Tim Tebow, Denver Broncos starting quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner -- and rebranding lesson

Tim Tebow was the biggest brand in college football just three years ago. During a career at the University of Florida from 2006-9, he set records in career passing efficiency and total rushing touchdowns in the Southeastern Conference (considered by many football fans to be the most competitive conference in the country).

Tebow’s teams sported a 48-7 record during his four-year career and won two national championships. He won the Heisman Trophy, emblematic of college football’s best player, in 2007, when he became the first college football player to both rush and pass for 20 or more touchdowns in a single season.

Now, Tebow is among the biggest brands in professional football, in just his second National Football League season. His number 15 Denver Broncos jersey is the largest-selling among all NFL players. Last weekend, he threw a game-winning touchdown pass in the first play of overtime to capture Denver’s first playoff victory in six years — spawning a record 9,420 tweets per second, according to Twitter.

But the two Tim Tebows are totally different brands, even though both have been successful.

So, what would one of the most-successful college quarterbacks of all time even need or want to change?

The answer: Because.

Tebow’s lifelong ambition was to play in the NFL as a quarterback. Not so easy, despite all the accolades: Many pro scouts considered his throwing motion (where he drew the ball back to his waist, rather than his shoulder, before throwing) to be unsuited for the NFL. Mel Kiper Jr., an ESPN pro football scouting analyst, was quoted as saying: “I don’t think he can be a full-time quarterback.” Given his relatively large size for a QB and his ability to run the football out of the shotgun formation, Tebow was labeled a running quarterback — faint praise and to many a way of saying he didn’t have what it took to succeed in an NFL offense.

Tim Tebow had a track record to think he was good enough. But he took it on himself to change. In a recent documentary about his preparation for the 2010 NFL draft, Tebow said:

“What we wanted to work on with my throwing motion was, really, get the loop out of it. Make it as quick as possible.”

Tebow’s goal became to change his muscle memory (a specific motor task put into memory through repetition) in order to show professional scouts that he was ready for the NFL. He needed to get his body to routinely make a different throwing motion, after four highly successful years in college. It took this elite athlete several coaches and about three weeks of 12-hour training days to change. Noted one of his coaches: “It’s going to take … 2,000 to 3,000 times doing something before you start to ingrain it in your muscles.”

Evidently, he changed enough: Tebow was selected by the Denver Broncos with the 25th pick in the first round in the 2010 NFL draft, and led his team to the NFL playoffs after the most recent 2011 season while leading fourth-quarter rallies for his team.

What lessons does Tim Tebow provide for you and your insurance brand?

1. Sometimes you need to change your brand because somebody else thinks so.
2. What you do well and what you need to improve both feed your brand.
3. Even the best at one level have to change to get to the next level. (A brand’s muscle memory might be doing something because it’s successful, but that doesn’t mean it will be effective in the future.)
4. Forgetting what you did before, and changing to something new, is difficult. It takes time and toil.
5. It can take a purposeful and sustained effort to create a new routine and a different environment.

Question: What do you think needs changing in good insurance brands?

UPDATE: See a story in American Agent and Broker about insurance industry spokespersons.

– traditional children’s song

Those who don’t get to Grandmother’s house by horse and sleigh (or airplane, bus, car, or train) are now traveling there via Facebook. They’re going to all kinds of places on the social networking site.

Facebook.com was the most-visited web site on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009, and on New Year’s Day 2010, according to data reported by Experian Hitwise. “Facebook” was also the most-searched word in 2010, according to the firm’s most recent statistics.

What does this mean for insurance brands? If the people are there, shouldn’t the insurance brands be there too? Maybe brand decision-makers can use:

– Ads and content to the theme of “Safe travels and secure home brought to you by [carrier name / agency name].”

– Facebook postings of blog content about holiday safety tips, an evergreen (pun intended) topic for TrustedChoice.com and others.

– Reminders about claims service numbers and tips in case of a home mishap or car accident around the holidays.

Researching this blog post, I came to learn that this song, which I’ve always associated with Christmas visits, is actually a Thanksgiving song by Lydia Maria Child published in 1844 written originally as a poem. The poem, titled “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” is based on her childhood memories and mentions visiting her “Grandfather’s” house. I always recalled the lyric as “Grandmother’s house,” not “Grandfather’s.” The author was a novelist, journalist and teacher who wrote extensively about the need to eliminate slavery, according to Wikipedia.

Question: What good social networking content do you use (or see insurance brands using) around the holiday season?

“It’s like a gift card in a big store.”

Recently a client made that statement at the conclusion of a discussion about a new branding initiative for his insurance firm. The client was delighted about having a range of choices in the creative materials we had developed. But he also was a bit torn and forlorn about having to only choose one approach from more than one choice.

Ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare once said.

With a marketing budget, or any budget for that matter, insurance brands need to make choices. Examples of some of the age-old choices are:

• Should I develop an email campaign to put my brand back in touch with those new contacts that stopped by the trade show booth recently? Or should I spend the budget to reach out to make a follow-up phone call to prospects we met last year?
• Is it a better idea to write up and design a case study or white paper to send to prospects, or to create a new ad campaign?
• And so on.

In 1960 (around about the time of the setting of the current TV hit MadMen) Jerome McCarthey presented the idea of the “4 Ps” to the marketing world: product, price, place, promotion. Philip Kotler later talked about making marketing decisions in the context of the “4 Cs” of the marketing mix:

• Product = Customer Benefits
• Price = Cost to Customer
• Place = Convenience
• Promotion = Communications

Insurance brands today have another wrinkle in their marketing decision-making. Whether you want to call it a “P” (for personalization or personal contact) or “C” (contact or customer contact or customization), the social Web gives marketers a chance to interact more personally, one-on-one, with prospects and clients. The social web is a new “place” (in McCarthey’s terminology) or a new “convenient” location to meet (in Kotler’s terminology). It’s in the mix.

How do you see insurance brands spending their gift cards, in light of the new choices the social Web provides?

Rooster has “grit” (Ross’s word), even if he’s time-beaten, weather-worn and (in actor Jeff Bridges’s take) has a muffled, mouth-chewing way of speech.

The girl heroine insists on coming along, so Rooster and Ross ride out on the range, encountering dead bodies, outlaws, rattlesnakes and other hazards. [Plot spoiler: Rooster tracks and kills his quarry (with help from a Matt Damon-acted Texas Ranger who has his own reasons for hunting down the villianous Tom Chaney). Mattie Ross gets her justice.]

I’m not a movie buff nor a Western fan, but this well-done movie led me to reflect on naming and insurance brand tagline projects we’ve been working on here at Aartrijk:

While not as hazardous nor as heroic as bounty hunting in the Old West, naming something has its own risks and rewards. And the processes have similarities.

Names, whether insurance product names or company names, are a key element of a brand. They can evoke and/or describe what an insurance firm has to offer. They can create an association or understanding of an insurance solution in the mind of a prospect or client. They can give rise to pride and inspiration among employees. They can be a shortcut that helps people find a brand again when they need it.

And seeking out a new product or brand name requires doing things that are out of the ordinary. It also requires (as does a movie plot) the suspension of disbelief and the willingness to wait out the twists and turns.

When insurance decision-makers hire Aartrijk for a naming project, like the young and strong Mattie Ross they are almost always looking for something they can’t find on their own. They’re looking for someone who is distinctly different from themselves but trustworthy. They want someone who’s been into the territory before. And when they ride along they’ll face a scare or two, and things won’t always seem to be working out.

Finding or creating a new name for an insurance product or brand has elements of a Western novel or movie: There’s a relentless quest. There’s adventure. And the journey gets dicey.

But finding the right name can be one of the most satisfying and inspiring things a brand decision-maker can ever do. To the Mattie Ross-like heroes and heroines who trust us: Thanks. We did it together.

But this resilient sector of the insurance industry continues to sprout new buds, even fully blooming new meadows of information:

• Trade media outlet InsuranceJournal.com has made a big push into video for several years. (Disclosure: Aartrijk’s senior team members host a regular podcast on InsuranceJournal.tv.)
• In the past several months, another insurance publishing firm launched the new PropertyCasualty360.com portal and the BenefitsPro.com portal.
• Digital editions of magazines such as Best’s Review and Rough Notes are delivering a magazine-like look with Web-like searchability.

This whole reinvigoration of the insurance trade press has roots in editors such as Sam Friedman (now-former editor of National Underwriter Property & Casualty) reinventing the traditional editors’ column as a blog.

Another key part of the new trend is the comments section.

Ah, comments. Insurance Journal allows free rein for readers to comment on its articles, unfettered and anonymous. That makes for interesting insights and sober analysis (along with occasional silliness and “flaming” of authors and public figures). Health care reform and its backlash have made for a boomlet in commentary.

It’s all part of free speech, right? Go America. Which brings me to the point: Is it the responsibility of users of insurance trade media sites to behave themselves?

One editor thinks so. He went so far as to try to stake out a line:

“I’ve been a champion of free speech (and press) since a high school newspaper run-in with an over-zealous Midwestern principal 25 years ago. It’s driven my entire career. But I won’t tolerate racism, sexism or homophobia on this site (or any other -ism). It will get you blacklisted faster than a Jersey Shore cast member.”

I didn’t have a problem with that (although I bristled when he brought Jersey into the discussion, of course). But fair warning about this warning shot: One person’s “-ism” is another’s “free speech.”

What do you think? How well does self-policing work when it comes to making comments on trade press articles?

At Google Inc.’s Think Mobile event in New York, industry guru Mary Meeker said that the pace and force of mobile growth is unlike anything she has ever seen.” —

Mary Meeker, the leading trumpeter of the Internet in its early days and now a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, is now saying mobile is growing faster than the Web did.

She’s got her evidence …

• Shipments of smartphones and tablet computers outpaced desktop PCs and notebook PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010, globally.
• Mobile data traffic is forecast to grow by a factor of 26 over the next five years, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.
• It took about 10 years for electronic commerce to reach five percent of all US retail sales activity. Meeker posits that mCommerce (mobile commerce) will reach the same level of penetration much faster.
• Desktop Internet units (mostly computers) topped one billion in 2000 after being introduced in the 1980s. Meeker forecasts mobile Internet devices will surpass 10 billion units in less than 10 years.
• Real-time features of social networking such as music sharing and location sharing are accelerating mobile device usage.

Insurance marketers, many of whom are still catching up with social networking (as well as older technology such as Web sites), now face another significant change. Business partners and consumers will be using new mobile technology devices (smartphones, tablet computers, book readers, car-based Web systems) to search, learn, interact and buy.

One insurance marketer catching the wave is Humana, which recently announced new services for a highly mobile consumer demographic where connecting has life-and-death implications: the U.S. military.

Meeker’s conclusion about So/Lo/Mo (social/local/mobile): “It’s going to be a fascinating decade.”

Questions for the insurance pros out there:

1. Are mobile devices insured on a homeowners policy?
2. When an exec loses his or her phone or tablet computer, how would you handle the business interruption claim and/or the identity theft risk?

I still remember the radio ad jingle. Growing up in central New Jersey and raised on AM radio, I repeatedly heard this commercial for a Philadelphia newspaper, which featured a consumer hotline dubbed “Call For Action!” (Using a word like “GReenwood” in the phone number followed by the numbers was a trick for making telephone numbers memorable.)

In those days of the 1960s and 1970s, lemon laws were not yet on the books, malls were just being invented, and the “vigilante consumer” (more on that term later) was a slumbering giant. So the local newspaper had a consumer action helpline where people could call if they had a problem with a consumer product or service. The Star-Ledger, a newspaper in New Jersey, recently reintroduced a similar column.The way it worked was: The reader called to describe their problem. The newspaper would then contact the business/professional with which the consumer was having a problem and ask for a better resolution for the consumer. The motivating factor often was that the newspaper would state that it was going to cover the situation in its “Action Line” weekly newspaper column.

Guess what happened? Results.

I recalled this catchy jingle the other week when I was disappointed in the performance of a consumer product (replacement windows) in my home. I called the store where we bought the windows, was told to phone a service number, and was informed that parts were still under warranty after seven years but labor was not. To replace the warranted parts on the window would cost $120 per hour in labor. (This is after we paid more than twice that per window.)

At that moment, recalling the thousands of dollars spent for the windows, I was irritated that I would have to spend $120 minimum (prepaid by credit card, of course, before the window manufacturer would schedule a technician’s service call) to fix a few window gaskets.

This consumer wanted to lash out and let a few people know not to buy this brand of windows.

I’m not proud of that. But I’m guessing many people have felt this surge of consumer-ish anger at some point or another. Faith Popcorn, futurist, called people exhibiting this type of reaction the “vigilante consumer” (Popcorn’s definition: “The consumer manipulates marketers and the marketplace through pressure, protest and politics.”)

Today, unlike my childhood 1970s, I can lash out on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or a blog or a replacement windows review site.

The question for insurance brands is: How will you handle this type of situation the next time it happens?

One of the people I admire most in social networking is insurance professional Nibby Priest, who from a Kentucky riverfront town Tweets and Yammers, gives us peeks into life, and mentions insurance now and again. When Nibby and I did an Insurance Journal Webcast for independent agents a couple years ago, an interesting question came up on this very topic. Here’s what we talked about:

“Question: In opening up your business to a Facebook fan page, you are obviously opening up your business to negative feedback. How do handle negative comments?

Nibby Priest: That’s a great question. Sometimes people don’t want to be a part of social media because they don’t want somebody to say something negative. You know bad things are not always bad; sometimes you need to know about them. So many times a client will leave you and you don’t even know what you did wrong. So, at least this gives an avenue and gives you, as business owners, the opportunity to go in there and correct it.

Social media is all about transparency. An example: Yesterday, Google messed up with Gmail. And what have they done today and late last night? They put out exactly what went wrong, what they learned from the experience, and they were transparent.

We need to listen to what clients have to say about us. So have I had any negative feedback? No. Can I get some? Yes. And whenever I do, I want to respond back positively and make a correction to it. That’s how I would handle it.”

When people call for action, how do you respond?

E-mail added 500 million users in 2010.

An article in Econsultancy.com’s blog reported:

“According to Royal Pingdom, 107 trillion email messages were sent in total last year. That works out to 294bn per day. There were nearly 2bn email users and 3bn email accounts, and the ranks of the emailing grew by nearly 500m. In other words, last year, email grew a Facebook last year.”

Royal Pingdom, a monitoring company, recently posted numbers about e-mail, social media, Web sites, etc.

The bad news: An estimated 90 percent of e-mail messages are considered spam. That points to social networking sites’ big advantage over e-mail: The people who post spam-ish things get un-friended and otherwise shunned.

What place does e-mail still have in marketing communications and branding? It’s changing, I think, but not going away.

In the village of  Liberty Corner, N.J. stands a car repair shop on the downtown corner. As I left my office on a recent cold winter evening, I drove past the shop and saw a car up on the lift and the mechanic (one of the owners, either Robert or Michael) underneath. Through the glass garage doors and under the bright florescent lights of the garage it was clear to see the man’s body language: Determined, intent, obviously wanting to solve whatever problem the car’s owner had brought to his attention.

The scene made me grateful for my own work, which usually involves sitting at a desk in front of a computer, writing about insurance in articles, news releases, ads, social networking posts, and the like.

Two days later I got an update e-mail from LinkedIn, the business networking site. It said: “Charles, 65 of your connections changed jobs in 2010.” The e-mail had thumbnail photos of all of them and an occasional question (“Where’s Scott now?).

That surprised me. I had no idea so many people I know on LinkedIn got new titles or jobs in 2010. That’s about one of every 7 people I am connected with on LinkedIn.

Two surprising things about that:

1) To me that’s a high number. That’s a lot of job changes in a year that was arguably lukewarm at best for economic growth. That’s a bit of good news that people are still landing jobs. Some of them were promotions, another positive sign.

2) I recalled helping one person in 2010 during his (lengthy) job search. Surely I knew about or could have helped someone else!

What are you grateful for in your work?

The Driskill Hotel's marble floor features its 'D' logo

Walking in to The Driskill Hotel in Austin for Brand Camp 2010 in October, I admired the high ceilings, the 1880s southwestern architecture and the quick attention from the staff.

And the marble floors.

Like many distinctive hotels, The Driskill spends a lot of money on its floors. They’re marble, distinctly colored, and clean as can be. Placed in the middle of the floor in the center of the hotel’s meeting space is the hotel’s logo (see photo to the right).

The floors and the logo were easy to notice as I was walking from meeting room to lunch and back.

I bet consumers notice these same things about your brand. Except for an insurance agency, the ‘marble floor’ might be something different: Good service; a pleasant working relationship; fast quoting; the ability to diagnose and prescribe insurance prescriptions for risk management.

Do you strategically place your brand identity in the midst of your “marble floor”?

If you do, it’ll give people (prospects and customers) the chance to notice and remember your brand.