Proud Mom: Cultural Standpoints

I'm thrilled to direct you to the first issue of Cultural Standpoints, a magazine about cultural insights, developed from the Brandcenter 2nd year Communications Strategists' thesis project.

It is vital in today's economic and business environment for strategists and planners to keep their ear to the ground and stay attuned to what folks are thinking and doing. Feel free to shoot me some comments. Yes, we've got some typos. But I'm new to this "publishing" thing. Enjoy! And stay tuned for issue #2.

SWOT Anyone?

The hammer’s been around for thousands of years. My guess is that every good toolbox or bag has one. We don’t walk around saying “Jeez, the hammer is so Stone Age.” Recently, I was speaking to a group of Account Managers about the power of a good question. I used the SWOT as an example of a great way to formulate your hypotheses or pre-conceived notions about an assignment before starting it. After the talk, someone came up to me and said, “I love using SWOTs but someone told me they are too ‘old-school’”.

I have no idea how old the idea of a SWOT Analysis is. For those of you from the “young school”, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Simple to do. Thinking about a project, a company, a product, you can create lists of facts or ideas and organize them under the appropriate headings.

But if that is all you do, then the SWOT is a very blunt instrument. What most folks tend to forget is that the magic is not in the diagram; it’s in the analysis. Look at the strengths and determine where the greatest leverage and momentum lie. Is a strength actually a threat if it reveals a brand needs to diversify? Which opportunity can you afford to take advantage of and which is too costly? Are your weaknesses smaller or greater than those of your competition?

Before you go to your client to talk about the next big project, sketch out a SWOT and see what it reveals. You’ll walk into the meeting better prepared for the briefing, with sharper questions to ask about what will make the project a success.

Perhaps you own a small business and you'd like to initiate a new project with your team. This is a great way to get started on the brainstorming and/or to use as a platform for your team meeting's discussion. And if you don't know how best to get a marketing or branding project launched, or don't have the time, then feel free to contact me and I'll be glad to help.

Why don't we fall out of bed?

Regardless of whether you sleep in a twin, full, queen or king sized bed, how come you don’t fall off in the middle of the night? Why don’t you roll over and right out onto the floor? We worry about that with kids. When a child moves to a big boy or big girl bed, parents usually put up railings to prevent “things that go bump in the night”.

Eventually parents take the sleep training wheels off. Someone told me that having children do ballet or gymnastics or just jump off a step helps them understand their body’s “place in space”. Maybe, we learn that place subconsciously. So no matter where our dreams might take us, we don’t end up on the floor.

I was struck by the fact that our personal artifacts serve to help us determine our “place in space”. They can be tokens that remind us of our values. Our family connections. Lessons learned from childhood. How far we’ve come. The places we’ve gone. The things that we do in our daily lives. How we’ve adapted. Artifacts, badges, trophies, lucky charms. Any or all of the handles could apply. Maybe even little personal oracles?

What do we then think about the person who goes through life “traveling light”? I knew a guy who never wanted to have more stuff than could fit in a manila envelope. At least that was his claim.

How do we unpack his story if he doesn’t keep things that mark the chapters? The power of a good question that forms the basis for a good conversation is probably the place to start. I do believe that as the stakes of “high tech” rise with every passing minute, there needs to be an equal rise in “high touch”.

I’m a fan of community technology for what it can bring to consumer research. At the same time, there is something to be said for the “breaking of bread” as was discussed by Thursday’s speaker.

One of the very best things you can do as a planner or strategist is to be fully present and engaged in the discussions you have.

Hell, probably one of the very best things you can do in life.

Note: This article was originally written for my VCU Brandcenter students.

Downsizing the Big Idea

During my Insights and Implications class last Spring, the students worked in teams to address an assignment provided by folks from Naked in NYC. The assignment was called Bagging the Big Idea and it was based on the following hypotheses:

1. With the tenure of the typical CMO measured in months rather than years, the chief goal of the Chief Marketing Officer seems to be to attach his or herself to a “big idea”, garner short term sales and attention and ride that into their next job.
2. A fragmented and hyper-segmented media environment creates a labyrinth of inconsistency that “big ideas” can find hard to survive.
3. With more marketing partners sitting around the client table these days, jargon, advertisingese, and agency-proprietary process vocabulary make it hard to reach agreement on just what a team is being asked to deliver.
4. Nobody has figured out whether a big idea is grown organically or synthetically engineered from the cloned DNA of a past success.

Each team was asked to develop a specific POV on how to define “the big idea”, how best to develop one and how to know it when you see it. It was a fun assignment and yielded some great blue-sky thinking by the students. I don’t think I’ll give that assignment again.

One Size Does Not Fit All

And that one size is not “big”. I’m more and more convinced that what we should really be in search of are lots of little ideas and their cumulative effect rather than one “clouds part and the angelic choir sings” big idea. Everybody’s onboard with the changing media landscape. We’re no longer held hostage by an inventory-based media model. Agencies and clients have the opportunity to create their own media vehicles and tailor those vehicles to specific audiences. Now more than ever the basic tenets of direct response marketing apply. Test and learn. Test and learn. It’s easier to do that with little ideas. Literally throw something against the wall, see if it sticks, learn and move on.

Todd Lamb, a Brandcenter grad and award-winning copywriter, exhorted our students to “keep making stuff and putting it out there”. It could be quite possible that companies need to adopt this philosophy to generate a sense of momentum and salience around their brands. Rapid prototyping may be the new hallmark of the next few years in our industry.

The complexity of culture Gareth Kay, Planning Director at Modernista and a member of the Brandcenter BOD, shared his belief that developing a perspective on culture was critical for planning moving forward. This would enable brands to have a point of view on the world, to take on and challenge a social problem or situation. If we wait for the development of a big idea, culture may have already moved on. Simple, single-minded small ideas offer nimbleness and in many cases, I’m guessing, cost-efficiency.

Let’s all get Lost

I confess to being a big fan of Lost. Not so big that I blog about it or maintain a catalog of hidden clues. In fact, some of the episodes hurt my head and make me wonder whether it’s time to give up on the show. I hang in there because I greatly admire the pre-planning and choreography of the storylines. How one season so specifically tees up another. And how the writers and producers went into the show controlling its demise in 2010.

This reminds me a bit of what I’ve heard Crispin thinks about during the strategic planning process – what will the cultural reaction to this work be? What will the press release look like? The replacement for the big idea may be the careful orchestration – the care and feeding – of a web of smaller ideas. Another layer of strategic planning – the “what happens next?” Jakob Trollback, founder of Trollback + Company, came to speak to our students last September. He asked the question ‘When does creativity happen?’ and answered it with ‘when something moves from one state to another’. Sure, that change might require something big. But it could just as well happen through something small and sublime. Today, small ideas may result in much needed short-term revenue.

Note: This post was drafted to be published in the VCU Brandcenter's annual magazine called SIXTY.