Heart and Soul: Two car manufacturers’ touchdowns at the Superbowl.

So much for every car commercial looking and sounding the same. Well, done, VW and Chrysler.

And thanks for treating your audience with respect rather than trying to merely seduce us with eye candy. I hope other advertisers will follow your lead.

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Artifacts of Influence: grassroots movements, familiar strangers and the power of the social media daisy chain.

On Grassroots and cracking the notion that power influencers drive product acceptance in the market:

“Why have Google and Apple done so well in the last [few] years? Because the grassroots love them. That’s the power root of the industry. Ideas here don’t come from the big influencers and move down. No, they start on the street and move up. Anyone miss how Google got big? Not by throwing a press conference.”

– Robert Scoble, via Johnnie Moore’s blog back in 2006.

Before I side with Robert, let me throw in a little word of caution: I know that the conversation has been geared in this direction for a few years now, but looking at cause : effect / influencer : influencee dynamics as a top-down model only seem fairly limited in scope. “Influencers” (whether they are “key” or “big” or “power” influencers) aren’t just at the top of their respective subcultural family trees. Sometimes, the masses themselves can be the power influencer.

Here is an example: When it comes to bottom-up and lateral impact, the street has always been a source of influence on culture, fashion, musical tastes, language, and political change. Urban fashions didn’t start on a runway in New York or Milan. “Gangsta” culture wasn’t designed in a Soho creative studio and then packaged and sold to rap superstars. It came from the street and was then commercialized. This same bottom-up and lateral mechanisms are true of punk rock, skateboarding, surfing, and just about every “culture” or “subculture” you can throw a cat at, from triathlon, to amateur photography to the country-club lifestyle. Influence starts at the bottom, not at the top. Top-down influence comes later and plays a very different role (touching on validation and scale).

Appealing to a grassroots base – which essentially consists of recruiting your 1-percenters to drive your campaign and influence their own lateral peer networks has always been smart. Politicians know this, which is why they are essential to the success of every campaign. Grassroots programs are militant in nature. They are infectious and viral in the true sense of the term. They feed on momentum and quasi-exponential growth. They may very-well be the most virulent form of Word-of-Mouth movements you will ever encounter. Why? Because they drive more than awareness and preference: They drive action.

If you are reading this and aren’t so sure you agree, that’s okay, but consider this: Every revolution in our history was the result of a grassroots movement. Every single one. Look at the American Revolution. The French Revolution. The fall of the Berlin Wall. More recently, thanks to the availability of cell phones, text messaging and the organic nature of social networks, the 2001 revolution in the Phillippines and the 2002 presidential elections in South Korea. Grassroots movements hold a staying power inversely proportional to the short-lived attention most marketing campaigns spend so much on.

For many of us, true influencers aren’t just celebrities or the upper stratum of a subculture. The way we become participants in the growth of a trend or the success of a product isn’t necessarily tied to product placement on The Apprentice, CSI, or whatever blockbuster is crushing the box office. We don’t necessarily buy clothes from D&G or Ray-Bans because Taylor Swift or Brad Pitt are seen sporting them in Cannes. Influencers are also our neighbors, our best friends, our co-workers, our parents, our kids. More than ever, they can also be familiar strangers on social networks, or a mob of people demanding the same thing you always wish you had the power to ask for yourself. Most of the time, these folks, NOT celebrities and so-called “thought leaders” are the true influencers in our lives.

It is human nature to seek safety, familiarity and validation both in the people we know and in numbers – which is why, from a corporate standpoint, large crowds (including virtual crowds) also tend to hold more power than a handful of so-called “influencers” conveniently picked by a marketing firm. Yet this insight into social networks (and social media on the whole) is one that a surprisingly large number of marketing, advertising and PR professionals trying to apply their trade to the social web still seem oblivious to.

We could go off on a major tangent here, but for now, consider the impact that this argument might have on the importance we attach to say… Klout, and to the “influencer” religion some marketing professionals are attempting to force into the social media discussion. (See left-hand model in the image below.) The problem, before you misunderstand me, isn’t Klout or its algorithms. I like Klout, actually. The problem lies in the worth we assign to the notion of top-down “influencers” – these magical people who, we are told, can get thousands, even millions of people to click a button, buy a pair of shoes, or go see a movie through a mere act of will… or a tweet.

Does this mean that cultural icons like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry, Kanye West and even Glenn Beck are not influencers? No, it doesn’t. Top-down influencers are real. They exist. Kim Kardashian, Leighton Meester and Justin Bieber help sell whatever they get photographed wearing. Drew Barrymore and Queen Latifah sell makeup. Leonardo DiCaprio sells Tag Heuer watches. Top-down influence is scientifically documented and relevant in the world of Big Advertising and Madison Avenue. But this type of influence, racing into 2011, is now a) increasingly limited and narrow in scope, and b) not immediately relevant when applied to complex, real-time, laterally-driven social networks.

If there is a lesson here, it is this: When combining your traditional marketing activities (regardless of the medium – print, TV, radio, web, mobile, POP, billboards, etc.) with your activity in the social space, look beyond traditional marketing dogma. Think beyond top-down influence. Consider the impact of lateral networks and organic word-of-mouth. Blend vertical and lateral forces.

Who really influences you to be a Mac or a PC? Who influences you to crave a Starbucks latte in the middle of the afternoon? Who makes you decide whether to shoot Canon or Nikon SLRs? Who influences your decision to choose one restaurant over another? “I want to be like Mike” still works, but the media landscape has changed considerably in the last few years – as it will continue to change still. Influence in the mass media space no longer fits the traditional marketing and advertising model, because mass media itself is no longer a top-down model.

Practical Advice: Next time you find yourself listening to a digital strategy that approaches a “social media marketing” campaign with a predominantly top-down “influence” model, stop, regroup, and consider a more mature perspective on influence – one that involves a carefully balanced combination of top-down, botton-up and lateral mechanisms.

Cheers,

Olivier.

 

 

 

 

Pre-order Social Media ROI:  Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization (Que Biz-Tech/Pearson) on Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com, or recommend it to someone today.

 

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How Marketing is choking the life out of social communications and social media – Part 1

Back in the day, social activity was a handshake on the sales floor. It was a beer after work. It was a cup of coffee or afternoon tea. It was a tennis match or a game of chess. It was lunch. It was a conversation at a party. It was a friendly hello on the street. None of it required a monthly subscription, a marketing firm, a guru or a content strategy.

Forget the “media” for a second and focus on the “social.” Focus on the word social.

What makes social media different from TV, radio, print and traditional web? More to the point, what is it that you as a company could do with social media that you cannot do via mass media?

Think. Think back to the way that friendly store manager made you feel about shopping there. Think about the impact that being friends with your auto mechanic has on your loyalty to his repair shop, about the degree to which positive experience, familiarity and trust impact your purchasing decisions every day. Would you rather do business with strangers or people you know? Would you rather do business with people who genuinely care about you and look after your every need, or companies whose employees couldn’t care less if you are happy with them? Think about this carefully. Do you look at Facebook and Twitter as merely new marketing channels, or as rich ecosystems where you and your customers can interact in ways that enhance your value to them and in turn helps you develop them into outspokenly loyal customers?

The companies that use social media correctly, the ones who see ROI from their activity there have already figured out that the social nature of channels like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare and others makes them radically different from traditional channels. Are they using social media channels for marketing purposes? Sure. But is that all they are doing? Not on your life. Check out the breadth of activity being managed by Starbucks, Ford and Best Buy, for starters. Marketing is only a small piece of the pie when it comes to the type of activities these companies engage in when it comes to the social web, and for good reason: Social media is not marketing media.

There are two things I want you to think about before we tackle Part 2 of this post. The first is this: If a company focuses its social media efforts on marketing, what is it not focusing on? Answer: Online reputation management, customer service, consumer relations, user groups, technical support, and consumer engagement, for starters. Yes, you read right. I used a social media buzzword. En-ga-ge-ment. Except that when I say it, I know what it means. I am not talking about marketing posing as engagement. I am not talking about content, contests and entertainment. I am talking about real engagement. The kind that feels like a handshake, like a conversation over coffee, the kind that develops trust, preference and loyalty in consumers. The real brick and mortar that companies can build their bridges with rather than the house of cards they are overpaying agencies to piece together for them. Social should feel like a handshake, not like a marketing message. Not like “content.” Not like a sales pitch.

The second thing I want you to think about is this: There are three clear phases in the customer life-cycle. They are acquisition, development, and retention. You’re a business and you want social media to work for you? Great. Your social media activity has to focus on all three phases, not just the first.

We know that your agency can get you lots of “likes,” follows and views. And as a company, you have paid the price for every single one. Now what? Did your digital agency, your marketing partner, your superstar consultant also factor in the rest of it? First question: What are you acquiring for all that social media spend – new followers or new transacting customers? Second question: Are you using your social media presence to develop these new customers into regular customers? Third question: Are you using your social media presence to further develop these customers into loyal customers, even ambassadors for your brand and products?

If all you are doing with your social media potential is handing it over to a marketing department, a digital department or an outside agency, you are not. All you are doing is spending money on reach and follower acquisition. Think beyond acquisition. What are you doing through social media to develop customers, to increase their frequency of purchases, the yield of their transactions? What are you doing to develop them from potential customer to new customer, from new customer to satisfied customer, from satisfied customer to repeat customer, from repeat customer to loyal customer, and from loyal customer to evangelist?

Move beyond the marketing/acquisition mentality or you will never get anywhere in this space. Later this week, in Part 2, we will dive a little deeper into what I mean by that.

To learn more about how to properly build social media programs that involve but are not limited to marketing:

Available now for pre-order on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com

 

 

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Care or die: Because customer loyalty isn’t really rocket science.

If you don’t care about your customers (or as Gary Vaynerchuck would say, “if you don’t give a f*ck about your customers,”) you are wasting your time with social media.

Your customers aren’t wallet with legs. They are people, and here is the thing about people: People prefer to do business with people, companies and brands they like; people, companies and brands that make them feel good; people, companies and brands they trust; people, companies and brands they feel a connection with.

I don’t care how good your content is and how many people visit your site. Keep telling me how many fans and followers you have, and how many unique visitors your website gets. That all sounds great, and yeah, it looks pretty swell on paper. But the reality of your situation is this: If you don’t care about your customers, they will sense it, and they will return your apathy.

Do you know how to inspire loyalty in your customers? I’ll tell you: It isn’t by training them to expect 20% off or by sending them coupons in the mail. It isn’t by sending them rebate checks or making every tenth drink free. You inspire loyalty in your customers by demonstrating your loyalty towards your customers. That’s right: You have to give before you can receive. You, as a company, have to set the tone, and the only way to do that is to give a shit.

I walked into a Staples yesterday to buy a cartridge of ink toner. The plan: $22. I also walked out with an i-Omega portable hard drive and a few 4GB thumb drives for Red Chair. The outcome: $100+. You know how that happened? Simple: From the moment I walked into that store, its employees greeted me with smiles and treated me like they would a friend. They didn’t try to sell me anything, they didn’t push me towards any upgrades, and none of it felt contrived. They just seemed to care. Not only did the store increase its yield in this instance (and not by a mere 10-20%), it also ensured that next time I need something for the office, I will shop there instead of online or across the street at one of their competitors’ locations.

Staples loyalty verdict: Very high.

Compare that with my latest experiences at Bloom (a grocery store), where none of the people who work there even bother to make eye contact with me.

Bloom loyalty verdict: You must be joking.

Social media is not just another set of marketing channels for companies to push content and messaging. Sure, you can use it as a marketing channel (in moderation) but the power of the space is to scale those 1-1 interactions customers have around brands and the experiences they foster. Companies whose leaders and employees care tend to shine in Social Media. Companies whose employees and managers don’t care, even when they produce decent content, go nowhere in the space.

As a quick illustration of of what I mean, let us turn to Twitter: The marketing world’s 140-character “what the hell are we supposed to do with this channel” puzzle du jour.

I am going to show you two examples now. One of a beverage company that cares about its customers, and one of a beverage company that cares mostly about itself… and even talks to itself, though mostly to pat itself on the back for being like, awesome. You decide which is which.

Incidentally, it might be worth noting that one of these two companies has kind of struggled to acquire its 46,000 followers on Twitter over the last 2 years or so. The other has well over a million. Guess which is which. (Hint as to why: One focuses on customers and the other focuses on itself.)

Also, in case it wasn’t obvious, nothing says “I don’t really give a shit about you but heck, maybe you’ll buy something anyway” like an auto DM on Twitter. Don’t know what I am talking about? Here are some examples:

My favorite thing about those automated “hi, I really care” little nuggets of gold is the fact that so many of them get cut short: Look at the @Retail_City and @jobpsalms auto-DMs above. Okay, Job. I’ll “try to keep it REAL” if you d…

Way to make a good first impression in a SOCIAL medium. As executives, employees, brand ambassadors and representatives of your respective companies, do you walk around with a recording of yourself at parties and industry events? When someone shakes your hand, do you step aside so an assistant can hand them your card and deliver a 140-character sales pitch? When a client or customer walks up to you and says “hey, I’m glad I ran into you. I have a problem with the thing I bought from you,” do you respond by handing them a brochure and walking away? Of course not. So why is it that so many companies think that this is acceptable behavior in the social media space?

Give a shit. It really isn’t that complicated. If you just do that, if you start there, everything will fall into place. If you don’t give a shit, and you show it by monologuing with “content” and selling all day, guess what: You’ve already lost to the guy in your industry who takes the time to actually shake hands, and makes time for real dialog. It was always this way, but the integration of social media into the business world has amplified the effect: If as a company, you demonstrate daily that don’t give a shit about your customers, they will return the favor by not giving a shit about you. The implications are simple: The more customers care about you, the more likely it is that you will have a good quarter. The less they care about you, the more likely it is that you will have a lousy quarter. Some things, you can’t automate or outsource. Your relationship with customers is one of them. That applies to the web as well as the “in store” experience.

So here’s a thought: Instead of spending so much time working on your “content strategy,” your “digital strategy” and your “social media strategy,” why don’t you focus on your “we give a shit” strategy? Try that for a month and see what happens. Trust me, the “content,” “digital” and “social media” will take care of themselves. You will barely be able to keep up – and that will be a good thing.

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Social Media and the Middle East: How technology, culture and shifting demographics will change the game in the next decade.

What if 50% of your market were under the age of 25, extremely mobile, social-media-savvy and brand-conscious?

What if you could turn back the clock a couple of years – knowing what you know now – and go back to the beginning of the social media “revolution,” only with mature tools and stable platforms at your fingertips?

Think about these two hypothetical situations and bring them together. How would you blend Social Media and digital communications into your business model? This is the question being asked by the business community in Dubai and the rest of the GCC – a region of the world finding itself on the cusp of a powerful marketing communications shift over the next couple of years, starting right now.

I shot a little video while I was there, just for you. If the video embed doesn’t work for you, watch it here.

The threat of failure: Companies (and their marketing partners and agencies) using social media merely as marketing channels through which to push traditional messaging, marketing offers and other noisy, low traction tactics. Traditional thinking is the enemy of progress in this instance.

The opportunity for success: Blend Social and Traditional tactics without making the same mistakes that companies in the west already made over the last few years. That is to say: Blend and mix social and traditional but do not confuse the two. Make full use of word-of-mouth (lateral forces) instead of relying on aggressive discounting to earn business. Watch where companies in western markets have succeeded and failed with social media (and why) before jumping into the space and making similar mistakes. (The US, Canada and Europe are outstanding labs for regions just now getting into the space. Don’t guess at it. Study what has been done and learn from it.)

Once again, the difference between success and failure rests on simple decisions being made by companies just like yours: Do we think this problem through both strategically and tactically, or do we just throw money at these new channels and hope for miracles? Some companies will reap the rewards of properly integrating social media into their business models while others will waste their time with poorly thought-through investments in the medium and see very little benefit from it. What is beautiful to me about the region though, is that it is still more or less virgin territory: None of these decisions have been made yet. The market is wide open for success. All I see is opportunity, not just there, but across the Muslim world, which constitutes a hefty chunk of the world’s population/markets. That is pretty energizing for someone with my kind of mindset. Yahoo is making big moves there. Most major European marketing firms and agencies were also well represented in Dubai last week. The momentum is building and for obvious reasons: The middle east is evolving fast, the region’s economies are looking beyond the oil boom (Dubai especially since it produces very little oil), and the population is increasingly young, connected, and modern. The shift is palpable when you are there. It isn’t theory or pie-in-the-sky. It isn’t all rainbows and unicorns (it never is), but the middle east is investing in its future, and its demographic profile is going to cause significant changes in its markets over the next two decades.

Eye-opening trip to Dubai on a lot of levels. Amazing place to visit if you get a chance, fascinating region, and LOTS of opportunities for great work to be done in the social space there over the next few years. Food for thought if you aren’t tied into a mortgage, your passport is giving you that disapproving look, and your suitcases have been begging for a little action.

 

 

Yahoo Middle-East's Ahmed Nassef at the Total Marketing conference

 

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Why your social media marketing campaigns aren’t working.

Tip: Pushing your marketing campaign through social media channels isn’t “social.” It’s marketing. Nothing has changed.

Your marketing department or agency might be telling you that you have a social media program, but you don’t. You might be paying for “social,” but that isn’t what you are getting for your money. What is really happening is this: You are buying the same digital marketing campaigns you were buying five years ago, except now, they also include Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

You can call it “social” all you want, but it isn’t.

Want to know what else? This:

This (above) is a typical example of what happens in the course of a successful marketing, PR or advertising campaign. Best case scenario: You spend money on the campaign, the campaign generates attention while it is funded, people buy some of your stuff, and when the money runs out, things go back to where they were before the campaign started.

Now let me show you what happens when you incorporate social media into the same campaign mechanism. Ready? This is going to blow your mind. Here we go. A marketing campaign using social media:

Pretty wild, huh?

If you didn’t notice the subtle sleight of hand, let me illustrate the concept slightly differently. Ready?

Your campaign without social media:

And now the same campaign with social media:

See what happened here? Totally different thing, right? (Thanks to Daniel Agee for the clever visual subterfuge. Inserting a human head onto my body was pretty impressive photoshop mastery.)

So… right. In the end, it is exactly the same thing, just wrapped in a different skin.

If you are using social media channels for “marketing” and mostly for campaigns, no wonder you aren’t getting any concrete results: You are doing the same old stuff that already wasn’t working all that well five years ago, only it has been repackaged to sound hip with the times and include a few more channels. That’s it. The only problem is this: You aren’t doing “social.” You are still basically just creating content, pushing it out to potential customers, and hoping they will bite.

And that is why you are getting nowhere in social media, no matter how many people click “follow” or “like” on your stuff.

By the way, if you are gauging success by measuring retweets, followers, shares and “likes,” I guess you also gauge success by measuring website hits, right? Same deal. Same ridiculous, empty, diversionary metrics that mean absolutely nothing. People clicking on buttons on the internet is about as valuable to your business as counting how many cars drive by your office every day.

Want to see the difference between a company that takes its social media program seriously versus one that only uses social media for marketing campaigns?

Here is what a business that uses social media for marketing looks like:

Each one of those arrows represents a campaign. If you think of campaigns as microcycles of spend, attention and impact, the above diagram shows six subsequent campaigns and their long term impact on business growth. The orange line above the campaign microcycles illustrates temporary jumps in sales or business growth, which tend to wane between campaigns but remain relatively flat over time. This line shows anywhere between 0% to 10% annual growth.

Now let’s look at companies using social media more holistically:

Note that in the above example, social media is used for more than just campaigns. The business is using social media not only to acquire new customers or trigger a spike in business, but to retain customers as well, to develop them into active community participants, loyal repeat customers, thereby increasing their buy rate, transaction yield, and their reach into lateral networks through organic word of mouth. In this model, campaigns are merely marketing microcycles of attention in a larger growth strategy focusing on building customer relationships.

Another way to look at the process is this:

If you aren’t familiar with plateaus, the stair-like portion of the diagram illustrates what role the campaigns play in a model where social media is integrated into a business in every department: customer service, technical support, community management, product management, PR, HR, R&D, etc.

In this model, campaigns drive attention and participation, just as before. Social media activity, through community management, online customer service, customer engagement and other truly social modes of social communications help maintain (even stabilize) customer participation not only in dialog but in transactions as well. Social communications become the answer to the “now what?” question asked in the first two diagrams of this post: Use each campaign to get you to the next level of attention and activity, and instead of letting it all die back down once the campaign is over, maintain it through engagement. Once things settle at that level, get to the next plateau using another campaign.

This really isn’t rocket science.

If you want results, think. Use your head. Don’t keep doing the same thing over and over again hoping for different results each time. Calling “marketing” by another name or adding “social media” to it won’t change what it is: Marketing. Just because your ad agency’s digital department has rebranded itself a “social media” department doesn’t mean anything has changed or improved. Same products and services, different skin. That’s it.

If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. Just keep pushing marketing content out through social media channels and see where that gets you. As long as those budget dollars keep coming, digital marketing companies will eagerly sell you whatever services you want.

Don’t be a sucker. Focus on results, not buzzwords and BS.

PS: Some of this stuff is covered in my upcoming book – “Social Media R.O.I.” available for pre-order on Amazon:

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Political logos: The origin of the Republicans’ elephant and the Democrats’ ass.

I can tell from the ridiculous negative campaign ads and 3rd grade rhetoric that it’s election time again. Funny how the very process that helps define this great nation turns us into evil little farts every November. It never fails: The finger pointing, the name calling, the innuendos, the cheap shots. So and so didn’t pay their taxes on time. So and so lets rapists go free. So and so secretly hates Americans. So and so is corrupt. (Wow, really? A corrupt politician? No way! Where?!?!?!?!?)

As a political science major turned brand management guy, this time of year always makes me a little sad. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in mass media campaigns to put some of the dumbest, meanest, most unremarkable shills on the planet in positions of relative power. This year’s selection is particularly painful to fathom, especially the bizarre band of quasi-illiterate anti-federalist nominees now refusing to “grant” interviews or take questions from the free press. My beef here isn’t political. I am neither Republican nor Democrat (or perhaps I manage to be both, depending on the issue or the context). But man, some of these people make me shake my head in disbelief. Strange that in a Republic that so values freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, so many of these “candidates” should refuse to work with the press, answer simple questions in an open forum, or address some of the batty statements they have made over the last six months leading to these elections. How did we get to a point where some of the dumbest, least educated, most openly racist people on the planet – people who seem to have no understanding of the very Constitution they seem so bent on “protecting” from the clutches of actual constitutional scholars, find themselves in a position to help decide whether the United States catches up to the rest of the world and gets back in the race, or veers off course to become the unfortunate fulfillment of a Margaret Atwood novel.

At any rate, while every other candidate is busy dragging his or her opponent in the mud and selling mindless buzzwords to their cheering fans, I thought I would inject a little culture and history into the whole process by sharing with you the origin of the Republican and Democratic parties’ emblems: The elephant and the ass (respectively). It won’t solve any of our economic and policy woes, but it might breathe a few little IQ points back into the overall political narrative. Maybe. (One can hope.) From From William Safire’s New Language of Politics, Revised edition, Collier Books, New York, 1972, via freerepublic.com:

 

The symbol of the party (the elephant) was born in the imagination of cartoonist Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper’s Weekly on November 7, 1874

An 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly connected elephants with Republicans, but it was Nast who provided the party with its symbol.

Oddly, two unconnected events led to the birth of the Republican Elephant. James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald raised the cry of “Caesarism” in connection with the possibility of a thirdterm try for President Ulysses S. Grant. The issue was taken up by the Democratic politicians in 1874, halfway through Grant’s second term and just before the midterm elections, and helped disaffect Republican voters.

While the illustrated journals were depicting Grant wearing a crown, the Herald involved itself in another circulation-builder in an entirely different, nonpolitical area. This was the Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874, a delightful hoax perpetrated by the Herald. They ran a story, totally untrue, that the animals in the zoo had broken loose and were roaming the wilds of New York’s Central Park in search of prey.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put them together in a cartoon for Harper’s Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing the Herald) wearing a lion’s skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism) frightening away the animals in the forest (Central Park). The caption quoted a familiar fable: “An ass having put on a lion’s skin roamed about in the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met within his wanderings.”

One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant, representing the Republican vote – not the party, the Republican vote – which was being frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a subsequent cartoon on November 21, 1874, after the election in which the Republicans did badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a trap, illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal allegiance. Other cartoonists picked up the symbol, and the elephant soon ceased to be the vote and became the party itself: the jackass, now referred to as the donkey, made a natural transition from representing the Herald to representing the Democratic party that had frightened the elephant.

Now you know.

Wondering if maybe political logos like the ass and the elephant are still the best emblems to represent political parties that neither look nor sound like they did back in 1874, I asked a few friends to suggest new emblems for the parties, and this is what they came up with:

Star Trek and beer. I may have to broaden my focus group just a tad.

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Ads vs. reality: The fast food stink test.

Source: http://www.boredpanda.com

This. Is. Brilliant. Every time someone does a piece like this, I find myself grinning ear to ear.

First, some attribution: The piece, published by www.boredpanda.com is tagged as a guest post by Dario D., who first published his images on his own site www.alphaila.com. I recommend that you check them both out for the full feature. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

The premise (from Dario):

So, I went to some fast food places (I won’t say “restaurants”, just “places”), and picked up burgers/tacos, so I could compare them with the ads.

I brought the “food” home (different stuff over 3 nights), tossed it into my photography studio, and did some ad-style shoots (with pictures of the official ads on my computer next to me, so I could match the lighting/angles/etc).

The result, of course is a set of gems (go see them all) that includes this other killer side by side dose of reality:

source: http://www.boredpanda.com

Dario goes on:

Don’t ask me how this advertising is legal. […] I happily pitch the idea that lawmakers are committing a crime against us people by allowing us to be continually insulted by this advertising […]  in defiance of human perception.

He has a point. The pictures don’t lie.

Compare this kind of advertising to anything else: Cars, candy, clothing, drinks, watches, laptops, tennis rackets, video games, etc.. Most products, when depicted in photographs used for marketing purposes are pretty close to what you can expect to get. In this particular industry, however, not so much.

Remember the scene from the movie “Falling Down,” back in the post Reagan 1990’s, in which Michael Douglas’ character (as mentally imbalanced as he may be) throws a fit over this very affront to human intelligence. Fast-forward to 04:06, towards the end of the clip to see what happens. Take a look:

If you have time, watch the whole scene from the beginning. It’s a classic.

The lesson here isn’t that false advertising exists, or that fast food companies are sometimes unethical with their marketing. The lesson is this: Promises matter. The degree to which customers’ expectations are met is the currency by which a brand’s worth is measured. In the era of social media, global word-of-mouth, and in markets where the abundance of choices can send yesterday’s market leaders careening into a pit of obsolescence, the foundations upon which you build your brand’s future cannot be based on institutionalized broken promises. Breeding cynicism about your products is just not good policy.

Now apply this thinking to your business. Put your marketing through the same test. Does it pass muster, or like these images above, is there a gap between promise and delivery?

Now ask yourself this: Which do you believe is the better choice to build a sustainable brand: Disappointing customers, or delighting them?

PS: Social Media “gurus,” consultants and “certifying bodies,” take a long hard look at what you are selling, and how you are selling it.

Cheers,

Olivier

Additional resources: This post’s grandaddy (click here).

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Olivier, where have you BEEN?!

Sorry for the lack of posts in the last five days or so, but I was in Portland, OR. Between being stuck on airplanes and airports, touring the city and its outskirts, meeting with some pretty amazing people and enjoying the honor of being on the 2009 Rosey Awards jury, I didn’t have much time to blog. Too bad too, because A LOT has been going through my mind these last few days, about a great many things.

Rather than write a series of long dissertations over the course of several weeks though, here are some observations about various topics in easily digestible Top 10/note format instead:

Flying coast to coast:

1. United Airlines had some good crews out of Chicago and Portland. As much as I’d love to complain about how horrible it was to fly cross country (twice), I can’t. The planes were clean, (relatively) comfortable, the crews were professional and friendly, and for the most part the flights were on time. Have airlines in the US turned the corner? I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s been a while since I’ve flown from coast to coast without wanting to rip into an airline or two. Well done, United.

2. Orbitz’ automated info service calling me on my cell to give me the latest flight info rocked. The one delay I suffered on the way home prompted two calls within minutes of the gate agent’s announcement. That’s FAST. Very cool and efficient.

3. The screens on the info kiosks in O’Hare all say, touch me, which I find kind of funny. Especially since no one does.

4. Airports increasingly turn travelers into homeless people. I saw more folks sleeping on the floor in our nation’s airports than I did in Portland’s public parks. Not to rag on Portland or anything (I am not), but that’s pretty obnoxious. What, a few hours on a plane and we lose all sense of decorum? Since when? Put your shoes back on and grab a seat. Concourse C isn’t your living room or your back yard. Thanks.

5. Books love long flights.

6. Travel light. It pays off.

7. Ironically, you can fly with a cigarette lighter in your pocket – as long as you buy it at the gift shop inside the terminal.

8. The TSA people at PDX are insanely friendly, and kind of funny.

9. Chicago O’Hare is a complete cluster. One of the worst airport designs on the planet.

10. The inspiration behind most airport terminal designs must have come from ER waiting rooms, which is not a good thing, considering that’s where most passengers will spend nearly half of their travel time. Pretty sad. We could do a lot better. Especially since… well, see number 4 (above).

Portland, Oregon:

1. Half-way between Seattle and San Francisco, surrounded by some of the most gorgeous, fertile countryside in North America, cyclists and microbreweries everywhere, some of the best vineyards in the US, a real foodie culture, effective public transportation… Should I go on?

2. California wines may get all the publicity, but Oregon pinots are the shiznit. Oregon wines rocked my world, and I know a little bit about wines since I’m French, so you really should listen to me on this. I am not wrong. Don’t know where to start? Check out Elk Cove Vineyards.

3. The best oyster po-boy on the planet is at a restaurant called EAT on N. Williams. (The oyster shooters are off the hook too.) From downtown, take the red line and grab the #44 bus. (Below: The triumvirate – microbrew, dirty mary oyster shooter, and good old glacier-fed water.)

4. Just a few miles outside of the city, you can see things like this:

Sorry for the poor image quality. I only had my phone on me. This is some of the prettiest country on the planet, and you don’t have to drive very far to enjoy it. What other major US city has this kind of awesomeness in its back yard?

5. Downtown’s wi-fi could have been better. Surprising since everything in Portland was pretty top notch. I guess I had to have one semi-negative thing to say about my stay. 😀

Oh, and the Hilton family of hotels MUST stop charging people for wi-fi (especially in its lobby and bar). Come on, Hilton hotels: If cheap hotels can provide free wi-fi for their customers, so can you. Welcome to 2009 (almost 2010). Don’t make me cross the street to use my laptop. It doesn’t help your business. That goes for Hiltons everywhere, not just in Portland.

Aside from that, my Hilton experience was fantastic.

6. Portland Ad Fed and the portland creative community ROCK. (And they sport a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek brand of humor that I dig a lot.) Below: Greenville, SC was not forgotten. 😀

Incidentally, if you’re in advertising and the PAF’s campaign around this year’s Roseys offends you, try this on for size: a) Chill. Take a deep breath. Relax. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Have a laugh at your own expense every once in a while. b) Read this.

7. Bicycles everywhere. Ladies ride bikes to work in skirts and heels. Gentlemen ride bikes to work in suits. Nuff said.

8. Hazelnuts. (1/2 of the Nutella magic formula.) They grow there. Lots of them. As a matter of fact, people there seem to know how to grow their own food, which is more than I can say for most people around the US. There’s something to be said for that.

9. Did I mention that Portland has a fantastic downtown? Great architecture, lots of cool places to discover, simple navigation, friendly people, coffee shops and restaurants everywhere…

10. People there seem pretty happy to be good neighbors without telling each other how they should live their lives, which I find kind of refreshing these days. Heck, nobody looked at me funny for drinking absinthe after dinner Saturday. If that isn’t pretty cool, I don’t know what is. Oh, and the fashions in portland are off the hook. Check out this guy:

Being on the jury of a prestigious advertising competition:

1. Many of you probably know that as a wee boy growing up in Paris during the golden age of European advertising, I was a genuine advertising junkie.  I’ve always loved advertising. So for me to be invited to spend a couple of days neck deep in ad campaigns was very much a dream come true. There were several moments during the Rosey judging when I caught myself grinning from ear to ear thinking about that little boy in 1970’s Paris, who would have been pretty excited to know that in a couple of decades, he would be judging an advertising competition. Very cool.

2. Not being an ad guy gives me a radically different  perspective on what makes advertising great or effective from people in the advertising industry. Not saying it’s a better perspective, just a different one.

3. Big budgets = better production values = better ads. Fair or not, that’s still the reality.  Agencies working with small budgets need to become smarter and more creative than their better paid competitors. Not just say they are – actually do it. Learn to do more with less.

4. Great advertising is not budget-dependent. Don’t buy into the mentality that your best clients are your biggest clients.

5. The advertising world does not understand the web. At all. Still. (Which is weird because so many ad agencies have pretty nice websites these days.)

6. If you are an advertising agency and you dream of winning an award, enter work worthy of an award. Don’t enter for the sake of having your work reviewed and rejected in the first round.

7. What works isn’t always what wins. Advertising that appeals to the general public (potential customers) doesn’t necessarily appeal to creative directors and agency principals – folks who tend to judge these things.

8. If you don’t win this year, try again next year. Between now and then though, let go of the fear. Be bolder, funnier, smarter. Dream big and live in the details. Do extraordinary work. Safe and derivative don’t win hearts out there in the world or in competitions. There really is no alternative to kicking ass.

9. Judging is hard. You want to give good work well deserved recognition, but “good” just isn’t good enough to be awarded a prize. You need to be better than good. You need to be great. Exceptional, even. I wish there were an award for just “good” work… but there really isn’t.

10. Ad agencies enjoy some of the coolest work spaces on the planet, and they know where to order the best takeout.

Before I forget, I want to send out a very special and warm thank you to Kim Brater, Jamie Sexton and Jerry Ketel for taking such wonderful care of me while in Portland. You are three of the coolest people on the planet, and I really can’t thank you enough for your trust, hospitality, friendship and generosity. 🙂

I also want to say hi to my fantastic co-judges: Raleigh, NC’s David Baldwin and Seattle, WA’s Cal McAllister. You guys taught me a lot and it was a blast hanging out with you. I hope our paths will cross again.

Sadly, you’ll all have to wait until November for the results of the judging (yes, the actual Rosey Awards), but don’t fret: I will keep you guys posted. Until then, be sure to check out the Roseys’ website (and PAF‘s too while you’re at it).

Top photo, left to right: David Baldwin, Cal McAllister and Jamie Sexton.

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The Hybrid Thinking Manifesto

http://wray-mccann.com

Several years ago, my friend Ernie Mosteller wrote this, over on Tangelo Ideas‘ blog. (I never grow tired of Purple Cow thinking.) Here’s the skinny:

“Family resemblances are a good thing. For families. But for agencies, it can get you into trouble. When the stuff you create for your boat manufacturer client starts to look or sound or feel just like the stuff you’re making for that software startup, oh, and the athletic-shoe retailer, and maybe the fast-food restaurant, too; you have to ask: Are you doing what speaks best to the audience? What’s best for the client? Or are you doing what you personally think is cool? Worse yet, are you doing what the competition is doing too?”

Absolutely.

I was flipping through some old issues of Fast Company recently, when I found a very cool little article by Christine Canabou entitled Fast Ideas For Slow Times (May 2003). In it, Christine made the argument for the fact that offering something different/unique was a crucial part of any company’s success.

Creativity is no longer exclusive to the ad agency world. Likewise, innovation is no longer exclusive to the design world. In order for businesses to thrive, creativity has to become part of their product operational DNA. In order for agencies to keep doing exceptional work for an ever-growing list of quality clients, they have to breed curiosity, exploration and innovation into their DNA.

It isn’t change. It’s evolution.

Here’s the thing: If you keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing, nothing new is going to happen to you. Your sales aren’t suddenly going to double. Your market share isn’t going to enjoy a sudden increase. Nobody is going to really notice you. If you’ve been growing at 6% per year for the past ten years, it’s probably safe to say that you’ll keep seeing 6% growth for a while longer.

A little while.

As Christine puts it: “Do nothing new, and you won’t make a mistake. But do nothing new for too long, and you risk making the biggest mistake of all.”

Yep. It’s easy to let your successes pigeon-hole you into Sisyphean repetition. Before you know it, companies come to you with requests to do for them what you did for your other client(s): “That thing you did for Spalookaboo, Inc… the thing with the talking cow and the karate-chopping mongoose… can you do something like that for us?”

Look. The last thing the world needs is another subservient chicken. More to the point, the last thing Crispin Porter + Bogusky needs is another subservient chicken project.

Something is only original once. Something is only creative once. After that, everything becomes derivative and stale. Copies of copies of copies are just what Seth Godin might call brown cows. (No matter how good and cool they are, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.)

It’s completely natural to see a competitor’s latest product or ad and think “Doh! Why didn’t we think of that?” It’s also natural to want to jump on the bandwagon by doing something similar. (The reasoning being that if it works for your competitor, it’ll work for you too.)

*sigh*

Copying for the sake of not being left behind is an expensive and terribly ineffective business strategy. (And it’s lame.) 1) You’ll come across as an “also in”. 2) You’ll back yourself into a price comparison corner (kiss your revenue goodbye). 3) You’ll be turning your back on your biggest competitive advantage – the practical application of your creative power: Innovation.

At best, being a “brown cow” guarantees stagnation.

At best.

It also guarantees that you will have to spend huge amounts of resources to promote yourself over and over and over again. That’s time, money, people… all of which could be better spent actually doing something rewarding and relevant that will help your business grow.

You could be creating WOM-worthy work for smaller clients, for example. For non-profits. For NGO’s. For niche markets.

You could be broadening your horizons… meeting new people, immersing yourself in cool new subcultures. You could be making every day a learning experience. An exercise in curiosity. A creative harvest. (By the way, the cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines is the lifeblood of innovation. Ask IDEO and FROG Design how it’s worked for them.)

Yeah, Hybrid Thinking. That’s where it starts.

By default, you would also be broadening your reach across a wider range of industries than any other agency in your sphere of influence (not just because it makes great business sense, but because it’s fun.)

Fun feeds creativity at least as much as new experiences.

Think about it. What if instead of chasing big clients, you focused on helping great little companies grow into extraordinary ones? What if you only worked with clients that you want to work with? What if you turned away work that didn’t interest you? What if you did what every innovator has done since the beginning of time: What if you changed the rules, one client at a time, one project at a time?

Would you rub a few people the wrong way? You bet. But they’d get over it.

There are also other options beyond simply increasing the breadth of your playing field. The very nature of the way you approach your work, your services and the way that you market them doesn’t have to be set in stone. Don’t sell yourself short.

Tom Peters, for example, makes a good argument for agencies to evolve into more deep-reaching Professional Services Firms (see his downloadable ‘PSF Manifesto’). After all, if creatives can come up with great advertising ideas, they can surely come up with insightful ways to improve a company’s customer service call center, design unforgetable retail spaces and help create groundbreaking new products, for starters.

This kind of transition won’t happen on its own. Client companies certainly won’t be the first to suggest it. (“Hey um… you guys make great ads, but… do you also do product design?”) It’s one of those build it and they will come things. Create the service. Create the market. Become a purple cow all over again.

More importantly, help your clients become purple cows in their own fields. (Ultimately, that will be the key to your success.)

Trust me on this: Many of them wish they had access to this kind of insightful innovation for hire. Not everyone can afford to keep top-notch designers on staff. (Or brand strategists.) Or marketing communications specialists. Or graphic artists. As for consultants… well, they can be terribly expensive and often too narrow in their approach.

Similarly, not everyone can afford a PR firm and an ad agency and a product design studio and a retail design consultant. (Assuming that, even if you could, all of the pieces would fit together properly… which is pretty unlikely.)

Enter the fully-integrated PSF/Agency: Cost-effective, versatile, nimble, responsive, insightful, completely immersed in their client’s culture. One-stop shopping for all of your innovative needs. Beyond its core team, imagine a network composed of the most brilliant minds and creative talent in the world, just a mouse-click away. A phone-call away.

Imagine if a PSF/Agency like the one I just described suddenly opened shop in your town. What if it were courting your clients? What if it had access to more contract talent than you could ever afford to hire? What if it were a lot cheaper than you are? (Sound familiar?)

What if, although advertising were only one of their revenue streams, their work still blew yours away?

What would you do?

What if they cut your revenue in half inside of two years? What would you do to stay alive?

Lay off part of your staff? Advertise more? Lower your prices? Work for free?

Purple cows don’t have to shake their baby rattles to be noticed. They don’t have to put up billboards all over town. They don’t have to engage in price wars. All they have to do is be purple cows.

Pistachio cows.

Tangelo cows.

Here’s a fresh little bit of Set Godin insight:

“Ad agencies have been backed into a corner and mostly do rattling. It’s the high-cost, high-profile, high-risk part of marketing, and the kind that rarely works. What a shame that some of the smartest people in our fieldaren’t allowed (by their clients and by their industry’s structure) to get behind the scenes and change the product, the strategy and the approach instead of just annoying more people with ever louder junk.”

Yesterday’s purple cows are today’s brown cows.

Tomorrow’s purple cows won’t look or feel or sound anything like you.

The question is, what are you doing about it?

Are you sure your model still works?

Something to think about.

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As a company, what are you really investing in?

Time for your weekly BrandBuilder reality check.

There are only two types of businesses: The ones you know are the best in their category, and… everyone else.

Advertising and marketing are nice, but too many “also in” businesses waste money on marketing and advertising when they should instead revamp one or two elements of their business that would help them actually gain market share. (The most pleasant and efficient customer service experience in your industry, a perfectly designed user interface, a 100% uptime guarantee, stunning design, impeccable ergonomics, remarkable flavor, etc.)

Advertising is basically a load of bulls**t unless you have something worth advertising to begin with. (Otherwise, what are you advertising: Hey, come buy from us! We’re the thirteenth best shoe store in the 29601!) You’re either the best at something, or you’re just another voice in the crowd getting fleeced by just another run-of-the-mill ad agency or “marketing firm.”

Before you start spending money on advertising, ask yourself what your super-special value to your users/customers/clients truly is. Maybe you have the best prices. Maybe you have the most comfortable meeting rooms. Maybe you have the most square footage of any gym in your area, or the freshest produce, or the most knowledgeable staff, or the fastest check-out. It doesn’t matter what that something is as long as it is something concrete (as opposed to another lame marketing spinfest). Is that one thing truly hitting the mark? Are you really delivering on it as well as you could? As well as you should?

Whatever your value differentiator is, whatever your brand’s value advantage is (or should be), this is what you need to invest in FIRST. Once you have that aspect of your business nailed down, THEN and only then should you even bother with advertising.

About a year ago, Seth Godin posted some great advice to college grads on his blog: Only borrow money to pay for things that increase in value. A pair of shoes or cool clothes never increase in value. An education or professional experience, however do. Great advice, especially in the crux of our current economic/credit crunch. The same applies to businesses, which is why Seth’s advice is so damn relevant to the discussion today.

Perhaps more relevant to today’s topic is a slightly tweaked version of Seth’s advice: “only invest in things that increase in value.”

Like shoes and clothes, advertising never increases in value. With advertising, you are at best buying a small percentage of the public’s attention across a very narrow sliver of space and time (and paying a premium price for it.) Before you know it, your advertising budget is gone, and so is that very expensive bubble of attention.

Investing in better products/services, better people and better processes, however, makes a whole lot more sense as these things never lose value. Great employees, great products, great customer experiences and fostering a unique relationship with your fan base are the types of things worth investing in. These are the true foundations of a great brand. These are the types of things that will help strengthen your brand equity.

Advertising rarely translates into brand equity unless these foundations exist to support it. Even so, the more solid the brand’s foundation, the less relevant advertising becomes.

Starbucks doesn’t advertise much and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Whole Foods ad anywhere, yet millions of people drop solid stacks of greenbacks there every year. I don’t shop at Target, wear Rudy Project sunglasses, drive a VW or crave a BMW because of advertising. Other than creating awareness for a product that hasn’t managed to capture anyone’s attention yet (red flag), advertising does little to impact most companies’ growth. Do they create spikes in interest, eyeballs and sales? Sure. When executed well. But growth? Over time? Nope. Growth is a completely different animal, and advertising alone, boys and girls, won’t get you there.

Building a strong reputation by developing great products, buzz-worthy experiences and generally delighting customers/users is a much stronger strategy than paying loads of cash for advertising.

Something to think about as you prioritize items on your budget for H2.

Have a great Wednesday, everyone. 🙂

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Reach your audience

Yeah, a bullhorn works, but it’s kind of limited. Still, much like any form of communications, having a captive audience makes a world of difference.

When you think about the nature of advertising though, it’s interesting to note that very few people actually seek it out. With the exception of… well, me (and a few others, I hope) most people don’t flip through their TV channels to skip regular programming in favor of the latest advertisements. Likewise, most people don’t pick up magazines specifically to browse through advertising content either. Most people only are only “accidentally” exposed to advertisers’ messages… several hundred times per day.

Okay, sure, we make exceptions during the Superbowl. The ads are as much a part of the experience now as what happens on the field, and that’s nice, but it’s the exception that confirms the rule. (At least for adults. With kids, it’s a different story.)

My point here is that we typically don’t seek out advertising. We don’t go to it. It comes to us. In the industry, we use the word “exposure”. Well, let me tell you about exposure: I don’t usually hear people say that they have been exposed to love or excitement or enthusiasm. When people use the word “exposure” it is usually in the same sentence as things like “virus” or “bad language” or “TV violence”.

Unless you’re a photographer, “exposure” is typically not a positive word. Yet we use it, because it describes the relationship between advertisers and the public fairly well. That tells you a lot about the nature of this business, or at least our perception of it.

As I’ve said before, advertising seeks you out. It comes to you. More and more magazines now offer more advertising content than actual content. (Advertising is content now.) Every ten minutes or so, whatever show you’re watching on TV takes a break so that advertisers can get get some more face time with you. On your commute to and from work, you’re exposed to billboard ads. The ads come in on the radio, at the multiplex, at the amusement park, at the store and just about every time you access a website. It follows you everywhere, hence the advent of ad-killing technologies like TiVO, ad blockers and satellite radio.

So I have to ask… If most of us seem to be working harder than ever to get away from advertising, does finding new channels to broadcast advertising really make sense? Is this really the relationship advertisers want to have to with their audience: A cat and mouse chase?

A question you have to ask yourself is this: Assuming that advertising actually affects purchasing habits, can it be argued that more advertising and more repetition will actually translate into more market penetration and more sales? Well, it depends on whether or not you a) have a great product, b) have a captive audience, and c) have the right kind of ad to begin with.

Emotional Ads vs. Informational Ads.

Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle University, and Washington State University examined consumers’ responses to advertising back in 2005 and came up with some pretty interesting findings. They took into considerations a variety of elements like brand beliefs, responses to informational and emotional appeals, efforts to avoid advertising, attention to ads and reliance on ads versus other information sources. The test group was shown eight TV commercials, half of which were defined as emotional and the other half as informational.

For the sake of clarity Nancy Gardner (who published an introductory report on the study’s findings) explains that:

Emotional ads are characterized as providing an emotional experience that is relevant to the use of the brand.

Informational ads predominantly provide clear brand data.

The basic results:

Consumers who considered themselves highly skeptical of all ads were persuaded less by informational ads than they were by emotional ads.

In contrast, non-skeptics were more responsive to informational advertising.

Skepticism leads to less attention to and reliance on advertising, and generally a decreased chance that the consumer will purchase the advertised product.

(Aha!)

Highly skeptical consumers have likely become skeptical over time, in response to numerous interactions in the marketplace that have led them to distrust ad claims.

The study further concludes that “skeptical consumers like advertising less, rely on it less, and respond more positively to emotional appeals.”

Per Carl Obermiller, professor of Marketing at Seattle University and co-author of the study: “Those who are more skeptical respond to advertising in negative ways – they like it less; they think it is less influential and, they do more to avoid it–zipping past ads on recorded programs and switching channels during commercials.”

Furthermore, “Skeptical consumers also are inclined to need to validate the truth of ads by consulting with friends and family members.”

MacLaughlan elaborates:

“The advertising skeptic regards advertising as not credible, and therefore, not worth processing. (His) perspective differs from the consumer cynic. A cynical consumer is critical of advertising because of its manipulative intent and indirect appeals. Such consumers may prefer simple, direct, informative advertising. Skeptics, however, do not.”

In other words, skeptics can’t be sold on a product or brand through the use of informational appeals.

So… it doesn’t really matter how many times you play the same ad over and over again. If your ad isn’t helping your intended audience to connect with your brand, you are wasting your time… and ours.

Once again, quality (or rather specificity) trumps out quantity.

Unfortunately, the report did not touch on what percentage of the US population might fall under the “skeptical consumer,” “non-skeptical consumer” and “cynical consumer categories.

Speaking of quantity and over-saturation, do you know what the average TV ad campaign’s life cycle is? 5 weeks. It should be more like 2-3. By week 5, it’s probably safe to say that we’re more than ready to move on.

Around the same time that UW researchers were working on their study, another research team was rolling out Project Wanamaker in Omaha, Nebraska to look at the effectiveness of ads over time.  Per Lee Weinblatt, CEO of The PreTesting Company:

“After two weeks of watching commercials, viewers generally become fatigued.“

Not that you needed a study to tell you that… but hey, it’s good to hear it from a guy who actually did research on this.

“The things killing TV commercials are overexposure and poor creative,” adds Weinblat. “Give them more interesting commercials.” Wayne Friedman, the author of the piece, notes that one advertiser–Subway–kept changing its creative during the test, and experienced less weariness among viewers.

The Attention Rubbernecking Fallacy:

A sad, sad word of caution, however: Erotic and violent images may cloud viewers’ ability to focus on the actual object of the ad:

“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images,” says Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald.

The effect is known as attentional rubbernecking.

“We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can’t get through,” says Zald.

In other words, although a provocative or visually loud ad is likely to grab your attention, it also hinders your ability to focus on the brand or product it promotes.

The findings, however, do not seem to take into account the effect of such an ad over time. Through repetition, it is likely that we might become desensitized to the distracting elements of the ad and naturally begin focusing more and more on its actual message. Since the more interesting the ad is, the longer it will continue to attract our attention, no matter how distracting the ad may be, we’ll eventually get the point.

(And that is good news.)

Food for thought. Check out some of these studies and see if they help.

Have a great Monday. 🙂

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Account Execs: A few pointers

Part 1.0: Selling isn’t ideal, but it is necessary sometimes.

I need to address the subject of value today. More specifically, I need to address the role that value plays in presentations made by an agency to a client.

Now… I know, I know… I’m a pull (demand) guy, not a push (sales) guy, so I understand your dismay at finding a post about “selling” on this blog, but this post is way overdue. As much as I hate to admit it, some things in the B2B world need selling. Like, for example, really good ideas.

If you are an ad agency (big or small), it doesn’t really matter how smart you think your strategy is. It doesn’t matter if you have the coolest ad concept in the world. It doesn’t matter if your superpowers have created the ultimate idea. No, none of that matters…… unless you can sell it to the client.

Sometimes, the idea just sucks. (Let’s face it, not everyone brings their A-game to the table on a daily basis.) But when the idea is solid, it’s incredibly frustrating for creatives and strategic thinkers alike to bring to the table their ultimate plan for world domination only to watch it be ignored, misunderstood or trivialized in some way.

No, let’s just be honest, it sucks.

Now… Let’s be pragmatic for a sec. Did the idea get snubbed because it wasn’t as good as you thought it was? Maybe… But if you’re reading this blog, let’s assume that you rock and that your idea is indeed the shiz and the nit. So what happened? Why didn’t the client jump up and down at the thought of the success and ass-kickery it would shower upon them?

Because you didn’t sell it, that’s why. You expected it to be so good that it would just sell itself, and you were dead wrong. (Hint: If your clients all knew a good idea when it hit them, they probably wouldn’t need you.)

Truth: A great idea + your enthusiasm aren’t usually enough. The people sitting in those chairs across the conference table don’t necessarily have your marketing or design savvy. They may not even understand their own customers’s psychology and motivations the way you do.  More importantly, they probably can’t connect the dots between the key elements of your presentation and their many layers of positive outcomes. Not really.

Here’s the thing: You’re not giving any of this away. You’re selling it.

How do you know this? Because your clients are paying for it. Whether it is in the form of a check for your services or an investment on their part, it’s going to cost them. While you are standing there “presenting,” they are thinking about ROI. They’re thinking “do I really need to do this?” “Is there something else I could spend this money on?” “Should I spend this money at all?”

That’s how your client’s mind works. No matter how “into” your relationship they may have seemed yesterday, no matter how much you think they normally “get” what you have to offer… come pitch day, come “this is going to cost how much” day, you’re swimming against the current again.

Every single time.

If you don’t realize that every presentation is a sales pitch from start to finish, you have gravely misjudged the situation. So don’t assume that you already have your client’s buy-in when you walk into your presentation. Instead, make damn sure the client knows whatever it is that you are going to do for them is worth every red cent – and then some.

Part 1.1: The Pitch

Your first mistake is probably to broadside your client with an “unveiling” of what you’ve been working on. Classic. You’ve just asked them to completely switch gears at a moment’s notice. No matter how good of an intro you’ve put together, they’re automatically going to be disconnected from it.

See, the many crossroads that have led you down the road to your idea, plan or concept are completely and utterly foreign to them. You’ve connected the dots for yourself over time. Even you, as smart as you are didn’t put this whole thing together in ten minutes… Yet you expect them to be able to do just that. Though possible, it’s kind of unlikely. Remember that they aren’t looking at your work the way their customers will. They aren’t able to. That’s why they came to you in the first place.

To overcome “unveiling shock syndrome”, you have to involve key individuals within your clients’ organization in the process of connecting the dots long before you deliver your presentation. You have to help them help you come up with goals, identify obstacles, and come up with creative ways to get around them. While the cooperative environment you’re creating will help you a) narrow-down the best strategy possible and b) gain more insight into your client’s world, your main objective in terms of selling your solution is to prep them for the big day. By the time your presentation comes around, they will have helped their peers get ready for it, and they’ll be your champions/ambassadors inside their own organization.

Seriously. Let me say this again: You can’t just throw the whole thing at your clients all at once. They’ll go into shock. They just won’t be able to relate. The more brilliant and original your idea is, the harder it will be for them to digest it in one sitting.

This is the kind of thing that makes clients shy away from great, original ideas and adopt a more boring, less risky, and ultimately ineffective strategic position.

The proverbial shooting one’ own foot most often stems from this simple and common miscalculation. Don’t fall into that trap.

Okay, that was part 1, in a nutshell.

Part 2 is all about building value… because guess what: If you don’t build value before you tell them how much it’s going to cost, you’re done. Dead in the water. Kaput. Finito.

Part 2.0: Building Value – The difference between features and benefits

People know value. That’s what they’re after. That’s what justifies the investment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the client side of a presentation which completely failed to build value… to generate excitement… to touch core motivators with the decision-makers.

The plans, the strategies, the ideas were all great. Some of them were often fantastic. But you have to present them in such a way that everyone in the room relates to how great they are. You have to make people understand where they come from, how they will solve their problem(s) and what they will do for them. You have to make them want them. Crave them. You have to make people drool – not at the ideas themselves, but at the benefits they will shower upon them and their business.

Sales are emotional, boys and girls. You have to reach into every single chest in that room and make a connection with the beating hearts within. Some in your audience love revenue. Others love crushing the competition. Some just want to see you come up with something cool and inventive. Others don’t care as long as there’s no chance that your plan will backfire. You have to consider all of these things – expectations, motivations, fears (especially fears) – and then you have to find in your work the elements that will best address them.

What you have to come to terms with right now, right this second, is that selling isn’t about the product or the idea. You can sell a terrible idea. People do it every day. (Don’t get me started. It’s a pandemic.)

Selling isn’t about dissecting and explaining what you have to offer. It isn’t even about how cool or original something is. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be rational at all. (Think benefits, not features.) Selling is about making people see, feel, taste and relate to value in a way that makes sense to them. It’s about conveying the promise that your idea will achieve not only results, but the results that matter to your client. It’s that simple. (Well, easier said than done, but whatever.)

So before you get too far into your tried, true but haphazard process, take a few steps back from your plan, squint at it until you can barely see its edges, and focus on the effects it has on your client’s world. Mostly, focus on the results. That’s really what you’re selling in there: results.

Part 2.1: The client doesn’t care about your dancing chimps. Seriously. That isn’t what you are selling.

Look at it this way: People don’t buy cars. Cars are machines with axles and engine parts and undercarriages. What people buy are those elements of the car that will enrich their lives. They buy comfort, style, power, speed, safety, status, image, freedom. They buy the color red. This sale is no different.

It’s an art, this sales thing. It really is. So all of you frustrated geniuses out there, take my advice: Talk to sales professionals. Pick their brains. Learn their trade. Not the sleazy ones, mind you. Talk to the ones you trust. The ones who sell with confidence and insight, not clever little sales tricks. Watch people you consider great public speakers. Study folks in your circle(s) whom people listen to and seek advice from. Learn to sell and close, Jedi style. You’ll be doing yourselves, your clients and even the world a huge favor.

Why? Because the more good ideas you sell, the less bad ideas will make the cut this year. And next year. And the year after that.

And between you and me, they ought to give out medals for that. (And I don’t mean industry awards. I mean medals.)

😉

PS: Wanna read more on the topic? Check out Kevin Hoffberg’s piece “The First Rule of Selling“. His 11 lessons are as quick to flip through as they are dead-on.

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Bruce Lee on the Art of Marketing

Fantastic piece on Bruce Lee and the art of marketing over at CultureMaking (via the Creative Generalist). Read the entire thing here.

Here are a few lessons we can all take to heart – and start applying immediately:

Bruce says: “Be formless… shapeless, like water”

Translation: don’t impose structure on a problem too early or stick rigidly to a process for process sake. Explore freely and allow your mind to wander; work adaptively and flexibly.

Here’s another:

Bruce says: “Here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony, now if you have one to the extreme, you will be very unscientific. If you have another to the extreme, you will all of a sudden be a mechanical man, no longer a human being. It is a successful combination of both. Therefore, it is not naturalness or unnaturalness. The ideal is unnatural naturalness or natural unnaturalness.”

Translation: In the end, a marriage of qualitative and quantitative insight is most sensible (where possible). But my personal preference is ‘culture-led’ i.e. cast your net wide and understand the problem/category/brand within its socio-cultural context first (via cultural analysis), rather than restricting your vision at the outset with consumer needs and statistical ‘facts’. Like Bruce also once said: “True observation begins when one is devoid of set patterns.”

Brilliant. Here’s more:

Bruce says: “I do not believe in styles any more”

Translation: Don’t get caught up with one one-fits-all models that claim to be the holy grail of branding. Mixing and matching different ideas, innovations, communication codes and media platforms often works best and allows you to execute your brand idea in a much more compelling and interesting way.

I love that one. All too often (still) do I run into the 100% old school (command & control / messaging / media-buying monologue) or 100% new school (WOM and SocialMedia are the new gods) mindset with Marketing firms and ad agencies. Very few actually know how to blend the two in an operationally effective way yet. This needs to change.

Long before the concept of T-shaped Marketing professionals ever surfaced, Bruce had these things to say about the advantage of being a creative generalist:

“The best fighter is not a Boxer, Karate or Judo man. The best fighter is someone who can adapt to any style. He kicks too good for a Boxer, throws too good for a Karate man, and punches too good for a Judo man.”

And also …

“Some people are tall; some are short. Some are stout; some are slim. There are various different kinds of people. If all of them learn the same martial art form, then who does it fit?”

Well put once again. Here is an interesting observation from the author (no, not from Bruce) that… at the risk of alienating many fine Marketing professionals, I have found to be surprisingly true:

As a parallel, this captures how the marketing industry prioritizes endless doing over learning, thinking and personal development. There are people who have worked in the industry for many years, clocked up a wealth of experience, and mastered all of the ‘core skills’ required, but because they have taken little time to read, explore, and broaden their horizons, they have remained trapped inside the paradigms of old, oblivious to the creative possibilities that lie before them.

I have similar conversations about this very topic on a regular basis: The marketing world should be a lot more forward-thinking than the rest of the business world. Why? Because Marketing departments, firms and agencies are a) populated with wildly creative and insightful people, and b) tend to attract the most creative and forward thinking art and business school graduates. It should be a no-brainer, right?

Wrong. I consistently find that Marketing professionals with 5+ years of agency experience tend to be  just as conservative in their approach to problem-solving and process than their “regular” business counterparts. By now, everyone in the Marketing world should have read Purple Cows and Tribes and The Tipping Point. Everyone should be at least familiar with the concept of broken windows and its relevance to the success and failure of brands. Everyone should be looking well past the messaging layer of all branding endeavors.

But that just isn’t the case. Most senior folks I run into are still holding on to Marketing assumptions and methods that were better suited for the 1980’s and 1990’s than to the era of emails, blogs, text messaging, and social networking sites. Most do not take the time to read the more influential books and blogs on branding and marketing. Most don’t even take part in the game-changing conversations that are reshaping their industry. The Marketing world as a whole still exists in a strange operational timewarp, and frankly, I have no explanation for it.

Fortunately, Bruce does:

“[W]hen clans are formed, the people of a clan will hold their kind of martial art as the only truth and do not dare to reform or improve it. Thus they are confined in their own tiny little world. Their students become machines which imitate martial art forms.”

Yeah, great creative is fun and effective, media buying is a great money maker, and despite what you may have read about recently, traditional marketing isn’t even close to being dead… But the people you are trying to reach are increasingly tuning you out. If all you have to offer is messaging, the very small majority of people you do actually manage to reach won’t believe you anyway. Among those who do believe you, without a remarkable brand experience to back up your marketing monologue, whatever you worked to hard to say will go in one ear and go out the other. (Yes, “sticky” should be part of your operational vernacular now. If it isn’t, you’ve fallen, way, way, waaaaaaay behind.)

With this in mind, how much more advertising do you and your clients really want to buy? At what point are you prepared to sit down and consider the enormity of the ROI that traditional marketing and branding methods alone truly have to offer anymore? At what point do you come to the realization that something needs to change in order for your clients (and you) to stop spinning your wheels so damn much… and actually get some serious, consistent, repeatable traction?

One of my smartest friends – the best kinesiologist on the face of the planet – Frank Roth put it all in perspective for me a few years ago. We were talking about websites and structure, and he suddenly had this spark in his eye, as if he had just remembered something true and raw and powerful that had been lurking underneath layers of superfluous verbage for a very long time… and it was this:

It’s just like dancing, sports, art and just about everything that stirs the soul and provokes reaction: First, you create the structure. You create a perfect, solid, symmetrical and harmonious architecture. (pause.) And then, you break it. You smash it. You shatter it. You completely destroy it. That’s when it becomes powerful. That’s how you release its energy.

As Marketing professionals, as brand strategists, as whatever it is that we happen to do for a living, work lacking in energy and momentum is just boring, dead, and stagnant. (No matter how clean, accurate and pretty it may be.)

I am sure that Bruce would agree that there is no power, no strength, no effectiveness in stagnation.

Step away from groupthink, if only for an hour a day. Free yourself from your corporate culture, no matter how cool or fun it may be. Read a book. Adopt a new point of view… or none at all. Shatter the structure of something beautiful, just to see what comes out of it. Attack a branding or marketing problem from this angle: What if I had a budget of zero dollars? How would I accomplish this? How would I turn this product or this brand into a media darling without advertising and brochures and websites?

Like Bruce, be mentally and operationally flexible. Keep an open mind. Don’t be limited by old thinking or traditional mindsets. Learn new skills. Adopt new tools. Improvise. Experiment. Rewrite the rules. Break new ground. Don’t settle for the little box you have carved for yourself in your market – and by doing so, don’t ask your clients to settle for their little box either.

You can all do much better than that. Um… we all can.

Have a great weekend, everyone. 🙂

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The Functions of a Marketing department

Via BrandXpress –

Rob Engelman was recently asked what a Marketing Department should be responsible for. His answer came as a list:

1. Focus on the Customer
2. Monitor the Competition
3. Own the Brand.
4. Find & Direct Outside Vendors.
5. Create New Ideas.
6. Communicate Internally.
7. Manage a Budget.
8. Understand the ROI.
9. Set the Strategy, Plan the Attack, and Execute.

Because we like to focus on brand stuff, here’s what Rob has to say about #3:

“The perceptions and feelings formed about an organization, its products / services, and its performance is what is known as its “brand.” The Marketing Department is responsible for creating meaningful messages through words, ideas, images, and names that deliver upon the promises / benefits an organization wishes to make with its customers. Furthermore, the Marketing Department is responsible for ensuring that messages and images are delivered consistently, by every member of the organization.”

Not a bad start. And for the most part, yes, he is right.

Read the rest of Rob’s points here.

Rob’s list is a great first step for any marketing department that finds itself needing to define its functions clearly. Let’s take it one step further though, with this second list, which should best serve marketing departments that have already accomplished all nine of Rob’s recommendations and are looking for the next step in their evolution:

1. Befriend your customers.
2. Become your market. (Don’t just monitor the competition. Rewrite the rules. Set the pace. Lead. Outdistance your competition. Make them copy you. Force them to up their game.)
3. Breathe your brand.
4. Recruit and direct outside vendors.
5. Foster Innovation.
6. Simplify your internal communications. Then simplify them again. And again. And again.
7. Strategize as if your budget had been slashed in half. Deliver as if your budget had been twice what it actually is.
8. Make your ROI completely clear to your clients and everyone in your organization.
9. Observe, adapt, strategize, anticipate, plan, execute. … and be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice.

If you can truly make this your list for 2009, you will probably blow away your competition. (Recession? What recession? … Exactly.)

Now get to work!

Have a great Wednesday, everyone.

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Grassroots vs. The Volcano

Ripped from Corante’s editorial page THREE YEARS ago (when Social Media wasn’t a word yet):

On Grassroots and cracking the notion that power influencers drive product acceptance in the market:

“Why have Google and Apple done so well in the last [few] years? Because the grassroots love them. That’s the power root of the industry. Ideas here don’t come from the big influencers and move down. No, they start on the street and move up. Anyone miss how Google got big? Not by throwing a press conference.” – Robert Scoble, via Johnnie Moore’s blog.

Before I side with Robert, let me throw in a little word of caution: I know that the conversation has been geared in this direction for a few years now, but looking at cause:effect / influencer:influencee dynamics as a top-down model only seem fairly limited in scope. “Influencers” (whether they are “key” or “big” or “power” influencers) aren’t just at the top of their respective subcultural family trees. Sometimes, the masses themselves can be the power influencer. This is an element of the discussion that has all too often been neglected… so that even Robert Scoble – and most of us – tend to naturally divorce top-down influencers from bottom-up (or lateral) influencers. Big mistake. While there are differences between them, they are very much part of the same very short equation: Influencers are influencers. Period. No category of influencer should ever be cast aside or taken for granted. The moment you do is the moment you drop the ball on reaching (potentially) millions of customers / users. It’s easy to favor bottom-up influencers over their top-down cousins (or vice-versa), but it is an terribly myopic way to reach out to your customers.

When it comes to bottom-up and lateral influencers The street has always been a source of influence on culture, fashion, musical tastes, language, and political change. Urban fashions didn’t start on a runway in New York or Milan. The “gangsta” look wasn’t designed in a Soho creative studio and then packaged and sold to rap superstars. It came from the street and was then commercialized. The same is true about punk rockers, skateboarders, surfers, and just about every “culture” or “subculture” you can throw a cat at, from triathlon, to amateur photography to the country-club lifestyle.

Appealing to a grassroots base – which essentially consists of recruiting your 1-percenters to drive your campaign and influence their own peer networks has always been incredibly efficient. Politicians know this, which is why they are essential to the success of every campaign. Grassroots programs are militant in nature. They’re infectious and viral in the true sense of the term. They feed on momentum and quasi-exponential growth. They may very-well be the most virulent form of Word-Of-Mouth movements you’ll ever encounter. If you’re reading this and aren’t so sure you agree, that’s okay, but consider this: Every revolution in our history was the result of a grassroots movement. Every single one. Look at the American Revolution. The French Revolution. The fall of the Berlin Wall. More recently, thanks to the availability of cell phones, text messaging, and the organic nature of social networks, the 2001 revolution in the Phillippines and the 2002 presidential elections in South Korea. Grassroots movements hold a power inversely proportional to the attention most marketing campaigns

For many of us, influencers aren’t just celebrities or the visible (or outspoken) upper stratum of a subculture. The way we become participants in the growth of a trend or the success of a product isn’t necessarily tied to product placement on Lost, CSI, or whatever blockbuster is winning at the box office this summer. We don’t necessarily buy Gap clothes or Oakley sunglasses because Jessica Simpson or Tom Cruise are sporting them in an interview. Influencers can also be our neighbors. Our best friends. Our co-workers. Our parents. Our kids. They can also be familiar strangers or a mob of people demanding the same thing you always wish you had the power to ask for yourself. More often than not, these folks, NOT celebrities are the true influencers in our lives.

It is human nature to find (and seek) safety, familiarity and validation both in the people we know and in numbers.

From a corporate standpoint, large crowds also tend to hold more power than a handful of insightful thought leaders:

“(Analysts) watch what grass roots are saying. The wisdom of crowds. It drives a lot of buying decisions.” – Scoble.

We could go off on a major tangent here, but we’ll have to come back to it some other time.

However powerful “grassroots marketing” may be, you cannot, by default, dismiss traditional media and the more widely accepted concept of the key influencer. I get a little nervous when that suggestion is made. Not every product or brand should put all of their eggs into the WOM, viral, or grassroots basket. As a matter of fact, very few companies should focus exclusively on new media to promote themselves or their products. These would be those rare few companies whose products are so revolutionary, so well designed and so culturally vibrant that they almost sell themselves. (How often does this happen? Not very.)

Everyone else should instead strive for a balanced approach that takes into account top-down strategies (like advertising, PR, and traditional marketing) AND bottom-up (or rather lateral) strategies like grass-roots initiatives, co-creation, WOMM, viral campaigns and blogging. For some, the mix might be 60/40. For others, it may be 20/80. Every company, product, objective and situation is different, which is… well, part of the fun, and the most exciting thing about the way the field of Marketing in general is changing before our very eyes.

If you’re Gucci, Coca Cola, Apple, Oakley or Vespa, you still need to rely on product placement and endorsements to stay relevant and drive your brand forward. If you’re Google, WordPress or XBox Live, however, your strategy will have to be completely different. Forget about product placement and Superbowl ads. You need to live, breathe and bleed blogs, WOM, co-creation and online forums. Your product has to be easily accessible and fun to use. It has to engage and create value for its user as soon as he/she starts interacting with it. It has to work better than every product in its category. This is what will generate the kind of discussion and buzz that will attract more users. Customers. Friends. Evangelists. Whatever you choose to call them. Be that as it may, without a focused PR program, without some kind of engaging identity for your product, and without well-articulated product release, customer conversation and crisis response strategies, you’ll be like a sailboat without a rudder.

Just as most successful companies have accepted that a certain level of customization is necessary to attract and retain customers, marketing has also become much more customizable and user-friendly. Look at it this way: Each company requires its own specific recipe. What works for Dell won’t necessarily work for Sony. What works for Oakley won’t necessarily work for Rudy project. In light of this, PSF‘s (Professional Services Firms) like ad agencies, PR firms, and design studios need to realize that a) the menu of options when it comes to marketing tools keeps growing, b) that it’s a good thing, and c) that in order to create the best recipe for their clients, they need to not only know their way around the marketing kitchen, but know how to formulate the perfect mix of ingredients in order to create consistently delicious and buzz-worthy recipes. PSF’s that do this (and their clients) will reap the rewards of their wise ways. Those that don’t will spend a whole lot of time arguing about the notion of old marketing vs. new marketing, and defending what side they unwisely decided to adhere to.

My advice: Don’t fall into the New Marketing vs. Old Marketing trap. You can’t afford to limit yourself to being a supporter of either one camp or the other. If you do, you’ll always be missing a big (and crucial) piece of the puzzle for yourself, and for your clients. Grass Roots, key influencers, advertising, blogs, product placement, PR, it all works… and works best when used in concert. Robert Scoble is right: Microsoft missed the boat when it failed to gain (and perhaps even seek) grassroots support. That being said, his dismissal of press conferences might be a little short-sighted. The combination of the two would most likely produce a much better result than either one on its own.

In the specific case of Microsoft, (since it is the subject of Robert Scoble’s post,) while the success (and traction) of its CRM and People-Ready programs is obvious, Vista still hasn’t yet found its voice… or its audience. This may be because the public still hasn’t been given a clear answer when questions like “what will Vista do for me again?” “What’s the point?” “Is this all it does?” are asked.

Exciting products are always great at generating grass-roots support. Products, on the other hand, whose value can’t clearly be articulated or understood, tend to rely more on loads of advertising and messaging to reach their intended audiences. On the street, nobody is talking about Vista. Nobody is excited about it or disappointed in it (yet). Most people I run into haven’t even heard of it yet, which may be symptomatic of bigger problems… but that will have to be a topic for another day. The point is that Microsoft hasn’t done a very good job of building value for its new platform yet… which may be why it hasn’t enjoyed much ground-level buy-in.

This is a perfect example of how using traditional and new marketing tools in concert would probably yield some pretty impressive results: Old – Hold press conferences. Present the product at high-visibility venues. Create great ads for it. Put it in people’s faces and make it impossible for us to go a week, a day, even, without at least thinking about it once. Make us want to try it. New – put it in the hands of users (influential or otherwise) and help them become power users / evangelists. Gain widespread support from users. Drive the discussion on blogs and forum sites. Make users want to recommend it to their friends, and non-users recommend it based on “what they’ve heard”.

… Assuming, of course, that Vista will be able to wow its users, which remains to be seen. (That may have to be the topic of yet another discussion sometime in the next year.) Lucky for you, Corante’s Neville Hobson already got a head-start on the subject a few months ago with this post, so definitely check it out.

Okay, I’ve rambled long enough for one afternoon. Have a great Wednesday, everyone. 🙂

(And feel free to tell me if you disagree.)

Note: This post was written three years ago, before Vista ran into major criticism and long before Social Media was a household term. Funny how the concepts are the same but the way we articulated them back then was SO different: Grassroots. Word-of-mouth (WOM). 1-percenters. Lateral influencers.

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Advertising and Expectations

I’ve been a film fanatic ever since my parents took me to see the first Star Wars movie (now known simply as Episode IV). Since I’ve also been a big advertising fan since… well, since I was old enough to watch TV, it stands to reason that movie trailers (the advertising of movies) kind of rank pretty high on my list of attention-grabbers.

Let me say this again: I love movie trailers. Always have. Always will.

But here’s the rub: Most trailers these days aren’t any good. They used to be. There used to be a certain degree of savoir-faire when it came to cutting movie trailers. They were exciting. They made you want to see more. They made your mouth water.

Not so anymore.

Most trailers now seem to be disjointed and pointless. The rule of the day seems to be “okay, let’s throw as much crap as we can into that twenty-second spot as we possibly can. Priority 1: Explosions. Priority 2: The funniest lines in the movie. Oh… and let’s add 20 extra seconds of useless footage at the end just to explain the entire plot of the movie to the portion of the audience who isn’t savvy enough to want to see the movie without having it explained A-Z upfront.”

Yawn.

To be fair, note that I said “most” not “all.” Some trailers are great. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

And don’t even get me started with the TV trailers. Not even worth the virtual ink. Completely worthless.

So before I go on, let me throw a little note to the powers that be in Hollywood: Please, please, please, stop putting out lousy trailers. Please!!! Aside from the fact that bad trailers don’t entice people to go see the movies they advertise (no, really, think about it), those of us who look forward to them are getting tired of having our expectations shattered by remedial, poorly cut junk.

How hard is it to put together an exciting 30-60 second spot with 90+ minutes of footage? If my neighbor’s kid can do it for free on his Mac and post it to YouTube, surely, a highly paid studio editor can do a half-decent job. Right?

But enough about that. Read the fascinating (and quick) post on Tom Asacker’s blog about advertising’s effect on expectations rather than simply sales. (It deals with movie trailers.) Here’s a sliver:

“Instead of examining the effect of advertising on sales, we examine how advertising affects the updating of market-wide sales expectations. The focus on expectations creates a valuable advantage. Our measure of expectations, which is derived from a stock market simulation, is an accurate predictor of sales.”

Confused? No worries. Click here to read the whole post.

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Discovered On Twitter

I run into so much great content on Twitter that I have decided to start posting some of it right here on the blog. (I understand that many of you aren’t on Twitter yet, and even if you are, you can’t possibly follow/read everything I post there. So to make things simple, I will start posting some of my favorite articles, blog posts, studies and opinion pieces discovered on twitter right here, where they won’t get lost in the shuffle. Twitter is far too swift a river sometimes.)

So here we go:

Pamela Slim’s How to strike a balance between giving content away for free and earning a living:

When you create a really clear picture of the kinds of people that you would love to work with, it makes it much easier to decide what kind of content to develop for them. (Read more…)

Matt Rhodes’ Five ways to engage your customers in 2009:

Unlike other activities, engaging your customers cannot be run as a campaign. It is not about creating a number of advocates for a product launch or about having a conversation with some of your customers for two months. Engagement needs to be ongoing; sustained and sustainable. (Read more…)

Michael Litman on Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance:

As the days go by, the numbers who are discovering Twitter is shooting up, it’s experiencing rapid growth YOY. […] It’s not there yet, but it’s getting towards reaching the tipping point. It has potential for business also, success stories are starting to emerge from well known brands who are establishing a presence and engaging with their audience. Perhaps most famously, Dell recently reported that they have made more than $1 million dollars through their DellOutlet Twitter account. It’s clear that there’s value to be had from many angles. (Read more…)

Karl Long’s 2009 Predictions for Social media – The flight from growth to value:

2008 demonstrated quite starkly that growth often obscures lack of ‘value’. This was demonstrated by the housing bubble, then the dramatic collapse of the financial services industry, then by the Bernie Madoff ‘ponzie’ scheme. All 3 of those dramatic collapses demonstrate how growth can obscure real value as long as there is continued growth. One of Wall Street’s greatest failures is it’s singular focus on measuring and rewarding growth, Wall Street IMHO is part of a systemic, management, and cultural problem that focuses our measures of business success on the wrong things. In fact the term ‘bubble’ is a fantastic term for describing this blind belief that somehow growth is the key, because as long as the bubble is growing all the participants feel like they are part of something valuable, this is of course the essence of a ponzie scheme and most multi level marketing businesses.(Read more…)

And to wrap today’s list this incredible creative gallery/resource suggested to me by JHP‘s Michelle Cuevas-Stubblefield (@mcstubbs). Michelle, thanks for having given crack cocaine to this creative/advertising addict!

Some of my favorite ads from Ads Of The World:

That’s it for today!  See you on Twitter… or out there in the real world. 😉

Keep creating!

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Premium Brands have always been recession-proof. Until now.

Building Real Value vs. Creating Sales Incentives

As you all well know, I am a big fan of Tom Fishburne’s work both as a cartoonist and as a marketing honcho. @GabriellRossi pointed me to this post via Twitter yesterday, and it struck a cord (as Tom’s posts tend to do).

Here’s what Tom had to say about the seeming pandemic of brand erosion:

“Value is of course the theme of the moment, and marketers are all scrambling to add more “value” into their marketing plans for 2009. I met with a retail buyer last week, and tried to convince her that there was still a role for premium brands in a recession. I shared my opinion that a recession simply heightens the urgency for premium brands to prove that they are meaningful enough to command a premium.”

The retail buyer disagreed. She said that premium brands had two and only two choices in this economic climate. Either increase price promotions to compensate for the premium or permanently lower the price so that there is no longer a premium at all. Merry Christmas.

I think it will be important for brands to be responsive, but not reactive, to this economic climate. Make sure that your brand has renewed meaning for consumers who are genuinely struggling, but that doesn’t mean that you have to start behaving like private label.

Thank you Tom.

See, back in the day, premium brands (dare I say luxury brands) hadn’t fallen into the mass market trap. Exclusivity bred value, and value guaranteed minimum price-points which in turn validated the brand’s position in the market. In plain English: Premium brands weren’t trying to scale. They didn’t want to compete against the middle and low-end brands for wallet share. When a company starts pimping out its products to every distribution outlet it can find, it’s just a matter of time before it’s available at Wal-Mart. (Which is precisely what happened to Levi’s a few years ago.)

You can’t be ‘premium’ and be on everyone’s wrist, Grasshopper. Every time I see a sixteen-year-old wearing Gucci, someone is hammering another nail in the once premium brand’s coffin. (For more on that topic, check out this little ditty.)

This topic came up recently during a conversation I had with Brains on Fire’s Spike Jones the other day. We were talking about brands, and Spike asked me point blank if I still thought that (blankety-blank brand) was still relevant and true, or if it had ‘sold out’? My reply was that it was still true to its roots. He didn’t agree, so I asked him why. His answer was simple: One day, while shopping at a massive bargain warehouse, he saw a bin of products from that brand just sitting there on clearance.

At one time, that premium and highly technical lifestyle brand had embodied the very spirit of adventure and extreme outerwear. Now, by virtue of sitting there in a bargain bin next to $3 family packs of some no-name Tupperware knockoff, the brand’s value evaporated. Poof. Just like that.

I can’t argue with that. It’s as clear an illustration of brand erosion as I could have ever conjured up myself: From the summit of Everest one decade to the bargain bin of a massive discount chain the next.

Brand death 101. Somewhere along the line, some hack of a brand manager decided “hey, if we got out of this specialty niche thing, we could scale like crazy!!!”

Yeah. And if Bang & Olufsen really had any marketing savvy, they’d be selling $75 stereos in Radio Shack too, right? *sigh*

When those of us in the business of building (or rebuilding) brands hear traditional marketing folks talk about building value through marketing plans, we just shake our heads at the familiar idiocy of the notion. A brand’s value may be communicated through Marketing, sure, but it isn’t created there. The value, folks, does not live in the marketing. It lives in the product. It lives in the customer’s interaction with it. It lives in the company’s customer service. In its quality control. In its billing department. In the spirit from which the product was first sparked and then painstakingly perfected.

The only people in the world who will ever try to convince you that a brand’s value is created through marketing plans are marketing people. Advertising execs mostly, but all branches of the marketing profession are guilty of perpetuating this decades-old farce. Stop falling for it. It may work great for breakfast cereals and air fresheners, but premium brands are a completely different animal. (And by Premium brands, I don’t mean J-Lo, the fragrance.)

Listen. The difference between Cartier and Armitron isn’t in the Marketing. The difference between Oakley and Ironman sunglasses isn’t in the branding. The difference between Ford and BMW isn’t in the advertising or the incentive programs.

Building value through marketing plans is called “selling”. It isn’t building value at all. It isn’t even really marketing. You can call it that if you want to, if it makes you feel better, but in the real world it is called promotions. (And yes, there is a BIG difference between marketing and promotions, just like there is a HUGE difference between marketing and sales.)

What this silly retail buyer Tom mentioned is concerned with is selling – as in selling as much of whatever she puts in her store as she can, as fast as humanly possible. That’s her business model. She couldn’t care less what brands she carries as long as they sell well and fast and get people in the door. Premium to her means highly profitable and fast-moving. Is there anything wrong with that kind of model? Of course not. But it just doesn’t jive with premium brands because premium brands – in order to remain so – cannot scale like Colgate or Capn’ Crunch cereal: Once premium is everywhere, it ceases to be premium.

Which is why premium brands fall into a different business model from the one embraced by Tom’s brand-agnostic retail buyer who can’t tell the difference between building value in the B2B space from building value in the B2C space.

Why Premium Brands are allergic to our discount culture

Where do I want to buy my premium coffee? Not at the local 7-11. Where do I want to buy my premium quality mountain climbing shell? Not at K-Mart. You get the drift.

Specialty stores are where premium brands thrive. If you’re Cervelo or Specialized, you want to be in real bike shops and triathlon stores and not Dick’s Sporting Goods. If you’re K2 or Rossignol, you want to be in real ski shops, not Wal-Mart. If you’re Cartier or Yves St. Laurent or Brooks Brothers, you want your own store. Your own retail space. Your own premium environment where your customers can get the full experience of your brand.

Speaking of your customers, are they looking for good deals? Sure! Of course they are. But they don’t want 20% OFF sales. They don’t want 2008 closeouts. Not if you’re a Premium brand. Never.

If you’re a premium brand and you want to discount a product to help the sale along, you do it discretely. Without eroding the value of the product or your brand. Without insulting your customer’s tastes. If they are about to walk out without buying what they came to look at, (assuming you care) you discretely tell them about your members-only sale. The one that nobody is supposed to know about. You’re doing them a favor now because they’re a valued customer. Because they’re special. Because you have that kind of personal relationship with them. You ask them to keep it on the down-low. Shhhh. Nobody knows about this. You wink at them and smile as you hand them their receipt and premium branded bag. You say their name as you thank them and wish them farewell.

And of course, when they get home and unwrap the thing they bought, the French bottle of perfume, the Swiss watch, the Italian pair of jeans, the English hand-made shoes, when they feel it in their hand, when they touch it, smell it, wind it, button it up, the value is right there in the experience. The experience which started in the store and continues every time they look at it, use it, share stories of it and inspire their peers to go buy one as well. When they open a magazine and see a premium glossy full page ad for the thing they bought, for the brand it embodies, they feel the value once again. They smile, confident in the knowledge that their premium brand, that the premium price they paid for it, that the value they assign to it are all safe and sound. And thus, all is well in the world.

What they don’t want is to get an email a week later telling them that the watch they just spent $5,000 on is now on sale for $1,300.

I don’t want to see my Canon EOS 1D in the glass case at Best Buy. I don’t want to see Hermes scarves hanging from a rack at Target. Mont Blanc pens shouldn’t be sold in 3 for 2 bargain packs at Staples.

When you start catering to everyone, you end up catering to no one.

As exemplified by Spike’s reaction to the brand we shall not name, once a premium brand sells out its authenticity, its exclusivity, its specialty in exchange for sales volume, it dies. Period.

There is zero value in being a sellout. None. Zip.

There is, however, always value in being exclusive. In being special. In being rare and hard to get. So if you are responsible for a premium brand or product, next time a Marketing professional (inside or outside your organization) mentions building value, make sure you’re all on the same page.

Have a great Monday, everyone! 🙂

PS: You can read more about the nature of premium brands here.

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Is advertising a tax for having an unremarkable product?

Original Photo by http://wray-mccann.com

A quotation and some words of wisdom from one of my readers:

“Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product”.
– Chief Inspector, The Geek Squad

“Here’s to being remarkable. Not in the great new award winning ad. Not in the emotional spin. But in having a drop dead, fantastically designed product that does all the talking.”

– David Taylor, “Where’s The Sausage” blog

Thanks, David.

So what do you guys think? Aside from advertisements dealing with events, promos, special sales and non-profits, do you agree with the above statements?

David Taylor publishes the where’s the sausage blog, which also deals with all things branding. Definitely swing by there and add him to your blogroll.

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