Patricia McQuillan

Patricia McQuillan founded Brand Matters in 2000 based on a career of innovative brand management including RBC, TD Waterhouse, Kraft General Foods and Tandem Consulting.

Brand Matters is a leading brand consulting firm which delivers brand strategy solutions successfully connecting business to brand. Brand Matters’ strategic approach is grounded in market research and branding best practices. Clients include Leaders of innovative organizations including Air Miles Reward Program, Canada Life, Canadian Diabetes Association and Siemens Canada to name a few.

Patricia’s academic qualifications include an MBA and Economics Degree from Queen's University. During her corporate career she served as VP Marketing, RBC Dominion Securities where she led the Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management re-brand. Prior to this, she held the position of VP Marketing, TD Waterhouse where she directed the marketing launch of the first on-line brokerage in Canada. Earlier in her career, she led successive business turnarounds over a 6-year period as a Senior Brand Manager at Kraft General Foods.

Today, she continues to participate as a thought leader as an owner of one of Canada’s leading brand consulting firms. She is not only an active member of the Canadian Marketing Association’s Branding & Strategic Planning Council but also serves as a Director on two Boards: the American Marketing Association and the MS Society of Canada, Toronto Chapter.

IDEO Shares Learning

I had the opportunity to attend a Rotman Lecture on the TOPIC: “Knowledge Sharing at IDEO: Designing for Social Interaction” January 28, 2010. The guest speaker was Gentry Underwood, Head of Knowledge Sharing Domain, IDEO

Gentry described a series of tests that his organization had conducted to learn how to design the optimal knowledge sharing system that can be implemented at companies. Much of this learning can be applied to the selection of social media programs and strategy development. Note that he cited as key to consider openness of company culture to collaboration.

Assuming that this is in place, he described the following top 5 considerations in designing the optimal knowledge sharing system as the following:

1. Building pointers to people, different from old school systems management. Service capability companies find this especially valuable. Shared people database
• Similar to facebook people like sharing about themselves
• Integrate available systems, like HR systems for office location and contact information
• Include your personal interests and your external blogs
• Tell your story in no more than 3 bullet points
• Upload documents related to your recent projects
• Team can share what they liked or not about their projects

2. Build rewarding systems, reward individuals - How to build rich people and project pages
• Three main sociological motivators
• Recognition: human nature
• Project staffing: help build better teams
• Career development: connect feedback through the system
• Able to look at individuals in the context of their peers.
• Compliance is not mentioned but included with an animated character in the system named Milton. This animated character appears as a man dressed in a suit and tie; he pops-up on the user’s screen if inappropriate information is being shared or vulgar language etc. The appearance of this character is almost comical as he waves his finger at the system user. In keeping with the intent of increased collaboration and sharing; Milton serves as a reminder rather than a harsh admonishment.

3. Design Intuitive interface, for example, iphone
• Must be really easy to use
• Reduce blocks to usability
• People already had account in system, did not have to set it up
• No training, not set-up, no hand holding->make it as easy as possible
• Information already existed and just needed to be bought together in an easy-to-use format

4. Take the road more travelled - Integrate with existing work flows
• Bring information to people through their in-box
• Public gathering place, in-office cafes now include large wall screens with the 20 most recent people page status updates. People paid attention to people pages and felt more connected. This encouraged passive and ambient connection between offices

5. Iterate early and often - Try lots of stuff and see what sticks
• Learn early and change fast
• For clients, develop software prototypes
• Social software is complicated the human factor is added to the computer interaction. Intuitive and understandable but appropriate social preferences integrated. Social software is in its early stages. Computer and human interaction integration is challenging.

Interesting, at the end of the presentation, the speaker reminded us that none of these on-line collaboration or social networking tools replace face-to-face communication. This may appear obvious, but we really do have to remind ourselves of this.

Patricia McQuillan

B2B Branding: Internal Branding a Key Factor to Success

Much has been written in the past few years on the topic of B2B branding. I find it the most rewarding aspect of branding and marketing planning, when it is done right.

Last week, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel on the topic of B2B branding; what does it take to win. I have to say that the quality of the panelists' discussion was top notch in terms or insight and expertise. The discussion lasted over 2 hours and easily could have gone on for several more…

A couple of first-hand observations that I took away from the panel include: 1) the agency turnout was stronger than client. This likely reflects the newness of the topic and the desire for greater expertise. 2.) The importance of internal branding was cited over and over again by the panelists (using a range of terminology) as the key factor for success in B2B branding. Considerations with internal branding and the connection to B2B branding success or failure included:(i) building trust with and through your employees in their one-to-one relationship with customers; (ii) the power of developing one voice through consistent internal and external communication; (iii) the absolute necessity to consistently delivering on the brand promise (key benefit) that you make through your people; and (iv) the importance of gaining buy-in from your CEO as you develop and refine your organization's B2B brand. Employee communication and education as well as connection to performance management systems were discussed in detail.

Several examples were provided by the panel and the audience of B2B brands failing to keep their promises and the tremendous opportunities presented when you get it right.

Has your organization had experience recently with B2B branding success or failure that relates to your internal brand?

By Patricia McQuillan, Brand Matters

Recessionary Marketing Theme #4

Our firm conducted research over the past year on the topic of marketing in a recession. This is the last of four themes that we uncovered as input to our CMA Marketing Blog with the hope of stimulating more dialogue.

The Need for Integrated Marketing & Measurement

Marketers will have limited success with ‘silo’ marketing tactics - for example, solely using social media or traditional advertising. In order to maximize the impact of marketing communications, brands need a combination of new, social media tactics and more traditional, mass marketing tactics.

According to a recent Booze Allen Hamilton study, 80% of marketers are spending more on digital marketing than in the past. This statistic is not surprising as marketers increasingly understand the need for integrated marketing communications planning to create a better experience for consumers by incorporating new media into their communications tactics.
Industry experts agree that there are two streams of marketing communications, (1) tactics targeting the masses (fixed, long-term focus) and (2) the more immediate stream addressing market opportunities as they arise (tend to include digital media). For example, the Doritos Guru campaign maintained their traditional mass marketing but added a social, consumer co-creation element to allow a pocket of their core customers to easily engage and contribute to the brand – supporting the idea that ‘brands belong to their customers’. Essentially, the campaign allowed a community to live online, and it also created general awareness. The fame attached to your brand helps.

Nissan Canada chose a different strategy to launch the Nissan Cube through their ‘Hypercube campaign’ as the launch campaign only used social media. The campaign was based on a contest that awarded 50 individuals with a Cube based on individual creativity and social networking abilities (participants must audition). The auditions gave the Nissan marketing team real user-generated content that can be leveraged in future communications.

It is difficult to measure the impact of social media compared to traditional media in integrated marketing communications planning, and as such, it creates additional challenges for marketers to clearly define the ROI of new, digital tactics. Just as marketing communications planning has evolved to become increasingly integrated, marketing tracking and measurement will evolve to measure the impact and relationship between traditional and digital media.

What has your firm's experience been with measurement of integrated marketing campaigns?

Recessionary Marketing, Theme #3

Canada’s Emergence as a Marketing Leader

Canada has produced many award-winning marketing strategies recently that are being duplicated else where. Moving forward, Canadian marketers will have an opportunity to be innovative and creative as US markets become increasingly conservative.

Although the Canadian market is relatively mature with slow growth rates, experts believe that the recent economic turmoil created as a result of the global credit crisis will force US marketing departments to act more conservatively, thus giving global brands the opportunity to innovate and lead new marketing initiatives (through testing and metrics) in Canada. For example, BBDO worked with Frito Lay to develop the ‘Doritos Guru’ campaign, which involved the brand working with consumers to generate a name for the new flavour of Doritos as well as product marketing communications for the flavour. This brand-consumer partnership (co-creation) was launched in Canada but is now being used by other brands around the world.

As marketing programs become increasingly complex and integrated, the Canadian marketplace offers brands more simplistic measurement capabilities, compared to the larger population and logistical challenges posed by such a large geographic scope in the US. Canada also has the opportunity to own ‘green marketing’ by creating strong branding/communications models thus getting the attention of the US.

There has been a new found respect for Canada, as one executive in a recent recessionary marketing roundtable stated “we haven’t screwed things up badly”, referring to our relatively strong banking system. Five years ago there was a lot of negativity surrounding ‘Canadian’ branding, but recently there has been a shift. Focus groups conducted by RBC in the US found that American consumers wanted to have the company Canadian-branded.

Overall, American marketers are beginning to understand that there are significant differences that impact consumer behaviour in Canadian and American markets, thus beginning to buy-into the belief that Canadian markets require unique marketing programs.

What are your thoughts on the topic of Canadian marketing leadership?

Marketing Innovation (recessionary marketing theme #2)

As mentioned with our last post, Brand Matters conducted research on the topic marketing in a recession; what does it take to win. This is the second installment sharing our findings with theme #2, Marketing Innovation.

As companies tighten marketing budgets, marketers are increasingly expected to do more with less. The value proposition remains at the core of a brand’s offering; however, marketers are taking an innovation angle rather than price cutting.

Experts agree, in times of economic downturn brands must continue to invest in marketing. There is increased competition with value brands growing, premium brands lowering prices, and private label brands beginning to advertise. As a result, marketers are faced with the challenge of finding more innovative/compelling strategies to break through the clutter and effectively reach consumers. Marketers need to find fresh, cost-efficient ways to not only communicate with consumers, but also attract new customers as competitors eat into market share. If competitors do slash prices, this is when brands must be innovative in order to sustain their competitive value offering.

No longer are agencies providing the ‘big idea’, instead, innovation is appearing in the form of smaller, more practical tactics – for example, digital media and community building are being used to better serve the needs of a more targeted group of high-value customers. As Brenda Truant says, “With less resources, you [marketers] must work smarter not harder."

Examples of resourceful marketing tactics include:

(1) Co-creation with consumers - the Doritos Guru campaign successfully accomplished by achieve over 1.5 million exposures),
(2) Brand partnership – seeking out potential brands to partner with who share the same customers or have a similar brand character. For example, BMW.
(3) Gain deeper consumer insights – analyze user generated content to identify consumer insights and refine marketing communication tactics. As the insight analytics business continues to grow, there is an opportunity to review this consumer-generated content to truly understand their branding needs and identify the most appropriate marketing communications tactics.

Organizations lacking cross-functional internal alignment and trust, especially between marketing and finance, will find it more challenging to gain buy-in and support for new marketing communications initiatives.

Although new marketing communications initiatives are often tests, experts agree that they should not be referred to as ‘tests’ internally – instead they should be folded into an integrated marketing communications plan with more traditional tactics. These tests are important as they will help develop the marketing communications innovation pipeline which will result in future marketing communications programs. Marketing must own testing, as stated by one participant, “without experiments [tests] there is only measuring and tracking.”

Do you have more to add with examples of successful Innovation Tactics that have been developed by your organization?