To me, this is the biggest job of branding. Yet, most people who talk about branding, even those who really, really get it, hardly give managing expectations a thought. But think about it this way:

• Any effort you spend trying to sell somebody who is NOT going to buy is wasted effort…time you will NEVER get back
• Any effort you expend to draw prospects who are not qualified to buy or likely to buy is wasted marketing expense
• The most expensive part of any sale is the closure—the part that involves people’s valuable time, creativity, energy, and knowledge
• Anyone who is strong-armed into buying is not going to buy again
• Someone who shows up knowing what you’re selling, wanting what you’re selling, and ready to buy what you’re selling is going to be a low-friction, low-cost buyer…and is likely to be a repeat customer…and is likely to be a good cross-sell/up-sell prospect,

So, the biggest job of branding is to communicate, loud and clear, what the world can expect from your brand—your product, your service, your pricing, your commitment to future products, the whole nine yards. Of course, it needs to do this by consistently expressing the brand to all the senses, even as the customer experience is consistent with all the brand expressions. One of the biggest mistakes branding clients make is trying to use branding to become something they’re not.

So, say you’re a hundred-year-old company that has never changed. You know how to make people comfortable who don’t like change very much. You are not very hip—never have been. You’re sort of technologically backward. You still use cash boxes and an abacus. You still serve coffee in cups with saucers (some of which have become chipped over the years). You don’t move very fast. You get a new marketing director, and the first thing she does is declare that this company has to be branded…it has to be presented to a younger, hipper, faster-moving audience as a hip, fast, cutting-edge company…because “that’s what people are looking for today.” WRONG.

What you really need is to find a younger audience, and a broader audience, of people who are in the market for what you offer, who are intimidated by cutting-edge stuff, who aren’t terribly hip, who don’t move that fast, and who would be quite comfortable with the rate at which your 100-year-old company embraces change…AND BRAND YOUR COMPANY AUTHENTICALLY… to that market segment. Differentiate on what is in your DNA. Don’t try to look hip if you’re not. It will make you look like you’re wearing somebody else’s clothes. Instead, brand for what you are, to appeal to those who would like you if they knew you, and to set authentic expectations.

Some people like Starbucks. Some people like Dunkin’ Doughnuts. Some people want a bank that feels like coffee shop. And some people want a bank that will never be mistaken for anything but a bank. I love UMPQUA. And I think everyone can learn from UMPQUA. But not every bank customer is looking for UMPQUA.

I hadn’t either, until a couple of days ago. The thing is reaching young consumers with advertising messages is getting really difficult. They have such tight control over what they watch, read, and see. They get their news from John Stewart, via podcast. They TIVO their TV shows, and watch whenever they want, without the commercials. They listen to digital satellite radio. It’s like trying to reach somebody wearing blinders and earplugs. So what do you do?

Well, they like to play games. So you can reach them via interactive promotions in which they get to participate. We’ve been doing a some work with mixed media programs using text-message technology as an opt-in medium. They opt in via text. Then you have their text number and permission to use it. You can then start a conversation via text, which is their preferred way of communicating…sort of like database direct marketing at light speed. We’re still learning about it, so I’ll keep you posted.

All of this brings me to “bluejacking.” Seth informed me the other day that we have the capability to “bluejack.”

“Whoa,“ I said. ”Don’t know what that is but it sounds cool.”

Turns out that you can broadcast an open audio signal directly into people’s Blue Tooth receivers. Now, I definitely wouldn’t like that, but then I wouldn’t be wearing an ear piece with a flashing blue light on it. To people who do, anything that makes the light flash (thus making them look connected and busy) is great. So to a certain sub-segment of the Blue Tooth demo, you can light them up with a commercial message, and they’ll dig it, because it makes them look cool.

Marketing communication is getting scary.

Well, you have if you’re a bank marketer. UMPQUA Bank is an Oregon bank that has put the “retail” into retail banking in a big way. They call their branches “stores.” They actually sell stuff in there. They open the stores up to public meetings, serve coffee to people hanging out there, and generally position themselves as the greatest bank in the world. They’ve taken guerrilla marketing and word of mouth to the limit also. They have an ice cream truck, which they take around to the markets they serve, passing out free ice cream. Everybody loves UMPQUA. Does everybody bank there?

Well, they’ve had impressive growth over the past 15 years or so. But they’ve also had some mergers and acquisitions, which means there is growth that cannot be tracked to their extreme likability. But they seem to be the flavor of the month in bank marketing. And as long as they’re having good ideas, and as long as their good ideas of being covered in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, let’s check it out and steal with impunity.

Just got back from the ABA Marketing Conference. Here are a few quick thoughts.
• Bank marketers are under greater pressure than other types of marketers to show a Return on Investment for their marketing spend—but it’s something all marketers face.
• Even the super quantitative people who CAN track and report ROI on promotional programs can’t track ROI on brand marketing.
• Selling to the top requires a way of thinking that is unconventional for bankers.

To help sell marketing ideas to non-marketers (something we do every day in the ad biz), I suggest that you prepare for the presentation by making crib notes answering the following questions:
What difference will this idea make?
How will this idea work?
Why will people love it, and who will love it?
And why is it cool?

This covers all the thinking styles…CEO, COO/CFO, Sales and HR, and Marketing.

Bank marketing is about to get a lot more sophisticated. I was around bank marketers for four days. And I can just feel it.

We’ve been doing marketing for banks since we started, back in 1994. Before that, I worked on many, many, many banks. In fact, the very first advertising assignment I had was for Equibank, in Pittsburgh, back in the 1980s. Very retail!

Anyhow, I’ve always had this question. Maybe somebody can help me with this. It appears to me that the key to bank success is cross-sell ratio. I’ve observed that just about every bank measures this. Many complain about how theirs is too low, or boast to the boss that while theirs is lower than they’d like, it’s still higher than the national average. But, with the possible exception of the re-structuring of Wachovia’s marketing department back in the early 1990s, I’ve never really seen a bank DO anything about it. So my question for senior bank marketing people is, do you really care about cross sell? If so, why don’t you focus more resources on it?

It seems obvious that in a relationship business like banking, the longer relationships last (loyalty) and the more services/touch points each relationship represents, the more profitable the bank will be. Is that not the case? In package goods land, where I spent a good part of the formative years of my career, a high-leverage KOI (key operating indicator) like this would not only be a thing, but it would be the thing. Cross sell seems like it should be as important to banks as driving trial and accelerating usage cycles is to package goods.

I suspect the problem is that marketing was anathema to banking for so long. Then, as banks started to dabble in marketing, they never got much past the awareness (image) phase. Because there were relatively few banks in any given market, there was always lots of low-hanging fruit. Suddenly, times have changed. I envision a time, sooner rather than later, when banks will need to focus on…

• attracting the right customers, and discouraging the wrong ones (depending on the bank’s business model)
• expanding all current relationships through cross sell (grow profits from the current customer base, not from customer acquisition)
• working to identify and retain the most profitable 20-50 percent of customers (through loyalty/retention tactics).

Two out of three of these are related, and can be affected by cross selling. Which gets me back to my original question.

We’re getting ready to go to the ABA Marketing Conference. We’ve been putting materials together that we think might be of interest to bank marketers, that we think might get the attention of bank marketers, that we think might engage bank marketers in a fun way. We’ve also been talking a lot about our credentials and accomplishments, in a way that will help us present them to bankers—the old elevator speech exercise.

Bank—Marketer. Seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it. That’s what makes this such a puzzle. And such a fun challenge. We’ve worked with a lot of bank marketers. The best of them are true marketers. AND true bankers.

I confess that I’ve never been in a room with 600 bank marketers. It’ll be a blast. Us getting to know them. Them getting to know us.

Since we’re kinda shy, we’ll probably start by catching up with some of our old friends from Riverside Bank, LegacyTexas Bank, Palmetto Bank, and County Bank.

I’m preparing to do payroll. As part of my personal program of productive procrastination, I thought I would delay this task with a little blogging. Whenever it’s time for payroll, I start to think about the price “P” of the marketing mix. It’s a natural, because it is a most practical reminder of the importance of gross margin, which is a function of price.

I read a book not long ago, Pricing on Purpose, in which the author talks about methods for stratifying prices, so that you can get higher prices from customers/clients/situations in which the tasks or goods have a higher value (that would be above the equilibrium line on the supply and demand curve, which I also learned helps to define price elasticity).

To a pure market economist, a thing is worth what the present customer is willing to pay for it at the present time, under the present circumstance. To a glass half-empty type (angry marxists), this is a definition of exploitative pricing. To that guy, a thing is worth precisely the cost of producing it—Marx lived with his mum for most of his adult life. That guy doesn’t take into account all of the times when the seller has to sell, and the present buyer, at the present time, in the present circumstance is willing to pay LESS than the cost of producing the goods—look at Florida real estate.

For the most part, I think it’s sort of silly to attach moral judgments to pricing. But people do. To some people, the “correct/fair” price of a thing is exactly what the last guy paid for it. By that logic, if a guy bought a bottle of drinking water for a buck before the famine, then the seller should be obligated to sell drinking water for a buck during the famine (remember Richard Nixon’s wage-price freeze?). As a practical matter, the most common idea of correct/fair pricing is some cost-plus equation. There is some arbitrary idea of a “fair” markup (usually somewhere between 15 and 300 percent, depending on the industry), beyond which, the seller is gouging the buyer.

Sometimes I like to turn the tables. Is it fair for somebody to make $100,000 on a piece of advice or work for which he paid $5,000? That’s a 2000 percent profit!!!!! Outrageous!!!! Yet that is often the case with people who purchase professional services. Then again, if the person rendering the service only spent two hours rendering the $5,000 piece of advice, then he’s making $2,500 per hour. Outrageous!!!!!! Nobody’s worth that!!!!!

By common, cost-plus logic (complete with added morality), the guy should not have been allowed to charge more than, say, $200 (at $100 per hour); and the person using the advice should not have been able to make more than $600 (that would be a 300 percent profit). That would be $104,100 in value that never gets into the economy. With the multiplier effect, that’s like $300,000-500,000 in goods and services that never get purchased. That’s ten unemployed households created in the interest of some arbitrary idea of a “fair profit.”

Wish I could make $2,500 an hour. Some days I wish I could make $25. Gotta get some paychecks written.

That’s objective, goal, strategies, measures. It’s one of the strategic tools we use to keep from wasting resources. Sometimes we have so many forms and strategic tools, that people feel like it restricts their creativity. Of course, we need to remember that our creativity is not the point of what we do; we should be focused on enhancing our client’s business. Besides that, certain constraints actually enhance creativity (for example, check out how a creative cornerback uses the sideline).

Anyhow, the OSGM is a linear/waterfall tool that helps us put first things first. Everything is subservient to the Objective—the reason for the initiative. From the objective come the Goals—practical, measurable desired outcomes for the success of the initiative. Then come Strategies—things we’re going to do in order to achieve the goals. Then come Measures—quantifiable methods, determined in advance, to evaluate the degree to which the initiative was a success…or not.

Without objectives, you can spend a lot of time, resources, money, and brand equity doing stuff that seems cool, but that does not get you (or your client) where you want to be. Without goals, you can all agree on what your trying to achieve, but then, you can spend a lot of time, resources, money, and brand equity doing stuff that seems cool, but that does not get you (or your client) where you want to be. Without strategies, you end up trying to solve problems by throwing money at them. And, of course, if you don’t establish your measures in advance, you can roll out some arbitrary measures after the fact and use them to declare victory (if you like the initiative) or defeat (if you don’t like the initiative).

So, the OSGM process keeps it about the business, and thwarts self-indulgent creativity, the tendency always to jump on the next big thing, and the counterproductive effects of office politics. It is what it is. It is does what it does. It succeeds or fails on its own merits. And that’s that.

A friend of mine, Bill Reynolds, who is a big-time media guy, once laid out this conundrum that media guys face. The big wins often come from cutting edge ideas—using media in a way that has never been done before, using things as media that nobody ever thought of as media before, stuff like that. But the long-term win for media comes from nailing the numbers and delivering the best cost per….

Lately, we’ve been working on some edgy media tactics that have to do with email and text messages. It’s gotten me thinking about all the stuff I saw developed as cutting edge media in my day.

Fantastic finishes. Remember those. It was a 2-minute feature at the two-minute warning of NFL games. Partnership between ALCOA and NFL films. The first minute was an NFL films set-up. Then there was a 30 second ALCOA spot. And then the conclusion to the NFL short. It was invented by John Friend Waldron (my first Creative Director) and Ira Bass (the head of media for my first agency).

Checkerboards and consecutives. This was a magazine tactic that worked like Bermashave (which was a pretty cool thing in itself). Each ad played off the previous ads, for a single cumulative message.

Public restroom stalls. I always liked this one. Of course, it was better for editorial than advertising. So technically, it was a PR medium.

Island on the stock page. Back in the day, before the web, daily papers ran an entire page of stock market results. My pal, Bill Reynolds (so I’m told), came up with the idea of buying an island in the middle of that page. The stock market content guaranteed a level of interest and a demographic profile. The fact that it was an island in the middle of this gray pretty much guaranteed that we owned the page. This was for Carolina First Bank.

The other day, we went to a ball game and sat in our friend’s corporate box (we can’t afford a corporate box, so it’s good to have friends). I looked down on the crowd and saw what I think is an opportunity. Bald heads as logo placement space! For TV, you could just paint the bald heads green-screen green, and sell the space by the inning (CG a different logo every inning—seventh inning stretch is a 15% premium). Could be huge.

We’ve been working on an RFP for a college lately, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Schools are unique even among services, because of the fuzzy nature of the product. Think about it in terms of following the money.

To the prospective student, the product of an education brand is the education, the prestige, the lifelong contacts, the credential, marketability on the job market, the coolness of the experience…stuff like that. But in the complex equation of school funding, this is just one piece of the puzzle.

To the alumni, the product is a prestigious name and reputation, continually renewed programs and facilities, an insider way of talking and thinking (consider the value of being a Skull and Bones man from Yale), an assurance that there are those before you who will share your experience…and those after you who will share that experience, the opportunity to be a part of something big and important, and the chance to be immortalized through your financial support of the institution. This is a huge piece of the funding puzzle. But there’s more.

To the governing/funding entities (boards of regents, legislatures, foundations), the product is the assumption that students will be accepted, educated, and graduated according to certain standards. This serves as a sort of guarantee to prospective and current students and their families, as well as to prospective employers, colleagues, and society at large.

To employers, prospective employers, and the economic development community, the product is the graduate, with the accompanying skills and abilities. So, to one of the customers, the product is another of the customers. And vice versa.

The challenge, then, is to develop a brand that is unified, yet engaging, true, and relevant to all of these diverse target audiences. To be relevant to both parents and students is hard enough. But to carry that to government entities, nonprofit organizations, financial institutions, and diverse alumni…you can see why this is not branding for dummies.

I don’t know about you, but I love this stuff.