Warning signs

The other night I had an "I Love Lucy" moment – I found myself desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempting to stem the tide of about 75 PSI of water shooting from what had been the stem control of an upstairs bath.

I had been ignoring a persistent drip for weeks.

Together with a client, I was speaking yesterday with a lovely woman who runs the Diabetes Education Center at a local hospital. The topic soon turned to preventative medicine, and the number of people who discover they have diabetes only after entering the ER with blood sugar levels in the 700s (that’s really high).

They were ignoring the frequent urination, constant thirst, weight loss, fatigue and other warning signs of diabetes.

Last month a neighbor had to be rescued from the side of a busy highway during rush hour when her transmission gave out and she slowly glided to a permanent stop on the gravel shoulder. The car had been recently detailed, however, so it looked sharp as it was hoisted onto the back of the battered tow truck.

She had been ignoring the thump and jolt from the backend of her foreign sedan for months.

And of course, we can all point fingers at the politicians and bankers and brokers and others who ignored the warning signs that have led to the current world financial credit crisis.

What are you ignoring? What are the warning signs in your own business that need attending to?

Are consumer complaints increasing? Is innovation fading? Are too many of your receivables over 120 days out? Do your employees fear the next 'all-employee meeting'? Has cash flow become the dominant topic over the water cooler, instead of tactics and strategy?

None of these scenarios are uncommon in a weakened economy. But what are you doing about it?

There are no easy answers to these problems. But analyzing the problem for weeks isn't helping. The quicker you act and the more decisive the action – any forward action – the greater the likelihood of preventing the situation from truly getting out of, that is, beyond your, control. Once a problem is beyond your control, it is too late and the options for a remedy, such as they are, are never good ones.

Okay, so this post doesn't say much that hasn't been said before. But if you've ignored the same reminders before, here's your chance to act.

Regardless of the specific corrective action required for your company's circumstance, the immediate requirement is communication. Internal and external communication to explain the company's circumstances to employees, partners and customers; reinforcement of company values and vision, and each individual's role in fulfilling the company's mission; the long term and near term future for the organization. And communication is a two –way street as well, that is, remaining open for customers to become real-time sources for feedback and product ideas, perhaps seeking out suppliers willing to extend finance terms, and listening to employees for suggestions regarding improving operational efficiencies.

The important thing is not to ignore the constant drip, drip, drip of market erosion and declining revenues, blindly hoping that a sudden macroeconomic recovery is around the corner, a rising tide that raises all boats. Don't ignore the warning signs. Take action now, because like my plumbing, the 'pressure' to take corrective action now is only building.

Marshall McLuhan and Social Media

Skype, Facebook, MySpace, Match.com, Vonage, eBay, YouTube, Craigslist… the connection between them is the connection between us, and all rely upon the Internet – or IP protocol – to operate.

It occurs to me that a few years ago the promise of the Internet was in the democratization of content and the free exchange of ideas. So today I'm not certain the cause of the hand-wringing over the growth of Social Media. Cynically I could suggest that our collective hand-wringing is simply in the fact that we don't accept Social Media as a valid tool (or proper use of our time) because we haven't yet monetized it properly. (44% of all web visits are to Social Media sites but only 5% of all revenue from the internet is driven from them.) All things, it seems, are accepted in time as we learn to make money with them.

While I understand the concerns regarding the lack of privacy of our youth's postings and the banality of photos posted by exuberant parents, it seems to me that Social Media – and similar applications of the medium – are simply the latest stop on the train to Marshall McLuhan's Global Village. It is, after all, the goal of an increasing number of projects such as One Laptop Per Child to bring the information and interactivity of the global web to remote, more impoverished parts of the world.

A JPMorgan survey from last November revealed that half of online social networkers were there to connect with old friends, while still more were there to interact with their current friends, sharing music and photos. There is a big time-waste with Social Media, say the critics – yet it is important to note that it is at least an interactive medium, unlike television.

The ultimate realization of the promise of the internet will be in its social aspects – connecting, sharing, even buying and selling. Whether in twenty years it will look like Facebook or appear more as holographic avatars in a room of mirrors is incidental. The thing that matters is that we all continue to communicate, regardless of the media.

Now if you excuse me, I need to research how to make money with Twitter…

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Phelps, Personal Branding, and 'These Kids Today'

Michael Phelps' recent stumble simply serves to underscore the critical requirement to actively build and protect one's 'personal' brand – especially online where a poorly lit photo from a lousy angle can become a sensation and tear down one of America's heretofore greatest athletes – not to mention the personal financial cost to Phelps in endorsements - as Kelloggs has already abandoned their multi-million dollar endorsement deal with Phelps.

Marketers have long recognized that with the growth of the Web 2.0, the term 'brand management' has proven oxymoronic, as the control over the perception of a brand is now more than ever before in the hands of the consuming public. Yet what of the impact on our personal brand? Those of us experienced enough to understand the importance of our personal brand (or 'reputation' to use an old-school term) are now leveraging social media to enhance it. And while readily evident to my generation, our youth appear not to understand or worse, not to care, that the consequences of their actions will appear today on more than their dreaded 'permanent record' –a manila folder in the principal's office – but rather, a new permanent record - another regret posted on a MySpace or Facebook page.

As recently as only a few years ago, an outlet for narcissism this dangerous was limited to the realm of celebrities and reality television. Yet today the explosive growth of social media (one of every twenty web hits is now directed at a social media website) has essentially created a world where we are all stars in our own reality show.

In a line I wish I had written, Lakshmi Chaudhry, writing in The Nation last January, derided the YouTube generation with this pithy line: “When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight."

In fact, I'm predicting that in the not-too-distant future we'll witness the advent of video capability on headsets so that we can stream our lives directly onto our own websites and Facebook pages. (Ironically I've determined that for some social media addicts, this will amount to a nearly 24/7 feed of them viewing their own pages.) SEE UPDATE

“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking,” observed author H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Absolutely true, but in a world where everyone is looking at everyone else, all the time, where is the room for such contemplation? When there are no dark spaces left for self-reflection, self-control or self-consciousness, is the movement toward this ever-increasing comfort in exposing our thoughts, our desires, and our backsides lowering the bar on what is considered ethical and moral, or just lowering the curtain on what we all knew was there all along?

In spite of recent growth in adoption of social media for the over-35 crowd, I'm still on the upper end of the age demographic for the technology, so my age may account for my views on the subject. Yet even forgiving for a moment my parental angst over what might simply amount to a generational gap in the way we view technology, the need for young people to be taught the basics of branding – particularly personal branding – is more urgent than ever before.

I had an email exchange about a year ago with an old friend whom I've known from high school, and a large part of the on-going discussion was non-specific regret over things said, fights fought, and hearts broken when we were 17. Nothing we did was ever beyond the pale for a typical American teenager, but the minor mistakes we made in high school never really impacted the men we became. It has always been that way. Except today, when seventeen year olds are codifying their spontaneous thoughts and actions in such a way that it will soon impact their lives and defining – essentially restricting – the person they will become.

As I use Facebook Facebookand LinkedIn to get connected and reconnected with colleagues from my early corporate roles here in Dallas, advertising years in New York, friends from high school and even junior high school (!), it is the branding wonk in me that is grateful that as an adolescent extrovert I was spared the consequences of access to social media. Yet regarding today's generation, I pause to consider the impact of a future web search that might bring up an intelligent byline they've written – alongside a photo of the otherwise respected author passed out at a 'kegger' years earlier.

Personal branding is as critical a skill to future generations as reading, 'ritin, and 'rithmetic. Yet unlike trigonometry, a working knowledge of social media's impact on personal branding will be relied upon again and again in their future. Adolescents today make choices that are under greater scrutiny and a harsher light than ever before, therefore discussion of ethical and moral choices needs to be highlighted at school and at home – along with the new visibility of these choices and their online 'permanent record'.

UPDATE, Aug 2010: www.looxcie.com 'Nuff said.

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No excuses

I recently re-discovered this quote from the inimitable Sir Winston Churchill and inspired, tried to build a blog entry around it, but in the end nothing I wrote seemed to add anything to his brilliant quotation that it didn't say on its own.

Apply it to marketing, selling, the economy, the environment, your marriage, the body politic or your now-fading resolutions; it all boils down to this:

"It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required."
Sir Winston Churchill

'The' One and Only

Image by Taifighta via Flickr Middle names, excepting in cases like G. Gordon Liddy or F. Scott Fitzgerald, are an often overlooked nod to a favorite grandparent or distant cousin. But in his inimitable blog, Seth points out that there is a middle name in marketing circles the resonates above all others.

"The". As in Attila, The. Hun.

What an amazing shortcut to get to what we branding guys call a "Brand Essence". Proper nouns on the left, adjectives and nouns on the right, 'The' in the middle.

What is your company's "The"? What is it that you do so well, with such consistency and regularity, that you are the only one that does it or the one against all others are measured?

Barbarians are now and forever defined against the One True Barbarian: Conan. The Barbarian. Giants, they must measure up to Andre. Want to be Great? Alexander set the bar. Sports legacies are built on this sort of imagery. (Ali) The Greatest, George Ruth - The Babe, (Jack Nicholas) The Golden Bear, or Gretsky - The Great One (Alexander apparently has competition).

Arnold got a two-fer. The Terminator. Who became The Governator.

A few obvious brands that overtly use 'The' in their positioning come to mind: There's Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia. Coca-cola, The Real Thing. Or you might favor Pepsi, The Choice of a New Generation.

But you don't have to use the The to be a The, however. You just need to know what it is. For example, there's Google, which we all know is The Search Engine. But how do we know that's the 'The' if we don't use the 'the'? Because Google is now a verb, just as Kleenex is (to their chagrin) now a noun. It's the ultimate 'the'. Not to mention that no less a source than our ex-President Bush indicates that he likes to use 'the Google'.

Years ago when casting for Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, it is rumored that the producers were looking to cast an actress 'like Tina Turner'. Finally they decided to cast the 'The'. Tina herself.

Be the The.

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Some ideas are more equal than others.

The genesis of this post was the gawd-awful design my sainted but flawed Mets will be forced to wear on their uniforms this year to commemorate their new stadium. Who exactly within the Mets organization designed that abomination? (The WordArt application in PowerPoint is not the ideal program for logo design. Just sayin'.) I ask because it couldn't have been a branding or design agency. Or maybe it was a branding or graphic design firm, once again cutting its own throat by abetting the tasteless opinions within the organization.

"You'll know you've made it when you can make money from what you know and not from what you do." It's what I was told when I started consulting. But I wasn't consulting in finance or M&A. I was consulting in marketing, where often what you know and what you do are the same. We're like lawyers that way. (And that's not the only way admen are like lawyers. But I digress.)

So therein lies the rub. At the point at which all you know and all you do is generating 'the big idea', there's been a door left open by we marketers that allow clients - blinded by narcissistic perspective and biased by the skin they have in the game – to value their ideas as well, if not better than – those who have made marketing, branding, design, and advertising their profession.

The insightful quote from Bill Hewlett that 'marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department' is as valid as ever – but too often misapplied. Hewlett never meant that everyone in the organization could create effective marketing. He was suggesting that everyone in the company had a responsibility to market the organization as effectively and as often as possible, and not to remain mute as marketing bore the weight of lead generation and brand-building. And it certainly didn't mean that marketing couldn't be trusted to create those messages. The distinction is as clear as the difference between the message and the messenger.

The belief (and I'll admit that I've been guilty of spreading it in the past) that 'good ideas can come from anywhere' is abject nonsense. The client's spouse is hardly ever – nay, never ever – right. I think it was the collective of smaller agencies that have been guilty of spreading this virus and have encouraged it among clients in a short sighted effort to position themselves as far more open and accommodating than their multi-national brethren who were, a decade or more ago, hammering closed the windows opened by legitimate alternative creative resources, such as Coca-Cola's use of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) to create the now iconic polar bears campaign.

Theoretically, of course, great ideas can come from just about anywhere, just as Archimedes made a great discovery in a bathtub. Yet as a general rule, such an egalitarian valuation of ideas does significant damage to the business of branding. Yes, you can win the lottery, a rookie pitch a perfect game, or a starlet be discovered in a drugstore. But what are the odds, and is it worth those odds to marginalize an entire industry – especially our own? Just as architects don't turn their drafting tables over to the developer, or doctors their stethoscopes to the patient, neither should marketing professionals abdicate their proper roles of architects of the next great idea and healers of troubled companies. And furthermore, as I stated in my post from a couple of years ago regarding the Houston's soccer team, why, if it is so easy, is it often done so damn badly?

Zeitgeist 2008

Cover via AmazonI'm currently halfway through the book Click (the one by Bill Tancer, not Nick Hornby); full title Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters. Tancer, who runs the research effort at online market research firm Hitwise, analyzes search patterns from search engine data and addresses the often surprising results and challenges us about what we've believed about the psychology of consumers. So when Google printed this "Google Zeitgeist" for 2008 – snack food for stat brats such as myself – I had to look to see for myself what Bill Tancer spends his day analyzing.

Interesting is the country-by-country breakdown of top 10 search terms and the "How to" list. #2? "How to kiss."

Some lonely gamers out there, still.

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Analysts, experts, and me

I've been amusing myself lately with the headlines I'm seeing in the business press. All of the experts and analysts that are financial reporters' go-to guys and gals for quotes and insight have something in common: No one is certain. Each one, to an individual, is either hedging - "Manufacturing is likely to rebound, but if China does this or that, or the bailout results in this other thing, then, it is likely to sink further." Or, equally common are out and out incorrect prognostications, such as T Boone Pickens predictions - almost wishes - that "oil won't fall below 120...100... 70... 50".

So in an environment where Kirk Kerkorian has lost billions, Jerry Wang has been forced from Yahoo, Alan Greenspan's portrait at the Federal Reserve is waiting for fresh graffiti, and even Warren Buffett can't turn a buck, I'm ready for my turn on CNBC's Squawk Box.


Here then are the prognostications I made on a recent survey from Chief Executive Magazine:

1. How would you rate business conditions in the US currently? Bad
2. How would you rate employment conditions in the US currently? Bad
3. How would you rate investment opportunities in the US currently? Good
4. How will employment change over the next quarter? Stay the same
5. How do you expect capital spending within your company to change over the next quarter? Stay the same
6. What do you expect the economy will experience over the next quarter? Stagnation (No growth, no decline)

On December 31, 2009:
Dow Jones (currently at 8,932) will be at 9621 points
Oil (currently at $40.50) will be $59 per barrel
Interest Rates (the Fed Funds Rate, currently at 1.00%) will be: 1.00%

Prediction comments:
(I said) Uncertainty is driving the market and the economy; once some certainty arrives with new administration - for good or bad - wild swings will stabilize and the widely oversold market and general malaise will slowly lift.

Confidence comments:
(I said) Business decision-makers will become comfortable de-coupling their decisions in the real world from abstrations like the Dow. But once that fog clears, the impact of government intervention on national debt and as a general signal of the new regulatory environment will be a drag on growth.


So we'll check back in a few months to see how I've done. If I'm right, I'll start a new profession. If I'm wrong, well, I'll join the legions of analysts and experts who now are taking a page from former President Clinton: It all depends on your definition of 'wrong'.

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

If your company or product were a fictional character, who would it be? It's one of the questions I ask when trying to determine the intended brand perception for a client. And I get more than my share of rolled eyes from the engineers in the room.

But consider your own response to this question: If you were thirsty, where would you likely find an ice-cold Obama? Next to the Dr. Pepper or nearer the energy drinks?

If you called your friend, would you expect to pick up and dial the McCain or are you more likely to just go online and 'poke' them on Obamabook? Maybe you'd discuss the McCain supertanker that is caught in a storm off the gulf coast, or the latest music player from iObama.

You can think about this when you pick up a snack of some organic dried fruit at Obama Foods for your flight to Chicago on McCain Airways.

Okay, the whole thing is silly. But now reverse that:

If you were thirsty, where would you likely find an ice-cold McCain? Next to the Dr. Pepper or nearer the energy drinks?

If you called your friend, would you expect to pick up and dial the Obama or are you more likely to just go online and 'poke' them on McCainbook? Maybe you'd discuss the Obama supertanker that is caught in a storm off the gulf coast, or the latest music player from iMcCain.

You can think about this when you pick up a snack of some organic dried fruit at McCain Foods for your flight to Chicago on Obama Airways.

Relatively speaking, the former made more sense, didn't it? And it proves out the power of branding on not only our perceptions of products, but perceptions of our leaders, our friends, and ourselves.

This important article was sent to me by a designer with whom I do much of Strategy180's branding work. It underscores the power of branding and how it may not only impact the can of soup we put in our grocery basket, but the future leadership of the world's last great superpower.

Perhaps now you might want to budget for that branding study, yes?

Spam sham

Spending and the stock market aren't the only things falling these days.

Worldwide, fewer and fewer consumers are bothering to open commercial emails. This from a study by eMail list management firm MailerMailer.

Their study reveals that the typical e-mail open rate for targeted marketing messages declined to 13.20% in the first half of this year, compared with 16.11% in the first half of last year. Click-through numbers fell too, from 3.18% in the first half of '07 to 2.73% in the first half of '08.

The data collected by MailerMailer indicated that the numbers between industries differed, for example, finance, government, telecom and even spiritual-oriented email messages having more success than others.
Supporting reports from other earlier surveys, pithy subject lines (<35 characters) performed better than longer subject headings, with an open rate of 19.6% and a 3.1% click-through rate versus 14.8% and a click-through rate of only 1.9%.

None of this slow down has apparently caught up with the marketing plans of most retailers, where SEO and email remain tops of their online marketing planning efforts. I believe that this is as due to marketing's continued search for a measureable and accountable media as emails' continued, though decreasing, effectiveness.

It has been reported that one hit out of a million emails (that's a .000001% click-through rate) makes the effort worth it to fraudulent spammers, so by comparison, even a 2.73% click-through rate is likely to remain a prize bird among competing turkeys this holiday advertising season.

A drop of sanity into a sea of panic

With the market in a freefall, credit tightening, and budgets shrinking, it seems very dark indeed. But before you simply accept a slash and burn budget number, you might want to reevaluate the assumptions from the executive suite.

They may be saying ‘people aren’t buying!’ – But people are buying, and they will continue to do so.

Who is buying? Most are the same folks that bought from you before (let's call them 'customers', just like we did last year) and some folks that bought from your competitors (let's call them 'lost opportunities', just like we did last year). There will be a few net new customers to the market, depending on the industry, but we can't generally count on that, so let's concentrate on the first two.

It's actually all pretty clear once you get out of the forest and identify the trees.

Those who are buying, although there are only as many or perhaps fewer than last year, still are seeking to replace or in some cases upgrade whatever they've purchased in past years. They'll be bargain hunting, negotiating aggressively, and demanding more for less. But they're buying. They'll look for savings and quicker ROI, but they're buying. They'll be looking for lower energy use and longer warranty periods, but they're buying. They are definitely seeking better credit terms. But they're buying.

Your marketing for the New Year needs to look closely – almost exclusively - at these 'customers' and previously 'lost opportunities'. The goal is to apply limited marketing resources to activities that protect and expand your current customers. The slowdown in net new business allows opportunity for nurturing what you have, that is, given the macro-economic environment, perhaps aggressive business development efforts should be scaled back in favor of one-on-one account development. Instead of making Sisyphean attempts to expand the pie, demand a larger piece of the existing one through campaigns targeting competitors – particularly who have made the mistake of weakening their own marketing and sales efforts in a short-term effort to 'weather the storm'. Look to shore up market share so that when the inevitable turnaround comes your company hits the ground running… from a starting point in the distance.

People are buying. But the only way to be certain you are selling what they are buying is to listen to what they need, deliver it with a little of what they want, and anticipate what they're going to need next.

I'd say I was brilliant if it hadn't been so obvious.

"It’s too late for Vista, and my humble prediction is that it will go away and undergo a retooling - perhaps a later integration of key features into a different OS release. "

- Me, Your Humble Blogger, in a March blog entry, "When Did The Guys From Delta House Start Running Microsoft?"

~Seven months later~

Microsoft Introduces Windows 7, Ending Vista Brand - New York Times

"Microsoft introduced what it said would be a slimmer and more responsive version of its Windows operating system on Tuesday, while unceremoniously dropping the brand name Vista for the new product... Other new features in this very early version included an enhanced and more flexible task-bar, more powerful search features, and an easier-to-use home network and file sharing. There was also a hint that Microsoft plans to revise Windows 7 to take advantage of the coming wave of multicore microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Mr. Sinofsky said the company would give more details on the ability of the new program to handle up to 256 processors."

Its a damn shame that my brilliant prognostications do not extend to the stock market.