lessons learned

Content Marketing Strategy Lessons From 3 Big Brands

Content Marketing Strategy Lessons From Three Big Brands - Fame Foundry Article

Screenshot courtesy of Fame Foundry

In spite of all the hype that surrounds content these days, many businesses still have lingering questions about exactly how to build a viable content marketing strategy.

So let’s look at how three top brands – a lifestyle products company, a professional services association and an e-commerce behemoth – are investing in content to build relationships with customers and drive sales.

Read the full article.

Branding Lessons From the BlackBerry 10 Launch

I have a confession to make. I’ve never been a BlackBerry user and have only watched the brand’s rise and fall from a nonchalant distance. In fact, as a creative professional weaned on mother’s Mac, I’m kind of an Apple fanboy. Yet, as I watched the BlackBerry 10 launch Wednesday, I was emotionally engaged with the BlackBerry brand for the first time ever.

Initially, those feelings were stomach-knotting frustration as I watched the familiar choreography of Apple product launches played out before my eyes but without the finesse—like a fine musical instrument just slightly out of tune. Thorsten Heins is no Steve Jobs, and several times he had to coax awkward applause out of the audience. Still, the event placed solidly (for me) in the middle ground between alluring Apple and geeky Google.

The hardware felt like a big “me too” in terms of, well, just about everything except the physical keyboard, which was more of a “hi, it’s me again.”

BlackBerry Z10 & Q10

Photos courtesy of BlackBerry

But then came the software segment and my marketing-nerd neurons glowed brightly with each swipe of the interface and its corresponding message. I was elated to find that RIM didn’t throw away its identity as a connectivity tool—one so beloved by its passionate users it earned the monicker “CrackBerry.” What I saw was not a desperate attempt to be like the new cool kids. Instead, RIM has not only embraced its core identity but poured more into it. Heins has stepped out in front, owning up to the mistakes, and leading an evolution of the brand into a modern connectivity center for people on the move. Dropping the RIM monicker for BlackBerry drives home this point. There’s no denying that BlackBerry understands its place in the mobile cosmos and is on a mission to reclaim it’s role as an addictive connectivity device.

Beyond mere posturing, the commitment shows up in the interface design, with instant access to email, messages, social and more built right into the core OS functionality. All your personal communication channels are a thumb-slide away from any screen or app you’re immersed in (That is, if my impressions are correct. Admittedly, this non-credentialed blogger hasn’t had the privilege of handling it.) The ability to navigate between active apps is nothing new, but BlackBerry seems to have refined the experience so that it feels seamless, adeptly calling it “Flow.” I admit to having “grass-is-greener” feelings when I now use my iPhone’s clunky app transition approach, which hasn’t changed in several generations of iOS.

But this is not a technical review, so to sum up, it seems BlackBerry’s leaders have finally taken a long look back at the brand’s heritage and a wide look around our hyper-connected world and decided to rebuild the sweet spot of BlackBerry business. Let’s hope it’s not too late. For now, Heins is wisely hedging by focussing on reinvigorating the current customer base. But it’s clear by the total product redesign and brand rejuvenation that BlackBerry is on a mission own again the business connectivity space.

Whether consumers buy it only time will tell. But I applaud BlackBerry so far and thank them for inspiring this marketer. Here’s a few insights I took away from the launch:

1. Own your mistakes.

“Fake it till you make it” is not a marketing panacea. When we fail our customers, taking responsibility goes a long way toward rebuilding trust. In today’s world of consumers playing product hopscotch, it’s important to give fans a reason to “Don’t stop believin’!”

2. Rediscover your soul.

If you’re brand has been watered down by unfettered growth or has suffered from a failure to evolve, it’s always good to do some corporate soul searching and get back to the core business areas and ideals that brought your original success.

3. Never forget it’s not about you.

Marketing pros often pontificate that your brand is how customers think of you, not how you think of yourself. For a while, BlackBerry leaders lost their way in aligning products with the needs of customers. The new messaging is a hyper-correction of that course, and that alignment is now the North Star for the brand.

4. Say something bold but believable. (Deliver hope.)

As Nancy Duarte excellently in her book Resonate, great influencers share the ability to shift our vision from current challenges to a better tomorrow. Always give customers something to look forward to, to be genuinely excited about, to hope for.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte on Vimeo.

RIM set the “we’re rebuilding for a better tomorrow” tone early in the launch by announcing the name change to BlackBerry up front. Updating the ticker symbol (“BBRY” on the Nasdaq and “BB” in Toronto) was the exclamation point on that statement, proverbially putting the money where their mouth is.

The press may be finished talking about the launch (it’s already dropped from the top spots on the tech blogs I’ve checked), but I believe there’s more to be heard out of BlackBerry. I look forward to listening and learning from their successes or mistakes.

If you took some lesson away from the BlackBerry 10 launch, please share it below.

 

Making Marketing Multi-Purpose: A Lesson in Efficiency From Survivalists

I love survival skills TV shows—as I believe many other 30-something white american males do, judging by the unending YouTube videos of caucasian arms wearing paracord bracelets and detailing the contents of “bug-out bags.” For the uninitiated, here’s a sampling.

On several episodes of my favorite show, Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival, co-host and survival skills instructor Dave Canterbury has emphasized that if a piece of gear cannot be used for at least three things, he doesn’t waste energy carrying it. I tucked this nugget of wisdom into my mind’s survival file for later use during the apocalypse.  I didn’t realize I’d recall it while thinking about marketing.

Survival Marketing

I was brainstorming recently about the marketing challenges entrepreneurs and small businesses face, trying to find fodder for a new batch of Fame Foundry podcasts. As I often do, I looked at my own experiences as a small business marketer and realized that my greatest challenge is usually how to get more marketing done with limited resources.

I wrote “efficiencies” on my dry-erase board and soon remembered Dave’s sage advice. Both the survivor and the small business marketer have in common the need for efficiency. For every unit of effort exerted, you want to maximize the benefits toward achieving your objective, be it rescue or revenue.

Multi-Purpose Tools

For Dave, being multi-purpose focused means prioritizing items like rope, which can be used for making shelters, making snares or making a million other things that could help keep him alive in the bush.

For the marketer with limited time, staff and/or money, it means constantly thinking about how resources like content and collateral can be reused, repackaged or repurposed.

For example, writing this post required time (the most valuable asset anyone has), concept exploration, writing, editing and fine-tuning things like keywords, headers and links. That’s a good bit of effort for a reasonably short post. To maximize the impact of this work, I’ll very likely write a podcast episode focused on the core concept of marketing efficiency. The wording will be different, of course, as will the style, so there is some additional effort required. But the concept is ready and the thoughts have been thunk. (I know thunk is not a real word.) And that is a big energy savings.

Future-Purposed 

On Dual Survival, when Dave and his partner Cody Lundin find trash or other “resources” in the wilderness, they often hang on to items with a future use in mind, like finding a plastic bag and saving it for a canteen when they find water later.

In like fashion, I’ll probably also tuck away this idea in an Evernote notebook dedicated to ebook writing. When the time comes to create my magnum opus of marketing, this remnant will be ready for a new life with other leftover bits like it.