Three Ways To Avoid Becoming a Mediocre Brand

When things are going well, it’s easy to slip into a routine.

And when you slip into a routine, it’s easy to stop progressing. It’s too easy to think past success will keep creating future success.

You risk not keeping up with the market. You risk competitors overtaking you. And you risk becoming mediocre.

This week’s newsletter contains tips and strategies to help you excel and escape mediocrity.

This Week:

• Marketing: Why Metrics Don’t Matter

• Branding: Would Anyone Care If Your Brand Disappeared?

• Advertising: How to Make Any Ad Memorable

• Five-Bullet Book Summary: Momentum by Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao

• Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Advertising’s Past, a Writing App, and Brainstorming

Marketing: Why Metrics Don’t Matter

Businesses have become obsessed with metrics.

This metric fixation is the byproduct of an unhealthy obsession with outcomes - the movement of a nonexistent needle - that conflates measurement with progress.

It's not that metrics aren't valuable: it's helpful to know where you are and where you're going. The problem occurs when businesses obsess about outcomes.

This outcome obsession has resulted in measuring the what and often ignoring the why and how. As economist W. Edwards Deming writes, "A numerical goal accomplishes nothing. … What counts is the method —by what method? … If you can accomplish a goal without a method, then why were you not doing it last year?"

Outcomes are byproducts of methods operating in complex systems. An improved outcome doesn't necessarily indicate that the complex system is functioning.

Enough pieces may function well enough that some errors get covered up.

By just looking at an outcome, a broken system could appear to function properly.

Without understanding the why and how, disaster can lurk around the corner, or a business may not be taking full advantage of its potential capabilities.

The systems and methods that produce the outcomes are what you need to evaluate, not just the outcomes.

An evaluation must look at the whole picture rather than an arbitrary outcome —much less a single outcome.

Do you pay too much attention to the outcome rather than the systems and methods?

• The W. Edwards Deming quote comes from The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education.

Branding: Would Anyone Care If Your Brand Disappeared?

75% of brands could disappear, and nobody would care.

Customers would move on. They'd find someone else. Their lives wouldn't have the slightest interruption.

Most brands are replaceable.

That is a big problem.

However, it isn't a surprising problem because most brands don't stand for something. And a brand that doesn't stand for something can only produce commodities. Only the people working for the company believe there is a brand. Customers don't.

75% of brands are just commodities by another name.

What a brand stands for doesn't have to be big: Heinz ketchup just stands for making your food consistently delicious. But it has to consistently stand for something relevant to your customers: Heinz has invested millions in research to develop ketchup that is chemically more delicious than other brands for a large segment of customers.

Even restaurants that produce everything in-house often still use Heinz ketchup. They know they can't equal the taste.

To be one of the 25% of brands that matter to customers, you must stand for something relevant to your customers. And you must constantly reinforce that stance.

Only when you consistently stand for something relevant to your customers will they care if you disappear.

Otherwise, you're just a replaceable commodity. Not a brand.

• The "75% of brands could disappear and nobody would care" statistic comes from Havas's Meaningful Brands report.

Advertising: How To Make Any Ad Memorable

If customers don't remember an ad, it failed.

Forgotten ads don't influence decision-making. They fade from memory. And they get replaced by more memorable products.

Forgetting leads to advertising failure.

But there's one tactic that can increase any ad's likelihood of being remembered. It doesn't come from advertising. It comes from one of the greatest theater directors, Peter Brook.

It's called The Acid Test.

Brook spent his life examining what it means to get to the heart of the theater: How to make an audience care about and understand the essence of the play. And remember it for the rest of their lives.

In his seminal work The Empty Space, Peter Brook introduces the concept of The Acid Test - a simple criterion for determining the difference between a lousy theatre production and a great one.

Here it is: does the theater production contain a single moment that, if recalled, a spectator can remember what the play was about years after the show ends?

That's it.

But, think about how powerful of a test it is: Years after you've seen a show, the only thing left is a memory; you're not going to remember all the details. But if there's one moment burned into your mind that captures the essence of the play, it was able to connect with you on a meaningful level.

In movies, these are the moments we often see in highlight reels, moments that bring back memories and make us want to recapture the way they made us feel: Garland's "There's No Place Like Home" at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Brando's "I Could've Been A Contender" speech in On The Waterfront, or Bogart sending away Bergman at the airport in Casablanca.

Great ads aren't any different.

Think about advertising: How many great ads have a memorable image that captures the essence of the ad and the brand? I'd bet every one of them. How many bad ads don't have an image that captures the essence of the ad and the brand? I'd bet every one of them again.

Apple's 1984 ad has it: the image of the runner entering the crowd of drones says everything.

Bernbach's "Think Small" ad for the Volkswagen Beetle captures both elements too: the image and the two-word phrase say it all (the text adds to the story, but the essence is there in the image).

Or, look at George Lois's Esquire covers: Andy Warhol sinking in a Campbell's soup can. Or, Muhammad Ali, hands tied behind his back, pierced by a barrage of arrows: clear images that sell the cover story by conveying the core idea in one clear picture.

All these shows, ads, and covers have one thing in common: they're created by people who fully understand who their audiences are and what they're really offering to their audiences.

Great theatre productions and great ads can't be built without this understanding. And without that understanding your ads won't be memorable.

So, next time you evaluate an ad, ask, "Does it pass the acid test?"

Five-Bullet Book Summary: Momentum by Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao

When you’re pressed for time, you’re more likely to default to routine behavior.

And one of the biggest time killers is meetings.

This week’s book is one of my favorite books on maximizing the effectiveness of meetings, Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings by Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao.

What it teaches you:

​How to run meetings that don’t waste time or resources.

The big idea:​

You should hold meetings only when there is a clear desired outcome and when the group can get more done together than people can on their own. Meetings should never be for sharing of information. You should have a clear agenda to achieve an outcome. You should state the desired outcomes specifically so people know what the end product of the meeting is (think in terms of nouns, not verbs). And those outcomes should fall under one of six categories:

1. Decide: Come to a clear decision with everyone clear on their next steps.

2. Ideate: Come up with ideas.

3. Produce: Work together to create or modify a product or deliverable.

4. Plan: Establish a roadmap for getting something done.

5. Align: Get everyone on the same page.

6. Connect: Build rapport.

Two key ideas:

​1. Limit invitees to only people who are necessary to achieve the specific outcome. You can inform stakeholders through email without forcing them to attend the meeting to stay in the loop.

2. When meetings rule a leader’s calendar, it sucks their time and energy and inhibits them from deep thinking. This hurts their own productivity. It also hurts the organization because leaders have less time and energy to do what they should do: think strategically and innovate.

A quote that stuck with me:

​“No one would tolerate knowingly wasting 5–10 percent of the budget, so why do we allow that to happen with our time?”

Three Other Things I'm Paying Attention To: Advertising's Past, a Writing App, and Brainstorming

• Advertising's Past: Studying the history of a field gives you a lot of insight into its present. Last year, I started a project of reading and re-reading all of the classic books on advertising. I made it up to 1966 with Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. Next, I'll take a detour back to 1942 with a book I missed: How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab. The biggest theme I noticed is that every book rails against advertisers driven by opinions instead of data. I guess little has changed.

• Writing App: There's one app I recommend more than any other: Scrivener. I do all my writing on it (including this newsletter). It's the best app I've found for organizing writing and research. It's much easier to keep your writing organized than typical document-based programs. If you do a lot of writing, you should check it out.

• Brainstorming: Last week, I wrote about 100 MPH thinking and the importance of creating a lot of ideas when brainstorming. This week, I came across a worthwhile read on some practices you should incorporate to get the most out of a brainstorming session. It's "The business breakthrough you need is a meeting you've never heard of" by Anita Stubenrauch. Stubenrauch wrote Apple's credo, which is used to recruit and train employees. You can read it here.