A simple idea – steward the momentum.

Momentum can keep ideas alive. Business critical ideas. Ideas that will drive innovation, develop new business practices, and engage customers in compelling ways. Ideas that drive profits.

Being a steward of that momentum can look like several things:

• Quickly moving from ideation to a plan of action.
• Building a plan that is challenging, but also realistic.
• Prioritizing.
• Making sure time and budget constraints are addressed.
• Breaking up the action items over a period of time, even if its a year+ (a realistic plan that takes some time is better than an aggressive plan that results in little execution).
• Celebrating milestones!

Momentum is hard to manufacture, and even harder to move forward without.

Microsoft’s been busy working to play catch up. Later this year they will release Windows Phone 7 with a totally revamped interface. Apparently Microsoft calls it “Metro UI.” Sigh.

Regardless of what that means, it looks pretty great. Lots of flat blocks of color and big type. It actually makes Apple’s stuff look somewhat dated in comparison. Perhaps the flatness is such a stark contrast to the popular effects-laden “2.0″ aesthetic.

Another interesting thing about the layout is the “seamless” pages. For example, the “People” or contact section looks to be one long horizontally scrolling page (you can see how the big titles get cut off as you scroll). Small details like this are risky, especially from someone as big as Microsoft. I hope it makes it to production intact.

All in all, it looks like a very interesting product. I wonder if it’s any indication of where Microsoft design is headed.

Try it today: Ask these questions of a random sampling of 5 customers and employees.

• What do we do?

• Where are we trying to go?

• Why does it all matter?

You will learn a lot through this simple exercise.

Don’t settle until it’s understood throughout the organization and the real test is when you hear customers say it back to you.

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According to Brand Week:
“For instance, it was none other than P&G that picked up the Film Grand Prix this year for Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV spot from Wieden + Kennedy. There is little doubt about the viral hit’s popularity. Launched in February, the official version has racked up nearly 12.2 million YouTube views.

But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.”

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Most companies would look at these numbers and pull the current campaign, but most companies haven’t had this amount of popularity. So, how do you deal with something this viral but with little impact to the bottom line?

Should Old Spice push on in faith or call a spade a spade and get out?

My gut tells me sales will increase with time. Branding is the discipline of building equity or meaning for long term gains and not always short term. With so much talk around Old Spice it is bound to pay off. However, if it doesn’t, could it prove the attractiveness of “Going viral” is no longer the end-all-be-all definition of an effective marketing strategy?

It almost comes down to Going Viral vs. Getting Results, what’s the real goal?

So you can see the progression of positioning, check out these commercials:

When dinosaurs roamed the earth …

1957…

1970s…

Super Bowl 2010 …

He said one thing in passing in the article that I haven’t been able to shake ever since I read it.  Schultz was asked how things had gone so wrong and he replied…

Success is not sustainable if it is defined by how big you become or by growth for growth’s sake.  Success is very shallow if it doesn’t have emotional meaning.

The article goes on to talk about how Schultz’s main agenda since coming back as CEO was to inject meaning back into the brand for all employees.  He did this mostly through bringing employees together and teaching them about the brand again.

I love to watch a leader lead with his heart first, balance sheet second.

Here’s a link to the HBR article should you want to read more. http://ow.ly/2gJvs

The U.S. dollar, British pound, euro, & Japanese yen were the only former currencies to have the same feature.

New countries write constitutions and symbolize their new direction with a flag. I never considered how important – and what a differentiator – it was to have our dollar symbol.

I love how much the development of this symbol is inspirational for the people of India:

“With this, India will join an elite group of countries which have a distinct currency symbol. It denotes the robustness of Indian economy,” noted India’s Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Ambika Soni.

“[It is] a way of saying we are entering into the realm of the developed world,” says Harish Bijoor, a brand and business strategy consultant in Bangalore.

Its a simple move, but a meaningful one for the people of India.

Articles referenced from Fast Company & Brand Channel.

“The things that make us American are the things that we make. This has always been a nation of builders, craftsmen.”

So begins the new commercial for the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee. It pulls on the strings of the heart for sure, transporting us to an imaginary America built with artisan hammers and nails. There’s been an interesting recent obsession with authenticity and American pride.

Dodge took a wackier, FREEDOM!! approach:

Levi’s built their entire new campaign on earthy blue-collar goodness:

In a different approach, big chain establishments are scribbling everywhere to appear smaller and more personal:

Over the past year, J. Crew’s been building carefully curated partnerships with classic brands like Ray-Ban, Timex, Levi’s:

It’s interesting that in the last decade, we were obsessed with bigger and global-er. Who knows, maybe it was the recession that pushed us in this direction of national pride, DIY, back-to-basics. The phenomenon started on the sidelines with small businesses and individuals, but is now making huge waves in the mainstream.

Not everyone has substance to back up their claims of authenticity. But if there truly is consumer yearning for honesty, craftsmanship, and simpler times, the posers will be called out, the genuine will thrive, and the Jeep commercial will be right:

“As a people, we do well when we make good things and not so well when we don’t. The good news is, this can be put right. We just have to do it.”

While I was there, we discussed the recent rebrand of the Norwegian company, Statoil.

Statoil is an oil company with over 500 filling stations in Norway with more scattered all over Scandinavia.  Here is an image of one of their filling stations.

The company recently merged with Norsk Hydro and here is an image of the identity after its rebrand.

Though I don’t have the privilege of  knowing all of the internal reasons behind why the company did this, it begs the question: Who is this for? Consumers are very familiar and comfortable with the filling station identity, but the executives wanted to change it to better display the merger.

So again, who is this for?  The Executives or the Target Audience.

The answer is always the Target Audience. All too often rebrands are done at the pleasure of the leadership rather than a strategic decision with the customer in mind.  Not that a CEO should be ignored in the process, but most often the CEO is no where close to the Target Audience.

First, if you haven’t seen any of the video responses, stop reading and click here.

After reading several blogs about the campaign, two major things stood out to me:

#1. The Team

A super team of writers, producers, techies, and marketers crammed into a studio in Portland, Oregon and produced 87 short crafted video responses on the first day alone in just 11 short hours. If you break that down, it’s about 7 minutes per video (not taking into account any breaks for lunch or sanity). The total campaign produced over 180 brilliant videos in three short days.

They used social media to track and target “Hi-Profile” social media guru’s and responding to their questions first. Like Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and Alyssa Milano to name a few, but also responding to many more, famous or not. Here’s a quote from Iain Tait, global interaction Creative Director at Wieden, about how they pulled it off:

“In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time. We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

#2. Trust & Partnership

The parent company Procter & Gamble showed incredible courage trusting this super team to write the content on the fly with virtually no approval or supervision. How many companies have that level of trust and partnership with their “vendors”?

The pay off for that trust?

The #1 most viewed channel of the week on YouTube, Putting it to the #3 most subscribers of all time on YouTube, and giving the Old Spice channel just over 92 Million views. Not to mention the unquantifiable amount of chatter over the brilliance of this campaign and how it could go down in the history books as one of the most innovative campaigns using all channels of social media.

The big question: Are these commercials on Brand for Old Spice? They’ve been known as the “classic” man’s deodorant since 1938, is this campaign too far?

Now, for your viewing pleasure, my top 3 of the 180+ video responses:

Their Open Happiness campaign commercials always ended with a simple, subtle riff referred to as their “Sonic Logo”. Pretty cool. But then consider that they used the melody as a flexible system for a global campaign – a melody that varied based on country and even time of year. And most recently they took the sound to a whole new level by incorporating it into K’naan’s World Cup Anthem.

You gotta watch and listen to this one to feel the breadth of what they accomplished with a few simple notes:

Amazing.