A Shot of Convenience

I got my annual flu shot today. It is only September and I live in a warm climate, so it’s usually approaching November before the local news guilts me into making a trip for the vaccine. They do this of course by warning me repeatedly of the pandemic cataclysm sure to occur if I alone remain the diseased zombie carrier of the latest flu strain named for a farm animal or obscure Asian nation.

Today, however, it was different. With my wife and son hunkered over his History homework, I myself made the weekly trek to our local hated and feared Wal-Mart to pick up a few staples. And there it was, near where I had twice exchanged my cart for one without a thumping or rebellious wheel: The Wal-Mart equivalent of the Mayo Clinic… a makeshift card table, folding chair, forms, syringes, gloves, and two disinterested phlebotomists. They were sandwiched in-between brightly colored plastic back-to-school dorm room accessories and the latest in Jacqueline Smith Signature sweatpants in size XXXL.

As I sat down to fill out the medical form, a small gnat flew between us. “That’s a bit disconcerting,” I mumbled.

Resignedly, the woman filling the syringe sighed, “It’s Wal-Mart.” We nodded silent acknowledgments and I rolled up my sleeve.

So why would I consider Wal-Mart, a discount mecca and focus of great derision by wanna-be cultural elites like myself, for a flu shot requiring sterile surrounds and capable professionals?

Because it was easy. The location was central, required no appointment, no long forms, no insurance hassles (though it was an option); the line was short, the procedure even shorter, and payment a breeze. I got a flu shot and they pulled in 24 dollars in less than a minute. That’s a win-win.

So it is with marketing. If in real estate, its location, location, location, in marketing, its easy, easy, easy. People will pay for convenience. A lot more. We routinely pay a 5000% + mark-up on tap water just for the convenience of a bottle. We’ll exchange good nutrition for the convenience of a drive-through window. And your last oil change involved $6 worth of oil but $20 worth of ‘high school kid with a grease gun’.

If you have an inferior or more expensive product, making it convenient to buy and to use still gives you a shot at success.

And speaking of shots, go get yours today. I hear rumors of a ferocious Tajikistani goat flu this season.

Twitter Quitter

I quit Twitter today. Oh, this isn’t going to be some minimalist manifesto, just a statement of fact.

I deleted my posts, all 1500+ of them, shared over the past two years or so. Some were moving, insightful. Most were fun. None were ever drivel. No one ever knew what I had for breakfast, I never foursquare’d myself into a virtual mayoral coup d’tat, no one knew when I was ill, and only occasionally did I mention the weather. I even gained a friend or two.

I just got tired.

I initially joined Twitter and other social media to remain up to date on the social media communities important to my clients. I even joined MySpace back in the day – closed the account when it became irrelevant to me.

I like to write, and Twitter and Facebook are good virtual water coolers for office at home types like myself. But they are an extension of me, that is, my personal brand, and before every tweet I’d have to consider that. That can be tiring, particularly for someone such as myself, given to dark humor and sarcasm – 140 characters is plenty of room for a zinger, but never enough for context.

So I’m not dropping out in some Luddite fantasy, I’m just lightening my load a bit. I can be distracted and Twitter is nothing if not a distraction. It was one more thing that took my time from things that were clearly more constructive, useful, profitable, enjoyable, important. Like all good business decisions when faced with limited resources (in this case, time) I had to determine if it was core to my business or life, and if I could justify the continued investment in it. The answer was clearly, no. It was not core, and there are other, arguably better ways to market myself and my ideas, and interact with others.

So my Twitter account is inactive. Of course, I’ll stay in touch, though my number of followers will undoubtedly fall sharply in the coming weeks (another invented preoccupation I'll not miss). I’ll follow the Twittersphere for news on how to leverage Twitter in marketing, and from time to time check on tweets from those I follow who continue to leverage Twitter expertly. The end of this relationship is amicable. I can tell you about Twitter. I can help you create a presence on Twitter. I can now see commercial purposes for Twitter I couldn’t see just a few months ago.

But for now, I’ll just be observing.

Purpose over Process

One of my favorite quotes about articulating and pursuing goals is from climber and author Todd Skinner: “To stick to the plan instead of the summit can make you fail to climb the mountain.”

In marketing as in mountaineering, being able to separate the purpose of our actions from the process of our actions is imperative for success. As marketing has wisely moved increasingly toward using analytics to quantify its contribution to the organization, often we can get caught up in the analysis over the objective. It isn’t enough to celebrate the sales directly correlated to a promotion, or the movement of a new product’s valuation from an analyst review following a presentation. These are useful metrics and benchmarks, not the overall objective.

Instead it is important to recognize how those results impact broader corporate goals. The clear articulation of easily understood goals is critical not only in gaining support for your actions, but in identifying when those actions deviate from the intended effect so corrective action can be swift.

The objective is a constant, so be careful that you do not use numbers to defend your actions, but rather to define them. You want to clearly articulate and get support toward the shared organizational objective, not the steps in the process.

No one ever asked Sir Edmund Hillary how many steps he took to reach the summit of Everest.

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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• Dot .CO Domains Are Hot (mwd.com)

Why?

Everyone knows that the bane of parents of toddlers everywhere is the repeated question, “Why?”. If a toddler wants to know why the sky is blue, they’ll ask again and again until you move off your initial perfunctory response of “God thought it looked pretty that way” to actually answering the umpteenth “Why?” by explaining the refraction of the sun’s rays on our atmosphere in terms a three-year-old can understand.

“Why?”

Because even an inquisitive toddler knows that asking “Why?” repeatedly is a great way to get to the answer. Not just AN answer. THE answer. There is even a rule of thumb in Six Sigma circles involving the “Five Whys”. It is a Six Sigma tool that doesn't involve statistical hypotheses… and so can be completed without complicated Minitab calculations. Asking “Why?” repeatedly can quickly drill down to the core of a problem saving time by focusing on causes, not just symptoms.

“Why?”

Because in marketing, as in manufacturing, solutions are often not as simple as they may seem initially. There are now layers upon layers of tightly woven inter-related initiatives that build brands and drive leads.

“Why?”

Because marketing today isn’t as linear as it once was. Since 2000, marketing has become increasingly segmented, specialized, and multi-directional. Information is accessible anytime, from a multitude of sources, both positive and negative.

“Why?”

Because technology, namely the Internet, Social Media, Dashboard software, and Web 2.0 have both created new, responsive interactive channels and revealed new ways to measure old (mass media) channels that make marketing far more quantifiable, measurable, accountable and effective than ever before... and marketing needs to embrace this paradigm.

“Why?”

Because if marketing ever wants a seat in the boardroom and to assume its rightful place in setting strategy for the organization, it will need to not only know the right answers, but be sure it is asking the right questions.

The Art of the Apology

Like a lot of people, I have been following the Gulf oil spill... and the related apologies - from BP, from the regulatory agencies, from Tony Hayward and other executives, and the list goes on. And it is not only the oil spill. Recently I've heard apologies from General McChrystal, Val Kilmer, Dave Weigel, JD Hayworth, Akio Toyoda, Joe Barton, Subway Sandwiches... oh hell, just Google "apologizes" and see what I mean.

So here it is folks, a marketer's guide to spin contr- er, apologies. I hope you’ll never need it.

1. You are sorry. A brief statement to open the apology that states the offense and expresses remorse and modesty. Shame is also useful if addressing issues of moral turpitude. Express interest in regaining trust/keeping customers.
2. You know what you did. A paragraph dedicated to a complete, albeit brief, restatement of the event or behavior.
3. You are responsible. Capitulate to your role in the incident and shift no blame, even if in fact it was shared. Your audience, not you, will assign blame among multiple parties. Acknowledge the injury done to effected parties.
4. You won't do it again. Detail your commitment to change and show customers/the public the actions you are taking to ensure that this type of situation will not happen again. (This is where celebrities announce their intention to go to rehab.)
5. You'll 'do the time'. If appropriate, offer details on information on restitution and compensation.
   

And if Tony Hayward is any guide, don’t worry, you don't have to mean it. As Jean Giraudoux once sagely stated, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.”

How to BP (Be Proactive) helping gulf restoration

This is, of course, ostensibly a marketing blog, so my thoughts and comments thus far (my last blog post, in fact) have focused on the PR/brand implications of BP’s pathetic PR response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (Since I posted that blog entry last week nothing has changed. In fact a few days ago, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward hit a new low by saying that he “…wants this to be over so I can get my life back…” as if he was more impacted by the disaster than the eleven men killed in the explosion and the thousands of gulf residents who have subsequently seen the destruction of their livelihoods.) It’s taken a little time for it to come ashore, but on Friday Pensacola, Florida residents saw the first tar balls wash up on shore, and of course Louisiana – and their state bird, the once – and now once again – endangered Brown Pelican, have been effected the worst.

PR aside, at some point we have to step in where BP's platitudes do not. However, not all of us can race to the gulf to wash birds with Dove detergent, but alternatively, here are a few links that will accept your donations:

• Adopt a pelican International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC)
• Donate to gulf restoration through the NWF (National Wildlife Federation)
• Help fishermen and the Louisiana seafood industry via protect our coastline.org: Also donate by texting ‘gulf’ to 77007

Oh, and one last thing: In spite of media coverage to the contrary, no one wants your hair: So you can keep your locks, Repunzel.

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BP media mis-steps: Incompetent PR or arrogant leadership?

I can’t help but consider the past six weeks of corporate responses from BP regarding the Atlantis Platform disaster. The initial response in the first week was bad enough to warrant a typical blog entry about proper PR, compare the obvious textbook Tylenol case, but I thought that too banal. Yet as time passes, the official responses continue to be not only awful, but awful in a colossal, ongoing, repeating, self defeating, ignorant sort of way that underscores that BP executives are far better at talking than listening. Or doing.

The spill in the Gulf is now the largest ecological disaster ever in the United States. (BP needs to thank the gross incompetence that led to the tragedies and human toll at Bhopal and Chernobyl for keeping them off the top of the ‘worldwide’ list. For now.) So let us consider for a moment what it must be like at BP headquarters:

Consider the boardroom dialogue at HQ that allowed BP CEO Tony Hayward to say to a UK newspaper that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

What of the urgent meetings among top executives that ended with the suggestion that BP stick to initial estimates of 1,000 barrels per day of leaking oil, when many independent experts were saying up to 20,000? Did they think the public – including experts in flow measurement – weren’t ever going to find out?

What of the casual water cooler conversations between cubicles where idiotic comments that the company “doesn’t know how birds and marine life have died” were allowed to be shared – and then implicitly encourage public opinion pieces about how the wildlife damage is minimal – “only being a little oil on a couple bird’s wings”.

Not to mention apparently very little comment regarding the eleven men who lost their lives when the platform exploded. (The media is complicit in their attention to the ‘pipe cam” over the human toll.)

There are more examples. Many, many more, as the list of mis-steps is as long as the oil slick is wide. But can we blame the PR team? Well, insomuch as an OIL COMPANY apparently had no, or a poor, or not agreed upon, disaster response process in place, yes. But even at that, it is often the corporate executives, regularly relegating PR (and marketing) to the back of the bus and out of the boardroom, that are likely to blame here. Instead of allowing these critical communication professionals to help manage the disaster communications, designate executive spokespeople, and align messages, BP simply sent employees a reminder of the Non-Disclosure Agreements in their contracts and then continued blathering unbelievable statements like a five-year-old caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Until the disaster, the BP marketing and public relations team was doing an excellent job redefining BP (which holds the worst safety record in the industry), as a leader in eco-friendly oil production and alternative energy. But corporate PR can only do so much. Eventually, words must be backed with action if a brand makeover is to ‘stick’.

Even at BP, I suspect their PR professionals understand this. Unfortunately, their executives never have.

"Plan", as a verb.

"Turn left here."

"But that's a building!"

"You missed your turn. Please make a u-turn as soon as it is safe to do so."

"But I'm in an alleyway!"

So, a couple years ago, I was visiting New York with my family, showing them my old haunts and taking in a game at the old Yankee Stadium. I opted to get a GPS unit from the car rental company because I knew that the roads had changed in the years that had passed since I last drove Long Island's Northern State Parkway.

Unfortunately, when on her very first assignment the lovely voice of the GPS unit directed me to a condo development in Queens instead of a hotel in Lindenhurst, it quickly became evident that things had changed since she'd last been calibrated. It wasn't long before I stopped referring to the chronically incorrect voice in the bright yellow sack as the family-friendly 'lemon lady', and opted instead for the far more colorful 'b*tch in the bag'. After the second day, we stowed the painfully out-of-date navigation unit in the trunk.

Are your business plan documents like that confused guidance system? Is your business planning process useful in navigating toward your goals or is it an annual process that is more routine habit than useful tool? If you are creating it once and then not updating it regularly to respond to changes that occur in the market, then what you created wasn't a tool, but a paperweight. Too often businesses large and small will smartly discuss goals, create a plan, normalize it across functional areas, print it out in color on glossy paper, put it into custom binders, and then put it on the shelf to be updated the next year when it is pulled down, dusted, and updated.

That approach only works for holiday decor.

So, sanity check: We are now halfway through the second calendar quarter, and have you even looked at your annual plan? Have you evaluated the assumptions and how they've played out? Did your competitors introduce new products, services, distribution? Did you or they change pricing strategy, pursue M&A or new partnerships? Is the same team in place? Did you hire someone for their experience and expertise and then quietly encourage them to follow a plan to which they did not contribute, wasting their insight? Did the market change? The environment? Did taxes increase? Were new products and versions and functions and services added precisely on schedule as outlined in the assumptions in the plan?

The plan document is not the objective of the planning process, any more than drawing a map is the purpose of a holiday. Planning documents are useful tools in guiding strategy and providing touch-points - so that even if the signs on the street change, you can still guide the organization to its destination.

Focusing on the map instead of your destination is a sure way to get- and stay - lost.

10 Steps to an Ineffective Marketing Plan

Browsing in Half Price Books yesterday, I stumbled upon the business section and a multitude of seldom referenced marketing guidebooks with their spines intact, pages pristine, with no notes in the margins. In spite of the fact that there are so many marketing books written yet so many marketing books unread, there seems no end to their creation. In the interest of full disclosure, there is, in fact, a partially completed unpublished marketing tome residing on this hard drive. So, much like we buy diet books instead of dieting and fitness books instead of exercising, businesspeople too will apparently buy marketing books instead of, um, thinking. So perhaps what is necessary isn't a book of to-dos, but of to-don'ts. In this vein, I present my Top Ten List Of Things To Do To Make Your Marketing Plan Completely Ineffective.

1. Wait. Eventually priorities will change, opportunities fade, deadlines pass, and your choices will dwindle making analysis of them easier.
2. Evaluate sunk costs and resources as if they are equally as important as to those required going forward.
3. Analyze and segment data until it is unrelateable to the original objective.
4. Test, iterate, re-test, and reiterate until your brand, messaging and communications are thoroughly inconsistent.
5. Apply book learning to the exclusion of real-world knowledge and experience.
   
6. Apply real world knowledge and experience to the exclusion of book learning.
7. Budget based on past sales data.
   
8. Use an off-the-shelf, "marketing plan in a minute" template.
   
9. Exclude new ideas because they come from outside your industry.
10. Apply any idea because you heard (insert guru of the day here) say it at a conference.
    

Eventually, I bought a copy of Joshua Ferris' And Then We Came To The End, about a Chicago advertising agency and its staffers weathering a recession. (No, the coincidence did not escape my notice.)

What are your experiences? What would you add to this list?

I'd rather fight than switch.

Like the BBD&O Tareyton cigarette ads of years past illustrated ("Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch"), most companies rely on brand loyalty to drive sales of their products among loyalists. Investing in initiatives to build this loyalty is the most effective means of creating easy recurring revenue and lowering costs while gaining share. Yet every day, consumers do change their habits - sometimes temporarily in response to a low price, sometimes permanently when a new product is proven superior. The objective for new product managers is to encourage first use - the first trial of a product among target consumers - in order to create a wedge between their buying preferences (or habits) and a new alternative.

CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) manufacturers are particularly involved in a this daily battle, often times a battle between brand managers in the same company (P&G, for example, regarding dish soap).

In a new report from the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), Booz & Co. and SheSpeaks, Shopper Marketing 3.0: Unleashing the Next Wave of Value, the authors state three critical weaknesses in the current battle brand strategies - all carry a similar theme, that is, too much concern regarding out-of-store promotion and a disregard for where 59% of purchase decisions are made - in store (pricing, shelf placement, and product packaging). While in-store promotion, pricing and packaging isn't sexy, it is effective. Marketers are often easily distracted by the excitement of promotional activity and the dynamics of mass-market tools, clever use of new media, and the like, but as I've stated before, the marketing function should be, arguably, less than 25% promotion. This report underscores that for CPG - but it can apply to B2B as well - that price, product and placement are very critical factors, particularly the latter when in-store displays, packaging, and 'shelf talkers' (shelf signage) are so very influential to shoppers - 77% of whom do not shop with a list, much less carry a hardened loyalty to a specific brand.

For me, once again this is a reminder that the critical value of marketing lies outside the clever graphics and innovative viral games. While still important, it is actually the pricing, product positioning, and placement that combined with promotion makes the needle move. Marketing must embrace more than promotion - and then measure and use analytic tools if they are ever going to be seen as equal professionals in the boardroom.

And that's a switch worth the fight.