Brand strategy gives McDonald's a 27 billion dollar advantage over Burger King. It's important that you understand how this happened, and how it applies to your organization.
The better you understand how the brand of your PLACE operates in the minds of your target audiences, the more effective you can be at engaging with them.
Pain, fear, anxiety … these are strong emotions that drive behavior. This is true of life. Life is also, it turns out, the very stuff of marketing, even that most rarified and peculiar kind—business-to-business marketing.
Sales has the power to change conditions, to transform a situation through the skills of the sales person. Marketing, however, generally does not possess such transformative power. Marketing needs to work with conditions as they are.
We don't always think of cities as having brands, but they certainly do. While some cultural institutions are actually strong enough to be active builders of the brands of their fair city, most are not, and most historic house museums are certainly not in such a position. But each institution's history and meaning in relationship with the existing brand of its city is a factor in its success.
Finding out what you need to know in order to have a proper marketing strategy is not easy or cheap, but I can pretty much guarantee that what's far more costly is executing a marketing plan without a strategy to guide it.
Does thinking about race make you racist? No. Does not thinking about race make you racist? Unfortunately sometimes yes. These are uncomfortable issues and hard to look squarely in the eye, but they are standing right in front of you. Time to say hello.
I loved Madeline Gins. I loved her as a friend and collaborator, as a sometimes co-conspirator. I loved her as my parent in New York. I loved her as the truly original spirit and intellectual light that she remained until early this morning.
Strategy is born from deep inspection of the question Why? Why is this goal important? If I cannot get to a good answer to why this goal makes sense in the context of my strategic vision, then the goal is suspect (or the strategy is suspect).
A stranger steps up to you on the subway and asks you to write a poem. You pause to consider the request. Then you let down your guard, detach from the rush, open your heart and oblige. In that moment you are being a true New Yorker—friendly, generous, creative, kind.
It’s not uncommon for clients to describe themselves as “the best-kept secret in town.” When they do so, a scene from Dr. Seuss’s classic, Horton Hears a Who, comes to mind—every Who in Whoville making noise to be heard out beyond their puff of dust.
If your Brand Idea is succinct, meaningful and consistently expressed, it'll be audible outside of your brand bubble, outside of Whoville.
Everyone has dreams. What you may not realize is how your dreams may be hinged to the dreams of others.
The cessation of desire leads to the cessation of suffering. —Gautama Buddha (paraphrased).
The implication of this, the second of the Four Noble Truths, is that the enlightened are generally not good marketing targets. Fortunately for most marketers this is a very small group.
Marketing strategy allows you to use pathways and footholds that apply your limited marketing budget more effectively (everyone's marketing budget is limited). Marketing strategy facilitates your ability to apply marketing money to the correct half of the Wanamaker equation—the half you are not wasting on audiences who do not value your message.
Focus group testing is appealing. I really do get it. In theory, it's a quick and efficient way to find out what you need to know about what people think or how they use your product or service, but in fact it isn't quick or efficient, and it has a dangerous inclination to lead you down false pathways.
