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.

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.

To QR do us part

By now you have all heard about QR codes (Quick Response). Although Canada is taking what feels like forever to adopt the technology, QR codes are practically everywhere in Japan. They are used on everything from fortune cookies to escalator handles.

Now, I think Japan has taken it a bit too far. Japanese gravestone maker Ishi no Koe ("Voice of the Stone") recently announced plans to begin selling gravestones with the two-dimensional bar codes embedded into them.

By simply snapping a shot of the tag with their cellphones, visitors will be able to view photos, videos and other information about the deceased. The device would also keep a log of each time the code was scanned so family members can keep up to date with when other relatives last visited the site.

In the future, Ishi no Koe hopes to use this technology to develop a new way to pay respect to the dead that wouldn't require you to actually be at the cemetery in person. The company sees this as an alternative especially fitting for today’s younger generation.

I wouldn't be surprised if brands begin advertising via QR codes on gravestones - "did your husband pass away? Try our new dating site to find a new one"

What are your thoughts?

Have we really come that far?

My mother was a single mom with two young kids. It was the 1970’s and she had to face the consequences of gender inequality. Life for her wasn’t easy. Back in those days, women needed their husband’s approval in order to get a credit card and men weren’t obligated to pay alimony or child support. I can remember the countless number of times my mother was “ripped off” by car dealers, harassed in the workplace and taken advantage of by lawyers and other so called professionals. This blog isn’t about my mom (although she deserves a blog just for her). It’s about women’s spending power and the gender inequality still recognizable today.

Fast forward to 2008. We have certainly progressed over the years but we’re not there yet. Did you know women still earn only 78 cents on the dollar compared to men yet women make over 80% of all household buying decisions?

The catalyst for this blog is based on an experience I had this year when purchasing new appliances for my home. Like most women, I did my research. I found a company offering the appliances I wanted for less money than the competition. I was excited to make my purchase and asked my boyfriend to accompany me to the store. Let me recount the customer experience I had at this particular store. As soon as we entered, the male sales person quickly introduced himself to my boyfriend. I introduced myself to him and asked him questions to which he answered to my boyfriend. If the price wasn’t such a steal, I would have walked right out the door. The deal was closed. The sales person wrote up all of the paper work, turned to my boyfriend and asked “how will you be paying for this today?” I was furious. What made him think the purchases weren’t mine for the house that I purchased myself? I whipped out my bank card and placed it in front of him with conviction. I wanted to tell him to read Marti Barletta’s book “Marketing to Women” so he could see how immense women’s purchasing power actually is. We have large wallets. Women account for 53% of investment purchases, 55% of consumer electronics, 60% of home improvements and 60+% of new car purchases.

Who is better at demonstrating gender inequality and alienating women? NOooooBODY.