Category: Writing

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By Evelyn Starr, {grow} Community Member

In Mark Schaefer’s book Marketing Rebellion, he states that consumers are now in control of brands and that this is the new order of marketing.

From an industry standpoint, this is certainly an unsettling new order!

But from consumers’ point of view, nothing has changed.

The disparity between the industry’s “a-brand-is-what-we-say-it-is” perspective and consumers’ true perception of a brand comes from the industry’s misunderstanding of how brands form in the minds of consumers.

Let’s explore that today.

The changing idea of “brand”

Marketers have long thought of “brand” in the cattle-marking sense. We are marking this entity in the manner we want you to see it.

Marketers rationalized that consistent marking and repeated impressions over time would make their conception of the brand actually become the brand in consumers’ minds.

The problem is that companies were only factoring their one-way communication into consumers’ image of a brand.

How brands form today

Consumers – humans – are wired for survival.

From our earliest days we’ve had to make decisions to keep ourselves alive.

Our early decisions included whether an encountered animal was a predator or prey. We used our past experiences and those we gleaned from others to categorize animals in our minds so we knew quickly whether to flee to safety or to pursue dinner.

Today’s challenges are less about bodily threats, and more focused on managing the thousands of messages that come our way each day.

We don’t have time to consider each message anew.

Instead, we do what we have always done – we accumulate experiences with an entity to formulate an image that helps us decide quickly whether we want to give our attention to that entity or not.

We brand to survive.

A sum of experiences

This is how brands form in consumers’ minds. They are the sum of all the experiences the consumer has had with the brand.

Some of those experiences are marketing messages from the company. But many experiences occur without the company’s knowledge.

Product usage experiences at home, out-of-stock situations in store, tales of good or bad experiences with the brand from friends, experiences working for the company…these and more get stored in the folder marked for that brand in that consumer’s mind.

Coca Cola’s Brand Image in Advertising and in Reality

In Mark’s recent post about the idea of brand, he featured an 1890 Coca Cola ad where the company portrayed the brand as sophisticated, youthful and vigorous.

By the 1950s, Coca Cola was still promoting those attributes in campaigns with the taglines “Almost everyone appreciates the best” and “Sign of good taste”.

My father worked for Coca Cola in New York City for two short stints in the late 1950s.

In June 1958 he was one of many college students Coca Cola hired for long shifts stacking bottles as they came off the line. The company paid overtime, welcome extra funds to college students.

The second stint was after he got out of the army in December 1959. The company paid overtime then too, and honored his union card meaning he got paid for the December holidays though he only worked a few days.

My father felt grateful to Coca Cola for the opportunity to earn much needed money. The jobs proved to be fun because the young people working there enjoyed being together.

My father’s brand image of Coca Cola is generous, fun and youthful from his experience working for the company. Not sophisticated though as the ads were saying.

When I was a child, Coca Cola was saying it wanted to teach the world to sing. Still a youthful and vigorous portrayal of the brand, though perhaps less sophisticated.

My parents did not keep Coca Cola in the house, however. My mother was health conscious before it was fashionable and did not want us to have the sugary drink.

My brand image of Coca Cola was that despite catchy TV commercials the product was not good for you.

As you can see, Coca Cola’s image in my mind and in my father’s mind came more from our experiences than from messages the company conveyed. We made choices about the brand and talked about it from our own perspective.

We controlled the Coca Cola brand in our lives.

Consumers Brand to Survive Every Day

According to Beverage Industry magazine, in 2018 the top 100 beverage companies accounted for 221 products in 15 different categories.

No matter which beverage category we want, we are still deciding among several brands.

And this is just a beverage choice.

We make hundreds of product and brand choices daily.

That is why we brand to survive.

We use our past experiences to shortcut the consideration process and decide quickly so we can move on with our lives.

Social media wake up call

Before the internet, we mostly kept our brand experiences to ourselves. Maybe we told a few people in our innermost circles.

Only a few souls were motivated to complain or compliment the brand wrote or called the company. Once the internet arrived, a few more emailed companies their thoughts.

Then came social media.

In the mid-2000s as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube launched, marketers discovered that not only could they advertise there, but consumers could express their feelings and share their experiences with brands there.

Suddenly consumers had the same kind of broad media platform that brands had enjoyed for years.

Social media reversed the communication flow of brand messages and turbocharged it.

Marketers felt like consumers had wrested control of their brands from them as thousands of consumer brand messages flew at them on social media, dominating conversation about their brand.

But what really happened is that they were finally privy to consumer conversations that happened in private before but now happened in public with a megaphone.

What does brand to survive mean for marketers?

Marketing isn’t going to override thousands of years of human evolution. Consumers’ branding-to-survive modus operandi is the reality that companies must face.

With social media, companies can’t feign ignorance and risk flak for disingenuous, inauthentic or inappropriate messaging, as Peloton learned recently.

The way to cope is to switch marketing’s focus from messaging to experience.

Every brand experience matters. Brands are constantly evolving in consumers’ minds. Recent experiences can loom large.

Marketers should be listening to customers via all channels available to them – social media, customer service lines, in-store, website help chats, market research – to understand their brand’s current image from the customer’s point of view.

With a benchmarked starting point, marketers need to articulate what they want the brand experience and image to be and then map a course to get there.

The course reaches beyond the marketing department into all areas of the business. Employees’ experience with the brand and how they talk about it is a significant contributor to brand image. Same for partners, vendors, anyone who comes in contact with the brand.

Even with perfect execution, you can’t control your brand. With careful execution you can influence it though and also build much goodwill that can buffer some less-than-ideal experiences.

If this effort seems daunting, remember that the humanity that causes consumers to brand also promotes understanding, forgiveness and enthusiasm.

Working toward exceptional brand experiences can be rewarding and give your brand a true competitive advantage.

Maybe it can even teach the world to sing!

Evelyn Starr is a brand strategist, writer and Founder & CEO of E. Starr Associates which specializes in marketing help for brands in adolescence, brands that have stalled after their initial success. Connect with Evelyn on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Why branding is rooted in evolution. We brand to survive. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

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They say opposites attract.

That holds true, even in a Hero’s Journey story.

And while you may craft opposing characters who find themselves attracted to one another, you would be wise to study these universal relationships—also known as themes—that great stories have utilized for generations to the benefit of their readers.

Here are the five essential Hero’s Journey themes that will thrill your readers!

What Is a Hero’s Journey Theme?

As we get started, let’s define just what kind of “relationship” we’re talking about here.

The beauty of these Situational Relationships is that they function like the utilities of a well-constructed building: They’re invisible. Only a reader with a trained eye will be able to detect your intentions.

Another benefit of using these Situational Relationships is that they resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds. They are simple and easy to understand.

They’re also commonly known as themes, driving concepts underpinning stories from start to finish.

Yet they are inherently ripe with opportunity for deep exploration and clever innovation. That’s why, after explaining each theme, I’ll provide some “Tips for Innovation” so you can hit the ground running with these essential archetypes!

5 Themes of a Hero’s Journey

Ready for the five Hero’s Journey themes? Let’s get started!

1. Good vs. Evil

Perhaps the most obvious Situational Archetype is the classic dichotomy between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. This trope has been successfully used by storytellers like George Lucas and classic Western authors to great success.

In this theme, your protagonist and their companions are on the side of Good. They defend values such as Freedom, Compassion, Justice, and Mercy.

What they ultimately represent, though, is Selflessness. These are the kind of people who would sacrifice their desires, and even their own lives, for the sake of others. That is what we have come to define as “Good.”

“Evil,” therefore, stands opposite to this. Evil embraces Control, Pain, Injustice, and Cruelty, all for the sake of acquiring as much land, power, or wealth as possible. Evil is ultimately Self-serving. This is why we tend to raise our children to be selfless, or “Good,” rather than destructively selfish, or “Bad.”

By aligning your protagonists with virtues of “Good” and your Shadow, Threshold Guardians, and Devil Figure with sins of “Evil,” you lay a moral foundation for your story that will make innate sense to your reader. Everyone knows, to an extent, what kind of behavior is “good” and “bad.” By connecting your characters to various virtues and vices, you can build your story’s world by using age-old assumptions about right and wrong.

How to Innovate:

While coordinating your characters’ morality along the lines of Good and Evil is a fine starting point, you’d be wise to complicate things just a little. If you’re familiar with older television shows that had to conform to strict content guidelines, you know that stories with clearly defined morals of Good and Evil can come off as inauthentic or even cheesy.

That’s why it’s wise to complicate your characters with some moral “gray area.”

In practice, this “gray area” means blending Good traits with Evil ones. For example, your heroic, selfless Hero may struggle with some amount of selfishness (like fear or an instinct for self-preservation). This struggle is believable and easily related to by your reader.

Similarly, complicate your villains with some “Good” traits. It is often these enduring traits, like kindness or loyalty, that make readers fall in love with despicable characters, like Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter.

Then there are characters whose moral compass is wildly uncertain. Known as the Shapeshifter, this character will often swing back and forth between Good and Evil traits, ultimately choosing between selflessness and selfishness. One such beloved character is Captain Jack Sparrow.

2. Haven vs. Wilderness

It isn’t just characters that should find themselves sorted between two opposing forces. Settings should, too.

The ultimate purpose of your story’s setting is to provide textured resistance to your Hero’s pursuit of the goal. While it may often be beautiful, it should always be dangerous. And while your settings may include pockets of safety and security, those pockets must be under threat or limited to a deadline.

Put simply, locations in your world exist on a spectrum stretching between Haven and Wilderness.

A Haven is a place of safety and restoration. Not only will your Hero needs moments to pause and restore his/her supplies and spirit, but your reader needs these locations as well. Haven settings function as waypoints. They are often locations the Hero travels to in order to find a clue or tool that helps on the journey.

And while a Haven may be a place of relative safety, it must always be under threat from within or without. The enemy is not far behind. A spy lurks within. Or a ticking clock forces the Hero to quickly move on.

Then the Hero resumes his or her journey into the Wild. And the Wilderness can be both a physical one (desert, tundra, the vacuum of space, a swamp, the depths of an uncharted forest) and a spiritual one (loneliness, being a foreigner, exile, guilt).

Ideally your story takes the Hero into and through both kinds of locations with the intensity (and resistance to the journey) increasing with every foray into the Wilderness.

How to Innovate:

Readers like to be surprised within the safe context of the familiar. Consider ways that traditional “havens” might be wild and dangerous (especially for introverted or outdoorsy types) and the “wild” might be a comfortable haven.

Many storytellers have found ways to explore the ways that humanity and its creations (machines, the city) can be alienating and deadening. Whenever you flip these locations on their heads, you aim to give the reader a fresh experience.

Just make sure that your Wilderness always resists the Hero’s pursuit of the goal. That is what distinguishes Haven from Wilderness. A Haven restores, while the Wild resists.

3. Nature vs. Machine

This Hero’s Journey trope is incredibly popular and widely used. Have you ever noticed that the good guys are often outgunned? And have you ever noticed that the good guys, to overcome these incredible odds, will rely on clever uses of nature to win?

Many stories do this, from Indiana Jones to Avatar to The Lord of the Rings.

These stories use this theme because it works. There’s something cathartic about the Ents overthrowing Isengard or Indiana Jones taking down a German tank with nothing but a whip, a rock, and his grit.

In the world of your story, Nature is usually represented by trees and animals. Machine, meanwhile, is usually some mechanized weapon, like a tank, helicopter, plane, or some other unnatural creation of man.

This theme represents a harsh truth that many readers know: Man is painfully effective at destroying nature. Through deforestation, pollution, rising ocean temperatures, mass extinctions, and more, mankind is leaving a deathly footprint on the Earth.

Yet even as we all consciously or unconsciously contribute to various natural disasters, we innately want the Earth to win. Nature, after all, is beautiful. Trees and mountains and horses and sunsets are beautiful. Tanks, while “cool,” are not beautiful.

How to Innovate:

The obvious way to implement this theme is through battle.

But there are more subtle ways to bring the reality of this dichotomy into your story.

One way this happens is through spirituality. When a character acts in faith, rather than reliance on technology, the effect is immediate: Audiences love it. Think of the end of Star Wars when Luke uses the Force to destroy the Death Star, rather than his targeting computer. It’s awesome.

You can also layer this conflict in your story’s world through setting description. What kind of violence or destruction against nature is occuring? How is this affecting the characters as they pursue their own goals?

Or consider writing a story where mankind’s attempts to control nature (through machines, of course) fail and go horribly wrong? This especially works when the characters are mindful of this theme and the havoc it wreaks. That’s why Jurassic Park is so beloved over its woeful sequels. It actually dares to ask the tough questions about man, his love of mechanical control, and the wild power of nature to defy anything that would control it.

4. Father vs. Son

I don’t care how great your father or mother is. There is probably something about them that drives you crazy.

That’s the heart of this crucial relationship. Since fathers and sons (and mothers and daughters) are cut from the same genetic cloth, there will always be reason for conflict and reconciliation.

In a Hero’s Journey, this can appear in two ways:

• Your hero is the son/daughter
• Your hero is the father/mother

For examples of the Hero being the son/daughter, think of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Pixar’s Brave.

For examples of the Hero being the father/mother, think of The Odyssey, Freaky Friday, or (one of my absolute favorites) Arrival.

The key is that usually both the Hero and their parent (or child) are both Good. Yet they differ in traits that are Good, and also differ in complicating “Evil” traits as well. These differing values create the difference that result in the conflict that we all know so well from our own lives.

How to Innovate:

The best way to innovate within this theme is to be willing to explore multiple points of view. This is why Freaky Friday is a beloved coming-of-age comedy.

Another crucial method of innovation is to avoid age-specific stereotypes. This will reduce your Father vs. Son relationship to mere name-calling that never penetrates the surface of your characters.

Age, and the experiences that go with it, are entirely relative to each and every individual who has ever lived. No son or daughter feels ignorant, emotional, immature, or unbalanced. In their mind, everything makes complete sense.

And similarly, no father or mother feels strict, cranky, unfair, or uncool (well, maybe some do), but not in the way they might be labeled as such by their frustrated children.

In a nutshell, everyone is trapped in their own experience and merits empathy. That’s why you, as the storyteller, need to consider how to give each point of view its own valid weight. Otherwise your story might devolve into stereotypes and assumptions about whatever age group you feel is in the wrong.

5. Sibling vs. Sibling

Whether brothers by birth or brothers by adoption, siblinghood is the perfect dynamic for conflict.

Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers benefited from sibling angst, as the conflict between Nebula and Gamora anchors the plots of multiple films. Shakespeare centered the conflict of King Lear around warring sisters and brothers.

Just as parents and their children share enough traits to call themselves “family” but enough differences to become enemies, siblings experience the same conflict but with an added twist: Competition.

Rarely do parents and children compete for the same prizes. While parents are busy trying to make money, their kids are trying to win sports competitions, love, or god-knows-what. But two brothers can easily compete for the same pretty girl’s affections. Two sisters can easily go to war over the same stockpile of scholarships.

That’s why we’ve all heard of sibling rivalry.

And it begins young. Even now, my five-year-old daughter is learning to share time, food, toys, and her parents’ affections with her baby brother who hasn’t learned to say “Please” or “Thank you.” She’s doing all the heavy (sacrificial) lifting. It’s by God’s grace alone that she hasn’t tried to sell him on Ebay!

Centering your story’s conflict around two feuding siblings taps into age-old tension that your readers will understand quite well. It’s also something you can use for side characters (like Nebula and Gamora), villainous henchmen, or the primary antagonist of the story (Thor’s sister in Ragnarock).

How to Innovate:

Perhaps the most overused version of this relationship pits brother against brother as enemies. This dates back to myths of Oedipus’s children, when his sons kill each other in civil war.

And while the siblings-as-protagonist-and-antagonist form can still be relevant, it may be far more interesting to your reader to put both siblings on the same side and force them to work together. How will they overcome their individual ambitions to achieve a common goal? How will they maneuver the challenges and conflicts of varying traits (some of which are self-serving, or “Evil”) in order to stay united?

This duel-protagonist structure can work with brothers, sisters, or both. Avengers: Age of Ultron had it both ways, as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are twins recruited to fight the Avengers, only to be recruited to the side of “Good” before the story’s end.

Opposites Are Attractive to Your Readers

Each of these themes takes two similar things and shows the contrast between their two extremes:

• Morality: Good and Evil
• Human Inhabitability: Haven and Wilderness
• Naturalism: Nature and Machines
• Reproduction and Age: Father/Mother and Son/Daughter
• Children in the Same Family: Siblings

When you craft your story in a way that explores these extremes, readers will love it. You reap the benefit of exploring familiar themes, but in new ways that are unique to the world of the story you are telling.

So how will you implement these situational, relational archetypes in your next Heroic Journey?

Can you think of examples of any of these Hero’s Journey themes? Are there other opposing pairs you find in stories? Share in the comments below!

The post 5 Essential Hero’s Journey Themes and Symbolic Archetypes That Will Thrill Your Readers appeared first on The Write Practice.

https://wordtothewise.com/2020/01/when-opens-hurt-reputation/

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails.

I get maybe a dozen of this style of email a week. It’s pretty annoying but whatever. I delete them, blog about them or, very occasionally, share them with some folks who might have a big bigger of a stick to wave at them.

I have to admit, this time I spent about 30 seconds considering adding a note onto that article. A brilliant example of cold email that should go to the spam folder is from PodiaHQ, aka podia.com. My only hesitation is that gives them what they want, and antisocial behaviour should never be encouraged. Plus, then I’d have to actually think about something else to blog about today and it’s 4:30 already. Then I realised this is exactly the thing to illustrate how opens can hurt your delivery.

Wait. What? Opens don’t hurt delivery! An open is a positive signal, isn’t it? The user opened and read the mail this is good. Except…. when a user opens an email, gets half way through it and then immediately marks it as spam.

Using opens as a metric for who to continue mailing without also having FBLs to identify which of those opens resulted in a this is spam hit, leads to an increase in mail to folks who don’t want it and/or are receiving the message in their spamfolder because they marked the sender as spam. Longer term it can lead to reputation problems.

In the consumer context opens are a way for us to tell who is reading our mail. FBL messages are a way for us to remove anyone who doesn’t like that mail. By processing FBL complaints, folks who open the mail and then complain about it are removed from future mailings. We don’t end up with a build up of ‘engaged’ users who are not engaged at all.

The obvious exception to this is being Gmail as they don’t have an ARF style FBL. But even then, if you have a decent enough reputation Gmail will show the user a “do you want to unsubscribe, too” message. We can sorta wiggle around the lack of FBL data by treating unsubscribes through the List-Unsubscribe header as spam complaints.

That’s not how it works for B2B. There are no FBLs for business mail. Many business users do have a this-is-spam button, though. That this-is-spam button ties directly into their filtering system. What you end up with is an audience that opens a message and reports it as spam. That open is now a negative signal, not a positive one.

I think our spammer friends at Podia haven’t made the connection that their advice causes delivery problems. Or, maybe they have which is why they’re using podiahq.com in their emails instead of podia.com. Ironically, they’re not putting much effort into the subject line here. A few months ago I was toying with the idea of sharing all of the stupid B2B spam I get. I collected over 2 dozen cold outreach emails just by searching for the subject line ‘Quick Question’.

The broader picture here is that we can’t just look at metrics in isolation, particularly when we’re troubleshooting delivery. Only mailing engaged users, when you’re not also getting back complaint data, means some of the folks you’re mailing aren’t users who want your mail. At best they’re getting the mail in the spam folder due to ISP metrics. At worst the spam foldering isn’t working and they end up repeatedly reporting your mail as spam.

We make assumptions about what signals to measure and what they mean. In order to correctly model what’s happening with delivery we need to question those assumptions regularly.

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-google-make-retargeting-harder-how-to-prepare/

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore how to prepare for Google’s plans to block third-party cookies and the expansion of Facebook’s Clear History […]

The post Facebook and Google Make Retargeting Harder: How to Prepare appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.