Thank’s for the prompt, Tom! Happy Christmas to you all!

Strategic Sock Innovation Heaven?

I am indebted to Rosa for bringing to my attention the Gallo Strategic Sock Vending Machine made available by the stlylish Milanese at Linate. I think we should all undertake an immediate storecheck- obviously with the correct coins and the appropriate hosiery

P is Provenance

Wasn’t it Balzac who said ‘le milieu explique l’homme’?  Which is probably why he spent so long describing in minute detail the shop soiled tawdryness of Rastignac’s Paris.

But if the place does explain the man, it also enriches him beacause place sells.…big time.

Place and branding have always gone hand in hand- an area’s reputation has probably always had an enriching halo effect on local people, products and services. Check out Sodom and Gommorah or the brand image of the Babylonians among the Egyptians!

A  Short Gazetteer of Brands :  feel free to add, modify or discard, Jeremy!

Arbroath smokies; Amalfi lemons; Bakewell tart; Cornish pasties; Dublin Bay prawns; Eccles cakes; Florentines; Gouda;  Hildon Water; Isigny creme fraiche; Jersey Royals; Kentucky Fried Chicken’; Lancashire hot pot; Melton Mowbray pork pies; Madras curry; New England clam chowder; Oleron oysters; Parma ham; Patagonia; Quiche Lorraine;  Roquefort; Sisteron lamb; Thai Green curry; Udon noodles; Viennoisserie; Vougeot; Wensleydale; Xeres (look it up!); Yorkshire Pudding; Zanzibar cloves

H is for Habit

‘Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior‘*

Catullus, the Roman love poet was the first great blogger of the love/ hate/love thing- in his case it was addressed to a young lady called Lesbia, who  may have been- for him -hors de combat anyway, but that’s another story.

For  marketeers, the equivalent of Lesbia  is habit.

My, do marketing folk  like a well established day-in, day-out piece of behaivour- an autopilot fix that we can’t do without,  and if most people are are doing it or want to do it, then it’s a short satisfying jog to big volume,  brand heaven. In this Nirvana will be found all the usual suspect high penetration, high frequency giants

But what if there is no habit established already?- ‘So what does a wheel do exactly?’ asked the caveman. It’s actually not so exciting to get an MP3player if you haven’t gone up a rudimentary learning curve in digital music and have no access to some MP3’s. There may be a wonderful new category opportunity just in front of you- but if only you can find the postioning moonletters to uncover the white space and a marketing idea to light the blue touch paper of consumer familiarity. Smnirnoff Ice was an overnight $ 1 billion  success that actually took 10 years.

On the other hand, what if existing behaivour is so ingrained it’s difficult to establish innovative variations even when you can show a benefit. So called low interest categories dominate here: toothpaste, canned foods, margarines and spreads. The marketplace is littered with the shipwrecks of interesting bids to  subvert a competitor with a subtle habit shift that didn’t quite succeed- herbs from the freezer, liquid coffee concentrate, or in the case of yogurt liqueurs didn’t come close to succeeding.

So Habit- I hate and I love you, but I gotta have you.

*’I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perchance you might ask?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening to me and I’m burning up.’

Strategic Waiver

Why do US socks  seem to apply a strategic waiver?  Why are Manhattan socks  so dull? Stripe up your marketing, chaps!

S is for Sacrifice

One of my earliest experiences of strategic thinking was when I was learning to play chess and coping with the somewhat counter intuitive idea of offering up  a piece in order to win an advantage and force a checkmate. Sacrifice is one of the most important stratagems of chess and so it is with branding.

The best brands are as much defined by what they are not, as by what they are. Guinness may have a challenging taste which is why it does not mean the same as Budweiser. There is a greedy and myopic kind of brand management that sees  a competitive image weakness as an opportunity to be ‘fixed,’  perhaps by some me- too line extension. The risk of course is of blurring brand meaning and weakening brand differentiation. A brand is not the same as a bland, as all Stratgegic Sockists know.

So go on, what are you are going to give up to win?

F is for Frame of Reference

Branding is a good way of  making complex or unfamiliar items accessible to people. Why this matters came home to me recently while reading C.J Sansom’s marvellous historical crime novel  ‘Dark Fire’

It’s 1540, and the lawyer Matthew Shardlake is at a Tudor banquet in the city of London where he is offered one of those ‘edible, yellow things from the New World that have been raising eyebrows since they arrived last month’ The phallic,  ’sweetest fruit of the New World’ provokes  shocked interest amongst his fellow diners. His first bite is  actually not very pleasant but when he sees people peeling back skins, he tries a second bite, but remains pretty unconvinced.

What this vignette shows is that defining what things are is lot harder than describing what things are like.

Moving to more modern times, does your computer actually crash? Does it really have a virus? Why is a mouse called a mouse?  All of these examples ofcontemporary technology  show that humans respond well to analogical reference points and that postioning without a good frame of reference is doomed to failure

C is for Choice

A trip to the Relais de Venise is the antidote to the mindless choices of a world gone option crazy- there is one starter, one main course and if you are a vegetarian, there is good and bad news- you do get cheese and a pud for your £19 but no ‘main course’ as such. And you know what,even in credit cruched London, they are still queuing at 9 o’clock on rainy Tuesday evening. So much for choices

Put a sock in it!

For such a fundamentally human activity, there is a shocking amount of uninspiring  mechanistic dullness written about marketing.

The mission of Strategic Socks is to make marketing accessible and fun.

Enjoy!