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This is the second phase of your Marketing Off-Site.

There are no shortcut available, It takes time to read, learn and implement it, and rightly so.

The first phase is available here.

Phase 2: Look back and Ahead

Time: 20 min

In this phase the goal is to understand the brand history.

Rediscover who you were and who you are. 

Dig into the key aspects that made your communication salient in the past, and can push the brand to move ahead more effectively like a bulldozer.

For this activity ask the group:

1. Why the brand began, what was the founder’s goal and what need was satisfied by the brand?
2. What were three key success factors? 
3. Who were the initial customers, define the early adopters. 
4. How was the brand different and how did it reach the customers? 
5. In the new cultural and social context what would be a re-expression of that need? 
6. Are there equities that were created over time that are still true? 
7. What ownable brand assets are available to rebuild the brand from? 

Go Out of the building

Time:  Undefined 

Until now you made some hypotheses about who you are and what your brand is. 

Now it’s time to test them. 

During the off-site speak with the technical people and ask them what are two or three qualities of the brand and which philosophy they see in the product development (attention for details, opportunities to experiment and to work on long-term projects).

• Are these product qualities perceived by the final user? 
• Are these company qualities perceived outside by company stakeholders? 

Plan a set of meetings and interviews for the following weeks with: 

• Customers 
• Key Stakeholders

The goal is to see the internal perception as a hypothesis to be tested with Stakeholders and Consumers – they are the one who shapes the reality.

Labelling the challenge

Time: 10-15 min

Earlier we defined the brand. Next we will define some labels to better establish the boundaries of the playing field.

• Are you challenging product specification, specific product features? 
• Are you challenging the customer journey, the product distribution or the customer experience? 
• Are you challenging the category culture like Nintendo Wii did with elderly people? 

This is a discovery phase where you can find unexplored ways to unlock new potential market segments.

Discuss the previous questions with your team and assign a label to the challenge.

If you want to investigate further Customer Experience watch this short video from Stanford Business School:

Simplify Simplify Simplify

Time: 20-30 min 

In these exercises with the group you will simplify your value proposition. 

Basically you will write key phrases to pair your brand with other brands or behaviour. 

The goal here is to simplify the consumer’s available choices, “me against them”. 

• Behaviour. Think and write down 4-5 phrases where you say “You (consumer) can do this or you can do that. If you do this, this will happen, if you do that, that will happen”. For example “You can travel with all these CDs, or you can have all your music in your pocket”, “You can pay expensive travel fare or you can be smart and chose low cost”, “You can hate yourself, or you can go to gym”
• Brand choice. You can choose this brand and have this experience, or you can choose us and have this kind of experience.
• Inspire. Another kind of “copy” you need to create is to provide an aspirational attitude that should come from your brand. 

Be Jealous 

Time: 15-20 min 

In these new exercises you will discuss what you envy of other brands. 

• Ask the participants what they are more jealous of elsewhere in the category
• What is the brand or product they secretly envy? Why? Try to explicate specific aspects and not be vague

Now try to create a short blog post where you describe how life is different for people when they use your product, how you see happiness satisfying their needs through your innovative idea.

In the same post describe how sad life is for people who use other brands. 

Conclude the post by painting a picture of how much better the future is for your clients by using your product.

Expectations, not reality

Please remember these are always hypotheses that must be validated through feedback.

You probably don’t know if what you imagined about your customers is real, and so after getting this feedback and defining how the future should look, you must work on shaping it and bringing it to life/bringing it into reality/making it real.

You must have Lamborghini’s mindset to challenge Ferrari

Perception is reality, but help yourself with Marketing Mix Models

Time: 10-15 min 

In this exercise the goal is to conduct a qualitative audit and then support later on with a quantitative audit.

With the team write on the post-it all the marketing activities of the past 2 years and what is planned for the next one.

Ask:

1. Looking back, which activity do you think strongly communicated the brand identity? 
2. Which activity reinforced the product and brand unfair advantage but not in a very impressive way?
3. Which activity diluted your core elements? 

Please note: Keep track of the outputs and create a follow-up section for that. 

It’s fundamental not only to work on “what do you think” but to correlate with data too. 

What does it mean? 

There is a very useful statistical technique called Marketing Mix Modelling that is helpful in evaluating the short term impact on sales of the marketing activities. 

After you have created your initial set of hypotheses on what was successful and what was not, find an agency or an analyst who can build these models and check how your perception is supported or not by data. 

This will not only challenge your beliefs/preconceptions, but will also help you design better experiments from a communication perspective. 

If you need help building a Marketing Mix Model you can always get in touch with me. 

It’s my daily job and I gathered some years of experience with international clients in the USA and Europe. 

You can write me on LinkedIn or in the contact form

Penny Pinching! 

Time: 15-20 min

Imagine that your managing director doesn’t agree with your marketing plan. 

This year the big expensive channels (TV, Newspapers, Google…) are out of the budget. 

What kind of activity will you plan in order to promote your key product message and your brand vision? 

What other channels do you have to reach your potential customers? 

Try to identify new digital media with lower cost per impression, stickers on delivery vehicles or taxis, collaboration with other brands in other categories like wine and beer companies do with Hello Fresh (a meal delivery company).

The key question of this exercise is how would you boost the brand awareness of your customers if your dominant medium is denied? 

Or in other terms which other channels can you leverage to increase consumers’ mental availability?

Write down, at the end of the discussion, all the new potential communication channels then in the following weeks, copy to a spreadsheet evaluating the costs of these channels and their customer base.

That’all for now! I will publish the third and fourth sections for designing your marketing off-site in the following weeks!

If you need help just write me on LinkedIn or here in the contact form.

Happy to help!