[MUSIC]

Once upon a time we worked with a client who was a manufacturer and

I'm not gonna say what kind of manufacturer in case they guess

it doesn't have a happy ending this story.

They were a manufacturer and so they had their manufacturing division and

their sales and marketing.

And their installation in other parts of the company, their dealer network.

And we worked with just their marketing department.

We reported to their director of marketing.

And when they started working with us their main

pain was that they were spending too much on paper clip campaigns.

Great, we'll fix that.

We reduced their cost per click.

We drove three times as many leads with the same kind of spend.

And all of those magical things look great in a case study.

But then, as we worked with them more and

more we saw that thing weren't quite right.

There were views or terrible like

just really awful reviews and this was back when before Google made you

use your real name to leave reviews so they were like, that's our competition.

I go, okay.

And one of them was obviously their competition, they left bad reviews for

every company in town except for the company they worked at.

Okay, legit.

But then there was more and more bad reviews.

And they were persistent bad reviews.

Like that person was so mad, that they would write a bad review and

then leave it on every possible review site, including ones we didn't even know

of until we saw the brand name pop up in our search.

Okay, they're really mad.

And so we bring this to the marketing department and

say, hey, maybe you could fix this.

And they'd say, that's installation's problem.

It's like, well, it's kind of your problem because we can actually see

your conversion rate going down.

We can see more searches for your brand name reviews,

we can see more searches for your brand name sucks.

That's not what we wanna have.

And they say, no, that's installation's problem.

Like can you please take $1,000 out of your marketing budget, and make this

right for this other angry, angry, angry person who continues to leave reviews.

No we can't do that either.

So it got to the point where we felt gross marketing this company.

They had all the right things, right?

They had a good reputation, if you hadn't bought their stuff yet.

They had Better Business Bureau logo.

They didn't have any outstanding cases.

They won Canada's 50 best employers to work at award, which is not really

an award you win, it's an award you pay for but people don't know that.

They had all the awards and they looked reputable.

So as marketers we felt like we couldn't keep marketing this product, it was wrong.

And for them, they couldn't get their different departments together

to solve the fundamental issues.

Their marketing did not match their reality, and this happens a lot.

In organizations now, you have one person who does your digital marketing and

you have someone else at the radio station who writes your ads and puts them out.

And then you have your customer service department, your call center, and

they have their own training manuals and training guides and what to say and

what not to say.

And then you have your social media team who's basically making it up as they go

along, right?

And I'm sure they're all nice people,

but they don't necessarily work in the same department.

They may not work at the same company.

This could be all outsourced different agencies.

And so they're not working together and we talk about silos and

breaking down the silos but really at the end of the day it isn't just

the silos within marketing, it's the silos within your entire organization.

And what happens as a result of this is that your brand is broken.

Your brand is not delivering the kind of experience that it should,

and so we're gonna fix that.

Your brand is your promise, your brand says,

if you go with us, this is what's gonna happen.

And different brands have different kinds of promises.

If you do marketing for Comcast, you have a difficult job.

I think Comcast is basically the only American company I consistently hear

bad things about, like not even one good story ever.

So if you're here from Comcast, I'm sorry.

That's got to be a hard job, please write a memoire.

I will read it.

>> [LAUGH] >> But you're brand is your promise.

Right, now Comcast promise is, well, you're stuck with us, right?

And that's what they're trying for.

But if you think about your own brand,

and what you're promising people, does that promise actually match the reality?

And it's more than marketing.

It's more than your promoted tweets, it's more than your radio ad,

it's more than your billboard, it's how you're greeted when you walk into a store.

It's when you call somebody what does it sound like?

Whenever clients we called them and I said put me on hold I wanna hear what it

sounds like and it was fuzzy radio like okay, so let's fix that.

It's stuff like that, and

it's all these different things that come together to make a brand.

And so, you're probably looking at this right now and

saying, Dana I don't have control over these things, that's ridiculous.

But when you're done with the brand strategy

which we're gonna walk through today.

You should, or you will.

So for example, looking at this list, I'm sure you're adding up in your mind

what you actually have control over at your job.

Maybe it's one small part of this, maybe it's several pieces.

You think vehicles, I don't have control over vehicles.

Maybe I can put a wrap n it, so our logo's on it, and therefore it's branded.

But it's not really branded, because if I get cut off by your truck on the road,

I have now had a bad brand experience.

I am mad at you, and I can't call, because we have hands-free cell phone laws.

So I'm just gonna sit there and see that your stupid company and your stupid truck.

And I'm gonna feel a little less happy, if I wanna buy your products and

services later.

I'm gonna feel a little bit less excited about buying your products.

And that is the essence of creating that good

brand experience, getting away from the bad things that take away from the brand,

and instead building a solid foundation.

For example, this is a airline in Canada, WestJet.

They do fly to US destinations.

If you like to visit Canada, they're very nice.

They're very, very friendly, and if you've been in Western Canada you will know about

the friendliness that you experience there.

It's like aggressive friendly.

Coming from Ontario originally, it took me a little bit to get adjusted to it.

I was used to grumpy Toronto and people were so nice.

[LAUGH] But for West Jet, they have,

they're very family friendly, this is their magic plane.

It doesn't just fly to Orlando, it flies around, and

if you tweet, hey I spotted the magic plane and use the hashtag,

apparently they toss you some credits for flight on WestJet which is pretty cool.

But they do this thing every Christmas,

and I don't know how many of you here have seen this.

They call it the WestJet Christmas miracle.

And it will make you cry, so don't watch it now.

Maybe like on your break in the corner so you can weep.

One that really stuck with me is there was a flight from Toronto to Calgary which is

about a four or four and a half hour flight.

And when you were at the gate there was a little video box and

there's Santa saying hey, what do you want for Christmas?

And you said to Santa what you wanted,

some people said socks, some other people said a TV.

They guy who said socks probably regretted it.

>> [LAUGH] >> And then, the plane takes off,

they're like oh, WestJet, they're so cute.

They asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

They get to Calgary, they get off the plane,

and instead of luggage, out comes there presents.

In the four hours the plane's in the air WestJet employees went and

bought everything on that list, and there's crying, there's more crying,

and instead of spending money on a tv campaign, they did this.

And it was a beautiful execution of a digital first campaign.

It's on YouTube, sponsor social, didn't worry about off-line,

it happened, because it was that amazing.

It went around the world, you may have seen it, it was all over Buzzfeed for

a couple of days.

But then, Michaela, our account manager at KickPoint took a flight with WestJet.

And one of the things that they do, part of their brand,

is that they tell funny jokes.

And by funny I mean bad jokes, like puns and stuff.

After you land and while you're taxiing,

because that's really the most boring part of the flight and everybody gets antsy.

So they tell bad jokes.

And usually they're like cheesy like what's brown and sticky, a stick [LAUGH].

But you're a little bit delirious because you've just been on a plane for

four hours so it's hilarious.

And this one time when Michaela took the flight,

the flight attendant told a really.

Inappropriate sexist joke, and half the plane laughed and half the plane went ugh,

and those people felt a little bit less great about WestJet.

Humans like consistency.

We like things to be the same.

We like to have expectations.

Consistency is wide brand restaurants exist.

I have stayed at the Hyatt, all of eight, three times for this conference.

We stayed in three different rooms, I'm sure.

They look the same, like it could be the same room for all I know.

And it's cool because when I get there I know what I'm gonna picture.

We like consistency.

I had to return something from Lenovo, I bought the wrong kind of plug.

And Anthony, my friend Anthony, I was waiting and waiting and

waiting and then he popped on chat.

He says, hey Dana, three exclamation marks, happy hump day,

three exclamation marks.

And then, thank you for contacting Lenovo's Post Sales Customer Service chat,

located at our Global Headquarters in North Carolina.

My name is Anthony,

how may I provide you with extremely satisfying customer service today?

I'm pretty sure the first two lines were actually Anthony and

the third line was not.

[LAUGH] Or so, am I talking to a human or am I talking to a robot or

maybe it's like Skynet, right?

All right, or is it the Lenovo cyborg who's now doing, it felt weird.

And it was like this throughout the entire chat, I was sending screen shots and

sending it around the office.

Because it was just crazy that he felt that he could say happy hump day,

which is funny, but come on.

And then they got this like Lenovo script.

Again, brand inconsistency.

And good marketing feels right.

Good marketing makes someone say,

oh I don't believe in advertising, while they choose Coke versus Pepsi.

Good marketing makes people make decisions that they are unconscious of and

every time you interrupt, every time there's a bad brand experience,

you're making people think.

We do not want people to think, and this is why we need brand strategy.

And this is why digital marketers are uniquely equipped to lead brand strategy.

When I talk to people about brand strategy, in fact,

I was talking to someone this morning while we were walking here and

I was talking about what I'm gonna talk about today.

And he said, yeah, I see that all the time in our locations.

And how people are greeted and all this other stuff.

I see the connections.

And if you're used to working in one little silo, like say radio, or

billboard or some offline traditional channels, you don't necessarily think of

all the different connections that go into that final product, but

digital marketers do.

All of us in this room are able to understand brand in a totally new way,

so I think that we are very well-equipped to go for the future of marketing.

Rand just talked about this,

lots of different speakers today are gonna talk about this.

This is where marketing is going.

The brand that manages to get their stuff together and provide a consistent

brand experience is going to win over their competition, hands down.

So let's get started.

I would like you to picture a brand continuum.

At one end, we have Dove.

Now when I say Dove, I'm sure you think of something.

Women wearing white, people looking in a mirror and crying,

some sort of like sketch, maybe that parody that they did.

And when you think of Protein World,

I imagine you probably think of something a little bit different.

Now Protein World, I don't know how many people know about these ads.

They ran an ad campaign in the UK, a little bit in New York.

And it was a picture of a woman wearing a tiny bikini and it said,

are you beach body ready?

Like I am not beach body ready according to Protein World and I'm okay with that.

I also don't use Dove, I'm somewhere in the middle.

So Dove and

Protein World have two very different brand statements.

This is Protein Worlds, when you read this,

there's some words that really stick out, revolution is one of them.

It's a very aggressive word, right?

Healthier, leaner, fitter, stronger.

Sounds like a Daft Punk song.

But this is their brand statement.

And then this is Dove's.

And this is just a portion of Dove's, Dove's is exceptionally long and

I decided not to give Erika hives and just take a portion of it.

But, confidence, not anxiety, positive relationship,

self-esteem, full potential, and if you put these together,

you can see that at their heart, they're really saying the same thing.

It's all about self-improvement.

It's about making yourself better, one way or the other.

Protein World's is you've got to look good in that bikini.

And Dove is, you're awesome just the way you are.

But they're still self-improvement at their heart.

Their brand strategy is how they execute

on that message of self improvement in very, very different ways.

So when you go back and you start thinking about your brand strategy,

I encourage you to start with your core values.

Maybe you have mission statement, maybe you have none of these things.

Maybe your mission statement says things like, world class or synergies.

Or it doesn't really say anything at all.

But it's a place to start.

Kick Point's core value is we help you do better.

That could be applied to almost anything, we apply it to marketing.

So write down those core values.

I'm sure they exist somewhere, maybe in a dusty document or somewhere.

Let's start with that.

And imagine your company as a person.

Now, marketing agencies,

I wanna say to you, you have to take the good and the bad.

So your persona is not Don Draper

because you can't have the whiskey without the sexism.

It's very specific.

And I see a lot of agencies are like, oh yeah, if our brand's a person,

it's totally Don Draper.

Peggy, I can get that, Don Draper, eh.

But think about how you would express your brand as a human being, and

humans are flawed, no human is perfect.

There are things that make your brand good and there are things that make your brand

bad, and you have to be really honest about both of these things.

Don't just gloss over the bad attributes, this is like therapy for your brand.

We're gonna talk about it, we're gonna cry, maybe some hugging, and

then we're gonna move on.

And really,

I think one of the most perfect expressions of brand as a person is Roger.

If I went around this audience today and I asked a hundred of you,

tell me Moz's core values, you would know.

There's a reason why you're here and you're excited for this, and

it's their core values, the tag fee code.

The givingness that they have for the community, right?

So if I went to your company, and I asked 100 people what your company stood for,

would I get 1 answer or would get 100 different answers?

That's a good sign that you need to start to build your brand strategy.

So we're gonna go through step by step how to make this happen.

So step one is why did this fail before.

If you're at a sufficiently large company, somebody has tried to do this, and

they failed and you want to know why, so you can avoid the same fate.

Think of it like Indiana Jones and when he's looking for the Holy Grail.

And he goes into that room, I'm sure most of you have seen this movie.

And he goes into the room with all the different cups and he has to pick

the Holy Grail and the old knight is there and says choose wisely, right?

And so he goes through the process and he picks, but

instead of picking a Holy Grail, wouldn't that be easy?

Here's our brand strategy!

Instead you're gonna be forensic analyst and figure out why everyone else died

and write it down, and be really honest as to why it died.

Dust off those biz school books, and do a SWOT analysis, and

figure out what is gonna cause havoc for this brand strategy.

And at this point, I strongly recommend getting the C-level on board.

So a couple different tactics for that depending up on how big your company is.

If you're very small company then

it may be very difficult because maybe the founder is maybe a little too involved?

And you need to get them to step back and so

I have a cautionary tale that you can feel free to share.

Someone we know back home is a personal trainer.

And he's building a company, but

he has problems because he is the brand on social media.

And they get a lot of their business from social media.

And so everybody says, oh, I only want to work with that guy, the founder,

I don't wanna work with anybody else.

And so they hire other personal trainers, but it's almost impossible for

people to come in via social and say, well I know you on social but

I guess I'll work out with this guy.

They're not excited about it, they don't stay.

And so he has to let go of his social media and

hand it off, but it's almost been too long now.

It's almost been to the point where it's gonna be really difficult to step back

as that brand.

As a small business, until you have a brand strategy,

until you have a brand voice, you,

whoever is the most prominent person at the company, will be that brand.

No matter what you do.

So building that brand.

Needs to be something that supersedes that person.

I think Moz went through the same thing here actually when they, one of the goals,

I remember Jen Lopez shared a slide and

one of their goals in social media was to be brand on Twitter with followers, yeah.

[LAUGH] And that was a really important goal for them,

because brand has such a strong voice and Moz had to be its own brand, past that.

So that's one way for the C-level if you're a small company.

If you're a bigger company tell them about how much money you're gonna save

by having less angry customers [LAUGH].

That you can take the same budget, don't say less cuz then they'll cut your budget.

You can take the same marketing budget and do more with it.

Because you're gonna be building more brand advocates.

You're gonna be building more happier customers.

And you're also gonna be eliminating something that

we like to call Marketing Debt.

If you don't stand for anything at all.

If you're like, if I say to you, who's your target market.

You could say everybody.

It means really your target market is babies.

No, it's not.

Then you say to them, we need to make sure that we stand for

something, because what's happening is reigning in people who are tire kickers.

We're getting people who are inappropriate customers.

We're getting people who expect things that we are not comfortable delivering.

And we wanna eliminate that marketing debt.

That is time your sales team, or you, or whoever handles new leads is wasting

as a result of inaccurately targeted marketing.

And building a brand strategy is going to make that happen.

It's a pretty powerful argument for the C-level.

Do more with less.

Save time across the board.

They like that sort of thing.

So hopefully, now you've got them on board.

Now, you need to think about the brand is, and what the brand is not.

And I'm gonna show you an example to illustrate this.

Erika from Moz has a great post

on the Salesforce blog about building brand voice and tone.

And I'm sure someone will tweet that out for you, so you have that.

But this is for a wedding invitation company.

So they have the brand is romantic and airy.

In the near future the brand may be elegant and elite.

The brand is not cheap or tacky.

So, to get to this brand,

and the brand is not statements, I recommend a card sorting exercise.

And if you haven't done this before, you get a whole bunch of cards with

things written on them and then you lock someone in a room until they can

sort down the cards down to what you need them sorted down to.

And maybe don't feed them until they do it either.

And don't let them get away with any of this oh,

I can't decide between these two things.

No, no, you need two is, two in the future, and two is not.

That's it, two.

Not six, not three, not oh, I can't decide.

Two.

And I also recommend a couple of things when you're setting up this exercise.

Write about 40 or so words down, but tailor them to your company.

If you make industrial I don't know, power driving machines, for

example, you are not gonna write romantic and airy as two of your brand attributes.

I think.

If you do you have a very specific segment, well done.

But make them specific to your organization.

But try not to influence the process, especially if you're an agency.

Because you do not work there.

They work there.

They know the brand better than you.

Your goal is to learn, draw it from them, and express it back to them.

That's what they're paying you for.

It's not necessarily for you to say,

well, I like this, so they make sure that their target market don't do that.

So write down these 40 or so words on cards,

start with the brand is not, it's a lot easier for people to say, oh,

I don't like that or I don't this, then I do like this.

Think about when the client see the designed pieces.

Right?

They don't start with oh, I really like this.

They're like, I don't like this color of blue.

That's the feedback.

It's not necessarily good feedback, it's frustrating feedback, but it's feedback.

So start with the brand is not.

Then work what the brand is, and then in the near future.

I also recommend don't do it focus group style.

Where you have a bunch of people in a room, because there's always gonna

be one loud person who's gonna end up overruling everybody else.

Try to do it one on one as much as possible.

So that you are getting the real unfiltered feedback.

And as a result of this, you're gonna get some really interesting answers.

And you're actually gonna be able to see where

the problem areas might be once you push out the brand strategy.

If 20 people say this and then five people in this other department say something

completely different, you're gonna have a bad time.

You know this now, so you can prepare for it, add it to you SWOT analysis.

And the next step is Defining Voice and Tone.

And lots of people have talked about this in depth.

Lots of companies have their brand voice and tone out there.

Nelchem has a good one that's publicly available.

Buffer, who makes everything public, has it available out there.

I recommend reading those over.

But I also encourage you strongly brand strategy is more than just voice and

a lot of companies get to voice and then they stop.

They say okay we're good, because voice is something tangible.

It's easy to grab onto and say well this is not what the brand would say or

this is what the brand would say.

What happens is that you have your marketing department speaking one way

because they're all really excited about this brand voice.

And then you have the people answering the phones still going back to the old way of

doing things.

And it's an incomplete implementation and

then they are like this brand strategy stuff doesn't work.

Nevermind, we're never doing that again.

And then you go and

join the dusty skeletons in the room with all the holy grails.

Make sure that your brand strategy transcends just your brand voice.

All that being said, this is an example that we did for a client of ours, they're

called Industry Mailout, they're based in Edmonton and they do e-mail marketing.

Which as you can imagine is a very crowded field, so

they have some things that make them standout.

And what we're working with them on, is to help express those values.

And so in our brand voice document we have right like this, not like this, and why.

This is real examples, a real screen shot from our document.

Please don't only include the bad examples in the document.

It can be really demoralizing, [LAUGH] everything you do is bad, and

I am here to fix it.

You are not the brand police.

You are a brand coach.

So encourage them to write different ways.

Show them why.

Explain it in depth.

Provide really good reasons for why you're asking them to change things.

Or, if they did something good, reinforce the good things.

I included one of the examples where what they wrote was not like this,

but in our document we do have examples where right like this and then we had to

come up with something bad as an example of how not to write to balance it out.

And at this point it's a really good idea to get human resources on board.

They're gonna be a really good ally in this.

If you're a large enough organization that has a human resources person or

department because they make the hiring decisions that bring in the people who

are gonna be implementing this brand strategy.

And one of the interesting things that a well-defined brand strategy does for

your organization is it defines culture fit.

If you interview someone and you say, hey,

can you write a blog post about why accounting is awesome?

300 words, don't worry about spelling or grammar,

just we wanna see a sample of your writing.

And you read this and you think, wow,

this really aligns well with our brand, that's a good hire.

You don't even necessarily need to provide them with the brand both, ahead of time.

In fact, sometimes you shouldn't,

just to see the kinds of information they come back to you with.

And also, as you go through this process, you're gonna have some people who

are gonna say, this is dumb and I refuse to do it.

And you're gonna need each other as an ally, at that point,

to help you solve these things.

Because if you're in a big enough company,

there's gonna be some people who are not gonna want to make this happen.

I also encourage you to keep it really simple.

Your brand strategy is not a 50 page document, it's a business card.

It's something that I could explain to you in less than a minute.

It's something that you could tell me about.

That elevator speech, that 15 second elevator

speech they tell you to do when you start your own business.

That's how your brand strategy should be expressed.

So, are there any German speakers here?

Okay, my German accent is apparently awful.

I went through Google and I tried to get it, I couldn't figure out how to say this.

So, but, you would know what this is saying.

So pretend that I just said this in German.

I'm not going to.

It's seriously half an hour at my house and then my wife said, no, stop.

It's. >> [LAUGH]

>> You're so bad.

This is I'm lovin' it from McDonald's.

And I'm lovin' it, if you're not familiar with the campaign, I mean you're familiar

with the campaign, but you may not be familiar with how it started.

It started as a German campaign made by the German advertising agency.

And it was so good and so successful that they put it around the world.

It's been translated into tons of different languages.

And it has the same core messages regardless of where you are.

And they use I'm Lovin' It,

which is arguably their most successful advertising campaign ever.

It's been their longest running.

Even better than the Big Mac song.

They've been using it for years, and they use it for hiring people,

you're gonna love your job, I'm loving it.

They use it for people who are excited about their food, and

if you see the commercials, and you hear the little ditty that they do and

you immediately think McDonald's, you're not their target market, and that's okay.

Although sometimes they do sell, like I drove past one yesterday and

they're like salads.

I'm like no, that's not why people go to McDonald's, salads.

One thing that's been really interesting about the I'm Loving It campaign is that

McDonald's in North America are actually doing quite poorly.

McDonald's overseas are doing very,

very well because of the different ways that they express the brand.

And so I would encourage you at this point,

if you have international locations, take that brand voice and

take that brand strategy, translate it, get someone who actually speaks

the language to do this not like Google Translate and get international on board.

Read it to them and if it doesn't make sense in their language,

if your using words that don't translate well, and this often

happens when you're thinking of things that translate from German to English,

usually you can figure English into some of their language.

But, if it doesn't make sense to them then you're gonna have a difficult time

selling this brand strategy around the world.

Your brand strategy should be so

simple where people see it and say, oh yeah I get that.

We help you do better.

Okay, I feel like that's a thing I can get behind, I'm loving it,

yes that's a thing I can get behind.

International locations will help you get there.

And so now that you've got all the stuff together.

You've got your brand voice, you're starting to build what this means for

your brand strategy.

How do you sell it to everybody else at the company?

I would encourage you to show the dream.

So this is the dream if you are a cellphone company.

We start with Jess, LochJessMonster on Twitter.

I don't know if that Twitter handle is available,

but feel free to grab it, if it isn't.

Asking her friend, Elle,

do you like Breeze Mobile?I'm thinking about switching to them.

And hopefully,

your social media department is monitoring non @ mentions of your brand.

There is a great study done that said that most brands completely missed those

mentions, please don't.

Hopefully your brand communicated back to them and your social media team knew

exactly what to say because brand voice, like this not like this.

They didn't spend time thinking about whether or not they should reply,

they didn't spend time thinking about what to say, they knew what to say,

and they were able to say it.

And then she did some Googling, she checked out the website.

Breeze.co is not a real website, please don't go there.

We couldn't get it, unfortunately.

Your meta descriptions,

your title tags, are another great place to put in that brand.

You're PPC ads, I can't even tell you how many PPC ads I see

that say the same boring dreck as everybody else and

this is a massive opportunity to stand out with your brand.

When I was at Search Lab in Boston, I talked about, very deeply about PPC

ads and one of the examples I gave was car insurance companies.

And I said, here's three ads, TV ads, from car insurance companies.

It's like, okay, everybody knows the Geico gecko.

Everybody knows Flo from Progressive.

At the East Coast they have an ap called map for you or something like that.

And everybody knew what their ads look like.

Great.

Here's three PPC ads.

Match them up with the brand.

Nope.

I think maybe one or two people got but it was kinda like they were guessing.

Because they all said the same thing.

Save money on car insurance.

My goodness.

What a unique concept.

I've never heard of that industry before.

I think everybody says you can save money on car insurance.

What are you gonna do to stand out?

So think about that in your marketing and how you express yourself.

Why does your brand get tossed aside when it comes to things like pay verticals?

It's okay if your click-through rate is a little bit lower.

This is a radical idea.

It's okay if your click-through rate's a little bit lower because the customers

that you get are gonna be the ones that you want.

I careless about the click through rate on an ad

than I do about the conversion rate on the landing page.

I careless about the conversion rate on the landing page

than I do on the conversion rate from the lead to the sale.

That's really the most important metric.

Don't waste your salespeople's time, get them just the leads that they want.

So Jess is now driving to the store.

Hopefully, the social media people said, hey, where's your nearest store?

Great.

Greg is gonna be there between 4:00 to 9:00 today,

make sure to say hi to him when you get there.

This billboard matches all the other advertising that you've seen.

There's no weird differences.

There's no special that you didn't see on the website.

Maybe it's got a nice, trackable phone number.

Maybe it's got a trackable URL.

The billboard matches, everything else is happening.

And now she's at the kiosk with her giant sack of money.

[LAUGH] And is ready to switch.

And at this point, how was she greeted?

Do the in store displays match everything else that has led her up to this point?

Is Greg behind the counter saying oh yeah, hey yeah I heard from our social media

team you're gonna be coming in and you've got an iPhone 6.

And here's what we can do to switch you over to our service and

here's how long it's gonna take for your phone number and all that stuff.

That's not an impossible dream.

We have the technology, we can build it.

It's not, it's just something that doesn't necessarily happen.

And if that happens people are gonna think that's amazing.

It's not impossible, it's just hard.

And I think that with a brand strategy you can achieve these connections.

And then after she's so happy she switched over her phone.

She actually ended up getting a six plus because she felt the six wasn't enough

like a tablet to hold up to your face.

I have a Moto X, so I make fun of iPhones all the time.

Then she got her email afterwords, and the email also matched

all of the brand touch points that have happened up to this point.

It wasn't one of those, dear customer,

we understand you've had a recent experience with us at Breeze Mobile.

Please fill out this survey for a chance to win a gift card.

Do people actually win those gift cards?

Is it like Publisher's Clearing House?

I always wondered and I filled them out.

I've been with my same cellphone provider for, I think, 18 years now and

I have always filled them out and I've never won a gift card.

I'm just, come on guys.

When I get to 20 years, maybe balloons will fall from the ceiling or something.

I'm hopeful.

But these emails also need to match that post purchase experience is,

I would argue, even more important than the pre-purchase experience.

Customer loyalty is not just lip service.

And it's also a two-way street.

A lot of companies expect customers to be loyal to them, but

they are not loyal to their customers.

Cellphone companies are particularly bad at this.

There's always deals for new consumers but not a deal if I've been with you for

18 years, and I'm renewing my cellphone.

Why should I stick with you?

You give me no reason to.

Customer loyalty has to go both ways.

So you bring all these pieces together, and you say this

is the kind of brand experience that's gonna make things less expensive for us.

It's going to increase customer retention.

It's going to increase positive word of mouth.

It's going to increase our net promoter score and

all those great metrics that people in the C-level like to see.

A properly executed brand strategy makes all those happen.

And at this point, you can say, okay, we're gonna get service on board.

Because you're able to show them how much better it is when people come in and

they're not pissed off all the time.

When people come in, they're like yeah you're social media person was so nice.

I'm really excited to give you a whole bunch of money and

help you meet your quota.

Right?

You have less angry phone calls.

You have people dealing with stuff in a more proactive way.

Going back to West Jet,

they've had a really difficult time lately in social media.

They're actually, I feel like they're providing a master class on

crisis management in social media because five of their planes,

two weeks ago, had bomb threats called in, and

every one of them had to be grounded, no idea who's doing it.

The Mounties are on the case.

That's a very Canadian thing to say, isn't it?

[LAUGH] I feel like a moose should come out now.

Right? >> [LAUGH]

>> But

they have been handling it on social media so well, and it's on their brand voice.

And they haven't just been, cuz their brand voice is helpful,

their brand voice hasn't just been like, hey look, guy who just lost your luggage,

we're busy over here dealing with a bomb threat, so we can't help you right now.

No, they've been helping everybody.

It's amazing, I do recommend you check out their Twitter, scroll back a little bit,

you'll see how proactive and on they are.

And when Mikayla told them about the sexist joke, they were really sorry.

And they do follow up, they do fix things and that's what makes the difference.

You screw up, you do have to apologize.

But getting service on board and saying like look you're gonna know when you're

doing things right and you're doing things wrong.

You will have that consistency, not just with consumers but

within your own organization.

And then, when you look back at this brand document again, now you can start to see

how all these things start to come together a little more clearly for you.

How you can figure out how your out of home affects your social network.

How your signage and your apps work together.

And what you can do to influence all of those things in your organization.

Go beyond a document.

Do not let your brand strategy languish as a 50 page PDF.

In your intranet.

It's a living, breathing document,

that is the true expression of your company out there in the world.

And always be coaching, don't think, okay, I've coached everybody,

why aren't you following the brand voice?

It's a constant, ongoing process.

And remember, brand coach, not brand police.

You don't wanna be the Soup Nazi when it comes to the brand.

No brand for you, right?

You wanna help people, cuz the only way you're gonna get

people excited about this, the only way you're gonna get cheerleaders,

is if you help them do better.

If you encourage them to be consistent with the brand voice.

If they start to feel it, this is cheesy, but

feel it in their heart, that's a good brand voice.

And if you do all these things and

you bring your brand voice completely together, you will feel

that every decision that you make, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales,

whether it's service, everything will drive forward together with purpose.

And at Kick Point our brand is called Lady KP, you can imagine why.

And we ask ourselves, would Lady KP say this, would Lady KP tweet this?

I am actually quite terrible at writing as Lady KP.

And my business partner, Jen,

we co-own Kick Point together, she is much better at it than I am.

So I'll send her things and

say, please, teach me how to do this cuz I can't get Lady KP's voice.

But I'm working on it.

And that coaching is really important.

And it's something that, it's okay if you don't get it the first time.

It's something that you're gonna work towards.

And if you do every brand interaction,

thinking about that brand voice, thinking about that brand strategy,

thinking about the ultimate purpose of this, every decision that you make

will drive your company forward with purpose, not confusion.

Thank you.

>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you, Dana.

So I was sitting there thinking about this, cuz we've all worked with companies,

and they seem kind of valueless, and you go in, and you try to, what is your value,

and you touch on this a little bit, and they say our value is to work hard and

make money and >> I hope that's most companies values.

>> Yeah. >> That's the surface of existing,

continuing to exist as a corporation, working hard hard and making money.

Otherwise, well, making money part maybe you're a charity.

They still have to make money.

>> Yeah.

>> So, I think you have to push past that.

And if they don't, and I mean as an agency it's really hard to say no to people, but

sometimes there are some lost causes and if you work at one, I'm sorry,

that just like, they're just not gonna get there.

Even Comcast, bless their terrible service little hearts,

they have service standards that they try to achieve.

As terrible as they are, they do have something that they stand for,

other than making money.

>> But making money, that's awesome though, that's fine.

>> [LAUGH] Yeah.

>> Okay, couple of questions and you can submit these on the hashtag MozCon

qa >> You talked about a process of putting

things on cards, where do you get the 40 words to put on those cards?

>> There's a lot of, I can tweet out a link later but there's a lot of good

prompts for writers actually when you're developing characters.

There's these great lists of words of different attributes that your character

can have in stories, in novels.

And so you can go through that list.

There's like 200 or so words.

That's a good start.

I'll tweet out some examples as well.

That's a good way to start.

And if you ask people around the company too before you start the card

sorting process that can kinda seed where you're gonna go with that.

>> Okay, final question.

Evan Davis asks, why was Arby's so low on your chart?

>> [LAUGHS].

>> And the meats.

What's the digs on Arby's?

>> Okay I personally love Arby's.

Often when we drive by an Arby's I have to stop and my wife hates it.

She thinks it's disgusting, so I just get my own little, roast beef burger and

have it peace.

And there's like two Arby’s left in Edmonton so I have to be very specific,

oh we're just gonna go down this way, it's a shortcut, and drive past the Arby’s.

Our art director made the brand continuum and I saw where she put Arby’s and

I laughed, cuz she knows that I love Arby’s and I just left it.

So that's why.

But Arby's roast beef, protein, Protein World.

And I wouldn't say too.

I imagine I wouldn't put the Protein World necessarily as the low end of

the continuum and Dove as the high end.

They're just different.

[LAUGH] >> All right, let's give a hand for

Dana DiTomaso everyone.

>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you.

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Thank you.