Image courtesy of www.menttium.com
FIT’s Master’s Program in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management has been teaching classes of talented young beauty marketers how to become tomorrow’s category leaders for over 10 years. As part of the creative, “outside in” focused curriculum, FIT pairs each student with an executive mentor – and this year, I was lucky enough to be invited to volunteer.
Being a mentor is both an honor and a unique opportunity to reflect on what you know, and what’s worth sharing with someone else. Mentoring a young woman who’s rising in her chosen career in the emotionally resonant, woman-centric world of beauty and wellness was particularly cool for me, since in my own career, the beauty industry “found” me a bit later in life.
Before Evelyn and I met, I gave some thought as to what I might have looked for in a mentor at her age. I spent my 20′s working as a marketer in the music industry. There were moments of thoughtful, collaborative mentorship to guide me – and (possibly more memorably), the moments when I found myself alone, creatively “winging it”… occasionally with spectacularly disastrous results. My ideal professional mentor would have married the best of both worlds: someone who teaches you enough to set you up to succeed, but also pushes you to wing it, challenges you to get out of your comfort zone, and encourages you not to be scared to learn through failure.
In that sense, as a mentee, Evelyn was my perfect match. She’s an impressive young professional who’s hungry to learn and brave enough to wing it on occasion. She left a large corporate job to join a start-up while enrolled at FIT, and a lot of what we talked about in our sessions was her challenges in designing a marketing communications plan for a new brand from scratch. Finding the consumer insight, building strategies that tap into the insight and resonate with the community of women who are your target – it’s all critical, fundamental stuff to “get right,” whether you work on the client or the agency side. And it’s often hard. And it’s usually more fun to do it with someone you like, respect, and can learn from.
While we were having fun, Evelyn’s analytical mind challenged me to take my mentoring skill set to the next level – and I think I learned as much from her as she did from me. There are two key takeaways, which in my experience are essential for anyone considering becoming a professional mentor:
- Remember: it’s not about you. You may be proud of your career achievements or itching to share war stories or pearls of wisdom. But being an effective mentor starts with a lot of active listening. Be wary of over-identifying with your mentee’s challenges and fast-tracking to solutions based solely on your personal career experience.
- Remember: it is about you. Ask yourself: what do you wish you’d understood earlier in your career? What perspective(s) have you been exposed to that can expand your mentee’s view of a problem? What have you read / seen / done that made a big impact on you and might be valuable to recommend reading or doing? Said differently, it’s great to share what you know with a mentee – but it’s even more valuable to share how you think.
A few Saturday nights ago, I convinced my colleague DeLisa to head downtown with me and check out a Journey cover band called Voyage. Since DeLisa and I both lived through the era of Journey’s omnipresence on the airwaves, I figured she’d be entertained watching my dear friend Robby (lead guitarist) and his bandmates roll out those nostalgic faves.
It was a great night: we drank beer, raised our hands in rawk salute, and sang ourselves hoarse alongside hundreds of other fans. And back at the desk on Monday, I couldn’t help but connect the dots between our fun night out and what DeLisa and I do in our day jobs at MMC.
So here are a few things a great cover band reminded me of:
1) It can be cool – and credible – to be a copy.
My friend’s tribute band offers Journey fans the chance to hear the music they love performed live more frequently, in more intimate venues, at a more reasonable price than the original band. They’re proudly selling one hell of an entertaining product to consumers who are interested in a high-quality copy. That inspires me when I think about all the times clients look us to come up with communications plans for products that aren’t new, or first to market, or notably different from existing competitors. Which leads me to my next point …
2) Context can be everything.
It’s not always the most revolutionary product that wins over hearts and minds – but it’s always the most relevant one. And relevance is of course defined by our social networks. If there were ten Journey tribute bands performing in Manhattan that night, none of those other 9 would have gotten my time or money – they weren’t relevant to me, my friends in the room, or my Facebook friends who followed along with my posts that night. Every day, my teams and I are working on PR programs for our clients that produce exactly that kind of authentic relevance and word of mouth.
3) Be great at telling – not selling – the story.
I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my life, and I’m still blown away by one simple thing: a great set list. The best live artists have mastered the art of arranging songs into a storytelling arc: they sing you through despair to hope, loss to love, sadness to sweet relief. And that reminds me that storytelling is my favorite part of the PR discipline ~ I love watching people in action who know how to make that storytelling “journey” irresistible.
I am a proud Canadian who’s spent an eye-opening few weeks experiencing my first Winter Olympics through the lens of American media – ironically, a Games hosted by my native land.
It would be far too easy as a smug Canadian to use this blog as a forum to mock the “gee whiz” tone of Today Show segments on poutine (“Canada’s national dish!”) or Brian Williams’ travelogue about bear-watching in the Arctic.
But I won’t. Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about the brands of the teams from my native country and my adopted one.
Brand Team USA has an overwhelmingly dominant share of voice in the US media – and if that seems completely unremarkable to you, you’ve probably never watched the Olympics on TV from a living room in a “challenger brand” country like mine.
Even in winter sports, Canada can’t historically compete with the superpower athletic teams from Russia, Eastern Europe or America; as a result, Canadian media tend to paint a more dispassionate picture, dividing air time and column inches among all countries’ notable athletes.
It’s got me thinking about all our various brands at MMC. Many are leaders in their category. When those brands enter the PR conversation, “showing up” as the big cheese has both assumptions and implications riding on it.
What if one day a challenger brand turned the tables? I’m reminded of a call I had last week with a cool, smaller client; they came into a PR strategy discussion assuming that humility was the only brand character they could own. I talked to them about Team Canada, who decided to make “Own the Podium” their mission statement in the countdown to these Olympics. Beyond the literal push (to get more Canadian athletes up on the medal podium), it was a seismic shift in brand communication. It was a new call to action for us quiet Canucks: wave our red mittens! Scream at the hockey rinks! Cry at the skating rinks! Sing “O Canada” from the mountaintops!
Own the Podium has attracted a ton of attention and media ink – and yes, it’s made Canada a target of a little trash-talking, as clearly the Americans will own the podium at the conclusion of these games (cue the “Canadian time share” jokes here). But overall it’s been a fascinating conversation ignited by a big, bold, unprecedentedly patriotic branding move – and my favorite part of these Games to follow.
Post a comment on your favorite Olympics media moment here!
I recently treated my boyfriend to a trip to Las Vegas for his birthday. I knew he’d love the chance to hit the craps tables, but I timed the trip around an event that was more of a gift to me: the U2 concert at Sam Boyd Stadium.
I’m a diehard U2 fan: I think they are truly one of the greatest bands and brands of my lifetime. In fact, I think about the U2 “brand” quite frequently when I’m brainstorming big ideas for the terrific brands I work with at MMC. Why? Because I think that at some point, really big brands pick their path towards one of two end points on a spectrum of the emotional relationship they want to have with consumers.
I’ve dubbed these emotional end points “lowest common denominator” vs. “highest common denominator”. The lowest-common-denominator brands can be seen everywhere around us: they peddle products that appeal to our need to be noticed, to be attractive, to be successful, to be envied, to be cool.
Highest-common-denominator brands, on the other hand, offer us stuff that feeds our need to make a difference, to make friends, to give back or pay it forward or add some beauty or laughter to this life. And that, to me, lies at the core of a winning brand’s survival strategy for the long term. Oh sure, these brands often gratify lots of our less noble desires along the way, but they tap into some higher-order emotion that’s intensely personal and yet universal
and they use that connection to accomplish more than simply selling more stuff.
U2 is a great example of how to rock the high end of that spectrum for me. Sure, music and merchandise are the band’s artistic commodities, but activism, passion and philanthropy define their brand
and keep fans like me showing up. (In fact I’m already plotting my 2010 tour date destination vacations ;)
Yesterday afternoon, the news of the sudden death of Michael Jackson stopped me in my tracks.
To rewind:
I was a newspaper arts editor in Toronto when Kurt Cobain died one April Friday in 1994. I vividly remember that day’s somber staff meeting: we changed our entire editorial layout to create a Kurt retrospective. I spent two days writing and re-writing a heartfelt lead op-ed column, discussing the loss with other grieving friends and listening to all my Nirvana CDs.
(I went on to a career in PR and marketing for the Sony Music label in Canada, and I worked on the release of Michael Jackson’s “Invincible”. Although Jackson had become all too vincible by then, shaking that gloved hand for the first time ranks among my all-time most memorable career moments.)
15 years later, my paper’s days-late coverage of Cobain’s death seems so antiquated it borders on absurd, especially compared to the way the whole world was talking within 15 minutes of the death of Michael Jackson. The current seismic tilt in favor of social media is most powerfully on display in moments of grief like these.
The human instinct to gather together to grieve is universal, and spans all centuries and cultures, but how we do it in virtual communities today is frankly fascinating. By now, we all know that texts and photos from EMTs were circulated via hundreds of social media sites minutes after their response to the 911 call from Jackson’s home, and that blog and Twitter conversation proliferated exponentially. TMZ.com reported Jackson’s death several minutes before any traditional media outlet did; within the hour, celebrities by the dozen elected to use blogs and Twitter to express their official condolences.
One of my first calls Thursday night was to my colleague Robert (the head of MMC’s social media department) to compare notes on what we were seeing unfold, and what our profession might glean in the way of insights.
Here are a few things we discussed:
Opinion’s infinite capacity to expand online. This truly is an unprecedented time of public self-expression. The future for PR is about joining and influencing conversation; the days of “managing” it are clearly gone.
Who are the fire-starters? The Michael story was a profound case study of leaders and followers in today’s pop culture social media landscape. Weeks from now, I predict we’ll be talking as much about who said what, and when, as we will about Michael himself.
Trying authenticity on for size. I was moved to tears and laughter more than once on Thursday night by statements from celebrities and industry execs who knew Michael. People talked about how brilliant, reclusive, sincere, totally weird, and unpredictable he was, how he was an iconic artist and a pop culture freak and a plastic surgery addict. Sure, the dead can’t talk back, but I loved how people didn’t feel the need to morph Michael into a saint in order to honor him.
So, over to you
what is this sad Michael Jackson news cycle making you think about?
I’m working on a number of projects for my clients right now to introduce “new news” to media influencers. New-ness is the lifeblood of a lot of public relations work: new products, new scientific studies, new insights, new trends, and new expert talents all make a talk-worthy debut in our discipline with the right strategy and executional planning. The opportunity to figure out how share new news feeds some of the most creative and rewarding moments in my day. (The delight that lurks in the task to make old news become new again is a topic I’ll save for another post ;)
I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about the allure of the new as I introduced a new friend and neighbor to the attractions of our shared Manhattan neighborhood. I’m a textbook influential :finding the perfect ‘hood hangout for brunch (in my case, Ze Café) is only truly sweet if there’s a friend with whom to share your discovery. A laugh-out-loud movie (in my case recently, The Hangover) or memoir (I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti) gets a second lifespan of enjoyment when it’s passed along.
Speaking of textbooks, any good bookstore’s business section shelves are groaning under the weight of shiny tomes that promise to reveal the winning strategies of successful influencer marketing and driving word of mouth ~ and yet still, getting it right remains an art, not a science.
So, I’m curious: what was the last time you told someone: “you’ve got to watch/read/see/visit/buy this?” And what moved you from a “get it” to a “gotta share it” mindset?
Today, I’m traveling to the little town of Chesley in Ontario, Canada to visit my grandmother, who turns 95 years old this week.
Since I work at an agency that specializes in marketing to women, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned from one incredible 95-year-old woman.
1. Change the vehicle, not the core values.
My grandmother watched horses turn into horsepower, hemlines rise and fall, phonographs and mimeographs replaced by MP3s and VDPs. Through it all, whether a carriage or a car got her to church on Sunday, what stayed true was in her heart. I think about my clients’ brands the same way. Bring on new tools! Have fun with Facebook groups, timely Tweets, pop-ups and pre-sales! Just don’t let tactics get your brand distracted from the heart of the conversation.
2. Get to know who lives on the back 40.
My grandparents lived for decades on a 150-acre farm. They knew every neighboring farm family for miles around, including friends and pets. I’m reminded of them whenever I map an influencer landscape for a client: it’s critical to understand the web of contacts and connections around a brand. That thought-leader lurking in the way-back might fulfill or foil your best intentions.
3. To everything there is a season.
Although I no longer spend summer weekends alongside my grandmother in her garden, I plant the seeds of stories for my clients every day. It’s vital to respect and respond to media’s “seasons”, the winds of change, the dark clouds overhead, and nurture your big idea until its season is ripe. PS: I’m surrounded by great gardeners at MMC!
4. Life’s going to surprise you. Don’t just plan to survive.
Wise advice for everyone, but especially in my profession, where storytelling is my daily work and I always have to expect an unexpected chapter or two. Today, a single headline can change a whole story arc! Going from “survive” to “thrive” mode reacting to life’s plot twists is a lesson I’m grateful my grandmother taught me early.
5. Make it matter.
A client may well be wondering how they’ll stay in business next year. My grandmother never expected to celebrate this many birthdays. She taught me not to assume I’ll get chances for “do overs” in this life, so professionally speaking I “make it matter” with programs that work hard for my clients right this minute as well as being the best building blocks for their long-term brand health.
Image courtesy of www.menttium.com
