Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

Great tag lines help your brand or idea stick in people’s minds. Reach out and touch someone;  We Try Harder;  When It Absolutely, Positively Has To Be There Overnight; It’s The Real Thing…

And this one from the Q&A site Straight Dope:

It says: The Straight Dope – Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It’s taking longer than we thought)

(Apologies for the fuzzy screen capture. Still trying to get Winsnap to work for me.)

Do you have a tag line? Does it stick with people? If not, maybe it ’s time to change it.  For some guidance use these tips on creating great tag lines from Kae G. Wagner of North Star Marketing.  I’m going to.

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In the latest engaging episode of the great podcast, The Engaging Brand, host Anna Farmery interviews Costas Kataras about his new book Nice Capitalism. Kataras makes two points, backed by research he says, that challenge conventional brand wisdom:

1) well known brands are dying off in countries that are more capitalist because the widening gap between rich and poor is killing off the middle class that supports well known brands. Instead, rich people are buying premium brands and more and more of the rest of us are buying generic brands for the price.

2) more socialist countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Norway and Denmark produce the strongest global brands.

These are huge ideas that seem supported by the evidence we see now of the impact on US brands of capitalism gone bad. (Have you driven a Ford lately?)

Part of Kataras’ argument is that countries with strong social safety nets also tend to have a business ethos that empowers workers. All this leads to generally happier workers that are motivated to produce great brands. Interesting argument but last time I checked, Walmart and Nike still had pretty strong brands built on exploiting workers at home and abroad.

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On episode #99 of Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel did an interview with Brett Hurt of Bazaarvoice that revealed information crucial to anyone trying to get clients past the “what if somebody writes something bad about us?!” objection. Bazaarvoice grew out of Hurt’s experience back in the days before Amazon made reviews commonplace. Back then most companies were so afraid of bad reviews that most didn’t have them on their sites. Then Hurt saw one company that had decided to try it out – but tentatively. They hid the reviews behind a tab on their site hoping no one would find them. But people did. And here’s the kicker: the ones who found the reviews had a 92% higher buy rate on the site. Hurt knew he had a solid business proposition and the idea for Bazaarvoice was born.

The key things to me that he revealed in the interview with Mitch were:

1) Having reviews on a site actually increases retained sales and lowers returns – especially having bad reviews. Why? Because having bad review lends credibility to the site because people feel that if the company is willing to put up the good and the bad they must have integrity. Returns are lower because people are more informed and their expectations more realistic before they buy.

2) The well-worn idea that “Someone who has a good experience will tell one person. Someone who has a bad experience will tell ten…” is a myth that was never supported by actual case-studies. The fact is that people are more likely to share good experiences and this means that there tend to be more good reviews than bad ones.

And last night I learned of a great example of how embracing the bad can be good for your brand.

I was watching a documentary about Halle Berry, the stunningly beautiful actress who won an Academy Award for her amazing work in the movie Monster’s Ball… Anyway, the show had a clip of Berry accepting a Worst Actress Razzie award for her work in the movie Catwoman which she did after Monster’s Ball.  The key word here is “accepting”. Not only did she attend the Razzie ceremony, looking gorgeous as always, but she fully played along, tearfully thanking the audience for the award and going on to “thank” those who helped her win. The Razzie clip in the documentary was followed by a number of people commenting on how much they and others respected Berry for the way she handled the award.

Now my question to you is: do you remember the Razzie, or Berry’s hit and run charge?

Now that’s personal branding at its best.

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Welcome to www.consciousimages.org. I have finally implemented the sage advice of Six Pixels of Separation’s Mitch Joel to make my online presences consistent under one name. In my case that name is: ConsciousImages. And I took the final step with the help of amazing customer service from Susan at my web host Bluehost.  I am not a techie so when I called Bluehost with the request to change my blog from one domain to another I was already nervous at the thought of what that would take. But Susan at Bluehost tech support put my fears to rest. Instead of doing the required minimum and saying: “You have to import your blog database to your new domain” she went beyond the call of duty and did it for me. She put me on hold for 20 minutes and when she came back on the phone she simply said, “Try it now”. It worked perfectly.

I asked her for her boss’ email and sent a glowing email to him.

This is my first post to my new domain – with lots more good ones to come!

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