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Monday
Jul262010

What's in Your Playbook? 

AuthorCrystal Good | DateMonday, July 26, 2010 at 4:30PM |

Recently, West Virginia native and New England Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss let go his long time West Virginia-based agent. Moss stated that he wanted more marketing opportunities and “off-field money”.

Prominent NFL agent Bus Cook, another native West Virginian, said in a recent interview in the West Virginia Record that, “Something (Moss) might do is hire a marketing firm.’” Instead, Moss hired Joel Segal, a sports agent.

For us here at Mythology, it’s a fascinating case study of do’s, don’t’s and opportunities; not just in marketing, but the marketing of West Virginia. When any West Virginian or WV-based business carves out a positive brand it, encourages and uplifts our state. We see this in Jennifer Garner, the Greenbrier Resort, Jerry West or Homer Laughlin China.

Time will tell if Moss is able to leverage himself into commercials with the same precision he has on the football field. But just like in football, marketing is about knowing your route (social media, direct mail, word -of-mouth, etc.) and just like a pro athlete, you have to make it look easy. Nobody sees the training and discipline that athletes go through for that game day razzle dazzle.

The same is true with marketing. There is a lot of behind the scenes planning and work that goes into what the public sees. Creative brainstorming sessions can go into overtime. At Mythology we’ve been known to work double overtime to capture these ideas and keep a creative momentum going that will benefit our clients. Like a professional athlete, its hard work but fun doing somethng you enjoy.

Today’s marketing is a two-way street. Think offense and defense.  It’s not enough to craft a brand that works for you; it has to be accepted by your audience. Eventually it will be game day and your business will need to get on the marketing field and see just how well your brand can compete. 

At Mythology, we compete with a KNOW , PLAN, DO strategy.  It’s as basic as knowing when to implement a full court press, man-to-man or zone defense.  Regardless of your business or service, location or size, you can always be ready and prepared  if you KNOW  something about your  customers , PLAN your strategy, and most of all, get out there and DO.

  

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Monday
May172010

Your Brand - Do You Really Want to Know What They Think?

AuthorJeff | DateMonday, May 17, 2010 at 2:27PM |

Recently, personal brand expert Dan Schawbel, author of You 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, spoke here in our headquarters city of Charleston, WV. Dan got me thinking about my own personal brand. At Mythology, we remind our clients that your brand isn’t really what you think it is, it’s what your audience thinks it is.

 So I decided to ask some folks to tell me the truth about myself.

OK, so this wasn’t exactly an unbiased research sample, but I posted this question on Facebook: “What five words describe me?”

Before embarking upon such an exercise, you should really consider whether you want to know what people think about you. Because it can get interesting.

There were a few responses that I wasn’t surprised to see pop up (“passionate, creative”). However, there were some interesting word choices that caused me to think. Some were surprisingly positive (“thoughtful, compassionate, genuine”) and some I wasn’t sure how to take (“sturdy, tenacious, whimsical”).  Sturdy???

In our work with clients across many industries and regions, one commonality is how little organizations really know what others think about them. It’s incredibly easy to hear from them how they think about themselves, but how does this match up with the reality of what exists in the minds of their target market?

What is the gap between what you think your brand is and what it really is?

If your goal is to develop a strong brand that makes it easier to build healthy revenue and profitability, it’s quite important to start with understanding where you stand today. Without that baseline, you will have a difficult time making smart, measurable marketing decisions to get you where you want to be.

We’re very proud of our client Spilman, Thomas and Battle PLLC, a growth-minded business law firm with presence in Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina. They recently launched a brand refresh campaign that was developed from a very strong foundation, which they begun by answering the following questions:

  • What messaging will generate the desired response among target legal services decision-makers in mid-to-large sized corporations? In other words, what are they looking for and what will they react positively to?
  • What do they think of us today in terms of those decision-making criteria?
  •  What messages would move us closer to building a belief about Spilman in the minds of potential clients that would help us reach our goal?

The fruit of this foundational work was very nicely delivered by the creative team at Spilman and our content marketing partners over at WELD.

So, are you ready to ask the question to your audience? What surprises await? Maybe you’re “sturdy” and “tenacious” and didn’t even realize it.

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Wednesday
Apr142010

Poetic Marketing

AuthorCrystal Good | DateWednesday, April 14, 2010 at 12:31PM |

Crystal Good, MythologistThis is my first official Mythology blog post! It took six months for me to overcome my fear of blogging. I’ll save that saga for my next post. I can assure you that even marketing professionals have social media anxiety.

Let me first say in this inaugural blog post, "Happy National Poetry Month", or NATPOMO as my Affrilachian Poet family calls it. The cool thing about NATPOMO is that it doesn’t ask you to wear a particular color or raise money. NATPOMO just asks that you read or write a poem a day, everyday for the month.

Writing a poem everyday can be as consuming as pondering those dang daily Twitterposts. Often I spend way too much time thinking and not doing. I’m accepting that there is no such thing as Twitter or writer's block – you have to think like Nike and “Just Do It”

This month while trying to write a poem a day, I keep asking my poems to come back when I’m not working. I don’t want to use my clients' time for writing poems.

Then I read How Brands Become Icons and discovered that I don’t have to ask the poem to leave. Poetry can stay in my marketing world and perhaps become part of my clients'. The book discussed how Harley Davidson in the 1980’s used poet and academic professor Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum to transform its brand into something mythical through his book The Holy Ranger.

Harley even named Rosenblum its official Poet Laureate and historian. I wouldn’t mind being a poet laureate of my favorite brand or company. I could write for days on Target, or "Targe’". I can envison epic sonnets and endless hakui’s on Sonia Kushak and Mossimo. I could even retell Target's unique startegy to sell top desighners at affordable prices as a brand differentiation strategy, perhaps in a lymric.

Another example of poetry in corporate America is A.K. Allin. She is America’s first corporate poet in residence. Her adventure is chronicled in her blog.

It seems poets and poetry have plenty of places to sit in corporate America, especailly at the marketing table. Most people will agree that an authentic poet must share the blood and truth of a subject and make a reader think in pictures and feelings; the same is true for good marketing.

Today’s marketing world is built on two-way conversations and third-party endorsements. There is no room for pomp and cliché. If you are stumbling on how to tell your brand story think about the honesty of a poet and then ask yourself if you honestly understand your brand and your customer?

At Mythology this is the first place we start with our clients – we call it the Understanding Pillar.

Another way to connect poetry to your marketing is to remember poets express emotion. Successful marketing campaigns move customers with emotion. When you are thinking or re-thinking your marketing strategy are you being a poet and searching for an emotional connection to your customers?

At Mythology, we do market research to make certain your business is using the right emotion to tell its story - what we call the Mythology Pillar.

I challenge you to think poetically this month about your brand, and just for fun, who would be your brand's “poet laureate”?  

Good marketing is poetry in motion!

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Friday
Mar262010

How Jamie Oliver is Building Belief 

AuthorLee Kraus | DateFriday, March 26, 2010 at 12:50PM |

Tonight is the launch of Jamie Oliver's: Food Revolution on ABC. For us in West Virginia it is an interesting proposition. A national show based on the premise of helping our city of Huntington deal with it's unwanted moniker "the unhealthiest city in America". So for us "locals" there are a lot of angles to this story, but for you as a marketer, there are lessons to be learned in building belief.

Here at Mythology we have a pillar of empowered marketing actually called "Mythology".  Mythology is creating and sharing you stories in unique and unexpected ways.  To do this you must understand your market, and your value proposition, and what makes you different from your competitors. Once this foundation is clear, then you can get creative and start building belief.
In our current world of message confusion and never-ending hype, you have to build belief through stories that can break through the clutter and stick. IN past posts we have mentioned the Heath Brothers and their formula for stories that are Made to Stick:

 

Via Presentation Zen

  • Simplicity - Finding the core of the idea
  • Unexpectedness - Combining surprise with interest
  • Concreteness - Bringing it alive by engaging the five senses ("memory Velcro")
  • Credibility - Tapping the power of authority - or anti-authority - to build belief 
  • Emotional - Priming people to care
  • Stories - Generating involvement that leads to action 


As I watched Jamie Oliver's TED presentation from February, I was amazed at his use of the formula. I suggest you take 20 minutes to watch the entire video.

 



Now let's break it down...
Simplicity 
Education about Healthy Foods Save Lives.

 

Unexpectedness 

Diet related disease is our biggest problem. Homicide is on the bottom of the list.


Concreteness 

Pulling all the food that one family eats in a week together in a single place and bringing a wheel barrow of sugar from years worth of drinking milk on stage made the problem concrete.


Credibility 

Connecting the statistics, the stories, and the solution together with real numbers and real costs.  


Emotional

An overweight family that struggles. A pastor that buries those who die.


and Stories

Jamie builds the story of the individual family, the Huntington WV school district, and his new culinary school and leaves the audience with a formula on how a solution can scale.
"One person teaches three others 10 health recipes and they then teach three more each."

 

He finished his presentation with a clear call to action.

 

Finally, I think it is important to understand that you have to work hard at creating your story. You won't be able to just sit down with powerpoint tomorrow and develop this deep and compelling masterpiece. It will take time to cultivate and build. But if you want to build belief in your idea then you might want to learn from Jamie, his presentation won the TED prize.

    

 

 

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Monday
Mar222010

Creating Memorable Experiences

AuthorJeff | DateMonday, March 22, 2010 at 1:05PM |

On Feb Feb 18th Verizon West Virginia presented The West Virginia HistoryMakers Event, “A Conversation with Henry ‘Skip’ Gates Jr." Mythology was contracted to manage the overall event experience utilizing our strategic communication techniques.

Crystal Good took the lead on the Mythology team by organizing the demand generation strategy, building a highly targeted event guest list, managing the RSVP process and leading the creation of the website.  “We sought to add value and creativity to the event structure and production details wherever we could,” Crystal said, “The History Makers event was full of lessons and opportunities. We were reminded throughout the event planning of the value in essential marketing tools:  communication, organization, team work, and preparation."

Assisting Crystal where Adrienne Sommerville and and intern Leslie Gibbs from the Univeristy of Charleton's MBA program.

Gibbs said, “At Mythology, teamwork is a technique that starts out like a triangle. The bottom layer is used as our base and in this case, it represents our team.  This is where we get together and see what each of us can contribute to making this event a success.  The middle layer is organization, planning, and preparation.  This is our 'get it done' stage, where we try to catch mistakes, edit, and peer-review everything that is being distributed out to the guest.  The top layer is our success.”

In this case with the team celebrated the top layer with a successful event, “A Conversation with Henry ‘Skip’ Gates Jr.”

 Joe Long, Verizon Director of Corporate Communications describes Mythology’s impact on the event:  "As the title sponsor for the HistoryMakers™ event honoring Dr. Henry Louis Gates, we engaged Mythology to provide support with event coordination, promotion and creativity.  The event and the very diverse audience were perfect.   Mythology's experience in building buzz and bringing people together helped make the event a great success. We were very pleased with the results."

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