Tocquigny

In my humble opinion, the majority of successful businesses employ two crucial foundational elements: quality product and effective persuasion.

In the traditional business model, product is what gets the prospect in the door, while persuasion compels the sale.

One of the secret weapons of branding, however, is the contrary: use persuasion for acquisition and product for conversion.

I’ve always had a weakness for rhetoric (see my past blog posts on the subject). How can human language be as powerful as a multi-million dollar super computer or as lethal as a machete? How can an audience be transformed through emotion, logic and credibility?

                                                       The Brand Manifesto

While most companies have mission and vision statements, only a select few have adopted brand manifestos. These commonly short, frank and liberal declarations don’t articulate what a company aspires to be — they define the company’s driving principles and passions. They are the living anthems and battle cries of a brand, something so finely ingrained in the company’s DNA that a bankruptcy or rebranding has little chance of changing it. Brand manifestos are written rhetoric at its finest.

But don’t just take it from me. Let some of the greatest brands speak for themselves:    

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

By now, I hope you’ve downloaded the newest version of How We Love Food – now available as an iPad app. From print to online to mobile and social, How We Love Food has evolved, just like my interactive marketing agency, Tocquigny, has over the last 30 years.

 While the way we share recipes has drastically changed since 1980, the way we share food hasn’t changed much at all. Everyone knows that food is all about sharing with friends or family. A meal well prepared is a meal best enjoyed with great company. Just like a successful dinner party is dependent on inviting the right attendees, the success of a mobile application strongly depends on promotion.   

That’s why we put so much thought into how we would best promote How We Love Food. An integrated transmedia campaign was led by two email blasts, driving users to the App Store. A landing page and a Facebook application also helped share the buzz about the application and pushed users to the App Store. Internally, the agency celebrated our proud creation by sharing links with our personal networks and – as you’ve seen all week – by contributing to 17 Stories with posts about our passion for the convergence of food, technology, and marketing.

The icing on the cake? Making things really social by contributing all download proceeds to Urban Roots, a signature program of the youth empowerment nonprofit YouthLaunch, which uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and increase access to healthy food. After all, How We Love Food – like most food experiences – has always been about sharing.

Over time, tracking key performance indicators like downloads, unique visits to the landing page, email click-through rates, referral visits to our agency site, and social media mentions has helped to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of different tactics.

In the end, Field of Dreams was a bit off. In marketing, if you build it, they won’t come. Promotion is the critical binding ingredient. So the next time you’re cooking up a mobile project, don’t forget to invite everyone over for dinner.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

No, not that Farmville. I’m talking about the new visibility of family farms in our responsible eating marketplace and how social media can be a great solution for keen farmers looking to seize this unique opportunity and build brand equity.

Picture the last time you were at a restaurant. Did the menu note that the food was fresh or organic? Maybe you saw a sign, trumpeting the restaurant’s locally sourced produce. These future artifacts are signs of the time. More and more consumers care about what they consume: Where did it come from? How was it made? Were the people who made it treated fairly How did it get to my plate?

Sustainability and social responsibility are no longer buzz terms - but market demands. According to a Deloitte study [PDF], 54% of consumers now enter stores actively considering sustainability attributes in their purchase decision. That said, only 22% actually buy based upon those attributes alone. For some reason, the 32% lost have changed their minds at the point of purchase.


For restaurants, that means selling the sustainability value proposition at their point of purchase: the table, check-out counter, or drive-thru. Consumers expect transparency, and that’s why restaurants (especially in Austin) are starting to list the local farms where they purchase their meat and produce.

In today’s digital world, it’s almost expected behavior to pick up our mobile devices and Google after being exposed to something of interest. Then, it’s no wonder why I’ve been perusing many a family farm website over the past year while nibbling on my non-GMO, grass-fed bison hamburger.

 
But, really - farm websites are admittedly a bit behind the times. And, that’s understandable: Farmers probably prefer to do what they do best - farm - and probably have very few resources to actually invest in such a labor-intensive communications medium. So, how can we save the family farm?

Easy: Social media! These websites clearly have great content: Stories about the family, why pastured eggs are better than factory eggs, pictures of the well-kept livestock, and more.

What better way to easily share that content than through Facebook photo albums or regular status updates? Or a quick Flipcam-produced YouTube video? Or check-ins on Foursquare at the Farmers’ Market?

Some farms are already catching on. And, while their audience may be small now, they’ll be well-positioned as the responsible eating marketplace continues to expand and this sort of restaurant transparency becomes an insurmountable barrier to entry.

Then, social media really will be dominated by Farmville. No, not that Farmville. 

Insperity, formerly Administaff, now has “Business Performance Advisors” (BPAs) instead of “Sales Representatives.” So why change the title of the front-line sales force?

Their 25 years of experience tells them that words matter. They’ve also re-named the industry a few times — in the 1990’s from Employee Leasing to “Professional Employer Organization” (PEO).  Then within the last year from PEO to “Workforce Optimization.” No one else in the industry can quite seem to catch up with this kind of thought leadership. The competition seems to just follow suit and adopt the terms that Insperity defines with its evolving solutions.

Of course, for long-term success, there must be truthful substance behind a clever title. “Business Performance Advisor” demonstrates Insperity’s sharp focus on “being there” for their clients, more like a partner. It also serves as an effective conversation starter/reminder that the BPAs can use to tell their story and articulate the benefits they bring to the table.

Thought leadership yields other benefits for Insperity as well. Because they are living the concept of ”trusted advisor” with their own clients, they also understand how to partner with their vendors in the same way. Insperity valued Tocquigny’s advice to invest a significant amount of time, energy and budget as we lead them through best-practice strategic planning of their forthcoming social media communities. 

Allowing us in as a partner — instead of seeing us only as a vendor or marketing firm — led to more effective planning that will be instrumental in developing high-impact online communities and tools. This ultimately plays back into their main mission and helps the BPAs “be there” for their clients.

The government’s newest attempt to deter smokers is literally sickening.  

Via FDA.gov: “These warnings mark the first change in cigarette warnings in more than 25 years and are a significant advancement in communicating the dangers of smoking. The introduction of these warnings is expected to have a significant public health impact by decreasing the number of smokers, resulting in lives saved, increased life expectancy, and lower medical costs.”

”Placement of new warnings on cigarette packages and advertisements — starting in September 2012, the new cigarette health warnings will appear:

• on the top 50 percent of both the front and rear panels of each cigarette package.

• in the upper portion of each cigarette advertisement, occupying at least 20 percent of the area of the advertisement.”

The images are most certainly unsettling and will now be leering at you from behind the counter at your nearest corner store. There goes my weekly candy bar run at 7-11. Tell me you can choke down a Milky Way after this:

Do we really think this will work? Apparently so: Lawrence R. Deyton, director of the F.D.A. Center for Tobacco Products, said the government estimates — based on other countries’ experience — that the new warning labels will prompt an additional 213,000 Americans to quit smoking next year…

So from 46 million to 45,787,000?

This is a whole new realm of advertising we’ve never seen before for a minimal result. We’ve come a long way from 8 out of 9 dentists prefer Colgate, baby. How will this tactic perform against a substance whose addictiveness is compared to that of heroin? And what’s next? Images of shirtless obese people plastering your local fast food drive-thru? Only time will tell.