The Engaging Brand

Putting the E into E - Motion

People are emotional. Business consist of people both as employees and as consumers. Therefore, business is emotional. I feel passionate that any tools available to managers that help address and manage the emotional content, should be embraced - that is why I believe social media can be so important - not as the only tool for communication but as A communication tool.

People learn more from adding an emotional element so how can social media help?

1. Social media can help bring out the personality of the brand - putting a human face behind the logo.
2. Social media allows people to speak to people, allows people to connect at an individual level.
3. Social media allows you to share YOUR brand story. It allows you to give emotional context to the content.
4. Social media allows you to co create with your employees and your consumers. This allows people to share their thoughts, their feelings, their needs, their desires.
5. Social media is about relationships.
6. Social media allows business to give value with no strings attached. Relationships thrive when both parties feel that they are gaining from the relationship.

I kind of think the E in the word Emotion can be seen as the electronic tools available. When you use social media correctly, as a relational tool that you get motion towards your brand.

Don't let EGO Get In The Way of Your Brand

Developing brands over time can be hampered by either a personal or corporate ego. Brands that succeed over the medium, long term fight against

E = Expecting past success to be the reason for future success
G = Generating more internal talk, more internal meetings than external focus and external conversations
O = Overconfidence and under-dreaming

There is a fine line between confidence and over confidence. Web 2.0 means that you now have tool at your fingertips to keep that E.G.O at bay....by listening and acting on the feedback.

Does Your Brand Look Great Naked?

No jokes about my personal brand, look I am over 40 what do you expect :)

One test for great brands is that behind all the marketing whether traditional or social media,  what does the "naked brand" look like?

• How great is the brand offering? Does it stand in its own right as an experience that fulfils a need in the market? Does the beauty stand out in the competitor's crowd?
• Are you fending off the ageing process by a brand health check....do you keep working on the product so that it retains its youthfulnesss?
• Does the naked brand reflect the truth of the advertising?
• Does the naked brand have good manners in every interaction with the consumers?

Most people, most things can look good when "made -up in public", however, the consumer will experience the brand in it's nakedness - at home, at work, at play. The brand has to stand in its own right without the make up of conversational marketing, advertising, logo's etc
In an age of social media, engagement comes when the person loves the naked brand. Engagement comes when you break through the barriers of advertising or marketing,  to experience the real beauty  - and you still love the product. No amount of social media will hide an out of shape, out of date offering.

When I think of internal brands and leadership, once the corporate clothes of words, of inspirational speeches, of promises are torn away....employees will only engage if the raw naked brand of day to day life is an embodiment of all that has been said....
 

Be the Pilot of Your Brand

Flying home from the USA, I was thinking about the connection between flying and building a brand.

A plane starts on the ground = A brand has to be grounded on core values before it can fly

A plane does not immediately fly, it needs to gather pace, accelerate to earn the right to fly = A brand is not built over night, it needs to build momentum.

A plane has a flight path, a flight plan to get to its destination = A brand needs to know where it is wanting to fly to, where does it want to take it's passengers (consumers)

A plane hits turbulence, but is strong enough to keep to its flight path = A brand will make mistakes, hit occasional dips but must always keep the goal in mind, keep the belief to get through it.

A plane needs air to fly. It is an enabler of connecting the desire of passengers to fly with the technology of using air to fly = The brand is not the star...it is an enabler, a connector of consumers to their dreams.

A plane needs pilots and passengers to get achieve the potential it was designed for = A brand needs leaders and consumers to achieve its potential

A plane has a destination = A brand has a destiny

A plane was revolutionary now it is evolutionary = A brand when launched needs to lead its own revolution against the status quo, once launched the revolution has to turn to evolution (or die). I think too many brands forget to evolve believing forever they are still revolutionary

Brands have the ability to soar above the competition when they connect people. Connect people from where they are now, to where they want to be....they are carriers of dreams

A Leader of Thought....

....Yesterday I posted about a card that I read...well I noted down another quote again from an unknown source.

"To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world"

In business, I think we can take this further

"To the world you may be one brand, but to one brand user you may be the world"

We have been so busy appealing to the mass population, so busy creating mass appeal, I believe we have forgotten the ability to connect at a personal level. With social media that is often taken as though it needs to be one to one. I don't think that is necessary or possible.

I think we need to speak personally and even "personably"......as if we are speaking just to you.That I am entrusting you with the secret of our brand, a secret we can share together, a secret that makes our friendship special. A secret that I trust you will only share with people who will understand....:)

Maybe mass marketing has moved from mass = many, to the more spiritual meaning of mass = two way thanksgiving.

Brand New York -Why Am I Engaged?

I am experiencing the wonderful New York for the first time. What has struck me is that you feel an affinity to the brand New York despite never having been before...I suppose that is through

• Brand storytelling through films and TV programs. I don't see the Empire State Building for instance I see Meg Ryan chasing  Tom Hanks....or the terror of King Kong etc I have personal stories of watching those films... who I was with...where I was....connecting me to New York.
• The song....I cannot say New York without saying it twice...that is the viral hook!
• Social networking. Most of my UK friends have been to New York. So they have told me about the experiences, the sharing of those stories....makes me want to engage with the NY experience.

This shows me again that brands have been built throughout history by word of mouth, by creating stories for people to share. New York may be new to me, however the concept of social media has been around for a long, long time. The difference was that

1. We needed other's to share it globally...eg film makers, radio
2. Our sphere of influence was narrow.

One interesting thought was that Sleepless in Seattle I equate to New York! Why because the emotional scene..the time when the film makers pull on my emotion is in New York....brands need emotion, people need emotion, engagement to brands or people need emotion.

Brand Need to Be Emotionally Intelligent

The Engaging Brand podcast this week was the first part of an interview with Galba Bright on emotional intelligence. Now although this was a discussion about individuals and leadership, it got me thinking about how brands themselves need to be more emotionally intelligent. In fact isn't that what we are seeing with Starbucks at the moment?

• Self Awareness. Brands need to be aware of their values. They need to have a confidence in what they are about and what they are trying to achieve.
• Self Management. Knowing the brand values - how do they evolve them, keeping them fresh yet true to their beliefs. How do they show their personality, how do they build on their strengths....how do they manage themselves in a market of plenty?
• Social Awareness. How well does the brand understand the market, how well do they differentiate themselves from the competition?
• Relationship Management. How well do they manage the relationship with the consumers? Social media can be an important element in this process. But whether the brand uses social media or not, how do they manage the experience that consumers have in each interaction with you?

Emotional intelligence is relevant to more than leadership, it is about understanding the world has changed from a product culture to an experience economy. When you listen to the podcast, think about how emotionally intelligent your personal brand or your consumer brand is......it could be the difference between success or failure.

Cultivating a Community

Community just doesn't happen, it needs work. That is true in business as well as personal life, it is true off line as well as on line. Strong communities cannot be made but I do believe that they can be cultivated...how?

• By committing to being part of the community. Any community needs people to be committed to wanting the community to work.
• Investing time in developing relationship skills
• Honesty. Communities thrive when honesty is respected and encouraged. The relationship skill investment is needed to ensure people are ready for honesty and know how to give and receive honesty properly.
• Strong communities "think of themselves less but not less of themselves"
• By not mistaking community for "sameness". People will be different, bring different things...the similarity comes in believing what the community stands for not in the similarity of the people.

I think brands and business succeed when they cultivate the characteristics of a strong community rather than trying to manage the community as people.

Has Your Brand Got Confidence?

With all the talk of social media, all the fears that business has of using the tools to connect with consumers, it is mirroring the "real world" shyness of brands to connect with the people who pay their wages...their customers. I would suggest that business does not fear social media, because even in real life many of those companies are still not listening to the customers/employees, it just does not have enough confidence to create that two way dialogue....to hear the bad as well as the good, or even deal with the bad as well as the good.

To be a strong brand, I believe it has to have confidence. That confidence is built on knowing what it stands for, bringing the company values to everything it does, understanding what they are wanting to achieve and taking actions that move the brand forward each day.

A confident brand knows that it will not please all the people all the time, it knows that feedback is essential to keep on course or keep it honest to its values. It does not fear interaction, it courts interaction - knowing that interaction will be both positive and negative, but interaction shows that both sides care enough in the brand to invest time in the conversation.

If you are not working with your customers, maybe just maybe that is a confidence issue that you need to work on internally through leadership development....

Are you a S.O.B? .....No, I mean a Social Object Brand!

There is nothing new in wanting people to talk positively about your company, about your brand. So why all this talk about new marketing? For me the output - strong reputation - is not new, the new part relates to

• Where your consumers talk about you - now on-line as well as off-line
  
• The tools that you can use to help people talk about you - blogging, microblogging, social networks, widgets etc

But the tools won't work unless you have something that people want to talk about, something that people want to share with their network, something that in some way creates value in the consumers lives.

Hugh Macleod (must read blog!)wrote a wonderful post on social objects a while ago and it made me think about how we put a huge amount of time into creating new products - or at least we should be! But how much time do we spend on creating the story to go with the product? The distribution part of the marketing plan now needs to include the conversation as well as the retailers.

Do we concentrate on the brand, the object but not the social aspect?

Consumers of your brand, both internal and external, are your own global salesforce that will work for you, free of charge, if you engage them in the story. A story that they can't wait to share with others. People will share news with their networks, as a way of building relationships, appearing "experts" or even that basic need of wanting to be liked. So today, think about whether you are an S.O.B - whether a corporate, employer, leadership or personal brand. Do you feed the conversation by supplying shareable news regularly, as a matter of course?

Here are some resources to inspire you

• Do we build a story that people can talk about, because it is relevant to them? (Listen to Nettie Hartsock podcast for inspiration )

• Do we understand the art of the conversation? (Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of Connie Reece podcast)
• Do we give people tools to share the story? (Listen to Connie Bensen for Community Ideas)