Coffee & Wine Life’s Earth-Bound Passions Building Brand Around Sustainability

Starbucks Shows The Path To Customer Preference For “Sustainability”

The path that Starbucks created with and for the concept of sustainable agriculture demonstrates how a business can increase brand preference by latching onto a trend or cause. Then, because of its size, Starbucks both advances societal good and sells more coffee. That idea may be a bit obtuse, but the analogy is Burger King turning it’s stores into a promotion for Mutant Ninja Turtles, to sell more movie tickets and burgers.

The stage is set for action: Coffee & Wine

• Two popular drinks where differentiation among varietals and preparation are distinct
• Two products that are wholly dependent on soil, location, climate and the care of the grower.
• Two global agricultural crops where sustainability has a market value.

Starbucks has educated many folks on the value of sustainable agriculture. Now is the time for the savvy wine marketer to swoop in behind, leveraging that education, illustrating its value in fine wine, and their brand in particular.

For the vintner, the question is how does his brand merchandise sustainability. Since most wineries are beyond ignorant in merchandising, that’s a moot point. For vintners, sustainability is real commitment, but when it comes to selling wine, sustainability is relegate to a page on the web site, only barely more important than the stainless steel fermentation tanks when it comes to selling product, (he said sarcastically).

Still the opportunity is real.

Can Your Brand McChrystal

Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It's a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy. It began as a scattering of acid remarks within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. But - thanks in large part to Twitter, the Web, and cable news - barely two days after those remarks were disclosed, a media firestorm ended General Stanley McChrystal career as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. (Many thought his career should have ended with his cover-up of the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman.)

Three Words Is Not A Brand

“You have to be able to describe your brand in three words,” some idiot said. I don’t think so. The Brand is the customer’s experience with the product. A bottle of Zin, friends, a spring afternoon on the porch, that’s all part of the brand along with the first taste, the vintner’s reputation, & more...

Beer ads all show people having fun with friends, not crushing cans alone in front of the TV, because it is the experience.

Three word are tag lines, not brands.

Below, match the three word tag lines with the company.

• It’s The Cheese
• German Engineering
• We Know Drama
• 25 – 50% Off Swimware

• Victoria’s Secret
• TBS [Itself a acronym for Turner Broadcasting System]
• Bayerische Motoren Werks [BMW]
• California Milk Producers

Note that each organization has brand values and associations that go deeper and more long serving than just three words. The three words are an attempt to roll-up and draw upon brand values your mind. My point is that there is way-more to brand than a tag line. Personal examples:

- Victoria’s Secrets. I’ve always wanted one of those posters of an oiled-skin, dream girl in a bikini, for my office.

- TBS: I watch TBS for the classic Astaire, Rogers, Kelly dance. That's what TBS is to me.

- BMW is sleek convertible, but high maintenance, just like an oiled-skin, dream girl.

- California cheese: Big bricks from Safeway for lunches and small artisan cheeses from the farmers market. A huge range.

Three words is not a brand.

.

Assessing Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

Often What Really Makes Up A Buyer’s Mind Is Not Only Simple But Also Free: A Word-Of-Mouth Recommendation From A Trusted Source. This Is Especially True In Experiential Products Such As Wine, Personal Electronics Or Movies. from McKinsey Quarterly

Google News Room & Twitter Microblogging + Geolocation

If you are wondering where to invest your time to learn new tricks of the trade, here from mashable.com are three updates in an overwhelming barrage “interesting stuff” which might help but are sure to complicate.
1. Twitter has just flipped the switch on geolocation within Twitter.com. Now users can pull up location-based information from individual tweets on the microblogging website. here
2. Google has just released an alternative player for Google Reader that gives those with a penchant for browsing news the ability to do so in an image-heavy, TV-like fashion. It’s like being in a TVcontrol room. here
3. YouTube will now display BANNER ADS on the mobile version of its website. Google made the announcement in a blog post, enticing would-be advertisers to sign up by saying that users of its mobile video website are tech-savvy early adopters with cash to spend — the ideal ad demographic. here

Social Net Relevance Keep Growing With Network

FBI's most-wanted list

There’s app for that

As FBI's most-wanted list turns 60, organization turns to social networking to help in search

Using an iPhone app users can have the faces of the most wanted, as well as top terrorism fugitives and missing children, right in their pockets. They not only can have the images, but also can press a key to immediately e-mail a local FBI office with their GPS location.

“When (posters) were in the post office, it was because a lot of people were in the post office,” said Nancy Beaton, a spokeswoman for NIC Inc., which developed the iPhone application. “These days, people spend a lot of time on their mobile phone, and it is the place to be.”

The bureau also has a small e-mail distribution list with 150,000 addresses for updates on the list, and it has turned to Facebook and Twitter to augment Web use.

Source: Dane Schiller, Houston Chronicle

Personal Note: In the 80’s in Silicon Valley I had the opportunity to meet a host of genius-level individuals who would become brand names of technology: Andy Grove, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Hennessy and on a minor note, my former neighbor Geoffrey Moore. I also had a consulting gig at Oracle where I met Larry Ellison.

So Congratulations Larry. You won it.

As the Associated Press wrote, “Ellison’s fortune made the victory possible, but the true star was his monster black-and-white trimaran and its radical 223-foot wing sail, which powered the craft at three times the speed of the wind, sending its windward and middle hulls flying well above the water.”

Social Media ROI

Today, some of the largest brands worldwide are using social networking platforms to become part of the conversation both on and offline, interacting with a massive community of users. For this reason marketing types are interested in defining the ROI

[This is for the, “If you can’t measure it …”, school of engineers as executives. – Doug]

Google on measuring ROI from Social Media

Average lifetime value of a typical account x expected new lead close% = LEAD VALUE

Next, calculate whether your social media efforts are paying off. Here’s an easy-to-use method. Choose a consistent time period for each calculation (monthly, quarterly or annual):

1. Hours invested in social media activities x average hourly rate = SOCIAL MEDIA COST
2. Social media cost ÷ target contribution margin% = BREAKEVEN
3. Number of social media leads x lead value = SOCIAL MEDIA GENERATED REVENUE
4. Social media generated revenue ÷ breakeven = SOCIAL MEDIA PAYBACK INDICATOR

If your social media payback indicator in step 4 is greater than 1.0, you are on track to experience a positive return on your investment.

Is Facebook the frog in the pond?

Facebook: “In a digital world fueled by social media, the prospect of translating large social networking audiences into solid earnings presents more possibilities than disappointments.”

[Very Zen: “Little onion, life is filled with more possibilities than disappointments.” – Doug]

Twitter states, “We are finding the brands that most effectively embrace these new opportunities are able to drive return-on-investment levels that compete with television in brand building and with search on performance. This combination, along with the scale that is represented, is a new and exciting world for advertisers, and we are just seeing the beginning of the opportunities that will exist.”

[Or is investing in Twitter like investing in FM radio at the dawn of television. – Doug]

Social media with its scale represents another new frontier for PR, advertising and the rest of an expanding marketing mix.

Source: relationship-economy.com

Brand Delivers

Brand is a powerful carriers of values. -- To the painting on the caves in Lascaux, the history of the Inuit, the Dead Sea scrolls, modern man will add Dianna Ross singing, "Baby love, oh baby love, won't you be my baby love…."

Brands are a synthesis of 20th century communications and of how we as a culture recognized products and services. Future archeologists will love this era as they dig through layers of CRT screens and Styrofoam packing peanuts in order to decode newspapers that refused to decompose.
In scholarly works, those 23rd Century archeologists will spin the meaning of such icons of the late 20th century as DEC, Lucky Strike, or the United Way. They will wonder what happened to Netscape just as we today speculate on the Etruscans.
All the effort about branding centers around the fact that brand delivers. The number one driver behind branding is that brands embody a set of values that provide assurance and draw people back. Brand is the marketing tool that delivers across all media.

The Half-Life Of The Next Big Thing

Waveboard 2.0 for the iPhone examples the ever shortening half-life of the Next Big Thing (NBT) by launching the mobile NBT; demonstrating that the product cycle becomes even more complicated as products need to roll-out in multiple hosting formats such as: 1/ Cloud, 2/ Desktop, 3/ Enterprise, 4/ Mobile, and 5/ maybe on some conglomerate API like Quicken or salesforce.com.
This becomes a real PR and advertising headache. Don’t tell the software guys, you this is really a form of product extension like mini-Oreos. The only people to succeed at this have big budgets to build multi-media/modal to differentiate their gold label from the light. The good news is that, the easiest group to reach are “mobile app fanatics” because they can be found.

Google Wave Positioning

Developers gave them a standing ovation Shaking their laptops above their heads
-Positioning: Replace Email
-Compelling Rationale: What would e-mail look like if it was invented today?
-Creating Category: "So, now that I'm caught up on this Wave...
-Evidence: When demonstrating Wave's ability to translate between languages, in real-time, as a person types, the audience cheered so loudly and for so long that it felt like they were calling for an encore at a music festival. -Acceptance: At the conclusion of Lars and Jens Rasmussen’s demo, the developers gave them a standing ovation, shaking their laptops above their heads. Source: John D. Sutter, CNN