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.

Then we set his hair on fire...

A note on the death of the King of P.. pitchmen - from this outstanding obit:

"Cast as a god, the man embraced the role, seeking to remake himself in a pale, childlike image only he could understand. The endless cosmetic surgeries, the reclusive years at the Neverland Ranch and the bizarre pronouncements and behaviors are the stuff of legend. Of course, being reborn was something he could never achieve in life. The mighty, moon-walking King of Pop, largely a media construct himself, lost sight of the fact that we're simply not our own creations. Perhaps by now, an ever greater power has reminded him of that."

Certainly personal branding is important, but it is equally important to remember that ultimately, it all ends the same for each of us.

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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• What were you thinking Burger King? (petpeeving.com)

Ahead in the Clouds

Once upon a time, Henry Ford said that cars could come in “whatever color you wanted, as long as it is black”. Then along came Harley Earl of GM who tapped into a nascent consumer demand and created a wider expectation for making annual design changes that accelerated GM’s dominance of the automotive market. (Well, for a few decades, anyway.)

Similarly, there was a time among established software developers (and users) when cloud computing (aka, Software as a Service, or SaaS) was viewed as too risky, too unstable, too limited in its feature set to ever truly replace local desktop software installations, excepting perhaps for CRM applications.

Today as WiFi/WiMax and general connectivity become increasingly ubiquitous, that desired connectivity is further leveraged by smartphones, net-reliant hardware and similar tools to make great inroads in market share. Laptops outsell desktops. The handset war (iPhone, Palm Pre and Blackberry Bold) is the new Coke and Pepsi, each phone the supposed savior of their respective companies. All this is driving a new expectation among the broader public for ubiquitous connectivity regardless of time, place or device. (Woah, déjà vous: I think I typed that on a PowerPoint slide back in 2001 regarding Unified Communications.)

Take note: The desire for always-on connectivity isn’t the driver – that was an assumed trend as early as 1998 – as much as it is an enabler. The real driver is the community of data and applications that the Web represents.

More proof: Microsoft Money, a desktop-based financial management package that had Microsoft power behind it and once enjoyed first-mover advantage, has been shelved by the Redmond behemoth, as they recognize the customer’s demand for integration and collaboration available with the SaaS models used by Intuit and Mint, among dozens of others – including their own MSN Money service. In rare candor, Microsoft states: “With banks, brokerage firms and Web sites now providing a range of options for managing personal finances, the consumer need for Microsoft Money Plus has changed.”

Note that Microsoft addresses the cloud not for its constant availability, but for the benefit of integration with the complementary applications, vendors and informational websites (“…banks, brokerage firms, and Web sites…”) that are facilitated through the web, and specifically, the collaboration that is common to Web 2.0. Intuit simply gets that the user experience matters, online and offline, and has always has outperformed Microsoft... nothing new for those of us tethered to their Office applications.

Web 2.0 is not just a curiosity or new marketing tool, but has now matured into a critical element of product development – today, mainly for software vendors – but tomorrow, perhaps also for manufacturing concerns. Like the new GM?

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• How Intuit managed to hold off Microsoft (news.cnet.com)

The Rules Of Business Still Apply

Remember the dot-com days? When profits didn’t matter, and the new currency was ‘click-thrus’ and ‘page views’? The bubble was built by the general public’s fascination with this new thing, ‘the Internet’, and e-commerce companies along with their telecom counterparts (installing ever-greater capacity) rode the bubble toward a sudden and inevitable burst.

Social Media is beginning its shakeout. MySpace is struggling. YouTube is gaining traction as watching video online becomes a standard media, and Facebook is seeing continued growth, but much of it outside the U.S. as this market becomes saturated and curious Boomers drop off the site. LinkedIn integrates a number of useful applications and solidifies its position as a professional’s social media rolodex.

Now comes Twitter, off its highs of the CNN / Ashton battle for a million followers, a month after an Oprah mention, a curiousity to most and not yet monetized. Studies have indicated that most new visitors stop visiting after a month, and now a report that May’s growth on Twitter was anemic, although, importantly, the time spent on the site (by its active members) grew substantially.

So what’s next for Twitter? I’m not certain, but it is critical to recognize that Twitter’s celebrity users are essentially spokespeople and pitchmen for the site, not a business model in and of themselves. According to the rules of business where a company has an established and vocal ‘tribe’ of followers in its niche, the focus should be to provide value to its most loyal customers (visitors). This may mean perhaps, more integration with the hordes of third-party Twitter applications being developed, recognizing its role not as an interactive medium but a broadcast medium and provide services accordingly, and determine the best way to monetize the platform without alienating a customer base that is not used to be ‘pitched’ with advertising. It is then that Twitter can begin to expand and regain interest among businesses and individuals who will leverage the platform and applications using methods tested and proven by the early adopters.

‘The Oprah Effect’ will only get you to the lip of Geoffrey Moore’s chasm. The rules of business still apply as Twitter attempts to cross it.

Full disclosure: www.twitter.com/jimgardner

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?

Posted using ShareThis

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.”

Getting off the dime

"'Even' is the new (in the) black", a friend in financial services told me the other day. He was referring to his clients' portfolios, bailed out banks, automobile manufacturers. A world where losing a billion fewer dollars than you had been expected to is seen as positive news for the market.

In a time of powerful financial gravity, 'even' is safe. 'Even' is acceptable. Except when it is not (for ancient historical reference, see Matthew 25:14-30).

The origin of the term to 'get off the dime' comes from old dance halls, when floor managers would see dancers and their customers barely move from a small (dime-sized) spot as they held tightly to one another. In the morality of the day, this was unacceptable.

Today it isn't dancers but companies and their executives that can't seem to unwind from their tight hold on whatever brings them security: cash, "the old way", the bird in the hand, or whatever was done a year ago when things weren't so dire. When Larry Young, CEO of Dr. Pepper-Snapple reported earnings last month, he stated, "Even though the majority of Americans are still working, the fear factor that has gripped the nation is having a significant impact on consumer psychology." That psychology is real, and it doesn't just impact sugared drinks. It carries itself into offices and boardrooms where it impacts a whole host of decisions based on the paralyzing fear of the unknown.

Such destructive emotions are common among all companies, large and small, and the longer they go unchecked, the worse the impact, as they create a flywheel of negative emotions throughout the organization, building, building, the cycle destroys any chance of a recovery.

In his book Confronting Reality, written with Ram Charan, former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy outlines a process for executives to begin to see the forest from the trees, and the symptoms from the cause. Companies that recognize the symptoms, recognize the cases, and, critically, take action to overcome them can recover. It just takes a little insight, a little courage, and a bit of forward strategic thinking.

And that's my two cents. I only wish I had as much as a dime.

This is broken.

If I can be so brazen as to add to Seth Godin's excellent 2006 Gel presentation, This Is Broken, I'd add an additional category to his list of broken things called "It made sense to us at the time" (something I discuss here) and suggest that an earlier blog post of my own hints at one of the possible solutions.

What's broken in your experience?

I had a broken experience yesterday on Amazon. I purchased four MP3s files from three different albums by the same artist. I was forced to check out four times, and further, when I pressed the back button, it returned me all the way to the main page, not the sorted list I had created. Took me close to twenty minutes.

Broken.

Know when to fold 'em.

I know. With that title, I've put a tune in your head you'll not get out for some time. Still, you could do worse than a 70s classic from Kenny Rogers. In any event, my point, and I do have one, is that that lyric has never been more appropriate in a business context than it is to the changes made possible by today's electronic media.

The Pirate Bay case (click here if you are not familiar) came to a conclusion today, complete with jail time and seven figure fines for its founders. So now the entertainment industry has a win in their column based on foggy reasoning, short-sighted strategy, and a desperate effort to hold on to their buggy whip business plans. Now they just have to leverage that surprising win by filing the same suit against thousands of copycats.

Good luck with all that.

The newspaper industry is no different. Teetering on extinction, there has been no shortage of attempts – legislative and otherwise – to support the newspapers' clearly flawed business model. Think of the effort to start a newspaper today with new investors: The ten-second pitch for venture capitalists? "We deliver news and opinion late, in a cumbersome and environmentally suspect format to individuals whose iterative feedback takes days and requires postage."

Well, sign me up!

From efforts to reduce regulation (rarely a bad thing in my mind) to subsidize newspapers through tax policy (rarely a good thing in my mind) the concept of a newspaper is so central to our culture, or so it is argued, that its simply 'too big to fail'.

Like banks. Or car manufacturers.

It's long past time to simply face the reality that newspapers, records, movies and other media are competing not just with new media, but in a brand new context. Traditional distribution methods for everything from news to music to movies are obsolete, and there isn't a tort or an injunction or any lawyer in the world that can stop it.

One of my favorite quotes on the subject is from US Army General Eric Shinseki: “If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."

Or perhaps more succinctly put by that other sage, "You gotta know when to walk away, and know when to run."

UPDATE 4-23: Excellent opinion piece regarding Susan Boyle sensation that indicates that the amazing viral nature of the clip has yet to monetize for YouTube or ITV as a result of the battles between old, new, and newer revenue models.

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• Creative Destruction Happens Quickly; Those Who Wait End Up In The Rubble (techdirt.com)

Of Babies and Bathwater, Part II

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

Given that any job opening today one step above entry level generally requires three to five years of experience in the field to be considered merely sufficient, what does it say about the plethora or Social Media Experts flooding the marketing field today?

In a field barely five years old, it is difficult to suggest that even Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the accidentally successful social media site Facebook, knows enough to consider himself an expert at how social media should be efficiently added to a traditional marketing mix.

"Traditional marketing mix? That’s because social media breaks all the rules! It isn't traditional!", will say my distracters, and by doing so, prove my point.

Didn't we hear this, a dozen years ago, when Internet entrepreneurs suggested that those of us still relying on P/E ratios didn't understand that 'click-thrus' and 'page views' were the new currency? "That’s because the Internet breaks all the rules! It isn't traditional!", I seem to recall them saying.

The blog entry below this post, linked by Zemanta, explains just one of the reasons that marketing in this environment isn't as simple as latching onto the latest marketing tool. Saying you 'do' marketing is easy. Actually doing it, and doing it well, is far more challenging.

Social Media is a new tool for marketers, a potentially efficient way to accelerate personal conversations with a brand's 'tribe', as Seth Godin would describe their most vocal and active consumers. A new tool, and just a tool, like the web, television, radio, newspaper, town criers, and signs etched in sandstone that came before it. It is not a revolution - no matter how successful political activists were last year in leveraging the media to communicate with… other political activists.

Twittering, blogging, actively posting on Facebook, sharing photos on Flickr, posting on Digg, are all experiential. Experiencing it doesn't make an expert. I'm on my fourth dog, yet I still feel compelled to take it to the vet for treatment. That's the critical difference between having an experience and being an expert.

Even Social Media Experts at established firms like Agency.com tried it with client Skittles and succeeded only in spiking discussion of the candy's brand in a negative light, visits to the site equally mixed between social media "experts" blogging on the ill-fated experiment and giggling preteens excited to see their indiscriminate use of foul language posted prominently on the site.

Integrated Marketing Communications remains a proven and successful strategy for developing and executing successful marketing campaigns. Integrating Web 2.0 and Social Media will most certainly be a critical part of this planning. But it cannot be done effectively in a vacuum by self-proclaimed social media experts lacking essential marketing skill sets and an understanding of basic, proven marketing concepts that can leverage these new tools to even greater influence. That’s babies and bathwater, experts and experience.

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• What comes after Facebook & Twitter? (thecustomercollective.com)