Can you answer this question? Your customers can.

At a casual business gathering this week, I overheard the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company being asked what his company did. He appeared to intentionally bite a cracker just at that moment, to buy time and think about his response. “Well, it’s complicated,” he finally replied.

This smart, educated Chief Executive Officer was elbow deep in company operations yet hadn’t an (uncomplicated) response to that 'simple' question - not because he was oblivious, of course, but because he had spent the last several years buried in finance, production runs, board meetings and other demands. Demands that took him farther and farther away from his customer, farther and farther from a good response. So when he was asked “What does your company do?”, he could only respond to the question by explaining details about the company’s software.

The ability to describe your product is a start, but it’s an answer to an altogether different question, that is, “How do you do it?”.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the question “What do you do?”, whether asked about you or your company, isn’t actually about what you do, it’s about the value you offer. “What does your company do?” is a question that summarizes several others, such as, “Who do you sell to?” “Why do customers buy from you?” and “What’s next?"

“What do you do? …to provide value to your customers?” It's not a question that only the CEO needs to know. Everyone in the company from the receptionist to the CEO should be able to articulate the company's value, because it should be the motivating factor for going to work every day. If you’ve spent the last several years being pulled farther and farther away from your customers, it is possible that you yourself may find this question harder and harder to answer.

But your customers know. It might be time to ask them.

That's a clown question, bro.

Who knew? Ron is a brand ambassador. But, "what, at this point, does it matter?"

To belatedly welcome 2014 to this blog, I lazily link you to this spot-on criticism of the makeover of make of Ronald McDonald.

Proving that social media is not a slam dunk.

Here's a broad, but direct and succinct analysis about the role and effectiveness of social media... as a tool, clearly not a solution in itself. Numbers tell the story on Oreo's real-time response to the Super Bowl blackout - what I still see as perhaps the best use of social media (creatively and contextually) since we as marketers started talking about it. But as good as it was, it wasn't a slam dunk. Read more here.

A Living Death

George A. Romero was an early contributor to the genre with his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No, this post isn't about the Zombie Apocalypse, although that'd get a lot of page views. Its about yet another pundit suggesting something is dead. That too gets page views. Death, vampires, and celebrities. Dead celebrity vampires are especially good for page views. But I digress.

No, this post is about a recent speech to the IoD given by Saatchi and Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts who boisterously proclaimed (as ad people are fond of doing) the following things as dead:

Marketing.
Value Statements.
Strategy.
The 'Big Idea'.

Suddenly I'm not feeling too good myself.

In fact, these things are not dead, they are merely changing. I'd use a caterpillar/butterfly analogy here but I fear metaphors may be dead too.

Marketing used to be about positioning, segmentation, and anticipating customer needs. Roberts says that approach is dead because change is too rapid today. Essentially, he says, think too long about it and 'poof!' its different and you're on the wrong track.

That's not death, that's just an acknowledgement of the importance of agility. Marketing requires greater agility than ever before. It means marketers have to listen more than ever before.

Value statements are dead and dreams are in. Dreams are in all right, dreams in the form of stories that register with customers. That's not death, that's an ability to convey moods, emotions, and to create relevance for your brand among customers. Tell a story, don't recite a fact... build a relationship, not a transaction.

Strategy involves too much consideration in a hyper world. Take an action, any action. Strategy is death. Still, if you don't have a destination in mind, to paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, any road will get you there. Strategy isn't dead. Analysis paralysis is dead.

Big ideas are dead, small ideas are where the excitement is. A series of ideas appealing to segments to build relationships that taken together add up to that one... big... idea. Dead? No. Chopped into little pieces to create something new? Very much alive.

Marketing isn't dead. It's just that the margins for error are slimmer. So the decisions we make now as marketers just appear more, well, life or death. 

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Halftime in America

Arguably (because there’s always an argument about it, as VW pointed out in their actual ad), the best ad of the Superbowl was the Clint Eastwood “Halftime in America” narrative for Chrysler, an ode to Detroit. It was very “Morning in America” Reagan-esque and very stirring. At least for some. I was actually more moved by a similar effort by Chrysler last year using a Chrysler 300 and an Eminem soundtrack.

This one, alternatively, annoyed me. It wasn’t the moody imagery, the obvious attempt at emotional manipulation, or the subtle insertion of exclusively Chrysler products to represent a revival of Detroit (it was their ad, after all). It was the choice of Clint Eastwood as spokes-icon.

Because weeks earlier, Clint had stated that GM and Chrysler should not have been bailed out. It is a position I agree with, incidentally, although likely for different reasons than Clint. But regardless of my politics, there was Clint, inspiring the citizenry with an inspiring, Dirty Harry voiced call to arms that dared me to disagree with him = that it was, in fact, halftime and an opportunity for America to renew itself in the ‘second half’. A second half that should never have occurred, per Clint.

This is not to say that I think it was a bad ad. Just... untrustworthy and lacking credibilty to anyone familiar with Eastwood's politics. Its an important message. A stirring message. It was also a bit of a whitewash given Clint’s values, something more akin to a political ad overlooking the candidate’s shortcomings. And it should be noted that at the half, the 'Patriots' already had the lead, came out in the second half and padded that lead, and then ultimately lost.

Indeed, its halftime, America.

UPDATE: Insincerity breeds contempt,and parody. I'm not alone in this, I guess. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_8qCbHsUA

It's good. Really good. It's TOO good.

Dear Nancy Brinker:

I'm a fan. What you've done for research is amazing. No one is a bigger supporter of the cause than I am. My mother herself was a victim of breast cancer so I say this with love, respect, and admiration:

Consider me 'aware'. I'm full of 'awareness'. I'm up to my eyeballs in 'awareness'. But like a pop song heard too many times, the pink thing has gone from helpfully ubiquitous to having the effect of the vandalism you'd expect from a Barbie-obsessed eight year old girl. It's too much of a good thing.

Your marketing - specifically, your brand communication - urgently needs a refresher because I can't be alone when I say I'm starting to tune it out like I do omnipresent graffiti in Queens.

To make a donation: http://ww5.komen.org/

The Oldest Profession

In this excellent Advertising Age op-ed by Les Marguiles, he addresses the critical importance of the agency-client relationship, or increasingly, the lack of one.

I can boil my take on the piece by suggesting that those marketers who allow their companies to commoditize service companies' efforts deserve what they get in the shoddy product returned from those desperate firms who won a project based on costs and terms alone - and therefore see no long term opportunity with the client.

Conversely, and importantly, those service providers – agencies, consultants, what have you – who accept that their work can be commoditized and are therefore willing to forego basic standards of quality of service, creative, and responsiveness also deserve what they get from clients who take that unique value for granted.

I remind my small agency colleagues of the following exchange, often attributed to Winston Churchill:

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are just negotiating the price.

Why you need to be .co dependent

I urge you to .co-operate on this.

Right after you finish reading this blog entry, go to your domain host and purchase your company's URL ‘.co’ domain.

As of today, you can register .co just as you have .com, .net, or .org, and other more obscure ones, such as .me or .name

It will cost you under $30/year but save you headaches. I predict .co will be a popular domain because: a, outside the US, web users already are used to typing .co prior to their country code (eg, .co.uk, for the Brits, .co.nz for the Kiwis); b, it’s a letter short of .com, which is great for typo trolling sites, and of course, c, in the states, it is a suffix for legal companies.

Yes, I might be wrong about the eventual land rush for the .co domain. If so, you’re out $30. If I’m right, you could pay thousands later. I say that’s pretty good insurance.

That’s it. Just this timely advice. No snarky comments, no opinion, no sermonizing. Mostly because I can't, off hand, come up with a good pun using '.co'. If you have one, post it in the comments (the .co mments).

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Marketing in the age of frugality

In the article "The New Consumer Frugality," by Egol/Clyde/Rangan from strategy+business magazine, the authors restate and expand opinions I made in earlier posts, including Fear and the American Consumer, wherein I supposed a world where fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) was the primary motivation of consumers and again in this post, where I suggested that there was a new normal of a higher savings rate, less consumer spending on credit, and general 'new religion' on main street.

The authors state that according to a Booz and Company study, fewer than 20% of consumers will return to their pre-recession spending levels. (It's nice to be right.)

The authors state: "A new frugality, characterized by a strong value consciousness that dictates trade-offs in price, brand, and convenience, has become the dominant mind-set among consumers in the United States — and probably in other wealthy countries as well. Two-thirds of American shoppers are cutting coupons more frequently, buying low price over convenience, and emphasizing saving over spending. Per capita consumption expenditure has declined across demographic groups. Consumer sentiment remains weak. These trends are not going to change, no matter the pace of economic change."

Then again, given that more than half this country's GDP is consumer spending, it'd be good to be wrong in this instance.

Still, what does this New Frugality mean for marketers?

Repeating a mantra of marketers weathering each recession, the authors state that we should continue aggressive marketing in a recession - but that unlike earlier times, that the return to 'better days' will not be marked by a return to normal strategies in product, pricing, promotions or distribution. The increased emphasis on, and redefinition of, value (defined as a combination of price, brand, and convenience) will drive decisions across all consumer groups - and this, combined with the community and transparency brought about by the rise of Web 2.0 means that credibility and performance will be paramount to consumers; views of this value judgment less impacted by status positioning and clever brand advertising than by collective market experience. And while brand awareness and loyalty are proven out by the experience, the post-recession consumer will seek out distribution channels that offer the best measure of that brand combined with price and convenience.

So two main lessons of the quoted study involve pricing strategy and promotions strategy: When looking for pricing solutions, the identification and segmentation of customers is, as one might expect, paramount. Price only to maintain profitable return on the most loyal customer segment where value continues to be perceived. As I stated last December, consider pricing strategies and tiers for various channels to deliver the best value as judged by each segment using different channels.

The second lesson involves MarCom. Develop promotional strategies that articulate the convenience (in distribution), pricing tiers and brand selection at all consumer/brand touch points. As the authors remind us, this will require marketers to embrace new advertising and promotion capabilities, particularly those around new digital tools that engage consumers at all points in the buying decision and encourage desired purchasing behavior.

The New Frugality is more than a new economic normal. It is a sea change. We now find ourselves in the 'frugal age' - and it will define us as much as the digital, space, or industrial ages did before.

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The Cure For What Ails Ya?

The turn-of-the-(20th) century practice of ‘snake-oil’ salesmen travelling the country to sell remedies of questionable efficacy has returned in the form of ‘Patent Marketing’, a term I’ve coined to play off ‘Patent Medicine’, the term given these early ‘medicines’.

I am seeing a lot of ads for – and an increasing number of small start-ups buying – crowd-sourced logo development, marketing plan builders, and social media starter kits touted as an inexpensive equivalent for professional guidance - and by extension, purposeful reflection and consideration on the part of business owners themselves.

I understand the appeal of these services. We are a society of the easy fix, the cheap alternative, a society where Wal-mart sets the expectation. Plus, much of marketing and advertising can appear on the surface as obvious and intuitive. (The reason for this is that generally, 'the obvious and intuitive' was created by marketers who created that perception from the complicated and obscure, but I digress.) Marketing, it then appears, is certainly not the province of supposed ‘experts’ – many of which by my own admittance, aren’t worth a tinker’s damn themselves.

Still, it is simple due diligence to find a consultant with whom you can feel confident. One that knows, or is committed to learning, your industry and your business. One that will take your lead but feels confident not to necessarily follow it. One with relevant experience that allows them to apply past experiences and ask the right questions.

The idea of selling ‘Mad Libs’ style pre-written marketing plans or picking a logo contest winner is worse than doing nothing at all: it is potentially destructive. It allows sloppy thinking, hides what might be an under-capitalization of the business, reinforces marketing as a support, and therefore, optional, function, and suggests that marketing’s end game is a document or advertisement, and not an ongoing process of communication with stakeholders.

Your business is unique. Can what you are selling be reduced to a document like an off-the-shelf lease agreement? If the communication with your customers can be reduced to being positioned like every other business that purchases your same ready-made document, then perhaps that’s all the differentiation that you can muster for your own product or service. And ultimately that’s another way these services are truly destructive, providing insufficient differentiation and discounting the real value of your product or service.

Snake oil remedies were touted as a cure for ‘what ails ya’, but were generally loaded with opiates that made the patient feel good for just long enough for the salesman to pack up his wagon and move on. If you are in business for the long haul, you’ll need a better prescription.

Using Context in Creative - Part Two

As with my last post on the subject, here are excellent examples of understanding and leveraging the nature of the media when developing creative. Courtesy of Alltop.

Do The Math

A common though underutilized truism in marketing is to quantify your claims whenever and wherever possible.

'Biggest', 'Better', Fastest', 'Smallest', 'Cheapest' are nice claims but of little* value. Only slightly better are percentages, useful in any circumstance when the real numbers are small to begin with ($0.04 is a penny less than $0.05, but it is also fully 20% less)

I was reminded of this point by a number** of excellent recent blog entries that are worth a read:

How to Make Your Data Matter, Fast Company, by Dan and Chip Heath - Notable insight: "...an $800 billion stimulus works out to be the rough equivalent of seven weeks' income for an American household. Is that worth it? Seven weeks' worth of work to stave off a potential depression. Or maybe you're appalled. Regardless, we can finally have a real argument, because we have a better idea of what we're arguing about."

How Comedians Clarify Brain-fuzzing Stats, again, Fast Company, by Dan Macsai - Notable Insight: "...If Rod Blagojevich winds up in jail, four of the last eight Illinois governors will have served time. Did you know -- and this is true -- that only 48% of the people who commit murder end up in jail? You are more likely to end up in jail if you become the governor of Illinois than if you become a murderer. Make the smart choice, kids. (Jon Stewart)"

What Does A Trillion Dollars Look Like?, courtesy of cnbc.com - Notable insight: "With the largest market cap among U.S. companies, Exxon Mobil’s value of publicly traded shares is over $345 billion (as of 3/31/09). If this amount was denominated in $100 bills, the block of Benjamins covering the area of a standard American football field would stack to a height of about 28.7 feet."

Ultimately if your numbers are impressive or modest, whole numbers or percentages, what matters is that your audience understands them and relates to them in clear terms that mean something to them.

(*specifically, 86% less value, that is.)
(** exactly three)

Shackin' up

Quick Quiz: When asked why RadioShack decided to rebrand itself "The Shack", CMO Lee Applbaum stated it was because (choose just one!):

1. We think "shack" conjures up many positive store images.

2. Some customers and the investor community refers to us as "The Shack" already.

3. We can't afford the real Shaq as a spokesperson, and he's in Cleveland now anyhow.

4. Basic research could have told us that "The Shack" is actually a popular Christian novel regarding the anguish of a parent over the rape and murder of his daughter. Oh, well.

5. Because... "The (Love) Shack is a little ol' place where we can get together! (Don't forget your jukebox money!)"


The answer is #2, although any of the answers is equally bad, and equally plausible.

That's right. RadioShack's most avid customers and "the investor community" (really? that's their target with this campaign?) already refer to the company (despairingly, perhaps?) as The Shack, so they figured they'd just co-op the term as their own in a desperate grab to leverage, and therefore destroy, any credible independent brand affinity.

Besides, marketing theory aside, every middle school kid in America already knows that giving yourself a nickname is just lame.

Noisy launches

Here's something startling obvious that often gets lost in the noise of an exciting product launch:

The product is the thing.

The company is not the thing. (An exception perhaps is Apple - which uses its powerful corporate brand to great effect.)

The distribution channel is not the thing. (Your distributors may incorrectly argue the point, especially VARs.)

And most certainly, the ad is not the thing. (Your agency's creatives may disagree, especially if the ads are spotlighted in an article like this one in Advertising Age.

Once you go down the path of suggesting that a "creepy" and "unsettling" advertisement is "doing its job" because people are talking about the advertisement (and not the product per se) you can quickly find yourself sliding down a slippery slope trying to quantify 'mindshare' and 'visibility'.

To be certain, if the ads are effective, they'll be talked about... but more importantly, so will the product. A truly effective advertisement quickly steps back and allows the product to take the spotlight.

After all, no one wants to hear the announcer keep talking once the band takes the stage.

Because Results Matter

Because Results Matter. I own that phrase as a domain. It is the Strategy180 slogan, and more than that, its the way we approach clients and projects. It is also the way that I think that all agencies - and their marketer clients - should view their relationships.

But they don't, and in the process, lower the bar of expectations and underestimate the value and influence of marketing.

And now the King himself - the Burger King - must understand that 'visibility' and 'mindshare', even 'frequency' and 'reach' are tools and metrics, not goals. This article in Ad Age indicates that the award-winning Burger King campaign is failing to gain ground - even cedeing it - to that ubiquitous clown and his league of banal but effective advertising and market positioning. When the much-lauded ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is in negative territory, even today's stock market looks like a better bet.

Because Results, after all, Matter.

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Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant?

Below is an intriguing re-post from Mashable regarding the ever-changing face of business and relationship marketing. In the late 90s we used to call Web 1.0, still one way electronic communications, "New Media". I imagine in "NEW" much the same way television was going to destroy radio, radio was to destroy print, and so forth. Yet the interesting thing about the 'new' in this 'New Media' is that it is the first to change the 'old media'... with newspapers weakened (I will not predict their demise), radio and television streaming, and now... old New Media replaced by Web 2.0, the new New Media. Now that's change.

Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant?

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Mystery Meat

You remember mystery meat, in the seventh grade cafeteria, trying to guess what part of which animal was buried under a mound of potatoes and curdled gravy?

How about this mystery meat: A television-centered campaign that promotes an oft-derided product by hiding behind and talking up the virtues of its partners' products? It is what Microsoft is doing in their new 'Laptop Hunters' campaign, and according to a study quoted in this Fast Company article, it is working.

Microsoft cannot put lipstick on this pig, but it can cover that pig by ladling the value propositions of the hardware manufacturers whose equipment runs the buggy OS (Vista, aka OS7) on top of it.

Microsoft recognizes and leverages the one area the Apple cannot readily claim: value for the money, as PCs can be had for an order of magnitude cheaper than even the most budget-friendly Mac. It realizes that for all the hype around the Mac, the product, to many, doesn't deliver the value promised in its advertising. And ultimately, the product experience equals the brand, no matter how well executed the 'I'm a Mac' campaign.

Thus it appears that for the time being, consumers are holding their nose as they go for the PC. Just like swallowing mystery meat.

UPDATE: 7-15: Microsoft: Apple Told Us to Cancel the Laptop Hunter Ads

Using context in creative

In marketing, we are all too often too quick to shrug and allow 'sufficient' or 'passable' creative because, after all, of the subjective nature of of clients' and creatives' judgements.

Yet the most effective messaging is rarely about the message only, the clever headline only, or the graphics only. It is more broadly all those things, always as they are used within a specific context. Delivering the unexpected means communicating the unexpected, in an unexpected way, in an unexpected place. Saatchi and Saatchi got it right with this ad for flea and tick spray:



Look carefully. This is an enormous advert on the floor of a transporation hub in Indonesia. The 'fleas' are passers-by, many unaware of their role in the ad itself.

Large format floor ads have been done before, but this one is the first I have seen that combines the impressive graphic impact of large-scale installations in an unexpected way, in this case where passers-by are integral to the message. Without them, the image is incomplete. Place this same image on a postcard or in a trade advertisement, it communicates the same message, but offers no interaction, no imact, and builds no affinity for the brand.

"Art" remains subjective, but "context" is objective. Recognizing this makes good creative easier to recognize, easier to sell, and builds credibility for marketing and advertising as measureable and accountable. As ad legend David Ogilvy is quoted as saying, “If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.”