brands. (This was confirmed for me by the sheer difficulty I had coming up with campaigns for this article).

Most companies wait until a megatrend is so pervasive and obvious that it becomes a minimum standard, a non-differentiating proposition -- so that leveraging them does nothing to differentiate their brand. Case in point: Who doesn't have a "green" message these days?

So what are the new megatrends that I believe will transform society in the coming years? What brands are taking advantage of them? And what can you learn from them?

Read on.

Next page »

Marketing Tip - KnowEm Helps Small Business Owners Claim and Protect Their Brands

From our friends at SmallBizTrends.com:

KnowEm Helps SMB Owners Claim & Protect Their Brand

Small Business Trends

October 22, 2009

By Lisa Barone

Back in August I highlighted Knowem.com, a cool new startup that I thought small business owners needed to be aware of. Well, earlier this week partners in crime Michael Streko and Barry Wise unleashed a new version of the brand-claiming service which has made it an absolute MUST for small businesses. This is one that simply needs to be on your radar.

KnowEm 2.0 launched on Tuesday with a brand new Web site and a host of new features that make it even more powerful than it was before (and it was pretty impressive the first time around). The KnowEm Enterprise Dashboard has been helping Fortune 500s secure their brands in social media since May of this year through private profile set ups (complete with links and pictures). According to KnowEm Co-Founder Barry Wise, “since the launch of the private invite beta of the enterprise dashboard, [KnowEm] has secured over 100,000 profiles”. Now, with the relaunch, they’re not only extending that service for major brands, but giving small business owners a way to get in on the action.

With the free, basic version of KnowEm, small business owners can instantly check brand name availability on 330 social media sites to see where their name is or is not registered. You can also register your personal name or brand for free on the site. If you haven’t yet launched that site or product, a quick KnowEm search is a great way to get some insight on names you’ll want to avoid or gravitate toward based on what’s already been registered.

Once you’ve identified where your brand is available, you can then choose have KnowEm secure it across any of the networks. There’s also a personal dashboard that SMB owners can take advantage of to access all of their social accounts from one centralized location. If you’ve ever had to manage multiple accounts, you know what a time saver this is.

To help businesses further control their brand, KnowEm offers three fee-based services:

• The Individual Edition: KnowEm will start the signup process for you at 150 different social media sites. They won’t create profiles, though, so you’ll have to do that manually. Cost: $99
• The Corporate Edition: KnowEm will personally register your username across 150 of the top social media Web sites, setting up a basic profile that includes photos, bio, URL and a description. These profiles are not automated and are set up by a living, breathing person from New
  Jersey (insert your own joke ). Cost: $350
• Subscription Plan: A monthly services that will sign up your username as new sites emerge (up to 30 new sites a month) to help ensure you get your brand on the next hot social site before it’s too late. Cost: $49/month

When we talk to clients about creating social media plans, our first step is to advise them to grab their brand everywhere. And we actually recommend KnowEm when we do it. It’s very important that you have control of your identify all over the Web and KnowEm is a great way to do that. If you’re looking to fill out your Google 10, now that KnowEm offers company and personal profiles, it’s also another site you can use to help you get this done.

From a security and branding perspective, KnowEm packs a powerful punch that you simply can’t get anywhere else. Most SMB owners don’t realize the importance of creating a consistent brand. You don’t want someone else to register your brand name and then misrepresent or malign you across the social media channels. The consistency also helps people who know you in one community to trust that you’re the same person in another. It’s about all about building authority and credibility through a trackable history.

I don’t think SMB owners really need to go the route of the Subscription Plan (unless social media is the core of what you do), but both the Individual and Corporate Editions are definitely worth the investment. Even if you simply opt for KnowEm to create and fill out basic accounts for you and you personalize the ones you’ll be using the most. It’s really important that you take the time to build a presence in social media.   As a result, KnowEm really is worth its weight in gold.

A CEO’s guide to reenergizing the senior team from the McKinsey Quarterly

In today’s tough and fast-changing environment, CEOs must help their top leaders to work through fear and denial and to learn new rules.

SEPTEMBER 2009 • Derek Dean

In This Article

• Sidebar: CEOs, tough times, and emotions

• About the author
• Comments (5)

When business conditions change as dramatically as they have in the past year, CEOs need to be able to rely on their best leaders to adapt quickly. But what should they do when their strongest executives seem unable to play a new game? The costs—organizational drift, missed opportunities, unaddressed threats—are so big that it’s tempting to replace leaders who are suffering from paralysis. But this is a mistake when, as is often the case, these executives possess valuable assets, such as superior market knowledge, relationships, and organizational savvy, that are difficult to replace.

Before sending promising executives off the field, CEOs should try to help them learn to play by new rules. While part of the task—making a compelling case for change, helping him or her meet new job demands—involves appealing to an executive’s rational side, there’s also frequently an emotional element that is at least as important. Empathizing with the complex emotions executives may be feeling as the assumptions underlying their business approach unravel can be a critical part of overcoming the fear, denial, and learning blocks keeping them stuck (see sidebar, “CEOs, tough times, and emotions”).

Read more:

Energizing the Senior Team, from McKinsey

Useful team building tools

• To innovate, make your goals your team's goals
  The trouble with most corporate innovation efforts isn't that employees aren't sufficiently innovative, argues Dr. Win Wenger -- it's that their individual goals aren't well aligned with those of the company as a whole. Companies need to find ways to convince employees that corporate interests and their own concerns are not separate matters, but aspects of a co-dependent effort, he says. InnovationTools (9/28)

Message to all operators on marketing and promotion: DIFFERENTIATE

Legal Sea Foods Stirs The Pot (Again)

by Karlene Lukovitz, Friday, September 25, 2009, 12:33 PM via MARKETING DAILY

When it comes to advertising, seafood restaurants are generally heavy on the overflowing platter images and light on the message.

Boston-headquartered Legal Sea Foods continues to defy that expectation. Take last year's campaign. To drive home just how "fresh" its fish are, the restaurant chain and its agency, DeVito/ Verdi, plastered the tops of Boston cabs with ads featuring a cartoon fish declaring: "This driver has a face like a halibut." Then they used the same concept on the sides of the city's Green Line trolleys, also expanding the fish's repertoire with other ads that included observations such as: "This line gets around more than your sister."

As intended, the ads got plenty of attention, eliciting both laughs and irritation among the public. The "halibut" version also generated so many angry complaints from trolley drivers -- members of the Boston Carmen's Union, who actually threatened to strike -- that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had that ad removed.

Legal Sea Foods also uses radio and TV quite frequently. One TV spot showed another cartoon fish swimming up to the camera to announce: "Bite me."

o Legal Sea Foods. One retired to a houseboat, only to drown when he "went to get the paper, and forgot his house was a boat." Another marked his achievement by getting a tattoo of an anchor -- and while at it, also got a tattoo of two women riding a dinghy, to commemorate "a different occasion."

Black-and-white newspaper ads that look, at first glance, like news coverage, play out the theme. One shows a fisherman holding up a huge fish, with a "caption" noting that he has finally sold a fish to Legal Sea Foods and the quote: "This is my proudest accomplishment, completely outweighing the birth of my two children."

The campaign aims to convey that Legal "is in the fish business -- we control our sourcing, so we know exactly when and how each fish was caught, and we select and test [for mercury levels] ourselves for total quality assurance," President and CEO Roger Berkowitz tells Marketing Daily. (Legal, founded by the Berkowitz family as a Cambridge-based fish business in 1950, opened its first restaurant in 1968, but remains "primarily a fish company," according to its official history.)

"Some have expressed disappointment with our humor -- some have even said that we have a warped sense of humor," adds Berkowitz. "We could just show great pictures of fish on plates like other seafood restaurants, and those might be attractive. But we use the tongue-in-cheek ads to underscore our serious message about being in the fish business. This is our point of differentiation."

Legal Sea Foods currently has more than 30 restaurants spanning the length of the East Coast. The "Legal" part of the name came from a family-owned market that dispensed "Legal Stamps" (forerunners of S&H Green Stamps) to customers in the early years.

From our friends at BusinessWeek - Getting into a Breakthrough Frame of Mind

•  

Today's Tip

Getting into a Breakthrough Frame of Mind

Posted by: on September 14

During this time of economic recovery it can be an opportune period to rediscover and even reinvent your business. The following ideas can help create the conditions for breakthrough thinking:

1. Unlock yourself from your expectations and be open to possibilities. Stay objective and open to many solutions. Locking in on one pathway or solution too early prohibits you from potentially discovering a much more effective way forward.

2. Review the opportunity or problem as you understand it. Review any data and information gathered, and ask if there are any untapped sources of further information.

3. Engage in experimentation. Make small investments in these trials and observe the outcomes. Outline the goal, but don’t dictate the solution prematurely. For example, we sometimes become so fixated on meeting financial goals that we forget that they were targets. We focus on the number, and not the assumptions behind the number that can change with current conditions.

4. Focus your attention on what you want to see happen, rather than what you do not want to occur. Rather than stating, "We don’t want to disappoint the customer" (which may result in you and your staff focusing on ways you are or could be disappointing the customer), reframe it as, "The customer will be thrilled by our product," which will turn your attention to all the ways the customer will be satisfied and retained. Make "Wouldn’t it be great if…" statements and avoid playing the devil’s advocate, especially early in the process.

These steps help lay the groundwork for breakthrough thinking and action, particularly during times of economic uncertainty.

Lisa Gundry
Professor of Management
Director, The Center for Creativity & Innovation
DePaul University, Chicago

NFIB membership survey - not the best news. Time to look deep to be sure your brand is strong!

• Optimism falls, jobless rate rises in August
  Optimism among small-business owners retracted in August, according to the NFIB membership survey being released today. As the unemployment rate rose to 9.7%, the highest level since 1983, the optimism rate of NFIB members fell 1.3 points to 86.5 in August. "The job generating machine is still in reverse," says William C. Dunkelberg, the organization's chief economist. Austin American-Statesman (Texas)/The Associated Press (free registration) (9/5) , The Dallas Morning News (9/4)

Taking the macro view in branding - essential to sustaining growth

All too often we hear from potential clients that they want to see immediate results from brand awareness projects or brand expansion.  Whoa.

What needs to occur first is the constructing (in rare cases a tweaking) of a brand story, brand promise, authentic key words, coordinated and distinctive design elements, and building an emotional connection with your customers.   That takes time.   Without it, sure we can get a story or two published, but that would't be the best approach.   That's what clearly differentiates firms like ours - branding, strategy and operational consulting firms - from the old, traditional "PR" (public relations firms).

Building brand infrastructure takes a look at current and desired demographics and a long term view of where the company, especially the founder and key management team, want to see the company in 10 years.   It takes time, money and a sustained effort for all elements to come together -- that's sometimes hard to see over next week's sales goals and payroll -- but it's essential to grow those goals and that payroll.

Concept Branding Group participates in Bank of America Small Business Online Community

We'd recommend looking around the site for some tips and advice on running your business.

Here's one of our recent posts  -- regarding building alliances

Bank of America Small Business Online Community direct link

 

Smart Moves in a Bad Economy -- from our friends at Entrepreneur.com

Link to Entrepreneur.com

Check out this great piece on what's really important in challenging times...we can't agree more on the savvy advice on marketing.

When costs rise and customers wane, don't let knee-jerk reactions kick you in the wrong direction.

By C.J. Prince   |   Entrepreneur Magazine - December 2008

In a perfect world, business owners would have plenty of time and energy to regularly review their balance sheets and analyze expenses, cutting unnecessary spending as they spot it. In reality, we often zero in on expenses only in a scramble to get back to sustainable profitability when the economy stagnates and growth stalls. But panic can lead to costly mistakes, and experts caution that while paring down may be necessary in the current climate, entrepreneurs should be careful not to cut so deep that they poorly position their companies for an eventual rebound. Here are three costs to reconsider and three cuts to avoid.

Smart Ways to Save

1. Say no to costly customers. For a growing business trying to win big-name clients, it can be very tempting to bid low for a high-profile project. But if the job is going to cost you rather than make you money, you have to take a hard line, says Martin Davis, 38, president of interactive development agency Ratchet. Davis recently had to turn down a project for Nike Bauer, which would have been his first for the global sports equipment manufacturer. "There was just no way we could deliver for the budget they had," he explains, adding that his company engages in a thorough, transparent process to estimate the cost of projects for clients to ensure it agrees to the right price.
   
   A closer look at each customer's profitability will be surprisingly revealing as you find that who you thought was your best customer is really your worst, says Jim Muehlhausen, author of The 51 Fatal Business Errors and How to Avoid Them. "It's scary, but you need to fire those customers. Not only will it save you money, but it will also make your business a lot easier to run."
2. Look at your tech expenditures. "We all tend to overspend on technology," notes Joe Knight, author of Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs and co-owner and CFO of SetPoint Systems Inc., a manufacturing automation equipment company. "And with small businesses, we get caught up in paying for technology that isn't really enhancing the business." Separate the need-to-have from the nice-to-have, he advises, and if you're paying for software licenses, go back to the company and haggle. "We've found that we can go back and renegotiate software maintenance fees because those companies are hurting, too," he says.
3. Bid farewell to underperformers. Given that people are probably your most expensive asset, you can't avoid personnel decisions when cost-cutting. Small-business consultant Tom Long recommends identifying the bottom 10 percent performers in the company and sending out the pink slips. Says Long, "One way or another, poor performers wind up costing you."

Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish

1. Don't fire great people. Cutting key performers simply because they're well-compensated can kill morale--and possibly your business--so make strategic cuts and hold on to your best people, says Muehlhausen. "If Mary is a superstar, you better find a way to keep her around." Replacing senior staff with a greater number of less expensive, junior bodies can also set you back, as Davis learned. "It ended up costing more hours, and we had to bring in more senior people to fix the mistakes," he says.
2. Beware of hitting bone. While you want to make sure your marketing dollars are spent wisely, resist the urge to cut the budget dramatically as a knee-jerk response to the recession, says Ira Davidson, director of the Pace University Small Business Development Center. "Now might be a good time to increase spending because your competitors, in all probability, are automatically saying, 'Times are tough; I have to cut marketing.' You may be able to pick up customers or market share because other people are cutting back."
3. Keep your benefits. Good benefits, including medical and dental insurance, certainly don't come cheap, but they do keep you competitive with larger employers in the ongoing war for top talent. If you cut them now, you may find that when things turn around, it will cost you more to get back on track, Knight points out. "If you're going to have a long-term business, you've got to take care of your people," he says. "I know a lot of small-business owners who will keep their people and cut benefits. I would rather keep the benefits and have to cut staff."

C.J. Prince is a writer specializing in business and finance. Reach her at cj@cjprincemedia.com.