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(3629, 2, '2013-03-08 23:26:43', '2013-03-08 23:26:43', '<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>Footwwear and Apparel\r\nIcon Inc\r\nBrand Positioning / New Product and Brand Development</strong></span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>\r\n</strong></span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>\r\n</strong></span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"color: #333333\"> </span></h2>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080\">This facial aesthetics marketer creates a new product brand for women consumers in the North American marketplace.</span></h1>\r\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000\"> <img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1070\" title=\"hydrelleface\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/hydrelleface3.jpg\" width=\"514\" height=\"216\" /></span></h2>\r\n<h2>Coapt Systems is a global developer and marketer of facial aesthetic products for the plastic surgery and dermatology markets. To grow their business outside of their core products of minimally invasive surgical devices, Coapt licensed a new technology for the facial dermal filler marketplace. PULL was asked to develop a completely new product brand to be marketed under the given trade name: Hydrelle.</h2>\r\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><span style=\"color: #333333\">From the ground up, PULL developed the strategic brand positioning targeting a younger, more affluent consumer. In conversations with women patients of facial dermal fillers, we learned their frequency of application would increase significantly if the experience was less painful. With that insight we helped the marketing team develop the brand positioning, brand messaging platform and tag line centered around the products most compelling competitive advantage–pain free injection. </span></span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><span style=\"color: #333333\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1712\" title=\"hydrelleweb\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/hydrelleweb2.gif\" width=\"515\" height=\"419\" />\r\n</span></span>\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>To bring this value proposition to life, we created a comprehensive brand identity system that included the new logotype, trade name signatures, trade dress, product packaging and brand messaging guidelines that serve as the foundation for developing marketing communications and surgical practice enhancement programs to support the market launch of the product in the US and Canada. PULL completed this work in an extreme short 8-week time frame from project kick off to market launch.\r\n\r\n<strong>Six months after the product\'s introduction, Hydrelle had gained the trust of influential facial aesthetic surgeons and dermatologists who were able to increase incremental consultations with prospect  women consumers considering the procedure.</strong>\r\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080\">“PULL did an excellent job of guiding our marketing team through the strategic positioning and creative process of our recent Hydrelle product launch. PULL’s contributions were exceptional. More importantly, PULL delivered all the market launch communications on a very tight implementation schedule… and on-budget!”</span></h2>\r\n<strong>David Barella, Senior Vice President\r\nGlobal Marketing, Coapt Systems, Inc.</strong>', 'Case Story: Icon Footwear Brand Development', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'open', '', '236-revision-3', '', '', '2013-03-08 23:26:43', '2013-03-08 23:26:43', '', 236, 'http://pullinc.berchman.net/236-revision-3/', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(238, 2, '2009-01-21 05:39:06', '2009-01-21 05:39:06', '&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #808000;\"><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Travel and Tourism Publishing\r\nAffinity Group, Inc\r\nWoodall\'s North American Campground Directories\r\nProduct Brand Positioning / Brand Communications</strong></span></span></span>\r\n<h1><span style=\"color: #b8860b;\">The leading publisher of RV travel and family campground directories elevates its brand positioning and expression to celebrate its 75th Anniversary.</span></h1>\r\n<span style=\"color: #808000;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2025\" title=\"woodalls theme\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/woodallstheme.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"350\" />\r\n</span>\r\n\r\nAffinity Group is a leading publisher of recreational outdoor enthusiast magazines. Its hallmark brand is Woodall’s, North America’s best known publisher of RV and Family Camping travel directories in print and online.\r\n\r\nIn celebration of its 75th Anniversary, and as a response to a turbulent consumer economy, shifting demographics and the higher cost of fuel, Woodall’s marketing team asked PULL to reposition the brand to an important and under-served advertiser segment– travel and tourism associations across the US and Canada.\r\n<h3>What began as a conversation about direct marketing to this advertiser segment, evolved into a deeper process of re-thinking the Woodall’s brand positioning and value proposition to users and advertisers alike.</h3>\r\nWoodall’s Campground Directories are a highly dependable and accurate resource for people who are passionate about the RV lifestyle. The brand positioning “Everywhere RVers go” proclaimed Woodall\'s leadership position with RVer\'s.  We then crafted a refreshed brand voice and messaging platform based on this core competitive advantage–Woodall’s is the most widely used and trusted travel planning resource for RVer’s and family campers all across North America. Advertisers know RVer\'s really care about what Woodall\'s provides them.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2030\" title=\"woodalls brand\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/woodalls-brand2.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"331\" /><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2038\" title=\"woodalls75th\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/woodalls75th2.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"355\" /><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2036\" title=\"woodemail1\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/woodemail11.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"255\" />\r\n\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1720\" title=\"woodalls.biz.RVlife.3\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/woodalls.biz_.RVlife.3.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"324\" />\r\n\r\n<strong> </strong>We provided creative direction and development for a comprehensive marketing communication program that included trade show communications, exhibit display, print advertising, sales literature, email marketing, and an online media planning website for all of Woodall\'s publications in print and online<strong>.</strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>Business Outcome</strong>\r\n<strong> In 2009, all the major competitors were experiencing double-digit drops in advertising revenue. Woodall\'s, on the other hand, experienced only modest reduction it\'s revenue projections, and is now in a stronger position to take advantage of a rebounding economy.</strong>', 'Case Study: Woodall\'s Brand Positioning', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'woodalls', '', '', '2013-03-13 18:04:56', '2013-03-13 18:04:56', '', 99, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?page_id=238', 8, 'page', '', 0),
(3621, 2, '2009-01-19 16:52:47', '2009-01-19 20:52:47', '<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>Grocery Retail\nBloom Markets / Delhaize Group USA\nBrand Identity Developmen</strong><strong>t</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>\n</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>\n</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #808080\"><strong>\n</strong></span>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080\">We created a new brand for a new way to buy groceries and business is blooming!</span></h1>\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1060\" title=\"bloomgirl\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bloomgirl.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"238\" />\n<h2>After many years of fine-tuning a low price strategy for grocery retailing, Food Lion recognized the increased competitive threat to its core business by several non-traditional grocery discounters entering its markets. In response, Food Lion developed Bloom– a consumer centric grocery retailing concept that offered affluent customers a more enjoyable, hassle-free shopping experience with more convenient ready to eat meal selections.</h2>\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1088\" title=\"bloom-id\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bloom-id3.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"356\" /></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1061\" title=\"bloominterior\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bloominterior.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"353\" /></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1062\" title=\"bloomstyleguide\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bloomstyleguide1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"238\" /></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1063\" title=\"bloomcheckout\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bloomcheckout.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"323\" />\n</span>\n\nPULL  was asked to create an entirely new grocery brand from the ground up.  We consulted with Food Lion’s management, marketing and store  development teams on brand positioning, and provided a strategic  assessment on naming alternatives that were under consideration.  The  trade name Bloom was selected because it represented fresh, lively and  natural goodness– all defining attributes of the merchandising plan to  offer more convenient and prepared foods to a more affluent consumer.\n\nTo  bring this new concept to life, we provided the store development team  with a comprehensive brand identity system and design solution for store  decor and design, facility signage, in-store merchandising, sub-branded  areas within the store and way-finding signage. Additionally. we  created the design management tools necessary to guide other creative  and advertising partners who would develop future market communications  programs for store grand openings.\n\n<strong>The  first Bloom Markets opened in 2004 to rave customer and industry  reviews. Business is blooming. Since opening the first store, nearly 60  more stores have been added, and more are on their way across the  mid-atlantic and southeast regions.</strong>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333\"><strong><a href=\"/2009/01/pull_case_study_bloom.pdf\">Download Bloom Case Study</a></strong></span>', 'Case Story: Bloom Markets', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'open', '', '113-revision', '', '', '2009-01-19 16:52:47', '2009-01-19 20:52:47', '', 113, 'http://pullinc.berchman.net/113-revision/', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(956, 2, '2010-02-22 14:19:01', '2010-02-22 14:19:01', '', 'Blog: PULL Brand Innovation Influence by Design', '', 'publish', 'open', 'closed', '', 'blog-influence-by-design', '', '', '2013-02-28 00:46:17', '2013-02-28 00:46:17', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?page_id=956', 6, 'page', '', 0),
(1326, 2, '2010-08-12 20:48:46', '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1327\" title=\"flow\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/flow.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"289\" />\n\nLet’s talk about “flow”.  Everyone has heard of the idea of “flow state”–that magical state of peak performance being when you lose track of time blissfully engaged in an activity you absolutely love!  It’s a state of being that eludes many creative entrepreneurs and solo professionals.\n\nAs trite as it may sound, to experience flow, we have to step out of our own way and follow our individual path of least resistance.  That’s what flow is- your individual path of least resistance! If you don’t walk your own individual path, you’ll never experience your flow (an awsome life).\n\nFlow doesn’t just show up because you want it to. You first have to know who you are, what you stand for, and how you will create value for people– and play your natural game. You have to know “who you are” in order for you to align “what you do” with “who you are”.  Knowing “who you are” is the only means to experience, with absolute clarity, the path you are walking (what you do with your time here) is the perfect one for you.  Your own unique path is the only path in which you will ever experience “flow”­­– your endless capacity to create and achieve what you desire in an easy and relaxed way!\n\nFor many entrepreneurs, what they do is stressful, and feels like hard work! Believe me, if what you are currently doing to create success feels anything like hard work, that’s your cue you’re not “walking in your path of least resistance”.   You’re burning daylight on the wrong path doing all the wrong stuff.  That stuff keeps you and your business from breaking thru to the next level of game. Doing the wrong stuff steals your most important business asset–TIME!\n\nFollowing your path of least resistance means choosing to play your own natural game. This will attract other’s to you who are playing the same game at higher levels than you, new opportunity and possibilities will seem effortless and endless, and you will sense that everything and everyone is favorable and supportive to your ideas.  By now, you’re probably asking yourself “how do I get me some more flow”?\n\n<strong>The seven phenomena of flow</strong>\nAccording to the 5,000 year old Chinese system of thinking known as the I-Ching, as you follow your individual path of least resistance, you will experience seven phenomena that will accelerate your progress, growth and success. I’m confident you have experienced and recognize one or more of these during those times when you were experiencing moments of peak performance:\n\n<strong>The flow of critical moments</strong>\nYou recognize those moments where the game is won or lost. Your sense of timing, discernment, and decisiveness enables you to capitalize on opportunity long before anyone else does.\n\n<strong>The flow of learning cycles</strong>\nYou recognize that everything is a learning cycle. The more you play, the deeper your passion, and the better you get. This knowledge sharpens your effectiveness in future critical moments.\n\n<strong>The flow of failing forward</strong>\nYou know there are only two kinds of failure­– one gives you learning, the other ends the game.  When you experience outcomes you don’t want, you’ll know immediately what to do next to play bigger and better.\n\n<strong>The flow of your opportunities</strong>\nYou recognize there are only two kinds of opportunity. One you create, the other you attract. You have no problem saying “no” to anything that keeps you comfortable and holds you back, and you attract only the opportunities that will continue to expand your scene.\n\n<strong>The flow of your commitments</strong>\nYou know your decision to follow your path is irrevocable. Being certain and “all in” on your vision demonstrates you faith and escalates your attraction of resources necessary to make it physical reality.\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong>The flow of your perseverance</strong>\nYou know that ideas take their own sweet time coming into form, and you are willing to persevere on your natural path through thick and thin, no matter what.\n\n<strong>The flow of your momentum</strong>\nYou recognize that momentum is the force created by the previous six, all working in harmony to accelerate your performance like a precision racing motor.\n<h2>“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us”.</h2>\n– Oliver Wendall Holmes\n\nFlow is within you not outside of you– the well spring of your flow is found at the core of your white hot center. You have unique talents, gifts, capabilities and insight that have always been there. You may not recognize their value because they are so natural to you. You hardly give them a second thought.  But if you carefully assess your past peak moments of performance and brilliance, you will notice a pattern emerging. That pattern of being and doing is you at genius levels. Do more of that, delegate or find partners to do everything else!\n\nYou must know with certainty the “game you want play”, and follow the rules of how your game is played. Your growth and success (flow) is determined by who you are, not by what you do. You can be the best at what you do, and still not find a way tap in to the greater flow available for you at the next level of game.\n\n<strong>At the end of the day, more flow requires playing a bigger game completely aligned to your individual path of least resistance.\n</strong>\n\nPlease share your comments.', 'The path of least resistance.', '', 'draft', 'open', 'open', '', '', '', '', '2010-08-12 20:48:46', '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1326', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2339, 2, '2011-05-06 16:56:46', '2011-05-06 16:56:46', '<h2>Welcome to PULL Brand Innovation.\r\nWe specialize in what\'s next.</h2>\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2455\" alt=\"Image of hand holding growth\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/growth-e1362178201947.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"312\" />\r\n\r\nOur purpose is to help executives and marketing teams of startup and emerging brands build the foundations of competitive advantage at the early stages of their business success. We help them discover, define and focus on what their brand must stand for to influence customers and lead the market, and what it will take for them to get there in the early planning phases of:\r\n<h2><a title=\"Hewlett-Packard LightScribe Brand Development\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/case-studies/hp/\" target=\"_blank\">launching a new business\r\ninventing new brands\r\n</a><a title=\"KeVita Probiotic Drinks Brand Refresh\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/brand-story-kevita-strategic-brand-development/\" target=\"_blank\">positioning brands for the next level of growth</a></h2>\r\nOur methods to enable growing companies in consumer products and business-to-business markets to benefit from a sophisticated strategic and creative approach to brand development, design and management. Anywhere your brand is seen, heard, or experienced, we collaborate with your team to elevate the quality of your brand’s presence and influence in the marketplace.\r\n\r\nNothing is more rewarding than a collaboration that turns new possibilities for growth and success into achievement. Our senior partners have decades of experience in market research, customer insight, brand strategy, brand development and design, brand messaging and marketing communications.', 'Welcome to PULL Brand Innovation', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'profile', '', '', '2013-03-08 23:39:36', '2013-03-08 23:39:36', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?page_id=2339', 1, 'page', '', 0),
(3637, 2, '2013-03-08 23:38:06', '2013-03-08 23:38:06', '<h2>Welcome to PULL Brand Innovation.\r\nWe specialize in what\'s next.</h2>\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2455\" alt=\"Image of hand holding growth\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/growth-e1362178201947.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"312\" />\r\n\r\nOur purpose is to help executives and marketing teams of startup and emerging brands build the foundations of competitive advantage at the early stages of their business success. We help them discover, define and focus on what their brand must stand for to influence customers and lead the market, and what it will take for them to get there in the early planning phases of:\r\n<h2><a title=\"Hewlett-Packard LightScribe Brand Development\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/case-studies/hp/\" target=\"_blank\">launching a new business\r\ninventing new brands\r\n</a><a title=\"KeVita Probiotic Drinks Brand Refresh\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/brand-story-kevita-strategic-brand-development/\" target=\"_blank\">positioning brands for the next level of growth</a></h2>\r\nOur methods to enable growing companies in consumer products and business-to-business markets to benefit from a sophisticated strategic and creative approach to brand development, design and management. Anywhere your brand is seen, heard, or experienced, we collaborate with your team to elevate the quality of your brand’s presence and influence in the marketplace. Nothing is more rewarding than a collaboration that turns new possibilities for growth and success into achievement. Our senior partners have decades of experience in market research, customer insight, brand strategy, brand development and design, brand messaging and marketing communications.', 'Welcome to PULL Brand Innovation', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'open', '', '2339-revision-9', '', '', '2013-03-08 23:38:06', '2013-03-08 23:38:06', '', 2339, 'http://pullinc.berchman.net/2339-revision-9/', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(3544, 1, '2013-03-01 22:54:31', '2013-03-01 22:54:31', '<h2>Welcome to PULL Brand Innovation.\r\nWe specialize in what\'s next.</h2>\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2455\" alt=\"Image of hand holding growth\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/growth-e1362178201947.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"312\" />\r\n<h3>Our purpose is to help executives and marketing teams of startup and emerging brands build the foundations of competitive advantage at the early stages of their business success. We help them discover, define and focus on what their brand must stand for to influence customers and lead the market, and what it will take for them to get there in the early planning phases of:</h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Bloom Brand Development\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/case-studies/bloom/\" target=\"_blank\">launching a new business</a></li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"Hewlett-Packard LightScribe Brand Development\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/case-studies/hp/\" target=\"_blank\">inventing new brands</a></li>\r\n	<li><a title=\"KeVita Probiotic Drinks Brand Refresh\" href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/brand-story-kevita-strategic-brand-development/\" target=\"_blank\">positioning brands for the next level of growth</a></li>\r\n</ul>\r\n<span style=\"color: #000000;\">We’ve designed our methods to enable growing companies in consumer products and business-to-business markets to benefit from a sophisticated strategic and creative approach to brand development, design and management. Anywhere your brand is seen, heard, or experienced, we collaborate with your team to elevate the quality of your brand’s presence and influence in the marketplace. Nothing is more rewarding than a collaboration that turns new possibilities for growth and success into achievement. Our senior partners have decades of experience in market research, customer insight, brand strategy, brand development and design, brand messaging and marketing communications.</span>', 'Strategic and Creative Branding for Emerging Companies', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'open', '', '2339-revision-5', '', '', '2013-03-01 22:54:31', '2013-03-01 22:54:31', '', 2339, 'http://www.pullinc.dev/2339-revision-5/', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(58, 2, '2009-01-08 19:55:48', '2009-01-08 23:55:48', '<span style=\"color: #808000;\">This past year was our first year operating under our new name and specialized positioning. Candidly, it was a tougher year than we had planned for. Of course that could be said for just about any business, and ours was no exception. By mid-year, we knew things were beginning to get austere to say the least. Yet despite the tough economic environment, we managed to get through with the completion of several significant projects that we are most proud of, and is evidence of the deeper and more strategic role we play in our client\'s marketing. We\'re delighted to share an overview of those engagements here in this post. As we look back over the past year, we are thankful for the opportunities that have come our way, and the confidence our clients place in our talent and expertise to help them create more value in their brand marketing programs.</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #808000;\">Being a small, independent firm by design allows us to work with clients that we know we can make a difference for.  We have built a tight-knit group of associations with other specialists in disciplines outside our own enabling us to bring more value to our clients marketing. But at the end of the day, it is the quality of our business relationships and the value we add, not our size, that makes the difference. Here are several examples to prove our point.</span>\n\n<strong>2008 Project Highlights</strong>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58515970b-pi\"><img src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58515970b-320wi\" alt=\"Pmc\" width=\"398\" height=\"449\" /></a>\n\n<strong>PMC Corporation</strong>\n\nThis global design,engineering and manufacturer of plastic components for the automotive industry retained PULL to help them position their corporate brand to become a Tier 1 supplier to the global automotive industry.  With corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio and engineering and component manufacturing facilities in Mexico and Europe, PMC required the discipline of a global brand identity to create communication programs the will build the foundation for owning the technical leadership position in the competitive automotive supply chain. PULL created a comprehensive corporate identity design system to anchor their global marketing communications in traditional and digital media.\n\n<a href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58a0e970b-pi\"><img src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58a0e970b-320wi\" alt=\"Emma woodalls\" width=\"402\" height=\"218\" /></a>\n\n<strong>Woodall\'s Publications Corporation</strong>\n\nWoodall\'s is the leading publisher of print and on-line travel directories for the RV and Family Camping markets in North America. With changing demographics, higher fuel costs and the tough consumer economy, the RV industry is facing significant challenges. What basically started as a discussion on ideas for developing more compelling marketing to the travel and tourism industry, evolved into a completely refreshed positioning of the Woodall\'s brand. PULL provided guidance on positioning Woodall\'s as the indispensable travel planning resource for the RV lifestyle. We  refreshed the look and feel of the brand, and created key marketing programs to the travel and tourism industry, and completely redesigned the Woodall\' s market and media planning sales presentation to advertisers in print and on-line. These new communications initiatives are scheduled to roll-out in the first quarter of 2009.\n\n<a href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58e17970b-pi\"><img style=\"border: 0pt none;\" title=\"OVYF \" src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536b58e17970b-800wi\" border=\"0\" alt=\"OVYF \" width=\"427\" height=\"164\" /></a>\n\nEvery year, we seek opportunities to do pro bono work that serves our community at large. This past year, we helped this small non-profit youth organization re-define its mission and its expression within our community. OVYF serves local disadvantaged teens with educational and occupational development programs outside of the school system.More importantly, PULL consulted with members of the board to leverage this new identity to build a stronger foundation on which to position the organization to apply for donor grants from larger philanthropic organizations who fund local youth development programs they deem worthy of investment.\n\n<a href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536bf570e970c-pi\"><img style=\"border: 0pt none;\" title=\"Exhact brochure\" src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010536bf570e970c-800wi\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Exhact brochure\" width=\"400\" height=\"308\" /></a>\n\n<strong>EXHACT Training &amp; Consulting</strong>\n\nExhact is a global human development consulting firm headquartered in Germany. Exhact serves C-suite executives in large and small organizations to better manage change as a strategic business practice. PULL consulted with Exhact principals on defining a compelling positioning for their practice that would serve as the foundation of their marketing. We also designed a comprehensive visual identity system that guides the development of marketing communications for their educational seminars.\n\n<img title=\"novielle\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/novielle.jpg\" alt=\"novielle\" width=\"400\" height=\"169\" />\n\n<strong>Coapt Systems</strong>\n\nCoapt Systems is a global developer and marketer of facial aesthetic devices for the plastic surgery and dermatology markets. To grow their business outside of their core products of minimally invasive surgical devices, Coapt developed a new technology for the facial dermal filler marketplace. PULL was asked to consult on inventing a completely new product brand under the trade name: Novielle. From the ground up, PULL developed the strategic positioning for the brand, and developed the comprehensive brand identity system, product packaging and brand guidelines for marketing communications to professionals and consumers in international markets.\n\n<strong>A look ahead...</strong>\n\nDespite all the doom and gloom reported in the media on a daily basis, we are looking forward to the year ahead. We are encouraged that there appears to be greater opportunity for small, highly specialized marketing firms. In our case, we continue to narrow our focus on serving diverse clients with deep expertise in corporate and brand identity development. Our expertise is anchored to more strategic consulting and visual design development, helping our clients build more customer-focused and sustainable foundations for their market communications initiatives. This tough economy will favor the specialist over the generalist, and we plan to narrow our focus ever further this year to better deliver on our core value proposition: creating influence for our clients in the marketplace.\n\nThere you have it, from all of at PULL, we wish you a most successful 2009!', '2008 in Review and a Look Ahead.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', '2008-in-review-and-a-look-ahead', '', '', '2009-01-08 19:55:48', '2009-01-08 23:55:48', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=58', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(60, 2, '2008-10-26 17:02:41', '2008-10-26 21:02:41', '<div style=\"text-align: left;\"><div style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010535c124db970c-pi\" style=\"display: inline; font-family: Arial;\"><img alt=\"Dietcoke2224\" border=\"0\" class=\"at-xid-6a00d834d6625a69e2010535c124db970c image-full \" src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.a/6a00d834d6625a69e2010535c124db970c-800wi\" title=\"Dietcoke2224\" /></a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"></span></span><br /><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"></span></div><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br /><br /></span></span>I recently spent some time reading <a href=\"%20http://www.gapingvoid.com/\" title=\"blog\">Hugh Macleod&#39;s&#0160; blog</a> where I found this interesting interview with author and famed ad man <a href=\"http://herd.typepad.com/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"blog\">Mark Earls</a> who wrote <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Creative-Age-Business-Marketing/dp/B000QENXM2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1224352117&amp;sr=8-2\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"bookstore\">Welcome to the Creative Age</a><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\"> </span>and <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Herd-Change-Behaviour-Harnessing-Nature/dp/0470060360/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1224352117&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"book\">Herds</a><span style=\"font-family: Arial;\">.</span> Two books that have sort of re-defined the brand conversation... read that here:<br /><br /><a href=\"%20http://www.gapingvoid.com/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"blog\">http://www.gapingvoid.com/</a><br /><br /><br />What I liked about the post was the discussion that this whole &quot;brand&quot; conversation that swirls around our business is really just a bunch of crap...and its time for some richer thinking about how to connect with consumers. Earls calls it the &quot;Purpose Idea&quot;. Here&#39;s how he defines what that is and why you should care:<br /><br /><strong><em>&quot;Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the &quot;What For?&quot; of a business,\nor any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the\nworld, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the\nbusiness seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and\neveryone else? BTW this is not &quot;mission, vision, values&quot; territory -\nit&#39;s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in\nsuits tend to get embarrassed about because it&#39;s personal. But it&#39;s the\nstuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because\nthis kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life&quot;.</em></strong><br /><br />Surprisingly, this is a scary idea in marketing, and advertising in particular. Mainly because it makes the rigor of brand strategy seem more like something to hide behind. As if passion and belief are, of themselves, not enough for the metrics obsessed.&#0160; Of course the heart of this discussion is really about value creation and why a market should reward your enterprise with existence, not to mention financial success. Influential marketers are an essential part of any conversation that brings people together in real life... way past the advertising.<br /><br />I think that most marketers are still way too charmed by math and analysis when it&#39;s about what it has always been about: emotion! For some reason I don&#39;t think some marketers feel good about betting the farm on emotion... that&#39;s too squissy... and yet every great movement&#39;s essential component has been passion.<br /><br />That means you have have a big purpose idea... one that is personnal, real. It has to create value based on its ability to connect people in their real life... where they are at risk of making other choices in an era of endless choices. When we work with client&#39;s who are positioning their ideas, products, services in the marketplace we try to engage the conversation from this point of view... their stuff has to really matter. We want to know what&#39;s going on here that really matters to people and why. In my opinion this insight is essential in creating experiences people love.<br /><br /><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br /></span><br /></span><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"></span><br /><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"></span></span> <br /></div>\n', 'The Purpose Idea', '\n', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-purpose-idea', '', '', '2008-10-26 17:02:41', '2008-10-26 21:02:41', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=60', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(61, 2, '2008-09-29 10:49:50', '2008-09-29 14:49:50', '<h2><strong><span style=\"color: #808000;\">In a recent meeting with a prospective client, to discuss a communications assignment, I was asking some questions about the client’s identity, trademark usage and visual design standards. For obvious reasons, I wanted to make sure that we had an in-depth understanding of the visual design standards that would guide our work in the particular assignment we were discussing. </span></strong></h2> <p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">My counterpart on the client side began to share with me their (large and cumbersome) visual design standards documentation. Of course this mid-size client with $300+ million in revenue was not a global firm with complex identity and trademark requirements, nor was the distribution of the clients products so complex that laborious visual identity standards was adding any value to how this particular client was managing its most important asset–its visual identity. This was not a surprise to me.</span></p> <p><span style=\"color: #666666;\">Beyond the form of this client’s identity and trademark management systems, what struck me the most was the fact that the marketing communications manager suggested to me “this is only a guideline and we don’t have to follow this exactly if we have a better creative idea” We just need to stay in the spirit of these identity standards”. </span></p> <p><span style=\"color: #666666;\">I was shocked. Now she wasn’t suggesting we ignore their visual design standards, just stay within the spirit of them.  Seemingly after all the human energy, time and money spent to have some visual discipline in place, here was someone suggesting we essentially use their colors and type fonts in our design work. It was obvious to me I was dealing with an individual who did not fully understand the value of design management. Nor did the organization back of this person value the process of documenting their trademark standards in an appropriate form to their specific requirements and educating their managers of the importance of strict and unwavering adherence. I think I know why.</span></p> <h2>Many mid-size firms grow from an entrepreneurial frame of reference. What sometimes happens is the development of a visual identity is not something that is given its full consideration early in the game.</h2> <p>For many companies in the start-up phase of their development, their visual identity consists solely of a logo. With so many other strategic issues involved in growing a business, there is not an obvious need for a long-range view about managing “visual identity”, and further, many simply do not have the resources available (human and financial) for such an endeavor. But as a company grows, management of their visual identity, trade names and trade dress often becomes a more complex issue, and one that requires executive management to adopt a more strategic point of view about the value of their brand and how its identity in the marketplace is managed. As a result, at some point in time they hire a design firm. And usually it is a design firm that does not have specialized expertise in corporate or brand identity. Creating verbal and visual identities and the design management systems that support their proper voice in the marketplace requires highly specialized expertise. This expertise is not well understood by mid-size companies.</p> <h2>Many mid-size companies are ill informed “buyers” of design expertise.</h2> <p>Just because a design firm creates logos does not inherently qualify them to provide guidance and plan a design management system that will evolve with the client business and continue to add value to it along the way. What usually happens is the well-meaning design firm creates the classic “big binder” graphic standards materials and leaves the client with the bill but no meaningful process that facilitates embedding this critical information into the organization in such a fashion as to prevent managers from wavering from, or worse, ignoring these brand assets completely. The result being a garbled brand identity that lacks meaning and relevance to customers over time.</p> <p><strong>Creating a visual identity and the design management system that supports it is both a strategic and creative process.  A company’s visual identity is the first thing customers encounter and engage with. It is a critically important asset in the equation of creating brand value over time. As the business evolves and its markets expand, the attributes of the visual identity and voice it projects in the marketplace must be managed with strategic discipline and not embraced “in spirit only” by managers who are responsible for creating marketing communications.</strong></p>', 'identity strategies: clarity from complexity', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'identity-design-is-a-highly-specialized-expertise', '', '', '2008-09-29 10:49:50', '2008-09-29 14:49:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=61', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(62, 2, '2008-08-27 12:16:25', '2008-08-27 16:16:25', 'I got this little ditty in my inbox and just had to share. Brilliant! Hope you enjoy it.\n\n<a onclick=\"window.open(this.href, \'_blank\', \'width=470,height=237,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0\'); return false\" href=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/27/creativejuice.gif\"></a><a href=\"http://www.dshed.net/harvest/\"><img style=\"margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; float: left;\" title=\"Creativejuice_2\" src=\"http://www.whitehotcenter.com/influence_by_design/images/2008/08/27/creativejuice_2.gif\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Creativejuice_2\" width=\"400\" height=\"201\" /></a>', 'Creative Juices', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'creative-juices', '', '', '2008-08-27 12:16:25', '2008-08-27 16:16:25', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=62', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(227, 2, '2009-01-20 21:51:05', '2009-01-21 01:51:05', '<img class=\"size-full wp-image-232 alignleft\" title=\"thomson-fullon9\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/thomson-fullon9.jpg\" alt=\"thomson-fullon9\" width=\"144\" height=\"210\" />\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">Today, I witnessed another milestone in my life with the celebration of Barack Obama as our first African-American President. Not to give my age away, but I remember other \"Presidential firsts\" as well. (Think Nixon)  I thought about ignoring it altogether, but then I had to remember how Barack Obama cinched the deal:</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>A clear value proposition delivered with compelling passion and emotion and packaged with expert brand discipline.</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">Barack\'s campaign was a brilliant example of brand building in the integrated media world we live in today. Anyone selling anything needs to study this guy\'s playbook. All of the attributes we now associate with this brand / person / President were grounded in simple iconography. Through every expression the promise of the brand made clear: hope. </span><span style=\"color: #333333;\">There is always the equal or greater seed of opportunity found in every adversity. </span><span style=\"color: #333333;\">And, in light of the challenges he steps into today, I know he has savored every moment of his success. As well he should and I, along with millions of other wish him more of it. To your (and ours) success Mr. President!\n</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>\n</strong></span>', 'Another Milestone', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'another-milestone', '', '', '2009-01-20 21:51:05', '2009-01-21 01:51:05', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=227', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(381, 2, '2009-01-27 18:15:07', '2009-01-27 22:15:07', '<img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-383\" title=\"mcdonalds-logo1\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/mcdonalds-logo1-300x229.gif\" alt=\"mcdonalds-logo1\" width=\"231\" height=\"177\" />\n\nHere\'s a good story for you... I witnessed this first hand at a McDonald\'s location in Las Vegas this past weekend. Here\'s the story:\n\nWhile standing in line behind a man buying breakfast for a bunch of kids, I watched in absolute astonishment how McDonald\'s lost a customer over 27 cents. The man had just purchased $32 and change worth of pancakes for the hungry kids... in receiving his order, the man politely asked the counter person if he could have two extra syrups with his order. The clerk handed him the extra syrup and said that will be \"27 cents\".  Everyone in line behind him (including myself) could not believe their eyes as the disgusted man handed over the change as he grappled with his bagged pancakes. Interestingly enough, a nearby customer said to the clerk \"you would think for an order that size you could part with a couple of free syrups. The clerk, not at all phased by the fuss, said \"we\'re supposed to charge for it\".\n\nI don\'t think anybody in line was \"lovin it\".\n\n<strong>Here\'s the moral of the story:</strong>\n\n<strong>Never let money stand in the way of serving a customer! For 27¢, McDonald\'s destroyed a valuable relationship with a customer. Not only the customer who paid the money, but the customers waiting in line to receive the same treatment!  When a brand is not loyal to its customers (even one) it is just a matter of time before customer\'s are not loyal to the brand. There is no amount of money worth creating an unfavorable experience for a customer. </strong><strong>And no amount of money spent on advertising can fix a brand who treats customers like they don\'t matter.</strong>\n\nThis whole event<strong> </strong>served to remind me that a promise is a promise. You may think this is no big deal, and this incident could not, in any real way, impact the future of McDonalds. It is such a little thing... an isolated incident. In this economy, and in our technology driven age, one bad experience is too many!\n\nWith all the complex and sophisticated operating systems that makes McDonald\'s, well... McDonald\'s, it is interesting to ponder how all of that could come crashing down over 27¢ of add-on sales.\n\n<strong>\n</strong>', 'How McDonald\'s can lose a customer over 27¢', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'how-mcdonalds-can-lose-a-customer-over-27%c2%a2', '', '', '2009-01-27 18:15:07', '2009-01-27 22:15:07', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=381', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(389, 2, '2009-02-15 17:44:07', '2009-02-15 21:44:07', '<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-391\" title=\"design-is1\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/design-is1.gif\" alt=\"design-is1\" width=\"500\" height=\"315\" /></span>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Strategically based design is how you bake in experiences people really care about. A well-designed customer experience is the main event in defining how worthy your proposition is of the love (devotion) customers bestow on your brand.  Think of it this way, if your brand were no longer in existence, would it matter to anyone?</span></h1>\nIt  is no longer enough to “exceed customer expectations” with product /  service, quality and price. In the idea economy, those attributes are now  the ante. To thrive in this new epoch we find ourselves in, enlightened  marketers are shifting their focus from counting transactions to  creating scintillating, dramatic, novel, relevant, transformative  customer experiences.\n\nMore than facts, process management and functional product or service attributes, value creation is a designed based discipline of creating an episode, an encounter, an adventure, a perception, and a sense that there is greater use value in the experience than in the goods themselves. In leading companies, design is a strategic business imperative, not a decorative act. More than designing artifacts, innovation-driven companies use design as an integrated discipline for creating experiences people love. <span style=\"color: #333333;\">Experiences are somewhat metaphysical. Enlightened marketers know this, and design the experience to be emotionally rich.  Harley Davidson does not sell motorcycles, Starbucks does not sell coffee, and Herman Miller does not sell office chairs. </span>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Remarkable brands have a metaphysical presence and deep emotional connection with their customers. They really matter! Strategically based design is the why behind the what.</span>\n</span></h1>\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">And let’s remember that small companies can be remarkable companies too.  Value creation is an idea that transcends size and scale.  Starbucks is a perfect example how their bigness almost killed their greatness. How remarkable the experiences customers have engaging with your brand, determines how much you matter. Right now, not many people care that much about Chrysler. Do people care about Honda? Probably.</span>\n\nWe\'re at the dawn of a new economic age, one driven by ideas, not rigid process. The shake-out in our current economy is proof enough that “creative destruction” is a firestorm clearing the way for more innovation in serving people and being of great value to them in their daily lives.  If your value proposition is not of great value to people, it will not be rewarded with existence. This is as it should be.\n\n<strong>In what direction is your enterprise headed?</strong>', 'To be good and different, brands must be remarkable.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'if-youre-not-remarkable-you-wont-matter', '', '', '2009-02-15 17:44:07', '2009-02-15 21:44:07', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=389', 0, 'post', '', 2);
INSERT INTO `pull_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(401, 2, '2009-02-19 13:29:25', '2009-02-19 17:29:25', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-402\" title=\"happyhappy\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/happyhappy.gif\" alt=\"happyhappy\" width=\"500\" height=\"464\" />\n\nCome on, get happy!  Seemingly in this sour economy we may be seeing an interesting trend in identity design– marketers want happy logos! The happiest of all is the fact that Wal-Mart had actually made an effort to copyright the iconic \"smiley-face\" as it\'s very own. Of course there is nothing wrong with putting a smile on things. Especially now when we could all use a lift.  I suppose if you are a consumer facing marketer, trying to own happiness as an attribute of your brand\'s identity might be a logical strategy... but is anybody buying it? In the Kraft example, this new identity was created for application to corporate communcations only, not product packaging. Which leads me to believe that the only people Kraft is really interested in making happy are shareholders not customers. Who knows? The observation is interesting nonetheless.\n\nThis kind of stuff comes and goes with the times and the whims of the folks in charge of brand building. In my opinion if you have to resort to putting a smile in your logo, you might have challenges smiley logos won\'t fix. Just a thought.', 'Happy,Happy,Happy!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'happyhappyhappy', '', '', '2009-02-19 13:29:25', '2009-02-19 17:29:25', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=401', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(417, 2, '2009-02-26 14:27:34', '2009-02-26 18:27:34', '<h2><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-418\" title=\"tropicana\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/tropicana.gif\" alt=\"tropicana\" width=\"308\" height=\"230\" /><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> <span style=\"color: #808000;\">Since our office is in an orange grove, here\'s a story that caught my eye. I read, with great amusement, a recent post on the <a href=\"http://adage.com/video/article?article_id=134889\" target=\"_blank\">Ad Age Blog </a>about the Tropicana juice carton package design debacle. Here’s the top line:</span></span><span style=\"color: #808000;\"> A big name, fancy-pants design firm creates a “fresh modern look” for an iconic brand that bombs with customers so badly that the marketer pulls it from store shelves immediately on its release.</span></h2>\nOf course this isn’t the first time someone has tweaked packaging in the name of fresh and modern to disastrous result.  What’s surprising is how often it does happen! I’m not going to rant on about design and stylistic failure here. Heaven knows I have had a couple of my own in my 30 years in this business. No, it is not about the new design of the Tropicana packaging that’s worthy of comment– it’s the arrogance behind it!\n\nJust<a href=\"http://adage.com/video/article?article_id=134889\" target=\"_blank\"> listen</a> to this guy babble on about the virtues of the so-called good design they were doing for the brand. It’s right out of central casting. If I were writing a parody of classic designer arrogance this would be the benchmark.\n\nTropicana, although not a leading brand, had tremendous equity with its loyal customer tribe because of a simple iconic visual element on the packaging facing– the straw in the orange… can you say fresh with any more simplicity?  To walk away from the brand’s main competitive advantage it’s customers believed so strongly in to embrace a generic run-of-the-mill package design is beyond me.\n\n<strong>Here’s the good news: customers still determine your success in marketplace. To abandon them with a superficial change in the form of a “fresh and modern look” can kill decades of slow, methodical brand building.  The customer’s voice was heard loud and clear just in the nick of time.  This is another textbook example of a brand not being loyal to its customers–use it as a reference point, next time a fancy pants designer gets a hold of your brand.</strong>', 'When change is not good.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'when-change-is-not-good', '', '', '2009-02-26 14:27:34', '2009-02-26 18:27:34', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=417', 0, 'post', '', 3),
(424, 2, '2009-03-11 18:33:16', '2009-03-11 22:33:16', '<span style=\"color: #808000;\"><strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-427\" title=\"brand\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/brand.gif\" alt=\"brand\" width=\"470\" height=\"401\" /></strong></span>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Authenticity is an attribute that cannot be fabricated or mandated by  management. You can’t fool customers into believing your proposition is  authentic through ubiquitous marketing. It is or it isn’t. Authenticity  is not veneer.</span></h1>\n<span style=\"color: #000000;\">A few months back, a young couple opened a pizza joint a couple of blocks from our office. Every day I notice this little joint is always packed!  Why?  It’s actually not in a great location. The food, though good, is not that special. The prices are not extraordinarily cheap, and they started their little business in the worst economy in a lifetime. </span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">Why are they thriving when other restaurants around them are struggling to stay afloat? Why is this business immune from the unfavorable circumstances that surround it? The answer is simple. It’s the real deal. They provide every customer with an authentic experience of love, fellowship and comfort over a simple meal. The value is in the authentic customer experience, not the meal.  Pizza joints are as commoditized as a business can possibly be, and yet, this one thrives!  I repeat, value creation begins and ends in an authentic customer experience.</span>\n<h2>Authenticity demands your behavior as an enterprise lines up with your value proposition to customers. Authenticity is yours to lose.</h2>\nHome Depot is a great example. When Home Depot promised customers “you can do it, we can help” then did away with the experienced, retired tradesman salespeople in favor of cheaper inexperienced labor to save money.  Customers knew the claim was bullshit and the results to Home Depot were disastrous. Customers can smell deception a mile away. You can’t fool customers ever.  Authenticity and value creation are not mutually exclusive. You can’t have one with out the presence of the other.  Authenticity matters more than money.', 'Authenticity: You can’t fool customers ever.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'authenticity-you-cant-fool-customers-ever', '', '', '2009-03-11 18:33:16', '2009-03-11 22:33:16', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=424', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(433, 2, '2009-03-22 19:46:36', '2009-03-22 23:46:36', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-439\" title=\"2008\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/20081.gif\" alt=\"2008\" width=\"500\" height=\"235\" />\n\n<span style=\"color: #003300;\"><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><strong>I am sure by now you’re plenty tired worrying about when the economy will begin to turn around and grow again.  For many of us involved in marketing, the state of the economy has taken more of our collective bandwidth from thinking of important innovation strategies to urgent survival strategies to cope with these uncertain times. </strong></span></span>\n\nAccording to Silicon Valley futurist, <a href=\"http://www.saffo.com/index.php\" target=\"_blank\">Paul Saffo</a>, we are experiencing more than a cyclical recession, it’s a total shift into the beginning of a new economic era that he calls the “creator economy”– where we create and produce at the same time. <a href=\" http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/internet/get-ready-for-a-new-economic-era?commented=0#txpCommentInputForm\" target=\"_blank\">Read about it here.</a>\n\nThe Crash of 2008 may indeed have been the first shoe to drop. I think we are at the beginning of something more– nothing short of a global push of the reset button. But the sky is not falling. What if our current state of affairs is the new normal? What if this is as good as it gets for the foreseeable future? Can we sustain our current model of producing more and more goods for more and more to consume? I don’t think so. It might be a better idea to place more thought on contributing to the flow rather than consuming the source. Where then, will the growth and expansion that drives our prosperity come from?\n\nWhere it has always come from– value creation. Regardless of what has been the main driver of economic growth this past century, (producers in the first half, consumers in the latter), creating and perceiving value has always been the key to growth and prosperity.  This underlying principal has held commerce together throughout the ages–seemingly, one the corporate world has forgotten about. As a result, we find ourselves in our current drama.  As long as human beings trade with each other, creating and perceiving value will drive lasting prosperity.\n\nThe Crash of 2008 is nothing more than a marker in time between the old and new order–the inflection point that defines the new economy we are entering into. Ideas born from inspiration as opposed to desperation will rule the day. Marketers who create more value from ideas that turn into goods that help all people enjoy a better, more sustainable life will be rewarded with prosperity. In this new idea economy, where the old idea of shared value (relationships) is the new currency of life, we need to keep our focus on inspired ideas that really matter to people.<span style=\"color: #003300;\">\n</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #003300;\">We are experiencing, through these uncertain times, the creative destruction of the old for the new. A space is being created for the new market leaders who understand that lasting prosperity is the effect of thinking win-win, as opposed to “I win”–on creativity, not competition.</span>\n\n<strong>What do you think?</strong>', 'The Crash of 2008: The sky is not falling!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-crash-of-2008-the-sky-is-not-falling', '', '', '2009-03-22 19:46:36', '2009-03-22 23:46:36', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=433', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(444, 2, '2009-03-27 17:40:52', '2009-03-27 21:40:52', '<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2621\" title=\"name-part-ii\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/name-part-ii.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"485\" height=\"279\" />Each year countless names are added to the brandscape. Naming is a strategic discipline of creating the most appropriate word or words that identity a company, product or service. Creating a memorable name, one that has legs with an audience, and one you can build equity in over time is a tough challenge indeed.</span></h1>\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">Anyone who has ever sat in a room writing ideas on a whiteboard will agree that creating an enduring name is far more difficult than it may seem</span>–it’s also the least understood of all the business or marketing communication practices.\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><strong> </strong></span>\nWhen we were going through our own process of  “naming” our firm, we held tightly to our criteria of having our name be one syllable simple and highly evocative of the value we bring to our clients. PULL fit us perfectly in its simplicity and in its promise. We gave this matter our full attention and consideration. It was not a casual process. Our business name, like yours, is our most important business asset.</span>\n\n<strong>Ten common naming structures to guide your thinking</strong>.\n\nWhat about developing names that identify organizations and brands with global reach? Creating words that transcend legal, language and cultural references gets even more challenging–not to mention the complex trademark and URL considerations that go with it. Naming is the most important element of a brand proposition. It’s the first perception by an audience about who you are and what you represent. Names should never be developed as an afterthought. A good name requires and deserves your full consideration.  If you are thinking about naming right now, you may find the following structures useful to your process. Of course, a naming and identity consultant might be handy in the process too… just a thought.\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>Real Words:</strong>\nThese are names that are simply re-purposed words. (e.g., Adobe, Amazon, Fox, Yelp, Saphire)  This category also includes misspelled words (e.g., Digg (dig), flickr (flicker)) and foreign words (e.g., Vox (Latin for \'voice\').</span>\n\n<strong>Compounds:</strong>\nThese names consist of two words put together (e.g., Firefox, Facebook, LightScribe).\n\n<strong>Phrases:</strong>\nThese names follow normal rules for combining words (but are not compounds) (e.g., MySpace, StumbleUpon).\n\n<strong>Blends:</strong>\nBlended names have two parts, at least one of which can be recognized as a part of a real word (e.g., Netscape (net + landscape); Wikipedia (wiki + encyclopedia).\n\n<strong>Tweaked Words:</strong>\nTweaked word names are derived from words that have been slightly changed in pronunciation and spelling - commonly derived from adding or replacing a letter (e.g., ebay, iTunes).\n\n<strong>Affixed Words:</strong>\nThese are unique names that result from taking a real word and adding a suffix or prefix (e.g., Friendster, Omnidrive).\n<strong>\nMade Up, Evocative or Obscure Origin Words</strong>:\nThese names are generally short names that are either completely made up, or, since their origins are so obscure, they may as well have been made up (e.g., Bebo, Plaxo).\n\n<strong>Puns: </strong>\nPuns are names that modify words/phrases to suggest a different meaning (e.g., Farecast (forecast, fore -&gt; fare), Writely (rightly, right -&gt; write).\n\n<strong>People\'s Names: </strong>\nUsing a general name or the name from a personal connection (e.g., Ning (a Chinese name), Wendy\'s (founder Dave Thomas\' daughter\'s nickname).\n\n<strong>Acronyms</strong>:\nThe least favored in our view. Names derived from the first letter of each word in the longer, more official name (e.g., AOL (America Online), FIM (Fox Interactive Media).', 'What\'s in a Name?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'whats-in-a-name', '', '', '2009-03-27 17:40:52', '2009-03-27 21:40:52', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=444', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(456, 2, '2009-04-02 18:33:24', '2009-04-02 22:33:24', '<h1><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\">We can think of no other industry where giving away strategic or creative advice for free, as a prerequisite for determining one’s worthiness and capability, is so embraced than in our industry. </span></span></h1>\nWe find spec presentations to be one of the most perplexing business  development practices in the marketing/advertising/creative services  industry.<span style=\"color: #808000;\"><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> Speculative strategic or creative work, or free pitching, is a convention that must be done away with.  Many clients, search consultants, and new business development firms may declare this impossible, but I believe the practice is outdated and does more harm than good in the long run.</span></span><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> </span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">With the US vs.THEM mentality that permeates most agency/client relationships, it might be easy to justify why this practice is so accepted. One of the compelling voices and opinions in our business on the evils of free pitching comes from Blair Ens. His <a href=\"http://www.winwithoutpitching.com\" target=\"_blank\">“win without pitching”</a> manifesto has been widely embraced by clients and marketing firms of all shapes and sizes. </span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">For sure, this dialogue is a step in the right direction. It’s an uphill battle, yet more firms are resisting this practice, still winning business, and serving their clients well.  We count ourselves among them. We are willing to buck the system and stand up for the value we bring to our client’s business. As a result, we have discovered there is a better method to win our client’s trust, serve them well, and grow our business profitably.</span>\n\n<strong>We hold our heads high.</strong>\n\nThere are two kinds of marketing firms–value creators and order-takers. Value creators are highly specialized experts in a particular practice discipline or industry category.  We see ourselves as equal practitioners to our client-side counterparts, retained to bring useful solutions to our client’s business problems. We have specialized expertise that is not in abundant supply within the client organization, and our positioning reflects that. A client who insists that we devalue our expertise by giving it for free is not a client we would enjoy working for. In my 30 years of experience working with clients, rarely do they value what they don’t pay for. If our business relationship is marginalized right from the start, we won’t be given the opportunity to add much real value anyway. To those we say, “thank you for your interest” and pass.\n<strong>\nWe will not solve business problems without being financially engaged</strong>.\n\nValue creators won’t part with their highest value product without appropriate compensation. If we demonstrate to our clients that we don’t value our best product, why should they? We say to these clients,  “we save our best thinking for paying clients”. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to have our best thinking going to business we don’t currently have. It\'s also a dis-service to our paying clients.\n<strong>\nWe are specialists, not generalists.</strong>\n\nAs Value Creators, we are positioned as narrowly focused experts. We continually develop our skills, talent and processes to deepen and enrich our expertise so that we may add greater value to our client’s business. We don’t “partner” with our clients. That’s a term used by likable order-takers, not problem-solvers or expert advisers.  As our expertise deepens, our impact on helping create bigger business outcomes for our clients grows and expands in equal measure.\n<strong>\nWe replace the “pitch” with a conversation.</strong>\n\nOur interactions with prospective clients are not about pitching and selling, but rather about conversations to determine if there is a “fit” between the two parties. The basis of this lies in our understanding of the client’s need, and in our determination if our specialized expertise can serve them well. It’s far better to say no early and often, than to waste the precious time of all concerned. We don\'t diminish the client\'s rightful desire to feel confident about hiring us. We do that through knowledge sharing right here on the blog. It\'s time to come together under better circumstances that through the cumbersome RFP and review process.\n\n<strong>Our pitch to you.</strong>\n\nPULL Brand Innovation is dedicated to serving marketing teams who seek ideas and strategies to successfully launch new products, transform brands to create bigger futures. We help you gain greater clarity and confidence in the strategic and creative decisions that impact your marketing success. We deliver on that promise by seamlessly integrating the disciplines of consumer insight, brand strategy and brand development.\n\nTo prove this claim, you can view a featured case story appearing on the upper right of every page of our blog. In each example, we illustrate how our expertise added value to our paying client\'s marketing success.\n\n<strong>If you see a fit, we\'d love to start a conversation. We wish you much success in your brand building initiatives!</strong>', 'Our point of view on speculative presentations.', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'our-point-of-view-on-speculative-presentations', '', '', '2009-04-02 18:33:24', '2009-04-02 22:33:24', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=456', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(466, 2, '2009-04-14 23:11:42', '2009-04-15 03:11:42', '<img class=\"size-full wp-image-467 alignnone\" title=\"behavior\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/behavior.gif\" alt=\"influence behavior!\" width=\"500\" height=\"338\" />\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><strong>The words “brand” and “branding” have become so ubiquitous in our jargon that they are becoming meaningless. Within your organization I’ll bet it’s a fair statement to say you’ve heard these words thrown around recklessly from time to time.  You probably wondered privately “does branding really matter?”\n</strong></span></h2>\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">At the risk of overly simplifying, let’s use the word “identity” in place of branding for this discussion. I think it\'s a far better word with more relevant meaning. Organizations, products and services all have an identity. It\'s through your identity that you build a relationship in the minds of customers by defining who and what your value proposition represents.  But this is only half the equation– the more purposeful component to identity building is the ability to influence customer behavior to purchase.  Endless logos and ad making will not get you there.</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>Nobody wants more branding</strong>.\n</span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\">The inherent value your product or service brings to the marketplace is the sum total what it represents in the minds and physical experiences of customers. All the perceptions and real interactions people have with what you bring the marketplace forms your identity (a.k.a.brand). Customers decide what this means to them, not you. Customers determine the hierarchy of competing identities in a category. To influence purchase behavior your identity must matter to people. The trouble nowadays is customers aren’t paying much attention, and worse, they don’t believe or remember branding messages anyway. As a result, even the most memorable branding falls short of influencing customer behaviors.  Couple that with the changing forces of our digital age, search technology, and how we are all instantly connected, and you can understand why traditional expectations of image and awareness in marketing are falling short in the eyes of the metrics obsessed. You can’t expect to influence behavior when customers are busy avoiding your branding at every turn. Nobody out there wants more branding.\n<strong>\nBehavior is the new “B” word.</strong></span>\n\nA fair amount of branding overlooks the fact that customers are only customers when they are buying your products and services. Because we tend to think in terms of demographic or psychographic segments rather than behaviors, most branding is disembodied from the process of purchase intent to actual purchase. Adding to this disconnect, customer purchase behavior is vastly different today. Not only do people buy based on input and affirmations of their own community, but also to share the value they receive from their purchases with others in their tribe. The bigger idea is that we feel better for having shared with others what we value, rather than feeling better than our neighbor for having purchased what they value.  People don’t buy just to improve their self-image alone.  The behavioral drivers for customers today are:  to be a part of something, add, improve, create value, to make a difference in their lives and in their community. For savy marketers, connecting to what customers are <em>doing</em> along the purchase pathway is far more compelling than anything you could be <em>saying</em> in your marketing– even embellished with the most lavish promotional and production trappings you traditionally rely on.\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>Influencing behavior through your identity</strong></span>\n\nYour identity has three components: who you are, what value you provide, and what experiences customers have through their engagement with your company, product or service. You are in control of the relevancy of all three of these elements. They must arrive in perfect alignment with every customer interaction.  The key to influence in your marketing is prompting customer behavior or action, not simply increasing awareness.  The who, what and how of your value proposition (identity) must be directly linked to customer behavior in the purchase process, otherwise you’ll be spending money blowing your own hot air through the media pipe.  To be truly influential, your identity must rely less on symbolism and address customer habits, foster trust, prompt action, earn loyalty, and facilitate sharing. Thinking about your identity (a.k.a. branding) in this way creates a brave new world where you write new rules for your marketing success that your competitors will find nearly impossible to emulate.', 'The new \"B\" word in marketing. ', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-new-b-word-in-marketing', '', '', '2009-04-14 23:11:42', '2009-04-15 03:11:42', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=466', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(502, 2, '2009-04-21 19:54:48', '2009-04-21 23:54:48', '<a href=\"/2009/04/emarldcity.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-501\" title=\"emarld city\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/emarldcity.gif\" alt=\"emarld city\" width=\"492\" height=\"295\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">I’m curious about how things work, especially what makes an idea have the mental stickiness in communication. Recently I came across an interesting bit of information on the human brain from Roy Williams, a self-professed wizard of persuasion. You can learn about Roy and his work <a title=\"Wizard Academy\" href=\"https://wizardacademy.org/scripts/default.asp\" target=\"_blank\">here.</a> Like Roy, I have a fascination with how the human brain works. </span></h2>\n<h2></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">If you’re involved in communication of any kind, I think it’s useful to have at least a basic understanding of how the grey matter between our ears processes information.  Think about this idea:</span></h2>\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>You’re a marketing message...</strong>\nYour hope is to arrive at the Emerald City, located in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, that place where decisions are made in the mind. However the journey to the Emerald City is long and difficult because the prefrontal cortex is the most isolated part of the brain that gathers information from the outside world. How will you, a marketing message, find your way to the Emerald City? Follow the yellow brick road of course.</span>\n\n<strong>But there’s a catch.</strong>\nIn order to travel the yellow brick road, you must first pass through a tollbooth called “Broca’s Area”.  Positioned next to the ear, Broca’s area screens all sensory input coming into the brain. In order for you, a marketing message, to pass, the price at Broca’s tollbooth is very steep indeed. When confronted with all sensory input, Broca cries, “Interest me! Surprise me with something I didn’t know. If you are not carrying new information or a new perspective, you’ll not enter the yellow brick road to the Emerald City!”. Broca turns away everything he “sees coming”.  Broca hates the predictable. This is the brain\'s way of focusing your conscious attention.\n\nThe Yellow Brick Road that runs from Broca’s area to the Emerald City is called the “dorsolateral prefrontal association area\" of the brain. In neuroscience parlance it’s known as working memory. We’ll call it imagination. According to neurological science, working memory (imagination) has three parts: the central executive, the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad.\n\nThe central executive chooses where to direct your attention. (after Broca has decided what does or doesn’t matter). The central executive decides what matters the most.\n\nThe phonological loop rehearses sound. Like when a song that gets stuck in your head, the phonological loop is a cul-de-sac on the Yellow Brick Road.\n\nThe visuospatial sketchpad is where you “see” things that have never happened. Like a movie screen in your mind.\n\nAmazingly, all this happens on the Yellow Brick Road of the dorsolateral prefrontal association area of your brain.  A part not connected to your eye, but to your ear. So If you are a marketing message, you better sound very seductive and irresistible if you want to pass through the tollbooth of Broca’s area on your way to the Emerald City.', 'Follow the Yellow Brick Road', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'follow-the-yellow-brick-road', '', '', '2009-04-21 19:54:48', '2009-04-21 23:54:48', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=502', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(510, 2, '2009-04-29 16:28:45', '2009-04-29 20:28:45', '<a href=\"/2009/04/values.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-509\" title=\"values\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/values.gif\" alt=\"values\" width=\"500\" height=\"349\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">It\'s safe to say that we are in a new age of connection that seemingly has caught marketers flat-footed. In this new age of two-way conversation and social media dominance over the old model of one-way push out the external media driven message, it is important to remember a timeless principle that connects human beings: we are creatures of meaning.</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\"> </span></h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><strong> </strong></span><span style=\"color: #333333;\">For thousands of years, humans have been concerned with who we are and why are we here. We are not a species of transactions, but of interactions.  People naturally connect with ideas when they come from sources of similar vibration. For the life of me I can not figure out why, in this day in age, marketers are so obsessed with controlling their out-bound marketing message. Thanks to the Internet, marketers can\'t control their external messaging anymore. Just ask the folks at Domino\'s Pizza. The recent episode of the Domino\'s employees home made in store video is evidence enough that years of goodwill building is destroyed in days on You-Tube.</span></p>\n\nMore importantly, people are no longer listening to marketing anyway!  Everything in our media obsessed culture is now clutter and white noise. No amount of media budget will change that reality.  What people covet are deep relationships with people of like minded values and beliefs. Within the context of modern day marketing it\'s us=them.\n\nThe thing to always keep in mind is that truth is always changing in relation to the culture of the day. And whatever truths were driving marketing and brand building a decade ago no longer apply. The speed of change is exponential.  However, amidst all the technology available to connect us, none of it matters much if there are no authentically shared values anchoring the relationship you have with your customer.  What\'s powerful about social media technologies is how quickly your proposition is vetted out if it is not genuine, real and authentic. You can no longer say it, you must walk it. People make their decisions to engage with brands based on their own inner beliefs and core values. They no longer care about features and benefits in and of themselves.  People today are seeking a greater sense of self.  Products and services (and the companies behind them)  that are aligned with these deeper shared values are re-defining our world.  The internal beliefs and shared values between brands and people are replacing the usefulness of outbound push marketing.  It\'s from this authenticity that brands live and behave in the world, and foster the interaction and engagement of like minded customers.\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">When brands behave badly and are disloyal to the tribe–they are quickly banished from existence.</span></h2>\nYour corporate or brand identity is more than a logo or promise to your customer–it is your own purpose, your reason for being, shared by the like-minded. As you express this value authentically, you will have greater influence with people who are pulled by the gravity of its greater embedded meaning. The new age of brand identity and expression has the marketing baked in. No need to push it out there.', 'Us=Them: The new age of brand identity.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', '510', '', '', '2009-04-29 16:28:45', '2009-04-29 20:28:45', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=510', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(540, 2, '2009-07-29 17:42:00', '2009-07-29 21:42:00', '<a href=\"/2009/07/name-part-ii.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-541\" title=\"name-part-ii\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/name-part-ii.gif\" alt=\"name-part-ii\" width=\"485\" height=\"279\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">I wrote an earlier post on <a href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/?p=444\" target=\"_blank\">naming</a> a few months ago. The point of that article was focused on the structure of various naming configurations. It was a left-brain attempt to outline some conventional naming structures designed to serve as a guide to help those who might be in the middle of a naming process. What I didn’t outline in the previous post was the right-brain approach to naming...</span></h2>\nWhen you engage in a naming initiative from the right side of the grey matter, the concern is less on structure and convention, and more on creating a clear mental image that serves the desired positioning of your company, product or service. A great name is just too important a business asset to come just from one side of the brain.  The right brain approach is the one that connects verbal cues with clear mental pictures. This is very important because people think and remember in pictures! Before I go deeper, let me share a couple of stories from marketing folklore.\n\nFor many years, there was a small but growing athletic footwear company with a check-mark shwoosh logo called Blue Ribbon Sports. Not a terrible name, but not compelling enough to create a powerful mental image of winning foot races. Wisely, the company changed its name to a word that came from a Greek Olympic chant meaning “win, win, win!  With this more evocative name, coupled with a more aspirational positioning and promise, Nike took off to the heights of greatness only a few companies will ascend to.\n\nThen there was the Pequod Coffee Company, a name under serious consideration from a start-up company from Seattle. The owners had a fascination with all things Moby Dick. (Apparently one was an English professor). What useful and compelling mental images and associations does the name “Pequod” bring to your mind?  Alas, someone said something to the effect “since you are so set on the Moby Dick theme, and you already have a mermaid as your symbol, why not use the name of the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck? At least it easier to pronounce and it sounds better”.  From there, another marketing legend is born!\n\nFor all you marketing communications executives working in a company with a three-letter acronym name that is not AT&amp;T or IBM, this might cause you to think more about a name that will provide your company with more powerful visual imagery that will separates you from the slush pile of all the other companies with dull, boring and meaningless three-letter names.\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">In a cluttered brandscape, owning a name that sparks a clear mental image that communicates the promise you make to your customers can be the white hot center of your competitive advantage.</span></h2>\n<strong>What mental images does your company name convey? Are these visual associations aligned with what makes your business matter to people?</strong>', 'What\'s In A Name-Part II', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'whats-in-a-name-part-ii', '', '', '2009-07-29 17:42:00', '2009-07-29 21:42:00', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=540', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(561, 2, '2009-08-11 13:53:24', '2009-08-11 17:53:24', '<a href=\"/2009/08/theshack.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-562\" title=\"theshack\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/theshack.gif\" alt=\"theshack\" width=\"450\" height=\"127\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">The Sans Radio SHACK Attack.</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">I’m amused with the new name adopted by <a href=\"http://www.radioshack.com/home/index.jsp\" target=\"_blank\">RadioShack.</a><strong> </strong>You can check out the promotional roll-out events <strong><a href=\"http://www.radioshack.com/theshack/\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.</strong> In an effort to be more relevant in the challenging retail environment of consumer electronics, I think RadioShack’s intention to transform itself into a more compelling and “hip” retailer is a good idea long overdue.  Alas, it might be too little, too late.</span></h2>\nThis name change seems to be a half-hearted effort with a half-baked result. My intuition tells me RadioShack’s management is still not quite sure what they want to become, or if they are even doing the right thing. Of course, I am not privy to the real facts behind the story, but as a blogger with an informed opinion, I think this provides an interesting example of why a name change must be an “all-in” affair. I rolled my eyes at the CMO’s hedging <a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=138297\" target=\"_blank\">remarks</a> that this is not really a name change?  Then what is it–advertising?\n\nLet me begin with the name change to– “The Shack”.  (Interesting that it coincides with Pizza Hut’s recent moniker change to “The Hut”.  I wonder if they are using the same ad agency?)  It seems to me, management must believe the key descriptor in the name (radio) is no longer an accurate handle that describes a relevant, and emotionally powerful customer-facing frame of reference.\n\nOn the surface, one might agree with the “logic” behind this rational, we are way past the glory days of transistor radios, CB’s and home radio operators for which this brand is iconic. One could make a convincing case for a name change. However, this effort seems blatantly superficial!\n\nThe hard truth remains– people have stopped caring about RadioShack (and Pizza Hut too), pure and simple. Here’s what has not appeared to have changed much at THE SHACK:\n\n<strong>oh-hum store environments with generic products</strong>\n\n<strong>a third-tier electronics component retailer with a low-value consciousness and blurry positioning.</strong>\n\n<strong>a management culture that continues to value safety and security, over love and innovation.</strong>\n\nI’m not being critical of the name change to “THE SHACK”.  In my opinion, (aka rant) I don\'t think it matters what you call them. I’m just saying that customers care more about the experience of value your brand provides them. You can’t change the name and not the substance behind the name and expect that alone will make your business matter to people again.\n\nA highly targeted positioning, an emotionally rich and relevant value proposition, and an unforgettable experience of value will comprise a brand worthy of customer advocacy. Best Buy has these bases well covered, plus their name says it all.\n\nBy the way, you may not realize this, but all the mobile communication products and services that are a large part of the merchandising mix at the now RadiolessShack are, in fact, just a newer type of radio. Go figure…\n\n<strong> What’s your take on it?</strong>', 'What\'s in a Name-Part III', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'whats-in-a-name-part-iii', '', '', '2009-08-11 13:53:24', '2009-08-11 17:53:24', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=561', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(641, 2, '2009-08-26 16:20:57', '2009-08-26 20:20:57', '<h2><a href=\"/2009/08/viewcover.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-646\" title=\"viewcover\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/viewcover.gif\" alt=\"viewcover\" width=\"515\" height=\"397\" /></a><span style=\"color: #808000;\">Developing a new or refreshed corporate or brand identity is often a response to change.  Many factors will drive that change– new management, mergers, acquisitions, product development, or a competitor’s threat to a core business. Most change within organizations (or individuals for that matter) is usually driven by external influences (fear) and rarely is initiated through forethought (innovation).</span></h2>\nSeemingly in every industry category, offerings are increasingly becoming commodities and perceived by customers as less differentiated and less valuable. Naturally it’s tempting to respond to this by changing something.  It’s only logical to assume that maybe you can duplicate success by copying the attributes, features or capabilities of what is working for others.  The sobering truth is this tactic will not sustain real growth, nor add more value to customers; it only increases the sameness and adds to the clutter.\n\n<strong>We adapt by copying others.</strong>\n\nSocial observer and author, <a href=\"http://herd.typepad.com/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Mark Earls</strong></a> demonstrates the simple fact that humans have largely evolved by copying others. For thousands of years, humans have adapted through a  “do what works” mentality. In fact, Earls points out “copying is our species’ number one learning and adaptive strategy.” The temptation to copy other’s success is, well–tempting. Here’s why:\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong>It’s easier and less risky to copy what works than to create more value.</strong>\n\nHumans have naturally sought the safety and security of the known, and avoided the risk of the unknown. When it comes to building an identity, product development, and marketing, the majority of change today is really just copied from what came before, or from what’s currently influencing the behaviors of the status quo.  The pressure to sell more stuff seems to trump creating more value through serving people better.\n\nAs a result, products have more features on features, there are more flashy logos, more marketing.  Seemingly, the more that changes, or gets copied, the more organizations and brands become the same– the result is more commodization with eroded brand equity.\n\n<strong>Your identity in the marketplace must stand for something.</strong>\n\nI’ve said this before; your business must matter to people, but not to everybody. There is no competitive advantage in doing what others do, or have done before. The idea that your business or brand identity promises a “total solution” is just another way of saying it doesn’t stand for anything.\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong>If your brand is number three or four amongst competitors, don’t confuse copying success with value creation.</strong>\n\nThe key to creating compelling value in the marketplace is to focus brand building strategy on serving the needs and desires of <em>only</em> those who value what you provide, love to engage with it, and in doing so, share it’s value with others. As the tribe of believers grows from the influence of others, so does the power of your brand’s identity and value. Copy that and you can change the world.', 'The temptation to copy what works.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-temptation-to-copy-what-works', '', '', '2009-08-26 16:20:57', '2009-08-26 20:20:57', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=641', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(653, 2, '2009-09-04 17:27:04', '2009-09-04 21:27:04', '<a href=\"/2009/09/chngeinside.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-654\" title=\"chngeinside\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/chngeinside.gif\" alt=\"chngeinside\" width=\"454\" height=\"451\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">When organizations and brands are in the process of changing their identity, I’ve noticed a tendency that it’s easier for executives to focus their energy on “breaking the change to the world” through measured marketing communications, rather than creating a prior strategy of bringing the inner-vested into the identity conversation early on. People naturally want to know “why are we doing this, and what’s in it for me?”</span></h2>\nIn communicating the aspects of identity change, is your focus on the inner (employees and shareholders), or the outer (more marketing)?\n\nThere are powerful market forces that shape identity change. Corporate identity changes are often driven by the CEO as a response to forming the outer market’s perceptions of the value to their enterprises, particularly after a merger or acquisition.  Brand identity changes are usually driven by circumstances in the outer media and sales channels.  These outer drivers are powerful forces indeed. Identity changes have an equally compelling effect on people inside the organization who will be tasked with contributing to “a new idea” they may know little about.\n\nWhen you provide the reasons why your identity requires change, it\'s imperative to have these ideas resonate positively within your organization first, before the outer world. When that happens, it’s like putting Miracle-Grow on the seeds of your brand image.  People on the inside must believe the changing organizational or brand identity will have a positive impact on their lives before they’ll be an influential-buzz-generating machine twittering away in our transparent digital age.  The reason most successful brands seem to have an inner glow about them is no accident.\n\nHaving an internal communications strategy in place at the very beginning of the process, is fundamentally important for a successful outcome. Better when clarity begins the process.\n\n<strong>What’s your take on this?</strong>', 'Changing on the inside first.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'changing-on-the-inside-first', '', '', '2009-09-04 17:27:04', '2009-09-04 21:27:04', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=653', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(668, 4, '2009-09-19 13:13:50', '2009-09-19 17:13:50', '<a href=\"/2009/09/multidimension.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-693\" title=\"multidimension\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/multidimension.gif\" alt=\"multidimension\" width=\"515\" height=\"317\" /></a>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">The best brands are those managed by business leaders who understand their brands are not one dimensional. They know it is more than just delivering a high quality product or service experience to consumers.Brands are multifaceted and multidimensional, just like the companies that own them.</span></h2>\nThere are four key areas that business leaders need to examine regularly, to build their strategic roadmap for growth and success;\n\n<strong>To whom you market</strong>.\nYou can only create cool products or solutions when you know who the likely buyer will be that will be using the product. It is critical to understand as much as you can about the potential buyer.\n\n<strong>Why they buy</strong>.\nGrabbing the largest share of those consumers’ wallets requires you really understand the usage of products in your space, and put rigor against their illuminating needs, motivations, attitudes, and preferences.\n\n<strong>What you market</strong>.\nYour positioning needs to drive purchase behavior and be ownable and differentiating (yes, you can actually measure these things). How you position your products/services will determine whether your brand will make it into, and dominate, consumers\' spending patterns.\n\n<strong>How you compete</strong>.\nYour brand equity or the health of your brand is a culmination of consumers’ familiarity with your brand and the sum total of their brand experience. These attitudes and perceptions determine whether you will have loyal advocates for your brand who will be the first to try any new product extensions, or become vocal detractors sharing their views with their online social network.\n\n<strong>When you actively manage these four key drivers of your brand\'s success, you will gain greater confidence to make the hard strategic decisions that help you avoid expensive mis-steps</strong>.\n\n<span style=\"color: #808000;\">Editor\'s Note: We\'re pleased to introduce Mike Murphy as a contributing author on the Infuence by Design blog, MIke is Founder and Chief Energizing Officer at Los Angeles based <a href=\"http://www.brandiq.biz\" target=\"_blank\">Brand IQ</a>, a leading consumer insight and brand strategy consultancy. We look forward to your comments. Email Mike: <a href=\"mailto://mmurphy@brandiq.bi\" target=\"_blank\">mmurphy@brandiq.biz</a></span>', 'Avoid a one dimensional relationship with your customers.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'avoid-a-one-dimensional-relationship-with-your-customers', '', '', '2009-09-19 13:13:50', '2009-09-19 17:13:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=668', 0, 'post', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `pull_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(701, 2, '2009-10-12 22:40:45', '2009-10-13 02:40:45', '<h2><a href=\"/2009/10/bigmoney1.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-719\" title=\"bigmoney\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bigmoney1.gif\" alt=\"bigmoney\" width=\"498\" height=\"346\" /></a></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">In a recent conversation with a prospective client in the pre-information gathering phase of qualifying consultants to help them with a corporate name and identity change, they asked “ can you give us an idea on your fee?” I answered the question with our standard minimum-level fee estimate “it all depends”.</span></h2>\nI answered the question by explaining our minimum fee requirements.  Of course, that brought the conversation to an abrupt conclusion.  Apparently they placed a lesser value on the solution than the criteria our minimum fee required. We quickly determined that we were not good fit for them at this time. I recommended them to a talented freelance graphic designer. No harm, no foul…\n\nLater I began to think more about the cost question. Why do clients fixate on the consulting fee– the smallest cost component in a fully implemented corporate rebranding initiative? From the client\'s point of view, what should corporate identity development cost? I began to do some research to see if there was any form of pricing standard or guideline that potential clients could learn about and use to help them qualify the cost question early in their search for a brand and identity consultant.  Surprisingly I didn’t find much useful information out there. I checked in with a couple of my colleagues in the identity business, the common answer: “it depends”.\n\n<strong><span style=\"color: #808000;\">There\'s useful information from <a href=\"http://www.identityworks.com/issues/issues7.htm\" target=\"_blank\">identityworks.com</a>, and an article on the question at hand. <a href=\"http://www.identityworks.com/issues/issues7.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Read it here.</a> This site contains useful information on the state of the global identity business as well as download on mapping out the process. Take a moment and check it out.</span></strong>\n\n<strong>Key factors affecting corporate identity development costs.</strong>\n\nThe nature of identity change (both strategically and creatively) is quite different for a corporate organization than it is for a category brand (product or service). While neither is a trivial undertaking, corporate identity development not only involves top line naming and logo development, but also involves complex assessment, planning and strategic planning with executive management. Additionally, subsidiary identities, naming structures, product brands and the scope of implementation over a variety of physical properties will vary significantly depending on the size of the organization.\n\nCategory brand identities are no less important, but implementation, or the scope of the physical applications involved are notably not as complex. Category brand identities commonly express themselves in media advertising signatures, product packaging, retail environments and various forms of marketing communications. Strategic and creative development consulting fees for an organizational identity change commonly depend on these factors:\n\n<em><strong>Direct engagement with CEO / CMO executives</strong>.</em>\nRarely are such endeavors delegated to lower level managers who would have full authority to make critical decisions. If you have a steering committee structure with lots of opinions to cater to, you’ll most likely be required to pay more in consulting fees.\n\n<strong><em>Size and scope of the organization, subsidiaries, business units, brand architecture</em>.</strong>\nIf the identity change requires complex planning, rigorous market research of various audience segments around the globe, the development costs can be significant.\n\n<em><strong>Reputation and experience of the identity consultant.</strong> </em>\nWill your corporate identity be developed by a generalist like your advertising agency or PR firm, or do you require the specialization of a global identity firm; or would you be better served by a smaller consulting team consisting of a highly specialized identity or brand strategists in concert with top identity design talent?\n\n<strong><em>How much time is available to complete the assignment?</em></strong>\nAssuming you are working with specialized talent in both strategic and design counsel,  there can be many business reasons why the process might be accelerated which would place a premium on the development costs.\n\n<strong>A rule of thumb (sort of)</strong>\n\nBecause there are so many variables, development costs (consulting fees) for rebranding an organization can vary significantly from consultant to consultant. Usually buyers of these services have little or no knowledge, experience or appreciation for all the processess involved.\n<h2><strong>For enterprises with annual revenues of $250 million+, (exclusive of extensive market research, audience segmentation analysis or physical property and media channel implementation), here\'s what you can expect:</strong></h2>\n<strong>Assessment / Planning / Strategy / Naming  $50-100K</strong>\n\n<strong>Verbal and Visual Identity Design Development  $50-75K</strong>\n\n<strong>Design Applications and Documentation (print or web based) $60-80K</strong>\n<h1>This fee range assumes you\'re considering a seasoned and highly skilled identity consultant with specialized expertise in corporate identity development.</h1>\n<strong>The value of specialized expertise.</strong>\n\nIdentity development costs can be significant one-time expenses for any size organization. But when understood as an excellent one-time opportunity to leverage the event of a rebranding, there is no better investment to build the foundation to command greater attention and awareness, elevate perceived quality and renew market confidence.\n\nOf course the cost to implement such a program over time (physically and in media communication channels) will always exceed the costs to develop the initial identity strategy. Highly specialized identity consultants come as close to creating and shaping the vibe of a client company as you can get, without actually being the CEO. Just think about all the valuable outcomes an institution’s name, logo, theme line, trade dress, unit names and unit signature system can potentially achieve:\n\n<strong>establishing the ‘preferred positioning’ the entity intends to earn;</strong>\n\n<strong>facilitating the entity’s distinguishing culture and quality that appeals to top talent;</strong>\n\n<strong>revealing to vested audiences the coherence and purposes of the entity’s composition;</strong>\n\n<strong>building the foundation of the entity’s value proposition to customers</strong>\n\n<strong>determining the criteria around  \"where we’re going, how must we best organize ourselves and behave to get there”.</strong>\n\nYour identity (corporate or brand) is more than the face of your organization in the marketplace. It deserves the investment specialized expertise delivers to build lasting influence and market value over time.\n\nRelative to the value you believe your corporate identity represents to your vested audiences, what price would you put on its development? Or think of it this way–what price would you pay to ensure a successful outcome?  What ever that “number” is for your organization, determines the perceived value you have for the benefits of the specialized expertise an identity consultant provides.\n\nI have to constantly remind myself that most people will perceive any price as high when they believe they are buying a commodity in abundant supply. I hope this provides you with some useful insight on the subject. As always, your comments are most welcome.', 'What should corporate identity development cost?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'what-should-corporate-identity-development-cost', '', '', '2009-10-12 22:40:45', '2009-10-13 02:40:45', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=701', 0, 'post', '', 7),
(731, 2, '2009-11-06 21:20:07', '2009-11-07 01:20:07', '<a href=\"/2009/11/newimproved.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-732\" title=\"new&amp;improved\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/newimproved.gif\" alt=\"new&amp;improved\" width=\"515\" height=\"324\" /></a>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Innovate or die continues to be the mantra for business growth. Many great innovations are often borrowed from other ideas.\n</span></h1>\nJust because a product is new or novel does not necessarily make it useful, necessary, or valuable. Every company wants to be perceived as innovative in their product development. The truth is many companies struggle to be innovative in ways that are game-changers for their long-term success. Many companies innovate around themselves, bringing to market only incremental innovation that can produced in strict cost structures, rather than developing a deeper and richer understanding of what people really care about. When we think of innovations, is there anything new under the sun? Are original ideas all that original, or is there value in collecting from prior sources and piecing new things together?\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">Enlightened companies innovate around life experiences and meanings rather than competitive or functional features and benefits. </span></h2>\nThe process of innovation in these enterprises is centered in a deep desire to serve the well being of people–to make life a little better.  To do that well requires insight and empathy in equal measure. Enlightened companies view the process of innovation as something sacred and transcendent of the physics of their organizations. Innovation is hard-wired into their culture.  It’s not a practice that can be mandated, it is inspired right along with failure. Enlightened companies know there is no such thing as failure in innovation, there is only learning. Thomas Edison proved that over a century ago when he proclaimed \"Your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are currently working on.\" Then he went about the process of failing forward to his \"innovation\".\n\nThe physical stuff of innovation (capital, raw materials, machines, markets) seems to be always available, however the availability of physical resources won’t make companies more innovative. The greatest assets for innovation come from the non physical, the formless. Enlightened companies harness the creative power of ideas, intuition, inspiration, imagination, insight and borrowed circumstances that form new proposals to customers.  These are proposals of meaning–which shows up in product forms that are unexpected, uniquely useful, loved, and are perceived as being of greater value. Innovation is both strategy and tactic, and organizations can learn to become very good at both to create sustained competitive advantage.\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\">People have more choices in the marketplace than ever before in human history. Bringing more products to market with more features just adds to the slush pile.</span></h2>\nMore and better product functions and features does not equate to innovation and competitive advantage. With very few exceptions–everything works. That’s the ante, not the differentiator. Innovation is about serving the needs of others first in ways that are unexpected, and when realized by customers, it turns out to be the very thing they were waiting for. Innovation is a consciousness, not an event or action step. Of course, the lasting benefit of innovating around borrowing from life experiences is the marketing gets baked into the product, with the end result being people gathered into communities, embedding it\'s \"new\" meaning into their own life expressions, and sharing this value with others.\n\n<strong>Enlightened companies who lead markets shift their focus from counting transactions to innovating scintillating, dramatic, novel, relevant, transformative experiences that really matter to people.</strong>', 'Is there anything new under the sun?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'is-there-anything-new-under-the-sun', '', '', '2009-11-06 21:20:07', '2009-11-07 01:20:07', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=731', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(746, 2, '2010-01-13 00:12:22', '2010-01-13 04:12:22', '<h2><a href=\"/2010/01/officeviewblog.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-747\" title=\"officeviewblog\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/officeviewblog.gif\" alt=\"officeviewblog\" width=\"515\" height=\"432\" /></a><span style=\"color: #808000;\">When I established my guidelines for writing and developing the voice of our Influence By Design blog– I declared I would share only information that adds value to my marketing colleagues on the client side, and never make it about me personally.  I’m in flagrant violation of that guideline with this post. As I look out my office window, I’m hell bent to share my musings on this new year/decade ahead, forgive my indulgence</span>.</h2>\nIn light of the current state of affairs in our economy, for many business people, this down-turn has been a perfect opportunity to refocus, regroup, make new plans, and generally ratchet it up a notch.  Many businesses are well prepared for opportunity when things get cooking again. My business is no exception.\n\nAs I thought about how I would grow the business this year, I discovered myself connecting more deeply with what I really love about my work and my business, beyond the making-money part.  Each year I ask myself the all important question  ”why am I doing this?”.  Here are my answers and not in any order of importance:\n\n<strong>I love contributing to growth and expansion</strong>\n\n<strong>I love when my expertise contributes to the success of others</strong>\n\n<strong>I love to creatively express useful ideas and bring them into form</strong>\n\n<strong>I love the diversity of my client’s businesses</strong>\n\n<strong>I love putting a face on things that influences positive perceptions and experiences</strong>\n\n<strong>I love design</strong>\n\n<strong>I love to be around smart and talented people</strong>\n\n<strong>I love to create value through the venue of my business.</strong>\n\nPure and simple, after 30 years, love continues to keep me going in the face of today’s challenging business environment.  I love doing what matters to me and serves others. We created PULL at the very beginning of this downturn.  My colleauges and I felt strongly marketers would highly value the deep expertise and specialized talent we provide them helping them be more confident in the business decisions that drive their brand marketing initiatives. And delivering these outcomes in a “cut to the chase, no BS” process. It turned out to be good timing.\n\nAs marketers begin to see a glimmer of light at a turnaround, more are preparing themselves for new opportunity and reconnecting with their brand heritage discerning how it supports or hinders serving customers in a crowded marketplace.  I see more opportunity on the horizon to serve people and share the love than ever before.  That’s what it’s all about.  Like Bob Dylan says “ you’re gonna have to serve somebody”.  After all the marketing theory, buzz-words and industry hype about fragmented media channels, and social media emergence, a successful brand simply begins by serving people well.\n\nIf we find ourselves having a conversation about your business growth, it will because we share this same point of view.  I love my work! My wish– 2010 becomes a year of prosperity for all of us. Happy New Year to you!', 'My thoughts for 2010', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'my-thoughts-for-2010-i-love-my-work-and-business', '', '', '2010-01-13 00:12:22', '2010-01-13 04:12:22', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=746', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(759, 2, '2010-01-26 23:57:45', '2010-01-27 03:57:45', '<h2><a href=\"/2010/01/catapult-blog1.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-761\" title=\"catapult-blog\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/catapult-blog1.gif\" alt=\"catapult-blog\" width=\"515\" height=\"246\" /></a><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> </span></h2>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> </span><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Catapult Innovation is a strategic and creative method designed to help consumer products marketers gain greater insight, clarity and confidence to grow their brand\'s impact, influence and income.\n</span></h1>\n<h2>In a cluttered marketplace, it’s our assertion that brand leadership is the most compelling differentiation. Only when opportunity and creativity converge into useful value in the marketplace does game-changing product and brand innovation occur.</h2>\n<h2>For those marketers in the early stages of strategic brand planning, we\'ve developed a pathway to help them see just over the horizon where their best opportunities are to create new value, rather than compete for what\'s already been created.</h2>\n<h2><strong>Barriers to brand innovation we help marketers overcome.\n</strong></h2>\nIn our collective 50+ years of experience working with business and product marketing teams positioning brands and bringing new products to market, we’ve discovered many marketers commonly face these brand innovation challenges:\n\n<strong>Insufficient understanding of who target consumers are and what they really care about.</strong>\nMany marketers develop and introduce new products that are based more in their existing capabilities to deliver incremental change to customers. Many marketers forget it\'s about the customer not their internal capabilities. Innovation is more than understanding customer functional needs and responding, rather it is the ability to bring game changing proposals to the right customers who are mad about what your brand represents to them. People buy into \"meanings\" more than products. As Henry Ford was fond of saying\" had I listened to what people told me they wanted, I would have built a faster horse\".  Serving people in ways that truly matter to them is the first step to game-changing brand innovation.\n\n<strong>The brand no longer resonates.</strong>\nIconic heritage brands can lose their relevance. Preferences shift,  consumers move through life, brands loose their shine long before they  stop generating cash. Brand meaning gets stretched and weakened by  ubiquitous extensions and licensing over time. It can be difficult  knowing when and how to best re-invent and re-invest in iconic brands.\n\n<strong>Lack of differentiation.</strong>\nBrand innovation has three fundamental components underlying any value proposition: resonance, difference and substance. Increasingly, product categories are becoming commodities. If a product isn’t good and radically different, it better come with a cheap price, and worse– in a commodity category, any price can be perceived as too expensive. Great brands are built on providing greater use value than people pay in cash value.  More product function just adds to the slush pile. You can\'t differentiate your brand / product by simply focusing on functions and performance benefits. Brand innovation provides a compelling \"proposal of meaning\", that is highly-valued and hard to duplicate.\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong>Moving too fast.</strong>\nCEO’s are constantly under pressure delivering on their promises to Wall Street. In turn, those promises get turned into financial metrics that product development and marketing organizations have to meet. Consequently, the focus is on the urgent and not the important. Seldom is a long view valued, product and brand development steps get shortened, and the quality and depth of strategic and creative thinking can be marginalized. The old saying rings true \"there\'s never enough time to do it right, and always time to do it twice\".\n\n<strong>Competing priorities and resources.</strong>\nThe cost of creating a new brand is daunting. In some CPG categories, new brands lasting more than a year after launch has dropped to 10%.  Share of mind has never been more difficult for marketers. Retail channels are changing almost daily. Resources to fund the marketing for brand building initiatives is getting harder to come by. Do more with less is the new normal. As the slices of the budget pie get smaller, and the pace to market quickens, it’s pretty obvious how results often can be disappointing. Add to that the inefficiencies caused by siloed disciplines, and it becomes easy to see why management can have no real sense of confidence their making sound business decisions on which opportunities they are well-suited to pursue.\n<h2><strong>Catapult Innovation brings clarity and confidence to the strategic and creative decisions you will make to build a solid foundation for your business success.\n</strong></h2>\nOutcomes– the Catapult Brand Innovation process is designed to help you create desired business outcomes.  Catapult is not a formula. It provides a disciplined structure for strategic and creative thinking when you\'re in the early stages of inventing new brands, introducing new products, or breathing new life into under-performing brands. We tailor our method to serve your specific circumstances, and bring together (at various points along the way) a diverse group of thought leaders who broaden the perspective, expertise and creativity necessary to help client teams gain clarity and confidence to pursue their best opportunities. More importantly, Catapult is a grounded process that includes the rigor of qualitative and quantitative research.  Testing verbal and visual prototypes against what really matters to consumers is a critical component. The result is brand innovation strategies and ideas that prove themselves worthy of the future investment required downstream for full development and market launch.\n\n<strong>You can learn more about our Catapult Brand Innovation method by downloading our <em> </em><a href=\"/2010/01/Catapult-Innovation.Intro1_.pdf\">Catapult Innovation Overview</a></strong><strong> (pdf).  Better yet, allow us to share with you in a confidential conversation how Catapult Innovation has created a positive impact on the brand building initiatives of established and emerging brands. To start the conversation, feel free to<a class=\"aligncenter\" href=\"mailto:tdawson@pullinc.com\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"aligncenter\"><em>email Thomson Dawson, Managing Partner.</em></span></a></strong>', 'How will you innovate the future of your brand?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'how-will-you-innovate-your-future', '', '', '2010-01-26 23:57:45', '2010-01-27 03:57:45', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=759', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(883, 2, '2010-02-04 15:56:29', '2010-02-04 19:56:29', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-899\" title=\"sixhats\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sixhats1.gif\" alt=\"sixhats\" width=\"516\" height=\"285\" />\n\n<h2>Collaboration is required component for innovation. Thinking about challenges and opportunities from different points of view is absolutely necessary.<em>“Six Thinking Hats”</em> developed by <a href=\"http://www.edwarddebono.com/Default.php\" target=\"_self\"><em>Edward de Bono</em></a>, is a powerful tool for masterminding a problem or opportunity. For those who may not know, de Bono is regarded by many to be the leading global authority in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.</h2>\n\nWe use the Thinking Hats technique in our group creative sessions when we are seeking to validate ideas. When diverse people are all thinking in the same room at the same time, there can be tension and a tendency to go with the strongest voices in the room. Six Thinking Hats is a powerful tool because it inspires transparent and inclusive parallel thinking. Next time you have a group problem solving session, try using the Six Thinking Hats to improve the quality of your thinking and decision-making that follows. Each \"Thinking Hat\" is a metaphor for a different style of thinking:\n\n<h3>White Hat:</h3>\nWith this thinking hat, you focus on the raw information at hand. It’s about the facts and nothing but the facts. Look at the data and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them. This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.\n\n<h3>Red Hat:</h3>\nWearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. What are you afraid of? Also try to think about how other people will react emotionally, and try to understand the intuitive responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.\n\n<h3>Black Hat:</h3>\nBlack hat thinking is cautious and defensive. It’s our common tendency to be the devil’s advocate, pointing out the flaws and why an idea won’t work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan or course of action. It allows you to eliminate them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency plans to counter problems that arise down the road. Black Hat thinking helps you spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many people tend to think too positively and under-estimate complexity, leaving them under-prepared for difficulties.\n\n<h3>Yellow Hat:</h3>\nThe yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of an idea and the value in it, and spot the opportunities that arise from it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks dark and difficult.\n\n<h3>Green Hat:</h3>\nThe Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop unbridled creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. Green hat thinking is about possibility and potential with no limits and no logic.\n\n<h3>Blue Hat:</h3>\nThe Blue Hat stands for process control. This is the hat worn by whom ever is facilitating your discussion. When ideas are running dry, or there a blocks in your process, the Blue Hat referees and can decide to move the conversation into any other thinking hat mode that keeps the thinking alive and moving.\n\nTry this technique out. We have a good deal of fun every time we use it.', 'Six Thinking Hats', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'six-thinking-hats', '', '', '2010-02-04 15:56:29', '2010-02-04 19:56:29', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=883', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(986, 2, '2010-02-22 22:00:56', '2010-02-23 02:00:56', '<a href=\"www.swatch.com\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-987\" title=\"swatch\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/swatch.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"251\" /></a>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">When thinking about product and brand innovation– what seems to elude many executive leaders is a lack of understanding that people do not buy products, they buy into meanings.</span></h1>\nMaybe the reason for this is simply the physics of most organizations inhibits radical innovation and the competitive advantage that results. What matters the most to people is not the function of a product, but their emotional, psychological and cultural connection to what a product means to them. The key to sustained competitive advantage for companies is to innovate around meanings rather than function and performance.\n\nRadical Innovation does not happen when you bring people an incremental improvement of what they already know. Rather, radical innovation (and market leadership for that matter) is the result of  “proposing” an unexpected meaning. This meaning, unsolicited by user needs, once discovered, turns out to be the very thing people where waiting for!\n\nThere are countless examples of companies who have mastered this. Of course, Apple is an easy one. And there are other compelling examples. Back in the early 80’s, Seiko and Casio were driving technological innovation in quartz watches, believing people wanted technical precision. However, a Swiss watchmaker realized people cared more about self-expression than technical precision. Swatch was born and proved to be a radical innovation of meaning that created radical market success. While Seiko and Casio were closely observing user needs and existing meanings, Swatch created new ones.\n<h3>Forget user-centered innovation.</h3>\nWith so many such examples in every industry to benchmark from, I am surprised most companies don’t seem to “get it”. Most are heavily invested in traditional market innovation – finding a consumer need and filling it. From our own experience working in early stage product and brand innovation, seemingly the conversation starts by the client explaining how their new product innovation has more buttons and is easier to use than the leading brand. A radical innovation of meaning rarely, if ever, comes from user-centered approaches.\n\nIn my view, this explains why so many high user involvement product categories are being commoditized. Most companies continue to improve incremental performance within existing market concepts leaving only a few visionary companies to gain competitive advantage (market leadership) by proposing new and different meanings. Did I mention Apple yet?\n<h3>Good and Different.</h3>\nIn his whiteboard book <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Zag-Number-Strategy-High-Performance-Brands/dp/0321426770\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Zag</em></a>, noted consultant and author <a href=\"http://www.neutronllc.com/neutron/who\" target=\"_blank\">Marty Neumeier</a> outlines the fundamentals of good and different. The premise is simple–you can’t lead by following the leader. To remove uncertainty and hedge risk in innovation, many companies rely on focus group testing. While useful for certain kinds of learning, people in focus groups have a frame of reference that is based on what is currently known to them. Most people usually want more of what they currently know– only with more features and cheaper. This is not an effective venue for discovering new meanings or competitive advantage.\n\nToday the marketplace is over-crowded with good. Good is expected. Good = the same! Different on the other hand, is more elusive. When a company proposes a radical innovation of meaning, it’s no surprise it will be first judged as crazy or impractical idea. Radical innovations of meaning don’t test well. A product that is radically different is always radically different than the current dominant meaning in the category. Think back to the Swatch example; personal expression trumps precision instrument. Indeed Swatch is still good and different.\n<h3>What is your innovation strategy?</h3>\nIn his book, <a href=\"http://www.designdriveninnovation.com/index.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Design-Driven Innovation</em></a>, author Roberto Verganti outlines a framework for mapping strategy for innovation as a radical change in meanings. Check out his thinking in the diagram below:\n<a href=\"/2010/02/innovation1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1010\" title=\"innovation\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/innovation1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"463\" height=\"435\" /></a>\n\nVerganti describes the process of product innovation and competitive advantage as historically being the result of product performance enhanced by disruptive technology advances and intense analysis of users’ needs. Radical innovation, on the other hand, is more about baking the more elusive unexpected meaning into the product. People discover something unexpected that, when delivered, is somehow what people have been waiting for, just not asking for. Radical innovation is a proposal to people. Radical innovation is not about function and form, but about function and meaning– never driven by users.\n\n<strong>As your company maps its innovation strategy, this distinction of radical innovation of meanings rather than features may be noteworthy in your product development.  If you‘re not thinking about radical innovation right now, you can be sure your competitor is. Lead, follow, or get out of the way has never rang so true.</strong>\n\nPlease share your thoughts with us.', 'Radical innovation is a proposal not a product.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'radical-innovation-is-a-proposal-not-a-product', '', '', '2010-02-22 22:00:56', '2010-02-23 02:00:56', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=986', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1185, 2, '2010-04-06 15:33:58', '2010-04-06 19:33:58', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1186\" title=\"ipad\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ipad.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"292\" />\n<h2>Apple changes the game once again with the introduction of the iPad. Apple will reinvent the world of publishing and content distribution much the way it altered the distribution of music right under the noses of the lethargic record labels.  By any standard, Apple’s relentless innovations are a marvel to behold. Apple deserves mighty applause for showing the world how to bake the marketing into the thing!</h2>\nIndeed, the <a href=\"www.apple.com\" target=\"_blank\">iPad</a> is a shiny new device that nobody really needs. But that’s not the point. The iPad will find its way and become immensely useful over time. Publishers ( particularly independent content creators and app developers) now have a new platform to create for. It’s estimated that the market for apps alone is now approaching $1billion.  The game has changed once again.\n\nWill the iPad save the marginalized print media, publishing and advertising industry? Who knows, only time will tell.  I think what’s more important about the iPad is not content distribution, rather it is the interaction of our fingertips on the surface of the screen that makes this device so compelling. Our physical interaction with this device is the big idea here. It’s my believe the iPad will change the way we use computers from here on out. This is just the beginning of a new wave, the first step in a new generation of devices that will bring humans ever closer to an altered state of virtual connectivity.\n\nOf course, there are many competitive devices that will be introduced in the near term. One could argue the nature of Apple’s closed system approach to product innovation as a good or bad thing.  None of that chatter will change the fact that Apple really matters to people!  300,000 units sold in one day says it all!', 'Applause to Apple!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'applause-to-apple', '', '', '2010-04-06 15:33:58', '2010-04-06 19:33:58', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1185', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1192, 2, '2010-04-15 19:08:13', '2010-04-15 23:08:13', '<h2><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1193\" title=\"socialmedia\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/socialmedia.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"451\" height=\"392\" /></h2>\n<h2>The number one topic and trend many CMO’s are integrating into their marketing mix is the use of social media. Marketers are trying to figure out how to get their brands invited to the social conversation, so they can do more marketing. In my view, social marketing is an oxymoron.</h2>\nMarketing is not exactly a “social” activity. Often, it’s a rude interruption. Regardless, the term “social media marketing” is now firmly established in our current marketing lexicon.  Many marketers continue to struggle with determining which discipline owns the social media effort within their organizations. Is it in the domain of advertising, PR, HR, IT? Social media, for all the attention it receives, is still largely a jump ball. The new breed of folks who will drive, create and maintain marketing communication content through all the social media platforms are still unformed and mainly siloed .  Who ever owns the social media initiatives, the big job is to get the marketer embedded in the “social”, and once there, pile on the  “marketing”.  The truth is consumers are not listening. Here’s why:\n\n<strong>There is no place for marketing in social media</strong>.\n\nThink about being at a party having an enjoyable conversation with someone of like mind, then some annoying person interrupts your conversation to tell you how great they are and why you should engage with them. This is basically what most  “social marketing” really is.  People hate being interrupted.\n\nMost marketers now hire some form of  “digital” advertising agency to provide the expertise to execute marketing campaigns in the social media space.  Here’s what most marketers and their agencies do not get–digital advertising is still advertising!  Advertising is an interruption. More so within the context of our user controlled, crowd-sourcing social web.  The social web is a real live conversation. It’s not a media pipe that marketers can own to shove messages through.\n\nAs a “media business”, Facebook and Twitter (the most successful social platforms) are still not big money-making media businesses like their traditional cousins (TV, print, outdoor) have been. I’m not suggesting they won’t be highly profitable someday, but right now they’re not. The reason is simple–the social web is by invitation only and marketing messages are not welcome. All of the social media platforms continue to struggle with the design of an advertising revenue business model that will not destroy the fabric of the social conversation they have thus far enabled.\n\n<strong>There are exceptions</strong>.\n\nThis is not to say that marketing messages don’t go “viral”– many do. Unlike the social sharing platforms, YouTube  (and other video sharing portals) are now pretty close to being what traditional broadcast has always been. The only difference is the ability for people to pass the content links around. Sharing links is the social part. What makes content worthy of being shared is usually associated with an entertainment value, not necessarily the marketer’s embedded sales proposition. However, entertaining people is not enough to earn admission to the tribe.\n\n<a href=\"http://cdn.visiblemeasures.com/youtube/chromeful/popup520x400.html?video=XQcVllWpwGs\" target=\"_blank\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1194\" title=\"baby\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/baby.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"290\" /></a>The Evian babies spot above is a good example of an entertaining viral message. Because of it’s paid-placement, the spot has been viewed by nearly 2 million people on YouTube. A case could be made that it was a successful test because the marketer has decided to roll it out into traditional broadcast media. To me, this is just traditional paid advertising re-purposed. I wouldn’t call this social media marketing because it’s not a two-way conversation.\n\n<strong>How to get invited to the conversation</strong>.\n\nMarketers want to get consumers “engaged” with their brand, and the web is where most of us are these days.  You don’t get invited to the real conversation by plastering blinking banners everywhere. Social media is about contribution and sharing, not selling. It’s about being an invited participant to a tribal conversation because you have first added value to the tribe. The best way to get invited is to be trusted. Brands earn trust just like people do– keep your promises, be cool to people, add value to the tribe first, make a difference over time.  Nothing new here. A recent post from <a href=\"http://mashable.com/2010/04/08/social-media-real-world-action/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mashable%2Fbusiness+%28Mashable+%C2%BB+Business%29\" target=\"_blank\">Mashable The Social Media Guide</a> offers an interesting story on how a few brands are using social media to create real world connections. You may find that interesting as well. When your value proposition is a welcome part of the conversation, it’s  value will naturally be shared with others, When that happens you’re no  longer marketing, you’re contributing. When you\'re contributing you\'ll  be remarkable. We used to call this good \'ol word-of-mouth.\n\n<strong>How is your brand contributing to the tribe in which it seeks to  belong?</strong>', 'Could Social Marketing be an Oxymoron?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'could-social-marketing-be-an-oxymoron', '', '', '2010-04-15 19:08:13', '2010-04-15 23:08:13', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1192', 0, 'post', '', 5),
(3593, 1, '2013-03-08 22:37:05', '2013-03-08 22:37:05', '', 'Case Study #12', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'open', '', '3592-revision', '', '', '2013-03-08 22:37:05', '2013-03-08 22:37:05', '', 3592, 'http://pullinc.berchman.net/3592-revision/', 0, 'revision', '', 0),
(1203, 2, '2010-04-28 16:53:09', '2010-04-28 20:53:09', '<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Dear Marketers:</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">I\'m  much smarter than your marketing gives me credit for. </span><span style=\"color: #808080;\">I don\'t like to be sold... I don\'t care about your advertising, your free samples, your promotions, your special offers. I don\'t like to be told what\'s cool, new, improved, last-longer, smells better, tastes better, or is less filling... I don\'t care about your brand, it doesn\'t matter to me. I avoid your interruptions to my busy day when ever and where ever I can... I don\'t have time to pay attention to your sales pitch... You are white noise to me and I have tuned you out.  I know the real deal from shinola... if you want to be a part of my life, here\'s what you\'ll need to do:\n</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">be honest with me</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">keep your promises </span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">treat me with respect</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">provide me with more use value than you take from me in cash value</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">teach me better ways to grow and expand my life experience</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">help make my day-to-day easier, lighter, more relaxed and enjoyable</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">help me to experience greater connection to what\'s important to me</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Do these things for me and you will win my trust and devotion. Then I will gladly welcome you into my life, and share the value of our relationship with others who are important to me. </span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Sincerely,</span></h2>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">A. Consumer</span></h2>', 'An Open Letter to Marketers', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'an-open-letter-to-marketers', '', '', '2010-04-28 16:53:09', '2010-04-28 20:53:09', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1203', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(1210, 2, '2010-05-10 19:23:06', '2010-05-10 23:23:06', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1211\" title=\"empathy\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/empathy.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"322\" />\n<h2>You’ve all heard the timeless advice “know your customer”. Most marketers agree knowing the customer is fundamental to serving the customer. Basic stuff right? But I wonder how committed brand managers are to really knowing their customer? The very term “brand manager” implies something less that “brand builder”.\nIn my opinion, to be a brand builder requires empathy for the customer!</h2>\nEmpathy is a powerful tool for gaining richer insight into your customer’s experience at every step in their value chain. Really knowing what influences and drives customer behavior requires one walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. You can’t build empathy with your customers sitting behind the glass in a focus group, or putting them through long complex surveys.\n\n<strong>Live the Customer.</strong>\n\nDo you live the customer?  Is your marketing organization driven to deeper action toward sharing the customer experience first hand across all touch points.  Marketing organization that have an empathy-driven culture are brand builders, not brand managers. This is an important distinction, and one that has a profound effect on your brand’s competitive advantage. How you get to know your customer, from insight building and evaluative testing, to how you communicate with them in earned and paid media, at shelf, and how you engage with them in post-purchase- are all touch points for engaging customers with greater empathy. You can’t pay lip service to this idea. Empathy must be a core value of the promise your brand makes.\n\nCustomers know the real deal from shinola- especially in our current crowd-sourcing, transparent social media landscape. Customer empathy is not a social media activity or a marketing initiative to be executed on.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Empathy is a genuine desire to share experiences and build relationships as a basis for creating greater value in the marketplace. Brand builders engage with customers in real life!</span></h1>\nBrand builders seek more than customer knowledge-they engage in a deeper, more personal consumer understanding that better equips them to impact brand growth. Brand builders are on a continual quest for engagement that brings them closer to their customers in ways customers value. Through conversation and observation, brand builders walk the talk. Brand builders know empathy and respect are the keys to earning customer advocacy.\n\n<strong>New habits and routines.</strong>\n\nBuilding brand equity through greater customer empathy may require your organization develop some new habits. Developing the mindset for increasing your level of customer empathy can transform your perspective from being a passive observer of behavior to a truly engaged collaborator, from product developer to game-changing innovator.\n\nAs you consider ideas and methods for increasing your commitment to developing stronger consumer empathy in your marketing organization, it’s important to remember what you know about your customers becomes the grist for what you do for your customers.\n\nPlease share your thoughts.', 'What brand managers need to know about empathy.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'what-brand-managers-need-to-know-about-empathy', '', '', '2010-05-10 19:23:06', '2010-05-10 23:23:06', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1210', 0, 'post', '', 1);
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(1220, 2, '2010-05-26 20:38:06', '2010-05-27 00:38:06', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1221\" title=\"mantra\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/mantra.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"317\" />\n<h2>One of the communication tools many organizations embrace with great enthusiasm to gather their audiences around the answer to “why we exist?” is the tried and true mission statement. Corporate mission statements are fun to create because they are usually created in an “off site” creative session– usually in exotic places where the participants can get a nice tan or play golf in the bargain.</h2>\nFor all the attention and effort the crafting of a mission statement receives from business leaders and consultants who create them, most of them sound something like this:\n\n<strong>“Our purpose is deeply rooted in a strong commitment to professionally build long term, high impact relationships with our customers so we may leverage the existing equities within our effective product innovations to stay competitive in tomorrow’s challenging business environment”.</strong>\n\nPure gibberish!  I venture to say many of these statements were created using the Dilbert Automatic Mission Statement Generator (which apparently is no longer on line because I can’t seem to find a direct link to the site through Google search).  Nobody cares about mission statements except the people who create them. They serve no other purpose than wall décor in the lobby, or to make the creators feel better about not having a simple compelling proposition of real value to share.\n\nOne of the components of our corporate identity and brand development practice is to help organizations define who they are and why they matter to people. Inevitably the identity conversation is driven by the CEO who exclaims, “We need a strong mission statement!” Upon hearing these words, everyone in the room begins to nod their head up and down and the great work of crafting the definitive mission statement begins.  In my experience, most of these efforts are a major waste of time, energy and money. Nobody outside the group cares.  To focus stakeholders on the answer to “why we exist’, we suggest you consider something much simpler, far more powerful and useful.\n\n<strong>Create a Mantra not a Mission Statement</strong>.\n\nA mantra is defined as a word, sound or statement repeated frequently to aid in concentration of thought. In Sanskrit, mantra literally means “instrument of thought”.  In business, and particularly in marketing communications, I suggest a mantra is a highly effective organizing principal or idea easily shared by people who care. A mantra, unlike a mission statement, is a short 3-5 word statement that clearly defines why your value proposition matters to people.  A mantra is also far more useful in communicating a single differentiating idea about who the organization is and what value it provides people.\n<h1>A mantra is a powerful, energy infused chant that everyone inside and outside your organization can instantly get their heads around.</h1>\nA mantra is far more useful in creating meaning than the verbosity of a mission statement. Here are a some mantra ideas for some well-known brands:\n\n<strong>Federal Express = peace of mind</strong>\n\n<strong>Target = good design for everybody</strong>\n\n<strong>Nike = authentic athletic performance</strong>\n\n<strong>Patagonia = eco-friendly weather proof fashion</strong>\n\nYou get the idea. Nothing complex, romantic, or clever about a mantra–but it is a far more compelling and memorable way to define the meaning of who you are and why you matter to people. A good mantra can even become a customer facing tag line. “We Try Harder” is a classic mantra example from Avis.\n\nIf you are in charge of corporate or marketing communications in your organization, and your CEO wants some tweaks to your mission statement, perhaps you could suggest creating a mantra instead. Make it easy for people to know what your organization or brand stands for. If you should choose to create one, make sure it is no longer than 5 words.\n\nBy the way, our mantra here at PULL Brand Innovation is “influence by design”. In three simple words we tell you what benefit we provide your business and how we provide it. We don’t have a mission statement.', 'Forget your mission statement. Create a mantra!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'forget-your-mission-statement-create-a-mantra', '', '', '2010-05-26 20:38:06', '2010-05-27 00:38:06', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1220', 0, 'post', '', 6),
(1225, 2, '2010-06-17 18:07:51', '2010-06-17 22:07:51', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1226\" title=\"end-of-brand-arrogance\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/end-of-brand-arrogance.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"298\" />\n<h2>Marketers are now on the far side of the inflection point where pushing products people no longer want has been replaced by business models that engage people with offerings that inspire. Indeed the walls of corporate marketing dominance have come tumbling down, replaced by the powerful voice of the tribe expressed through Twitter, Facebook, and a growing host of social media sites driven by the newly empowered consumer.</h2>\nFor many marketers, these are fascinating and turbulent times indeed. We are now in a world where consumers have witnessed the bankruptcy of the largest automotive and financial brands, only to witness yet again the disintegration of BP’s brand equity and reputation over a few short weeks. The days of brand arrogance towards consumers are at long last finally over.\n\nSurely as a marketer you would agree the most fundamental and important element in branding is people. As marketers, you spend all your time, energy and money discovering ways to connect your brand with people. More than ever, the consumer landscape in which your brand lives or dies has become one gigantic slush pile.  If you don’t make this connection, you’re brand will quickly fade into this abyss.\n\n<strong>The new rules.</strong>\n\nConsumers who yearn for authenticity and demand transparency are now writing the new rules for brand engagement. To play this new game, marketers will have to learn how to close the gap between their logical, metrics obsessed corporate cultures and the emotional world of consumers. Brand building is now, more than ever, about bridging this gap through rich emotional connection.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">The driving force creating the direct link between consumers and brands is the web, whose dominance in global culture will soon eclipse traditional media. </span></h1>\nInstead of the pitch, marketers must be invited to the conversation, or start a new one people care about.  The leading brands understand this shift and focus their energies on what matters to people first, brands that don’t will be long gone.\n\n<strong>Branded communities people care about.</strong>\n\nLeading brands are built around branded communities that people care about. The communication model holding these communities together is now firmly established on the social web.  Leading brands have become a culture in their own right.  The web sites of brand leaders are no longer the digital brochures they began as a few years ago, but have become social engines for real and highly valued interactions with consumers.\n\nAstute, savvy marketers build their brand platforms around the emotional aspects of what really matters to people within the community.  Most old school brands still fuss over methods to codify their sites and the visitors to it. Worse yet, old school brands behave in a manner that suggests they own the conversation and control the formed perceptions in people’s minds. Old school brands no longer have this power or influence.\n\n<strong>The bar has been set much higher.</strong>\n\nThe key to brand building in the brave new world is now centered in rich conversation, emotional engagement, and unique intimacy with consumers.  This is what drives and inspires trust and differentiates the brand’s competitive advantage from its alternatives.  Marketers can no longer pay lip service to this idea because the bar for real consumer engagement has been set much higher. The organizations behind winning brands are focused on fostering the following:\n\n<strong>Building a culture whose purpose is social and doing good things for people.</strong>\nA good example of this would be <a href=\"http://www.weightwatchers.com\" target=\"_blank\">Weight Watchers</a>. This is a dynamic $1.5 billion brand, $200 million of these revenues come from the web, making it one of the most successful and sophisticated social media destinations with over four million unique visitors. Members own the conversation there, not the brand. It’s designed and built as a community and it operates as one. It serves people in ways that are remarkable and worth talking about with friends.\n\n<strong>Provide a meaningful product that requires emotional engagement.</strong>\nForward thinking brands like Apple, Patagonia, Target, Herman Miller, IQEA all have the marketing baked into the product. It’s not about fancy features and user benefits; it’s about emotional engagement pure and simple. The experience your product provides must go far beyond utility. People no longer seek products but emotional relationships.\n\n<strong>Every core activity is based on social connections.</strong>\nMarketing is over. Social engagement is the benchmark of sustained brand value. Every consumer touchpoint must be centered on fostering this two-way conversation. The word-of-mouth emotional engagement inherent in social media will be the driving force behind the development of new business models.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">More importantly, brands will support new levels of transparency and connection that will make online commerce the most trusted model.</span></h1>\nThe social web is tearing down the walls of arrogant marketing communication faster than most marketers can adapt to the changing reality. This is as fundamental a shift in our cultural development and evolution as Gutenberg’s printing press was to people over half a millennium ago– but the difference is in the exponential speed in which technology and culture embrace each other.\n<h2><span style=\"color: #000000;\">For brands to make this emotional connection and turn it into competitive advantage, they must first build their communities from the inside out.</span></h2>', 'The end of brand arrogance.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-end-of-brand-arrogance', '', '', '2010-06-17 18:07:51', '2010-06-17 22:07:51', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1225', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1238, 2, '2010-07-13 23:56:43', '2010-07-14 03:56:43', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1620\" title=\"aimhigher\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/aimhigher1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"442\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808000;\">To be successful at repositioning your brand, you have to create higher  meaning and aim higher. Aiming higher requires outward thinking and  learning from the marketplace.</span></h1>\nOver the past two years, we have been engaged with a variety of consumer products brands whose managers are seeking new opportunities to grow their brand’s value. In all these engagements, I have noticed a common thread among all of them – consumers no longer care about them because they have lost their compelling meaning in the consumer’s mind. One thing is certain– once a consumer’s mind is made up about a brand, it’s next to impossible to change it. The decisions facing brand mangers and marketing executives regarding how they deal with our ever-evolving market landscape usually comes down to three options:\n\n<strong>-       continue to invest in the existing brand meaning</strong>\n\n<strong>-       create a </strong><strong>sub-brand</strong>\n\n<strong>-       invent a completely new brand</strong>\n\nAll of these options have advantages and disadvantages, more so if the brand is also facing dramatic challenges in distribution. The driver underpinning all these options is change. Brands are dynamic. They have their cycles and they run their course. What’s hard for managers to grasp is when to move on.\n\nThis is particularly true if the brand was once a leader. Market success always creates size, power and a false sense of security. Over time, this creates an unrealistic view of the external reality, and a lack of urgency to correct course in maintaining relevancy among consumers.\n<h2><span style=\"color: #888888;\">Brand managers naturally become inwardly focused and they tend to miss seeing new opportunities or competitive threats. Complacency becomes the norm and the brand’s compelling meaning in the minds of consumers gets blurred and sales drop.</span></h2>\n<strong>Breathing new life into a tired brand.</strong>\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<a href=\"http://www.magners.co.uk/Home\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1242\" title=\"pear_cider_med\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/pear_cider_med.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"211\" height=\"256\" /></a>As I said earlier, repositioning your brand requires elevating its meaning into a new mind space that consumers really care about. This has very little to do with the brand’s functions and benefits. It’s about creating a new meaning, usually one that is based on highly simple yet emotive ideas.  These emotional drivers are what people care deeply about and determine their preferences and purchase behaviors.\n\nIn his book <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/REPOSITIONING-Marketing-Competition-Change-Crisis/dp/0071635599\" target=\"_blank\">“Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis” </a>legendary marketing guru Jack Trout outlines a great example of how a brand can aim higher in its positioning and create a whole new meaning for a new consumer segment.  I’ll paraphrase the story from his book:\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>An Irish cider brand commonly sold in large plastic bottles at discount prices, and consumed by vagrants on park benches successfully repositioned itself as a premium drink in the British market. Struggling with declining sales and losing distribution, the brand owners decided the dowdy cider was in need of a dramatic makeover. Here were the simple and obvious ideas in the brand’s higher repositioning:</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• reduce the alcohol content to the same as most beers</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• intensify the apple flavor</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• ditch the plastic jug and use fancy pint bottles</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• stop selling it on tap in pubs and bars</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• jack up the price</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong>• and most importantly, market the beverage to be poured over ice, whereas traditional ciders are usually served at room temperature.</strong></span>\n\nPutting the cider in bottles elevated the brand, not only because of the price increase, but also because consumers could now hold the product and its new image in their hands (much harder to do with a draft beverage). This also opened new and more premium channels of distribution. The idea of serving it over ice was based in part on the fact that many Irish pubs had poor refrigeration. New packaging and messaging encouraged consumers to pour the cider over ice.  This simple idea resonated with consumers in an evocative way which changed the meaning behind the brand, and differentiated it from other alternatives. Within a year the brand enjoyed sales increases of 260 per cent.\n\n<strong>How you can aim higher to reposition your brand.</strong>\n\nIf you are faced with reinventing your brand, the problem you face will most likely be obvious, the solution to the problem will be obvious, but many don’t trust the obvious. Somehow many people believe a good idea has to be clever, mysterious or layered in complexity. The best ideas for repositioning brands are simple. If the core idea behind your brand’s meaning isn’t simple and obvious, it won’t stand a chance in the over-crowded slush pile of a marketplace in which your brand must reside.\n\nSimple ideas are self-evident, which is why they work so well. Positioning is the art of sacrifice. A brand can only stand for one compelling, radical differentiating selling idea.  The trouble with simple ideas is they have no appeal to the imagination and are easily over-looked. We are naturally drawn to the more clever and ingenious ideas. Resist this temptation. Aim your thinking higher toward the simple, obvious differentiating idea that elevates your brand to a new meaning people really care about.\n\n<strong>What’s obvious to you about the future of your brand?</strong>', 'When repositioning your brand – aim higher!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'when-repositioning-your-brand-aim-higher', '', '', '2010-07-13 23:56:43', '2010-07-14 03:56:43', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1238', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(1282, 2, '2010-07-26 19:58:14', '2010-07-26 23:58:14', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1283\" title=\"monstromart\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/monstromart.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"285\" />\n<h2>I swiped this cartoon image from a wonderful <a href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html\" target=\"_blank\">TED Talk</a> by Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing. If you are managing a brand, do yourself a favor and take some time to watch it. It has significant implications for brand marketers.</h2>\nAs I listened to her scholarly presentation, I thought how the power of choice affects our collective work in building the value of brands. Obviously choice, and more specifically free choice, is what we Americans have built our entire cultural narrative on over the past two and a half centuries. But is our cultural inclination for more and more choice really serving us? I ask the rhetorical question because I think it’s worth thinking about.\n\nWe have abundant choice. We are surrounded by options. This is not so in other parts of the world. It is interesting to note, that in those cultures where many choices have not been previously available, the sudden available of choice causes tremendous stress and anxiety for people. People simply have a difficult time sorting things out.  In some cultures, choosing for oneself is viewed as disrespectful to the harmony and collective well-being of all concerned. For example, in Asian cultures, it’s better to have the “buy-in” of others, particularly those who are admired and respected, who participate in the choices an individual makes. For these people community trumps individualism.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">When it comes to the brandscape, our available choices in all product categories seems more and more endless. So much so that I am beginning to believe that choice is dumbing us down as a culture. </span></h1>\nDon’t get me wrong, I am not advocating less freedom to choose. I\'m simply throwing the idea out there that we might have more choice than is really good for us. At a minimum, we have more choice than what is truly useful to us. I don’t believe ubiquitous marketing online or off is helping bring more clarity to people about choice. More marketing and more choice just adds to the slush pile.\n\nWhen we think about the implications of choices and its effects on the consumer’s purchase behavior, the important question is not what choices are available, but why consumers choose what they choose.  It’s my belief that the preferences and choices consumers have for one brand or another has nothing to do with the number or quality of alternatives available. It’s simply a matter of how brands connect with shared beliefs, values and meaningful emotional connections consumers have with a particular brand\'s value proposition.\n\n<strong>If you have additional thoughts on this, please leave us a comment.</strong>', 'The Power of Choice', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-power-of-choice', '', '', '2010-07-26 19:58:14', '2010-07-26 23:58:14', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1282', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(1306, 2, '2010-08-10 21:46:04', '2010-08-11 01:46:04', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1307\" title=\"whirllyride\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/whirllyride.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"382\" />\n<h2>As a marketer you invest precious resources (time, money and talent) toward achieving your business goals–namely getting people to engage with your brand and creating more revenue! The rules have changed and many marketers are being left behind.</h2>\nWhat’s interesting (to me at least), is most of the tactics marketers employ today are no longer working like they used to, yet executives keep demanding more ROI. Surely by now we can all agree the marketing game has radically changed and so should the obsessive expectations about marketing ROI. Marketing is no longer about creating demand measured in sales, but building relationships measured in trust. The more important and transcendent ROI we need to be measuring is the quality of lasting relationships rather than the quantity of consumptive sales.\n\n<strong>At best, today’s consumers ignore marketing, worse they loathe it.</strong>\n\nThis should be no big surprise to anyone charged with building the value of a brand. Consumers are inundated with over 3,000 marketing messages a day. Despite this, marketers keep churning out advertising nobody cares about.  But the real problem isn’t that people abhor advertising, or that tons of money is wasted on marketing that is poorly targeted, ineffective, and just plain annoying. The real issue is consumers have changed!\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Consumers now have the power to determine and control what they allow into their heads.</span></h1>\nTechnology has finally shifted the power from the marketer to the consumer. Now consumers have the tools to opt-out and bar any further interruptions from marketers.  There’s no going back to the old ways of doing things. Consumers now enjoy the ability to consume only the content they want and enjoy (sans the embedded marketing messages) and frequently use these same new tools to boycott or disparage any brand they find lacking in their trust.\n\n<strong>Your marketing must add real value to people\'s life experience, or your brand will be doomed to the slush pile.</strong>\n\nThe most effective way to create relationships of trust with people is to create marketing that, in and of itself, has intrinsic value beyond the sale of anything. Over the long haul, building trust with people is much harder than creating a sale, and much easier to lose. Trust is abstract, soft and squishy, while sales are hard and definitive.  Both are measurable, but trust always trumps a quick buck.  In my view, building trust is a much more sacred activity than the telling and selling tactics that comprise the bulk of marketing today.\n\nThe cornerstone of our brand consulting work is based on the premise that consumer engagement with a brand must be anchored in experiences people really care about. How meaningful people find your value proposition, and the way in which it serves them emotionally, determines their willingness to buy your goods, and share this value with others. This means your marketing must do the following:\n\n<span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong> invite your brand\'s participation within the tribe of like minded enthusiasts.</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong>add something of value to the quality of people’s lives through knowledge sharing, entertaining or problem solving–without it involving a sale.</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong>be centered in service and the well-being of the tribe.</strong></span>\n\n<span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong>be meaningful to the right people in tangible ways.</strong></span>\n\nTo accomplish this you will need to know what is really important to people and what high level needs remain unfulfilled within the context of their larger lives. In other words, your marketing must provide a framework for people to have engaging experiences, richer connections with others, and help them to make a positive impact on the world at large.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">To put it simply–you have to share the love and meet higher emotional needs</span><span style=\"color: #888888;\">.</span></h1>\nEnlightened marketers know consumer’s basic needs are already satisfied though products and services they currently buy. Not only must your marketing be built into your product offerings, but transcend them as well.\n\n<strong>The ROI on building a more meaningful value proposition.</strong>\n\nTo be invited to the conversation your customers really care about, your marketing must first contribute something of intrinsic value to them. When you do, the formula for consumer engagement and ROI on your marketing initiatives will look something like this:\n\n<strong>A value monopoly=more loyalty=higher prices=increased profits=more opportunity to grow greater value in your brand= may the circle be unbroken.</strong>\n\nYour comments are most welcome!', 'New rules for greater consumer engagement.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'new-rules-for-greater-consumer-engagement-and-marketing-roi', '', '', '2010-08-10 21:46:04', '2010-08-11 01:46:04', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1306', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(1328, 2, '2010-08-31 20:34:36', '2010-09-01 00:34:36', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1329\" title=\"targetimage\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/target.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"277\" />\n<h2>Targeting your value proposition to the right consumer is a basic marketing function. Knowing where to aim your creativity and money is the essential first step in any productive initiative to grow the value of your brand. Yet as important as defining the right target consumer is for your value proposition, it doesn’t automatically mean that defined segment will engage with your brand. Targeting is a means, not an end.</h2>\nBrand managers are passionate about targeting! Many use a variety of techniques and methods for defining consumer segments. They know it’s better to generally get the definition of their customer mostly right. Targeting is not an exercise in precision as much as it is having a navigational aid to aim the trajectory of your marketing. It\'s worth noting your most perfect and profitable customers most likely will not comprise the largest majority of people who will make up your customer base.  So effective targeting needs to include those consumers who may be just outside the descriptive attributes of your high yield customers.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Like a game of darts, you can score points and win without a hitting the bulls eye with each throw.</span></h1>\nTo gain a comprehensive picture and an actionable perspective on defining your best target consumer profile, consider all these criteria:\n\n<strong>Demographics</strong>\nThe basic and fundamental starting point, critical for segmenting the market to identify the highest potential target groups, usually defined by sex, age, household characteristics, occupation, origin, income, and education. The most useful aspect of demographics is these attributes are concrete and without bias.\n\n<strong>Psychographics</strong>\nThese are particular psychological and attitudinal traits that can be discovered and characterized to better understand what will drive certain purchase decisions – e.g. lifestyle, interests, values, likes/dislikes, preferences, etc. How a person feels are big clues to discovering about what really matters to them. And people always buy into “meaning” rather than the perceived functional benefits.\n\n<strong>Category/Brand Attitude Drivers</strong>\nOften marketers define the attitudes of consumers of their brand by using descriptors that really reflect the basic category or “cost-of-entry” drivers that engage all people in a category regardless of any brand preferences.  The result is that there is no special attitude in the target customer profile that will be different from what all other consumers in a particular product category expect and perceive at a minimum. In effect, these are the antes to participation. Knowing what this base line is important for defining what makes your brand good and different.\n\n<strong>Category/Brand Usage Habits</strong>\nCurrent usage is critical to assess, because ultimately your marketing efforts should be designed to modify the current attitudes and change the expected behavior of target consumers, so a good category benchmark is critically important. This is often overlooked by many brand managers simply because certain habits and attitudes are assumed rather than confirmed.\n\n<strong>Behavior</strong>\nLimiting your profile definition to psychographics, attitudes and usage habits may not be actionable enough for innovative marketing initiatives. Having a clear understanding of the exact type of mindset and behavior that characterizes the target consumer is imperative. For example, assume that the psychographic “label” for your product/brand is by itself not detailed enough. Your segment profile description is more actionable if you can visualize evidence of this profile with a specific behavior.\n\n<strong>Emotional Needs</strong>\nOnce again the more compelling dimension of a target customer need is the emotional side, especially for consumers who have yet to establish a strong loyalty to brands.  In particular, one must determine precisely how the target customer currently feels about a current product, and even more critical, coming up with an insight that identifies what she/he yearns for that is the highest relational, expressive-to-self benefit that transcends product use.  Once properly defined, higher emotional needs become the basis for re-shaping your value proposition and the brand’s positioning.\n\n<strong>At the end of the day, it takes a both a macro and micro view to define your best opportunities to connect with the people who represent your best opportunity for marketing success. Having a detailed definition of a target segment is only a beginning. From there, your proposition must matter to these people in ways that the available alternatives do not meet.  Defining a group of people does not automatically translate into understanding them in ways that matter to them enough to engage with your brand.</strong>', ' Targeting your best customer is a means not an end.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'targeting-your-best-customer-is-a-means-not-an-end', '', '', '2010-08-31 20:34:36', '2010-09-01 00:34:36', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1328', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1359, 2, '2010-09-17 14:32:25', '2010-09-17 18:32:25', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1360\" title=\"focusgroup\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/focusgroup.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"290\" />\n<h2>Focus groups have been the go-to method many marketers employ to gain insight on how certain people think, feel and behave. In our social media connected world, are focus groups an effective forum for driving creativity and innovation in brand development and marketing?</h2>\nHenry Ford said “if I gave people what they said they wanted, I would have made a faster horse”.  Mr. Ford instinctively knew then what still holds true about people today­­–people simply don’t know what they want, or what form an innovative idea should come in to solve a problem they don’t yet know they have. Nobody needed a car. Yet once realized, the automobile was arguably the most significant game changing product innovation of the last century.\n\nA more contemporary version of this example is alive and well at Apple. Apple never conducts focus group research to guide their product innovations or drive their marketing. Innovation isn’t about giving people what they say they want. Asking people want they want or need is not a very useful tactic in driving new ideas for innovation. Yet, many marketers continue to rely on this artificial “laboratory” research to gain insights into what specific segments of people might be thinking about, what products they may use, and why they favor one thing over another.  Rarely will focus group research shed any useful light on the deeper needs people have that are, as yet, unrealized in their minds. If we assume this to be true, why do focus group research at all?\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">“ I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they rely too much on research, like a drunkard uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination”.\n– David Ogilvy</span></h1>\n<strong>What do you need to know?</strong>\nInstead of asking consumers contrived questions to reveal their preferences or their intent to purchase, as marketers, we need to discover what truly matters to people. To break through the slush pile of our crowded marketplace, your marketing must be perceived as genuinely valuable and useful to the people you’re hoping to win over. Beyond product features and use benefits, if you want to engage consumers today, your marketing (not just your product) must improve (in tangible ways) the condition of people’s lives.\n\n<strong>Focus groups have become marketers default button.</strong>\nI have witnessed too many times how quickly marketers jump into focus group research to learn some information they think they don’t have. ( I am as guilty as anyone else in this regard) Truth is, there’s a ton of research out there. Combine this available information with solid intuition, and the collective (paid for) experience already within your organization or industry, and you can find all the information you need to form and support a compelling marketing or brand positioning idea.\n\n<strong>Focus groups are artificial settings.</strong>\nPeople live real lives. Gathering a group of people into an artificial environment and probing them with over simplified questions only creates artificial results. Plus people usually don’t know what they don\'t know.  It’s very difficult to get useful insight from people who are not in their natural environment.  And there are always those participants whose energy can dominate or influence the perspectives and opinions of others in the group. The results in this artificial setting are almost always biased.\n\n<strong>A focus group is not quality time with consumers.</strong>\nThe reason focus groups are so commonly used is because they are easy and cheap to execute. However spending an hour with groups of 6-8 people in a room can hardly be called quality time.  Chances are the thoughts going through participant’s heads during the session go something like this:\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>I don\'t like the guy next to me… I really don’t care about this product, but they’re paying me $75…I don\'t feel comfortable sharing my real opinion in a group…this is boring!\n</em></span></h2>\n<strong>Get out in the real world and be with people.</strong>\nInstead of sitting behind the glass, get out into the real world.  Be everywhere your tribe is gathering online and off, be where they do their laundry, shop, eat, play, relax. Spend quality time with them in real-life settings.  Learn how your target customer not only uses your products, but how they live in their real lives. Much of what we humans think about is unconscious, and our emotions are intertwined with our reasoning. It comes down to understanding basic human nature, and what higher level emotional needs are currently unmet within the context of your target consumer’s overall life.\n\n<strong>Put your efforts toward spending quality time with real people in one-on-one natural settings. Through these interactions, you’ll gain far richer consumer insights that will directly lead to more relevant, compelling, meaningful and valuable brand building strategies.</strong>', 'Are focus groups really that useful in driving brand innovation?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'are-focus-groups-really-that-useful-in-driving-brand-innovation', '', '', '2010-09-17 14:32:25', '2010-09-17 18:32:25', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1359', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(1418, 2, '2010-09-28 14:10:02', '2010-09-28 18:10:02', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1419\" title=\"greatValue_2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/greatValue_2.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"387\" />\n<h2>Consumers are definitely giving retailers permission to grow their private brands.  The real question is will retailers grow private brand value or simply grow more private labels?  In the age of mega-private brands, this trend is giving national CPG brand managers some added anxiety these days.  It also presents some relationship challenges for retailers to grow the value trusted CPG brands bring to their customers.</h2>\nAccording to a report published this past year by consulting firm <a href=\"http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Deloitte</em></a>, consumer’s perceptions and attitudes toward private brands are changing significantly; and offers insight into the notion that spending less for private brands doesn’t mean consumers are settling for less from private brands. According to the report, only one-third of the respondents endorsed the statement “ I often feel that I am sacrificing when I purchase a store brand instead of a national brand”. This is no surprise when one stops to think that many consumers today believe that store brands and national brand are essentially made of the same stuff. According to the report, 80 percent believe the statement “most store brands are manufactured by the national brands”.\n\nThe report further suggests that the current economic climate has made consumers more discerning about the brands they prefer. 75 percent of respondents agreed “ these economic times have made me more aware of which brands I care about and which ones are less important to me”.\n\n<strong>Who’s winning?</strong>\nSeemingly one could easily conclude that private brands are beginning to win the battle of the brands through market share gains over the national brands. What’s accelerating this trend is private store brands are beginning to employ more strategic product innovation and the brand management discipline commonly employed by big national CPG brands. Consumers now believe there is little difference in quality or value between the two alternatives. Worse, many consumers believe they’re paying for the “advertising” of the higher priced national brands. Here are some more interesting highlights from the report:\n\n<strong> <em>Between 2006 and 2009, private brand market share rose across 74 percent of products in the personal care, household goods and food and beverage categories in the United States. </em></strong>\n\n<strong> <em>In 2009, store brands represented nearly 18 percent of CPG spending and over 23 percent of CPG products sold.</em></strong>\n\n<strong><em>Private labels represent 20 percent of grocery store and 18 percent of supercenter sales. </em></strong>\n\n<strong><em>Store brand products were 31 percent cheaper across product categories than their national brand counterparts.</em></strong>\n\n<strong><em>Store brands are not just a recession related phenomenon – U.S. store brand sales continue to grow over the long run despite improving economic conditions.</em></strong>\n\n<strong>Retailers are now taking product and brand building innovation to heart.</strong>\nWhat’s driving innovation within private brand-driven retailers is fairly simple–they can be far more nimble than national CPG brands. Developing a private brand can be far more efficient and at a much faster pace.  Private brands don’t have to make the long-term capital investments in product development, manufacturing and rigorous BASES testing and other quantitative research methods to gain the assurance that their value proposition is relevant and the long-term investment warranted. Private brands have the real-time retail environment to test brand concepts with far less risk, and they receive immediate feedback because their customer’s are voting with their dollars right in the store!\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1421\" title=\"variety-great-value-\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/variety-great-value-.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"272\" />\n\nWalmart’s <a href=\"http://walmartstores.com/pressroom/news/9028.aspx\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Great Value</em></a> brand is a case in point on being nimble and innovative in near real-time. Covering well over 100 product categories, and launched in 2009, the Great Value brand continues to adapt and transform itself much faster than CPG brands of similar scale.  The Great Value private brand was so expansive and compelling at shelf, customers began to believe they were being driven to favor the value brand over national brand alternatives. At the risk of alienating customers and CPG suppliers, Walmart correctly and quickly balanced their “brand block” private brand presentation in a fashion that did not  obscure the shelf presence of national brands–thus the power of a <a href=\"http://www.storebrandsdecisions.com/news/2010/09/21/walmart-shifts-private-label-strategy-\" target=\"_blank\">mega-private brand</a>.\n\n<strong>Private brands will lead the way.</strong>\nIt’s probably safe to conclude the next generation of super successful brands will not come from the name brands, but from more private brand-focused retailers. Consumers seeking to save some money in tough times may be fueling the current growth in private brands, however the cat is out of the bag, and progressive retailers will continue to innovate and leverage to the fullest advantage their immediate access to their customers.<em> </em>\n\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Editors Note: I gathered much of the research for this post from the blog: <a href=\"http://mypbrand.com/\" target=\"_blank\">My Private Brand</a>. I encourage you check the site out and subscribe to the feed. It offers useful insights into the emerging trends surrounding the global growth and advancement of Private Brands.</em></span>', 'Private Brands vs. Name Brands: Who\'s winning the consumer\'s loyalty?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'private-brands-vs-name-brands-whos-winning-the-consumers-loyalty', '', '', '2010-09-28 14:10:02', '2010-09-28 18:10:02', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1418', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(3592, 1, '2013-03-08 22:37:41', '2013-03-08 22:37:41', '&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\">Consumer Packaged Goods\r\n</span><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Vitimans and Dietary Supplements</span>\r\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"> JavaJamu LLC</span>\r\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"> Strategic Brand Development and Design</span>\r\n<h1><!-- p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } --> <span style=\"color: #b8860b;\">We collaborated with this start-up marketer to create a new brand that reveals a 1000-year-old secret for health and beauty to consumers in the US and Canada.</span></h1>\r\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2222\" title=\"jamulife-id\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/jamulife-id.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"367\" /></span></h2>\r\nTwo successful entrepreneurs in specialty health food retailing had the big idea of creating a line of health and beauty products based on ancient herbal formulas and remedies from Java. These products are known throughout Indonesia simply as “jamu”. With limited resources for marketing, they asked us to help them create a unique brand from scratch, and develop a compelling value proposition to specialty food and dietary supplement distributors in the US and Canada.\r\n\r\nLike most start-ups, the biggest challenge is always money for marketing. Add to that the competitive nature of the specialty health food retail channel, these creative entrepreneurs recognized they had one shot to build a brand story that was uniquely positioned and differentiated from a variety of competitive products. They were committed to building a strong brand right form the start!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2169\" title=\"JamuPackaging\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/JamuPackaging1.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"351\" />\r\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2170\" title=\"Jamulife.catalog\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamulife.catalog1.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"243\" />\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAlways up for the challenge of creating a brand from scratch, we began by learned everything we could about the restorative powers of all the herbal formulas that comprise what is known as “jamu”. We learned that consumers who regularly shop in independent health food stores know a good deal about alternative remedies for health and well being, and they are open-minded when learning about new methods and products they believe will add value to their lives. We recommended that marketing and communications target this influential consumer segment.\r\n<h3>Jamu has a well-documented thousand-year tradition of enhancing a sense of well being. We crafted the value proposition and the brand positioning as “revealing this 1000 year-old secret for health and beauty” as a means to experience optimum health aligned to our busy lifestyles.</h3>\r\n<h2><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2213\" title=\"Jamu-theme-2\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamu-theme-2.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"343\" /></h2>\r\n<h2><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2219\" title=\"Jamu-theme-3\" alt=\"\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamu-theme-3.jpg\" width=\"515\" height=\"345\" /></h2>\r\nWorking with the client partners, we developed the trade name, designed the brand identity, taglines, brand voice and trade dress for all retail packaging, point of sale displays, sales sheets for individual products, and brand guidelines for developing retail packaging and messaging for future line extensions in a variety of product categories. We identified likely opportunities for future brand growth such as energy food bars, energy drinks and skin care products. These concepts were developed and presented in a pitch document to support sales presentations to potential distributors who service independent retailers of these products.\r\n\r\n<strong>Business Outcome</strong>\r\n<strong> The company was successful securing distribution agreements enabling the launch of the first generation JamuLife dietary supplement product line to independent health food retailers in several major cities in the US. For our client, it marked the beginning of their business journey. For us, it\'s all in a day\'s work.</strong>', 'Case Study: JamuLife Brand Development', '', 'publish', 'open', 'closed', '', 'jamulife', '', '', '2013-03-13 18:12:10', '2013-03-13 18:12:10', '', 99, 'http://pullinc.berchman.net/?page_id=3592', 12, 'page', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `pull_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(1433, 2, '2010-10-04 21:13:41', '2010-10-05 01:13:41', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1444\" title=\"mcdonalds 2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/mcdonalds-21.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"183\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">To the degree your brand meets the expectation of your customers, will define the true value by which your brand is measured.</span></h1>\nI absolutely love these fast food images from a blog called <a href=\"http://alphaila.com/articles/?p=452 \" target=\"_blank\">Alphaila</a>. (There are more if you have the time to visit.) They are perfect for illustrating the false promises brands can make to their audience/customers.  Now I am not picking on these fast food brands, I want to know how anyone continues to believe they will receive the product as promised, when the reality is so starkly different. Especially when people are in the store consuming the sorry reality right in front of a large poster beautifully illustrating the fantasy. Don’t these fast food companies realize that what they promise is a big fat lie?\n\nPromises matter to people. If you don’t deliver what you promise to people, in time, you won’t matter to them. This is true in every product category. This is true in all walks of life.  More importantly, in our social media crazed world, vetting out broken promises made to consumers has instant ramifications to the credibility and trajectory of your brand’s perceived value.\n\nAdvertising images make implicit promises. When the product doesn’t match up to the advertised promise, isn’t that like cheating, or on some level, stealing from people’s hopes? Perhaps most advertising (in any form) is useless crap. Maybe brands can get away with this sort of thing because nobody is really paying attention anyway. But it’s worth thinking about… sh*t or shinola.\n\n<strong>Like these brutally honest images, ask yourself if there is some part of your marketing and visual messaging that over-promises and under-delivers. In what ways could your marketing imagery be breeding mistrust and degrading your brand’s value? </strong>\n\n<strong>Think about it.</strong>\n\n<strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1435\" title=\"bigmac 1\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/bigmac-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"464\" height=\"276\" /></strong>\n\n<strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1436\" title=\"burgerking\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/burgerking.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"464\" height=\"252\" /></strong>\n\n<strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1447\" title=\"jacktacos\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/jacktacos1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"286\" />\n</strong>\n\n<strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1441\" title=\"tacobell\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/tacobell1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"464\" height=\"311\" />\n</strong>\n\n<strong>\n</strong>', 'Promises Matter!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'promises-matter', '', '', '2010-10-04 21:13:41', '2010-10-05 01:13:41', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1433', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1460, 2, '2010-10-08 15:01:47', '2010-10-08 19:01:47', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1461\" title=\"GAP\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/GAP.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"136\" />\n<h2>Rarely do I rant about dumb things marketers do. What do I know about anything? I wasn’t there to see or hear first hand the decisions people make about their brand building initiatives. The last time I got on this soapbox was the <a href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/when-change-is-not-good/\" target=\"_blank\">Tropicana</a> packaging fiasco.  I can\'t restrain myself from commenting on what appears to be another branding blunder–this time from the GAP!</h2>\nFor whatever purpose, the GAP has designed a new logo? This is another unbelievable example of mindless corporate rubbish. What on earth, were these smart minds thinking? As if changing logos was a solution to their profound problems. For nearly a decade, same store sales for the GAP brand have been declining compared to its sibling brands Banana Republic and Old Navy. GAP is an irrelevant brand that stands for nothing but cheap. With a brand new spanking logo– designed, yet again, by a fancy-pants branding and design firm– I\'m sure GAP will be on its way to market dominance very soon.\n<h1>Quite simply, the GAP is a badly positioned brand in a house of brands  that nobody (especially the target millenials) cares about. GAP has much more  serious issues than its logo.</h1>\nMy advice to the branding firm: Take your money fellas! You’ve done nothing to serve your client’s future. This is one gig you shouldn’t hurry into a case study. No amount of money will compensate for what you have so short-sightedly done to your reputation. For some amusing reading, check out the comment thread from <a href=\"http://adage.com/article?article_id=146326\" target=\"_blank\">Ad Age</a>. Here\'s the rationale (from the article) for this turd in a punch bowl:\n\n<em><strong>Louise Callagy, a Gap spokeswoman, told Ad Age that the brand is changing and the company wanted a new logo to reflect that. \"For the last two years we\'ve been working on evolving the brand identity for Gap,\" she said. \"[The new logo] is more contemporary and current and honors the heritage of the Gap brand with the blue box but takes it forward.\"</strong></em>\n\nPure gibberish! This kind of stuff devalues the whole idea that branding is a valuable marketing discipline. I hope there are smarter minds at GAP who will prevail before the real money gets spent implementing this generic, worse than run-of-the-mill branding effort.\n<h2>That\'s my 2 cents. Leave me yours as a comment.</h2>', 'Fall into the Gap of Insanity!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'fall-into-the-gap-of-insanity', '', '', '2010-10-08 15:01:47', '2010-10-08 19:01:47', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1460', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(1482, 2, '2010-10-23 16:51:32', '2010-10-23 20:51:32', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1483\" title=\"sprigeologo\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sprigeoID.final_.shadow-2.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"361\" height=\"319\" />\n<h2>Over the past weeks there has been a lot of media coverage on bullying at school. From elementary schools, highs school, even colleges–bullying has become a dominant issue in many people’s minds–sadly with devastating consequences. With the media coverage in full swing, we have been working quietly with a small team of dedicated people whose mission it is to eliminate bullying all together!  The tool they have created to accomplish this important mission is Sprigeo!\n<img class=\"size-full wp-image-1488 alignnone\" title=\"sprigeo poster\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Sprigeo.bannerlorez1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"258\" /></h2>\nSprigeo is an online resource tool for middle school kids, their parents and school administrators to report and respond to incidents of bullying all across America. Srigeo is the brainchild of noted author, professor, education consultant and thought leader <a href=\"http://www.middleschoolyears.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Joe Bruzzese.</a> Joe is a leading authority on the middle school years. His consulting firm, Thinking Forward, works with kids, parents, middle school principals and administrators, to make middle school education an enriching experience for everyone. And if you’re a parent of a middle school age kid, you know how challenging those years can be. I remember vividly those delicate years when my own kids where in middle school. Bullying is a behavioral disease in our schools–particularly in middle school.\n\nWhen it came time to think hard about how best to position and build an identity around this innovative online reporting system, Joe and his team asked PULL for strategic and creative guidance.  We were eager to play a role in a project that will really make a difference for people!  It all started with a funny name.\n\n<strong>Sprigeo sure is a funny name.\n</strong>Joe and his team originally coined the name “sprigeo”.  In the beginning. they were not completely confident about this name and asked our advice. Naturally when you see a perfect solution before you, you don’t question the good fortune of an intriguing and memorable coined name like Sprigeo.  A larger organization with the money to spend would have focused-grouped this to death. We advised against wasting time and their money on that kind of research.<a href=\"/2010/10/sprigeoman2.gif\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1496\" title=\"sprigeoman\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sprigeoman2.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"279\" /></a>\n\nWhat we were most fascinated with was how could we build a compelling meaning into this abstract name that would deeply resonate with the main audience–12 year old kids who would be courageous enough to anonymously report incidents of bullying at their school by using the Srigeo reporting website. The brand’s visual identity and core messaging you see displayed here is the result of our collaboration.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Simple, quirky, non-threatening but serious, Sprigeo’s positioning of “be safe” became the mantra for designing the brand identity system. </span></h1>\nThe “sprigeo guy” was designed to be an important visual element for creating a safety character kids could relate to in ways that would enhance their belief that Sprigeo is a safe venue looking out for them. And in many cases, Sprigeo would be the only lifeline many kids would have to help them feel safer at school. With our client’s permission, we are delighted to introduce you to Sprigeo, and what we believe will have a profound and positive effect on shifting the behaviors of kids all across America, making school a much safer place for everyone.', 'Building a brand to stop bullying in school!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'building-a-brand-to-stop-bullying-in-school', '', '', '2010-10-23 16:51:32', '2010-10-23 20:51:32', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1482', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1530, 2, '2010-11-16 18:25:44', '2010-11-16 22:25:44', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1542\" title=\"cashcow\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cashcow1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"295\" />\n<h2>New and fresh ideas usually come from an awareness of new opportunities in the marketplace. It can be challenging for iconic brands to take advantage of new opportunity and remain relevant to people. Iconic brands tend to lose their relevance long before the cash they generate begins to dry up. Once they lose their luster, iconic cash cow brands are nearly impossible to change.</h2>\nConsider the fate of these iconic brands that held on to their heritage at the expense of innovating a bigger future:\n\n<strong>Sears:</strong> once the dominant leader in the mail order business, now an “also-ran” against big box retailers. Their relevance lost by disruptive technologies. The very principles of “mail order” that made Sears a great iconic brand, were reinvented by Amazon. The rest is history.\n\n<strong>Newsweek:</strong> Once the biggest news magazine by circulation in America. Now diminished by lost circulation and advertising revenue, it has finally been sold to a digitally savvy internet competitor.\n\n<strong>Chevrolet:</strong> No brand was more iconic and embedded into the fabric of 20th century American culture. The problem is we are now in the 21st century and the game has changed. Chevy’s current advertising manta “runs deep” is a gallant attempt to reinvent itself by looking to the past. Good luck with that one. Most people seem to be paying more attention to forward-thinking Hyundai these days.\n\n<strong>Xerox:</strong> It invented laser printing but held tightly to it’s dominant document company positioning while HP exploited the technology and became the industry leader.\n\n<strong>Kodak</strong>: It invented digital photography, but cemented itself into it’s dying film business.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">The most successful companies are the ones who have no problem killing their cash cow brands.</span></h1>\nApple has done this over and over again. Killing cash cow product brands has been the hallmark of every Apple product innovation since the Macintosh. True enough, Apple is an easy benchmark to make the point, yet there are other marketers who routinely reinvent, reposition and realign their brand innovations at the expense of their most sacred cash cow brands.\n\nGillette is another great example–first killing its highly successful single-edge razor blades in favor of the TRAC II, then killing that with another innovation– the adjustable twin blade Atra brand.\n\nJaguar has reinvented itself–emerged from the chrome and glass shackles of the Ford culture– completely re-styling its entire product line and successfully leveraging the most transcendent attributes of it’s long heritage. But it was an expensive transition for the new owners.\n\n<strong>What gets you there won’t keep you there.</strong>\nThe marketplace moves too rapidly to rely on the momentum of scale and history. There is simply too much choice today.  Evolving the meaning of an iconic brand is a tricky business. Along the way it’s easy to blur the brand’s identity and it’s value proposition attempting to fit what worked in the past into what’s going on today. Managers of iconic brands are naturally boxed in by the heritage the brand represents in people’s minds.  When heritage represents “old and tired”,  it’s nearly impossible to change that perception in people’s minds.\n\n<strong>To change or not to change–that is the question.</strong>\nShould every iconic brand be forced to change with the times?  Not exactly. White Castle Hamburgers has been around since the 1920’s. Their identity, store décor and menu have been pretty much the same since the beginning. White Castle is indeed an iconic brand, yet it is far from old and tired. As the burger category evolved around them, White Castle kept doing what they do best. The result–next to McDonald’s, they have the highest sales per store unit in the category.  Why is this? The answer may lie in the fact that White Castle did not pursue growth for its own sake. White Castle kept its focus on serving its customers in ways customers have highly valued for over 70 years– growth was not the driver of brand value.\n\n<strong>Making the transition from a dying market to an emerging one.</strong>\nWhen an iconic brand is “locked in” by it’s heritage, brand owners and managers may find themselves in a similar fix as the aforementioned Sears-its iconic heritage blurred by the “softer side of Sears” and now the brand is limping into the sunset meaning very little to anyone. Sears could well have leveraged its original mail-order heritage to the online world and become the dominant online retailer. Of course, that prize went to Amazon.\n\nAccording to Marty Neumeier, author of <a href=\"http://www.amazon.com/Zag-Number-Strategy-High-Performance-Brands/dp/0321426770\" target=\"_blank\">ZAG</a>, iconic brands make the leap to new relevance only when they focus on the two-stage rocket strategy–essentially leveraging the cash generating strength of the iconic brand to fuel the innovation of a new brand. Killing the cash cow, as the second stage rocket of the new brand takes full advantage of the momentum of the first, can take a long time–certainly longer than a quarter or two.\n\n<strong>Brand managers with enlighted management and the intestinal fortitude to stay the course, can leverage their iconic brands and pave the way for newer and more relevant expressions of the original value that people continue to care about. With all the revenue pressures facing marketers today, the difficulty is knowing when to fire the second stage rocket before the fuel of the first is at last spent.</strong>\n\nYour comments are encouraged!', 'Killing a sacred cash cow to reposition iconic brands.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'killing-a-sacred-cash-cow-to-reposition-iconic-brands', '', '', '2010-11-16 18:25:44', '2010-11-16 22:25:44', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1530', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1558, 2, '2010-12-07 23:51:21', '2010-12-08 03:51:21', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1559\" title=\"blogchristmascard\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/blogchristmascard.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"258\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">On behalf of the PULL Brand Innovation Team, we wish our clients, partners, colleagues, and loyal readers a joyous Holiday Season, and best wishes for a prosperous New Year!</span></h1>', 'Happy Holidays!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'happy-holidays', '', '', '2010-12-07 23:51:21', '2010-12-08 03:51:21', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1558', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1586, 2, '2010-12-31 17:27:49', '2010-12-31 21:27:49', '<h1 style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In many conversations with my client colleagues over the past year, hands down, the most important brand building challenges they say they’ll face in the coming year will be vision, innovation, and alignment.</span></h1>\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-2112 aligncenter\" title=\"focus\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/focus1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"309\" height=\"358\" /></span>No doubt, the stakes for marketplace success are growing ever higher for marketers. Consumers have more choice than their mind’s can process. Against the backdrop of a dicey economy, over-crowded retail channels, and price pressure driving nearly every decision these days, marketers are neck deep and choking on more short-term marketing tactics to sell more stuff.\n\nFew are granted the luxury of stepping back and making big picture assessments with clarity and confidence that the future they are busy creating will matter to anyone by time they get there. Brand building is like riding a bullet train these days. It’s easy to feel like your being left behind. Regardless, I believe it’s a good idea to be looking up and out right now.\n\nIn listening to my client colleague’s conversations, here’s my take on what may be the most important areas of focus for many marketing decision-makers and brand managers to pursue their best opportunities this coming year.\n<h1>Vision</h1>\nThe global economic reset will continue to slowly shake itself out. As a result, more brand managers (with enlightened management) will recognize the value of crafting a bigger, more compelling vision for their brand’s future. A future that will be rich in opportunity for those brands that truly know who they are, what they represent, where they’re going from here, and why they will matter to people.  Vision is everything! Everything that ever was, is now, or ever will be, begins with a compelling vision.\n<h3>How clear is your vision looking out onto the horizon of opportunity right now?</h3>\n<em> </em>\n<h1>Innovation</h1>\nThe marketplace is a vast slush pile– with more slush added daily. The brands that will be rewarded with existence will be the ones that continue to innovate better ways to be of value and serve people. This is where the real game is played.  Innovations, both incremental and disruptive, are happening at light speed in every product and service category. There’s simply no room left anymore for me-too anything. More marketers will be putting their creative energies into innovating highly valued “meanings” for their offerings, rather than adding more competitive features and benefits– and in the process, create whole new markets.\n<h3><strong>Where do you see your best opportunity to change the game?</strong></h3>\n<h1>Alignment</h1>\nBy now, most consumers are online. Increasingly, paid media messaging is less about awareness and more about engagement online. To genuinely connect with people there, the web has ever-evolving rules of engagement. Rule number one is you can’t control the message. Rule number two is you have to be invited. It will be a continuing challenge for brand managers to align their brand vision and product innovations to stay relevant and highly valued by people. It is an  understatement to say the social web is a sea change of profound magnitude for marketers. Brands must provide intrinsic value to people first, and the social web is the perfect venue for doing this. Brand managers who successfully connect the dots and add to the collective good in their customer’s lives will dominate. Being authentic, honest, and trustworthy–is how the marketing gets baked in these days. Paraphrasing Seth Godin, “ideas have to ship” for your value to matter to people.\n<h3>How aligned is the quality of your presence to your vision for a bigger future?</h3>\nOf course, brand managers will continue to experience much more pressure to deliver on short-term results. Unfortunately, that’s not changing. This will suck up their creative bandwidth that otherwise might be directed to creating ideas that enable new demand rather than chasing what’s already out there.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Enlightened marketers will focus more on creating, rather than competing for what has already been created.</span></h1>\nAs the “new normal” settles in, and the consumer economy begins to warm up a little in the coming year, marketers have a perfect opportunity to renew their vision, bring new innovations of meaning to the marketplace, and align the quality of their presence in the minds of highly devoted people.\n\n<strong>How important is vision, innovation and alignment creating influence and growth to your business?\n</strong>', 'Three things enlightened marketers will focus on!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'three-things-brand-marketers-will-focus-on-in-2011', '', '', '2010-12-31 17:27:49', '2010-12-31 21:27:49', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1586', 0, 'post', '', 8),
(1637, 2, '2011-01-18 21:01:57', '2011-01-19 01:01:57', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1638\" title=\"starbucks identity\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/starbucks.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"317\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In an era of crowd sourcing and online $100 logo design, the specialized skills and talents involved in identity design are seemingly being marginalized even further. Are big iconic brands moving in that direction?</span></h1>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #333333;\">“If, in the business of communication, image is king, the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown”. – Paul Rand</span></h2>\nThroughout the brand strategy and marketing blogosphere, there’s been a lot of buzz and chatter about the recent logo / identity changes Starbuck’s has implemented to help it move closer to its next incarnation. A few months back, the Gap made a similar move with less favorable reviews.\n\nIn both these instances, it’s pretty clear people in our business continue to care about these changes. The question is–do customers care? Do they really care what your logo looks like?  Does it matter that much to your marketing success?\n\nIn my view big brand identity changes of any kind illustrates a couple of interesting points. Mainly that people pay attention to the marketing shifts brands they care about undertake. Secondly, there appears to be a huge gap in people\'s understanding of the difference between a trademark and a brand.  They are not one and the same. And finally, the critical importance of brand management to align all customer facing communication (of which trademarks are a primary component) to evolving strategic imperatives that effect business performance in the future. The stylistic aspects of these types of changes are less important than the potential to diminish brand meaning in the process.\n\n<strong>Generic corporate and brand identity: a growing trend?</strong>\n\nThroughout my marketing career, the heart of my work has always been centered in the discipline of corporate and brand identity design. Certainly it has been in my own interest to care passionately about the value that visual design adds to building a strong identity in the marketplace. Lately, I’m not so sure visual design, and the management of visual brand assets, really matters to anyone but designers. In an era of ubiquitous online $100 logo design, the specialized skills and talents involved in identity design are seemingly being marginalized even further. And now big iconic brands seem to be moving in that direction.\n\nAfter the Gap’s generic logo appeared, I was even less confident that marketers value the specialized expertise involved in creating trademarks that reflect, enhance and enable positive business outcomes. I began to wonder if there is a growing trend these days for brand marketers to devalue their brands by being represented in the marketplace by generic trademarks. After all, the sole purpose of a trademark is to provide differentiation between brands.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1639\" title=\"ups-logo-redesign\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ups-logo-redesign.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"430\" height=\"150\" />\n\nThinking back on it, I remember how sad I was to see <a href=\"http://www.logodesignlove.com/all-about-paul-rand\" target=\"_blank\">Paul Rand’s</a> elegant package symbol for United Parcel Service be cast away in favor of a generic shield with a monogram letterform– so commonly delivered by the big branding consultancies today. Identity designers like Rand and his contemporaries (Saul Bass, Walter Landor, John Massey, Ivan Chermayeff, and the early founders of Pentagram) represent a school of thought few clients embrace these days.  Identity design today seems to be more of a crowd sourced decorative act rather than a strategic business imperative.\n\n<strong>Corporate brand identities evolve over time</strong>.\n\nBusiness, markets, products, management, cultural trends all change over time. Likewise, the corporate or brand identity evolves in a similar path along with the organization it represents. Starbucks is just one of hundreds of iconic brands whose identity has evolved with the pace of organizational and cultural change. There is nothing new here.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1640\" title=\"pepsi logo evolution\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pepsi.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"290\" />\n\nThe decision to drop the associated typography from the Starbucks symbol is one that many iconic brands have made (Nike, Apple, McDonald\'s quickly come to mind). Whether this supports the strategic imperatives facing Starbucks’ next level of growth remains to be seen. But the visual design tactic is hardly without precedent.\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What’s important are the associations people have with a logo–not the logo itself.</span></h1>\nA logo (trademark and its associated visual language) is the symbolic representation of a whole narrative story built into an organization over time. Brand equity is the result of successfully delivering on the promise your brand represents in the hearts and minds of consumers. Indeed, there are some time-tested design guidelines all enduring trademarks share, but that is not what enables them to endure. What makes a logo endure (and be cared about) is not the design, but the promise it represents.\n\nAt the end of the day, consumers (and all other stakeholders) care about the promise delivered. In time, people will accept whatever symbolic form the brand\'s promise represents. In a me-too marketplace, the importance of developing and managing a highly differentiated brand identity is more critical than ever.  It’s still my passionate belief that the specialized discipline of corporate and brand identity design brings tremendous value to how the promise people care about is best represented and managed.\n\n<strong>Your comments are most welcome.</strong>', 'Who cares what your logo looks like?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'who-cares-what-your-logo-looks-like', '', '', '2011-01-18 21:01:57', '2011-01-19 01:01:57', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1637', 0, 'post', '', 10),
(1669, 2, '2011-01-23 15:09:03', '2011-01-23 19:09:03', '<a href=\"http://www.storyofstuff.com/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1670\" title=\"The story of stuff\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/stuff.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"269\" /></a>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Every marketing executive, brand manager, marketing consultant, industrial designer, package designer and manufacturing engineer should sit down for 20 minutes and learn about the Story of Stuff.</span></h1>\nI came across this sobering <a href=\"http://www.storyofstuff.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Story of Stuff</a> video a few months back. It had a profound effect on me. I can’t imagine that it will not have a likewise effect on you. Being that the sole purpose of my / our profession is to figure out ways to sell more stuff, I began to realize the truth we all face– mainly our global consumer culture may be killing at an exponential rate the very system required for our survival. Perhaps it might be a good idea for all of us with a vested interest in the continued dominance of a sustainable consumer-based economy to think deeply about what we are really doing.\n\n<strong>Your comments welcome.</strong>', 'The Story of Stuff Revisited.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-story-of-stuff-revisited', '', '', '2011-01-23 15:09:03', '2011-01-23 19:09:03', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1669', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(1680, 4, '2011-01-27 17:53:36', '2011-01-27 21:53:36', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1681\" title=\"eatgood\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/eatgood.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"471\" height=\"312\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">If you are a food and beverage marketer, in all likelihood, a portion of your target consumer has joined the rapidly growing ranks of health conscious adults in the United States.</span></h1>\nWhat are consumers thinking about when it’s time to eat? In this information-era, how do consumers deal with the plethora of food-related product information and brand messaging? If consumers are tuning out the marketing, how does health benefit messaging get in? How well does your brand and product messaging serve consumer food choices, purchases, and consumption? Recent BrandIQ consumer behavior studies have generated some provocative answers to these fundamental questions.\n\nIf you are a food and beverage marketer, in all likelihood, a growing portion of your target consumer has joined the ranks of health conscious adults in the United States. We’ve learned that a majority of health conscious adults are actively managing their health through the food choices they make. These consumers are consciously working to prevent, control and manage a range of ailments from acne, diabetes and heart disease through diet. This is having a profound effect and the food choices they make.\n\nBrandIQ research shows this growing consumer segment equate food choice as health management, whether the issue is a doctor’s diagnosis, or their well-being in general. Through nationally representative sampling backed by forward-thinking, cutting-edge statistical analysis, we charted what really matters most to health conscious consumers:\n<h2>Among health conscious adults, when it comes to food and beverages, there’s a dichotomy between wanting value-added or processed foods that provide nutritional benefits, and consuming only fresh, all-natural healthful foods.</h2>\nThese consumers want and expect vitamins and nutrient-rich foods, but value-added can also mean added stuff they don’t want. They want fresh all-natural foods. Indeed, reading a lot of product information can be confusing,  but this highly informed consumer will only select food products that helps them make the right decisions about maintaining optimum health and well-being.\n\nConsumers will continue to have a growing awareness of health and nutrition issues, and their food choices and ultimate purchase behaviors will be driven by this growing awareness. These consumers are making choices based on what helps them create and manage optimum health. Managing health through food choice is a growing consumer trend that will have a huge impact on purchase behavior. Food and beverage marketers who recognize the opportunity within this trend, by developing and positioning their products in support of it will be the next brand leaders.\n\n<em>Editor\'s Note: The is a guest post by Mike Murphy, Founder and Chief Energizing Officer at <a href=\"http://www.brandiq.biz\" target=\"_blank\">BrandIQ</a>, a market research and brand strategy firm headquartered Los Angeles. BrandIQ a strategic alliance partner of PULL Brand Innovation. Contact: <a href=\"mailto://mmurphy@brandiq.biz\" target=\"_blank\">mmurphy@brandiq.biz</a></em>', 'How growing health consciousness affects food choice and purchase behavior.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'how-growing-health-consciousness-affects-food-choice-and-purchase-behavior', '', '', '2011-01-27 17:53:36', '2011-01-27 21:53:36', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1680', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(1755, 2, '2011-02-17 15:39:40', '2011-02-17 19:39:40', '<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1756\" title=\"sacrifice-and-focus\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sacrifice-and-focus.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"402\" /><span style=\"color: #808080;\">It’s tempting for brand owners to leverage as much value as they can from the equities of their brand– sometimes at the expense of why your brand matters in the first place.</span></h1>\nIf you’re responsible for managing a successful brand, of course you would want to seek as much opportunity to grow revenue as you can. Brand extensions may not only provide the perfect tactic to add to your revenues, but they can also strengthen the brand’s original meaning in the bargain. This is precisely what makes the art of sacrifice such a hard pill for many marketers to swallow.\n\nI like to think of brands as if they are beasts of burden– everyday they plow along with great strength and endurance as long as they stay healthy.  One of the big indicators of brand health is resonance. If you stretch your brand’s meaning too far with exaggerated licensing deals and brand extensions, well –you’re hastening its demise. Before you start making big shifts by adding more stuff to what your brand encompasses, be confident it aligns to the organizing principles of your brand strategy.  Don’t muddy your long-term brand equity by losing your resonance with the tribe that got you there to begin with.\n<h2>Like a good parent, sometimes you just have to say no. The good news is the more you say no, the more highly-focused (and valuable) your brand becomes.</h2>\nThe art of sacrifice, in my view, is what makes enlightened brand managers grow brand value with skill and discernment. There will be tempting, quantifiable opportunities to slap your logo on stuff that seems to make sense, but deep inside you may intuitively know that doing so will distract the brand from its reason for being. Yet in the meeting with the finance folks, you’ll be asked why you’re not aggressively  “maximizing brand revenue”? Your answer will require great courage.\n\nSure, you could argue a very tight brand focus won’t work for every situation or product category, but if you study the attributes that have comprised all successful and enduring brands, they never lose their meaning and connection with people who highly value their relationship with the brand.  It’s not customers who are disloyal to brands, it’s brands that are disloyal to customers. Customers determine the competitive hierarchy. Once their mind is made up about a brand, it’s near impossible to change it.\n\nSometimes a razor sharp brand meaning it is the most important component of competitive advantage and marketing success. Remember too, the further up the need hierarchy (from basic functionality to deep emotional connection) your brand meaning climbs, the more difficult it is for competitors to emulate what your brand delivers.\n\n<strong>Practice the art of sacrifice.</strong>', 'The art of sacrifice: Maintaining razor sharp focus on brand meaning.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-art-of-sacrifice-maintaining-razor-sharp-focus-on-brand-meaning', '', '', '2011-02-17 15:39:40', '2011-02-17 19:39:40', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1755', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(1820, 2, '2011-02-21 20:54:36', '2011-02-22 00:54:36', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1992\" title=\"catapult logo\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Catapul-ID-150px3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"103\" />\n\n<strong>Consumer Packaged Goods\nLALA USA / LaCreme Master Brand\nStrategic Brand Positioning</strong>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Facing the headwinds of a more fat and calorie conscious consumer, </span><span style=\"color: #888888;\">La Crème embraced a strategic brand positioning that promised consumers a rich and creamy experience.</span></h1>\n<h1><strong><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1822\" title=\"lacreme\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/lacreme.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"300\" /></strong><span style=\"color: #808080;\"> </span><span style=\"color: #808080;\"> </span></h1>\n<h2><strong>LALA USA, a leading marketer and distributor of dairy-based food products, had reorganized their brand portfolio to maximize their distribution strategy in grocery channels in North America. La Crème was one of several yogurt brands in the LALA portfolio that required a new definition and positioning as a result of new products being developed and marketed under the La Crème label. </strong></h2>\n<strong>We were asked to provide strategic and creative guidance through our Catapult Innovation method to develop a master brand strategy that extended the equities of the La Crème brand across the spectrum of new diary products under development.</strong>\n\n<strong>Brand Innovation</strong>\n\nFacing the headwinds of a more fat and calorie conscious consumer, we discovered several important emotional drivers to purchase that really mattered to consumers when they thought of foods with real-dairy, rich and creamy attributes. The most important factor for consumers was their belief that “real-dairy” foods were more healthful, nutritious, of better quality, and tasted better. These consumers desire, and have a deep affinity for the richest experiences life has to offer. The trade name “La Crème” powerfully represented the premium, best-in-class associations this target consumer segment really cared about.\n<h2>We defined the La Crème brand consumer segment as people who were passionate about rich, creamy foods and desserts that satisfy their discerning and selective taste. For those who crave the rich creamy goodness of real dairy cream in the foods and desserts they enjoy–there’s simply no substitute. Nothing else comes close, nothing else will do!</h2>\nWe developed several value proposition and positioning concepts for the brand that were rigorously tested with consumers. These were optimized to provide guidance and direction for future product developments and all consumer-facing marketing communications that would support those product introductions.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1861\" title=\"lacremeimage\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/lacremeimage.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"312\" />\n\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"> </span>At each stage of the process, our method provided the pathway to create a compelling value proposition that was highly-valued and distinguished from other brands in the category.\n\n<strong>Business Outcome\nLALA was successful in introducing new La Crème branded yogurts, coffee creamers, and dessert products penetrating significant US distribution with major grocery retailers including all WalMart stores.</strong>\n\n<strong>You can learn more about our Catapult method for introducing new products and inventing new brands <a href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/how-will-you-innovate-your-future/\" target=\"_blank\">here.</a>\n</strong>', 'Brand Story: LaCreme Master Brand Positioning', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'brand-story-lacreme-master-brand-positioning', '', '', '2011-02-21 20:54:36', '2011-02-22 00:54:36', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1820', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1875, 2, '2011-02-28 22:25:50', '2011-03-01 02:25:50', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1994\" title=\"catapult logo\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Catapul-ID-150px4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"103\" />\n\n<strong>Consumer Products\nEnergizer\nProduct Brand Positioning / Brand Messaging Platform</strong>\n\n<strong>\n</strong>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">We helped Energizer execute on its business strategy to expand its master brand into new product categories that represent the brand’s bigger future.</span></h1>\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1884\" title=\"energizer-lead\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/energizer-lead.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"256\" />\n</span>\n<h2><strong>Energizer, known all over the world by its beloved Energizer Bunny, has been growing its brand value bringing new products to consumers that leverage it’s brand equities in portable power. When Energizer’s new product marketing team was planning to introduce a cordless inductive charging platform for electronic devices, they were facing three fundamental challenges.</strong></h2>\n<strong>First, inductive charging of electronic devices is a technology that was still evolving a universal manufacturing compliance standard within the industry. Secondly, consumers were not familiar with the technology or its use. And finally, Energizer could not claim “first to market” with this type of product. Through our Catapult Innovation method, we were asked to provide strategic and creative guidance in developing a value proposition, product positioning, brand messaging strategy and product nomenclature system that would serve as the foundation for all channel marketing activities supporting the product launch.</strong>\n\n<strong>Brand Innovation</strong>\nWe began by introducing this technology to a select group of consumers who considered themselves early adopters and influencers in their use of electronic devices.  We helped the product marketing team discover important insight on what really mattered to consumers when they charged their electronic devices, which devices were most essential to them, and why those particular devices were most important.\n\nThrough this discovery, we provided strategic recommendations on how best to target, define and differentiate the value proposition to tech-savvy, early adopter consumers. While competitive products featured multi-device charging, we recommended that Energizer position its product within a narrow frame of reference– smart phone charging only.  Consumers had high emotional involvement in their smart phone. How they kept their smart phones powered was of significant importance to them.\n\nThrough quantitative concept testing of several positioning ideas, product naming and nomenclature platforms, we were able to validate a compelling go-to-market messaging strategy focused on what mattered most to smart phone users.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1879\" title=\"energizer-packaging\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/energizer-packaging.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"367\" />\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1881\" title=\"energizer-retail\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/energizer-retail1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"398\" />\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Like their smart phones, tech-savvy consumers want life fully charged and ready to go at all times.\n</span></h2>\nFrom this strategic positioning, Energizer\'s marketing team could begin to develop key product messaging. Taking this idea once step further, we provided creative guidance for the descriptive product nomenclature featured on packaging and marketing communications, as well as the visual look and feel of various retail channel communication touchpoints.\n\n<strong>Business Outcome</strong>\n<strong>Now known as the <a href=\"http://www.energizer.com/inductive/default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Energizer Inductive Charger</a>, the product was successfully introduced in late 2010, and can now be found in major retail outlets in the US including Target, Best Buy and Home Depot. Energizer was also successful in developing the product to feature a universal inductive charging standard known as Qi (pronounced chee). This universal compatibility standard allows any electronic device that is Qi compatible to be charged on the Energizer Inductive Charging Station.</strong>\n\n<strong>You can learn more about our Catapult method for introducing new products and inventing new brands <a href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/how-will-you-innovate-your-future/\" target=\"_blank\">here.</a>\n</strong>', 'Brand Story: Energizer New Product Introduction', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'open', '', 'case-story-energizer-new-product-introduction', '', '', '2011-02-28 22:25:50', '2011-03-01 02:25:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1875', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(1925, 2, '2011-03-02 19:44:55', '2011-03-02 23:44:55', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1929\" title=\"penny\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/penny1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"144\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Another iconic retail brand takes a stab at crowd sourcing their logo. This time it’s JC Penney. Although it appears to be another gapification of identity design, JCPenney seems to have slid this in under the radar. Where are all the pundits who were so vocal on Gap and Starbuck’s recent identity changes?</span></h1>\nApparently JCPenney (unlike Gap) took great pains to vet this generic jewel, claiming the new design won the approval of thousands of customers, and was endorsed by two design schools. (think contributions to their scholarship funds). Read the <a href=\"http://adage.com/article/adages/jcpenney-s-logo-changing-bet-notice/149041/\" target=\"_blank\">Adage</a> story.\n\nAfter a rigorous process sifting through 200 design submissions, turns out the winning logo was designed by a third year design student. Congratulations to the design student!  I’m sure this effort will lock into a solid entry-level position at one of the big brand design shops.  Here’s what the CEO had to say:\n<h2>\"We\'ve made significant progress transforming our Company over the last several years by infusing great style into our assortments, delivering world-class customer service, and introducing new and innovative retail technologies that have made JCPenney a retail leader in the digital age,\" said Chairman-CEO Mike Ullman. \"Our new logo reflects the modern retailer we\'ve become while continuing to honor our rich legacy.\"</h2>\nReally? How does this new logo do that exactly?  I never cease to be amused at vacuous corporate PR (bullshit) copy writing.\n\nFar more interesting to me than the design, I haven’t heard a whimper from the snotty nose bloggers who dissed all over GAP. This seems completely strange to me. Nobody seemed to notice this at all.  If nobody noticed (or cared), how will this design represent JC Penney’s so called progress at creating a more exciting and relevant shopping experience?\n\n<strong>Love to hear your comments!</strong>', 'Another big apparel retailer sports a crowd sourced logo. Did you notice?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'another-big-apparel-retailer-sports-a-crowd-sourced-logo-did-you-notice', '', '', '2011-03-02 19:44:55', '2011-03-02 23:44:55', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1925', 0, 'post', '', 7);
INSERT INTO `pull_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(1945, 2, '2011-03-14 15:45:53', '2011-03-14 19:45:53', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1946\" title=\"innovation.cover\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/innovation.cover_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"273\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">These have been unreasonable times! In previous recessions, consumer spending was our ticket out of the dip. That’s not happening this time around.</span></h1>\n<h2>We’ve prepared a report on product and brand innovation for you. It’s our intention to share our insight, selected industry data, and perspective that may be useful next time your team sits down to plan the marketing strategy for introducing new products and creating new brands. We sure hope you find it helpful. If so, please leave your comments for others.</h2>\n<h1><a href=\"/2011/03/InnovationReport.final_1.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Download PULL report (pdf)</a></h1>\nConsumer spending is already 72% of GDP, and is not likely to grow  further. Our productivity has not declined even with 10% unemployment,  so it is unlikely to increase now. I don\'t think you would disagree  marketing teams are doing more with less these days. This is especially  true when bringing new products to market. The only string left to play  on is innovation. If you’re going to create a bigger future, it’s going  to require you innovate one. If innovation is the gateway to bigger  futures, new products have always been the path.\n\nYou can’t lead by following. If you can\'t be in the top three of your  product category, perhaps some invention is in order. Only innovation  can blaze the trial of competitive advantage. Enlightened business  leaders and marketers will focus their collective  resources on  creating, rather than competing for what’s already been created. We  believe this is what we as marketers need to be focusing on right about  now.\n\n<strong>Innovations are happening right now, round the clock, and round the  world. Indeed innovation holds the key to our global economic recovery.  As a result, there will be a massive increase of new product  introductions in every product category as the economy turns around. </strong>\n<h3><strong>How  clear is your vision looking out on the horizon of opportunity?</strong></h3>', 'Creating bigger futures through radical product and brand innovation. ', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'creating-bigger-futures-through-radical-product-and-brand-innovation', '', '', '2011-03-14 15:45:53', '2011-03-14 19:45:53', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=1945', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2162, 2, '2011-04-01 18:18:56', '2011-04-01 22:18:56', 'Consumer Packaged Goods\nJavaJamu LLC\nStrategic Brand Development and Design\n<h1><!-- p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } --> <span style=\"color: #808080;\">We collaborated with this start-up marketer to create a new brand that reveals a 1000-year-old secret for health and beauty to consumers in the US and Canada.</span></h1>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808000;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2222\" title=\"jamulife-id\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/jamulife-id.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"367\" /></span></h2>\n<h2>Two successful entrepreneurs in specialty health food retailing had the big  idea of creating a line of health and beauty products based on ancient  herbal formulas and remedies from Java. These products are known  throughout Indonesia simply as “jamu”.  With limited resources for  marketing, they asked us to help them create a unique brand from scratch,  and develop a compelling value proposition to specialty food and dietary  supplement distributors in the US and Canada.</h2>\nLike most start-ups, the biggest challenge is always money for marketing. Add to that the competitive nature of the specialty health food retail channel, these creative entrepreneurs recognized they had one shot to build a brand story that was uniquely positioned and differentiated from a variety of competitive products. They were committed to building a strong brand right form the start!\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2169\" title=\"JamuPackaging\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/JamuPackaging1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"351\" /><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2170\" title=\"Jamulife.catalog\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamulife.catalog1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"243\" />\n\nAlways up for the challenge of creating a brand from scratch, we began by learned everything we could about the restorative powers of all the herbal formulas that comprise what is known as “jamu”. We learned that consumers who regularly shop in independent health food stores know a good deal about alternative remedies for health and well being, and they are open-minded when learning about new methods and products they believe will add value to their lives. We recommended that marketing and communications target this influential consumer segment.\n<h2>Jamu has a well-documented thousand-year tradition of enhancing a sense of well being. We crafted the value proposition and the brand positioning as “revealing this 1000 year-old secret for health and beauty” as a means to experience optimum health aligned to our busy lifestyles.</h2>\n<h2><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2213\" title=\"Jamu-theme-2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamu-theme-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"343\" /><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2219\" title=\"Jamu-theme-3\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Jamu-theme-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"345\" /></h2>\nWorking with the client partners, we developed the trade name, designed the brand identity, taglines, brand voice and trade dress for all retail packaging, point of sale displays, sales sheets for individual products, and brand guidelines for developing retail packaging and messaging for future line extensions in a variety of product categories.  We identified  likely opportunities for future brand growth such as energy food bars, energy drinks and skin care products. These concepts were developed and presented in a pitch document to support sales presentations to potential distributors who service independent retailers of these products.\n\nBusiness Outcome\nThe company was successful securing distribution agreements enabling the launch of the first generation JamuLife dietary supplement product line to independent health food retailers in several major cities in the US. For our client, it marked the beginning of their business journey. For us, it\'s all in a day\'s work.', 'Brand Story: JamuLife Brand Development', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-story-jamulife-brand-development', '', '', '2011-04-01 18:18:56', '2011-04-01 22:18:56', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2162', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2269, 2, '2011-04-07 14:31:27', '2011-04-07 18:31:27', '<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2270\" title=\"maker--user\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/maker-user.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"354\" /><span style=\"color: #808080;\">To align brand relevance, the makers and the users need to see their own reflection in the mirror of the brand.</span></h1>\n<h2>Strong (cult) brands really matter to people.  However, in practice, brand’s can become lazy and so can their managers. Before brands loose their relevance, there’s always a period of complacency in brand management. When people stop seeing their reflection in the brand–then people stop caring (buying your stuff). You can’t advertise your way out of that problem.</h2>\n<h2><strong>It\'s important to remember: I am the brand.</strong></h2>\nThink of any brand that really matters and you’ll discover the type of people buying the stuff are the same type of people who design, make and sell the stuff.  This is the awesome sauce of brand identity alignment. Apparel brands like Patagonia, The North Face, and Columbia have this going for them in spades.  The bond that binds is a deep inter-personal connection between the users and the makers.\n\nBut what about low-involvement-categories like breakfast cereal or toilet paper? Can a cereal brand (or toilet paper) build rich meaningful relationships with customers? Relationships based in the passion of their mutual experience?\n\n<a href=\"http://www.kashi.com\" target=\"_blank\">Kashi</a> quickly comes to my mind.\n\nIn the same manner as the enthusiast apparel brands mentioned earlier, Kashi customers see themselves, their values, and their identities in complete harmony with the Kashi brand. They’re one and the same.\n\nLikewise, the Kashi people care about the same stuff as their consumer– greater health and well-being for themselves and the planet.  For Kashi, making food that enhances life is sacred business. For Kashi customers, living well is sacred business. More people are waking up to caring more about others and our planet, and buying Kashi products too.\n<h1>Well-managed brands in every category know who they serve and why because the lunatics are running the asylum.</h1>\nIf your organization finds itself realizing it’s brand has lost it’s relevance, or is fuzzy about who cares about it- don’t let another 30% drop in sales shake you into taking action. Start by looking in the mirror… what do you see?', 'I am the Brand!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'i-am-the-brand', '', '', '2011-04-07 14:31:27', '2011-04-07 18:31:27', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2269', 0, 'post', '', 3),
(2298, 2, '2011-05-03 14:16:24', '2011-05-03 18:16:24', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2299\" title=\"lost-in-translation\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/lost-in-translation.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"311\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Managing the translation of brand strategy to creative messaging is a delicate process of enabling the polarized thinking archetypes of the engineer, economist and artist to form a singular voice.</span></h1>\nSeemingly the intersection of brand strategy and creative messaging is an area where many marketers struggle. Developing a brand strategy is a top-down introspective process driven by a business strategy, while creative expression is a downstream activity centered in marketing communications. In many organizations, these two disciplines occupy different levels on the value chain.\n\nIn several <a href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&amp;gid=1410607&amp;type=member&amp;item=50332042&amp;qid=a6be8ebe-87e9-4783-ac00-2f4fb7d26a04&amp;goback=.gmp_1410607\" target=\"_blank\">LinkedIn discussion groups</a>,  I presented this question to gather some outside insight for this post.  I was amazed at the diverse opinions this conversation stirred up. From the discussion thread, one can easily conclude brand strategy often times gets lost in the creative translation. Does this surprise you?\n\n<strong>Brand strategy is not marketing. </strong>\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\nBrand strategy can’t be created from the outside in.  Brand strategy is not a decorative or promotional process either. All leading brands represent a single, compelling unifying principle that drives business performance from the inside out.\n\nBrand strategy illuminates the brand’s behavior in every internal action taken by stakeholders, and in all mental and physical interactions customer/consumer’s experience.  Strategy and messaging are two sides of a coin.\n\nTranslating brand strategy into creative messaging is a complex process.  To be effective, the process requires more than a thoughtful “hand-off” between left-brainers and right brainers. It’s too messy with lots of moving parts. When markets change in six-month increments, something more transcendent is required to close the gap.\n\n<strong>Creative briefs insure creative block.</strong>\n\nThe default tool for aligning strategic imperatives to a creative messaging platform is the Creative Brief.  We’ve all written them, read them and ignored them.  No doubt, the creative brief is a useful tool if your plan is to simply provide the descriptive criteria for directing “creatives” to make marketing stuff and deliver it through channels and touch points.\n<h2>A creative brief, no matter how well written, doesn’t always insure clarity in translating the essence of brand strategy into brand messaging. In fact, I suggest most creative briefs are an impediment to the process. Here’s why:</h2>\nBrand managers and agency account planners (generally the authors) are tactics driven. That’s because 80% of the daily processes within marketing departments and ad agencies are based in project management. Creative Briefs tend to be control documents, rather than a forum for gathering inspirational ideas. Brand managers and their communication partners focus on the best way to manage process and the tight budgets they have been allocated. They usually aren’t thinking long-term when at the crossroads of strategic and creative decision-making. They’re focused on getting a job done (on-time and on-budget).  Add the changing priorities of executive management into the mix, and it’s easy to see how messy creative briefs become.\n\nCreatives (the receivers) have different motivations and definitions of successful outcomes (things like winning awards, peer acceptance, career advancement). As a generalization, creative people get the rap of being more into doing stuff that’s cool first and foremost. By nature, creative people are style, technique and craft driven. They need guidance. For many, data is dry and not very interesting. There’s a built in bias to discount left-brain imperatives. And heaven forbid you place boundaries and restrictions on their creativity by adherence to a long, highly detailed creative brief.\n\n<strong>We need a more perfect union.</strong>\n\nThere’s a natural separation between the thinking styles of data people and creative people.  Within any organization, there are three “thinking” archetypes that must work together in harmony if your translation from brand strategy to brand messaging will ring true and clear for all concerned. They are the engineer, the economist and the artist.\n<h2>Managing the translation of brand strategy and creative messaging is a delicate process of allowing the polarized thinking archetypes of the engineer, economist and artist to come together as an integrated force giving voice to brands that will create the bigger futures every one desires.</h2>\nLikewise, people within the diverse functional disciplines of product development, manufacturing, finance, marketing, sales and HR need to come together in a more perfect union of artist, economist and engineer thinking. These thinking archetypes form the quintessential three legs of the stool that comprise the fullest expression of the brand aligned to it’s unifying strategic principle. However, to design the stool, requires yet another thinking style that embodies the value of the other three.\n\n<strong>The catalyst for designing grand cathedrals</strong>\n\nIn my view, brand owners and stakeholders must all learn to become “brand architects”– integrating their diverse organizational disciplines to harness their collective power to better manage materials, data, money and creativity when at the crossroads of strategic and creative decision-making.\n<h2>In effect, thinking like architects will enable your team to design an enduring structure to bridge brand strategy and brand messaging in ways that don’t look, feel, sound or smell like marketing.</h2>\nThrough the archetype of the “architect”, the translation of brand strategy into compelling brand messaging becomes a more inclusive, elegant, transparent and designed process. Like any good architect designing a grand cathedral, concern for the integrity of brand materials (engineer), the rigor of brand metrics (economist), and the beauty of the brand stories (artist) are all necessary elements of a far greater whole.\n\n<strong>It takes an architect to vision and build cathedrals… everything else is just bricks in a wall.</strong>\n\n<strong>Love to hear your comments on this subject.</strong>\n\n<strong> </strong>', 'Lost in Translation: The gap between brand strategy and creative messaging.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'lost-in-translation-the-gap-between-brand-strategy-and-creative-messaging', '', '', '2011-05-03 14:16:24', '2011-05-03 18:16:24', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2298', 0, 'post', '', 12),
(2349, 2, '2011-05-17 20:21:50', '2011-05-18 00:21:50', '<img class=\"size-full wp-image-2350 alignnone\" title=\"butterfly\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/butterfly.jpg\" alt=\"brand transformation is not pretty\" width=\"515\" height=\"342\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What holds brands back from innovation and market leadership is the same element that holds people back: FEAR!</span></h1>\nAs a species, we humans fear change.  We can’t help our natural inclination for safety and security. It’s wired into the lizard brain at the base of the skull. We fear taking risks, making mistakes, not meeting plan, looking stupid. It\'s far better to fit in, go with the flow, be safe and not freak out our fear-based bosses.\n\nYet no one will argue innovation requires taking risks, making mistakes, not meeting plan and looking stupid. All transformation is scary.\n\nBrand transformation (like personal transformation) requires a passion driven decision to add to the growth of the world. It requires creating opportunity by first bringing new value to people, rather than competing for the value already created by others.\n<h2>If you’re intention is to build a leading brand, the majority of your organizational thinking must be on the creative plane (possibility and potential) not the competitive plane (hard bargains and discount pricing).</h2>\nIndeed, we live in world of nonstop interactions and connections. Soon humans (if not already) will experience life as a digital reality as well as a physical reality. Yet our relationships (with brands and people) will most likely begin in the digital before they can move to the physical. Ideas are the new social currency, and they now come from everywhere and from every direction– only faster!\n\nAs trite as it sounds, marketers are scared. Frightened of what is required to be a leading brand.\n\nBrands (like people) are heavily invested (encased) in their identity and their story. To transform brand followship to leadership requires the brand to pass-through a distinct set of transformational phases that are messy and painful:\n\n<strong>the rupture:</strong> the realization that what worked so well no longer does.\n\n<strong>the release:</strong> letting go of the resistance to change\n\n<strong>the retreat:</strong> the scariest part because it requires a period of non-marketing.\n\n<strong>the revival:</strong> new ideas, forms and structures take early shape...like seeds.\n\n<strong>the rehearsal:</strong> play, play, play with these new idea seeds.\n\n<strong>the realization:</strong> when the possibility becomes achievement.\n\nThis is a dynamic, never-ending process – one continuous circle of rupture to realization. Unlike predictable gestation periods, innovative ideas TAKE THEIR OWN SWEET TIME coming into form and serving people. The creative process is rarely quantifiable.\n\nThis is the squishy manifestation stuff that metrics obsessed, risk averse brand managers and their CMO bosses have difficulty talking about. Most would rather call their order-taker ad agency to crank out the next promotional campaign to spike some sales this quarter. After all, they have a business to run.\n\n<strong>It takes courage to lead. I define leadership as the quality of one\'s presence in every aspect of life. Elevating the quality of your presence is not painless or pretty. And so it is with brands.</strong>', 'Brand transformation is a scary process.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-transformation-is-a-scary-process', '', '', '2011-05-17 20:21:50', '2011-05-18 00:21:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2349', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2465, 2, '2011-06-21 20:51:19', '2011-06-22 00:51:19', '<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2466\" title=\"apple\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/apple.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"300\" />\n<span style=\"color: #808080;\">When brands reach the tipping point where sales begin to slide because customers no longer resonate with the brand’s value proposition, it’s time to put your finger on the pulse of your brand and determine the long-term outlook for brand health.</span></h1>\nBrands have life cycles. They begin with excitement and promise, enter their growth phase, reach a plateau, and then slowly lose relevance as customers move on to the latest and greatest new thing. This is as natural as life itself. That’s why it’s a good idea to monitor brand health along the way–before sales slip.\n\nBrand managers these days are heads down managing the urgent daily business of the brand. Rarely are they offered the opportunity to step back and make an informed high altitude assessment of brand health.\n<h2>Completing a brand audit is a chance to take a fresh and objective look at your brand from a number of critical perspectives.</h2>\nA comprehensive brand audit will often reveal new grow opportunities for your brands, and new ways to make your brand resonate with a new generation of target customers who will represent your brand’s bigger future.\n\nIf you believe your brand could use a check up, take the time to make a close examination of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats facing brand health. A comprehensive brand audit will include a thoughtful examination of the following:\n\n<strong>External Partners and Customers</strong>\nThis includes your distribution channel partners, independent sales reps, strategic supplier partners and — most importantly — your customers. Using social media tools is a very effective way to monitor brand health with partners and customers.\n\n<strong>Internal Stakeholders\n</strong>Gaining deep insight and understanding of how all stakeholders within your organization perceive the brand’s value proposition and meaning is important because they’re in direct contact with customers; and it’s equally important for management, product development, manufacturing and other groups within the organization to have a clear picture of what the brand stands for.\n\n<strong>Competitors\n</strong>Since your brand doesn’t live in a vacuum, it’s often instructive to compare its image, message and product or service scope within the competitive landscape. Take a deep, long look into their new product initiatives, programs and value-added services. The key is not to benchmark, but to differentiate your brand.\n\n<strong>Brand Positioning\n</strong>What does your brand promise? Is this promise still important to customers? Does your brand matter to the high value customer that represents the brands bigger future? Does it reflect a highly-valued competitive advantage not in abundant supply elsewhere?\n\n<strong>Brand Identity\n</strong>Do customers know what your brand stands for? The brand audit provides the reality check on just how well the essence or personality of the brand is resonating.\n\n<strong>Brand Equities</strong>\nIt\'s critical to gain quantifiable insight on important metrics like brand awareness, purchase behaviors, attitudes, values, market share, customer life value.\n\n<strong>Brand Architecture\n</strong>Brand architectures can get out of completely out of alignment over time. Take the time to reflect on how your brand is portrayed at the Master Brand level, and if it confuses or encourages clarity at the Product or Sub-Brand level. Also check that there is no confusion between the Corporate Brand or other attribute brands or branded features.\n\n<strong>Communications / Messaging\n</strong>When brand managers think about consistency in marketing communications, they often think only about visual consistency. And while visual consistency is critical, it’s also the most obvious. Go one step deeper: what does your brand actually <em>say</em>? What are the primary and secondary messaging platforms that guide consistent marketing communications? If you reviewed several communication pieces carefully, would they portray a consistent message?\n\n<strong>Budgeting / Resource Allocation</strong>\nDoes your brand receive the resources it needs to grow and prosper? Do you know what you <em>should</em> be spending your resources on? Are there more effective methods and tactics that will yield the desired results in your marketing activities?\n\n<strong>It’s vital for an organization to deliver a consistent brand strategy across all points of consumer contact, it’s equally important to have a precise and detailed understanding of how that policy is progressing. Brand Owners (from time to time) must step back and review how their brand is holding up. It is invariably an energizing experience, and all those involved will find the process illuminating.</strong>', 'The brand audit framework for determining brand health.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-brand-audit-framework-for-determining-brand-health', '', '', '2011-06-21 20:51:19', '2011-06-22 00:51:19', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2465', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(2477, 2, '2011-06-28 19:43:20', '2011-06-28 23:43:20', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2478\" title=\"logo-again\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/logo-again.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"171\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Contrary to what many believe, the logo is still the main event in communicating the essence of what a brand represents. Within our obsessively condensed attention spans, the logo is more important than ever.</span></h1>\nMake no mistake, logos are ubiquitous and so are their creators. In an era of $100 logo design and crowd sourcing, one might conclude the discipline of logo creation has been reduced to automated assemblies of database centered type fonts, symbols, icons and pictograms. Seemingly, anyone with a flair for color and arrangement ought to be able to cobble together a decent logo.\n\nMany big name brands have recently tweaked their logos in a crowd-sourced craze to connect with their customers (think Gap and JC Penney). Seemingly brand owners have devalued the importance of their logos through their adoption of these online easy-do-it yourself-generic-creativity-generating portals.  As a result, web sites like HP’s Logoworks have become thriving businesses.\n\nOn the other hand…\n<h2>Creating a logo that brings enduring value and differentiation to the business enterprise it represents requires deep insight and highly specialized talent and skill.</h2>\nAs our world gets smaller through the technology advances in how humans interact and communicate, logos that are instantly recognized and clearly understood are more important and more valuable than ever.\n\nThe logo must work so much harder today–especially when compressed down to sixteen pixels favicons, used as buttons, links, or embedded in content on a mobile screen. The space is getting smaller and the white noise in the slush pile of the marketplace is getting louder. Truly effective logo design is being pushed to new limits delivering instant recognition in ever-smaller digital footprints.  Beyond the communication idea, these are important design considerations many brand owners are just beginning to realize and evolve their identities with the times.\n\nAnd more importantly, when a logo can transcend any language, linguistic or cultural barrier, and still represent a compelling brand story, its value to brand owners increases exponentially.\n<h2>What Paul Rand said about the importance of the logo three decades ago still holds true today: “If, in the business of communication, image is king, the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown”.</h2>\nLogos have always been an abbreviation for our preferences, and symbolic of the value that defines who we are and what we promise. For centuries, logo forms have been stitched into the visual fabric that surrounds and connects us. The logo and the ideals it represents are more important than ever–and so is the discipline and process of creating them.', 'The logo rises again!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-logo-rises-again', '', '', '2011-06-28 19:43:20', '2011-06-28 23:43:20', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2477', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2491, 2, '2011-07-25 17:32:04', '2011-07-25 21:32:04', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2493\" title=\"new value\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/compete1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"290\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Many marketing people are obsessive about the urgent work of competing rather than the more important work of creating.</span></h1>\nBrand owners and managers are busy people! They’re busy everyday in back-to-back-meetings. They’re under increasing pressure to create more revenue, and get more stuff done as cost effectively (cheap) as possible. They’re thinking about supply-chain logistics, product development, pricing, channel strategy, promotions, customer service and their competitors.\n\nManagers are hyper-focused on their marketing ROI– the urgent metrics executive management values most and forms the basis of reward and compensation. It’s easy to see why the focus is on the urgent rather than the important. Only a select few of enlightened marketers are afforded the luxury of paying much attention to the more important work– creating!\n\nOne of the important principals we hold near and dear in our brand strategy practice needs to be mentioned:\n<h2>Tis better to create new value than compete for the value created by others.</h2>\nWhy on earth do really smart people invest tens of millions of dollars bringing me-too products to market?  It makes no sense at all, yet it happens all the time in every product category.\n\n<strong>The most important things are often neglected.</strong>\nThink about your own personal life. There are important things that inspire your imagination and are worth pursuing, but somehow they get pushed back while you focus on the expedient matters at hand. It’s no different in organizations.\n\nIncreasing revenues with the greatest profit margins is the urgent work of business organizations. The more important work of increasing their value to people is often neglected in the frenzied money-making process. This is where most organizations experience dynamic tension – create new value vs. milk the status quo.\n\nIf your company/product/brand no longer existed would any one care?  Does your enterprise represent an ideal (beyond your product/service) that people highly value? Does your organization focus on innovation that provides people just what they’re asking for, or do you focus on providing people what they’re dreaming of and waiting for?\n<h2>Increasing your value to people requires the insight to be two steps ahead of the customer’s stated needs and connecting with their unspoken aspirations and dreams. This is what people really care about. The products/brands that best represent these higher ideals are usually the ones that reshape categories and lead markets.</h2>\n<strong>If you’re discounting your prices, you’re not leading anything.</strong>\nOnly market leaders command premium pricing. There can only be one leader. Everyone else sells on functions and price. And in an over-crowded marketplace, where there is abundant choice, any price is too high. You can’t grow your business discounting your prices. Nor can you increase your prices without providing the equivalent “new value” people are dreaming of and waiting for.\n\n<strong>Innovate around a higher meaning.</strong>\nCreating new value always involves proposing new or unexpected meanings. What matters most to people is not the function or performance of a given product, but their emotional, psychological and cultural connection to what the products means to them.\n\nNew value is in the “meaning” not in the physical thing. People don’t just buy product, they buy into a higher meaning. This unexpected idea, unsolicited by user needs, once discovered, turns out to be the very thing people were waiting for, just not asking for. Nobody was asking for an iPod, Facebook, baked potato chips, the Swiffer, or any other product innovation that has redefined or reinvented a category.\n\n<strong>Moving up the value chain implies more than a fair exchange.</strong>\nIt’s no longer enough to meet customer quality expectations. Today, everything is good. Good=the same!  To thrive, enlightened business leaders will focus less on urgent transactions and more on creating scintillating, dramatic, unique, relevant and transformative experiences.  This will always involve innovating new value ideas that provide far more “use value” than customers pay in cash value.  This is the over-looked source code to customer advocacy.\n\n<strong>Creating a bigger future in unreasonable times.</strong>\nIn previous recessions, consumer spending was our ticket out of the dip. Not any more. Consumer spending still holds at 72% of GDP.  It’s unlikely to grow further. And in the face of nearly 10% unemployment, productivity has not declined, so it’s unlikely there will be big demand for more workers either. The only way out of this mess is to innovate your way out. Creating bigger futures is the important work to focus on.  This requires lots of inspiration, freedom and creativity.\n<h2>No other strategic activity is more important (and elemental) to business growth than creating new value for people.  At the end of the day, it’s simply a matter of choice to commit to do this important work.</h2>', 'Create new value rather than compete for the value created by others.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'create-new-value-rather-than-compete-for-the-value-created-by-others', '', '', '2011-07-25 17:32:04', '2011-07-25 21:32:04', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2491', 0, 'post', '', 3),
(2515, 2, '2011-08-03 14:46:49', '2011-08-03 18:46:49', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2516\" title=\"shelf-battle\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/shelf-battle.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"188\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">The big battle for packaged goods success has always been at the shelf, and nobody will deny the influence packaging has on winning this battle. But it takes more than words on a label to win.</span></h1>\nRight now consumers are shocked and paralyzed, and it shows in their purchase behavior. In response, marketers are in hyper mode tweaking their packaging, discounting their prices and promoting their brands–doing whatever it takes to get their share of a diminishing wallet. Winning at shelf keeps getting tougher.\n\n<strong>A case in point. </strong>\n\nThe inspiration for this post came as a result of a recent conversation with a brand owner (who had experienced early distribution and sales success with their start-up ready-to-drink health beverage line) about the effectiveness of their current packaging to communicate the product benefits to influence purchase.\n\nThey were concerned about the descriptive words used to convey the benefits of the product’s attributes. They believed people cared about function, and they wanted to use better words. They believed the words on the label were the cause of a sales slide. They asked us for some advice on how to fix their copywriting problem.\n\nThe brand owners could not see the real cause of their sales slide. They were too emotionally invested in what they’ve been doing thus far, even though it was clearly no longer working. They were more interested in “selling tactics” without any deep concern or strategy for connecting with people. The desire for immediate sales was having the opposite effect.\n\nLike many marketers, they went right out and did some tactical qualitative work to learn how consumers reacted to various descriptors that touted product benefits. They also tested these words in various decorative packaging design themes as well. As you would expect, they came away with lot of information about what words and decorations people like–but no useful information revealing why this start-up brand (that showed such early promise) was losing momentum and sales.\n\nThat didn’t seem to matter to the brand owners. They just wanted to know which words they should use on the packaging. Once they got the words right, they figured their troubles would be over. Does this story sound familiar to you?\n\n<strong>Winning at shelf requires more than words on the packaging. </strong>\n\nFixing words on your packaging that need fixing is an easy thing to do. Influencing consumers to reach for your product at shelf rather than the other alternative is a very difficult thing to do. Marketers want the quick fix–some clever copywriting, a few design tweaks and–viola!\n\nTo win the battle at shelf requires your product represent a greater, more valuable idea to the consumer than the words and decorations used on the label to describe its function and benefits.\n\nConsumers must value “the reason to believe” the promise of value. They must highly value the very reason the product exists in the first place. Certainly, product attributes, functions and benefits form the building blocks that differentiate one thing from another. Being different is not enough to win at shelf.\n\nConsumers demand and expect products to function and deliver benefits. Today everything is good. On the shelf, good = the same. Delivering functional benefits is not enough to win at shelf either.\n\nAbundant choice and clutter has made consumers deaf and blind. They’re immune to marketing, buzz words, descriptors and flashy colors. To win at shelf requires the product represent a higher ideal and a greater experience. If it doesn\'t, it better be the cheapest price.\n<h2>Fulfilling a highly emotional, expressive-to-self need is what people care about and pay extra for. To get consumers reaching for yours rather than theirs requires they hold a perception your product represents an experience they highly value and is difficult to substitute.</h2>\nIf the product doesn’t represent a higher ideal and is the same as everything else, copywriting and graphic design, no matter how clever and cool, won’t be effective in building long term sales growth and brand value. But you could win some design awards.\n\nBy the way, here are the highlights of our advice to the brand owners in our story:\n\n<strong>Forget about features and benefits, they are antes in the category. Reconnect your team with the core purpose and higher ideal the product was created for (besides making money).</strong>\n\n<strong>What does this product represent to people that is highly valued and difficult for them to replace. Craft a clear and relevant value proposition based on that.\n</strong>\n<strong>Find out who really cares about this proposition and why.</strong>\n\n<strong>Determine if these people represent a sizable market opportunity for the product to compete and win.</strong>\n\n<strong>Craft a compelling positioning idea that focuses your organization and your resources on the art of sacrifice.</strong>\n\n<strong>Define a high value target consumer,  aim your creativity and resources only at them.</strong>\n\n<strong>Craft a relevant and credible story of value the people you serve really care about.</strong>\n\n<strong>Develop a brand messaging platform on the higher ideal rather than features and benefits.</strong>\n\n<strong>Design product packaging that is distinguished from other alternatives, and communicates with simplicity the ideal and experience your high value consumers really care about.</strong>\n<strong></strong>\n\n<strong>Rinse and repeat for future product introductions.</strong>', 'Winning at shelf requires more than words.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'winning-at-shelf-requires-more-than-words', '', '', '2011-08-03 14:46:49', '2011-08-03 18:46:49', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2515', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(2534, 2, '2011-08-22 18:44:42', '2011-08-22 22:44:42', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2535\" title=\"shopability\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/shopability.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"264\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Successful packaging sells. Any company that invests millions of dollars in product development, consumer research, and marketing expects a return on that investment. The shelf is where that happens.</span></h1>\nProduct packaging is an integral component of the shopping experience. For many people shopping/buying is as much or more an emotional experience as it is a function of picking up stuff they need. With 80% of purchase decisions being made at shelf, the product’s presentation is the only form of marketing seen by 100% of the folks who reach for it and drop the product into their shopping cart.  Advertising can’t claim that. As a marketer, no one is more sensitive and aware than you of the daunting task to create successful packaging in an over-crowded-with-abundant choice retail environment.\n\nThe design of your packaging determines if your product will make it into the shopping cart or not. In every product category, from elegant wine and spirits, perfumes and apparel to laundry soap and toilet paper, successful packaging design is about connecting emotionally. If the product packaging doesn’t reach out and instantly connect with the consumer, it’s game over.\n<h2>Packaging that sells is friendly to the mind and connected to the heart of the shopper. In other words your packaging must be designed to be imminently “shopable”.</h2>\n<strong>Awareness + Emotion in a nano-second.</strong>\nThe mind filters things out with amazing speed and effectiveness. Think about times when you were shopping looking for something specific, or times when something caught your briefest attention. Your mind is constantly filtering out stuff underneath your conscious awareness while you are consciously searching for another thing. Yet when something catches your attention, to hold it long enough for your brain to register, it has to connect with your heart. You have to experience an emotion in order to continue to hold your attention for longer than a nano second. As marketers, that’s all the time the packaging has to make a sale and win at shelf.\n\n<strong>The two battles at shelf.</strong>\nTo make a sale, there are two battles at shelf you have to win. First, people have notice your product and reach for it (as opposed to something else). Secondly, people have to drop it in the cart. You have to win both battles. The product’s packaging is the only weapon you have to win.\n\n<strong> </strong>\n\n<strong>Designing shopability into your packaging.</strong>\nShopability is how well your packaging will catch the attention and connect to the emotions of your target consumer. Unlike so many other marketing tactics where you have far less control, you can control the shopability factor into your packaging by design. Packaging that is shopable shares these essential design characteristics:\n\n<em>The Brand Billboard Effect</em>\nIf you have a complete line of products that involve several facings on the shelf, the brand’s visual identity should form a big billboard shouting out who the brand is across the shelf.\n\n<em>Simplify The Focus</em>\nKeep it extremely simple and focus on the highest emotional benefit the product provides. The consumer needs to know what makes the brand special and why they should buy.\n\n<em>The Brand Messaging Hierarchy</em>\nHow many layers of branding are on the packaging facing? If you have layers of branding on the facing (corporate brand, sub-brand, product segment, violators and flags), are these layers supporting how the consumer’s mind is working? Is your branding useful or just white noise?\n\n<em>Spotlighting</em>\nPutting visual emphasis on a new feature or a differentiated attribute is a common practice. Is the spotlighting on your packaging a promotional disruption, or is it an integrated descriptor that is important to product segmentation and shopper experience?\n\n<em>The Impression Hierarchy</em>\nThe mind sees, imprints and recalls in a systematic way. To make an impression on the mind, packaging needs to support how people perceive levels of information when they are shopping. Information is processed incrementally in a sequenced manner. In order of perceptual importance to the mind, packaging design must support these impressions:\n\n<em>1. color–invokes a physical response </em>\n\n<em>2. shape– creates and supports recognition</em>\n\n<em>3. imagery– stirs emotions and fulfills needs</em>\n\n<em>4.  words– informs</em>\n\n<strong>When you’re facing the task of creating and designing new packaging, it’s important to consider how the consumer’s mind deals with managing the intense overload of sensory information coming at them from every direction when they’re walking down the store aisle.  How they see, connect and recall things has important implications for how shopable your products are at shelf. Packaging that sells is always shopable.</strong>', 'Designing shopability into your product packaging.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'designing-shopability-into-your-product-packaging', '', '', '2011-08-22 18:44:42', '2011-08-22 22:44:42', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2534', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2550, 2, '2011-09-13 16:31:31', '2011-09-13 20:31:31', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2551\" title=\"datatrack\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/datatrack.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"265\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">No one will dispute the fact that information about consumer trends, attitudes and behaviors is necessary and useful to gain insight on determining the basis of planning marketing tactics. Like a sharp knife, data is both useful and dangerous.</span></h1>\nMarketers love data. They can’t get enough of it even as they drown in it. And there is no shortage of resources for marketers to get more and more data on consumer trends they believe will influence their marketing effectiveness. It may be time for marketers to recognize data as too much of a good thing. Paradoxically the more data marketers gather on consumer behavior, the more removed they are from knowing what really matters to people.\n<h2>Data (in and of itself) has no value whatsoever. Add to that consumer’s growing resistance to providing information to marketers, and its easy to see why the proliferation of data driven marketing is reaching a tipping point where so much data simply becomes useless white noise in the background of a crowded marketplace.</h2>\n<strong>Consumers believe data tracking is stalking.</strong>\n\nTracking the behavior of consumers online is an activity marketers love. Placing ads as a result of contextual browser behavior is all the rage right now for marketers. Trouble is consumers resent the fact that their browser behavior can be tracked by marketers seeking to dish up advertising that reflects their so-called interests.\n\nAccording to a recent Consumer Reports study, the majority of consumers don’t want to be tracked online. Here are some statistics to think about:\n\n78% of American consumers are uncomfortable receiving ads based on their internet browsing and online purchasing behavior.\n\n67% think the government should protect their online privacy.\n\n75% regularly erase cookies to thwart marketers who want to track them.\n\n40% believe their personal information is shared with marketers without their consent.\n\n<strong>Brands are built on trust not data.</strong>\n\nYou can gather all the data in the world about consumers and it won’t help you one bit if people don’t trust what your brand represents. Trust is something so basic and fundamental to building relationships with people, it’s difficult to understand why so many marketers ignore this fact in their data-gathering tactics?\n\nThe way to build trust is to contribute something of value first. If your marketing activities do not have trust baked in, then you will be alienating buyers. Contributing value starts with building a community by contributing to the community. For the most part, consumers are deaf and blind to marketing. Marketing has a smell to it that evokes a response “oh yeah, they’re trying to sell me something and it’s annoying”. Nobody wants to be sold anything, but people love to buy things. People buy things that matter to them.\n\n<strong>In the long run, those marketers who invest time, talent and money contributing value to their tribe rather than obsessively collecting data about them are usually the market leaders.</strong>', 'Data tracking is digital stalking.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'data-tracking-is-digital-stalking', '', '', '2011-09-13 16:31:31', '2011-09-13 20:31:31', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2550', 0, 'post', '', 0);
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(2602, 2, '2011-09-28 14:15:18', '2011-09-28 18:15:18', '<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2603\" title=\"perceptions\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/perceptions.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"262\" /><span style=\"color: #808080;\">No doubt about it change is hard. Humans resist change until they absolutely have to. Like a bad habit, you won’t kick it until it threatens your very existence. So it is with changing a brand’s perception in the minds of customers.</span></h1>\nOnce a customer’s mind is made up about a brand it’s next to impossible to change it. Marketers embarking on the journey of brand transformation must recognize it’s an inside-out process not for the faint of heart.\n\nBrands become what they have proven themselves to be. Mental perceptions are hardened by experience. People can’t form new perceptions without a new experience. Like the chicken or the egg, what comes first?\n\n<strong>Brand owners are the first to resist change.</strong>\n\nThere is a long period of denial before brand owners will change their own thinking. It can take years of sales declines before brand owners will wake up and deal honestly with a brand that is losing ground. This is especially true of iconic brands that once were leaders.\n\nThere’s a sense of complacency that cripples organizational action. Long before the cash starts drying up, iconic brands lose relevancy and customers. It’s hard to see this happening in real time. The dynamics of organizational thinking tend to favor the status quo.\n\nIf you’re going to change brand perceptions, the process begins by changing from within.\n<h2>For many brand owners, the default button for changing brand perception is a new ad agency, creating a different slogan or new ad campaign. Truth is, saying it’s so won’t make it so.</h2>\nConsumer’s perceptions only change through a changed experience. For consumers, experiencing new advertising (assuming they’re even listening) can never be a substitute for experiencing new and more relevant value from your brand.\n\nMeaningful change in brand perceptions first requires honest internal assessment and deep introspection. This is difficult for brand teams to do these days– especially when their performance is judged by management on a quarterly basis. Brand teams hyper-focus on the urgent work (running the business) rather than the important work (creating new value that represents a bigger future).\n\nThe first question that requires a solid answer is “what must change within our organization that will enable us to create a greater experience of value our customers will care about”? You can’t begin the journey of changing outside perceptions without internal clarity, confidence and consensus on what defines your brand’s value proposition and why it will continue matter to people. If your brand where gone tomorrow, would anybody care?\n\n<strong>There are only two options to consider.</strong>\n\nAssuming your brand team has the necessary internal clarity, confidence and consensus about what must change and where the greatest opportunities for success are found, there are only two strategic options available:\n\n1)    continue to invest in the current brand\n\n2)    invent a new brand\n\nThere are positives and negatives associated with both alternatives, but both will require lots of time, hard work and money. Let’s take a top-line view of these options.\n\n<strong><em>Continue to invest in the current brand:</em></strong>\nIf the strategic decision is made to continue to invest and turn around an under-performing brand, one thing must be understood–what created initial success may no longer insure future success. The key to successful transformation is how willing you are in helping consumers “unlearn” the associations they have with the current brand before you embed new associations and create more relevant experiences the target consumer segment cares about.\n\nIconic heritage brands that have abundant awareness but little relevance with a new generation of consumers are very difficult to change. Managers of iconic brands are naturally boxed in by the heritage the brand represents in people’s minds. Along the way it’s easy to blur the brand’s identity and value proposition attempting to stretch its meaning and value to new consumer segments.\n\nStarbucks is a great example of a successful turn around of an under-performing brand. After twenty years of ubiquitous expansion, the very thing that made the brand great was contributing to its demise. In addition, the brand faced growing threats from unlikely competitors such as McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts who offered more convenience and lower prices. Starbucks responded by changing nearly every aspect of its operations and core store experience from the inside out. Today the brand is once again enjoying the fruits of its leadership position. But it was a very expensive journey.\n\n<strong><em>Invent a new brand:</em></strong>\nIn the long run, inventing a new brand from scratch may be a more prudent decision than attempting to change customer perceptions of an under-performing brand. This is particularly true if the current brand’s positioning has boxed it into a market segment that has no future.\n\nIf the determination is made that the current brand associations by consumers bear too heavy a weight on the brand’s future expansion, inventing a new brand may be the only recourse for a fresh start.\n\nBlack &amp; Decker faced this very challenge. As the market for consumer power tools began to get more competitive and saturated, Black &amp; Decker brand owners decided to expand into the construction products market. Of course, the construction professional perceived the Black &amp; Decker brand good enough for sporadic odd jobs, but not the kind of product that could stand up to prolonged, rigorous professional use. No amount of product design or advertising would change this perception.\n\nTo enter this market, Black &amp; Decker invented the DeWalt brand. DeWalt has been an enormous success for Black &amp; Decker. One of the benefits of this strategy is the Dewalt brand commands far higher price points. Plus a good part of the market doesn’t even realize Dewalt is even made by Black and Decker (and that’s just fine with Black and Decker).\n\nTo enter a new market, it may be necessary to invent a new brand.  By doing so, along with fundamental changes in product functions and features, positioning and pricing that are more attuned to a new target consumer segment, and you may be able to have the best of both worlds.\n\n<strong>At the end of the day, there are no absolutes or easy choices. Changing customer perceptions about a brand’s value and relevance is dicey at best.  It’s worth repeating the process requires brand owners have a clear purpose and vision, the determination to stay the course, and lots of time and money.</strong>', 'Changing Brand Perceptions', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'changing-brand-perceptions', '', '', '2011-09-28 14:15:18', '2011-09-28 18:15:18', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2602', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2624, 2, '2011-10-20 12:52:31', '2011-10-20 16:52:31', '<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2625\" title=\"netflix\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/netflix.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"274\" /> <span style=\"color: #808080;\">When marketers behave arrogantly, the value of the idea people care about is instantly diminished. And once this happens, the road to redemption is long, difficult and expensive.</span></h1>\nConsumers  don’t value brands; they value the idea the brand represents to them.  This idea will always be worth more than the product, or the actual  bricks and mortar of the business enterprise. A recent example of a marketer’s arrogance towards its customers is NetFlix.\n\nThe story is classic, almost cliché. In the Netflix case, an innovative technology quickly ramps into an innovative business model with rapid customer acceptance and advocacy, and then inexplicably breaks its trust bond with the very people who were making it great. Other brands have done this as well. New Coke quickly comes to mind.\n\nOf course, much of the hubris and arrogance was initiated by Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings.  When the decision was made to raise prices and change how customers receive value without any consideration to the value of the brand’s “reason for being” and what it represents to people, the value of the Netflix brand was instantly diminished.  Not even a gracious mea culpa from the CEO or promotional incentives will undo the damage done.\n\nThe Netflix brand paid an incalculable and heavy price. The lesson for brand managers is clear:\n<h2>People place higher value and trust in the idea your brand represents– not the physical thing itself.  Before you change the physical thing, make sure the change will not damage the trust people have in the idea and its experience.</h2>\nIt’s not about the thing you make, the service you provide, promote and sell that matters. Netflix customers didn’t care about the “service” provided. They cared about something far more important– being in control!  Without warning or consideration, Netflix took that away from their customers. Bad idea.\n\nThis is an important and often overlooked principle in brand management.  When a brand is successful (like NetFlix), it’s because customers value an emotional experience more than a functional benefit. When the brand delivers on the desired experience, trust is earned, bonds are made strong, and brand value grows. Seemingly in the Netflix example, it\'s the brand not being loyal to customers, not the other way around.\n\nFunction, features and benefits come along for the ride. They most certainly have to be there, but they don’t matter as much as the perception of “use value” inherent in the brand’s promise.\n\n<strong>Continue to provide customers with greater “use value” than they pay you in cash value and your brand will always be trusted and command premium pricing.</strong>', 'Brand arrogance and the road to redemption for NetFlix.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-arrogance-and-the-road-to-redemption-for-netflix', '', '', '2011-10-20 12:52:31', '2011-10-20 16:52:31', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2624', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2635, 2, '2011-10-21 16:37:13', '2011-10-21 20:37:13', 'Consumer Products: Women\'s Apparel &amp; Accesssories\nIcon Footwear\nStrategic Brand Development\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Targeting younger women consumers who value everyday originality, we collaborated with this early stage couture footwear brand to rejuvenate its brand positioning and visual expression for greater US market penetration in leading department stores.</span></h1>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2636\" title=\"classicicon\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/classicicon.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"353\" /></span> Icon Footwear is a couture manufacturer and marketer of printed leather woman’s footwear, handbags and accessories.  Icon footwear had experienced early marketing success through it’s offering of classic and comfortable printed leather footwear designs targeted to woman over forty. Icon products were primarily sold through small fashion boutiques and specialty apparel retailers in the US.</h2>\nThe brand owners desired to expand the business by developing new product designs that appealed to a younger, more fashion conscious consumer, and to increase their opportunities to penetrate major department store distribution in stores like Nordstrom\'s and Macy\'s.\n\nThe new product designs offered women consumers more stylish designs presented in fresh, colorful and artful printed leather patterns of contemporary and master paintings and prints. These footwear designs afforded consumers an opportunity to express their individuality in a spirited, lighthearted way.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2654\" title=\"tradeshow2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/tradeshow2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"345\" />\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2638\" title=\"iconweb\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/iconweb.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"377\" /><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2639\" title=\"brochure\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/brochure.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"253\" />Through qualitative research, we learned the Icon women highly-valued practical, comfortable and wearable footwear, but also appealed to their playful, individualist, expressive, non-conformist nature. The brand mantra of “step lively” became a call to action for the Icon consumer to explore and express her individuality and leave an indelible impression on those around her. The Icon women valued practical comfort without sacrificing stylish, everyday originality.\n\nTo bring this strategic brand positioning to life for retail buyers, we developed a brand messaging platform, and provided creative direction and guidance for the development of a new trademark, brand guidelines, retail packaging, merchandising elements, collateral sales materials and consumer web site.', 'Brand Story: Icon Footwear Brand Positioning', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'brand-story-icon-footwear-brand-positioning', '', '', '2011-10-21 16:37:13', '2011-10-21 20:37:13', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2635', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2675, 2, '2011-11-02 13:00:13', '2011-11-02 17:00:13', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2676\" title=\"brand-focus\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/brand-focus.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"383\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Building successful brands is not a one-size fits all activity. Brand building is both art and science, and the method of creating brand strategy is never the same for every brand.</span></h1>\nBrand strategy is an obsessive and often the most misunderstood discipline in marketing. It’s of critical importance to know beforehand what will be the most effective strategy for building your brand. Brand owners and managers who desire brand innovation often end up with brand imitation. In a world predisposed to sameness, there’s nothing worse than clawing your way to the middle with a brand strategy that doesn’t fit the realities of your business strategy.\n\nIt’s extremely difficult to build a brand that breaks through the slush pile of images and messages consumers are drowning in today. Not only must brand strategy differentiate your proposition from others, but more importantly, this differentiation must also be highly valued.\n<h2>Most contemporary brand managers would agree– we’re way past the traditional thinking and point of view that brand building is an activity that endows a product or service with a catchy name, snappy slogan, pretty logo, compelling packaging and advertising.</h2>\nBrand strategy is like creating mythology– stories people care about and remember. People don’t buy products, they buy personalities and meanings associated with the story of those products. People will only find meanings in brands with personality.\n\nA brand strategy worth investing money in over the long haul has to tap into the emotions and feelings of your target segment in ways that transcend the functional and rational benefits associated with using the product. Depending on the nature and culture of your organization, and the reason your brand exists in the first place, here are four different methods for brand strategy development you may consider useful to your strategic and creative thinking:\n\n<strong>Branding Strategy by Centralized Planning</strong>\nIn this method, brand strategy is approached in a rigorous, centralized and formal business planning process. Typically this approach is used by companies with large and diverse product portfolios that are defined as a  “house of brands”.  Each brand within the portfolio has it’s own management team, customer segment, product life cycle, supply chain, performance metrics, market share, and profit contribution mandated by centralized planning and tons of data.\n\nCompanies like Proctor &amp; Gamble, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Gillette and GM favor centralized planning as the cornerstone of their brand strategy.\n\n<strong>Branding Strategy by Image</strong>\nThis method is usually driven by creatives within advertising agencies in a leading brand development role and linked to creative execution of various ad campaigns. Marketers and their agencies closely link the brand to imagery driven by latest trends and fads in the culture.  Brand strategy is developed in a more tactical manner driven by the various cultural associations customers have that are surrounding the brand image.\n\nImage conscious brands like Abercrombie &amp; Finch, Calvin Klein, BMW, Absolut, Tag Heur are brilliant at this type of strategy.\n\n<strong>Branding Strategy by User Experience</strong>\nIn this method, customers perceive product quality, functional benefits and brand image as a given. What these customers are after is an experience that dazzles the senses, touches the heart and stimulates the mind.  In this method the customer is the most important component of the brand. Brand managers focus on service design and usability, which are at the very core of these experiences, to drive brand strategy.\n\nBrands built on user experience include Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Disney, IKEA, xbox, Costco, and Tiffany.\n\n<strong>Branding Strategy by Self Expression</strong>\nIn this method, marketers place the role of brand building as a collaboration with their customers. Marketers innovate new meanings rather than products. Customers are actively participating in creating the meanings associated with the brand that are a reflection or a symbolic representation of their own personal identity or inner self. Here the strategy is centered on “brand as badge”.\n\nBrand examples that are built on self expression include Swatch, Apple, Mini, Uggs, Louis Vuitton and Herman Miller.\n\nAll over the world, humans are drowning in data and information. As information and our collective intelligence becomes more automated in the goo of the internet, human beings will value more of what can not be automated- emotion, imagination, connection and engagement.  Brands will live and die on the ability of their stories and meanings to deliver what is highly valued by the marketplace.\n\n<strong>At the end of the day, regardless of the method used to drive your brand strategy, the question remains “what does your brand stand for that matters to people and makes a difference”?  Brands that lead markets know the answer and build accordingly.</strong>', 'Four Methods of Strategic Brand Building.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'four-methods-of-strategic-brand-building', '', '', '2011-11-02 13:00:13', '2011-11-02 17:00:13', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2675', 0, 'post', '', 3),
(2689, 2, '2011-11-11 20:44:50', '2011-11-12 00:44:50', '<strong>Consumer Packaged Goods</strong>\n<strong>Kevita Probiotic Drinks</strong>\n<strong>Kevita LLC</strong>\n<strong>Strategic Brand Development</strong>\n\n&nbsp;\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Bringing new vitality to this up and coming functional beverage brand, we helped KeVita refresh its brand to set the stage for its next level of growth.</span></h1>\n<h2><span style=\"color: #808080;\">\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2910\" title=\"kevita vertical 2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/kevita-vertical-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"575\" /></span>\nKevita is an early stage RTD functional beverage brand offering consumers a delicious and refreshing way to include probiotics into their diet for digestive and immune health. Founded in early 2010, Kevita has experienced some early success with regional distribution, new product introductions and more operational efficiencies.</h2>\n<strong>Challenge</strong>\nLike most early stage start-ups, not enough attention or resources was invested into brand building. The KeVita brand was struggling to define its value proposition in the functional beverage category and faced entrenched competition from other beverages promising health benefits from their ingredients. The product labeling and shelf presence, although bold and colorful, was generic offering consumers no compelling reason to reach for the brand or retailers to stock it.\n\nIn the hyper-competitive beverage category, the KeVita brand needed a compelling and distinctive brand positioning and promise that retailers believed would win consumers at shelf. To grow distribution into national grocery chains required a complete assessment to define where the brand could compete and win going forward.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2691\" title=\"oldkevita\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/oldkevita.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"325\" />Old Kevita Packaging and Trademark\n\n<strong>Brand Innovation</strong>\nWorking from the brand team’s current market research, and other insights gathered from in-store product demonstrations, we helped the brand team define the target consumer segment that represented the brand’s best opportunity. These consumers were at the nexus of three important trends driving their engagement with the category: greater awareness of the health benefits associated with probiotics in their diet, the market growth of the natural products and functional health beverage category, and the desire these consumers have for creating life experiences with a “sustainable” sense of health and well-being.\n<h1><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2906\" title=\"Kevita GroupShot2\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Kevita-GroupShot2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"792\" height=\"494\" />Informed by the learning from qualitative consumer insights we crafted a value proposition and brand positioning around what health-conscious consumers cared about most– to experience radiant vitality!</h1>\nTo bring the new brand promise of “delicious vitality” to life at the store shelf, we designed the refreshed brand identity, trademarks, packaging formats and product labeling system to vividly express the essence of refreshing natural flavors, sparkling, living probiotic cultures, and radiant energy expressed with bold and vivid color. The early response from key retailers like Whole Foods has been remarkable. You’ll soon find KeVita in all nine refreshing flavors on the shelf of every Whole Foods Market (and others retailers like them) all across the USA.\n<a href=\"/2011/11/12-oz-16-oz-comp.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2904\" title=\"12 oz 16 oz comp\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/12-oz-16-oz-comp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"792\" height=\"576\" /></a>\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2908\" title=\"Kevita Dispaly\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Kevita-Dispaly1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"792\" height=\"472\" />\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;', 'Brand Story: KeVita Strategic Brand Development', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'closed', '', 'brand-story-kevita-strategic-brand-development', '', '', '2011-11-11 20:44:50', '2011-11-12 00:44:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2689', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2734, 2, '2011-11-17 12:52:29', '2011-11-17 16:52:29', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2735\" title=\"design is a good idea\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bluesky-winter-08-5.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"334\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Design is an essential thinking skill that must be mastered as a strategic business imperative throughout the entire enterprise. Design is not merely a decorative act.</span></h1>\nEverywhere one looks in the marketplace there is revolution and disintegration. Wave after wave of technological change and ubiquitous choice comes upon us more rapidly, engulfing us, confusing us more profoundly. Marketers are struggling to keep pace with disruptive forces that are reshaping the manner in which they innovate new value in this so-called new economy.\n\nGlobalization has still to prove itself globally useful amidst a world experiencing the dynamic tension of growing consumption and dwindling supply. The new workplace has seen its own revolution. People no longer rely on the old paradigms of security within the corporation as out-sourced manufacturing, customer service, and even out-sourced innovation mark the end of an era of status quo–especially in the US. Ironically, the nature of this paradigm shift has un-hinged our own intuitive human connections even as we become more and more digitally connected in the social web.\n\nMany marketers have been unprepared to re-think the structures of their enterprises and flow with the changing times, while new, more agile competitors are doing it for them. Brand strategy is no longer about differentiating brands within a category, but rather designing a whole new category your brand can own.\n\nThere are two dynamic realities marketers face in this new economy:\n<h2>1) ideas are more important than process.\n2) move up the value chain, or be cast aside.</h2>\nNature, in the form of our current economic realities, has had a wonderful way of clearing the dead wood in the system to make room for more innovative players to grow and prosper. Amazingly, as the rules of the game change in real time, improvisation and flexibility is now a useful strategic skill within organizations.\n\nIt’s an exciting time rich with opportunity for those who view it as such. Indeed, opportunity is apparent everywhere. If you are a marketing executive, charged with defining and managing the competitive advantage of your products and services, the implications of this disruptive age are of significant importance to your future.\n\nFor your brands to stay relevant, your “value proposition” will be less and less derived from attributes of product and service features, and more from the emotional connections and experiences your customers have through their interactions and associations with your enterprise. Creating these “experiences”, and the use value they offer people, is the result of the strategic and creative process of DESIGN.\n\n<strong>Design is: a focused fanaticism to create value.</strong>\n\nDesign is, in all its disciplines (product, process, environment and communication) an essential thinking skill that must be mastered as a strategic business imperative throughout the entire enterprise. Design is not merely a decorative act.\n<h2>Good design is a value generator. Design has added billions of dollars worth of market capitalization to those enterprises that understand its power and higher purpose. In the new economy, design is the soul of enterprise strategy.</h2>\nYou don’t have to look very far for examples of brands where this principle is applied with phenomenal results: Apple, Nike, Starbucks, BMW, Harley Davidson, Herman Miller, Target, Gillette, Virgin – every one of these enterprises are absolute fanatics about design and its fundamental importance to their business strategy.\n\nWhatever the product or service enterprise, you’ll find design fanatics at the very top of leading organizations. Fanatics who value design as the white hot center of competitive advantage. As a result, design elevates brands above the competitive plane into, dare we say, the more abundant creative plane. Design leaders are not bound by the restrictions of the competitive plane (think cost and commoditization), when they are free to innovate, grow and expand by leveraging the love (think passion and devotion) customers have for their offerings.\n\n<strong>In a world of growing complexity and abundant choice, design is the great differentiator.</strong>', 'Design is: a good idea!', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'design-is-a-good-idea', '', '', '2011-11-17 12:52:29', '2011-11-17 16:52:29', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2734', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2767, 2, '2011-11-28 18:56:33', '2011-11-28 22:56:33', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2768\" title=\"fish\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/fish.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"242\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In a world of ubiquitous choice in every product category, brands no longer compete with each other rather they seem to be melting into each other. It’s time to rethink different in a world predisposed to sameness.</span></h1>\nIn category after category, the more brands strive for differentiation, the more alike they become. This is the paradox of different. Never in the course of human history has there been more abundant choice and consumption.  There are more upgrades, add-ons, flavors and features between brands in a category that many have become indistinguishable in consumer\'s minds.\n\n<strong>The rise of the category connoisseur.</strong>\nIn her provocative and quirky book “Different–Escaping the Competitive Herd”, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon describes how consumers navigate product categories and discern differences among brands within categories. She uses (to great effect) a low involvement category like breakfast cereal to illustrate the process. According to Moon, it goes something like this:\n\n<em><strong>You’re standing in the middle of the breakfast cereal isle in your local grocery store. Your mission is to select a cereal you’ve never tried before–ideally one you will end up enjoying. How would you go about it?</strong></em>\n\n<em><strong>If you were a breakfast cereal category connoisseur, you would simply walk down the isle instantly eliminating whole batches of cereal types from your consideration– kid’s cereals or anything with lots of sugar. You might begin to narrow your focus down to granolas or high fiber cereals. Maybe you would eliminate raisons or walnuts from the mix. Until you make your selection. The whole exercise would be over in less than a minute.</strong></em>\n\nConsumers have learned to deconstruct a product category into sub categories and mini categories. Consumers, faced with overwhelming choice, have learned to make distinctions between various brands based on the smallest details of difference, and along the way become category connoisseurs. Before consumers can discern brand differences, they must be highly involved in the category.\n\nOn the other hand, if you were an alien from another planet, this simple task would prove nearly impossible. For this poor soul, ALL the cereals would appear to be pretty much the same. Why? Because where a connoisseur (category aware consumer) sees differences, the novice (unaware consumer) sees similarity. According to Moon, “connoisseurs can discern subtle differences based on nuanced asymmetries”, while a novice will lack the necessary filters to organize the assortment of choices in a relevant or meaningful way.\n\nYou could repeat this same exercise in any number of product categories with the same result. Try explaining to our aforementioned alien friend the difference between a Honda and a Toyota?  AT&amp;T Wireless and Verizon? Wendy’s and Burger King?  Coke and Pepsi, Crest and Colgate?\n\nYet as consumers, we take for granted how frequently we make purchase decisions among brands in the face of mind boggling, overflowing product choice. For brands competing in a category, this reality has critical implications–especially in mature product categories where the number of alternatives has grown exponentially.\n<h2>It’s a mistake to assume product proliferation within the category translates into product diversity. As the number of products grows in a category, the differences between them become trivial, almost meaningless.</h2>\n<strong>The emperor has no clothes and everybody knows it.</strong>\nThe whole point of an effective brand strategy is to create relevant competitive advantage in a category. This is accomplished by having a value proposition that is highly valued and not in abundant supply. Yet with so much choice, it’s difficult to name a brand in any category that stands out for its uniqueness.\n\nWe now live in a brand landscape of dissimilar clones where imitation has become cloaked in the disguise of differentiation. Marketers still believe in the myth of competitive separation and advantage by function, features and rational benefits. They continue to imitate rather than innovate.\n\n<strong>Meaningful differentiation is a breakaway from conventional wisdom.</strong>\nOver time, consumer’s consumption patterns dictate the conventional wisdom of the category and what defines the functional reach of the products within that category. It’s easy to see why brands that fit neatly into the consumption pattern blend into the category. Thus contributing to the trivial differentiation that eventually becomes imitation.\n<h2>To break free of the defining norms and innovate new meanings, brands have to breakaway and provide consumers with an expanded view or alternate frame of reference.</h2>\nBreaking away means letting go of the consumption pattern embedded into the category. Consumers must be complicit in this process for the magic to work.\n\nA great example of a breakaway brand is Cirque du Soleil.  It falls into the “circus” category, but this brand has skillfully crafted a highly valued and differentiated positioning as everything a circus is not. There are no tents, tigers and elephants. No ringmasters. Instead it borrows attributes from other entertainment categories like, dance, music, opera and theater.  It becomes something all together different–far outside the bounds of a conventional circus.\n\nBreakaway brands bring new meanings to the party and make the most of the stretch, holding on to enough of the conventinal wisdom to avoid category defection. Breakaway brands stretch these boundaries and live as outliers. These brands are the opposite of the well-behaved brands in the category and consequently provide a radical differentiation from the status quo.\n\nBreakaway brands challenge the conventional patterns of consumption in the category by proposing new patterns to consumers they would not normally apply in that specific context. In essence, these brands provide the very thing consumers were waiting for, just not asking for.\n\n<strong>To break the paradox of different, brands become the exception in their category and not the rule.</strong>', 'The paradox of different.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-paradox-of-different', '', '', '2011-11-28 18:56:33', '2011-11-28 22:56:33', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2767', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2781, 2, '2011-12-05 16:09:31', '2011-12-05 20:09:31', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2782\" title=\"crazy-idea\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/crazy-idea.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"289\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">The notion that the process of value creation and innovation can somehow be quantified as something predictable, with outcomes easily repeated, is a compelling one indeed. Unfortunately the magic of value creation doesn’t work that way. The source of value creation BEGINS with formless creative thought not data.</span></h1>\n<strong>Crazy ideas.</strong>\nEverything that ever was, is now, and ever will be is at first a formless thought seed in the creative mind. Many of the products we can’t live without today started out as crazy ideas– automobiles, airplanes, personal computing, digital music an entertainment, smartphones, the internet and social media – stuff nobody needed or was asking for, but once realized was just the thing they we’re waiting for.  All the stuff that has changed how we live in the world begins as formless crazy ideas.\n<h2>Crazy ideas are always more richly embedded with game changing opportunity than safe ideas. A safe idea is the one you can “prove will work” before it takes form in the world.</h2>\nAs early humans, we learned and adapted within the context of our surroundings. When humans first learned that fire makes life easier (like cooking meat and keeping warm) the idea of fire was eagerly embraced as necessary for survival. I’ll bet before people figured out the “use value” of fire, it probably was a very frightening thing to experience–and not perceived as very useful.\n\n<strong>Crazy ideas are like ancient fire– feared until proven useful.</strong>\nThe music industry fought tooth and nail to avoid the firestorm crazy idea of digitally produced, reproduced and distributed music. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the days of vinyl records and CDs. If you were a creator of music, you had very little power in how you received economic reward for your creative output. If you were a consumer, someone made the decision for you about what music would be available for you to listen to. It was a closed system unable to accept and utilize a crazy idea.\n\nConsumers were not demanding the crazy idea of digital music be created out of their unmet need for digital music.  Yet once its use value was realized, the crazy idea changed an industry and the world.\n\nThe same is true for more commonplace crazy ideas like the Swiffer, which changed how people clean their homes. Dreyer’s Slow Churned Ice Cream, which enabled consumers to enjoy more healthful desserts. And Digiorrno Pizza, which elevated frozen pizza to delivered pizza status.  Nobody was asking for these crazy ideas, yet each one proved massively successful.\n\n<strong>Crazy ideas propose new meanings and create competitive advantage.</strong>\nIn a me-too world of abundant choice, it’s far better to create new value (propose new meanings) than compete for the value created by others. If your product is competitively ranked number three or four in a category, you may want to be thinking about a “crazy idea that won’t work” that will create a new meaning around your product that puts it in a league all its own.\n\nThat’s what Swatch did. When their bigger competitors Seiko and Casio were closely monitoring consumer needs for technical precision then inventing Quartz technology, Swatch had the crazy idea that people valued self-expression more and created a new category and untouchable competitive advantage in a class by themselves for over a decade.\n<h2>The key ingredient to competitive advantage is to provide people with more “use value” than they pay in cash value.</h2>\nAlthough you could buy a high-quality, precision quartz watch from Casio for under $50, it didn’t provide the perceived use value of self- expression available for $100 from Swatch. This is the power of crazy ideas in creating new value even when it’s not driven by known user needs.\n\n<strong>Two choices: the creative plane or the competitive plane.</strong>\nIf your business is to thrive in the new economy driven by crazy ideas, you’ll have to choose between operating from the creative plane or the competitive plane.\n\nWhen your organization operates on the competitive plane, it can only win when somebody else loses. You will only bring products to market that are based in incremental user needs, and abundantly available from other sources. You’ll be forced to compete at the lowest price. Crazy ideas that are without form and unproven will be discounted in favor of the status quo. Your enterprise will be managed based on control, competition and survival.\n\nOn the other hand, if your organization creates value on the creative plane, there will be no shortage of supply or opportunity.  You’ll bring products to market that redefine the category, delighting customers with the unexpected, making competition irrelevant. Your customers will experience more use value than they pay in cash value–making price irrelevant. Your teams will be focused on turning possibilities into realities. You will not count transactions but create experiences people love and build trust money can’t buy.\n\n<strong>Indeed, value creation is a crazy idea. Get crazy and more up the value chain.</strong>', 'Value creation is a crazy idea.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'value-creation-is-a-crazy-idea', '', '', '2011-12-05 16:09:31', '2011-12-05 20:09:31', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2781', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(2793, 2, '2011-12-08 16:21:13', '2011-12-08 20:21:13', '<p><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2794\" title=\"kodak\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/kodak.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"316\" /></p>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Let’s pay respects to Eastman Kodak which appears to be rapidly fading into black, the victim of it’s own arrogance and the forces of creative destruction raging in our digital age.</span></h1>\n<p>As I write this post, I can\'t help singing the lyrics of Paul Simon’s 1973 iconic tune: “Kodachrome gives us our life’s bright colors, give us the greens of summer, make us feel all the world’s a brighter day”.</p>\n<p>Once the bluest of blue chip brands, Kodak is eminently about to enter some form of bankruptcy protection and reorganization. Of course, no surprise there, but as the Holiday Season draws near, I am nostalgically reminded of Kodak’s “open-me-first” dominance of the season and all the special “Kodak moments” throughout the year that were the foundation of its dominant position in our culture for over a century.</p>\n<p>This is a dramatic ending to an iconic and beloved brand that was once as globally recognized as Coca-Cola.</p>\n<p>With it’s stock price hovering around a buck, $800 million in cash on hand, and a monthly burn rate of $70 million, it’ll take less than a year for Kodak (like Polaroid) to become a history lesson for marketing MBA’s to ponder in business schools. Kodak is now frantically trying to stay afloat by selling its intellectual property. Buggy whips anyone?</p>\n<p><strong>The irony of the digital age.</strong><br />\nSome people may not be aware that in 1975 Kodak engineers invented the digital camera. But like many innovations, the idea was not deemed particular useful by the management of a company deeply cemented into it’s dominant chemistry based film business.  The irony is palpable for sure–made worse by the arrogance of Kodak’s executive management over the years.</p>\n<p>The last spool of Kodachrome film rolled out of a Mexican factory in 2009. With instant point and shoot digital photography on cheap cell phone cameras, even consumer-grade digital cameras are quickly becoming relics. Worse, only a tiny fraction of consumer images taken on cell phones or digital cameras gets printed to paper. Who needs printed pictures when people share digital photos on social media networks?</p>\n<h2>New economic models and global competition have destroyed other giant companies, but digital technology has been a destructive firestorm making every aspect of Kodak’s business completely irrelevant. I can think of no better example of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” principle at work.</h2>\n<p><strong>The arrogance of success.</strong><br />\nKodak is a lesson to any CEO in an industry dominant company– things change, nothing lasts forever. (This goes for the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook). Almost from it’s founding in 1890, the money came rolling in decade after decade fueled by the razor-blade strategy of selling cheap cameras and reaping lavish profit margins through consumables of film, chemistry and paper.</p>\n<p>By the mid-70’s Kodak owned nearly 90 percent of the film and camera market. With this level of dominance, you can just imagine what kind of executive culture was brewing in the Petri dish of marketplace success. Arrogance and complacency are often the by-products of an unassailable competitive position, and Kodak has been no exception.</p>\n<p>When Fuji Film entered the US market, Kodak executives refused to believe that Americans would embrace a foreigner over the sacred brand. Big mistake. Rebuffing its chance to become the official film of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Fuji brilliantly exploited the opportunity and achieved a permanent hold in the US market, significantly eroding Kodak\'s share.</p>\n<p>Then came the digital age. Although Kodak had embraced many me-too digital features in its products by the mid-80’s, it’s executives could not fathom a future where film would have no role whatsoever in image capture. Nor could they manage their bloated business, pension obligations and executive compensation on the low profit margins and competitive pace of a marketplace overflowing with short product cycle technologies.</p>\n<p><strong>The Kodak Moment has passed.</strong><br />\nEvery brand has a lifespan– a beginning, middle and an end.  That said, companies can remake themselves on a scale now confronting Kodak. IBM did it. GM is on that road now. It can be done.  Alas, we may be witnessing the last Kodak Moment right now.</p>\n<p>True enough, it could be argued it’s premature to write off the Kodak brand. Kodak has a century of consumer marketing expertise and a viable technology portfolio to leverage. However, without visionary leadership at this critical time, Kodak may be forced to sell the remaining seeds of its potentially brighter future and fade into black.</p>\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\n', 'The Last Kodak Moment.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-last-kodak-moment', '', '', '2011-12-08 16:21:13', '2011-12-08 20:21:13', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2793', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(2811, 2, '2011-12-12 19:52:38', '2011-12-12 23:52:38', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2812\" title=\"WHCchristmascard-LZ\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/WHCchristmascard-LZ.gif\" alt=\"Happy Holidays from PULL Brand Innovation\" width=\"515\" height=\"258\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">To our clients, colleagues and friends, on behalf of PULL Brand Innovation, we wish you a joyous Holiday Season and much prosperity and success in the coming New Year!</span></h1>', 'Happy Holidays!', '', 'publish', 'closed', 'open', '', 'happy-holidays-2', '', '', '2011-12-12 19:52:38', '2011-12-12 23:52:38', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2811', 0, 'post', '', 0);
INSERT INTO `pull_posts` (`ID`, `post_author`, `post_date`, `post_date_gmt`, `post_content`, `post_title`, `post_excerpt`, `post_status`, `comment_status`, `ping_status`, `post_password`, `post_name`, `to_ping`, `pinged`, `post_modified`, `post_modified_gmt`, `post_content_filtered`, `post_parent`, `guid`, `menu_order`, `post_type`, `post_mime_type`, `comment_count`) VALUES
(2820, 2, '2011-12-27 18:54:29', '2011-12-27 22:54:29', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2821\" title=\"ship\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/ship.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"328\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In many business organizations, there is still much confusion about the role of strategic brand development and brand management and who within the organization should lead it. Brand strategy and brand management is too important to be left to marketing people.</span></h1>\nThat’s my spin on the famous David Packard quote (as in Hewlett Packard) about marketing being too important an activity to the well-being of a business enterprise to be left in the hands of marketing people alone.\n\nBusiness leaders have notoriously looked at marketing with a critical eye. Marketing is not a “hard discipline” like engineering, sales and finance. Business leaders love quantified activities that facilitate a predictable return. Marketing doesn’t provide predictable returns. And in today’s social media, permission and privacy driven world, marketing is even more suspect by consumers. Customers want real, authentic connections and engagement to brands, not more marketing and selling.\n\n<strong>Brand strategy and brand management is not a sub-discipline of marketing.</strong>\n\nAs brand strategy and brand management becomes more essential for marketplace success, enlightened business leaders have moved it further away (and upstream) from the core competencies within marketing organizations.\n\nYet for many organizations, brand strategy and brand management is an activity mostly managed within the marketing discipline. Consequently everybody in the marketing profession does “branding” these days. Branding gets bundled into a plethora of tactical marketing activities like PR, advertising, social media, sales promotion, packaging and marketing communications. Brand strategy and brand management is not marketing, advertising or communications.\n\nThis by no means diminishes the essential role of marketing for creating awareness and demand. Brand strategy and brand management is not about creating awareness, it’s about guiding the quality and relevance of organizational behavior in serving a specific group of customers/consumers. It’s a more sacred and strategic process defining the who, the what, and why an organization or a product exists in the first place – beyond money making. Brand strategy and brand management is about the soul of the thing–the intangible, the unseen, the meaning rather than the physical.\n\nBrands make promises to people. Break the sacred promise and no amount of clever marketing will rebuild lost trust. Just ask Netflix or Tropicana what can happen to your business when the bonds of trust breaks. The value of brands lies in the perception customers have in their minds about what makes a brand matter to them. To matter nowadays, requires brands build deeply rooted emotional connections and never fail to deliver on the promise.\n<h2>The discipline of brand strategy and brand management is centered in creating a set of unchanging, universal principles that guides the behavior of organizations and the products they bring to the marketplace over the life of the enterprise. It’s not about informing the next advertising campaign.</h2>\n<strong>Brand strategy and brand management is a top down discipline.</strong>\n\nThe principles that guide the strategy and management of a brand have to be driven by the leadership of the organization. Brand leadership begins with business leadership.\n\nBusiness strategy informs brand strategy which, in turn, informs marketing tactics.\n\nWhen marketing organizations (or worse their advertising agencies) attempt to define and lead brand strategy, it becomes more marketing. Consumers / customers loathe marketing. Marketing now gets in the way of real engagement with a brand. Marketing needs to be baked into brand strategy, not the other way around.\n\nBusiness leaders must drive brand strategy. Leaders determine the higher purpose, vision and values of the business enterprise, not their marketing organizations. Consequently, when leaders have clarity on “why” their brand exists, it’s much easier and more effective to weave the elements of brand strategy into the fabric of the organizational culture and guide the behavior of the organization at every customer touch point in the value chain.\n\n<strong>Brand strategy and brand management is internal, marketing is external.</strong>\n\nBrand strategy informs everyone within the organization why they exist and matter to people, what values they share, what markets they serve, what products they innovate and bring to market, what processes they use, and what experiences they are to create for customers and the community at large. Without this solid foundation firmly established, marketing organizations (and their agency partners) have nothing to go on – no map, no guidance, and no discipline – an aimless ship adrift without a rudder.\n\nBrand strategy and brand management is the rudder that steers the ship.', 'The Rudder That Steers The Ship', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-rudder-that-steers-the-ship', '', '', '2011-12-27 18:54:29', '2011-12-27 22:54:29', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2820', 0, 'post', '', 5),
(2828, 2, '2012-01-11 15:50:11', '2012-01-11 19:50:11', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2829\" title=\"searslogo\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/searslogo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"302\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">With 120 Sears and Kmart stores about to be shuttered, the future looks uncertain for yet another iconic US retail brand. Here’s our view on what it might take for Sears Holdings to create a brighter future.</span></h1>\nIt’s an understatement to say the retail environment has become a slush pile in the past decade. Once a dominant presence in every major mall across the US, Sears is now a relic from the past struggling to find its way in a culture that no longer seems to care.\n\nSame goes for Kmart– these iconic and once beloved brands (like Kodak) appear beyond transforming themselves into something that people will love again.\n\nI remember growing up in the 60’s and shopping at Sears and Kmart with my Mother. She loved shopping in both those stores. Dad too. It seemed to me both these brands represented the idea that the good life was accessible to just about everyone everywhere. My family was no exception. My parents made all their major purchases at a Sears or Kmart store. They wouldn’t consider alternatives.  I grew up with a deep belief that these stores were somehow sacred places for a thriving middle class living the American dream.\n\n<strong>Times change, Sears and Kmart didn’t.</strong>\n\nNow executives at Sears Holdings find themselves in a scramble to figure out what to do with these brands that have become dinosaurs from a lost world–relics from a time when things were simple and uncomplicated.\n<h2>Retail knowledge and expertise is not the core problem for Sears– it’s the investment banker management culture that has over time sucked the value out of these brands.</h2>\nProfit has been placed above serving people with experiences they care about. As I have written in previous posts, iconic brands begin to die long before the cash they generate dries up.\n\nOf course, there are many highly skilled and experienced people within the Sears organization that know the retail business inside and out, with far more depth than I will ever know in a hundred lifetimes. It’s time for the folks at Sears Holdings to transform the brand into something worthy of its heritage and a brighter future.\n\n<strong>Sears’ brighter future is in the parts not the whole.</strong>\n\nDespite tired merchandising and dingy looking stores, Sears store brands are a shining pot of gold that can pave the way forward to a brighter future. Craftsman, DieHard, Kenmore and Lands End are all highly valued brands that still matter to consumers. Trouble is, one has to go into a crappy Sears stores to buy them.\n\nMaybe a tough decision could be made to sell these coveted brands through other retail channels. According to a recent post on <a href=\"http://www.storebrandsdecisions.com/news/2012/01/03/what-lies-ahead-for-sears-store-brands\" target=\"_blank\">Store Brand Decisions</a>, that may already be happening as there is speculation the retailer may be getting serious about new channel strategies for its legacy hardline private label brands.\n\nAccording to the post, Sears has made moves to expand its store brands beyond its own stores. Sears recently struck deals to sell Craftsman tools at Costco stores and is expanding this program to include Ace Hardware stores. This past September, Sears announced plans to sell its DieHard Gold auto batteries at Meijer discount stores. However, there have been no announcements about selling Kenmore appliances at other retailers, but there’s plenty of speculation.\n\nThat seems like selling off the “seeds” of their brighter future. Indeed it’s a logical short-term strategy for revenue and keeping the stock price up, but these coveted store brands own all the cache! When you can buy them somewhere else, who needs Sears?\n\nSeems to me, reinventing the Sears experience by leveraging the valuable equity in these private brands through more effective and creative merchandising in smaller retail footprints and online is the smarter move. Get rid of everything else–including Kmart. Who needs a Kmart today when Target, Wal-Mart and a host of other discount retailers have that space covered in spades.\n\n<strong>Create experiences people love.</strong>\n\nThe entire Sears customer experience must be purposefully reinvented and designed.  This is what IKEA accomplished. Despite the fact that people hate shopping for furniture, IKEA reinvented the entire furniture shopping experience–and did it in a manner that’s contrary to the conventional wisdom about furniture retailing.\n\nUnlike most furniture retailers, IKEA does not deliver, and you have to set-up your stuff once you cart it home. And despite all this hassle, people love IKEA. It is one of the most beloved retail brands. People don’t buy furniture at IKEA they buy into an idea, an ethos, a certain way of living.\n\nSears could learn a thing or two about the value of designed experiences to differentiate itself from other big box competitors. To do this will require a tremendous culture shift within the ranks of executive management.  To people concerned more about short-term profits, it’s far easier to close down non-performing stores than create ones people love to shop in.\n\n<strong>Leverage the iconic Sears mail-order heritage into a richer digital experience.</strong>\n\nBack in the day when people cared about Sears, they also loved the Sears Catalog. Sears invented the mail order catalog. With online retailing now common, Sears seemingly missed the boat translating their iconic catalog into a rich online experience consumers crave today.\n\nOn the current site, there are over two dozen product categories offered with thousands of items. You can buy everything imaginable. Why?  Why not focus the Sears online shopping experience around the valuable and much loved store brands. Leave everything else to Amazon who does a much better job.\n\nOnline, Sears is a me-too generic site. If people don’t shop in your brick and mortar stores that represent an experience they love, why would they shop online in the face of other more capable alternatives?  If you visit the site, there is no visual merchandising of the beloved trade names, only generic descriptors like “refrigerator” or “washers and dryers”. You have to really dive deep to find the brand name Kenmore. In the desire to sell everything under the sun, Sears no longer means anything to anybody.  In the online world, Sears should leverage its mail order heritage and be the exception not the rule.\n\n<strong>Focus and the art of sacrifice.</strong>\n\nThe toughest thing for an iconic brand to do is focus and sacrifice. To thrive, Sears must do both. Sears needs to focus on a compelling positioning that sacrifices a “be all things to all people” business with gigantic scale, and transform itself into a business that offers a highly relevant value proposition narrowly targeted to select high value customers.\n<h2>Less is more. Put the marketing and merchandising focus on the much loved store brands. Get rid of all the other the soft lines. Retire or sell the Kmart brand.  Design a compelling retail experience in smaller footprint stores. Reinvent the online experience. Target higher value customers.</h2>\nCan they pull it off? Time will tell.', 'Thoughts on reinventing Sears.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'thoughts-on-reinventing-sears', '', '', '2012-01-11 15:50:11', '2012-01-11 19:50:11', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2828', 0, 'post', '', 5),
(2842, 2, '2012-01-16 14:27:50', '2012-01-16 18:27:50', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2843\" title=\"annual report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/CC-Image-Scan.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"303\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In another era, a big part of my creative work as a writer and designer was in corporate and investor related communications. Every year my office produced a dozen or more printed annual reports.</span></h1>\nOf course nowadays, you’ll find Annual Reports as pdf downloads on corporate websites. Not the lavish productions that were common back in 80’s and 90’s when my office was creating them. Designing corporate annual reports was an amazing process back then. When I speak to design students about the process, many look at me with blank stares on their faces. \"You mean you didn\'t use photoshop\" they ask. That always makes me smile.\n\nThe printed annual report is indeed ancient history. In a recent conversation with a former colleague, we were fondly reminiscing about all the care, craftsmanship and money that went into producing this important annual communication extravaganza. We were marveling at the development process working with the company CEO, the storytelling, the design, the art and photography, not to mention the middle of the night press checks with our blurry eyed clients. Seems rather romantic looking back.\n\nI once had four different annual report press checks going on at the same time at the same printer. Those were the days. Sometimes I miss the energy and the smell of ink standing at the end of a giant press with loop in hand.\n\nAlas annual reports are not completely dead in print form, many companies still actively publish and distribute their annual reports in printed form.  For the life of me, in our digital age, I can’t imagine why? So I went back into the archives to share some of the lost annual report work I am still proud of. These examples are all from the mid 80s. Trouble is I can remember all the client companies and the specific year of publication.\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2844\" title=\"Inamed Annual Report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/inamed-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"403\" />\n\n<a href=\"/2012/01/Haw1.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2846\" title=\"Haworth Annual Report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Haw1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"337\" /></a>\n\n<a href=\"/2012/01/Gantos-Annual-.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2847\" title=\"Gantos Annual Report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Gantos-Annual-.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"362\" /></a>\n\n<a href=\"/2012/01/Guardsman-AR-.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2848\" title=\"Guardsman Annual Report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Guardsman-AR-.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"249\" /></a>\n\n<a href=\"/2012/01/Xrite-AR-.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2849\" title=\"Xrite Annual Report\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Xrite-AR-.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"365\" /></a>', 'A little nostalgia for the printed annual report.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'a-little-nostalgia-for-the-printed-annual-report', '', '', '2012-01-16 14:27:50', '2012-01-16 18:27:50', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2842', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(2859, 2, '2012-01-17 21:04:57', '2012-01-18 01:04:57', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2860\" title=\"designthinking\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/designthinking.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"305\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Business leaders lean on terminology like “design thinking” to define and quantify the process for innovation. It doesn’t matter what you call the process, what we all desire is more creativity in the process. Creativity is elusive.</span></h1>\nMost of us don’t understand creativity, but all of us appreciate it. Marketers spend all their energy seeking creative solutions to the challenge of building enduring and successful brands.  Creating innovative products and brands people can’t get enough of is an elusive reality for many businesses–yet innovation happens everyday all over the world.\n\nKnowing that innovation is happening everywhere, and not wanting to be left behind, most enterprises want to be really good at innovation if they are to create competitive advantage in the marketplace. This is where the organizational discipline of “design thinking” comes in play. It’s a trendy term that implies a higher value method for delivering creativity and innovation.  It’s jargon.\n\n<strong>Innovation is radical not incremental. </strong>\n\nRadical innovation is what happens when something unexpected shows up, and it just happens to be something people where waiting for– just not asking for– like Facebook, the Swiffer, and an iPad. Every one of these innovations was not based on user needs. Radical innovation is not about function and form, but about meaning– never driven by users.\n\nSo what then is the basis for creativity within the innovation process? The answer is simple– a creative mind with the passionate desire to pursue an un-proven and perhaps un-needed idea at just the right time.\n\nMost enterprises aren’t set up for investing and pursuing un-proven and un-needed ideas. They’re organized around risk-averse quantifiable disciplines to make profit and return value to the owners of capital invested. Managing process requires linear thinking creativity does not.\n\n<strong>Creativity requires the right dirt.</strong>\n\nLike life, creativity within organizations requires the presence of specific elements and in precise quantities. We all want more creativity. For creativity (and innovation) to thrive in organizations, the dirt has to be right.  If it’s not right, then innovations coming out of the enterprise will most likely be incremental – one feature or benefit better than what the other guys are doing at a cheaper price.  Flat-screen TVs come quickly to mind.\n\nIn our me-too cluttered marketplace, incremental innovation is not enough to drive much change in behavior or demand.  Nor will it propose new meanings and context that’s highly valued by the marketplace. Building the ecosystems within organizations that spawn greater creativity and innovation is not something every organization will be good at. That’s why so many business leaders and consutancies embraced the idea of design thinking.  It\'s a way of making creativity within organizations a linear process.  Business leaders love linear process and efficiency.\n<h2>Jargon may make designers sound smarter, but it doesn’t enhance their creativity. Nor will it provide market leading innovation.</h2>\nMore creativity within organizations requires the dirt be comprised of:\n\n• an engaged and passionate leadership with a big vision of change\n• the vision and purpose is shared amongst all stakeholders\n• a healthy shared acceptance of risk playing out on the edges of what’s possible\n• talented and highly skilled people who share the vision and pursuit as their own\n• money\n• time\n\nTake any of these essential elements away, or have them not be in the proper quantities and you can call the innovation process anything you like, but it doesn\'t make creativity a force alive within your organization.\n\n<strong>All people are creative.</strong>\n\nCreativity is the unique expression of our most basic human nature. Everything that ever was, is now, or will ever be, is at first, a formless idea swirling in the goo of creativity inside someone’s head. There is no special club one has to be a member of to express their innate creativity. Both right and left brains are welcome and necessary.\n<h2>What’s awesome about creativity is it’s such an inclusive thing. Everyone likes creativity because everyone believes they’re creative. And the good news is they’re right!</h2>\nThe behaviors necessary for people to be creative don’t require special knowledge– just empathy and awarenss of human needs and being sensitive to the people and culture you’re immersed in.\n\nFrom that experience, people will creatively develop the specific knowledge and wisdom to frame up the problem and develop the organic ability to create and enact the right solutions. I suppose you could call that design thinking if it makes you feel better. Call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, the desired element is creativity.\n\n<strong>Not all organizations are creative.</strong>\n\nThere are plenty of creative people designing away inside business organizations that are not driven by creativity or innovative. Every organization can’t be Apple even though they possess all the components that make Apple-type companies possible. This is what makes organizational creativity so elusive. Consequently academia (those that teach but cannot do) tries to provide the doers with fancy terms and quantifiable thinking models to make creativity and problem solving something more predictable and dependable. Seemingly, the more organizations try to mandate creativity as a core competency, the less creative and innovative they are. It\'s a bit like dancing with your shoe laces tied together.\n\nCreativity is a phenomenon not a process. Design is process, engineering is a process, and marketing is a process. CEOs who value a culture of strict process usually lead enterprises devoid of the creativity that drives radical innovations that change the world for all us.\n\n<strong>Creativity doesn’t require terminology to help people be more creative or organizations more innovative.</strong>', 'Creativity by any other name is jargon.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'creativity-by-any-other-name-is-jargon', '', '', '2012-01-17 21:04:57', '2012-01-18 01:04:57', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2859', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(2926, 2, '2012-01-31 15:42:56', '2012-01-31 19:42:56', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2927\" title=\"brain\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/brain.jpg\" alt=\"Brands live in the mind.\" width=\"515\" height=\"387\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Brands are not things; rather brands are a representation of a highly valued idea that resides in the minds of customers and stakeholders. A brand strategy\'s success or failure depends on how well brand owners understand how the mind operates.</span></h1>\nBrands represent a set of unifying principles that guide an organization’s behavior and its manner of delivering experiences customers highly value above the available alternatives in the marketplace. Strong healthy brands maintain an intrinsic value to customers that over time translates into tangible financial value for the brand’s owners.\n\nConsumers care about what a brand represents to them on the highest emotional level. The physical properties and functional benefits that comprise and define a brand are of less importance–this explains the difference between Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Toyota, Apple and the rest of its competitors.\n\nSounds simple enough. The trouble is consumer’s minds are fickle. And worse, the marketplace is a slush pile of competing brands. It’s easy for brands to lose relevance with customers quickly – especially in our age of instant connections, abundant choice and consumption. Brands with the sticking power to drive purchase behaviors over decades consistently lead their tribe of loyal advocates forward through a compelling value proposition and positioning that transcends the consumer’s inherent and natural tendencies toward fickleness for the next greatest thing.\n\nA brand strategy\'s success or failure depends on how well brand owners understand how the mind operates.\n\n<strong>Minds have limited capacity.</strong>\nThe mind rejects any information that does not compute. It accepts only new information that matches its current state of mind. The mind has no room for what is new and different unless it is related to the familiar.\n\n<strong>Minds resist confusion.</strong>\nPeople resist that which is confusing, and cherish that which is simple. People want to push a button and watch the thing work. People love simple.\n\n<strong>Minds are insecure and emotional.</strong>\nMinds are emotional, not rational. People buy things for emotional reasons. When people are uncertain, they often look to others (influencers) to help them make the right decision about how to act.  People don’t like being out of the loop.\n\n<strong>Minds don’t change often.</strong>\nWe are more impressed by what we already know (or buy) than by what\'s \"new.\" Once  a mind has formed a habit it’s very difficult to change.\n\n<strong>Minds have difficulty staying focused.</strong>\nThe more variations you attach to a brand, the more the mind will lose focus. The more the brand loses focus, the more vulnerable it becomes. In toilet tissue, corn oil, or toothpaste, the specialist or the well-focused competitor is always the winner.\n<h2>Strong brands need to be exceptional at one thing than good at many things. Strong brands represent a single, simple, ownable, credible, highly valued and differentiated position in the minds of the target audience segment the brand serves.</h2>', 'Brands live in the mind', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brands-live-in-the-mind', '', '', '2012-01-31 15:42:56', '2012-01-31 19:42:56', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2926', 0, 'post', '', 7),
(2933, 2, '2012-02-09 16:16:33', '2012-02-09 20:16:33', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2979\" title=\"blueribbon\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/blueribbon1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"430\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Once the decision has been made to continue to invest in an under-performing brand, the temptation is always to do more of what got you there–that rarely works when brands face reinvention. Brand owners will be faced with a new set of challenges completely foreign to them.\n</span></h1>\nBy that I mean relevance. The simple reason brands begin to under perform is that people no longer care. When that happens, like it or not, you’ll be starting over from scratch. This is a hard pill for brand owners to swallow, particularly if the brand was once an iconic leader in its category.\n\nFor brand owners and managers, the process of brand reinvention begins with an open mind. You can’t look at the issues driving your brand’s under-performance by looking at the problem through the same lens that built the earlier success. Brand reinvention requires openness to many possibilities. What got you there, won’t get you there. Brand owners must first acknowledge their inherent organizational complacency–which is the root of an under-performing brand. Nothing breeds complacency like previous success.\n\nConsider the fate of these iconic brands that held on to their under-performing heritage at the expense of innovating a bigger future:\n\n<strong>Sears</strong>\nOnce the dominant leader in the mail order business, now an “also-ran” against big box retailers. Their relevance lost by disruptive technologies. The very principles of “mail order” that made Sears a great iconic brand, were reinvented by Amazon. The rest is history.\n\n<strong>Newsweek</strong>\nOnce the biggest news magazine by circulation in America, now diminished by lost circulation and advertising revenue, it has finally been sold to a digitally savvy internet competitor.\n\n<strong>Chevrolet</strong>\nNo brand was more iconic and embedded into the fabric of 20th century American culture. The problem is we are now in the 21st century and the game has changed. Chevy’s current advertising manta “runs deep” is a gallant attempt to reinvent itself by looking to the past. Good luck with that one. Most people seem to be paying more attention to forward-thinking Hyundai these days.\n\n<strong>Xerox</strong>\nIt invented laser printing but held tightly to its dominant document company positioning while HP exploited the technology and became the industry leader.\n\n<strong>Kodak</strong>\nIt invented digital photography, but cemented itself into its dying film business.\n\nAnd on and on the story goes. To reinvent, brand owners and managers need to accept the fact they must get better at doing everything differently. In many marketing organizations this is difficult to do, especially when they are tied to the same performance metrics the brand delivered in its hey-day. If you’re in the early stages of reinventing your brand, you\'ll need to have clarity and confidence with the answers to these four questions:\n\n<strong>To whom will you market?</strong>\nIt\'s critical to know as much as you can about who the most fervent buyers are or will be. It’s customers that determine the competitive hierarchy of brands in a category.  Everything starts with the customer. When brands reinvent themselves, chances are they’ll be serving a new and different customer segment.\n\n<strong>Why they buy?</strong>\nIt’s critical to know what drivers bring the brand unquestioned relevance to the new target segment. What drives customer participation in the category, and more importantly, what drives their purchase behaviors and brand preference within the category?\n\n<strong>What makes (or will make) your brand highly valued and difficult to substitute?</strong>\nIn a world of me-too products and abundant choice, the brand must represent a single emotional benefit that is highly valued by the tribe and difficult to substitute. To reinvent relevance, the brand must be the exception to its category and not the rule.  Brands that stay relevant offer a simple, yet emotional benefit rather than a functional one.\n\n<strong>How will your brand compete?</strong>\nCreating experiences customers love at every point in your value chain is essential. Brands that under-perform stop sharing the love. You’re not sharing the love when the product becomes stale and tired, or becomes a commodity, or your customer service takes a back seat to profit margins. Reinvention means creating new value, new meanings, rather than continuing to compete for the value nobody cares that much about.\n<h2>The difficult reality for most brand managers is they live in a world of tactics and metrics. Most brand managers are hard pressed to have the freedom to think past 180-day cycles. Reinventing a brand is more metaphysical, transformative ideas can take their own sweet time, and there are no guarantees.</h2>\nBefore investing in new marketing tactics and advertising campaigns, its imperative to gain an objective and rigorous assessment of the brand\'s current equities, it\'s relevance to the consumer segment that represents the brand\'s bigger future, and possibly to identify new opportunities for innovation and product development where the brand can once again lead a tribe.', 'How to transform an under-performing brand.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'how-to-transform-an-under-performing-brand', '', '', '2012-02-09 16:16:33', '2012-02-09 20:16:33', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2933', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2942, 2, '2012-02-27 18:31:34', '2012-02-27 22:31:34', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2943\" title=\"brand-name\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/brand-name.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"463\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Naming is the most important element of a brand’s value proposition. It’s the first perception by an audience about who the brand is and what the brand represents. From day one, a brand name requires and deserves full creative consideration and legal protection.</span></h1>\nTrademarks, which are the names or symbols associated with a specific company or product, are tremendously valuable to companies building a brand. This is especially important for start-up brands that may underestimate the importance of developing a brand name and registering it for trademark protection early in the game.\n\nDeveloping a trade name for a product or service is a highly specialized marketing discipline and a difficult process in and of itself. Outside of the creative aspects of naming, being able to “own” the name as a registered trademark is more difficult than ever. The sheer volume of trademark registrations each year in every product category is staggering– and that’s why the process of naming is so critical to the success of start-up brands.\n\nThe process for creating a brand name strong enough to propel its unique value into the minds of customers and pass legal muster requires the skill and talent of experts. It’s not a casual exercise. Even when the process has been carefully executed, owners of start-up brands can run into unforeseen legal trouble from larger competitors who may use trademark law as a means to deter competitive threats to their business.\n\n<strong>Trademark registration is not a routine matter.</strong>\n\nSuch was the case for a start-up snack food brand whose owners thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot new product — a flat pretzel snack called “Pretzel Crisps” — and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800-pound gorilla of the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.\n\nAccording to its filings with the Patent and Trademark Office, Frito-Lay contends that Pretzel Crisps cannot be registered as a trademark because it is a generic term. “Like ‘milk chocolate bar,’ the combination of ‘pretzel’ and ‘crisp’ gains no meaning as a phrase over and above the generic meaning of its constituent terms,” the company wrote in a 2010 motion. You can read about the full story <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/business/battle-over-pretzel-crisps-shows-value-of-a-brand.html?pagewanted=1\" target=\"_blank\">here</a>.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2944\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"515\" caption=\"Pretzel Crisp Product Packaging\"]<img class=\"size-full wp-image-2944\" title=\"PRETZEL2-popup\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PRETZEL2-popup.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"277\" />[/caption]\n\nWith so much at stake in a crowded marketplace, brand owners are much more likely to fight over trademark rights to names. For example, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are embroiled in a dispute over the term “app store,” for software applications, which Apple moved to trademark in 2008.\n\nThe legal question seems to hinge what types of names are more “own able” than others. In the case of the snack food “Pretzel Chips”, this is a descriptive name. On the other extreme, a name like “Fandango” is more evocative. Descriptive names have obvious connotations and benefits because consumers more easily connect the meaning of the brand name to the product’s physical attribute. Consequently descriptive names can be favored over more evocative names whose meaning must be developed in media and marketing communications over time.\n<h2>The legal question remains– can descriptive names be distinctively unique and own able under current trademark law?</h2>\nIt’s this question that sometimes gets overlooked by new brand owners in the process of naming their new product. This is a grey area and can be left to fuzzy legal interpretation. Of course, it’s far better to hedge this risk very early in the naming process by completing a comprehensive legal scan of early naming candidates by a skilled trademark / intellectual property attorney.\n\nIf you’re in the process of naming a new product brand, you might find this early blog post helpful: <a href=\"http://www.pullinc.com/whats-in-a-name/ \" target=\"_blank\">Ten common naming structures to guide your thinking</a>.', 'For start-up brands a trademark is tricky business.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'for-start-up-brands-a-trademark-is-tricky-business', '', '', '2012-02-27 18:31:34', '2012-02-27 22:31:34', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2942', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2956, 2, '2012-03-15 18:53:47', '2012-03-15 22:53:47', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2957\" title=\"social good\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/value.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"425\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Beyond the transaction/marketing driven model of brand building, enlightened brand owners are building the value of their brands around aligning social good with business good. These organizations realize the foundation of their competitive advantage will be based on a higher purpose – social good.</span></h1>\nIn the marketing driven model of brand building, the focus is on awareness and communicating the better features of the product. Consumers and customers simply exchanged money for a product/service. When the performance of the product matched up to customer expectations the brand promise was delivered… end of story.\n\nThat’s no longer good enough for consumers/customers today.\n\nApple’s on-going saga of complicity in the harmful working conditions in the Chinese supplier factories is a recent example of the deeper scrutiny placed on brand owners. Apple’s circumstances makes the point clear– consumers not only consider the products you make, or the services you provide, they’re also looking carefully at your entire value chain–where your stuff is made, what it’s made from, how it impacts the environment, the community, who your suppliers are, how well employees are treated. Consumers are scrutinizing the value of brands based on the social good they do in the world.\n\nBrand owners must ask themselves “how can we align our business good with social good”?  The answer to that question needs to come from the very top of the organization, not from marketing or PR departments. The answer to this question must be the very reason or purpose the business enterprise exits in the first place. The relationship of social good and business good must be the core value proposition of the enterprise–above moneymaking.\n\n<strong>Breaking down the barriers within organizations.</strong>\n\nTraditionally the siloed nature of organizations would have one group of people thinking and acting on corporate philanthropy and community, while other groups are developing and marketing products with the greatest profit margins possible. These functions rarely if ever are informed by a vision to maximize social and business good. Business good and social good being “functions” rather than a unifying principal of existence.\n\nEnlightened brand owners are breaking down the functional barriers within their organization and converging these interests into a common social purpose driven brand value.\n\nPatagonia is extraordinary in this regard. The higher purpose of Patagonia is not to make and market more technically driven outer wear, rather Patagonia’s leadership has aligned their core values and mission around stewardship and sustainability of the planet as a whole. They are a leading voice and advocate for this greater good and it is embedded into their brand promise. This is not a brand strategy, or clever marketing– it’s who they are as an enterprise. It’s the reason their employees come to work everyday. It’s also the reason the brand has unquestioned relevant differentiation in customers minds and competitive advantage at a premium price points in the marketplace. Patagonia is a brand that represents social good and business good as two sides of the same coin.\n\nThe deeper principal that brands like Patagonia are based on is simple– social good is highly valued (relevant) to its customers and drives business performance (competitive advantage).  Patagonia walks the talk everyday. For Patagonia, there’s no difference between advocating for greater sustainability and stewardship of the planet and making money.\n\n<strong>Doing good is not good enough.</strong>\n\nDoing social good simply for a business gain is a fool’s errand. It’s not enough to “do good”. The aspects and activities of social good is not something added to the brand’s purpose–it is the purpose! Enlightened brand owners are employing the brand strategy principal of relevant differentiation to align social good and business good.\n\n<strong>Three critical factors need to seamlessly fit together to make your brand’s social purpose have relevant differentiation.</strong>\n\n<strong>First, you need to know without question, what the brand is the very best at doing.</strong>\n<strong> Secondly, whatever the brand is best at must be something customers really care about.</strong>\n<strong> Finally, whatever the brand is best at, and highly value by customers, must serve the good of the greater community (planet) at large.</strong>\n\nWith these insights brand owners and managers can more easily identify activities of social good that their brands can align with in unique and authentic ways.\n<h2>Doing good is good business.</h2>', 'Brand Building on Social Purpose.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-building-on-social-purpose', '', '', '2012-03-15 18:53:47', '2012-03-15 22:53:47', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2956', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2970, 2, '2012-05-07 13:57:18', '2012-05-07 17:57:18', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2971\" title=\"sharedvalues\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/sharedvalues.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"335\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Brands, just like people, have values– bedrock principals they stand for and hold near and dear to the heart. These principals form the reason brands exist. Brand values influence two important business assets—relationships and reputation. Relationships are built on trust and reputation is built on delivering on your promise.</span></h1>\nIn our over-crowded, me-too marketplace, points of difference that are function and feature based are no longer sustainable. Consumers today are tuning out marketing and tuning in to those brands that represent shared values. Forward thinking marketers recognize their brand building initiatives must focus on relationships and reputation. Nothing else really matters.\n\n<strong>Connections begin with respect and empathy.</strong>\nBrands aren’t human, they have no consciousness, brands are not things, nor do they do anything. Brands are nothing more than a shared idea of value– mirrors of our interactions and transactions with each other. Of course, it’s fashionable and fun to talk about brand in the parlance of our industry, brand managers and brand consultants love jargon and thinking models that they can write on a white board.\n\nAt the end of the day, we’re still talking about an idea of value in the mind. And one idea human beings value is connection to other humans and being part of the tribe. When people share values they’re more likely to hang with their like-minded mates. And so it is with brands. The power of brands lies in shared connections based in shared values.\n\n<strong>Shared values forms the basis for all relationships\n</strong>Wherever we go in business and in life, we bring are own values along as well. When others share our values, this becomes a powerful and attractive force to bind us closer together. Shared values form the very basis for every relationship.\n\nEnlightened brand owners realize in our time-compressed days, most of us have little time for things (and people) that don’t really matter to us. For brands to matter, the customer must believe the brand is bringing something more valuable to them than the cash exchanged. In effect brands have to provide more “use value” than they ask in cash value.\n\nIt is the shared experience of value that binds customers to the brand and the organization behind it. When brands deliver at this level, they lead markets and shift the culture. The result is massive financial gain for the brand owner.\n\n<strong>Building a values-based brand.</strong>\nNo longer can brands be differentiated on features, benefits or price. There’s just too much stuff out there these days. Customers have so much choice everything is white noise. Leading brands are always differentiated by their shared values. If the values your brand represents are not aligned to the values of your customer, no amount of marketing will change their mind.\n\nTrust is the foundation of a value-based brand. As in all relationships, trust is what holds things together and defines the quality of brand reputation. You’re the real deal or not–it’s just that simple. Here’s a list of things brand owners of values-based brands always do to build trusted relationships with customers:\n\n<strong>• value their purpose more than their profits</strong>\n\n<strong>•  eliminate a sales first culture</strong>\n\n<strong>•  focus on the things money can’t buy</strong>\n\n<strong>•  live their convictions rather than conform to markets</strong>\n\n<strong>•  listen more and market less</strong>\n\n<strong>•  elevate the quality of life for the tribe</strong>\n\n<strong>It’s as simple – and as difficult – as doing the right thing.</strong>\nValues-based brands are always “doing the right thing.” It’s a simple principle, but one that foils many brand owners because many don’t take the time to know what the right thing is. It’s inevitable that every brand will face some form of change, controversy, and crisis. And it’s in these challenging times, that a brand’s actions broadcast its values. In In a marketplace hyper-focused on the next best thing, values-based brands are disciplined focused, consistent, and credible.\n\nThe objective of values-based brand management is to do the right thing without agonizing over the specific issues. When brand owners know what values for which their brands stand, one can see choices more clearly, make decisions more easily, and serve the tribe with more humility.', 'The power of brands lies in shared values.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-power-of-brands-lies-in-shared-values', '', '', '2012-05-07 13:57:18', '2012-05-07 17:57:18', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2970', 0, 'post', '', 2);
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(2983, 2, '2012-05-14 16:47:08', '2012-05-14 20:47:08', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2984\" title=\"labrynth\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/labrynth.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"342\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">A startup business faces many difficult challenges getting off the ground.  For many early stage CEO’s assessing their priorities, product development and the seed money to grow are their primary concerns. Few if any are thinking much about brand building.</span></h1>\nFor startup CEOs, brand building needs to be as important to early success as product development and raising money. You can have the most innovative, groundbreaking product ever conceived, but if you can’t create a strong foundation for communicating that value to the marketplace, chances are the business won’t go far.  Developing a strong brand is critical to the early success of startups.\n<h2>The Ugly Baby Syndrome</h2>\nMany startups have a difficult and awkward task of communicating the value of their product/service innovations in ways that matter to investors and potential customers. At the beginning (especially when seeking investment capital) founders have a tendency to believe that everyone will “get the big idea” of their next big thing.  As a result, they usually message their value badly at the beginning.\n\nLike any newborn, learning to walk the talk requires falling down and getting up again and again. But the break neck pace of the venture capital deal making machine is not very forgiving to the stumbles of startup founders not able to tell a compelling story of why their innovation matters to anyone beyond their Mother.\n\nThe heart and soul of brand building embodies a relevant and differentiated value proposition. Founders must be able to articulate why their baby matters to some people! Remember, at the beginning nobody cares!\n<h2><strong>What makes your startup good and different?</strong></h2>\nThe marketplace is a slush pile. Every year new businesses, products and services are born into a vast sea of ubiquitous sameness. For startups to have a chance of making it past the infant stage, their value must be well defined.\n\nNo one will deny the fact that startup CEOs work long days, weeks and years in their business. Few CEOs will work “on” their business. Brand strategy is the process of working on the business. Having the clarity and the confidence to define value in compelling ways is the first step in building a sustainable brand.\n\nFounders need to take a long, hard introspective look at how they will discover and articulate why their innovation is good and different. In a world of increased commoditization, relevant differentiation is the source code to brand building success.\n\nGood and different means the value the business brings to the world must be highly valued by a well defined target customer and not in abundant supply elsewhere. When you can define what that is for your business, you will enjoy competitive advantage in the industry category in which you are operating and command premium pricing as well.\n\nIt doesn’t get any better than that.\n<h2><strong>Brand strategy is not marketing.</strong></h2>\nOne of the big misconceptions startup CEOs have about brand building is that it is a marketing activity. In fact, these are two separate (yet related) activities. Brand strategy is about knowing the DNA of the value offered to the marketplace, marketing is the process of delivering the message through various communication channels.\n\nIt makes no sense whatsoever creating grandiose marketing schemes without those plans being anchored and informed by a higher guiding strategy about what the brand will represent in the mind of a target customer. This should be good news to startup CEOs since marketing is an expensive proposition most startups can ill afford.\n\nBrand strategy requires real market insight and creative thinking, while marketing requires cash. Marketing should always follow brand strategy.\n<h2><strong>Branding begins with a good name.</strong></h2>\nOver time the startup business will grow up. It will acquire loyal customers, it will have created trusted relationships and enjoy a reputation that will translate into greater financial value.  All of this will happen more effectively and efficiently if you start with a good name to build your good reputation on.\n\nNothing is more valuable to a startup business than a good name. Start by creating one that will serve the growth and expansion of your value over the long haul.\n<h2><strong>The three components of a strong and enduring startup brand.</strong></h2>\nThere are many definitions about what a brand is. Regardless of how the idea of a brand is defined, a startup brand requires three well-designed components:\n\n<em>Brand Identity:</em>\nThe essence of what your brand represents to customers. It is “who” the brand is. This is represented by symbols, language, and the culture or heritage of the organization.\n\n<em>Brand Promise:</em>\nThe benefit your brand brings to customers. This is “what” the brand provides that is highly valued and not in abundant supply. These associations are based in the functional, rational and emotional benefits customers receive from the brand.\n\n<em>Brand Experience:</em>\nThe tangible experience customers have in their interaction and transaction with the brand. This is “how” the brand delivers on its promise.  These associations are based in real life engagement with products, people and places.\n\nOne might consider this to be the three legs of the stool in building an enduring brand right from the beginning. All three of these components must be designed. They do not come into form on their own. The process of design is the critical discipline in making all three components come together in harmonious alignment within the mind of the target customer. The awesome thing about design, if applied correctly and consistently, it will enable your startup brand to emulate its values to the marketplace with more credibility and effectiveness.\n<h2><strong>You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.</strong></h2>\nEveryone has heard that statement before. But for startup brands the statement holds even more significance.  Whatever startup brands are doing, chances are they’re doing it for the first time. The first presentation to an investor, customer or important employee must be simple, clear and compelling–there are no second chances.\n\n<em><strong>Editors Note: PULL offers a highly facilitated one-day brand strategy and innovation workshop tailored to the issues facing early stage CEO\'s and their teams who value the idea of applying a sophisticated approach to brand development early in the business development phase and to set the stage for their next level of growth. Download the Overview by clicking the link below.\n</strong></em>\n<h2><a href=\"/2012/05/PULL-StartupWorkshop.pdf\">Brand Strategy and Innovation for Startups and Emerging Companies Workshop Overview</a></h2>', 'Brand Strategy for Startups', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-strategy-for-startups', '', '', '2012-05-14 16:47:08', '2012-05-14 20:47:08', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2983', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(2998, 2, '2012-07-06 14:11:59', '2012-07-06 18:11:59', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2999\" title=\"designing the future of brand design\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/designthefuture.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"279\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Make no mistake; it’s an exciting time to be alive– especially if you happen to make your living as a brand designer. Opportunities for brand designers to bring value to their clients are everywhere – in every culture and in every industry category. Here are five trends that may effect our future success.</span></h1>\nWe are at the dawn of a new age in human development and progress. Ideas and innovations around the planet are compounding daily in every field of human endeavor. It’s amazing to witness in our lifetime how science is just beginning to hold a faint glimpse of understanding into the amazing power of the human mind and the mysteries surrounding the composition of the universe.\n\nEverything that ever was, is now or ever will be is at first a thought seed in the creative mind. We are creating at a pace that is exceeding the projections of the most optimistic forecasts for innovation and human progress that were unthinkable just a decade ago. All of this amazing human output has been designed!\n<h2><strong>What kind of future will we design?</strong></h2>\nThe interesting thing about making predictions on future trends is no one can say with certainty that your prediction is wrong.  Looking out over the horizon, what does the future hold for today’s brand marketer and brand designer? What will the future look like? More importantly, in an era of crowd-sourced commoditized creativity, how will brand designers add new and greater value to their clients in ways that matter to them and they will pay extra for?\n\nThese are important questions to ponder if you want to have a thriving career and business in the brand consulting and design game now and into the next decade. Outlined here are five trends impacting the future of brand design.\n<h2><strong>How we work has changed forever.</strong></h2>\n<strong></strong>In my travels, particularly in the US, I’ve had the privilege to speak to many young designers and business students ready to graduate from design schools and universities. They’re all so eager and hopeful to find their place and get their foothold in the business world. Everywhere I go, many ask me the same question ”what’s the best way to get a job”?  My answer is a bit sobering– there will be limited opportunity for those seeking a predictable job. Our business no longer operates on the 20<sup>th</sup> Century model of a steady and safe day job in a branding agency or corporate design department.\n\nWe live in the global idea economy now. How we do our work and the structures under which we provide our services and value have changed forever. Today the majority of brand designers are working solo, freelance and independent.  The nature of our business is ever more project-based. Technology has, at last, removed the necessity for us to physically be in one place or in proximity to our client colleagues. Virtual office structures are now commonplace. Teams of independent creative people from all over the world routinely work together on shared assignments and disband at the conclusion.\n\n<strong><em>The future trend: Our profession will continue to be dominated by people who have the required entrepreneurial spirit to develop new ways to deliver value to clients while they remain free and independent to pursue opportunities that are in line with their personal goals and creative aspirations. More and more of us will work and collaborate with clients and colleagues in places of the world we may never visit. For success minded marketers and brand designers, the opportunities inherent in this trend are limitless.</em></strong>\n<h2><strong>There are far too many of us.</strong></h2>\nThe price of all this entrepreneurial independence and freedom is there are too many of us. More and more new designers are coming into the graphic design profession every year. Unlike other design disciplines like architecture or industrial design, graphic design has a low barrier to entry. Adding to the glut, many older designers (especially in the US and UK) are staying in the game well into their 60’s, changing their views on retirement as a result of the recent economic downturn. Consequently there will be a growing slush pile of practitioners in brand design.\n\nIn many client-side marketing organizations, the “design process” has been pushed further down the value chain. Clients view most brand designers (be they consultants or in-house) as tactical implementers making marketing things that are necessary rather than seeking their counsel and advice on the more strategic aspects of value creation, brand building and management.\n\nClients have abundant choice when choosing brand designers. Consequently they have the power in the buying cycle. This over-abundance of supply makes for an extremely competitive environment. This will only increase in the future as our social media connected world enables clients to more effectively utilize crowd-sourced innovation.\n\n<strong><em>The future trend: Brand designers will move up the value chain by becoming highly specialized experts–known for their specific expertise in a discipline, an industry, or a consumer demographic. To prosper and grow, brand designers will forsake their generalist positioning and build their reputation and business success around a narrow and deep expertise that will enable them to differentiate themselves from competitors and command premium pricing from clients who place a higher value on their specialized design expertise.</em></strong>\n<h2><strong>Attention spans are shrinking faster.</strong></h2>\nIn our hyper-connected, digital world there is more information produced each day than was produced in the prior thousand years of human history–and it’s increasing every day at faster speed. Consequently the attention span of consumers (particularly young people) is shrinking at the same rate. In an age of endless texts and tweets, literacy suffers. The Internet is junk food for the mind. The more information created, the less attention is available.\n\nConsumers are now surrounded and protected by a sea of white noise. The tactics of simply decorating outbound marketing are over. No one is listening and nobody cares. Brand marketers and designers are no longer in the communications business but rather in the engagement business. To engage consumers, one must connect with them where their memories are created–at a deep emotional level. In the end, it’s not facts people remember but feelings.\n\n<em><strong>The future trend: Brand design and management will require practitioners (client marketers and designer alike) to be meta-focused on designing real and useful experiences people love–with greater sensitivity and responsibility to the environment and the social well being of those who are served in the marketplace. To remain relevant, brands must be trustworthy ambassadors of social good and the shared values of the tribes they serve.</strong></em>\n<h2><strong>Clients value outcomes not deliverables.</strong></h2>\nWhat bonds clients and brand designers together in a relationship is change. Transforming the client’s undesirable circumstance into a desired one is why we get hired. Clients value business outcomes.\n\nClients value the achievement of their business objectives more than they value the technical outputs of brand designers. Designers tend to place greater value their “process” and their “craft”. Unfortunately, for as much as we strive to master the craft of design, craft is the ante. Clients seeking design craft now find it readily available on ubiquitous design-competition and crowd-sourced web sites at cheap prices.\n\n<em><strong>The future trend: Reshaping the designer/client relationship will require brand designers to bring more useful and rigorous consumer insights that impact the very nature of how their clients bring value to their customers. The good news is brand designers will be seated at the big table. The more difficult future trend will see brand design and management focused on real business outcomes rather than producing more logos, taglines, style and decoration. And clients will increase their demand for designers to prove the value of their ideas by constantly measuring their return on investment.</strong></em>\n<h2><strong>Consumers value authentic cultural diversity in brand expression. </strong></h2>\nGlobalization was once thought to be an “equalizer” opening markets and bringing more capital to developing countries to produce goods for other countries.  But the reality has proven to be something quite different. Globalization has brought new levels of intense competition among nations.\n\nIt’s no longer about countries like China and India making products that other companies slap their brand on, but rather these countries are now making products the world demands simply because they are from an authentic region. Consumers the world over value authenticity in the brands they favor. For example, no one wants to buy Ferraris or wear Armani if those brands are not made in Italy.\n\n<em><strong>The future trend: Brand design and management will continue moving away from the homogenous western (US and UK) stylizations of corporate and brand identity so emulated in the past. The work of brand designers will reflect authentic cultural reference points unique to their various regions of the globe. Designers are celebrating the cultural styles of their regions and this is moving the discipline of brand building to new levels of diverse cultural expression. This trend is already firmly in place in China, India, Eastern Europe, and many South American countries.</strong></em>\n<h2><strong>Designing a bigger, better future.</strong></h2>\nCreating a bigger better future is at the very heart of design and this fuels the inner passion of designers to innovate new solutions for their clients.\n\nLike the fire keepers in the age of prehistoric man, designers will continue to be the visualizers of the future. We are the agents of change bringing order from chaos, understanding from ignorance, simplicity from complexity. That’s not changing. Nor is the required success mindset so necessary for the creative imagination to innovate a brighter future.\n\nFor the most part, designers are an optimistic lot. Designers have a special gift at seeing better things for people way ahead of the status quo. Designers are possibility thinkers asking the “what-if” questions that drive innovation in our human development as well as the global marketplace. That won’t be changing either.\n\nRegardless of the economy and global circumstances we find ourselves in, there is always going to be a demand to design a vision for a bigger, better future. Designers will be at the epicenter of this activity leading the way forward.', 'Designing the Future of Brand Design.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'designing-the-future-of-brand-design', '', '', '2012-07-06 14:11:59', '2012-07-06 18:11:59', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=2998', 0, 'post', '', 9),
(3018, 2, '2012-07-19 19:34:08', '2012-07-19 23:34:08', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3019\" title=\"gothic-forest\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/gothic-forest.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"503\" height=\"304\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Unlike their big brand counterparts, CEOs of startups and emerging companies often times don’t really know what to expect from the process of defining their brand value to their stakeholders and customers. For many, the undertaking may seem more like entering into a deep, dark forest–a big leap of faith risking valuable capital to boot. Many ask themselves, “what if we get this wrong?”</span></h1>\nWith so much risk facing small growing brands, and no forgiveness in the marketplace if they don’t get it right, I’m convinced many entrepreneur executives have that thought cross their mind. Unlike PR, promotions and advertising, brand strategy begins as an introspective process. Defining brand value for small companies and their brands is mostly intuitive and it takes guts.\n\nRecently, having just completed the process of changing their name and creating a new identity, a CEO of a growing B2B company, confessed to me, “ You know, at the beginning of this whole process, we didn’t have a clue where this would lead us, or have any confidence what we were contemplating was even the right thing to do. Changing our business name was a big deal­—we only had one shot to get it right!\n<h2>The currency of our modern social age is attention. CEOs of startups and emerging companies don’t have the financial luxury of buying attention, they have to earn it. Like your money, your customer’s attention is limited too.</h2>\nThe whole process of defining your unique value to customers in ways customers care about may seem rather mystical, abstract and difficult to quantify. Big brands and the companies that own them, can hedge their bets through reliance on expensive research and market data. Small brands have to rely more on guts and intuition, and a deep empathy for their customers rather than deep pockets for advertising.\n\nWe’ve all seen many examples in our business folklore where guts and intuition won over the prevailing market wisdom and data hands down. If you’re the CEO of an emerging young company, here are some suggestions that may provide you with more clarity and confidence in the strategic and creative decisions you’ll be making when you enter into the process of defining your brand’s value.\n\n<strong>Be more of who already you are rather than more of what you are not.</strong>\nUsually the driver of defining brand value is change. There is a current business circumstance that is undesirable and needs changing. Of course, this doesn’t occur in a vacuum, there are competitive forces in the marketplace that shape the context of change. Shaped by competitive forces, it can be tempting to think your organization needs to become more of what it isn’t. It’s far more powerful to be more of what has made your company and brand successful thus far. Being more of what makes you highly valued and difficult to substitute is what differentiation is all about. Brands that endure are highly focused on why they matter to people. As you think about change, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.\n\n<strong>Defining brand value is a collaborative process. Innovation and creativity come from diverse sources and usually not from where you‘d normally look.</strong>\nDavid Packard (of HP fame) was noted to say “marketing is too important and activity to be left to the marketing department”.  At the inflection point of inventing, defining, refreshing and expressing, the perceived value of your brand, you need to look everywhere and to everyone who has a stake in your success. When you’re tweaking the whole, all the parts have to be considered. Begin with customers first.\n\n<strong>Defining brand value is not about decoration but behavior.</strong>\nYou can create the “coolest branding” (logos, slogans and packaging) but those things don’t do anything, only people do things. Living your brand value every day in every action your company takes to create value is behavior. You can’t mandate or rule how your people behave in the marketplace; your people must, of their own choosing, be in resonance and shared values of your business purpose. Who hangs with you is more important than your cool logo.\n\n<strong>Execute flawlessly with the resources available.</strong>\nFor small growing brands, money to execute on communicating their value is also an issue. If you have gigantic marketing budget based on mass media delivery, it’s easy to get your message out and make the right impression.  Money makes everything easy. For startup and emerging brands they have to start with what they have and from where they stand. Whatever marketing tactics you choose to spend money on, execute flawlessly. Spend what it takes to do it right!  If you don’t have the money to do something right, do something else where you can afford to put your best foot forward. Start with your presence and use of social media. There is broadcast network willing to air whatever you put on for free…it’s called Youtube, Vimeo, Slideshare…you get the idea.\n\n<strong>Editors Note:\nPULL offers a one-day facilitated brand strategy workshop specifically designed for CEOs and their teams of early stage startups and emerging companies who want more clarity and confidence in the strategic and creative decisions they make to build the foundation of brand value.</strong> <strong>You can download a pdf copy using the link below.</strong>\n<strong></strong>\n<h2><a href=\"/2012/07/PULL-StartupWorkshop.pdf\">PULL Brand Strategy for Startups Workshop Overview</a></h2>', 'Guts and Intuition: Defining brand value for emerging brands. ', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'guts-and-intuition-defining-brand-value-for-emerging-brands', '', '', '2012-07-19 19:34:08', '2012-07-19 23:34:08', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=3018', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(3040, 2, '2012-08-13 09:19:55', '2012-08-13 13:19:55', '<a href=\"/2012/08/storytelling.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3041\" title=\"brand storytelling\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/storytelling.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"214\" /></a>\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">In our firmly established social media era, marketing is no longer about persuasion and promotion, but connection and customer engagement–and nothing is more engaging to human beings than a compelling story.</span></h1>\nIn a world of micro segmentation and instant communication, controlling the marketing message is now next to impossible. Customers control the perceived narrative now. The headline of a recent <em><a href=\"http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html \" target=\"_blank\">Harvard Business Review blog</a> </em>post proclaims, “Marketing is dead”. These headlines seem to appear everywhere in the blogoshere these days. Everyone is proclaiming the demise of marketing in our social media driven world. To use Mark Twain’s iconic statement, rumors of the demise of marketing are greatly exaggerated. Marketing is not dead, but it has transformed into something traditional communication channels no longer serve very well. This shift is keeping marketers up late at night these days.\n\nAt the core of every great brand there must be a mythological narrative that transcends “marketing”. Iconic brands like Apple, Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Patagonia, and Herman Miller have at the core of their DNA a mythic storyline that inspires the actions, beliefs and behaviors of its devoted tribe members over the long term.\n<h2>We are creatures of evolution. Humans have shared beloved stories since the dawn of our existence. The ancient tradition of storytelling serves to remind us of who we are, and how we should behave within the structures our village, our culture and our world at large. Brands are no different.</h2>\nBrand storytelling is the art of connecting the hearts and minds of customers to shared values and ideals that define the “sacred truth” of why the brand exists and who benefits from its existence. Compelling brand stories serve to remind us of something sacred and valued about ourselves rather than promoting some new product feature or additive. Sacred brand stories are not veneer slapped onto the next ad campaign.\n\n<strong>Brand storytelling is not copywriting.</strong>\n\nThere are certain verbal and visual story-based patterns that have always been influential to people in significant ways. We are born with this innate ability to feel and respond to stories, and how we feel about any idea directly influences our action and behavior.\n\nIn the noise and clutter of ubiquitous marketing, only those brands that rely on the transcend narrative of their story will rise above to be heard and revered by those who resonate with the core values, archetype and mythic themes of the brand story. From Homer’s epics, the stories of King Arthur’s Roundtable to the Star Wars films, mythology has always been at the core of transcendent stories. Marketers who recognize the mythological story patterns in their brands will have tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace over the status quo.\n\nApple’s “think different” story line was a classic example of a brand story born from the “rebel” archetype of the persona of its founder and visionary. Regardless of the specific product being marketed, this outlier storyline was both implicit and explicit in the actions and behaviors of stakeholders and customers alike.\n\nFrom the very beginning, Steve Jobs was an extraordinary storyteller who recognized the power of mythological themes as a guiding principal for product development and marketing. From Apple’s first computer to the iPad, this was not a convenient fiction of advertising concocted to sell more products! Yet, Apple’s sales success is the stuff of mythic legend. The values and truth of the Apple brand (or any brand) is found in its unique mythic story.\n\n<strong>Brands that lose their way, loose their connection to their sacred story first.</strong>\n\nSears is a lost brand. It has lost any connection to the mythic storyline that made it great. Sure one can make a compelling case about how the world of retail has changed, and operationally Sears has not been able to perform effectively in the new competitive environment, but that argument is a symptom of a previous cause.\n\nThe leadership at Sears valued short term profit over innovation in a changing environment. Forsaking the transcendent value of their brand’s story to guide critical decisions in a changing, ultra fast world, Sears relinquished its position of greatness to Amazon. Lost brands in every category lose their sacred connection to their story and consequently wander into the abyss. Hewlett Packard may soon suffer a similar fate.\n\nIf you’re managing a brand that is underperforming, ask yourself if the leadership of your organization are the first champions and trust holders of your brands mythic story, and if the story still provides the guidance and illumination to keep the tribe connected to its transcendent meaning and behaving in a way that supports the truth of why the brand matters.', 'The art of brand storytelling is not copywriting. ', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'the-art-of-brand-storytelling-is-not-copywriting', '', '', '2012-08-13 09:19:55', '2012-08-13 13:19:55', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=3040', 0, 'post', '', 2),
(3051, 2, '2012-08-24 08:50:10', '2012-08-24 12:50:10', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3052\" title=\"shared values\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/iamyou.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"324\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What if your brand messaging and marketing communications activities where centered in resonance with your customers personal story. In other words, what if your customers connected more deeply to their own personal story as a result of your brand story?</span></h1>\nBrands that represent deeply shared values with their target audience always do this in a natural organic way. These customers don’t perceive the story as marketing, but rather as a welcome outreach–like getting a thoughtful card from a good friend. If your research shows a disconnect with your target audience, chances are your brand messaging is not an embedded component of the customers own personal story.\n\nIn today’s meta-crowded marketplace, the sounds of marketing have now become white noise. Marketing has become nothing more than low-level static in the air. You sense it lurking, but you pay no attention to it. Most marketing communication is nothing more than background noise. It’s near impossible for me-too brands to break though and earn customer attention, action, and advocacy. In every product category, ubiquitous choice is accelerating the pace of commoditization. More ad campaigns just add to the noise.\n\n<strong>How enduring brands break out of the white noise.</strong>\n\nOf course, what separates an enduring brand from the rest is it’s capability to break out and earn trusted brand engagement from the target audience. This is only accomplished through relevance and meaning. Relevance and meaning are always anchored in shared values. Shared values put the message and audience in a state of resonance. Resonance embodies trust. Trust guarantees engagement and advocacy. It’s a “hip bone is connected to the leg bone” sort of thing.\n\nThe most effective and efficient tool for creating relevance for your brand is to ensure your brand plays a staring role in your target audience’s personal story. Marketers should be spending their creative energies knowing the audience and their story narratives intimately and how their brand authentically fits into that story.  Yet in the day-to-day world of tactics, promotions, price discounting, and one-upping competitors, marketers seem more interested in laminating their brand story on to their target customers. This is why so much marketing is simply ignored.\n\nLike attracts like. If our stories are aligned, chances are we are sharing our experiences and preferences together. We share our commonalities. There is no difference between how people create and maintain relationships and how brands do it. Brands are simply a symbol or badge that connects the tribe to a shared ideal.\n\nTo cement the bond between brand story and customer story requires the alignment (or true north) of the brand to be centered in shared values and ideals. Brand stories can only be relevant and resonant when:\n\n• Brand and audience share a common purpose. The fundamental reason the brand exists\n(beyond exchanging money) is the same for the audience.\n\n• The audience cares deeply about the brand\'s most compelling differentiator.\n\n• The brand shares personality attributes with the target audience.\n\n• The brand\'s “oneliness” is credible, believable and trusted by the audience.\n\n<strong>The importance of archetypes in brand storytelling.</strong>\n\nSince the beginning of human civilization, all stories have been based in archetypes. To tell stories that impact the mind of the audience, storytellers introduce the role of archetypes. All transcendent stories have compelling characters. More importantly, these characters had story narratives they strictly adhered to. These characters are known as archetypes. Some examples of archetypes are the Hero, Jester, Magician, Sage and Explorer. All archetypes have a defined personality. In context to brand storytelling, these common archetypes can be translated into the components that define or personify a brand’s personality. Audiences recognize these brand personalities because the archetypes themselves are universally recognized.\n<h2>Enlightened marketers understand their audiences and the how their brands will be incorporated as part of their customer’s personal journey or story.</h2>\nEnduring brands have a personality that fits perfectly into the customer’s story narrative. This is not a coincidence nor is it a contrivance. When brand owners get this idea, the effort (and the financial resources) to communicate the brand personality is always significantly less than for brands who mean little to everyone and matter to no one.\n\nIf you study the brands that build uncommon relevance and resonance, you’ll recognize them as brands that created massive marketplace success with little need for or reliance on mass advertising.  Brands like Zappos, Starbucks (at the beginning), Facebook, Patagonia, IKEA, Herman Miller, and of course Apple have all mastered this principle. These brands are based on shared experiences.\n\nIn fact these brands, and others like them, owe much of their enduring marketplace success to word of mouth communication. Least we forget word of mouth is nothing more than a form of storytelling–told by the customer not the marketer. We will incorporate the stories of relevant brands into our own stories but only when the stories that are worthy of telling.\n\n<strong>Building your brand story narrative based on shared values and personified through archetypes allows your audience to both recognize and understand why your brand matters, and to tell it to others through the narrative of their own personal story.  </strong>', 'Shared Values: Connecting to the personal story of your audience.', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'shared-values-connecting-to-the-personal-story-of-your-audience', '', '', '2012-08-24 08:50:10', '2012-08-24 12:50:10', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=3051', 0, 'post', '', 1),
(3065, 2, '2012-08-25 10:41:57', '2012-08-25 14:41:57', 'Business to Business\nDigital Print and Data Management\nBrightformat\nBrand Positioning, Naming Development and Corporate Identity Design\n\n&nbsp;\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">After eight years of growth, this digital print and data management company reinvents itself with a new brand positioning and corporate identity as their foundation for a brighter future.</span></h1>\n<a href=\"http://www.brightformat.com\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3066\" title=\"brightformat-lead\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/brightformat-lead.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"209\" /></a><a href=\"/2012/08/bflogo.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3067\" title=\"brightformat logo\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/bflogo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"186\" /></a>\n<a href=\"http://www.brightformat.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Brightformat</a> is a leading digital print and data management services company headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The eight year old company, originally known as Diversified Data Services, had grown far beyond its original data and mailing services roots to become one of West Michigan’s premier providers of digital printing, wide format printing and direct marketing services.\n\n<strong>The Challenge</strong>\nThe printing industry is a commodity business where customers have abundant choice of providers and most printing companies compete for business solely on price. The company, which had an excellent reputation for customer service, had moved the core of its original mail house services business to new technologies in on-demand printing, large format printing and direct marketing support services.\n\nCompany executives realized in order to grow to the next level, the business name was no longer relevant and expressive of the type of business the company had become. Executive leadership recognized that a name change and complete shift in the way the company marketed its services was necessary.\n<a href=\"http://www.brightformat.com/\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3069\" title=\"bf-apparal\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/bf-apparal.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"352\" /></a>\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3070\" title=\"bf-web-home\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/bf-web-home.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"343\" />\n\n<strong>Brand Innovation</strong>\nWorking with the company’s executive management team over a six month period, we facilitated a series of brand strategy and positioning workshops designed to guide the client’s executive and business development team to refocus and recalibrate their value proposition to a discerning customer segment. This target customer segment highly valued the specialized expertise of digital on demand print services, and they represented a customer group at the premium end of the West Michigan market.\n\nBeyond the functional benefits associated with the specialized expertise their customer’s enjoyed, we learned that this customer segment valued a distinctive level of personalized service expressed through proactive problem solving innovation. The client’s reputation for creativity, innovation and ingenuity coupled with a vibrant, stress free customer experience was the source of differentiation and “oneliness” that enabled the client to build their new brand positioning around the idea of focusing on the customer’s marketing success, rather than simply delivering a print job.\n\nTo bring this positioning to life, we guided the client’s executive team through a rigorous naming process that mandated the new trade name be highly evocative supporting the client’s innovative approach to collaborating with their customer’s to create marketing success.\n\nBrightformat was the perfect name to embody the idea of illumination, innovation and vibrant customer experiences.  We then designed the new corporate identity system that included a new logotype, symbol, color system and visual design standards for all marketing and communications. Examples of those executions are featured here.\n\n<a href=\"http://vimeo.com/48003840\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3068\" title=\"Brightformat Video\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/pete-and-mike.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"384\" /></a>\n\n<strong>The Outcome</strong>\nCheck out the <a href=\"http://vimeo.com/48003840\" target=\"_blank\">video</a> featuring Brightformat’s executive leadership announcing the name change with humor and grace. Here’s what Pete Houlihan, CEO of Brightformat, had to say about their engagement with PULL:\n\n<em>“From the very beginning of the workshops with PULL and through the implementation of our name and visual expression, PULL was thoughtful, collaborative, and was clearly committed to our success. Their experience, guidance, and creativity helped guide two very different shareholders toward a result that we simply could not be happier with. They didn’t tell us who we should be or where we should go–they guided us along a path that helped us discover that our direction and purpose had been there all along, we just needed the expertise to help us reveal it.”</em>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<strong>Thank you Brightformat! We wish you great success and brighter days ahead.</strong>', 'Brand Story: Brightformat Brand Development', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'brand-story-brightformat-brand-development', '', '', '2012-08-25 10:41:57', '2012-08-25 14:41:57', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=3065', 0, 'post', '', 0),
(3135, 2, '2012-09-19 10:11:10', '2012-09-19 14:11:10', '<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3136\" title=\"brand storytelling\" src=\"/pullinc/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/whiteboard.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"514\" height=\"303\" />\n<h1><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Every enduring story is based on a transcendent idea that’s bigger than the story itself. The elements of any story – characters, plot, environment – can clarify, focus, and influence the idea expression, but it’s the big idea that drives the story. Not the other way around.</span></h1>\nAn enduring brand story brings an “idea of value” to life where it will be experienced by people who care about its purpose and spread its shared-values to others. Storytelling is at the white-hot center of how humans share ideas that matter and build relationships between them. As marketers, we invest tremendous energy and resources into the act of storytelling.\n\nAll story forms–movies, books, ads, even tweets– have a core idea that brings purpose to telling the story in the first place. This is especially true for brand stories. It’s about a bigger idea. Some call it the “true north”, the vision, archetype, the essence of the brand, but the core idea behind the brand story is the centerpiece of what makes a value proposition irresistible.\n\nFrom the startup in its early stages, to an established global brand–storytelling leads the way forward but the idea of value is its path. This is not about advertising budgets. Millions have been spent telling the wrong story about a valuable idea to the right people.\n\nThe methods, execution and production of things that tell brand stories have forever changed. We now live in an idea economy driven by digital social interactions. Brands with big ideas of value catch fire at light speed, lead markets and build unimaginable market value wealth for all stakeholders. Me-too brands crash and burn.\n\nBig ideas change cultures and then we tell stories about it. Ideas of value first, brand story second. At the center of all your communications– advertising, press releases, investor reports, packaging, events, customer service – the big idea your brand represents must be the main character in your brand’s story.\n\n<strong><em>Editor\'s Note: </em></strong>\n<strong><em>PULL offers a one-day-issue-based intensive workshop designed to guide marketing communications leaders and teams to better define and express a compelling story that informs and guides the verbal and visual development of brand communications at all touch points. For information email <a title=\"Brand Storytelling Workshop\" href=\"mailto:tdawson@pullinc.com\" target=\"_blank\">Thomson Dawson.</a></em></strong>', 'What\'s at the center of your brand storytelling strategy?', '', 'publish', 'open', 'open', '', 'whats-at-the-center-of-your-brand-storytelling-strategy', '', '', '2012-09-19 10:11:10', '2012-09-19 14:11:10', '', 0, 'http://www.pullinc.com/?p=3135', 0, 'post', '', 2);
