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Yes! We Can!

Have you ever thought the home page of your big, beautiful, awesome, professionally designed, horribly expensive website is an overgrown thicket of inconsequential stuff that does nothing but vacuum money from your bank account, dust up your clients’ view of your business, and never delivers prospects to your sales funnel? Yeah, me, too. But then I learned to treat my website like a legal brief; the key word there being, “brief.”

Briefs should be short, sweet, well-organized, easily navigable, and to the point. Take a look at these 16 examples of brief website home pages from Hubspot! They are all good. They are all effective. They are all brief. They are short, at least “above the fold.” Uncluttered. They all resonate with their target audience and compellingly state their value proposition and only one value proposition.

And, finally, they all state that “single-topic” value proposition front and center in very few words how you can use whatever they are selling to join a crowd of similarly situated others and make your life better.

None of them talk at length about how many years of experience their company has. None of them discuss everything their owners have ever done and every award they have received. None of them provide you with much, much more information than you can easily digest in 5 seconds. None of them give you more choices to delve deeper in their website than you can pick from one look at the page and pushing on button.

And, being good cultural branders, most of them are doing as many of the steps of cultural branding as they can on one page.

An, they are doing it effectively using good layout, CTA (call to action) placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements.

These things can be done by yourself with just a little education, training, and experience; just a little bit of coaching from a business advisor with education, training, and experience in website design, implementation, optimization, and usage; and just a little bit of help from a website service company that is geared toward using easy, inexpensive tools to provide business owners with easy, inexpensive websites.

Among all the other things I do, I run a business company consulting company, which is not only affiliated with, but also uses such a website service called hibu.

[reminder]How can we help you create and use your website better?[/reminder]

 

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Can You Culturally Brand With Your Website?

We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.
We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.

Don’t you wish you could just get one consistent line of advice about how best to market in the digital world that you could then learn, understand, master, and use like Ron Popiel’s Rotisserie Oven (“Just set it and forget it!”) Yeah, me, too. But, that is not going to happen.

This is the real life of marketing in the modern world. People are fickle. They are fickle about what they want. They are fickle about how they figure out what they want. The majority of them now use online search to do it, but online searchers are  fickle, from moment to moment, about how they find and use your website. And do not even get me started about how Google and the rest of the search engines change their algorithms faster, but with a frequency that seems much more often, than the average couple’s sexual encounter. But I digress.

We are discussing in this series of posts cultural branding and today we are wondering if you can culturally brand on your website. If we look at the websites of the cultural branding examples discussed in Holt’s literature (see the prior posts for details), we see some cultural branding going on in some of them.

The best example is Dove soap. http://Dove.com It’s “Real Beauty” campaign is right there, front and center on the home page. You see that real, but very pleasant looking woman and you want to read what she has to say. Your click the “Read more” and get drawn into the issue, wanting to read more. You click the big circle to find out people’s answers to their survey of “beauty bias.” When you are done, if you are looking for a comforting, caring, friend who “gets you, really gets you” and loves you for all you both are and are not, you can’t wait to go out and pull a bar of the grocery store shelf on aisle 7, halfway down on the right, just are eye level.

For Chipotle, http://chipotle.com, you have to hit the “Food with integrity” button on their top menu, but then you are sucked into Chipotle’s commitment to cook up a better world with every burrito they wrap or bowl they fill. They love their pigs right up to the point they kill them …. But I digress. They even link you out at the bottom of their long culture page to their self-produced comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous. I couldn’t get the first episode to run on my MacBook Pro and gave up after looking at a black box in the middle of my screen for two minutes. Nonetheless, Chipotle has cultural branding there.

Axe, http://www.axe.com/us/en/home.html has much better cultural branding than does Old Spice, https://oldspice.com/en . Compare the two and you will see the obvious differences. Panera, https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/home.html, has it’s 100% clean food success front and center on the first page of its active and interest-grabbing slider.

But, no one, NO ONE, does cultural branding than Starbuck’s, https://www.starbucks.com. Like the others, they make you click their top menu’s “Responsibility” button to find it, but when you do, you are immersed in a multi-media extravaganza about Starbuck’s egalitarian bonding with everyone, while disparaging no one.

There are a ton of examples of both good and bad cultural marketing on websites. But almost all of them are professionally produced with really HUUUUUGE financial budgets behind them. Which brings us to the question driving this post, “Can you culturally brand using your website?”

The answer is definitely, yes, but you have to use your own POWER and proceed only with every resource you have in order to do it. You have to invest at least some of each of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to ring the bell with your website. Websites are, however, the major marketing media used by small businesses and you have to leverage your resources to make yours work for you effectively and efficiently.

Come back tomorrow and we will talk more about how.

[reminder]How much of your resources are you investing in online marketing?[/reminder]

 

 

 

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Use All 5 Steps of Cultural Branding to Build a Better Ranking Website

 

Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.

Cultural branding did not just spring up last week, month, or even year. One of the early writers about it is Douglas Holt, who wrote How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Holt, a former Harvard Business School professor who wisely gave up academia for lucre, founded the Cultural Strategy Group. http://culturalbranding.org. His friends at HBS apparently still love him, however, because they published his work another time as a Big Idea section titled Branding in the Age of Social Media. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.

Cultural branding requires you to innovatively leapfrog the conventions of your workspace and champion ideologies that are meaningful to your largest sphere of prospective customers. This requires a shift from mindshare branding, through purpose branding, and to cultural branding.

If you’ve ever marketed anything in the past, then you familiar with mindshare branding, whether you call it that or not. Mindshare branding uses psychological associations to convince prospects whatever you are selling will enhance their benefits, emotions, and personality. Purpose branding, mindsharing in the present third millennia, actively espouses the values or ideals prospective customers share.

Cultural branding requires less obvious selling and more subtle, but also more active, support of a targeted pre-existing cultural segment of society’s values and ideals using a strategic combination of traditional media platforms and current social media tools. The targeted subsegment is one that is working on leapfrogging the larger society’s orthodoxy, which creates a cultural opportunity that a marketer can then champion purposefully, truthfully, effectively, and efficiently. Cultural branding requires actually figuring out what culture you want to serve and then actually joining and serving that culture.

Finding, joining, and serving a culture takes # steps:

  • Mapping the cultural orthodoxy
  • Locating the cultural opportunity
  • Targeting the crowdculture
  • Diffusing the new ideology
  • Innovating continually, using cultural flashpoints.

In his HBR article, Holt explained each of these five steps and describes how Chipotle scored 80% over the test of time:

  • Chipotle leapfrogged the cultural orthodoxy that “BigFood’s” commercially processed and refined foods were good for us,;
  • located the cultural opportunity being pushed by Whole Foodies, Trader Joe’s fanatics, Jamie Oliver home-cuisinartists, and others that they wanted healthier food such as organics, non-organic, but unprocessed, and farm-to-table fruits and vegetables;
  • Researched, recognized, and joined the grassroots subculture (crowdculture) advocating these ideas;
  • Diffused the subcultures idea in an entertaining, educational, and enthusing way using some short, animated movies tied in to a good social media presence and traditional media platforms; but
  • Chipotle spun out in the end, however, when it didn’t continue along the culturebranding path by picking inconsequential issues to support, picking consequential issues such as non-GMO foods, but failing to walk that walk, and then suffering through its E.coli problems.

Holt’s article mentions other brands that have exploited subcultural shifts, such as:

  • Axe (men’s grooming products exploiting the “lad” fad)
  • Dove (led the body-positive crowd with a campaign for “real beauty”)
  • Old Spice (used Isaiah Mustafa to let women believe they could improve their men with Old Spice deodorants and colognes).

So, apparently, Holt’s recognized and pointed out for us cultural branding. The question remains, how do we in small business, who cannot afford much in the way of professionally produced videos run first on traditional media and then seeded over social media, use cultural branding most effectively and efficiently to run, grow, and sell our businesses better?

Come back next time and we will discuss more about that.

[reminder]How does your website compare and contrast with the websites of the companies mentioned in Holt’s article discussed in this post? Look and see and then come back read the next post in this series.[/reminder]

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3 Reasons Most Business Websites Suck at Branding

 

Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.

  1. Most business websites’ owners are too tight-assed to use the word suck on their websites when it’s really appropriate. People, especially serious business owners, seek to be universally loved and understood as serious, professional, prim, proper, and absolutely neither common, crass, nor, heaven forbid, vulgar. Being so, they for darned sure aren’t willing to let their hair down long enough to really relate with real people who are quite comfortable saying something, like your perfectly coifed website, sucks when it really sucks.
  2. Most business websites’ owners try to create a culture around themselves instead of trying to serve a culture that is coalescing around a topic bordering their businesses’ workspaces. Coca-Cola made this mistake with its Coca-Cola Journey digital magazine. Under Armour apparently didn’t when it took over where Nike left off and began UA’s “I Will What I Want” program by addressing issues of concern to UA workout clothing wearers somewhat more rowdily and randily by letting the public it was seeking lead the discussion
  3. Most business website content is designed to sell instead of enlighten, educate, entertain, and enthuse those viewing the website.

So, what can you do to do better than your dull, boring competitors?

First, do the opposite of these things.

Second, do the opposite of these things in a way that doesn’t overtly look like you are trying to do the opposite of those things.

Third, come back next time and we will learn some details of cultural branding.

[reminder]Would you stay on your website more than three seconds after you first see it?[/reminder]

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3 Issues for Crafting Defecting Customer Recapture Strategies

Recapturing lost customers is like recooping lost sheep. We can help you save departing customers.

Picking up where we left off discussing Kumar and his associates’ research on recapturing lost customers, let’s look at their three main questions of interest. When you are crafting a recapture strategy, you must consider the following:

How likely is a given customer to come back?

Trying to regain every lost customer can sap your marketing resources. It’s better to be more efficient and effective by focusing on people whose prior behavior suggests they can be more easily convinced to return. Has the departing customer referred others and never complained or only had complaints that were satisfactorily resolved? These are your best bets. Has this customer canceled because of price alone? If so, that customer is more likely to come back than one who left because of poor service. If a departing customer claims your prices are just as bad as your service, don’t bother knocking on their door again. Such types are the least likely of all to return.

How long will a reacquired customer stay, and how much will he or she spend?

You should consider the returning lifetime value of each lost customer. This is usually based on that customers average historical spend multiplied out over the number of years you expect the reacquired customer to stay. You’d probably be surprised to find someone who departs will be more loyal their second time around. In fact, recaptured customers generally stay recaptured longer, and customers who defect because of price and come back for a better deal stay the longest of all. This shows the important upside of win-back strategies.

Which people should get which saving offers?

You should consider the specifics of each customer in relation to your historical experience with others. Don’t use one-size-fits-all “new-deal” incentives. Who gets what recapture offer varies based on your company’s specific facts and circumstances and the reasons the customer left and is willing to consider returning.

 

You will have to study your customers to work strategically when bringing back your own lost customers. Simply identifying those who are the most likely to sign up again, rather than appealing to every defector, can increase your win-back rates. Considering each lost customer’s average lifetime value can drive how big an offer to make to get them back.

 

A lot of this data can also be used to develop initial customer acquisition strategies, but that is a topic for another day.

 

[reminder]What do you know about your own new customer prospects and lost customers and have you thought of hiring us to help you learn more?[/reminder]

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3 Great Things for Crafting Defecting Customer Recapture Strategies

Recapturing lost customers is like recooping lost sheep. We can help you save departing customers.

Have you ever had a customer leave you and just said to yourself, “Big deal, so what, and who cares? New customers are a dime a dozen.” Yeah, me, too – long ago. But let me tell you why we’re both wrong and why we should almost always work hard but be selective about keeping defecting customers.

First, it usually costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to recapture a departing one. Second, departing customers tell exponential numbers of friends why you stink, but those whom you tempt back into your fold tell even more people what a deal they conned you out of, most of whom will be new customers. Third, who needs a third reason? The first two are more than enough, but there are more discussed below.

But, how do you get defectors to rejoin your tribe? And how hard should you work and how much bling should you toss at them to get them back? Like most things common business owners take for granted, however, there is a good deal of science behind winning back lost customers.

Some folks who appear to know a lot about this stuff are V. Kumar, a professor at Georgia State University; Yashoda Bhagwat, a doctoral student there; and Xi (Alan) Zhang, another doctoral student there, who studied the issue for seven years and published an article in the Journal of Marketing in 2015, which got a lot of press including an article in the Harvard Business Journal. Regaining “Lost” Customers: The Predictive Power of First-Lifetime Behavior, the Reason for Defection, and the Nature of the Win-Back Offer. Journal of Marketing: July 2015, Vol. 79, No. 4, pp. 34-55, (http://journals.ama.org/doi/10.1509/jm.14.0107) discussed in the Harvard Business Journal, March 2016 pp. 22-23 (https://hbr.org/2016/03/winning-back-lost-customers).

The upshot of Kumar and Co’s research is reacquiring customers who leave may help businesses not only regain their lost profits but also usurp profits from competitors. Nonetheless, not all lost customers are worth the investment in reacquisition and not all of them will remain profitable if reacquired. These guys studied (1) the lost customers’ first-lifetime experiences and behaviors, (2) the reason for defection, and (3) the nature of the win-back offer made to lost customers are all related to the likelihood of their reacquisition, their second-lifetime duration, and their second-lifetime profitability per month. Their study shows that the stronger the first-lifetime relationship with the firm, the more likely a customer is to accept the win-back offer.

Come back tomorrow and find out some answers to vital questions you need to consider when crafting your own “customer saving strategy.”

[reminder]Do you even care about recooping your lost sheep and recouping their profits?[/reminder]