by Temel Aksoy
Social media is an environment where all brands must be transparent. Brands that hide information or mislead people in a setting where transparency is the rule will only hurt themselves. People don’t expect brands to be perfect. Everyone knows that brands, like people, make mistakes. What people refuse to accept and even protest is when brands deny facts known to everyone and distort the truth. People want brands to acknowledge their mistakes, apologize and outline what measures they’re taking to ensure that the situation isn’t repeated. The most important thing that cyberspace has taught everyone is that both people and brands must assume that their interlocutors are at least as smart as they are and behave accordingly. This is a world that can’t tolerate insincerity and trickery and rejects anything that’s not authentic.
Brands must provide information about themselves on the Internet and make it possible for people to reach them. In addition to having fun, people want reliable information on social media. Brands must answer the questions that people ask on social media honestly. Brands that don’t exhibit this kind of integrity should stay away from these platforms.
A successful presence on social media requires the creation of original content. If a brand wants to have an effective presence on the Internet, the only way to do this is by creating original content that people will find helpful. In addition to providing this original content, brands must be regular with their message and schedule. Brands that don’t have a stable content policy will see interest fade.
In the pre-Internet world, information flowed in a monologue-type style from a single source to the public. Today, everyone has the opportunity to comment on any topic, which has led to unprecedented transparency. It’s no longer possible for people, or organizations or governments, to hide anything (details in chapter 87).
Companies must understand the rules of social media and act accordingly. If not, they’ll damage their reputation, which is very expensive to restore.
82. How
to Do Effective Advertising
It’s easy to outline the rules of effective advertising, as I’ve done in previous chapters; implementing them, however, is very challenging. The list of considerations is quite long. For a brand to succeed with advertising, it needs to remember all of the following:
First of all, the brand must define in simple and clear terms the message it wants to communicate. No advertising agency can help a brand that doesn’t know what it wants to say.
Brands should convey a single message in each of their advertisements, because people will remember only one message—if they remember any at all. If the advertisement can communicate this single message to the audience, it has succeeded. It’s futile to expect more than this from an advertisement. Therefore, communicating more than one message in a single ad is a waste of money, not a way to save money.
It’s not enough to communicate just any kind of single message. The message must be specific, because people have trouble perceiving general and abstract concepts. Every marketing executive and every advertiser and advertising agency must understand how the human mind works and how it builds memory structures. This is a prerequisite for effective advertising (details in chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14).
An advertisement must create an emotional response in the audience (details in chapters 7, 8, and 9). It takes work for the human mind to perceive and process abstract propositions and reach conclusions. Most people would prefer to ignore a commercial rather than go to the trouble of figuring it out. For an advertisement to be effective, it must be both interesting and emotionally appealing (details in chapter 70).
Some people see an advertisement for a brand but can’t remember which brand the advertisement belongs to. To avoid this pitfall, every brand must display its name, logo, color and symbols clearly and prominently in advertisements to create an association with the brand (details in chapters 52, 53, 54, 55, and 56).
Every brand must have its own way of visual and audio communication, which it must maintain for long periods of time. Advertising that reflects the particular style of every new marketing executive and every new advertising agency prevents the formation of brand memory. Every brand that succeeds in advertising has untiringly deployed the same visual elements (logo, color, symbols, etc.) in its advertisements for many years.
Brands should advertise so they’ll be recalled when people think of the category (category entry points, or CEP). If more people remember the brand at their moment of need, those people are more likely to buy the brand (details in chapter 69).
Depending on an advertisement’s objective, a decision must be made about which channel it will use. No brand has the resources required to effectively deploy its advertising on every channel. From the start, a decision must be made about which channels to use and which ones to ignore, based on the advertising objective and budget. There is no requirement that every advertisement be shown on the Internet and social media (details in chapters 76 and 77).
It’s better to show an ad to a large number of people (to prioritize reach) than it is to show it intensively to a narrow group of people. Every ad should target all the users of the category (details in chapters 43 and 75).
Ads should utilize the same primary visuals and the same messages on each channel. If a brand can’t integrate the ads it uses on television with those it uses for newspapers, radio and outdoors, this lack of integration will reduce the ads’ effectiveness (details in chapters 73 and 76).
For an ad to be effective, it must meet a minimum budget threshold. Many ads featuring a high level of creativity are unsuccessful because the company didn’t provide an adequate budget for them. The way for a brand to stand out on a channel, each of which is crowded with hundreds of advertisements, is to set aside the budget that the ad deserves. The best approach is to allocate the advertising budget in such a way as to keep the ad running for a long time, as opposed to running in short, intense bursts (details in chapter 72).
Brands do not only advertise to introduce new products, announce discounts or boost sales. Advertising is a marketing activity that a brand is compelled to engage in simply to protect its market share. Brands must advertise, even if they have absolutely nothing new to say.
An ad’s impact is obviously directly proportional to the size of the media budget, but every advertisement is only as effective as it is creative. Creativity is a talent that’s hard to come by. The number of truly creative people in advertising in any given country is smaller than you might imagine. These people have the ability to communicate the message brands want to convey in a fresh and creative way. They understand how human memory operates, are skilled at using visuals and language and are good storytellers (details in chapter 70). They are invaluable, simply because they know how the human mind works and how brand memory is formed. Brands that leverage these skills will experience greater success.
As this list makes clear, advertising isn’t an optional element of marketing—it’s absolutely essential—but it’s also the marketing activity on which companies are most prone to wasting their precious and limited resources.
For a brand to see optimum return on its marketing investment, it’s vital that it follow the rules I have outlined above. It’s easy to tell someone what needs to be done; it’s another thing entirely to do it, especially when the task at hand is something as daunting as designing an effective long-term ad campaign. The number of brands that engage in effective marketing is quite low in any country, precisely because this is such a challenging endeavor.
CORPORATE BRANDS
83. Bra
nds Are Not Just for Customers (Consumers)
According to Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, the reason that humans rule the natural realm in spite of our physical weakness is because we’re able to form flexible cooperative relationships in large numbers.
Bees and ants also cooperate in large numbers, but, as Harari says, they’re no
t flexible and harmonious. There is no species of bee that can alter its social structure overnight in response to an opportunity or threat. Similarly, elephants, dolphins and chimpanzees may form harmonious societies, as they’re all very social, but they only do this on a small scale, because the cooperation between them depends on knowing the other intimately.
In contrast, large numbers of people who don’t know each other can still cooperate to accomplish amazing things. People with different goals and expectations, languages, religions and ethnicities can live together in harmony. This is a quality unique to humans. Only humans engage in effective cooperation by forming villages, towns, cities and nations. The carpenter, cobbler, shopkeeper and painter can live in the same locale and meet each other’s needs.
For people to be able to cooperate in large numbers, they must have a shared philosophy and act accordingly. People will get in a car with people they don’t even know to go home and to work. They use products and services produced by total strangers. Everyone lives their life buying products and services produced by others. What drives this division of labor is a shared understanding that everyone accepts, and we all comply with it.
We all accept, for example, that for one person to buy food from a market, butcher shop or grocer operated by another total stranger, both the seller and the buyer must trust in a piece of paper called “money” or a method of payment known as a credit card. As Harari notes, no monkey will give his banana to another monkey in exchange for a piece of paper. The reason a passenger will board a bus driven by someone they’ve never even met or a plane flown by a pilot they’ve never seen and feel safe on the journey is because of the assumption (acceptance) that every person will fulfill their responsibilities.
These shared assumptions are like “software” that has been loaded into the human mind. Thanks to this software, people eat food produced by total strangers or go out alone at night by themselves in a strange city and later return to their hotel in safety. No wild animal living in the jungle has this luxury.
If it weren’t for this shared philosophy (acceptance) that holds people together, social order would be impossible, and the result would be chaos. Having shared values and understanding is a prerequisite for all of the large-scale cooperative ventures humans engage in. States and societies, for example, are both human-structured organizations bound together by the values of their culture; they continue to work because they’ve enshrined their shared values into law.
Companies function similarly. Shared values and understanding are essential for the thousands or tens of thousands of employees at major corporations to cooperate effectively with colleagues with whom they have no personal relationship. This need for cooperation among strangers is why companies outline missions, visions and values and communicate them to their employees, expecting that all of their employees will conduct their business accordingly.
These statements are the shared assumptions of the corporation. The company’s mission, vision and values are the “software” required for employees to cooperate effectively and work together in harmony toward a common goal. As long as every employee is following the software’s directive, the company can work as a “single body.” This ability to act as a single body describes the ideal organization—a state that every company wants to achieve.
In well-run companies that strive for this ideal, the leaders clearly communicate the corporate mission, vision and values. They do this in an attempt to instill these values, like software, in their employees’ minds.
In some other companies, mission, vision and values aren’t communicated explicitly in writing but are conveyed anyway via tangible practices such as leadership behaviors. Everyone easily understands the company’s values—what is acceptable and what is not—from the decisions and actions of company managers, because every manager who makes a decision and implements it is clearly communicating the company values.
No matter what method is adopted, the result is that everyone who has worked at the company for a short time immediately figures out the company’s philosophy and the goals it wants to achieve; they upload—consciously or not—this “software” to their own minds and act accordingly. Employees who fail to comply can’t hang on.
The platform where a company’s mission, vision and values are described is its corporate brand. Companies communicate their philosophies to employees, dealers and suppliers, as well as to the media and the public, through their corporate brands.
Today, many companies don’t understand why it’s essential to have a mission, but they go ahead and “outline” their own mission, vision and values anyway by making a collage from what they’ve seen in other companies. They do this based on the assumption that these concepts or ideals are somehow important. They then post these statements on the company walls (websites) and check the task off of their “to-do” list. However, the employees, customers and suppliers of such companies immediately understand that these words don’t actually mean anything, because the actions of the company are so radically different from the words. No company is powerful enough to hide its lack of integrity.
A company’s mission, vision and values constitute the shared understanding that makes it possible for a large number of people to act as a single body. Companies that don’t really understand what these statements mean, but merely copy and paste them from the mission, vision and values of other companies for show, are degrading themselves.
84. Bra
nd Vision
A company’s raison d’être—in other words, its mission—is to provide benefit to people (details in chapter 1). In addition to its mission (duty), companies may have a dream or a vision.
Just as people adopt purposes or dreams for themselves such as “being a good person,” companies also tend to focus on an ideal or principle that’s so lofty it can’t be achieved, then they call this lofty aim the company vision. Even if a person will never in their lifetime see the situation where they feel they are a “good person,” they still constantly strive to attain this goal. Similarly, companies identify a vision (purpose) that they’ll never achieve and work toward this ideal.
Well-run companies view their vision (lofty aim) as a compass and try to have a positive impact on as many people as possible by following the direction provided by the compass. Companies that tap into this motivation well can keep their employees, dealers and suppliers together and direct them toward a common goal.
I think that companies are absolutely doing the right thing if they share their raison d’être (mission) and dreams (vision) with their employees and the public. But I don’t believe that having such a vision is beneficial to the growth of a brand.
In his book entitled Grow, Jim Stengel, Procter and Gamble’s former global marketing director, claims that the performance of companies with a strong brand purpose significantly exceeded market growth. As support for his claim, Stengel selected the 50 most successful companies from the Millward Brown database of 50,000 companies, in a retrospective study going back from 2011 (the year he wrote the book). Then, he claimed that these companies grew 400% more than the market average because they had a strong brand purpose.
There is nothing logical about the reasoning that Jim Stengel employs. The fact is, companies with superior performance are successful because they’ve done lots of things right, not just one thing. It’s irrational to attribute the success of these companies to an ideal (the purpose). Every company wishes that growth of 400% above the market average could be achieved by adopting a lofty brand purpose, as Jim Stengel claims. Finding success in this manner would make it so much easier to run a company. (For more, see Byron Sharp’s article “The Flawed Stengel Study of Business Growth” and Richard Shotton’s article “Truthiness in Marketing.”)
I believe that the raison d’être for every company is to benefit humans (details in chapter 1. I argue that it’s extremely beneficial for every company to specify its missio
n, vision and values and to instill this philosophy in all of its employees, suppliers and dealers. But I also believe that everyone should understand this fact: most shoppers could not care less about the company’s vision and mission. Most people who buy a product or service pay no attention to the mission or vision of the company.
The vision that a company adopts serves as a compass for its employees and suppliers, but it’s a fantasy to expand its function and claim that companies who adopt a vision will definitely be successful. Because of this interest in fantasies and myths, however, some companies have been swept up in a desire to impact the common man on the street with slogans like “feeding people’s spirit,” “creating the future together” or “working every day for a better world.”
There is nothing wrong with these sentiments, but companies should first fulfill their responsibilities to develop fair relationships with their employees and suppliers, pay their taxes and respect the environment, rather than trying to hoodwink customers with grandiose slogans.
85. Emp
loyee Brand
In the twenty-first century, a company’s success depends not on manual labor, but on employees who make contributions by their knowledge and creativity. Today, companies work hard to improve employee satisfaction, attract creative talent and encourage volunteer contributions. Therefore, the concept of “employee brand” has been an important item on company agendas in recent years. The “employee brand” concept describes an ideal situation in which employees take ownership in the company, take responsibility and initiative, make voluntary contributions to the company’s goals and advocate for the company in every situation. (Many authors prefer to use the term “employer brand,” but to be faithful to what this concept aims to describe, I prefer to use “employee brand.”)