Brand Autopsy

Over at the Fast Company blog, there is extensive coverage, 35 posts in total, of the recently held Innovative Marketing Conference. If you are more into the podcast thang, Shel Holz and Neville Hobson recorded a slew of interviews with smart marketers. Plus, there are images galore over on Flickr. So I’ll do my best to refrain from adding clutter and instead, peppering the already existing chatter with a few knowledge nuggets and observations.

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Deepak Advani is the CMO at Lenovo and he delivered the morning keynote for Day 2. (Lenovo??? That’s the Chinese-born company that purchased IBM’s PC business in December 2004.) Anyway, he gave an interesting case-study look into how Lenovo is strengthening and positioning the ThinkPad product brand to build the Lenovo master brand.

While much of the presentation seemed to be a sales pitch for Lenovo the company, Deepak talked about how the importance of first communicating the brand and then the importance of delivering upon the communicated brand. He used this super-simple chart to illustrate his thoughts:

At the end of his presentation, Deepak shared with us the viral video tactics Lenovo was doing to communicate the brand. But something didn’t smell right for me or with Rob Leavitt. Rob sums up my feelings by writing this on the FC Now Blogjam:

”One sour note, though: one of the more "clever" viral initiatives, creating an allegedly independent site with "smuggled videotapes" from the Lenovo research lab, definitely fails the smell test. It's a cool little site, and apparently generated great traffic, but this sort of manipulative technique is only negative in the longer run.”

While Lenovo’s viral video tactics smell untrue, Deepak clued us in on a very high-touch viral tactic that Levono’s employees are doing which smells very true. Many Lenovo employees will carry around a supply of red track balls. And when they see someone using a ThinkPad computer, they’ll introduce themselves and give them a new red track ball to replace their worn-out track ball. A simple, yet meaningful way to connect with customer.

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Panelists during the Models for Innovation: Creating New Products and Services that Work session talked a lot about how to gain actionable and forward-thinking insights from customers. Tony Ulwick, Strategyn CEO and biz book author, shared this statement, of which, I’m still chewing on …

”Unarticulated needs [from customers] are not existent. However, unarticulated solutions do exist.” Tony Ulwick

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The New Toolbox for Marketers session was lively and informative thanks to the super-smart panelists and to Johnnie Moore’s facilitation skills. Throughout this session, panelists and attendees discussed the changing times for marketers as either an evolution or a revolution. Diane Hessan, CEO at Communispace, managed to brilliantly sum-up the current state of marketing by saying …

”The revolution is that consumers are more in control. The evolution is how consumers will use their control.” Diane Hessan

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Lois Kelley goaded Larry Weber, long-time PR big-wig, into ranting about all things advertising/marketing related during The Changing Face of the Marketing Department session. Larry dropped lots of HMOs (hot marketing opinions) throughout his thirty-minute rant.

Some of his harshest comments were directed at Word-of-Mouth companies from BuzzMetrics to BzzAgent to the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). He chided BuzzMetrics for being the “snorkelers of the marketing ocean.” Basically, Larry believes BuzzMetrics doesn’t dive deep enough into its analysis and understanding of the WOM game. He also took swipes at BzzAgent by saying that any form of compensation automatically compromises the marketing activity. And he threw WOMMA under the WOM bus for associating itself with these businesses.

So if Larry dislikes BzzAgent’s compensation system, then why did he blurb Dave Balter’s GRAPEVINE book? On the back cover of GRAPEVINE, a book which shares word-of-mouth learnings from BzzAgent campaigns, Larry Weber praises Balter (and BzzAgent) by saying GRAPEVINE is, “A thoughtful and timely read.”

Cantankerous musings aside, Larry Weber made an astute observation on how marketers can learn a lot from gourmet chefs. Chefs must carefully select ingredients and methods to cook sensual, emotional, and experiential dishes. Marketers, too, must carefully design the strategies and select the tactics to prepare sensual, emotional, and experiential marketing programs.