Entries Tagged 'Publicity' ↓

Patrick Hanlon caps his seven assets in Primal Branding with “the leader.”

I expected that he would proclaim the need for a single, charismatic leader: a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, a Jack Welsch.

He lists those, but he also lists more subdued leaders, leaders who base their leadership on their ability to listen, to have vision, to manage multiple skills.

Tomes have been written on leadership, and Hanlon doesn’t dig too deep. He does even give an example of non-traditional leadership such as at the advertising group Mother that has eliminated the role of account executive.

And that’s an important note: just like a brand can have more than one sacred word or more than one icon, it can also have more than one leader.

Indeed, we want many leaders. Our job is to cultivate, train, and empower people to be leaders.

And when we nurture leaders, we give followers and not-yet-leaders something they can connect to, which is what Primal Branding is about.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo: National Archives)

Patrick Hanlon takes a broad view of ritual. He sees any repeated process, whether it’s settling an insurance claim, getting married, or using an ATM as a ritual.

So what does this have to do with Primal Branding and making an emotional connection with your audience?

If you take a thought approach to these many repeated interactions, you have the ability to create a powerful, positive, and remarkable experience for your audience.

Here are some examples:

• Aveda salons have made their “welcome the customer” ritual include giving them herbal tea and a scalp massage,
• Progressive Insurance has made their “accident claim response” ritual involve sending an agent to the accident scene to write a check on the spot,
• Lego made their “welcome toy professionals” ritual that reminded the adults what life is like for kids from birth through adolescence.

I can fully see how these rituals would make the customers build stronger connections to the companies.

What does this mean for a community organizer?

Think about some of the rituals you have with your members, volunteers, and activists:

• What are your rituals for thanking volunteers? For thanking donors?
• What are your rituals for welcoming new members?
• What are your rituals for starting meetings? For ending meetings?
• What are your rituals for starting presentations?

How can you make these experience special and pleasant for people?

Here are a few ways to implement this that come to mind for ICPJ:

• Begin all our events with something for spiritual grounding. We often do this already. It can be tricky, since “interfaith” isn’t a religion, but offering something to ground our events in a sense that peacemaking is a spiritual act is a way to make a meaningful ritual.
• Enthusiastically welcome new members. How can we create a process where new people immediately feel warmly welcomed, connected to the community, and invited to get more involved?

What are your rituals? How can you make them more positive for your audience?

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo by ionushi)

Primal Branding describes icons as “quick concentrations of meaning that cuase your brand identity and brand values to spontaneously resonate.”

They can be images, sounds, smells, textures, characters, tastes that resonate with your audience. Here are a few examples:

• The OXO “fins”
• The VW Beatle
• The Apple startup tone
• Mickey Mouse
• Wedding Dresses
• Oreos
• Gandhi
• The smell of an Aveda salon (yes, they are conscious of it)
• yellow ribbons

An icon gives your audience something concrete to latch onto. Hanlon doesn’t explain how to create this, it may well be an intuitive process that is more felt than taught. He does share some lessons from some folks in the business of icons. I must admit, though, I’m left wondering what in the world ICPJ could use as an icon.

I’m open for ideas.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post)

The second asset that Patrick Hanlon describes in creating a Primal Brand is a creed.

What is it you believe in? What are you about?

The focus of Primal Branding, after all, it to get people to believe in you. How can they believe in you if you don’t believe in anything yourself.

Hanlon lists some effective creeds:

• All men are created equal [and women!]
• Save the whales
• It’s the real thing

A creed is the thought that lies behind a mission statement, though your creed may not be a long, formal, or stuffy as most mission statements are. It may tie in with your tagline or motto. Whatever it you call it, it’s how you and your audience know what you are about. It ties in with Guy Kawasaki’s call to “make mantra” in The Art of the Start.

At the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, I think there are two elements to our creed, and hashing them out is something we need to work on.

One part of our creed is that we believe that we make peace by bringing people from different faiths and backgrounds together around our shared concern for justice. We are stronger together, and ICPJ brings us together.

The other part of our creed is that we believe that peacemaking is a spiritual act, so we offer “social change with spirit.”

When I speak, I do speak about our origin story, which ties in to our creed of being stronger together. It does help people know where we came from and what we’re about.

What do you believe in? How do you communicate that to your audience?

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post)

The first asset that Patrick Hanlon identifies in Primal Branding is the origin story.

This tells where the group, product, or person comes from and indicates where it is going. It provides context. It provides something for people to connect to.

Often, a creation story invokes a quest or a vision for the future. For example, Nike’s founding story involves trying to create the perfect running shoe. Starbucks’ founding story is about serving the perfect cup of coffee. MoveOn’s tells of trying to get the country to move on from the attempts to impeach Clinton and get on with the business of the country.

Creation stories also often involve overcoming adversity. FedEx’s founder going on to start the company after his marketing prof. laughed at him. A free South Africa emerging despite the oppression of the Afrikaner minority.

Storytelling guru Andy Goodman recommends that every nonprofit have a bank of stories at hand, one of which is the creation story, and I’ve found it useful to be able to tell ICPJ’s creation story to explain our origins in bringing people together from different faiths and backgrounds to work for peace.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post)

Primal Branding is a take on how to create something that people connect to on an emotional level–something they believe in.

Whether it’s a product, a cause, a company, a movement, a person, a religion, or whatever, Patrick Hanlon discusses his take on how to make this into a powerful, “primal brand” that people connect to.

Hanlon identifies seven pieces of the “primal code” that help create something (he uses “brand” to refer to all of these) that people connect to:

• the creation story,
• the creed,
• the icons,
• the rituals,
• the pagans,
• the sacred words, and
• the leader.

I’ll take a look at these seven pieces and how Hanlon brings them together in subsequent posts.

But first, does his premise makes sense for community organizations.

It depends.

For organizations like ICPJ, the NAACP, MoveOn, I think it does. Even if we’re wicked-effective, we won’t have funders or activists if we don’t create positive, emotional connections with people.

For some organizations, however, I don’t think it does. I’m not convinced that GetDowntown needs people to believe in the organization to convince people to change their commuting behavior. They do need businesses and employees to believe that biking, bussing, carpooling, walking, or telecommuting are good commuting choices, but they may not need a “primal brand.”

If Peter Brinkerhoff is right, I sure do.

That is, if I want to reach younger audiences. In his latest Mission Based Management Newsletter he writes,

My daughter Caitlin, who is a college sophomore and 19, informed me last summer in no uncertain terms that “no one uses email, no one listens to voice mail, Dad.“

And this is a story I’ve heard from other people in higher ed.

Last night, ICPJ hosted a Dinner and a Movie, and let me just say that the crowd was decidedly not of the Facebook generation. So, if we want to stay relevant (or maybe become relevant) to a younger generation, this tells me that we’re going to need to actively invest in working with them on their terms, using their technology.

Facebook it is.

Just don’t make me twitter.

When you have an event, your energy and excitement peaks before the first guest walks in the door. By the time the event is over, you’re exhausted.

For your attendees, however, their energy peaks at and right after the event.

Here’s how it looks if you’re an organizer:

Your guests, however, have a different experience. It looks like this:

What does this mean?

First, it means that your attendees are most ready to take further action and to get more involved right after the event, right when your energy is at its lowest.

That means you need to plan your follow up before your event!

You have a golden opportunity to cement your attendees’ commitment to your cause immediately after it finishes. That’s when they will be most receptive to action alerts, fund appeals, or just a feel-good “thank you for attending” email.

So plan that follow up while your energy is high. Plan what you will do to keep in contact with your attendees. Create the infrastructure. Even draft the emails you will send out.

By the time you get back to the office after the event, exhausted as you are, you want to be ready just to do a very little bit of tweaking and data entry to get your follow-up to your attendees.

Follow-up is like gold for increasing commitment to your cause. Don’t lose that chance by neglecting to plan for what happens after your last guest goes home.

In the chapter “Taking Troy,” in Begging for Change, Roger Egger introduces the idea of the “calculated epiphany.”

His thinking goes like this. Folks are overwhelmed with direct messages about problems and programs. Those messages don’t work anymore. So you need a stealth way to change their worldview. You need a marketing Trojan Horse that will slip past the gates.

You need a calculated epiphany.

Here’s an example. The for-profit catering firm made up of DC Central Kitchen grads caters a black tie reception. At the end of the night, Egger introduces the kitchen and wait staff, gets a round of applause for them, and then tells folks that they are homeless or formerly homeless. The power of their transformation impresses people and gets them to start changing their ideas about the homeless. (Of course, this would only work after the dinner and after the guests have eaten good food and gotten good service.)

So far, so good. I agree this is a powerful way to change people’s views.

But I disagree with Egger when he takes to task some of the print ads and how they use emotion to make their point.

For example, he critiques an ad by the Ad Council and America’s Second Harvest. The add is a tear-jerker with the picture of a young (white) girl and the text:

Julie is cold. She has chicken skin, she says. She woke up in the middle of the night shivering because I turned the heat down. I’m afraid if my bill gets too high I won’t have any money left for food. I pull Julie close and hug her tight. She says she will be fine-she knows she’s not really a chicken.

Egger makes two critiques of this ad. First, he asks “now what?”  Here I agree with him. There isn’t a call to action. The ad doesn’t lead people to do anything.

His proposed ad reads like this:

Everyday, Second Harvest Food Banks save empowerment programs across this country tens of millions of dollars so they can focus on job training, literacy classes, and after-school program so that families like this can live independently

Second harvest-Using Food as a Tool to Combat Hunger and Build Communities, one family at a time.

I ask Egger the same question, “now what?” What do you want me to do?

Also, Egger asserts this will be a more effective ad. I want to see the evidence. Most of the research I’ve seen says that emotion compels action, not statistics and arguments.

Here Egger is acting on ideology, not evidence, and I find it disappointing.

Jeff Brooks at the Donor Power Blog shares the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer.

What does it do? It measures the emotional impact of the words in your headline. Headlines with more emotional impact are more likely to be read. This helps you test the emotioanl impact of your headlines

It’s an interesting tool, but it’s only part of the story. It’s also important to have a headline that conveys informaiton and benefit.

An example: “Emotional Marketing Headline Analyzer” to me sounds like a useless piece of jargon, but it get’s a score of 60%. The headline I used only got a score of 14.29%. Which headline would you have read?