Chris Herbert's List: Marketing Plan Project

• We can try this for competitive intelligence project. - Chris Herbert on 2008-06-08

• "Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos.

• Give this a try for some of our videos? - Chris Herbert on 2008-06-08

• BeFunky offers two services: The Cartoonizer and Uvatar. The Cartoonizer lets you upload photos and give them a cartoon effect. Uvatar lets you create a more realistic avatar based on a photo.

• Personality is what brings a brand to life. To a degree, this does need to happen naturally, but there is a set of techniques and ideas that any company can follow to use the power of personality to help their company stand out.
• Dyson vacuums stand out not just for the design of their products and great customer reviews but because the personality of the brand is all about invention and people respond to that.
• Personality for an organization is all about sharing a more human connection with your brand so that your customers see you as more than just a faceless entity. In that description, you can never really have "too much" personality. The more of an authentic connection you are able to offer, the better.
• Having a personality for your brand cannot help you if you don't have a good product or service to sell. It can't replace having something worthwhile. So if you find yourself trying to have a personality, and it's not sticking, it's likely because people don't see the authentic connection between how you are interacting and your brand. Authenticity is about truth, and the best way of knowing if you need to change course is by actually asking your customers.
• The reason why people respond to Southwest or JetBlue or other newer airlines is in part because they inject more humanity and personality into their process.

• In the B2B category, there are many brands that put themselves in the same position for one simple reason: they focus on "featurespeak." When you do this, often your brand personality sucks because every communication is focused on what your product can do. No one wants to talk to or hear from that guy who's always pitching his stuff.

• Question: What is the first steps in creating a brand personality? 

  
   

  Answer: One thing that many people are talking about is the role of social media in creating a brand personality. Though it may be tempting to launch an online social network, or a brand new shiny blog, personality is not just about social media.  

  
   

  The real first step is to focus on what I call the three core elements of personality: being unique, authentic, and talkable. This means making it ok for your employees and customers to talk about you. It also means crafting a backstory and taking advantage of your "personality moments."
• What is the error message users get on your website when the reach a broken page? When you send your customers products, what message does the packaging provide? Focusing on the details is what personality really means. And it is the way to go from having something decent to having something that people can't help spreading the word about.
• The word "tools" is not the right one to use; the best way to spread a brand personality--not surprisingly--is through people. Employees and customers are the messengers of this personality and ideally the way that it will come to life. There are also methods such as crafting a good "backstory" for your brand to demonstrate the heritage of where you come from and what you believe--similar to how the TV show Lost uses backstories to take you inside the lives of characters.

  • Imagine a picture of JB's desk in his basement for example.
• The thing that makes a great agency-client partnership is when a business already has a good sense for what they do, and the help they need is in strategically figuring out how to communicate that value and stand out among their competitors. A key part of the value that an agency can add at this stage is helping a brand to bring that personality out of the organization.
• A common mistaken perception about brand personality is that it is dependent on having a charismatic and pronounced CEO or talking head. In some cases, that can certainly help ... but the idea of personality for a brand is that it is something that is brought to life by ALL customers and employees.
• People are responding in droves to the fact that NASA has created a Twitter account for the mars rover (@marsphoenix). It's not because the head of NASA is exhibiting an interesting personality, but because someone within is offering a real human connection to the work that the agency does.
• This is the idea of the accidental spokesperson: someone who is becoming a spokesperson without being formally trained in that role. If you look around the world of business, you'll see this happening with increasing frequency as social media tools become more and more available and widespread.
• There is one common factor that nearly every company which has a broken brand personality will share, and that is that they have an "employee silencing policy."
• When you keep your biggest potential evangelists from talking about your product or service, you are stifling your personality. To get past this, you need to let them share their voices.
• Ultimately it just comes down to building a more human and authentic connection with your customers. That's a universal principle that just about every brand should be focusing on.

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• Your offering must be appropriate. That’s apparently true in your case, but I’ve seen cases where sales managers have asked their sales reps to sell high when the product was a commodity that’s typically handled by a purchasing drone. If it’s not something that’s going to be on a top CEO’s radar, calling high is wasted effort.
• You must be a social equal to the CEO. You either need to be the kind of person who could be the CEO or the type of person who can mix socially with a CEO. In other words, fresh-out-of-college newbies can’t effectively call high, unless they’re the children of the CEO’s friends. Don’t laugh; it’s been done.
• ssuming that you’ve satisfied the preconditions, there are (exactly) four ways to get a sales appointment with a CEO:
• Laddering. This is the process of building contacts inside the organization leading towards a personal introduction to the CEO. The trick here is not to try to close the deal with the lower-level folk, but to think of them as potential referrers who will get a career benefit if they call the CEO’s attention to you and your offering. I discuss this process in my previous post: “How to Reach the CEO.”
• Cold Calling. This is the process of breaking through the layers of protection that keep the CEO from answering his or her own phone. If you follow this path, you’d better be a truly fabulous cold-caller, because you’re only going to get one shot at it. However, I do know that it can work because most CEOs, once you get into their inner circle, are easy to sell. I explain how to get the CEO on the line in my previous post “How to Reach the CEO…Directly“
• Networking. This is the process of building contacts outside the organization, otherwise known as “referral selling.” This entails researching the life of the CEO and then building a network of contacts that gradually lead you towards a personal introduction. This is an extremely productive sales tactic that I’ve discussed in several blog entries, most notably: “How to Generate Your Own Leads” and “Five Rules for Great Referrals“.
• Socializing. This is similar to the networking concept, but leads towards an “accidental” meeting between the sales rep and the CEO. You research the CEO’s life and interests to discover any public or semi-public event where it would be possible to meet the CEO socially.  Possibilities include executive conferences, local golf courses, stockholder meetings, and charity balls. I haven’t written previously about this method, so I’ll explain exactly how to do it in tomorrow’s post. Stay tuned.

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• here are three solutions to this problem:

   
   
  1. Work with lower level contacts to gradually win access.
   
  2. Enlist the help of a colleague, peer or friend of the CEO.
   
  3. Trick the CEO into taking your call.
• Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s start with the first method, because it’s the way that most customers would prefer you approach the situation.

• He points out that in most companies the “decision” to buy (or not buy) an offering is often shared between three individuals:

   
   
  1. The “budget owner.” This is the CEO or (if your offering is small potatoes) some lesser executive.
   
  2. The “problem owner.” This is the operational manager whose department actually needs your offering.
   
  3. The “access owner.” This is the person in the operational manager’s department who is willing to talk to you and (hopefully) sponsor you.
• Typically your first customer call is to the “access owner” who then agrees to sponsor you to the “problem owner.” If the “problem owner” is satisfied that you can provide something of value, the “problem owner” gives you access to the “budget owner.” If you can get all three people to say “YES,” then you have a sale.
• To make this method work, your sales approach needs to be different for each type of decision maker.
• The “access owner,” being lower level, is primarily interested in his or her own credibility and position in the hierarchy. This person will want to be certain that you are credible and can deliver as promised, so that bringing you forward will enhance the status of the “access owner.” At this point in the sale, your emphasis is on creating an aura of personal credibility and building a strong relationship.
• The “problem owner” is typically too busy to talk to you unless somebody else in the organization (i.e. the “access owner”) is willing to put his job on the line by sponsoring you. The “problem owner” is primarily concerned with whether your offering will have an actual benefit in the part of the business that’s the responsibility of the “problem owner.” At this point in the sale, your emphasis is on the solution and the benefits that it will provide.
• The “budget owner” (i.e. the CEO) isn’t interested in your offering, per se, but on the impact that your offering will have on the proverbial bottom line. (See my previous post on this subject.) So at this point in the sale, it’s all about making the decision to buy into a no-brainer. The way you do this is to make the “access owner” and the “problem owner” into your advocates.

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• Here's how to get access to the CEO (or anyone else) without negotiating through underdogs and gatekeepers:
• If there’s no link to the CEO’s email, troll around the website to discover how they’ve set up the names for their email addresses.  Example: if the PR flack Joe Blow has the email j.blow@acme.com then CEO Billie Bigwig probably has the email b.bigwig@acme.com.  Try it. 
• If your email bounces back as undeliverable, create a second email, address it to all of the following: bb@acme.com, billie@acme.com, bigwig@acme.com, billieb@acme.com, bbigwig@acme.com.  The address that doesn’t bounce back is the CEO’s email.  Works about 90% of the time.
• Office phone.  As I described in an earlier post, call the main switchboard, ask for “accounts receivable” and then, when an accounting drone answers the phone, ask for the CEO’s direct line or extension. If all you can get is the CEO's extension, you can usually get the direct line by replacing the final numbers of the main corporate number with the extension number.  For example, if the main number is 212-555-1234 and the CEO’s extension is 666, then the CEO’s direct line is probably 212-555-1666.  If that doesn't work, get the CEO’s admin’s number and then dial up and down from there.  For example, if the Admin’s number is 212-555-5560, try 5561, 5562, 5563, etc then 5559, 5558, 5557, etc.  (I got this last idea from a comment in this blog.  Thanks!)

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