Strategy & Brand

Everything that you say says something about you.

Your brand narrative is how you tell your story. It runs deeper than a marketing rollout or an advertising campaign.  Your brand narrative is told in and through newsletters, press releases, promotions, CRM, sales, programming, products, annual reports, and internal communications- day in and day out. Your ongoing narrative should reflect your brand vision and purpose, your strategic direction, your operational tactics, your intent and partnerships. If crafting your brand narrative isn’t a constant, grueling, and tedious ongoing process, then it’s likely you’re producing ineffective noise.

Wrestling your brand narrative into focus requires skill and authenticity. Calling yourself cool doesn’t make you cool and calling your brand relevant doesn’t make it relevant. Drop the ego, the corporate-bologna, and the stuffy verbiage from your self-promotions and figure out how to reflect who you really are and what you really have to offer. Narrativity is not vague or generic.

Meticulously crafted brand narratives connect with people; they gracefully distinguish your unique interests, voice, differentiators, and the powerful benefits that genuinely matter to clients and customers. Brands that make a connection, reinforce their relevance, and speak to people are identified immediately as the must-have solution; the real deal, second to none. Your brand narrative should convey the personality, style, and strengths that enliven your collective organization.

Your communications are a reflection of your brand identity and directly contribute to your brand image, whether you intended them to be or not.

Here are a few questions to help you do a quick audit of your Brand Narrative:

• Do your messages accurately communicate your story?
• Are your messages genuine and authentic or just feel-good self-compliments and well-worded spin?
• Does your brand’s spunk, funk, credibility, attitude, personality, sensitivity, or vibe shine through your messages?
• How do your messages reflect your brand identity, values, and strategy?
• Are your messages clear and concise?
• Do your messages speak to the real issues that concern your audience?
• Do your messages reflect the values of your audience?
• Are you addressing the relevant issues on the minds and the immediate ‘To-Do’ lists of your customers?

If your brand is irreverent, your brochure should be too. Conscious design should be applied to more than just your color schemes and typography. Every billboard you put up and business card you hand out should reflect the essence of your brand.

One of the secrets to attaining true cohesion between all of your messages and mediums is a solid copy strategy. Your copy strategy helps your web content, brochures, letterhead, business cards, signage, speeches by company spokespersons, advertisements, and email signatures to all convey the same brand. Not its third cousin, not its twin, not its look alike- the exact same brand- from its look and feel, to its verbiage and its values.

Your copy strategy outlines whether or not you’ll use oxford commas, put periods at the end of bulleted sentences, use conjugations (like it’s in place of it is), use dots or dashes between breaks in phone numbers… It lays out which terms and phrases you’ll use and which ones you’ll avoid. It’s a clear and simple, explicit guide that outlines how your brand looks and sounds on paper.

A good copy strategy depends on a rock solid brand identity. Your brand identity is who you are, what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and how you want to be experienced. Your Brand Identity is how you conceive of your brand. Without a clearly defined Brand Identity, communications from different departments or for different mediums can seem disjointed and blur the brand narrative.

The secret to brand relevance isn’t a Cracker Jack prize, Twitter account, or Facebook Fan page.  If you don’t have anything to say, you’re not worth listening to. Social Media is a valuable tool when it’s used as a relevant and meaningful contribution; when your company’s web chatter is driven by mere advertising and self-promotion, your response will be as shallow as your efforts. 
A social media strategy predicated on friending, following, commenting, RT-ing, and #TrendingTopics isn’t all that far off from the sex tape track to fame. Sure, it worked for Paris, but if your values and core purpose are deeper than a designer puppy tote, you’re going to need a more authentic strategy.

Just like your website, social media ROI depends on quality, not quantity. The keywords that direct the most traffic to your site aren’t always the keywords that result in the highest number of page views or the longest amount of time on the site. It doesn’t matter how many people view your page every day, it matters how many of the right people view it. Quantity is a by-product of a quality-driven strategy.

Key concepts to maximize your social media investment:

-Relevant Information: Make sure you’re genuinely communicating your relevant brand. Are you sharing information that contributes to the lives of your ideal customer? Does all of the information you’re sharing match your brand? Are you communicating in a tone and style that reflects the brand? Do your updates reflect your values, your niche, and your purpose?

-Authentic Ideas: Make sure you’re relying on your own hard work, creativity, ingenuity, and expertise. Over-utilized @’s and #’s make it pretty clear who has something to say and who’s trying to mooch off the social forces of others. Real people- real, intelligent, sophisticated people will be reading your posts. If you post something shallow and moochy, you’re probably going to be getting some grimaces on the other end. Grimaces are bad for social media ROI.

-No Pitches: Make sure your social media outlets are brand touch points rather than advertisements or sales pitches. Social media is about community, it’s a platform for sharing, and sales pitches are selfish. If you’re pitching, angling, and positioning rather than contributing, you’re not going to be welcome in the sand box for very long.

-Guiding Values: Make sure you have a plan for handling offensive comments and posts. If profanities wouldn’t be tolerated in your boardroom or at your trade show booth, you don’t have to tolerate them in the content generated by viewers, fans, subscribers, or visitors. Use your brand values and guiding philosophies to develop a personal strategy for what to tolerate, what not to tolerate, and what to do about it. Your strategy is up to you, but it’s important for your plan to be consistent and your response to be swift.

-Your Brand Style: Make sure your strategy is tailored specifically for your brand. What works for the office next door won’t necessarily work for you. You can’t out-tweet the New York Times. Keep your tone, your content, and the volume of your activity in perspective.

-Monitor Your Presence: Take the time to brainstorm the most likely problems that your social media strategy may encounter and the steps you can take to prevent these dilemmas. If the situation warrants, develop emergency response plans. What will you do to reduce the risk that the account will be hacked? How closely will you monitor spoof accounts? Is it likely that a problem will arise if the company tweeter has his or her blackberry linked to the company twitter and the phone is stolen?

- Quality Counts: The actual number of people who subscribe to your channel or fan you on Facebook isn’t really an indicator of your effectiveness in a given medium. Remember that having 10,000 fans on Facebook doesn’t mean 10,000 people see your updates every day. Your Weekly Facebook Page Update, your Bit.ly stats, and your video views are a far better judge of your ROI than your fan count.

-Netiquette Matters: Make sure you know the rules. While the topic has been heavily and frequently debated around the BlackDog lab, there are rules of decorum and etiquette to social media interactions- it isn’t a wholly lawless frontier. If you’re not sure of the rules: get a book on the topic, talk with people who are more familiar with community in question, read relevant blogs, and play in the space provided until you’re clear on the accepted rules of conduct.

Here are a few social media resources we recommend:

“YouTube For Business” by Michael Miller 

Mashable, www.mashable.com 

“The Twitter Book” by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein

Make art- not advertising. Whether it’s a two page spread in a print publication or a vertical banner on a website, at BlackDog, we believe if the ad you’re placing isn’t as interesting, attractive, and useful to readers as the content it’s sandwiched between, you’ve missed the Big Idea. 
 Promotions that are irrelevant or out of sync, campaigns that are boring, interstitial ads (the frustrating ads that hijack your attention by forcing you to watch an ad before a page will load), floating ads (the in-your-face ads that float across your screen to block the page and raise your blood pressure), ads that blink, pop-ups, and awareness initiatives that annoy your viewer all impact the way your brand is perceived and experienced.
 
Allowing these lackluster intrusions degrades the visitor’s experience, cheapens your brand image, devalues your ad space by diminishing your advertisers’ return on investment, and leaves your  viewers feeling as though (by tolerating all of the unwanted messaging they’ve been subjected to in exchange for the content provided) they’ve already paid for their subscription.
 
Here are a few characteristics of a good advertisement:
-A good ad is art- it is crafted, it utilizes design principles, it has meaning, it has relevance. The ultimate compliment a print ad can receive isn’t a marketing award- it’s when a reader carefully tears the ad out so they can keep it somewhere more visible (on their fridge, in a frame, etc.).
 
-A good ad is bold- it captures a viewer’s attention. Bland ads rob readers and visitors by taking up space that should have been allotted to more appealing content. Leave your ski mask and slim jim at home and give us ads worth looking at.
 
-A good ad is a mutually beneficial exchange for advertiser and viewer- it provides information that the reader actually wants, which, in turn, significantly increases the return on investment for the advertiser.

View the 2010 Threats to Girlhood Report

Threats to Girlhood include all of the issues, mindsets, factors, trends, and circumstances that impact girls’ lifelong health, wellness, happiness, and ability to succeed. Identifying current Threats to Girlhood is an important step towards advancing the well being of girls, the possibilities for women, and the strength of communities.  The 2010 Threats to Girlhood report issued by BlackDog’s foundation Serious Play for Serious Girls provides a collective view detailing the breadth and depth of the challenges that girls face.  Good brands will use this report to guard against inflicting these challenges developed as an outcome of their actions.
Emerging research on the state of girlhood highlights the interconnection of girlhood threats. Education and poverty, body image issues and advertising, sexual abuse and self-harm, conformism and commercialism; the issues threatening our girls aren’t isolated and unrelated.  Radically reducing Threats to Girlhood will require that we, collectively, work to improve all the interconnected causes along the way, not just the side effects.

No one single parent, politician, celebrity role model, company, organization, product, publication, or advertisement is solely responsible for the development of girlhood threats. We are all, however, responsible for the ways in which we contribute to these threats or fail to contribute to their solution. Radically reducing Threats to Girlhood requires a holistic solution: an out-of-the-box and into-the-hands-of decision-makers solution that takes the whole girl, the world she lives in, and the interconnection of the threats facing her, all into account.

This report is certainly not exhaustive, but we hope it will help show the scope of the problem and the urgent need for a new perspective. Because Threats to Girlhood are continually changing, shifting, and evolving, this is an ongoing project intended to continue addressing threats and working towards solutions.

We believe that research shouldn’t be remanded to vaults and scholarly journals, so if your research helps identify a Threat to Girlhood or a solution to a girlhood threat, we hope you’ll pass it along for possible inclusion in the report. Please send your stats, facts, and insights on girlhood threats, along with a copy of the published research or report in which the insights appear, to us for review.

I can’t tell if what I am seeing is a gross over simplification or just a lackluster attempt to ‘spin’ a brand, get on with the show or turn a buck.

What I do know is that the inherent power of brand to tell a vibrant story, capture the essence of a working people and articulate a higher purpose is being reduced to cryptic taglines, vague images, and meaningless stories.

 Authentic brand relevance isn’t cheap or easy; it can’t be bought, prescribed or faked. Authentic brand relevance is an earned honor of distinction bestowed upon companies that are grounded in a philosophy of being, know their purpose, make connections, and relate a perspective that speaks to and engages people.
 
Authentic brands advance thought-leadership, part from the herd, take the high road, keep it fresh, and offer meaningful solutions in the marketplace and to the world.
 
Authentic brands are a holistic, matchless advantage, enlivened by people with the power to restore a lost sense of humanity and balance to business.
 
This is about the time that I find myself in the awkward position of assuming the role of brands overprotective and perturbed Jewish mother.When resources are tight and competition real why are organizations announcing re-branding efforts that amount to nothing more than an altered juxtaposition of their logo in a fresh splash of color with a quippy tag-line chaser? A risky practice in that it seems to attract considerable word of mouth only when the effort is considered a dismal flop, otherwise it appears to go unnoticed. A logo cannot possibly capture the story or accurately represent the collective ambitions, effort, ethics, synergy and attitudes of any people working to solve problems and achieve goals in fierce times. I’m riled when brand is repeatedly diminished to a visual interpretation when there is real work to be done. I’m incensed that any working community of people would be reduced to a meaningless or superficial level of perception. Genuine influence will cost more than cheap tricks and idle dribble.

The missing piece in children’s branding isn’t a strategy for multi-media tie-ins, advergame licensing, or on-the-money, pop culture predictions. No, not this time; more of the same has only made the void more evident.
What is missing, and what is needed, is conviction. Purposed conviction turned dedicated intent, represented by a sworn commitment much like the Hippocratic Oath. Not a certificate program, membership to a created association, three days at a conference in Des Moines, or a “good enough” seal of approval representing lackluster standards. Children’s branding is in need of an internalized dictum to “first, do no harm” that aligns integrity, organizational purpose, brand management, and the optimal development of children. This sworn commitment requires a guiding philosophy that holds individual ability and judgment accountable, demands respect for scientific discovery, and vows to regard the holistic care of children and childhood above all other competing concerns. It also requires an adopted practice of responsibility and professionalism dedicated to promoting the highest standards of well being and optimal development at each developmental stage and phase, guarding the season of childhood.

Brands don’t exist in vacuums- they impact, influence, and shape our global ecology. From the modeling and messaging conveyed to children through the media, to the nutritional content of their breakfast cereal, children are being molded, influenced, and impacted by the brands they see, hear, and use.

Ideals to purvey, values to reinforce, cultural differences to overcome, stigmas and stereotypes to destroy, and threats to childhood are all too plentiful. What is sparse, are companies that guard the season of childhood, see their vocation as a service, and that champion the role and opportunity to proactively influence the healthy real life needs of children.

Children need inspired playthings and wholesome messaging to help them tackle real world issues. Brands are either meeting the demand with constructive tools, placating children with shallow entertainment, or are selling out by buying into the notion that what they produce, promote, and contribute is inconsequential to the cultural realities of our day. If companies don’t begin adopting actionable, responsible standards rooted in high ideals, transparency, health, and holistic wellbeing, the industry will become subject to restrictive legislation.

The philosophy and relevance behind brand development has proven to have utility across a wide and diverse range of interests. Brands distinguish organizations, churches, teams, industries, destinations, associations, events, museums, causes, institutions, politics, clusters, professions, movements, buildings, and the arts, one from another, when services offered don’t.
It should come as no surprise that the utilities sector – electric, water, and fuel are  utilizing the power of brand to humanize the service, build trust, attract employees, educate consumers, establish value, reveal what has been perceived as hidden, and  define a new engagement with consumers. Utility Companies must embrace brand or risk ceding their long established position to competitors or alternative solutions.

A utility brand is not a new method of spin, a mere communications roll-out, or another dangling carrot incentives program. A brand is a competitive advantage that defines, differentiates and strategically aligns and positions the utility to clarify credibility, reliability and value in a meaningful and powerful demonstration, one corporate decision, and one customer touch point at a time. The utility brand does not live in the marketing department but rather serves as a strategic infrastructure throughout the organization, guiding all C-level, departmental, operational, and customer service judgments, consistently delivering the promised purpose and values. A dynamic utility brand is only as powerful as it is accountable to deliver.   

Thriving brands focus on innovating solutions and connections that attest to their significant relevance and sincere commitment.  A non-traditional pilot program in Canada provoked awareness and engaged consumers by allowing energy users to fit their consumption to peak and non-peak times.  In the end, customers were empowered to shift their patterns of consumption, impacting their carbon footprint, benefiting the utility, and reducing consumer costs. This win-win approach spurred 78 percent of the consumers to vote the pilot program into stable existence, less than 20 percent wanted to revert back to the traditional pricing plan.1

When was the last time that you aligned your decision making values with the shared concerns and interests of your customers for mutual utility?

1 Ontario Energy Board Smart Price Pilot “Backgrounder: Ontario Energy Board Smart
Price Pilot.” Ontario Energy Board. July 26,2007.

Dr. Cliff Arnall, a Cardiff University researcher has identified “Blue Monday”, January 25, as the most depressing day of 2010. A pseudo-scientific formula weighing and measuring human experience ratios isolates today, “Blue Monday” as the figurative day of resignation and defeat. With a wave of   arms thrown in the air or silent acts of desperation apparently today is the day, if we haven’t caved already, that hope is abandoned and goals are forsaken.
Rather than stand by and watch hope be damned we have mounted an  effort to resurrect all those New Year’s resolutions set to be sacrificed on the altar of setbacks, unexpected interruptions, and will power fatigue. We offer industrial strength goal and motivation energizers, proverbial armor to gird and champion your will onward. All we are saying is…give change a chance!

WHY? WHY to the power of 40?
Are the goals that you have chosen worthy of your effort?
Is the goal an answer to a sincere need or deep desire?
Would your life lack meaning, verve or quality without the adoption of this new challenge?
This is important to assess as there will come a time that you will be forced to make decisions that could derail your progress or leave you feeling selfish.
There will be moments and blocks of time ahead that will challenge your need to invest in this goal or work so hard.     
Why did you start this to begin with? Why is it important?
Keep asking “Why?” until all the excuses are answered, validations outlined and motivations revealed.

Time to change
For everything there is a season.
What’s driving you to address this NOW?
You’ve solidified the value of the goal. How about the timing? Is this the right effort to invest in right now?
Do you hurt enough to implement change? Want change enough to suffer the transition?
Did you start this without considering the other real life conflicts that interfere?

Chart the Course
Walk the particular change process out. Step by diligent step. Establish markers and measures on a calendar that will help you to keep track of progress and distinguish points of celebration.
Break the big plan down into bite sized accomplishments that get celebrated.
This detailed plan will be incredibly rewarding and motivating. There is nothing so compelling as a progress report to motivate change onward.
Setbacks will happen. Readjust and plug on. It’s all part of the adventure.
Remember to mix things up.

Trouble knocks too 
Problems will pop-up. Be ready with a back-up plan, perhaps even a back-up plan to your back-up plan.
As you outline your plan identify and troubleshoot the limitations and target potential pitfalls that could interfere with fulfilling your agenda.
Planning with all the possible obstacles in mind eliminates a lot of the problems that derail success.
Create solutions to make meeting your goals easier.

Pace matters
Gusto has led all of us down a path of frazzled exhaustion at one point or another.
Perhaps you started your change management effort by jumping in, full force and all systems ago.
And now you are confronted with the reality that you can’t manage your real life demands and the aggressive plan that you innovated under the influence of so much unbridled enthusiasm.
Quitting now won’t resolve the tensions. Re-engineer a working solution with all the needs in mind.
Implement a plan of action that increases over time allowing for a comfortable and sustainable integration.
Establish dates and objectives that will serve as measures marking your success.

Work the plan
Establish a working and consistent schedule that reflects the goals and priorities in your life.
A carefully created schedule, with built in flexibility will cultivate a sense of order in your transition chaos.
Follow the plan, even when you don’t feel like it.
 
Peer pressure
Most of us will find unlimited reserves of resolve to do what we said we would do if we have put our credibility on the line, if everyone we know is watching us to see if we are doing what we vowed to do.
Who wants to disappoint others? Who wants to eat humble pie?
Openly commit to your goals. Tell colleagues, friends, family and co-workers about your plans. Share your progress and your slumps.

And now a few words from our sponsor…
A word of encouragement can go a long way. You’ve taken the time to start this; it makes good sense to support yourself to the finish.
Right now while you are hepped up and enthused write down your goals with an inspired emphasis on the end in mind.
Remind yourself what you are striving for in quotes that speak to you or pictures that inspire.
Hide, place and post your purposes on your calendar or on the refrigerator; where ever most helpful as a constant motivator or to avert a moment of weakness.
Keeping motivations running high is the biggest challenge to realizing goals.  Amp up your own supports.

Follow the plan, not your mojo
At some point your enthusiasm will sell out and your motivation will fail, abandoning you on the road to change.
You aren’t always going to want to follow through on your big plans and high hopes.
Face it, admit it, and own it. Plug on without them. Ride out the emotional and inspirational lulls adhering to the plan that you built when you were thinking clearly. 
Do what you know to do, regardless of how it is that you feel. Motivation will follow.

Feed your inspiration, starve your doubts
What you think, say and listen to is incredibly persuasive.
Clean up your self talk. Monitor your own thoughts for self defeating and negative scripts that run uninvited through your mind.
Eliminate “I can’t do this”, “what was I thinking?”, “I don’t have time for this” and all other lies and distractions that pop up automatically and challenge your commitment.
Devote energies to replacing negative thoughts with a new and improved reality.

Fine tune the focus
Change is hard.
There is a time for scrutinizing the detailed process of change…In the beginning, when you are determining if this change makes sense now and while framing a dedicated plan to follow.
Obsessing over the dedicated details, length of time, tasks and steps involved to realize your ambitions will make the change process heavier.
Once you’ve committed to a plan of change refocus your thoughts on the wanted outcome. Rather than thinking about what you can’t eat on your weight loss plan, write a list of what you can eat and visualize what you are going to look like as a slimmer shade of yourself.

Read all about it
Reading enhances awareness, broader perspective, education, tools, insights, personal success narratives and all the motivation that anyone would need to remain focused and immersed in the change and adoption process.
Read books, blogs and supports to strengthen your goal every day.
Feeling equipped and knowledgeable builds confidence and impacts success ratios.

Find a few great minds
Find someone else that shares your passion for this particular goal.
Who is the authority on this topic? Who has mastered what you want to achieve? Who is doing it in your own community?
Meet them. Inspiration is harnessed and the goal is made more real as you incorporate the change you want into your life.
Some goals can’t be achieved alone. Find the supports that you need through networks or online, before you need them. 

Accountability Partner
More often than not goals are disadvantaged from the start, lacking the supports necessary to be integrated.
If you are serious about instituting change find an accountability partner. Someone that will challenge, inspire, brainstorm, educate, provoke and celebrate your evolution.
The American College of Sports Medicine found that working out with a partner resulted in 34 more minutes of exercise.

Brand is more than just “looking good”.  An authentic brand requires doing good.

Just putting a pink ribbon on your product doesn’t make you socially responsible. “Certified Organic,” “Carbon Neutral,” and “No Trans Fats” claims on your packaging won’t achieve it either. A brand isn’t socially responsible unless they are consciously and meticulously concerned with their impact on society. While the vast majority of companies think of social responsibility in terms of green initiatives and charitable donations, true social responsibility is a guiding philosophy that runs far deeper than individual programs, outreaches, or financial sponsorship.

Before a company adds a social responsibility page to their website or boasts about their community and environmental initiatives, they should ask themselves several questions: what is society? Why does it matter? On what does society depend? How is our company, as a whole, contributing to society? How are our products, strategic partners, affiliates, retailers, and third party service providers contributing to society? How are we detracting from it?  And, in which areas are we likely to effect societal trends and evolutions, for better and for worse, intended and not? Neglecting to understand, predict, consider, and moderate your social impact is socially irresponsible, even if you help fund a great cause.

If companies don’t abide by voluntary and mannerly rules of conduct and responsibility, stricter legislation will be required to uphold societal values. In her book “Why Manners Matter: The Case for Civilized Behavior in a Barbarous World,” Australian speechwriter turned noteworthy social philosopher, Lucinda Holdforth, suggests that the stability of modern society may actually depend more on manners than it does on legislation, transportation, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Every working element of society depends on manners. “Manners,” she explains, “are both evidence of a functioning society and an important means of upholding that society. Manners provide a form of social self-limitation, a means by which citizens signal their willingness to live together and abide by common standards…. Destroy manners- sweep aside all of a society’s habits, conventions and patterns of behavior- and you may well find that you have nothing left but chaos. And because human beings cannot live for long in a state of anarchy, sooner or later some form of oppressive authority will step in to restore order on a new, more punitive premises” (1).  

1.Lucinda Holdforth. Why Manners Matter: The Case for Civilized behavior in a Barbarous World. Amy Einhorn Books, 2009. P. 25-6.