Category Archives: innovation

Leadership, influence and brand

I recently took a 5-day management course at Schulich School of Business. It was a very good course. I learned some things, validated expertise and I particularly enjoyed seeing profs who work in my field, marketing and strategy, teach.

The program consists of five parts: leadership, marketing, strategy, finance, HR. It is left to the participants to put this all together into a holistic thought pattern for themselves.\

In my view, this is essential.

For instance, marketing is not merely something other people do in your organization. ‘Marketing’ is what everyone who wishes to influence decisions – at any level – needs to do. The processes of getting consumers to buy product A vs product B are remarkably similar to what it means to leverage one’s hard won influence.

Indeed, in my view, influence is best defined as your personal brand equity expressed in the willingness of others to follow you. Frankly leadership is not about leading – it is about giving others reasons to follow.

Case in point: As an external consultant I never have the authority to change anything, I also have no way to reward my clients’ staff with more money. Yet, I lead and we make good things happen. My success is tied to how well I infuse projects with meaning, communicate appreciation, and generate desired outcomes. Naturally, with each successful project my brand equity grows and my capacity to do more good work increases. That’s why leadership (inspire) is such a powerful concept, as compared to management (perspire).

Social Marketing – Constructing a Message

 

Numerous studies cited for instance in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point toward a deliberate, effective message construction for social marketing campaigns that aim at changing behaviour. For instance, in experiments it has been shown that behaviour can be modified by not merely emphasizing the nature of a problem, but by offering a positive message. (Example: a sign that reads “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the park,” was far less effective in preventing visitors from removing artifacts than this positive message: “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest”).  

Similarly, a message focused on how many people are engaging in an unhealthy activity have been shown to be less effective at motivating the desired behaviour than one that emphasizes how many people are already doing things right. This type of message can aid in correcting social misperceptions and boost the healthy behaviour. (Example: “20% of Montana college students drink too much alcohol.” versus the much more effective “Most (81%) of Montana college students have four or fewer drinks each week”).

Again in a similar vein, a neuroscientific study reported on in Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom showed through bran scans that explicit non-smoking messages, for instance the explicit depictions of the effects of cigarette smoking found on Canadian cigarette packs, and explicit messages like smoking causes lung cancer or smoking kills do little to keep smokers from smoking. On the contrary, brain scans showed how these messages in fact stimulated the craving in smokers, suggesting they may well be achieving the opposite results.

Economics of fear and sustainable buying practices

Here’s a hypothesis for consideration:

With news media reporting – in particular headlines – bleakly declaring the end to life as we know it for many months now, it is inevitable that people feel that the global financial crisis is having a major impact on their lives. This feeling is spawned by what we are told day in and day out at least as much as it stems from real losses in employment or investment portfolios.

Sustainable buying practices might well be on the rise. Those are practices not based on personal debt financing and overleveraging to “get things now”. They are built on concepts of need, affordability, prioritization and saving for specific purchases. As this shift occurs it demands equally sustainable pricing practices, elastic enough to be responsive to the market and to ensure the survival of the business beyond this crisis. It means the “traditional” growth model has to be rethought in terms of “sustainable exchanges”.

Any business model but especially those based on debt financing will have to be rethought in the context of needs, wants and sustainable personal – and business – finance.

I imagine it also means customer value propositions will increasingly include price related incentives, meant as short-term fixes to stimulate consumption. But in business only a few can survive on low price positions, the rest need greater differentiation to sustain their business. I imagine the competitive landscape will increasingly be thought to include alternatives across sectors of the economy, not just direct competitors within a specific sector.

If the above is so, what does that mean for how I think about performing arts marketing and sustainably developing audiences?

Teaching clients about online presence

In the last few days I’ve lead two Q and A workshop sessions with completely different clients to help them understand how they can start to use the web for much more than, well, than having a web site.

Helping clients draw the connections between their own site and how to drive the right kinds of traffic to their site means that they can become a lot more effective in their marketing, relationship building or sales efforts.

It’s been interesting to speak about these issues to non-specialists – being understood seems to involve a lot of non-web metaphors that are grounded in people’s real lives. (Something about marketing speak that mystifies and obscures rather than enlightens sometimes.)

Anyhow, having done these two sessions I now have a ready-to-go, customizable workshop on how to think about integrating online channels and using anything from SEO to search marketing to facebook or myspace and other social networking fora, to lead generation and nurture to e-news to RSS and whatever else we will be able to do on line next. Since surely its greatest hallmark remains its “evolution.”

It’s My Cornwall contest way to win trust

Over the last few months I’ve worked with a team from Banfield-Seguin on the City of Cornwall Economic Development Department’s rebranding and business / resident attraction programs.

We gained a great deal of insight from the research process, where we talked to a lot of people in Cornwall about Cornwall, conducted a review of economic development success stories as well as a reputation assessment based on news media and web coverage. Based on the findings, we felt that the next strategic move would be to give the people in Cornwall even more of a voice in shaping the city’s new brand story. We thought the benefits of that approach would be considerable: we would shift perceptions about Cornwall, earn the residents’ trust in the work, make it real and foster buy in to the process and its outcomes.

In close collaboration with the team, we came up with the It’s My Cornwall contest. With great local media support, and direct, on-the-ground engagement, for instance through a day at the mall to solicit on-the-spot video and audio submissions, we got more than 130 entries in 19 days. Then we short-listed the 20 best entries, and promoted voting: 5,071 votes were cast.

The energy and enthusiam generated was palpable. We even got CTV Ottawa coverage for this initiative. All that bodes well for the next steps in rebranding and marketing Cornwall.