The dawn of a new era in astronomy is here. Today, we got the first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

If you’d like to go beyond the photos, check out this Podcast [and transcript] on ‘People I (Mostly) Admire’ entitled Why Bother Searching for Aliens? In the 48 minute show, Astronomer Jill Tarter explains what civilizations from other planets could teach us about our own future. Dr. Tarter spent her career searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI, S-E-T-I. She led programs at NASA and co-founded and led the SETI Institute for 35 years. If you’ve read the book Contact written by Carl Sagan or seen the movie, Dr. Tarter was the inspiration for the hero, played by Jodie Foster in the movie.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-bother-searching-for-aliens/

Enjoy!

Today, I discovered the Podcast ‘On Strategy Showcase’ through a LinkedIn post about Martin Weigel’s interview. The post said, “the role of Planning isn’t to inspire creatives, but to POINT imagination and resources to the right tasks that matter… we need more conversations that get the industry focused on usefulness, not just inspiration.”

To which I responded, “YES YES.” If you’ve worked with me as a Planner, and the topic of our role as Planners has come up, it’s likely I shared an opinion in the same vein. I think the root of finding “tasks that matter” lives in tension taming. I wrote more on “Taming Tensions” here a few years ago.

—

Here’s the podcast link and bullets of what popped for me after getting the audio transcribed from Martin’s interview:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w-ks-martin-weigel-on-our-industrys-unhealthy-fetish/id1494056579?i=1000554092017

—

Title: “W+K’s Martin Weigel on our industry’s unhealthy fetish with “insight” and other pitfalls for strategists”

• …truths that everybody recognizes are becoming the real new currency of planning.

• …what’s the sort of the common thread that goes across all of your writings. And I remember you said indignation and, you know, it’s, it is interesting to, you know, the definition of indignation. I had to look it up to make sure I had it right here. It is an annoyance provoked by what is perceived as unfair.

• …because you always seem to be bringing, trying to bring reality back into the, into this industry. And I wonder if it is rooted in the fact that you started off in reality

• …the oversupply of utter self-serving bullshit in our industry… personal feedback loop of indignation because it, it says, Martin, you, you know, you still give a shit and you’re, you’re still alive.

• …I’m not sure if our job is to inspire. I think it’s, You know, if the creative engine can’t start itself on the cold winter’s day, I wanna get a more reliable car.

• I think the role of planning is point imaginations and resources that tasks that matter [17:26]… to point problem solvers at the, at the right task so they can have maximum, maximum effect.

• Identifying and articulating framing that task with imagination and rigor is, you know, that’s the heart of the planners, a planner’s role.

• The essence of strategy as many, many wise people I’ve observed is the art of choice. It’s the art of finding the point of greatest leverage. You know, when there are many points that you could point imaginations out, it’s finding the one where the imagination can have its greatest effect and solve the problem.

• It’s about perspective.

• Most advertising gets ignored by people because it ignores them.

• I think we are, I think from time to time, we are dangerously blind to our, either our disconnect or our difference… the data there shows quite clearly that people in advertising are richer, whiter, more middle class, more privately educated, and more male than the general population – richer, whiter, more middle class, more privately educated, and more male than the general population… that’s a problem, right?

• If you let it, the world will do most of the work for you.

• …popular culture still exists in a world of overly fragmentation and personalization.

• …it strikes me that there there’s, there’s vastly more insight into the human psyche in the fiction section of your book shop than will ever be in the archives of any marketing department, vastly, vastly.

• …change is our real deliverable. That’s what we create for clients. We create new futures. We, we, you know, if somebody wants, we fold the future into the present we make today, we make tomorrow different from today. That’s the job at hand that is the only job at hand is to make tomorrow different from today.

• It could only effect thinking if we began the process by asking ourselves what is the change we want to create in the world? What are the objectives both hard and soft across different timelines? How will we measure progress towards that?

Alix Morrow is the Founder and Chief-Make-It-Happenator at AlixCompany based in Austin, Texas. AlixCompany helps brands move the meter from thinking to knowing by truly getting in-stream with consumers in today’s marketplace. For more information on our qualitative, quantitative, and planner-for-awhile (PFA) services please visit www.alixcompany.com. 

It was in April 2020 when my neighbor alerted me that she had seen my indoor cat outdoors running around. This couldn’t be true for several reasons – most of all because if the cat gets out, I’m usually running around trying to find it.

A few days later, I saw the cat she thought was mine basking in the sunlight. It was feral. So, a few evenings later, the cat somehow got inside my house to eat the food next to the door I’d put down. I named her ‘Suzie Q. I Love You’ or just ‘Suzie Q.’ for short.

Suzie became an indoor outdoor cat after that first evening inside. While the ‘Cat Daddy‘ says there’s no such thing as both in/out door cats, Suzie Q. had to be. The first morning after sleeping inside she darted at sunrise, running into the windows with big head clunks. Ouch! She also shat on my white faux lamb rug (my fault – I didn’t show her the litter box).

As Suzie Q. became accustomed to in/outdoor living, she started bringing me gifts. A colleague shared that was a good sign. She brought me a mouse, small bird, and lastly a horny toad.

Here’s a photo of the horny toad gift.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Love, Suzie Q.

Brand strategy has always been important. It’s how I was ‘brought up’ as a strategist. A recent rise in brand strategy interest can be attributed to market shifts and consumers’ changing affinity patterns. So, what’s changed in the role of brand strategy and how can companies adapt to stay ahead of the competition?

Let’s dig in a bit…

The Rise in Brand Strategy and Market Changes

Market research is a vital aspect of brand strategy. But how we conduct market research is becoming more focused on pre-consumer happenings. As cited by Forbes, insights are gathered from product designers and marketers before the product even reaches the hands of consumers.

This is thanks, in part, to changes in technology, which allows for greater access to data – and more of it. But what does this mean for businesses? Simply put, you should use every person in the ‘chain of production’ in the role of brand strategy. Everyone will be producing data, so use it to your advantage to use this data to improve your product before customers see it.

Reputation and Ethics

Company reputation isn’t a new focus, but the rise in brand strategy has changed what it means to consumers. As you may already know from our ‘Young Affluent’ focus several years back, consumers do show allegiances with their spending. This is particularly true within sustainability and young affluents.

But how does this fit into the role of brand strategy? Put sustainability front and center if you plan to win the youth market. That said, make sure your efforts are genuine because people are good at sniffing out ‘greenwashing’. Conduct market research to see what competitors are doing and decide how your company can improve its sustainability. Finally, make it visible and honest, and stick to your goals.

Final Thoughts on Brand Strategy

The role of brand strategy is always changing, and it can be difficult to keep up. If you’re looking to ground your marketing efforts with integrated brand strategy, AlixCompany can help. Since 2008, we’ve been helping advertisers and marketers move the meter from thinking to knowing by truly getting in-stream with consumers in today’s marketplace.

AlixCompany is based in Austin, Texas with Regus offices all over. We help brands move the meter from thinking to knowing by truly getting in-stream with consumers in today’s marketplace. For more information on our qualitative, quantitative, and planner-for-awhile (PFA) services please visit www.alixcompany.com.

A good friend was transferred to NYC to manage a women’s shoe store in Herald Square. Over lunch sometimes, when we were both living in NYC, she would share with me valuable me sales tips. This one day in particular she said, “It’s helpful when you are resourceful and provide what they need – sometimes they don’t know what they need.”

She continued by sharing how a customer would come into the store looking for a classic black pump heel. She would bring out that pump and also provide the same pump in brown. Additionally, she’d bring out a ‘rando’ pump that was the hottest selling pump of the season. Four times out of ten customers would purchase that second pump, two times out of ten they would purchase the rando, and every once in a while – they’d purchase both!

What’s your brown and rando pump when customers ask about a black pump?

Alix Morrow is the Founder and Chief-Make-It-Happenator at AlixCompany based in Austin, Texas. AlixCompany helps brands move the meter from thinking to knowing by truly getting in-stream with consumers in today’s marketplace. For more information about our qualitative, quantitative, and planner-for-awhile (PFA) services please visit www.alixcompany.com or call us at 512-537-8503. We make house calls and welcome referrals. 

If you’re touching any facet of communications, you’re in for a climb as “trust in all information sources [is] at record lows”.

Just like the ‘us’ in trust is important – the ‘and’ in brand is equally as important. Trusted brands close the value-destroying divide between ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ marketing which fosters loyalty, engagement, brand exclusivity, and lastly relationships.

When you Google ‘trust’ you get 6,490,000,000 results. That’s 13% more than COVID-19 (5,650,000,000), 90% more than Cola-Cola (653,000,000), and 93% more than Joe Biden (456,000,000). (Source: Google search; June 20, 2021)

Edman’s Trust Barometer shows “trust in all information sources [is] at record lows”.

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2021, p24; https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2021-01/2021-edelman-trust-barometer.pdf

For Our Business Right Now

Most interestingly for the communications business, is how trust serves as a bridge for accomplishing both short-term and long-term goals.

Tom Roach’s blog post “The Wrong and Short of It” is my favorite for setting this up more. He writes, “Short-termism and long-termism are both just wrong-termism. So let’s end the false choice between long and short-term marketing tactics, maximise the compound effects of getting them working together in harmony, and start to close the value-destroying divide between ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ marketing. It’s limiting marketing effectiveness and brand growth, when we’ve never needed them more.”

No more short-term, long-term… trust is uniquely an “all-term” mechanism. And, we desperately need “all-term” thinking right now.

What “All-Term” Thinking Involves

More specifically, what does “all-term” thinking involve? It’s more than quality and affordability. Like any lasting relationship, it boils down to being reliable, honest, authentic, transparent, and care-full.

Source: March 2021 HarteHanks Behavioral Index, p49

Essentially and in the simplest terms, it’s how a brand behaves. Ah, yes – finally to behavior (my favorite)!

The Us in Trust is Rooted in How a Brand Behaves

Psyche.co published a nice bit in 2020 on ‘How to Know Who’s Trustworthy’ which maps out five virtues of “intellectual dependability” to lean on when “knotty problems call for sound advice…”

1. Intellectual benevolence – genuinely caring about your wellbeing
2. Intellectual transparency – sharing perspective with the motivation of helping you progress
3. Communicative clarity – removing or resolving sources of ambiguity when communicating
4. Audience sensitivity – an appreciation of an audience’s distinctive features
5. Intellectual guidance – displaying a certain open-ended wisdom in supporting you with inquires

(Source: Pysche.co, Psycho Guides, November 2020; https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-spot-whos-trustworthy-and-whos-not-on-what-matters?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=9ab72309f6)

If we’re pulling apart the ‘us’ in trust, then we need to also look at the ‘and’ in brand. That is, trusted brands enjoy more loyalty AND more engagement AND acceleration along the marketing funnel AND exclusivity in the category AND lasting consumer relationships. WARC published a nice piece last February on this for subscribers here. (https://www.warc.com/content/article/bestprac/what-we-know-about-brand-trust/110020, February 2021)

So, to pull it all together – trust levels suck right now. In order to improve as communicators, we need to move from short-term/long-term to “all-term” thinking. Just like the ‘us’ in trust is important – the ‘and’ in brand is equally as important. Trusted brands close the value-destroying divide between ‘brand’ and ‘performance’ marketing which fosters loyalty, engagement, brand exclusivity, and lasting relationships.