Posts Categorized: Marketing

Published on March 11, 2011 by Scott Gould

Keep it Simple, or you’re Stupid

Have you ever made the mistake of making something too complex?

I remember when I was about 12 years old at school and we did a project called “Make a Million.” The idea was the children had to team up in pairs and then run a project that, during break times, would create revenue. Looking back, it was a great way for the school to instill some business and entrepreneurial skills into us as kids.

However, my project didn’t go down so well. Whereas some teams sold posters of clipart that they printed from their computer, or sold a set of 5 penalty kicks, or charm bracelets that they had made, my business partner and I decided to make a complex game which was a mix of snakes and ladders fused with monopoly. Suffice to say that when break time came, we normally sold one run on the game as it took the whole break to play it. But even then, people were reluctant to play because it was, well, just so complex! It was easy to buy a poster or kick a ball, but this was just too much.

Thus it was here that I learnt my first business lesson. Keep it quick, simple, and scaleable. I’d like to tell you that I learnt my lesson there and then, but my perfectionist mindset has struggled with this one for a long time as I have often defaulted back to building the perfect system as opposed to a profitable one, or even a useable one!

The simple one wins. Ask Dropbox.

I read a similar, more grown up version of the same story on Quora. Isaac Hall, co-founder of Syncplicity discusses why Dropbox is more popular than other tools that have similar and often better functionality. What he boiled it down to was simplicity. It just works. No tweaking necessary. (You can read his answer here, just click on “change log” to see his full response.) The most pertinent part of it was this:

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues — it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:Windows for dozens of users — doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn’t innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: “Why don’t you support multi-folder synchronization?” His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn’t get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.

I like this – Dropbox could have multiple folders, but they don’t, because people just don’t get it.

Making things simple is about making sure people get it. It’s realising that too many options paralyzes people (which one should I do?), that asking for settings scares people (what if I get it wrong?), that an unclear benefit deters people (why spend my time on this?)

Starting with simple

My friend Darren Smith is an expert in user design and experience and he tells me that when it comes to design there is a general rule to ensure that no matter how advanced a design gets its core remains simple, ensuring that any further levels of complexity advance the feature set without compromising the simplicity of the core.

This useful point helps us with something that Brian Driggs and I have been discussing on the subject of making meaning and also writing SMART email. When it comes to building a platform for people to live their lives on, it needs to be simple with optional further levels of complexity. As to how that looks, I’m not sure – but I’m up for discussing it.

5 ways to keep it simple

So what are the main lessons here? My main points, in contrast to my failures with my efforts to make a million at school, would be:

It can be explained in a sentence. My game couldn’t.
You can look at it and know what it is. You can look at a poster and know that you buy it. But when you look at a peice of card with directions scribbled on, it’s not that obvious.
You don’t need a manual. What is good about the iPhone is when you get it, it’s ready. No configuration. This isn’t the case with many phones that I’ve tested!
It’s quick. The great thing about Dropbox is that you install and it’s done, and you can use it right away. Again, no more configuration.
Any complexity is guided step by step. I loved playing this pinball game that I downloaded on my iPad a while ago that taught me how to use it step by step in a test run. This isn’t anything new, but it’s amazing how many platforms lack this and just expect you to figure it out through trial and eror.

So those are my 5 lessons. Now over to you:

Your Leading Thoughts

Thinking offline, how do we take the platforms that we are building and ensure they are simple, with further levels of complexity?
When does simple harm you?

Photo courtesy of visualpanic

Building, Marketing
branding, marketing, meaning, platform, simple
13 comments
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Published on March 8, 2011 by Scott Gould

Buyology Lesson 1: The Logo is Broken

Every wondered how you know an advert is for a product without seeing the logo or the product?

One of the hot new trends in marketing circles at the moment is neuromarketing. It’s the science of marketing in the sense that it measures people’s brain activity when they are looking and engaging with marketing messages, and thus seeks to deliver a quanitfiable answer to questions like “does engaging senses make a difference?”, “are logos effective?”, and “do anti smoking signs make people stop smoking?”

The leading book on this right now is Buyology (aff link), by Martin Lindstrom, which is a very well written journey through Lindstrom’s vibrant mind that debunks traditional marketing methods.

Of course those of us who are part of the social revolution know that traditional marketing is becoming more and more ineffective, but this book not only says in a way that your boss will listen, but goes one step prover and scientifically proves it (to a degree – the samples are small.)

Buyology

Over the next weeks I want to look at three or four of the main learnings that I drew from this book, along with adding the others things that I’ve been thinking about at the moment that extend his ideas further.

Each one is a lesson in how marketing, and indeed communication, has changed – or rather, has always stayed the same and only now have we realised how wrong our methods have been.

So without further ado, lesson one.

The Logo is Broken: how Association is the new Branding

Something I’ve been saying more and more to our sponsors for Like Minds is that I want to embed them into the narrative of our events. I’ve always known that banners on stage or logos on a website were not just cringy, they were ineffective, and instinctively I’ve always tried to make our sponsors the same companies that provide us with something that is used in the very fabric of the event. Starbucks provide our coffee, Ooyala provide our video platform, Optix provided a social media survey, etc.

According to Lindstrom, my approach is actually correct with the science of association. In fact he goes as far as to say that the association of a product, like the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle of the red of the Coca-Cola brand, neither with the logo in sight, is more powerful than seeing the logo. What Lindstrom did was wire people up to his MRI machine and scan their brain activity whilst showing them various images, videos and sounds. More brain activity meant more success, less meant failure. So this is what he found:

In measuring the effectiveness of Coca-Cola’s, Ford’s and Cingular’s sponsorshop of American Idol, Coca-Cola came out trumps and Ford didn’t get much benefit at all. Lindstrom says this is because Coca-Coal was part of the actual story of American Idol. The judges have Coca-Coal red glasses and seats that are modelled after the shape of their bottles. Contestants are interviewed in a Coca-Cola red room, and the song tracks can be downloaded courtesy of Coca-Cola.
Ford however are not involved with the contestants or judges at all – they only get an advert played at the beginning of the commercial break. What Lindstrom says is that the product or brand must be critical to the storyline. So he’d say that that one-off shot of the Sony Ericsson phone in Casino Royale wasn’t best placed because it wasn’t pivotal to the plot.
When measuring smoker’s reactions to cigarrettes, they reacted more strongly to the red of Malborro against a desert sunset (their branding) than they did to the logo. He did numerous other experiments that said the same thing. This is why he says we know when an advert is for a brand when we don’t even see the product – it’s all the associated feelings, colours, sights, sounds, storyline, etc. This is why Marborro do a good job with sponsoring Formula 1 – apparently when he showed people Forumla 1 images, the same part of the brain that craves cigarettes lights up because this association with the brand is so strong.

His conclusion is that our minds are so bombarded with logos all day that when we see a logo or know something is an advertisement, our guards go up automatically.

Smashable Brands and Strong Assocations

The marketer’s response, he says, must be to then strengthen the associations that we have with our brands. He calls brands that have very powerful associations smashable brands, as you could smash the brand into tiny pieces, pick up one of the those tiny pieces, and still know that it was the brand.

So in the case of Coca-Cola, if you smash a Coca-Cola bottle, you still know it’s Coca-Cola. Likewise you can tell a Mac OS X icon apart from a Windows one. Or take the image of the Ferrari at the top of this page – or is it? We think it’s a Ferrari becuase it’s bright red, but it might not be. That red on a car is so associated with Ferrari that we think it is. And also when I look at it I also think

The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that I need to far more aware of all the elements that either people already associate with my brands, and also what I want to associate. I think that whilst I’m keen on design and love branding, I actually haven’t been thinking enough about association.

I’d say most people take association as far as a logo, a font and a colour. We should be thinking about associating much, much more.

A critical part of this is knowing what to associate with. A association has the potential to harm our brand if it doesn’t have positive connotations and reinforce the values of our brand.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’ve chucked out a few thoughts here and certainly haven’t followed the thought line for long, because I think we need to discuss it here.

First of all, what are you comments on this? Have you seen other brands do association well? Have you experienced it yourself?
Second, what are some of the ways that we can be better at association? How do we ensure we pick correct associations?
Thirdly, given that many of us are knowledge workers with our own “brands”, how can we use association on a personal level?

Image courtesy of kaneda99

Published on March 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

How to make Meaning

Yesterday we asked whether our brands are making meaning after examining the progression of brands from functional, to aspirational, and now to meaningful.

Today: how on earth do you make a brand meaningful?

Guy Kawasaki, when he discusses the Art of Innovation (exceptional videos – 10 minutes long), says that you must make meaning with your offering. He explains that products that go deeper than entertainment and touch at purpose at the ones who are making meaning – that their existence in the life of their customer is one that helps the customer define their world.

There are two core parts here for me that I would say we could distill “making meaning” down to:

Help people understand and define their life through your offering. Deliver offerings that empower people to make sense of where they are today, and where they were yesterday.
Move beyond entertainment to purpose. Provide people with direction, help them to discover their reason for being, where they want to be tomorrow. Make your brand something that people can derive identity from.

So we’ve got yesterday and today, and tomorrow. Understanding yesterday and today, and directing tomorrow. I believe that offerings and brands that do this are meaningful to me on the most fundamental level.

For example, my church, The River, is a meaningful brand to our community. We help people through teaching resources understand where they are and where they’ve come from. And our events, our community, and our strong emphasis on life application and living life on purpose provides direction.

Labs

So how do we go to the lab and make meaning? If our two key words are understanding and directing, then we must take what our offering is and adjust it to provide these two. Some ideas:

Deliver tools that help people categorise themselves. This categorisation helps them define the world within them. Note that this isn’t boxing people in. For example, the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Markus Buckingham was meaningful to me because the large set of skills that it assigns you with via the online test helps you better understand yourself. The label increases self awareness with restricting me. Apple do this with their product types – “Are you a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro – or are you an iPod Nano?”
Deliver tools that people can build on. The idea of building platform is what Apple did with the App Store. Because of it, other developers have an income, therefore Apple is meaningful to them. Guardian also did the same with their Open API.
Deliver tools that help people define the world around them. The power of faith is that it gives people a decision making framework through which they can understand their life. Decisions are powerful and when we help people make them and define their worlds, we are meaningful to them. Consider here how powerful youth tribes are in that they provide slang that defines what is part of their tribe, and what isn’t. That slangs defines their world.
Deliver tools that help people direct their life. Or perhaps more pertinently, helps people make their next step. If your offering is making the next step for someone easier, then you matter to them. I’m doing courses with my wife on how to breastfeed, change nappies, give birth, etc, and the fact that these courses are preparing us and helping us make decisions about our life is meaningful to me. They are helping direct us.
Deliver tools that people can use to help others. The power that I’ve seen in affiliate and networking marketing programs is how they give their distributors all the tools in the world to get others on board. And guess what? That type of assistance directs people to do it more, and the original distributor draws value and direction out of this.

More?

For a more in-depth and academic approach to making meaning, read this article that I found on “developing meaningful brands“.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts: how do YOU make meaning?

Published on March 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Your Brand: Is it Making Meaning?

Most brands don’t compel people. Today we’re going to look at shift in the consumer mindset that demands that brands who want to go somewhere must compel them.

Robin Wight said in his insight at Like Minds that brands exist to make the purchasing process easier. This was an eye opener for me because I realised how it is indeed the case that a brand reduces my need for original critical thought and makes me rely on what Robert Cialdini calls fixed action patterns – fixed ways of reacting based on certain mental shortcuts.

Certainly for the majority of brands that you’ll see at a supermarket, that’s their role. But what most of the Friends reading this will be in the business of doing is moving beyond brands that merely make it easier for us to purchase or align with. We are interested in making maning, in aspiration, in purpose, in challenge. Our ideal brand is one that people derive identity from.

The brand on three levels

In an exceptional video entitled Rethinking the Idea of the Brand, Umair Haque talks about three levels of brand. (Thanks to Brian Driggs for emailing it to me.)

Functional brands seek to differentiate one product from another by targeting a particular demographic. This is what Umair describes as the base level of branding.
Aspiration brands emerged as status symbols: I don’t buy a Samsung MP3 player, I buy an iPod. This is where Umair says we’ve been for the last 3 decades.
Meaningful brands are, paraphrasing Umair, where a brand has a tangible output on the consumer’s life in terms that matter for them. He says furthermore than meaningful brands are the opposite of egocentric demand, which he calls alocentric. The general thrust is that a meaningful brand contributes to the human race, not just me as an individual.

(Side note for another discussion another day: I would understand Umair’s description of meaningful brands to be highly linked to community and we could also label them as social brands.)

Overcoming indifference with purpose

The power of the meaningful brand is that is overcomes indifference. With functional and aspiration brands saturating markets left, right and centre, a meaningful brand taps into something deeper than a brand meeting my immediate functional need.

In actual fact, I see meaningful brands as tapping into Maslow‘s top hierarchy of self-actualisation - or as I say – purpose.

Recently I was talking to someone who unites a community of people around an event. They wanted to know where to take the event, and my response was that they needed to go beyond entertainment (uniting people around a good time) and instead unite people around purpose. In other words, make meaning by helping the community make meaning.

As a church pastor, community builder, mentor and with Like Minds, I’ve always seen the direct benefit of basing the orgnisations purpose in the helping of others find their purpose.

How can you be indifferent to something that has helped further you on your quest for purpose and meaning?

Making your brand meaningful

We’ve covered enough ground for today, so tomorrow we’ll discuss just exactly how we make a brand meaningful. And what we need to discuss that is your feedback on this post now. The conversation has begun – now add your thoughts:

How do you move a brand from aspirational to meaningful?
What the meaningful brands in your life?

Announcements, Brand Experience, Community, Marketing
branding, meaning, purpose
11 comments
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Published on February 28, 2011 by Scott Gould

If it doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead

Want to learn why if you content doesn’t spread it’s dead, and how to make it spread? Read on.

You’ve heard me bang on before about spreadability vs reach. I arrogantly thought that I had come up with the concept, but I found out in the middle of last year that Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford had been using the phrase far longer than I had.

One of the things that Henry wrote about in 2009 that I was re-reading recently was the notion that If it Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead. I’d advise you take 10 minutes today to read the article. Sam on the other hand has been writing about the difference between sticky media and spreadable media. You can see some of his slides on the subject in this presentation.

Spread me or I’ll die

Certainly Henry and Sam’s thinking is high level but what they are both saying when it comes down to the basics is that if whatever you produce isn’t spreadable, it is dead. You might succeed in getting something to stick with one person, but if they don’t spread it… well.. it’s dead.

I can see a few levels of spreadability here, crossing both offline and online:

An item needs to compel people to spread it in the first place (as Scott Stratten says, people spread awesome)
An item should be simple, because complexity is hard to explain and spread
An item should provide the words for mouth if it expects word of mouth – in other words, give us the words to use when we spread your product
An item should have built-in one-click ways to spread it

So if we took a typical peice of digital content:

It should be awesome. This spans from a Facebook photo that you are tagged in (awesome because it’s personal) to a video that makes you laugh (awesome because it’s very funny) to a blog post that speaks right into a situation you are in (awesome because it’s relevant)
Simplicity for online content mostly means short and simple. But when people get offline, it seems our attention span increases, which is why we shower The King’s Speech and Black Swan with Oscars (both films, interestingly, with a simple premise)
A photo by nature will warrant a description, but a video or blog post should have a title and a description that people repeat
In built spreading means a blog post has a retweet or Facebook like. Facebook’s eco system enables one click posting of any media item to one’s newsfeed, Disqus auto posts comments to feeds, etc. (Unfortunately, Twitter still requires two clicks to share which I think is just plain idiotic)

I would say that each level trumps the level below – so whilst many people adorn their sites with share buttons, you can still see that they’ve only had 5 retweets of a particular blog post. Clearly the content wasn’t compelling, and thus despite having those share buttons, it didn’t spread and now it’s dead.

Of course, I have hundreds of these blog posts, particularly the last 6 months, that just haven’t been shared because the content was not compelling enough.

Seth Godin in Purple Cow praises Hotmail’s use of the inbuilt email signature that was at the bottom of every Hotmail email account inviting others to sign up. They certainly hit level 4 and got millions upon millions of signups because of it. But this was only because the content itself – the email – was compelling and personal in the first place. I can imagine far fewer email accounts would’ve been created of the back of a SPAM email message – which is what people perceive Hotmail to have become.

Be Compelling

Thus your ultimate goal has creators of any media is to make it compelling – compelling because it’s personal, relevant, entertaining, inspiring, and so on. If you do, people will spread it. And if you add ways to make it spreadable, people will spread it more.

Your Leading Thoughts

Your thoughts as a leader are valuable and the driving force of this blog.

Are you hitting those 4 levels with the media content that you are creating?
If we took “compelling”, what are the different parts of that, i.e. personal, relevant, entertaining, etc?

Published on February 27, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Put People in the Story

I thought this video was a really great example of promoting a product by putting people in the story.

Just a note on this: putting people in the story is more powerful than teling them the story. And telling people a story is more powerful than just showing off a logo.

More to come on this over the next week, including how I’m going to be using this principle for Like Minds.

Enjoy your Sunday,
Scott

Published on February 20, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Birthday Party

Too often we complicate community, marketing, social media, etc. So when I saw this exceptional video the other week, I had to share it with you.

Question: doesn’t this just get you right back to the basics of:

Identifying passions
Identifying influencers
Targeting online and offline to create word of mouth
Delivering an exceptional product / event
Creating multiple levels of participation within the product / event
Providing some memorabilia / takeaway to build advocacy for next time
Keeping the community alive

I think I’ve got myself a new framework right there?

So my task to you: boil this down to the simplest framework and let’s discus.

Published on January 12, 2011 by Scott Gould

The 5 Innovations of the App Store

Apple have now launched the Mac App Store – the translation of the hughely successful App Store designed to deliver apps for the iPhone and the iPad onto a full blown computer running a full blown operating system.

Whilst PC Mag has already produced a hands on walk through that I shan’t be repeating, and Techcrunch gave their treatment here, I’m going to keeping this to the innovations of the App Store and what it means for the future as opposed to today.

Let me say right off of the bat that I think this is industry changing. I wrote about the 5 Innovations of the iPad last year and predicted the arrival of the App Store on the Mac because of the ease and process of the ecosystem. I said that this new iOS ecosystem is “how computing should be” and now it’s come to fruition.

In many ways, this revolution is just a packaging of smaller innovations from Apple as well as others and a general shift towards apps – but – it is Apple who have made that all important first move. So let’s unpack them.

So here they are, tahe 5 Innovations of the App Store:

1. A truly complete ecosystem: the end of you being the family tech support

One of the benefits of Macs over PCs was that Apple could deliver a complete product – that from the hardware through to the software, it was designed and made to work harmoniously and seamlessly. But, when one moved away from iPhoto and Safari and the other preinstalled software, expertise was required that not everyone has. Files had to be downloaded, mounted and installed, accounts had to created and various payment gateways had to be navigated.

The long and short of this meant that those who are not early adopters or at least the daring early majority would not use the software that they had access to. My wife, for instance, despite being pretty savvy with her Mac just won’t go and install Chrome despite Safari’s sloth-like speed. My mother in law as well, who has mastered iPhoto, had no idea how to install a little plugin to make her photo books work better.

And even early adopters like you and I tire with having to search through Google or other sites to find new software, and then go through the rigmarole of creating an account, paying, managing updates on all the various programmes, etc.

But now consider that with the App Store, I have:

One place to find apps (and boy, is it a pleasure compared to Google or Apple’s own online listing)
One safe place to download apps
One account with which to purchase apps
One place to update apps
One place that combines with my iPhone and my iPad
One click technology that does it all (just like Amazon’s one click ordering)

And perhaps just as importantly as all the above – the App Store works in the same seamless, easy and delightful way that the iOS App Store works. Which leads to:

2. An existing ecosystem: you’re already using the App Store

I don’t know how many iPhone and iPad owners there are out there. But however many tens of millions of them that there are, they’ve all been using the App Store since they got their first device.

So perhaps that’s an incredible innovation right there: the app store isn’t really new, at least from the stand point that there’s barrier to entry. It gets all the power and novelty of new without the user support headache.

One can’t underestimate the power of this. For 7 years, since the launch of the iTunes Store, Apple has been training us for their future. So now whatever Apple releases through their ecosystem, we’ll buy it, with the strong selling point that we already know how to use it and like how it works.

3. A mirroring ecosystem: your life beyond than the cloud

Google’s Chrome netbook is one of many moves towards the cloud that sees more and more business being done exclusively online. Yet Apple have maintained a strong application focus, MobileMe being their only online software. Now, Apple and many of the apps that we use on iOS and our Macs, like Evernote or Dropbox, do use the cloud, but there’s something more than the cloud that I think the App Store is leading towards: mirroring.

Consider this rather regular scenario. You’re documents are on Google Docs, and normally you’re fine on the iPad. But for some reason the internet won’t work and bang – you’re fileless. Or how about you saved some pages in Safari for offline browsing, and when you opened them, they refreshed and you lost them. Or let’s say you DO have Google Docs – now you’re restricted because you’ve got to deal with the lame way that it works on the iPad.

The cloud is great but let’s be clear about it: it’s only for storage. What I love about Evernote is that it stores things in the cloud, but I’ve always got offline versions on my Mac and my iPad. And this is what mirroring is about.

Mirroring is having the same workflow and essential setup on your iPad as you do on your Mac.

Take for instance this screen capture of my iPad homescreen and my Mac dock – a lot of crossover here which means that my workflow can be consistent between the two.

When I talk about cloud to my wife she switches off. You know why she loves Evernote? It’s because it’s the same everywhere she uses it. And with the Mac App Store we are now moving to a place where your actual setup is the same no matter which device you are using.

Ecosystem, workflow and applications are the important words here. I am totally convinced that Apps will overtake the browser because they are purpose and custom built to the needs of the app. Take Evernote again as the example: it works so, so much better as a desktop or iPad app than the web version. And this is the case for pretty much every app. With a browser my workflow is very constricted (unless I’m a geek), but with apps I can have a real workflow. Take for instance the Mashable Mac App. My wife would chose this over a browser any day of the week (were she even just a jot interested in social media, that is.)

This is why I actually use my iPad better for organising my life because of the apps I have and the way they all interlink.

4. A win-win-win ecosystem: it benefits the developers, it benefits us, and it benefits Apple

According to Mashable, one million app downloads were made on day one of the Mac App Store. Evernote in particular have more than doubled their daily new users because of the App Store.

Developers win with the App Store. It means they are now in the easiest channel for their apps to be installed by consumers, and the same benefit that the iOS App Store has had for, let’s be honest, booming the app industry into an actual industry, will now extend that same benefit to desktop applications (or more likely, desktop versions of existing iOS apps, because people are becoming more familiar with them than desktop-only applications.)

We, the consumers, win because we get an easy to way to get apps. As in point 1 – I can’t wait to NOT have to offer as much tech support because my mother in law can now download apps herself without my help (well, once I’ve installed the update for her, that is!) I really do see this as a major step forward in making computing simple for all people.

I remember when I first moved to Mac that what marvelled me the most was the ability to just get on with my work and not have to keep maintaining my system. That same ‘I can just get on with it’ benefit is coming to the early and late majority through the App Store because now they can just get on with it.

And of course, Apple win hugely out of this arrangement – all the more reason for them to keep making things simpler and better.

5. An innovative ecosystem: it is new

This might be a bit of a no brainer, but the App Store actually is innovation. It’s taking learnings from other areas that have each been moving the baton forward and now applying them to the Mac platform. And importantly, it’s new. When I see a lot of Mac updates or Windows updates, often they are just ‘enhancements’, but this is truly an innovation. It changes the way people will consume applications.

What will the repercussions of this be? I think apps might become more disposable. At the moment, if I take time to download an app, I’ve probably done research before and then when it comes to downloading, the work that I’ve put in means I’ll give the app a good go.

But with one click downloads and a simple way to find new apps, I think they might become more disposable. Of course the upside is that these apps are more discoverable, but the emphasis now must be for them to really deliver. The apps that will do best here of course have already trained the user in using their app on the iPhone first.

Your Leading Thoughts

Pick one of my points and further it – what do you think is further down the line?
What innovations have you found that I’m missing?

Published on January 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Video: Steve Jobs on Apple and Value, in 1997

Has your brand lost power in an over-saturated market? With thanks to Trey Pennington, this short little video from Steve Jobs back in 1997 provides exceptional insight into using values in marketing to multiple the power of your brand.

I found it’s been valuable for me to watch this because in some instances when we talk so much about content online we forget about the power that design has. I’m always telling people that design matters but feel I’ve lost a bit of way, so I needed this:

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch directly on YouTube.

This video has reminded me to focus on the gut emotion that people feel when they see the logo of Like Minds or The River Church, or the feeling that they will feel when they hear those words mentioned.

Associating Value

The issue is that it’s noisy, and perhaps we are thinking, “If only I were Apple, I could have time to influence people”, but even Steve doesn’t take this for granted. Steve’s opening paragraph in particular which sets out the dilemma:

“This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is.”

So surely the process begins with asking, “What are the values that the market associates with our brand name and logo?” I wonder, how many of us know the three values that our brand must communicate? Do we have that kind of crystal clarity and diamond focus about WHY we are and WHO we are?

Likewise, do we know what we are not? When we ran the Like Minds Summit with Visit Finland last year (the tourist board of Finland), in creating their social media strategy we were given their brand book that said what Finland WAS and what Finland WASN’T. It was a great help, and certainly clarified the direction that we must not go in with reagards to a social media strategy. However it lacked the final piece:

Knowing your benefits. I mean, do we really know what value we add? What is the product that people immediately associate with us? (Apple = iPhone, Microsoft = Windows) And do we know how that offering benefits them at the lowest level. I’m not talking about some crazy concoction of “it empowers people to do this and this and realise this”, I mean the once, two word benefit that cuts through the crap. The trouble that we had with Visit Finland was finding what their primary offering is, considering New York = Empire State Building, Paris = Eiffel Tower and so on. Without knowing this, you’re stuffed.

Your Leading Thoughts

So I would say to associate value we need to know 1] what values we are, 2] what values we are not, and 3] what benefits we offer.

Can you answer all three for your brand? Or where are you stuck so that we can help?
Alternatively, can unwrap more of how you have learnt to associate value?

Brand Experience, Marketing, Social Media
apple, brand, value
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