Few established organizations set aside time to come up with game-changing ideas. Most meetings are designed to produce incremental changes or strategic shifts.
Rarely do you find an established organization trying to create a future that is radically different than what exists as their current day-to-day reality.
This is why most organizations are blindsided by disruptive competition: they couldn’t see them coming because they didn’t come from the competition they were monitoring.
When we coach clients on their branding and marketing strategies, we like to marry best practices with customer data. Although some clients want us to use our research methods to do a deep dive into their customers, most companies want us to use their existing data—either collected by themselves or an outside company—as the source of customer knowledge. Over the years, I’ve noticed some common pitfalls in the ways customer insights are collected and used across companies of all types and sizes.
Here are five ways to avoid some of the most common ones.
When Aeschines spoke, they said,”How well he speaks.” But when Demosthene spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
“Damn, Daniel! Back at it again with the white Vans.”
Remember that meme? It took the internet by storm in February 2016. What started on February 15th as a video on Twitter of Josh Holtz commenting on his friend Daniel Lara’s clothing skyrocketed Josh and Daniel to recognition, landing them on Ellen DeGeneres and being crowned one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time Magazine.1
Seeing its popularity and its ability to break through the clutter, many brands started appropriating the meme: Clorox suggested to “get back at it with Clorox” and Axe attempted to link its popularity to their #findyourmagic hashtag.
As in the case with the Damn Daniel memes, companies often try to hijack memes in an effort to gain borrowed visibility. But, all too often they release their memes after popularity has peaked or they misunderstand the meme.2 3
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.Gilbert K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
As we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving next week in the US, reflecting on what we’re thankful and grateful for over the last year is the norm.
But, it’s important to regularly reflect on gratitude and thankfulness as individuals and as organizations. Too often we take employees and customers for granted. Yet, it is those employees and customers that we owe our success to.
What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same. Go through a magazine and pick out the advertisements you like best. You will probably pick those with beautiful illustrations, or clever copy. You forget to ask yourself whether your favorite advertisements would make you want to buy the product.David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
Does this sound familiar: you hire an agency for a campaign, but what you get back doesn’t fully capture your brand or it isn’t in line with what you thought you made clear during preliminary meetings? And, you end up running the ad anyway because there’s no time or budget to do anything else.
This isn’t out of the ordinary.
Many agencies try to convince their clients that they have unique expertise and creativity that the client doesn’t have access to without them.
Yet everyone should be cautious not to make something impossible that nature would not allow, unless it would be that one wanted to make a dream work, in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.Albrecht Dürer, Four Books on Proportion1
When people think about creativity, they typically think of it in terms of three Ps: Person, Problem, and Product. A person solves a problem in a new way and creates a new product.
The problem with thinking about creativity in this way is that it ignores the fourth and most important P: the Process.
When you’re creating innovations, you’re likely not going to get it exactly right the first time. You’re going to fail.
Failure’s relation to producing creative results has to do with how people perceive failure. It is related to what psychologists call goal orientation. Goal orientation operates at the individual level and is driven by both individual and environmental factors.
Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience. But if you have the same experiences as everybody else, you’re unlikely to look in a different direction.Steve Jobs in Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head
Highly creative people don’t have special abilities. But, many of them naturally do what others have to train to do.
And, training to be creative begins with constant learning.
Successful brands are many things. To appeal to customers, organizations must be credible, with actions that are in alignment with their messaging. There must be no disconnection between what a brand promises and what it delivers.
A brand must be meaningful, with specific relevance to customers’ lives. Successful brands are unique, with a distinct identity in the marketplace. Successful brands are holistic, meeting customers’ needs on multiple levels. Successful brands are sustainable, engaged in business practices they can maintain over the long term.
