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.

The Hype Cycle

Although an awesome marketing name for a chrome and flame-painted chopper, the hype cycle is not a creation of Orange County Choppers, but rather a term of the Gartner Group research firm and refers to their interpretation of the development, maturity, and adoption of technology.

You know, the path between 'slideware' (unproven ideas that only exist in PowerPoint slides) and 'general availability' (store shelves).

Speech recognition is one of these technologies. In 2000, they were admittedly my slides suggesting that a speech platform was 'around the corner'. In 2003, when they were Microsoft's slides (with the introduction of their speech server) and again now, these slides are re-issued with a Google logo.

I know a lot of earnest people in the field of speech recognition and I know they spend a great deal of time refining and improving speech recognition capabilities in myriad applications. In this article, you'd think that a decade of inprovements, trial and error, and frankly, millions of VC dollars hadn't already been expended when Larry Page and Sergey Brin decended from the heavens, touched the complicated technology, and made speech 'finally viable' with Google Voice.

Speech technology is already a viable (and functioning) technology. But I also understand that there is a required ecosystem of hardware, software and services in speech technology to make it 'work' as a fully-functional platform of the future, in spite of the hype that accompanies a Google launch of anything from a phone OS to breadsticks. ("Peak of inflated expectations" in graph.)

It is a gentle reminder as product marketers, we understand that it is as important to build expectation and excitement at a launch as it is to control those expectations. The marketplace doesn't allow marketers to underperform to their promises, a lesson we knew but were (supposedly) reminded of with the Internet bubble. As this article points out, and Microsoft discovered, speech is a human construct that requires a great deal more than money and technologists - even Google money and Google technologists - to make it meet the long-held expectations we have held for speech as an interface in the near term, and to overcome the long-held cynicism that a future feature-rich, reliable 'speech-driven platform of the future' will now have to overcome to establish a marketplace. Speech has sat at the peak of inflated expectations long enough. It desrves to grow, but only if allowed to drop into Gartner's "trough of disillusionment" first (graph).

To be certain, speech will drive a viable comprehensive OS platform one day. Just not this Thursday. Or next.

Unpopular popularity

"Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded" is one of my favorite 'Yogis', so named for the famed Yankees catcher who is perhaps as famed for his unique turn of phrase as his play on the field.

In a study released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, we find that, once again, there is a lot of truth to what Yogi Berra has to say. The study illustrates that the fall of an item or style in popularity mirrors its rise to popularity, so that items that become popular faster also die out faster.

These, my friends, are called fads. The study's authors were quoted as saying that “While it is easy to see products, ideas, or behaviors catch on in popular culture, less in known about why such things become unpopular." And this question is as critical a question to marketers as any.

In a cross-cultural, non-commercial study that harkens to Levitt's book Freakonomics, study authors Berger and Le Mens analyzed baby names in France and the US over the past century. The two researchers found a consistency in the rise and fall of given names - that the longer it took for a name to become common, the longer it took for the name to fall out of use. Parents interviewed indicated that they were simply unwilling to risk saddling their child with a name they perceived as 'faddish'.

For marketers, these results indicate that it is the perception of a trend that makes the creation of a fad self-fulfilling. While somewhat intuitive, there is often no scarcity or other economic factor that forces certain trends that 'hockey stick' in popularity to die out faster. Instead, the concept of 'the harder they fall' is based in the idea that people, for all their concern about fitting in, don’t want to be seen as following the herd. The key is perhaps in not controlling the growth, but in marketing the message - even as sales rise without apparent assistance from 'those guys in marketing' - that the growth is because of the value offered by the fast-growing product or service, and not transient fads.

And that will mean that in addition to trying something, marketing will keep people coming back, even as it gets more crowded.

The Antique Selectric

A recent back-to-school shopping trip with my pre-teen son did plenty to remind me of the widening generation gap between us. Navigating through brands I'd never heard of and styles that will, one day, define the cultural lowlight of his generation (just as parachute pants defined mine) – helped me acknowledge that the pigment had indeed left my hair, never to return.

An annual report called the Beloit College Mindset List – you may recognize it as common fodder for chatty 'lite rock' morning radio hosts – reminds us all not only of the generation gap and differences in our cultural context, but the pace of change in today's world. This year's study calls out sixty points of reference that the typical 18-year-old, born in 1990, takes for granted. These include:

• Universal Studios has always offered an alternative to Disneyland in Orlando.
• The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno.
• Caller ID has always been available on phones.
• IBM has never made typewriters.

Had the Beloit study existed when I entered college, my elders would have likely been reminded that I never knew the country without a space program, had never listened to radio for anything but music, and automobiles always had air conditioning. In turn, upon turning 18, my son will have never known mobile phones without cameras, grasp the concept of a paper map, or have enjoyed music on anything larger than an iPod.

And forget the iconic Selectric… he won't even know IBM as a consumer brand.

Small gods

I recently discovered that a friend considers himself a Luddite because he has so far resisted the seemingly inescapable social pressure to own a mobile phone.

Having just returned from CTIA, where the discussion among the assembled wireless companies and network equipment providers was once again on the subject of providing more data access, services, collaboration on mobile devices - and I feel somewhat like an anthropologist among the crowds because I still know at least one 18-49 year old without mobile service at all. That's right, forget mobile internet and collaboration apps... he is lacking even simple mobile voice communication.

Actually, I am very sympathetic - and in fact envious - of my friend's postion on mobile phones. As Jerome Lawrence wrote for the play Inherit The Wind, "Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. You can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. You may conquer the air, but birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

Today we clone livestock and can grow a heart in a petri dish. We 'google' or 'wiki' information at our fingertips and can quickly become a skeptic, if not an expert, on any topic under the sun. We live and work in orbit 220 miles above the earth. We TIVO our favorite programs and thus appear to control the fabric of time. This week, a 'man' even announced his pregnancy.

Mobile phones have already allowed us to master the concept of being omnipresent. Success with these other endeavors will bring us closer to be omnipotence too. Small gods, each one of us.

So I cut my friend a break. Those who refuse the latest gadgets aren't Luddites. Just human.