How to get buy-in for important marketing and branding initiatives / Quickserve breakfast is heating up / Top trends that will change business / Expand your repertoire with a corporate blog

HOW TO GET BUY-IN FOR IMPORTANT MARKETING AND BRANDING INITIATIVES
What’s the best way to get decision makers all on the same page when important marketing and communications outcomes are at stake? What can you do when design and branding decisions need to be made by a group—especially by a group of people who don’t necessarily value the creative process?

It’s important to help people make connections.

A method is needed to help make the connection between the unspoken, emotional aspects of people’s feelings and perceptions about a company, product, or service, and the visual representation of it—a tricky thing to understand for many people.

The problem
Often, brands, logos, and graphics are created by outside marketing firms without executive level input, and are based on a designer’s interpretation of communication value. There is often a substantial gap between the designer’s natural understanding of the creative process and the lack of this understanding on the part of the individuals in the company who are purchasing the creative solution. This gap causes company management to relate to the visual representations on the surface, out of context, and with knee-jerk reactions—even if they understand the objectives used by the designer to develop the solution. In the absence of a process to bridge this gap, personal likes and dislikes are used to evaluate the appropriateness of the creative solution, as individuals have little else on which to base their reactions. When you’ve got a group of decision makers to satisfy, this is bad news. As everyone’s personal likes and dislikes are going to be different, coming to agreement can be very difficult.

The solution
The solution is to bring the people responsible for the approval and ultimate use of the visual solution into the creative process at the beginning and have them involved in the creative development. With the group’s participation, everyone’s input is prioritized and put into context, and relationships between graphic elements and their purpose can be explored. This process helps to bridge the communication gap and match specific objectives with visual interpretation and/or wording in a way that makes use of each person’s valuable insight about the organization, its products and/or services, and its objectives for the future. Understanding, agreement, and ownership are all outcomes of this method.

The process is relatively simple. An initial session can take between two and three hours to complete, depending on the amount of discussion that is a byproduct of the session.

When to use it
Obviously, you wouldn’t use this process for every marketing or communication project that comes across your desk. But for the larger ones, like branding your organization or major marketing campaigns, the addition of a process like this can save time and large amounts of resources in the long run, allowing you to avoid multiple expensive false starts.

How it works
There are three main parts of the session: 1.) determining where everyone stands at the start, in terms of understanding the objective and why it’s being undertaken, 2.) identifying everyone’s current perceptions regarding the objective, and 3.) identifying where the group wants to end up in terms of future perceptions for the initiative. After all of these elements are identified through exercises, discussion uncovers similarities and direction that can be agreed upon. These will be the basis for the creative direction.

The details
2 to 3-hour working session
Attended by everyone who has a voice in the outcome
No more than 25, no less than 4 attendees

Baseline Brainstorming -- the group will participate in a working session to identify individual understanding of the objectives.

Current and Desired Perceptions -- this two-part exercise helps to identify current and desired future perceptions of the initiative.

Emotional Tests -- The group “reacts” to common graphic and communication elements as they relate to previously defined desired future perceptions. The group rates and categorizes communication elements for appropriateness for the initiative.

Summary and Review
Progress and direction are reviewed
Next steps defined

Results Report and Creative Development
Information gathered at this session is condensed and organized into a report for team approval of direction.
After approval of results report, creative conceptualization is begun by design team.

Group Assessment
Group critiques creative solutions
Direction approved, or
Feedback is given for further development

When embarking on major marketing or branding campaigns, organizations that take the time to lay the groundwork with this critical process will pave the way for group buy-in, saving time and large amounts of resources. It’s all about helping people make connections.

Learn more about strategic branding, brand process, and brand case studies at www.hoeck.net.

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QUICKSERVE BREAKFAST IS HEATING UP
The breakfast business is a big one, valued as high as $34 billion. In the fight for an increased share of this market, McDonald's and Burger King have of late turned to one of the biggest lures in the quickserve business -- cheaper food.

McDonald's has expanded its "Dollar Menu" concept to its breakfast foods in select trial markets. Part of this push are commercials featuring blenders and coffee pots being recycled as obsolete, thanks to the cheaper availability of McDonald's breakfast.

The $1 or less menu included the sausage biscuit, chicken biscuit, sausage burrito, fruit and yogurt parfait, two hash browns, 16-oz. soda, and 12-oz. coffee. And in Romeoville, Ill., just outside of Chicago, the chain is test-marketing a 24-hour breakfast menu.

Burger King is testing a morning value menu in New York. When it rolls the promotion out nationwide, there will be six items for a dollar or less and a few other items available for $1.39 or less. Featured on the menu will be the Hamlette sandwich, sausage biscuit, and others.

Given the hot breakfast market, it's not surprising that Taco Bell and Wendy's are also planning to get into the game. The last member of the top five quickserve chains -- Subway -- is still indecisive about breakfast, with a value menu or otherwise.

Be sure to check out past issues of Marketing Tips for more information about breakfast trends and the opposite of quickserve, "slow food".

Source: Advertising Age

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TOP TRENDS THAT WILL CHANGE BUSINESS
Workforce.com has its list of 25 trends that will change the way you do business in the coming years, but 25 are too many to explore here. We'll offer five of the highlights.

1. Better email
While email has become the dominant mode of communication in the business world, it is far from perfect. Future generations of email will have improved spam filtering, automatic translation, and increased integration -- allowing for a one-stop-shop for email, voice mail, fax, and everything else.

2. Europe becomes the standard
With increased communication between European and American counterparts in multinational companies, it's predicted that European benefits -- more email privacy, liberal vacation policies, and other conventions -- will be coveted by those on the U.S. side. Look for employees and labor organizations to push to adopt the European perks.

3. Working from home
The Sulzer Infrastructure Services firm in London reports that by 2010, more than half of American workers will spend more than two days a week working outside the office. In 1990, only about 4 million people "teleworked" one or more days a week, but it was up to 28 million just a few years ago, and rising. Broadband internet access has become faster, cheaper, and more reliable, making it more and more feasible to work away from the office.

4. Labor shortage
As more baby boomers retire and business continues to grow, many authorities predict a serious labor shortage in the coming years. Forecasts say that by 2010, there will be more jobs than employees to fill them, eventually culminating in a shortage of about 10 million workers.

5. Outsourcing
The market for outsourced services continues to grow and grow. Look for more and more companies to send their transactional processes (like payroll) to outsourcing providers. And on that note, look for more and more companies to "offshore" their work, sending it out of the country to places like the Philippines, India, and Eastern Europe, where skilled white-collar labor is far less expensive than in the U.S.

Be sure to check out past issues of Marketing Tips for more information about the coming labor shortage, the changing workplace, and working with remote employees.

Source: workforce.com

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EXPAND YOUR REPERTOIRE WITH A CORPORATE BLOG
Blogs aren't just for college kids and computer geeks. Corporate blogs are gaining popularity as convenient ways to communicate late-breaking news to your audience or customers, to collect feedback, and to communicate more effectively in general. Blogging is really more an art than a science, but the following tips will help get your blogging off to a smooth start.

1. Check it out
Before diving in, look around at public blogs and leave a few comments, to get familiar with the way things work. Then, consider setting up a test blog with a limited audience so you can work out some of the biggest kinks before rolling out the actual blog.

2. Make it an easy fit
Blogging is a low-maintenence, DIY endeavor at its roots. As such, find ways to fit blogging into what you already do, rather than committing huge budgets and huge chunks of time to it. One example might be to use a blog to complement your newsletter.

3. Pick a small focus to begin with
Don't over-promise. Choose a specific aim or purpose for your blog and stick to it. You might plan to use the blog to draw more visitors to the website by updating it frequently with breaking news. Or you might use it to link to poignant testimonials.

4. Get stakeholders involved
Set some goals for your blog debut with the help of those who will be contributing to it or judging its success. Assess expectations early-on. Doing so will help to determine what vision you should aspire to for the blog.

5. Create a blogging policy
Remember, technology is only one of the issues you'll face. You probably don't want to allow just anyone to post just anything on the blog. There's company culture to think about, and your brand, and your overarching communication policies. Anticipate the need for guidelines, draft them, and plan to adjust them as the project evolves. 6. Set up a single point of contact for questions It's a new endeavor, so questions are bound to arise. To address them efficiently -- from how-to questions to technology issues -- set up a single person or group that anyone should go to with questions.

Source: www.marketingprofs.com