Stand-Up Strategy

I wrote my first book together with Antti Isokangas 11 years ago. Collaboration worked well and although that book was about digital transformation and written when MySpace was still a thing, we still get monthly (positive) messages about it.

We thought it would be nice to do something together again.

With Jani Niipola we started hosting weekly sessions about brand purpose in Clubhouse.

They were fun, thought-provoking and attended by great vocal people. After every session it felt that there is so much more to discover and discuss about the topic. Creative juices started flowing. Topics started to emerge and ideas bounced around. Things escalated from talking to writing. We started to dig deeper into this most overhyped and misunderstood term in marketing right now.

So I am very happy to announce that we have signed a publishing deal on our new book.

It will be the definitive book about brand purpose.
Simple, transparent and brutally honest.
No bullshit, jargon or boring examples.
(some dad jokes thrown in for good measure)

So essentially the Purpose book to end all the books about brand purpose.

Out early 2022.

Excited, energized and slightly scared about this.

Yesterday I was talking in Ogilvy Quench, which is sort of TedTalk or Pecha Kucha for Ogilvy fraternity. Very interesting talks on how cursing is good for you (f*ck yeah), should you pronounce “GIF” or “JIF” (the latter) or the enjoyment of cryptic crosswords (“enjoyment”).

For my talk I went to more personal route and talked about a challenge affecting more and more couples nowadays, but which is not talked enough about.

I talked about our problems in trying to have a child.

It was quite a rollercoaster for four years which shaped ours philosophy and outlook of life. The feedback after the talk was something I haven´t experienced before (mainly because majority of my talks are just marketing jargon spiced up with some lame jokes). Many people have reached out to me privately to thank and share their experiences. With this subject I am only expert of experience so my views are very subjective. This is just one story which actually in this case got happy ending. Quite often it does not (or at least the ending you envision). However I found it helpful during those times to be open and transparent of challenges we were facing and we got lots of support when we opened up.

The presentation can be seen above.

For those of you who go to the end of the presentation can also notice that I have new book coming up next year. It is guide to brand purpose but in Finnish style: simple, practical and brutally honest. Maybe some cursing as it will be good for you. I am writing it with couple of great writers (I don´t know why I am in the group, probably as a mascot).

More info on the book coming soon.

There has been a sudden surge of briefs in recent years, where one of the goals has been to increase engagement. Usually said in those exact words.

Increase engagement.

I buy the basic idea of the engagement: The more customers talk about our brand and the more they spend time with our brand, the more likely they are to spend more money to the brand.
There is usually a correlation. I stress the word usually. Other thing I stress is that you have to engage your customers (and potential prospects). If you engage random people, you will get random results.

However with fluffy terms and catchphrases such as “engagement”, “joining the conversation” and “listening consumers”, we usually miss the bigger picture.

How does this engagement actually helps our business?

Like Martin Weigel highlighted in his brilliant presentation “How not Fail” (which also inspired this post heavily), the advertising is more about mass reaction than mass participation. Even with social media in the mix, advertising is still mostly about the struggle to get enough eyeballs. Engagement has not replaced reach.

What is the biggest problem with display advertising?

Some might say that really low click-rate is the main problem. But actually the biggest problem is that the small minority who is clicking the ads is not representing the whole online population. To put it bluntly, those who click ads are those we do not really want to target.

The same problem is there with Facebook Pages. We keep our fingers crossed that our “Fans” are really our customers. The brutal truth is that many times those “Fans” are people with no higher affinity to your brand but just higher tendency to like anything that is on Facebook. Especially when there is lottery involved. Also when talking about passion brands, the engagement level in Facebook is still relatively low (around 0.64 %). And majority of the brands are not passion brands.

So am I suggesting to get rid of term engagement totally?
Yes & no.
Engagement might make business sense and has its place in brief, but then you need to consider the following three things:

1. Engagement should be tied to business goals.
What is the value of the Facebook share for us? What is the value of the positive blog comment? What is the actual next step of engagement?
This requires some serious soul searching for both client and our agency people. If we do not measure the real effects of engagement, we are walking in the dark. We need to understand the role of engagement in different parts of the consumer journey and set appropriate KPI´s for them (with connection to actual business).

2. Engagement needs to be tightly defined.
What kind of reactions do we want to achieve? What kind of reactions can we anticipate? Do we want spark controversy like GoDaddy? Do we want to educate or entertain?
Every brand wants to remain positive in online, but the things which spark actually the most engagement are negative. Like Timothy Ferriss put it: best content is threat to either behavior, belief or belongings. How many of the brands are really willing to threat anything?
Engagement never trumps relevance.

3. Engagement should be made as easy as possible.
What is the most lightweight interaction we can have? How we made reacting as easy as possible?
The average web user is too busy to comment, but he just might have time to share your content forward or press like. Majority of the people want to be passive consumers, not active participants. They want entertainment, not engagement. That is also the reason why Superbowl Ads are so popular, they are great entertainment which you consume fast and easily and then move on.

Brands seldom can dictate what is discussed at the water cooler. However it can tap to existing discussion topics and add its own twist to it (pun intended). By acting like this, you can actually become a topic at the water cooler.

Great case example of good engaging program was Oreo Daily Twist for the following reasons:

1. It tapped into existing conversations.
2. Made it easy for people to participate with micro-interactions.
3. Instead of big bang, it had lots of small starts, which had the potential to go viral.
+ Was still able to have the product in the center.

This is good example of engagement done right. We need to do more campaigns like this.