Jennifer Morozowich

Jennifer Morozowich has spent the majority of her career working on brands we love. For 14 years, she worked on culture-defining campaigns from such clients as Apple, Nokia, Absolut Vodka, Labatt, Canadian Tire, CIBC and Microsoft. Jennifer has worked with some of Canada's top advertising agencies as well as with integrated, brand activation shops. Jennifer is passionate about social media trends and understanding how consumers think. Jennifer joined The Marketing Store in 2007 as Director of Strategic Planning to provide strategic guidance and consumer insights to assist in the development of campaigns designed to entertain, engage and motivate consumers. The Marketing Store is a global ideas company that helps conventional brands succeed with unconventional thinking.

The Future of Planning

When Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King created the notion of "planning" back in the 1960's, they began the journey to what is now a very discombobulated discipline.

Let's have a look at the first description of account planning - "The account planner is that member of the agency's team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used - not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client's advertising problems." - Stanley Pollitt

In the 1990's, Jay Chiat evolved the definition of planning to add a splash of creativity and flare, yet still remaining true to the discipline.

Fast forward to 2010. This is where I face a split opinion.

Many agencies are not familiar with the discipline of planning and try to create a role to fill an unfulfilled need. This role usually includes a planning title; created with little or no knowledge of what planning actually is. This direction dilutes the discipline of planning and builds confusion both internally and with the client. We now have client planning, creative planning, research planning, just plain planning, strategist, account planning strategist and most recently, digital planning or digital strategist. I'm sure I've left out a plethora of others.

On the other hand, It's my personal belief that a good account planner can be all of the above as long as the consumer is at the core root. It's all a matter of managing expectations with the employer/employee and client. Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client's brand and visa versa. Because communication channels continuously multiply, it is crucial for planners to stay ahead of how consumers are engaging with brands.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Jennifer Morozowich

Personal Branding

I know I'm aging myself when I say I've been in the business for 16 years. Over this time, I've noticed a slow migration from the importance of an agency's brand and reputation to an individual's personal brand and reputation. I attribute this to social networking.

Before the days of Facebook and LinkedIn, when job hunting, we were most attracted to the agency with the best reputation, who did the best work and who had the best brand in the industry. Now, we put just as much emphasis on the people who work for an agency and what their personal brand represents. This works both ways. Employers also seek employees whose personal brand would be a good fit for their agency.

I can't write a blog about personal branding without giving a shout out to Tony Chapman. Know him? Sure you do. Love him or hate him, in my opinion he is the industry leader in personal branding.

Glenn Swan recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn asking "Do you feel a strong personal brand is important for job seekers?" 86% of those polled said yes. 13% said it depends on the position.

So, how do you create your personal brand? Treat it the same way you would a client's brand. You can start by asking yourself these questions:

What do I want to be known for? What am I good at? Am I uniquely valuable? What can I bring to an employer that other's can't? What are other people doing and how can I do it better? Who do I want to target? How am I going to reach them? What is my "elevator pitch?"

It's also crucial to be transparent. The industry is a small one and by now, you've probably developed a reputation along the way. Be honest and sincere in your abilities and experience.

By the way, this personal brand is for hire.

Jennifer Morozowich

Brainstorming - Friend or Foe?

Does this sound familiar?

A room filled with bowls of assorted colourful candy. Objectives written on a flip chart or white board. Fifteen of your colleagues sitting together; some excited, others staring at the clock waiting for the hour to pass. A junior employee stands at the front of the room capturing notes while his/her boss shouts what to write. One of your colleagues won’t shut up. He keeps repeating the same ideas over and over again. He also intimidates the more junior staff and shoots down all of their ideas. Your other colleague is hoarding the candy. Frustrated yet? Welcome to a typical agency brainstorm session.

Love them or hate them, brainstorms are an essential part of the ideation process. If done properly, they can generate new, fresh and innovative ideas that will make you and your company shine.

There are various methodologies or processes one could use in a brainstorm. I would recommend every person from your agency take a course to learn what these are. One of the most reputable, inspiring and FUN brainstorm workshops I’ve ever taken was through www.27marbles.com. I highly recommend you have them present to your company. I guarantee they will blow your mind.

I won’t take you through the methodologies in this blog because you really must experience them to put them into practice. What I can do is share five simple rules one should follow when conducting a brainstorm session.

1. Assign a facilitator to conduct the session. The role of this person is facilitation not participation. Participation may bias the group. Think about it. The next time you are facilitating a meeting ask the group to stick their pen in their ear. Chances are everyone will do it without question. You as the facilitator have the power to influence. Influencing the group is the last thing you want to do in a brainstorm session.

2. Assign someone to take the role of the “owner”. This person is responsible for creating the task for the session and for ensuring the overall outcome of the brainstorm session has met their needs.

3. Select different styles of thinkers and representatives to participate in your session. If you are brainstorming about a particular category i.e. Generation Y, invite people from that demographic. If you are brainstorming on customer service, invite someone who lives and breathes it. Perhaps invite a flight attendant. You get the point.

4. There is no magic number of participants to invite to a brainstorm session. Just remember though, it’s easier to turn around a corvette vs. a bus. Try to keep it to a maximum of 10 people.

5. Keep the ideas absurd. Stay away from providing tactical solutions. When you start thinking tactically, it means you already know how to execute. Select ideas that scare you and that you have no idea how to execute. If you already know how to execute these ideas, chances are your competition does too.

Most importantly, something you will hear me say at my work on a daily basis is “it’s easier to build feasibility into a new idea than newness into a feasible idea. “

Social Capital Value Add ChangeThis Manifesto & eBook

This is a follow up to my June 13th post about ChangeThis and Social Capital Value Add (SCVA).

Due in part to your response to that post, a Canadian was among the authors published this week in ChangeThis’ 50th issue. SCVA was released along with ideas from Seth Godin, John Kotter, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Vince Procente and Andrew Abela. You can check out the ideas and authors at www.changethis.com.

Michael Cayley, the author of SCVA has also released an eBook that expands on the highlights introduced with the ChangeThis piece. Like any theory of corporate valuation, the reading gets complex but Michael has tried to keep things moving with a Wizard of Oz metaphor.

As a marketer, I found the idea of memetic brand the most interesting. Here is an excerpt on that …

… “The marketing/communications mix is completely different than it was before 2004. Broadcast’s monopoly on attention is dead. The symbolic brand, which has been the fastest growing source of corporate value for the last quarter century has reached its pinnacle. It is being absorbed and replaced by memetic brand. Technologies have evolved and mapped so tightly to the way humans transact, form relationships and create self-identity that it is time for business management to link the pioneering academic studies of social capital and social network analysis (SNA) to value based management and the priorities of marketers.” …

Even if you find yourself challenging the ideas, the eBook may prove useful to your team and clients just because it is a good overview of the technology and trends at work in the current market (you might insert Fig. 1 attached). A lot of the material is familiar, but SCVA connects it into a useful framework and anytime I came across something that I wanted to dig into further, it was easy to take a little side trip into more depth through a few of the eBook’s more than 200 hyperlinks.

Enjoy!

Cast Your Vote: Introducing Social Capital Value Add

As I wrote about last November, social media is at a critical time as it catapults into the marketing mix, blurring the line between traditional and “new” media.

One of the key points in the history of brand management was the whole “Barbarians at the Gate” period, when the link between brand value and corporate valuations was established, touching off a wave of corporate deal making. Deals like Nabisco and Kraft commanded the headlines but the main outcome was the broad realization in global boardrooms that brands are a top priority. They require commitment, investment and special management methods.

I worked with Michael Cayley while he was CEO of a VC-Microsoft backed startup and talked to him today about his idea to establish a link similar to brand valuation, between social media and corporate value.

He developed the idea while doing an MBA in Paris last summer, wrote a paper and sent it around to reviewers for feedback. One of them turned out to be a co-founder of www.ChangeThis.com who suggested submitting it to their editorial board. He did and ChangeThis has posted the idea, along with 15 others selected for this month. ChangeThis is sort of like a www.digg.com, only you vote for ideas instead of news stories. The top ideas on June 19th get distributed to more than 20,000 so-called influencers … editors, journalists, academics, authors, bloggers, etc.

ChangeThis has helped spread ideas by well know authors like Richard Florida, Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters and Malcolm Gladwell. “Introducing Social Capital Value Add” is currently the leading idea posted and Michael made a point about its support, “Corporate valuation is a complex topic. The SCVA manifesto is designed to help break down the walls of understanding between social media and the boardroom table. If the ChangeThis voting gets up over 500, we enter the territory of some of the most demanded manifestos in ChangeThis history. I’m not Chris Anderson or Tom Peters. So maybe there is a demand out there to make the corporation more socially motivated and a need to understand how social media impacts future earnings”.

CMA members all understand that social media is “game changing”. Instigating the conversation about how and why social media is becoming integrated into the marketing mix is an evolving story that we are all involved in and this is one way to help that story emanate out of Canada.