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Category : Thinking

Think Outside In

Key #5 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.

Imagine you’re marketing a limo service and you get Uber’d.

Or you’re trying to put travelers in hotel beds and you get Airbnb’d. You run a car dealership and you get Tesla’d. You’re a travel agent, a financial advisor, sell insurance, or – heaven forfend – you publish the yellow pages!…

I know real people in these situations, and I can tell you this about every one of them:

They never saw it coming!

But Nike saw it coming. Starting with their own brand story, they got ahead of change. Nike didn’t see themselves as an athletic shoe company – they saw themselves as a company that inspires athletes. While other athletic wear companies may have seen the coming age of wearable computing as irrelevant, Nike saw it as an opportunity to inspire. In creating Nike Plus, they got ahead of the curve and developed a way to get to know their customers like never before.

You don’t have to BE a new economy business to WIN in the new economy. You just need an inspiring idea that guides you, and you need to be able to connect that idea to better experiences for your customers. American Express (founded 1850) has done it, reinventing the core of their customer relationships many times over. JetBlue (founded 1998) has done it. Apple (founded 1976) is most certainly doing it.

We call these companies Inspiring Action brands. They share a common point of view. They see things with their customers’ eyes. They know what the people they serve aspire to be and do. They know what their devotees love about themselves with them. They’ve mapped the customer journey and have found ways to intercept and change behavior.

You are what they do.

Your audience is just people trying to inspire action in themselves. If your service works better, you win.

Think Outside In. It’s really that simple and that challenging. Understand your inspiring idea from your customer’s point of view. Map the journey and work out effective ways to change behavior and create new habits.

 

Inspiring Action Podcast with Steve Harrison

Steve Harrison has won more Cannes Lions awards than any other creative director in the world. He is one of the most influential and inspiring copywriters of his time, and is the author of “Changing the World is the Only Fit Work For a Grown Man”, an eyewitness account of the life and times of legendary adman Howard Luck Gosssage. For his work, Campaign Magazine has recognized Harrison as “the greatest Direct Marketing Creative of his generation”.

Tune in and listen as Steve calls in from the United Kingdom to tell host Mark DiMassimo all about his book, his unorthodox journey to becoming an award-winning copywriter and much much more on this edition of the “Inspiring Action Podcast”.

 

Inspiring Action Podcast with Leslie Dukker Doty

Leslie Doty was the marketer behind the legendary Citibank AAdvantage Card campaign that won the top Account Planning Group Award, a Gold Effie, and was recognized by the Loyalty Marketers Association as the campaign of the decade. That campaign, created with creative director, Mark DiMassimo, was the seed that helped launch DiMassimo’s fledgling agency, nearly two decades ago. The journey of discovery to the inspiring idea behind that campaign was the seed from which the Inspiring Action approach that Doty and DiMassimo share has grown. As colleagues and friends, Leslie and Mark have achieved many things as partners in inspiring action. Fast forward 19 years and the agency that Leslie undoubtedly helped take liftoff has long since named a conference room in her honor, and what better title for the plaque than the “Leslie Doty Dukker Center of Inspiration”?

Leslie’s extraordinary resume includes stints as the Senior VP at MasterCard Advisors, Managing Partner of DiMassimo Goldstein, Corporate Vice President at CVS health, and now as the Chief Marketing Officer and President of Reader’s Digest Consumer Services, Inc.

In this very special episode of the “Inspiring Action Podcast”, Leslie and Mark revisit their time working on Citibank’s AAdvantage card, an experience that both call transformative in their careers. Listen in as Leslie tells Mark about the defining moment in her career when she became a marketer, and how a great insight can turn into an award winning campaign.

 

Proove Accountable Media, The Way Media Should Be.

Media Agencies are operating in an old school fashion, marking up inventory, not being transparent, moving at a snails pace and not investing in the best talent. I felt there was an opportunity for an agency to be fully transparent, ethical, and to act as a true agent for the client. Built from the ground up, Proove is positioned as a challenger to the old school model and is set up to drive success for our clients in todays world.

What do our clients get from an honest agency?

No previous prearranged media, partner or data commitments…a realtime log of the daily optimizations made & a non-biased media recommendation that clearly maps back to what you need to accomplish in market. You will actually know where your media is running.

What does that mean?

Results.

Proove Accountable Media, the way media should be.

Read the full Business Insider article here.

 

What’s Your Measure of Proof?

There was once a man who refused to give up smoking until it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that smoking caused disease.

He didn’t live long enough to see the proof.

Today, there are direct (digital, mobile, SAAS, subscription, e-commerce, club…) marketers who refuse to improve their marketing success with an insight-driven multi-channel strategy until the perfect attribution model has been developed.

Every day, another one is buried by a marketer with a more reasonable measure of proof.

Is overall marketing efficiency your ultimate measure? Is making one dollar of marketing spend return two or three or four times as many customers your objective?

If so, you are an optimizer.

If you prefer perfectly attributable though small gains in discrete channels, then you’re an incrementalist.

Optimizers eat incrementalists for lunch.

Sometimes, in very big places, incrementalists work in the middle of a pyramid with optimizers at the top. Even so, they can only swim so far up before they hit a ceiling. Too late, they find that the open market is not a very friendly place for an incrementalist.

Why do incrementalists do it to themselves? Is it because they are trading upside for certainty? Is being sure more valuable to them than being successful? Is being right worth more to them than results?

Or did they just swallow a less intelligent idea of what it is a marketer is supposed to do?

Well … enough musing about the incrementalists, much as I would like to convert as many of them as possible to a life of success beyond explanation.

We are for the optimizers.

 

Freedom’s Pusher

We think we’re free, but we have habits. Our habits are tyrants. They dominate us. Hard as we may try, we can’t get free of habits, we can only build new ones. And we only feel “free” when we’re dominated by habits that empower us.

So, freedom is an addiction.

I help people form more inspiring, more empowering habits. I help marketers make more inspiring decisions, so they can help more people form more inspiring habits.

I’m Freedom’s Pusher.

What Happened to My DiGo? (What you want to know about our new logo and identity)

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When we first launched this agency nearly two decades ago, we briefly had more time than clients, so we focused on building our own brand — and the world responded!

Since then, we’ve never lacked for exciting opportunities to do what we do for inspiring clients.

Naturally, our own brand became a bit like the Cobbler’s Children. You know that story right? The shoemaker so busy that his children went shoeless. That’s the way it’s told, usually. Truth was probably a bit different. The Cobbler’s Children never really went without shoes. It’s just that sometimes the shoes were quite old and worn down. Other times, the Cobbler tested out his most eccentric designs on his own children, saving the tried and true for his customers.

In my version of the story, the Cobbler prospers due to his focus on his clients and his intense commitment to his craft, and finally turns his attention and skill to making extraordinary pairs of shoes for each of his children.

So, check out our new shoes, in the form of a new identity to support our inspiring action mission.

Building brands and businesses through inspiring action teaches us something new every day. Most of all, we have learned the power of an inspiring action to spark something that grows and grows.

Thus, the match. From now on, when you see our logo, it will be ready to be grasped and struck. Ready to touch off a blaze.