The Business Of Looking Good (For Two!)

Does my bump look big in this? 

As any expectant mother will tell you, it isn't always easy looking good when you are dressing for two. With more on their minds than trawling the shops searching for suitable clothes to wear, it can be a challenge for any expectant mum to find the right outfit for that special occasion.

The Personal Touch

Our featured business this week is StyleMama, Ireland's latest maternity boudoir. Like many great businesses, StyleMama was born when Gillian Ryan, herself an expectant mother, saw a gap in the market for maternity clothes for hire. Gillian's requirements as a mum-to-be are shared by expectant mothers across the country, and she has built a thriving consultancy with customers travelling from across the country for personalised sessions in her studio.

It's All In The Fit

The business model Gillian uses is a perfect fit for a one-woman operation but if she is looking to grow the business and build a successful brand, she needs to extend the consultancy model to include an on-line experience that mimics the one-to-one in-studio experience. 

An example of this would be to add a  'chat' function to the website where customers could receive Gillian's expert advice without having to visit the showrooms in person.

Over To You

How do you suggest Gillian might better reflect the consultancy experience through her website? Listen back to the show on the Kickstart Your Business blog and let us know what you think. 

We'd love to hear from you.

When The Brand Is Quicker Than The Eye

Roll up, roll up, snake-oil for sale!

A study conducted as far back as 1963 seems to confirm the popular view that much of the business of branding is about sleight of hand.

Each day, the good people at Delancey Place send on what they describe as 'eclectic little excerpts' from various books and articles on almost any subject under the sun.

A recent excerpt, which was taken from Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, cites how expectations seem to colour our taste:

"In 1963, three researchers secretly added a bit of red food color to a white wine to give it the blush of a rose. Then they asked a group of experts to rate its sweetness in comparison with the untinted wine. The experts perceived the fake rose as sweeter than the white, according to their expectation.

Another group of researchers gave a group of oenology students two wine samples. Both samples contained the same white wine, but to one was added a tasteless grape anthocyanin dye that made it appear to be red wine. The students also perceived differences between the red and white corresponding to their expectations.

And in a 2008 study a group of volunteers asked to rate five wines rated a bottle labeled $90 higher than another bottle labeled $10, even though the sneaky researchers had filled both bottles with the same wine...

Proof, if proof were needed, that branding is just one more gimmick in the bag of the snake-oil salesman.

But, like any instrument, branding can be used to very different ends: Misdirection in the case of the fake label but help and guidance in many others.

Once, at a conference, I chatted with someone who played a role in the recruitment and training of staff for Spar convenience stores here in Ireland. Now, I've never been a fan of the Spar signage. Even as a child I found it ugly and crude. However, my colleague told me about the care that Spar take in choosing people to work in their shops; how they recruit young people, who are cheerful and friendly, live locally and are at school or college. He insisted that these criteria meant that a Spar shop assistant offered a particular brand of helpfulness.

Until that time, I had passed by our local Spar shop with my nose in the air, determined not to darken the door of a monument to bad taste. However, shortly after I met this brand champion, I found myself entering the local Spar to make a small purchase. To my surprise, I discovered the youngster behind the counter to be as friendly and obliging as I'd been told. For the first time, I was able to look beyond the crude exterior and see what was behind it. I've since become a regular visitor to Spar.

Misdirection on the one hand, help and guidance on the other.

In the right hands, the brand plays its role in making the business of selection much easier for the customer. When handled clumsily or dishonestly, it can deceive and mislead.

The real power of branding is apparent when it's used well: for both buyer and seller life is simpler, as the brand skilfully directs customers to where they can get what they want, when they want it and at a price they're happy to pay.

I guess it's time for me to get up onto my soapbox...

Roll up, roll up, brand-direction for sale!

Walk This Way

I took a walk on the wild side during a visit to my client, Temple Country Retreat & Spa.

Each morning, Temple's Declan Fagan leads a short stroll around the working farm, which is very popular with guests. During the walk, he likes to point out things of interest and remind us to notice what's going on around us - from the steaming pats and flattened grass where the cattle lay down for the night to the sudden flash of colour on the ivy leaves as they catch the sun. He gently encourages us to walk more naturally and return to the easy roll from the heel striking the ground through the ball of the foot to the toe and on again.

Once we're walking again with our eyes at the natural level of the horizon and our shoulders loose and easy (rather than in the hunched-up, head-down style that we city-dwellers seem to prefer), he calls our attention to what's beneath our feet and invites us to feel the difference between walking over mud, loose gravel or fallen leaves.

As he described on Thursday how the feet gather information and the body makes adjustments as it receives the new intelligence: a tweak here, a nudge there; it struck me that we need to find a way for our brand to walk more naturally in much the same way. We often walk rough-shod over the ground in our business, and are so intent on getting to where we're going that we're unable to meet the eyes of our customers or pick up on the market intelligence available to us as we cross the terrain. To our unthinking feet, mud, loose gravel and fallen leaves are all the same, and we march on without a thought for what's going on with our customer.

I like Declan's observation that the body knows what to do based on what it senses and his suggestion that a more natural walking-style puts us back in touch with the raw intelligence that can guide our actions. As brand-owners, we can ask what we need to do to feel the ground beneath our feet and walk again with the rolling gait of the countryman - even as we make our way through the crush of the marketplace.

No Branding Required

Recently, a colleague in my business network (let’s call him Mike) came to me and suggested that as my regular pitch to the group made sense, he would like to hire us to work with him to build his brand. I was delighted. Like anyone else, I love a new piece of business and the opportunity to work with a colleague that I greatly admire was hugely appealing.

But as we teased out his reasons for branding, it quickly became apparent that he had no real need of our services. Mike has built a successful business around his very personal delivery of a professional service. For his customers, Mike is the brand. They love the way he does business. They trust his personal touch, his obvious commitment and attention to detail. They feel safe with him, which is terribly important when it comes to the nature of his work. Given the choice, they would deal with nobody else.

For many business owners, this state of affairs would leave them feeling trapped and unable to grow the business. But it suits Mike down to the ground. He likes working alone. He wants to grow his business piece by piece and has no wish to hire someone else to work alongside him. He has secured the financial future of his family by taking out insurance against serious illness or death. He is largely irreplaceable but that seems to work for him.

I quietly wondered whether his being irreplaceable worked as well for his customers as it does for Mike (what if he falls under a bus and they are obliged to deal with someone else?). He agreed that, as extra insurance, he would identify a colleague who might make a very good ‘second-best’ and could pick up the pieces in his absence, if the unthinkable happened.

Apart from that provision, we agreed that it made no sense for Mike to go to further trouble and expense to build his brand. The truth is, he would get little return on his outlay. It would probably amount to a vanity project.

There’s little point in investing in branding services if yours is a business best delivered by you personally and you have no wish to grow beyond that. For your customer, you are the brand and it is likely that you, and you alone, know best how to deliver it.

Bear Essentials

Whilst the new ad campaign which has Paddington Bear giving Marmite a try (instead of his usual Marmalade) is both charming and, I suspect, effective, I must confess to having mixed feelings about the rewriting of classic children's stories to suit the commercial agenda of one product or another.

Conscious that there is something a touch fuddy-duddy in my reaction, I just about resist throwing up my hands with the cry 'Is nothing sacred?'. I know we can sometimes be a little precious about seeing our favourite performers, teams or even theatres fall into the hands of advertisers (witness the current griping about the naming rights of Lansdowne Road although the Irish rugby team are doing their bit to make sure that this isn't the only thing to disappoint the loyal rugby fan right now). But am I alone in finding that there's something just a little disturbing in seeing classic storylines make way to opportunities for product placement in much the same way as many of the new stories being told in film and games?

Although I'm not a big fan of the Paddington Bear stories myself, I do know that I would be troubled to read that the hero of 'I Am David', my own favourite children's book, was to make his epic journey across Europe to rediscover the taste of true butter rather than be reunited with the mother he hasn't seen since infancy. And I would imagine that there would be uproar at Hogwarts if Harry were to endorse a 'muggle' brand in the course of one of his adventures.

Let's stop the spread. I'm not sure where to draw the line but I am inclined to issue a stern 'hands off' to advertisers everywhere when it comes to the childhood stories that we take with us into our adult lives as part of who we are and how we make sense of the world. Let Paddington Bear stick to his marmalade and let the makers of marmite peddle their spread elsewhere.

Simply The Beast

I've been meaning to include these very simple but eye-catching stencils that Brooklyn Zoo used to promote their attraction.

Animal shapes are so familiar to us from childhood and this creative placing of stencils over various backgrounds - trees, fences, paint-splattered walls - around the city lends them the perfect touch of the exotic. Just like the animals themselves.

What a great way to tap into something so ingrained in our experience and have us look at it in a whole new way.

Backchat Or Sweet-Talk?

'Our waitresses pinch back!'

Last week, I visited local retro diner Eddie Rocket's with my family and was reminded how much I enjoy their particular sassy brand of communication, especially the signage. Dotted around the walls are notices telling diners: 'Be nice, you might have to work here someday', 'In case of fire, pay the bill and get the h*@% out of here' and 'Be patient, gourmet food takes longer'.

You could argue that, in the words of the old wisecrack, 'I didn't come here to be insulted!' ('No? So where do you usually go?') but there is something charming in the irreverence of the one-liners that proves highly popular, not only with our family but with the dozens of teenagers and other families around us that help make Eddie's one of Ireland's most successful franchises.

So why do we go there to be insulted? I've long believed that the popular notion of the customer as king is flawed as it suggests a subservient relationship between seller and buyer. Instead, I think it's much more important to ask what role the customer (or situation) demands of the seller and to play that to the utmost. At Eddie's, it's clear that we like it when the seller is sharp rather than honey-tongued.

In part, it's because it matches our own sense of the type of service likely to be found in a classic American diner of the '50's. It's also charming when a brand doesn't take itself or its customer too seriously. Eddie Rocket's is quick to remind us that it's only American-style food after all; but with the assurance that what it does, it does very well.

Here, the customer isn't always right. Instead, Eddie's works hard on building rapport rather than old-fashioned respect and allows its customers to kick back and enjoy hospitality diner-style. And judging from the happy buzz during our recent visit, it's apparent that Eddie's does offer a cure for the summertime blues.

Brands Across The Water

In a recent Business Common Sense, Denny Hatch suggests that tourist boards should partner with overseas museums to promote tourism to their country. He thinks they should choose museums exhibiting related art or artifacts on the basis that "People that go to museums love art, have spare time and often plenty of spare cash. Many of them travel incessantly and are constantly on the prowl for ideas of new places to visit."

This is something I saw our own development agencies use to great effect in the '80's and '90's when Ireland was an economic backwater struggling to raise its profile. I'm not sure whether it was policy or not as arrangements seemed quite informal but it wasn't uncommon at the time to attend an Irish trade or enterprise event that had more going on from a cultural point of view than any other. Against a backdrop of Irish nostalgia for the 'old country', those first handshakes and 'what-are-you-havings?' set the scene for much of what followed.

Mind you, that same informality played sweetly to the brand Ireland values that our salesmen were plugging across the world. Once the link had been made, they could get down to the horse-trading of inward investment, joint venture or whatever.

I believe we often underestimate the social side of a brand when we go to market and I see those same salesmen as bold pioneers who played a much greater part in our economic success than we give them credit for. I think there's a lesson there for smaller brands who want to extend into new territories. A social route (which often crosses nicely with a sporting or cultural exchange) allows us to make much greater inroads than a more direct approach.

Sticks & Stones

I see that Mentos are offering visitors to their site the services of Trevor, your own Mentos Intern who you can have carry out a range of tasks for you including: 'call you in sick to work, prank call your friends for you and tell you how wonderful you are'.

Now, I don't want to seem too po-faced but I can't help but see this tendancy for companies to jump on a more sophisticated version of the British public-school brandwagon (with its glorious 'fagging' tradition) as a bad thing for both customer and brand-owner. This is not too far away from the nasty strain of bullying that has crept into parts of the online space and I wonder whether it's because that particular playground is as poorly supervised and regulated as the traditional public-school quad?

Nor is it clear to me how this particular venture fits the Mentos brand positioning (although I appreciate that the business may be 'minting' it in terms of visitors, brand awareness and confectionary sales). Tango went a similar route with its 'happy slapping' a few years ago and suffered when the phenomenon made its way into the real world.

I don't like bullies and it seems to me that too many brands go for the cheap thrill of tormenting the smaller ones in a bid to win some easy popularity.

What do you think? Am I taking some harmless fun a little too seriously or will this "all end in tears?"

Play It Again, Sam

I caught the tail-end of the game between local Gaelic Football rivals Dublin and Meath on Sunday and rushed to read all about it in the papers on the following day. Now, this isn't the first time I've caught myself doing this. What is it about reviews that has us turning the pages to see what someone else has to say about our experience?

Earlier today in a meeting with a client who's building a hotel here in Dublin, I was reminded of this and wondered again about the power of review. And not just the review of an expert but any skilful retelling by another of something I've just seen, heard or felt for myself. I think that this replay effect can be used very successfully in building up the story of a new brand, especially in prompting word-of-mouth to move at a quicker rate than usual.

A new business can't always afford to wait for things to move at normal pace and retelling the experience for a happy customer is likely to prompt them to revisit it for themselves as well as giving them something to say if they're inclined to tell someone else about it.

As a brand-owner, you might ask yourself what opportunities there are to review your own brand experiences and whether this is something you might use to good effect in driving word-of-mouth.

*Note for our overseas readers: Irish Gaelic Football teams play to win the All Ireland Championship and receive the Sam Maguire Cup, affectionately known as Sam.

Come Out To Play

Game on?

Over the past few weeks, Contagious Magazine has reported on a couple of highly successful promotions by Orange and Red Bull in the UK that invite the audience to come out and play.

Whilst games of one kind or another have always been used by brand-builders to raise awareness and have customers engage with the brand, these particular games seem to me to tap into something elemental in the human spirit. Orange are offering tickets to the Glastonbury festival for those who predict where in the field a real-life bull will be on a particular day at a particular time - a sort of Spot-The-Bull update on the once-popular print game that's now played courtesy of video cameras and GPS.

Meanwhile, Red Bull have taken up the invitation of Facebook (what Contagious call "the clean and intuitive alternative to MySpace") to offer their variation on the traditional game of Rock Paper Scissors which they call Roshambull.

Why do these games in particular strike me? In large part because I can see our long-dead ancestors playing something similar around a campfire to while away the time whilst dinner was cooking: 'I can foretell from which part of the forest the hound will come' or 'Bet my shadow-animal will best yours'.

There is something about play that we sometimes ignore, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) space where we mistakenly believe it has no place. The play that happens between a customer and the brand makes for a powerful connection that seems to operate at a primitive level and reaches deep to lean on what market research guru Clotaire Rapaille refers to as the "reptilian hot buttons", the part of us before the contrived and intellectual, the place from where our decision-making comes.

Rapaille argues that as a researcher he looks beyond the intellectual and the emotional to find that place where it all began for us, and suggests that brands that speak to the instincts of that place are the most effective.

We have seen something similar (although I don't like to see it in terms of 'reptilian hot buttons') through our own Smile Conference where we make much play on the word 'smile' and where delegates respond to our feedback form 'Smile or Frowns' with word-play, pictures and smilies of their own to let us know whether they found the event useful or not. This playfulness seems to allow for a frank and affectionate exchange that I don't believe would be possible if we were to take a more sensible, 'businesslike' approach.

What do you think? Which B2B brands do you know that successfully invite the customer to come out to play?

White Smoke & Mirrors

A recent mail from Brandchannel included news on a charity, Habitat For Humanity, and a piece on some of the branding issues facing private military firms (old-fashioned mercenaries to you and me).

I'm not sure whether the juxtaposition was deliberate or not but it reminded me of one of the things I almost always have to address with a new client: the notion that branding is somehow a cloak and dagger activity, some machiavellian art practised behind smoke and mirrors.

Whilst it robs my craft of some of its mystique, I'm quick to point out that branding is a tool like any other in business and one that can be put to work selling deep-fried food to overweight children just as readily as it can work on behalf of a homeless project. In the right, or the wrong hands, it's a powerful tool for positioning and for change and whilst I'm against the NRA on issues of gun-control, I do believe that brands are a generally a good thing (they make our choices simpler for one thing) and that every business-owner should have one.

But then, you'd expect me to say that!

Love's First Kiss

I met with new colleague John Austin of eBrand for a coffee during the week and we got talking about the importance of that first meeting with a prospective client or supplier. We agreed that too often this first encounter sets the stage for an unequal relationship that doesn't do either partner any good in the longterm.

If the client sits back with arms folded and says, 'Impress me!', the chances are that what follows will take the form of a beauty parade and a relationship in which the one finds it difficult to unfold those arms and the other struggles to come down off the catwalk. In the same way, if the supplier sets out to seduce the client into a relationship, that liaison is always likely to have undertones of insincerity and manipulation.

It always seems to me that the 'first date' in any relationship is hugely important and that the savvy buyer and seller should set out to make it a meeting of equals. The smart buyer in particular should look carefully at the overtures being made by the brand seller and ask, 'Is this the type of relationship I'm after?'. A seller who dangles glittering incentives in front of me is always likely to take me for a dupe whilst one who seeks to lure me from another relationship that works is unlikely to have my best interests at heart.

In the same way, the buyer who flits from one brand to the next according to this introductory offer or that giveaway is not likely to stop with me for long.

So whether we are buyers or sellers, we should ensure that we get to behave on our 'first date' as we'd like to go on and that we set the stage well for the relationship that might follow.

Are You Looking At Me?

A reminder that our attention is fast-becoming the most valuable asset of all comes courtesy of Contagious News that Blyk , the 'pan-European free mobile operator for young people, funded by advertising' has just announced collaborations with some of the world's best-known brands, including Buena Vista, Coca Cola and L'Oreal Paris.

If at first glance, this appears to have nothing to do with smaller brands, particularly those of SMEs, I suggest you look again. Most small businesses have a strong relationship with their customers and an ability to ask for attention thanks to the trust they've built up. I've seen this at work in our own company, Islandbridge, where customers often ask for introductions to our other customers or events.

Perhaps it's time we considered how this attention might translate into opportunities for us and our customers to offer the commodity part of our proposition for free whilst charging (others!) for the privilege of talking to us and the group we have gathered around our brand.

On the other hand, does anyone else share my own misgivings that this simply catapults us into a Minority Report-type world where every visible surface is given over to advertising of one kind or another and every relationship is up for hire?

(Notwithstanding the claims of Antti Öhrling, one of the masterminds behind Blyk that, "The fundamental principle is that advertising never interferes with primary function of the phone. If you do it in the right way, it's not just how much [advertising] can you tolerate—it's something people find useful and fun.")

Sometimes, Three's A Crowd

Denny Hatch, in his latest Business Common Sense argues that marketeers should steer clear of humour in pitching to customers ("with very few exceptions, humour in advertising doesn't work").

His argument is that it's not enough to draw attention to your offer, it's got to be the right type of attention. I wonder whether the same thinking mightn't extend to much of the excitement about numbers that currently dominates discussions about the internet. There's no doubt that many websites and services are drawing a crowd - but is it the right crowd, in the right frame of mind to listen to your pitch?

As always, it comes down to the quality of the relationship that your customer is looking for. It's no good playing to the crowd when your customer is looking for something a little more discreet. Check that the numbers add up before rushing into a stadium when a more personal approach is what's required.