Davis Thinking } analysis and interpretationMarch Madness begins this week, but the madness around athlete endorsements has been around since the days of Michael Jordan. It came to its most recent head last Thanksgiving, when a certain superhuman hit a fire hydrant and set off a torrent of media, fan and sponsor action and reaction. The sexy unfolding of that incident and its subsequent tawdry revelations probably inspired the Developing the Athlete’s Brand panel at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference – a gathering which usually focuses on wonkier subjects. The panelists, after a barrage of questions from conference attendees, touched gingerly on Tiger’s comeback strategy, but the real takeaways were about the industry, not Tiger. The resulting discussion raised larger questions about athlete endorsements as brand strategy, and whether the sports representation industry model is still relevant today.
We're fans of IKEA and have written on their past marketing successes and brand missteps. The company captures our attention again by tackling an area of its business that, for many, leaves much to be desired: the assembly of its products.
Davis Brand Capital, which published the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25 ranking in December, today announced expanded rankings in five industries: automotive, finance, retail, technology, and telecom.
Tough times for automakers have turned the industry upside down. Household names like Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer have gone the way of the dodo. Saab narrowly avoided a similar fate with a last-minute purchase by Dutch super car manufacturer Spyker, a niche player that has intriguing plans for the quirky Swedish brand. Fiat and Chrysler became strange bedfellows. And Toyota is struggling through an historic, crippling recall. But one of the more interesting outcomes of the recent upheaval within the auto industry is Ford Motor Company's sale of Volvo to China's Geely.
In December, Davis Brand Capital announced the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25 ranking. Toyota ranked #8 overall and was the top-ranking automaker. Since the release, Toyota has issued a series of historic recalls, and the brand has suffered a precipitous fall from grace. So far, the recalls affect more than eight million vehicles worldwide, with Toyota considering still more for its best-selling Corolla. And recall-related malfunctions have caused an estimated 34 deaths since 2000 in the U.S. alone, according to government data released this week. Beyond the direct financial, legal and ethical implications of the recalls themselves, Toyota faces a crisis of consumer confidence comparable to the Tylenol cyanide murders or the Ford Explorer/Firestone fiasco. Rebuilding consumer trust will require much more than a public relations war room and marketing blitz. Toyota faces a fundamental brand challenge that extends deep into its culture, its operations and its core meaning. As the story unfolds and an embattled Toyota hunkers down for the onslaught, important lessons from the crisis are already coming to light.
I'm thinking of Jobs - not the big Steve variety - but the kind being discussed everywhere from Davos to Washington to the Main Street or kitchen table nearest you. The economists can debate how best to create jobs - my thoughts center primarily around how they are changing and how organizations are reading those changes from top to bottom.
Legendary television producer Norman Lear often said it was best to start the story "in the middle." That's where the truth of the narrative is, and the theory held for Super Bowl XLIV. Smack in the middle of a confused and confusing collection of ads was The Who, an embarrassing half-time show of old white men singing of "pinball wizards" in the age of connected gaming, and claiming some distant insight into the "teenage wasteland" of a generation to which they do not belong. Yet, they were entirely relevant context for the general fiasco of this year's ads, asking: "Tell me who are you?" With some notable exceptions, advertisers seemed to have no idea who they were this year, nor who their customers might be.
Last year, the economy in free fall, I expected both Monster and CareerBuilder to forego the silly punchlines and offer a clear message of help and hope to the millions of unemployed Americans watching the Super Bowl. I was disappointed. This year, the jobless number nearing 15 million, I tuned in certain they'd finally get it right. That the employment experts would share their most inspiring success stories: The father of four who, laid off after 15 years at the same company, found new opportunity through Monster. Or the young college grad who, thanks to Careerbuilder, discovered an obscure field to which she could apply her highly specialized degree. Instead we got beaver-fiddling and tighty-whities -- proof these job search emperors have no clothes.
When Steve Jobs took to the stage in San Francisco's Moscone Center on January 27, the world knew what to expect: Apple would finally announce its long-awaited tablet. With that pre-determined focus and the anticipatory roar for the next "insanely great" thing, most missed the larger announcement of the day. Steve Jobs did not simply announce the company's latest creation; he completed a task first made public in January 2007, when the company dropped "Computer" from its name to become Apple, Inc. The real news hidden in plain view as Jobs unveiled iPad was the repositioning of the company that created the personal computer.
Recently, Slate's Ben Sheffer presented Apple's case against Gawker's Tablet Scavenger Hunt, suggesting the web pub's Valleywag blog may be inducing Apple employees to violate trade secret law. But to measure the potential loss for Apple solely in terms of trade secrets is to overlook a much larger violation not just to Apple, but to the customer as well.
Migros is Switzerland's largest supermarket chain and one of the 500 largest companies in the world. Known as the big M because of its iconic orange logo, the company employs more than 84,000 people and has recently posted sales of more than $20 billion. Turning 85 years old in 2010, Migros' unique history, business savvy and far-reaching vision make it a noteworthy case study for brands in and outside the category. Migros has been ahead of its time from its inception, and is a prime example of how a company can diligently build brand capital through innovation, social responsibility, thoughtful portfolio strategy and a careful management of brand voice.
First, Hardee's showed you its B-Hole. Then, Bud Light Lime gave it to you In the Can. Now Axe, with all the class and finesse we've come to expect from the brand, wants to Clean Your Balls. On the surface, this seems like nothing more than your typical nether regions marketing. But look under the hood, and Axe's down under approach has more in common with early marital aid advertising than beer and fast food.
This spring, Universal Orlando will open the much-anticipated Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which it promises will be "unlike any other experience on earth." If the park succeeds with what it's got tucked up the sleeve of its flowing robe, there's going to be a new owner of magical theme park experience (that sound you just heard was a 81-year-old mouse shaking in his over-sized yellow shoes).
New mobile applications from automakers GM, Mercedes, Ford and BMW advance the concept of branded utility in profound ways. Recent apps from these brands blur the lines between branded utilities and pure product features. And there are important implications in the auto industry and beyond.
GE (NYSE:GE) captures the number two spot in the Davis Brand Capital 25 for 2009. The world's largest company, GE has rebounded from a transition period and one of the most challenging years in its history -- one that saw its stock plunge to record lows. The company's nimble and effective management of its brand capital is helping it tackle new market paradigms and position itself to lead into the future.
As the year ends, we look back at the most read and shared posts from Unbound Edition's contributors, and a few more favorites chosen by our editorial team. We appreciate your continued readership and commentary and look forward to more dialog in 2010.
Microsoft ranks #4 on the Davis Brand Capital 25, besting twelfth-place rival Apple. Despite taking some hits in a year-long advertising tit-for-tat with Mac, Microsoft joins fellow technology brands IBM (#1), HP (#3) and Cisco Systems (#5) at the top of this year's list. The Davis Brand Capital 25 is the only annual list to evaluate brand as an amalgam of intangibles, including brand value, competitive performance, innovation strength, company culture and social impact. Microsoft's top-five ranking is a reflection of the company's successful management of its brand capital across a diverse portfolio of technology products and services.
Cisco's #5 ranking on the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25 should come as no surprise. Cisco has taken an integrated approach to developing its intangibles for years. The following sections detail Cisco's success in carefully managing its brand value, competitive performance, innovation strength, company culture and social impact.
On Monday Davis Brand Capital released the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25, and IBM took the top spot. IBM's #1 ranking may surprise some at first glance. After all, brand is typically viewed primarily through a marketing lens, and therefore tends to be more closely associated with consumer-centric - and arguably more glamorous - companies such as Apple or Nike. But the Davis Brand Capital 25 examines brand more holistically: as a collective set of intangibles, including brand value, competitive performance, innovation strength, company culture and social impact. The following commentary and qualitative assessment of top-ranked IBM highlights the company's successful management of these five intangibles that comprise brand capital and provides context for its #1 ranking.
Davis Brand Capital today released the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25 ranking, which evaluates brand beyond its traditional marketing function and considers it as an amalgam of intangibles creating value in the intellectual economy. The ranking compares the five key intangible categories by which the consultancy defines brand capital: brand value; competitive performance; innovation strength; company culture; and social impact.
Patrick Davis Partners, the brand capital consultancy, today announced an expanded portfolio of services and a name change to Davis Brand Capital.
Back in June, Miracle Whip broadcasted its condiment manifesto to Gen Y. Punctuated with the official quivery chalkboard script of all advertising-spawned youth movements and set to a swaying, poly-ethnic crowd kickin’ it kiddie-pool style, a bored (yet defiant!) voice-over proclaims: “We are our own unique, one-of-a-kind flavor. We are Miracle Whip. And we will not tone it down.” Hmmm. A hipster decree from a 76-year-old sandwich spread most famous for its supporting role in my great aunt’s deviled eggs? The campaign was hard to swallow.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new walls are being erected that challenge the fundamental right of the public to free news and information. However, free today no longer means free from bias or state control, but instead not paying for content. News Corp.'s announcement that it would introduce pay walls has set off a firestorm of response -- the majority of whom say it will not work. The minority see Murdoch as the potential savior of professional journalism, an ironic twist for the man behind The New York Post and other tabloids. Others focus on the proposed model and respond that it could work, if News Corp. can apply the lessons it has learned from pay television and the music industry, which evolved its model in response to illegal downloading.
After years of disappointing design, quality and performance, GAP seems tapped into the American cultural pulse once again. The company's holiday advertising campaign announces that the country is "Ready for Holiday Cheer." Like many retailers, GAP is spending more and launching earlier this year, including a major Vanity Fair insert and back cover. Whether these efforts end up translating to sales, of course, remains to be seen. Still, the campaign does more than any other to date to declare a shift in attitude. Consumers will decide for themselves to celebrate in ways "modest" or "all out," but either way, GAP gives permission "to liberate" from the dark clouds of the past 18 months. A holiday declaration of independence -- "This holiday, it's up to us" -- makes the empowerment message abundantly clear: Yes, Virginia, there is an American spirit of hope, even joy, that will not be silenced. The recession is over.
For more than a year now, I've admired an unusual vegetable garden in a middle-class St. Louis neighborhood. The owners, Chinese immigrants, have carefully designed the space to house lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, berries and all varieties of climbing and flowering foliage. What's unusual is that it's all in the front yard -- a space the other neighbors reserve for traditional landscaping. Compared to the austere evergreens around it, the garden is a beautiful, bountiful, dynamic space that transforms year round. And it reflects the reinterpretations and reappropriations of space I see springing up in the post-digital marketplace.
Two autumns ago, Chevron, working with the Economist Group, launched Energyville as part of its "Will You Join Us" campaign. Not surprisingly, the campaign, the site, and the game drew a lot of criticism and vitriol for alleged greenwashing and hypocrisy. By posing a question the way it did, Chevron also invited negative answers (“No, I will not join you” on the blog) and word play that twisted the URL (Will you join us in protesting Chevron?). Despite all this, Chevron has persisted.
The motoring and mainstream media alike have scrutinized Detroit's Biggish Two-and-a-Half ad nauseum. Both experts and the car-buying public are questioning Detroit's ability to innovate in the post-SUV cash cow, post-bailout world. And rightfully so. Admittedly, there are a few bright spots on the horizon. But the real innovation story likely won't be the much-hyped Chevy Volt or even Ford's Fit-beating Fiesta. And it certainly won't be the ridiculous idea that positioning Chrysler to compete with Cadillac will somehow save the beleaguered brand (have you seen Cadillac's sales figures, Mr. Fong?). I'm betting Detroit's next disruptive innovation will be the rebirth of Saturn.
I just finished Dave Eggers' new book Zeitoun. It's the harrowing tale of one man's experience in New Orleans after Katrina. Completely unrelated, and with far less consequence, my husband just tried to get home from Phoenix on Jet Blue's red eye - a journey that took nearly 24 hours. So I have been thinking about man vs. system. The first is a terribly consequential tale, the other banal, but they are both about the systems we construct.
No, we aren't referring to the 80s clothing line, rather we are referencing the mixed messages professional tennis is sending to the public. Both authors are tennis fanatics. However, despite our love of the game, as brand strategists we are baffled by the sport's inability to evolve, notwithstanding its stated intention to do so.
The most successful beer marketers in the world have crossed a line. According to AdAge, a pun is “the final frontier” in “tasteless” beer advertising. In a spot for Bud Light Lime leaked on the Internet, everyday folks innocently confess to getting it “in the can” (some of them like it and want to do so again!). The punch line of the spot reveals that the popular brew is now available in all-too-familiar handy aluminum containers.
I noticed Clear has been stealing a page from its competitor Verizon with its creative - or lack thereof. To tout its comprehensive coverage, it uses sprinkles as a metaphor.
IKEA fans are all a-Twitter over the company's recent font change from Futura to Verdana. Designed to be easy to read at small sizes (like catalogs and computer screens), Verdana will be used in IKEA's print and digital communications. What seems on the surface like a simple, subtle shift -- one that arguably fits the company's brand of streamlined, smart, affordable design -- has triggered an onslaught of negative reaction so filled with bile that one might think the company switched to Comic Sans or Jokerman.
Usually, the city of Venice is partially flooded by water a number of times every year, courtesy of its slowly sinking foundation. However, these days the city called "La Serenissima," or most serene, is facing a different kind of flood -- one it is much less prepared to stem.
We're in a post agency age, would someone please notify the sports leagues? While middlemen everywhere cry out in pain, umbrella sports organizations from high school to the pros skip blithely along with blinders on, slicing their member institutions' intellectual property into ever smaller segments while their lawyers kick and scream at technological advancements and rail at the consumers themselves - yes, that's right, the very fans who comprise what ESPN dubs Sports Nation, otherwise known as the blood that courses through the veins of the mighty American sports machine. Does this sound sustainable to you?
Starbucks has a brand problem. Everyone knows it. Their founder knows it. And, to Starbucks' credit, the company is taking action. A brand problem, though, is a business problem. It's not a matter of addressing or re-dressing things. It's about operations, about the integrity of processes. Making the promise and keeping the promise of the brand can never be detached from the consumer experience. This is not good news for Starbucks; it's still faking it.
It is no news that advertising agencies are in crisis, struggling to survive under the multiple pressures of reduced client budgets, degraded media effectiveness, and connected, informed consumers. What is news: agencies are proving themselves unable to adapt and to fix their own business problems; client-side solutions are winning. This, more than anything, illustrates the disconnect too often experienced between “the business” and “the creative” sides of marketing. The marketer’s role, in the end, is to navigate the markets — to succeed even amidst change — not just to razzle and dazzle though sales don’t come in the door. This applies to clients and to marketers alike. Mad Man: market thyself.
Given that I last wrote about Hardee’s Biscuit Holes, I couldn't resist continuing the theme of fried dough. This time: doughnuts. Specifically, Krispy Kreme’s new international “Fave Fan” contest, celebrating six dozen years selling original glazed. Open to Krispy Kreme doughnut lovers in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines and United Kingdom, "Fave Fan" invites customers to write, in 72 words or less, “how Krispy Kreme has made their lives special.” A winning contestant from each country receives 12 dozen doughnuts over the course of a year and a plane ticket to Krispy Kreme’s U.S. headquarters, where they will go head-to-head in a competition to “design the best doughnut.” Why Americans aren't invited to participate probably has something to do with the company's 2007 bankruptcy (and $3 stock price, down from a high near $50), but why celebrate an American brand through an international contest? Is "Fave Fan" the secret ingredient to a Krispy Kreme comeback, or is their marketing team one original glazed short of a dozen?
Pepsi is exhibiting some fresh bruises after recent media coverage of the company’s brain drain under Massimo d'Amore. When one considers Arnell’s leaked logo study and the lashing from the trades (and 20% freefall) over Tropicana’s repackaging, it’s hard to argue freshening up its brands netted PepsiCo any positives. Yet despite a flood of negative attention (much of it deserved), the most interesting aspects of the work have received the least attention. I may take my own lumps for this one, but I think the Pepsi brand has made some smart choices in its updated approach to communicating “refreshing.”
Some say Goldman Sachs has a brand problem. And the media pile-on includes the FT, New York Magazine, the New York Times and Rolling Stone with its oft repeated and colorful judgment of the company as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” But I say, Mr. Lloyd Blankfein, light up a cigar and stick to your arrogant guns. I don’t think you have a brand problem. I think you have a brand which is working very, very well. To the chagrin of many others.
At a time when most leaders, including that of the western world, want to summon the “spirit of innovation” and change to reignite consumer confidence, a number of food companies prefer to bust that ghost before getting slimed by progress. From Wendy’s to Heinz to Haagen-Dazs, well-known brands are reminding us that it’s ok to push the “pause” button on innovation. None, perhaps, more joyfully than Post Shredded Wheat.
It’s a hard time to tackle branding if you are a television channel. What with the mishmash of shows, the plethora of “talent,” the multitude of distribution platforms, the unrelenting pressure on retaining audience and the changing media landscape, distinguishing the distributor is a difficult and possibly thankless chore. So many egos and properties, so many fragmented audiences, so little room for a clear, identifiable position. So little opportunity for a relationship with the public.
Last week, while Amazon was rewarding Zappos for their exceptional customer-centric culture, Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis raged against the Cablevision machine. He lamented long wait times for repairs, unrealistic service windows and aggressive, uncaring service representatives. I add to his account my own recent experiences with some of the largest U.S. corporations, not in an attempt to trump Jeff, but to showcase how pervasive the problem with customer service has become. While some bright spots certainly exist (Zappos and Twitter’s ComcastCares to name two), the consistently negative experiences reported by consumers (anecdotally through social media and quantitatively through survey results) suggest that in today’s service economy, even our largest companies are failing the consumer, and ultimately, America.
Last night, So You Think You Can Dance celebrated its 100th episode. In addition to featuring encore performances by the greatest dancing talents to grace its stage over the course of seven seasons, it finally treated audiences to the uber-hyped performance of “brilliant” song-and-dance genius...um...Katie Holmes?
Dog tired the other night after what seemed like endless work-related communication clarifications, I signed off with this tweet: “Done translating for the day…surfing all these lexicons is exhausting. Desperate for the Esperanto of changing times.” Within seconds I got a message: Esperanto is now following you. I had to laugh. So here’s the translation Esperanto: I am NOT interested in Esperanto (we’ll talk about the lack of context on Twitter later). What I AM interested in is the common language of change and innovation.
Last year’s economic meltdown has shone a disproportionate light on the financial and automotive companies. The brands and institutions within these two industries have been scrambling to respond with clear, overarching agendas — green, consumer-centric vehicles in automotive, greater transparency (and regulation) in the financial sectors. While less in the spotlight in recent months, the food industry has been equally frenetic, but has not clearly articulated a larger agenda. Do the many microtrends, from local and organic to simple and safe, add up to something more substantial?
On Tuesday’s DVD release of Mad Men’s second season and across recent promotions for the August 16 premiere of season three, we’re seeing an inspired, Draper-esque approach to making 60s era ad culture relevant to today's audiences. Mad Men’s marketing blitz blends past with present as skillfully and successfully as Weiner himself. This mashup of reality and fiction, a strategy also used to great effect by HBO’s True Blood and its advertisers, proves that brands willing to go off script are endearing themselves to new, loyal audiences.
The inevitable economic recovery is arguably just around the corner. Yes, it’s always too far ahead. But at least there is light at the end of the tunnel. Obama says it’s a “long way off,” likely to cover his own posterior. However, the IMF and the Fed are cautiously optimistic. And, with few exceptions, the Dow has been relatively flat in recent weeks. I don’t want to jinx it, but it feels like we’re at the bottom of a very steep hill to climb rather than falling off of a cliff. The recovery -- albeit likely a slow one -- is coming. It’s just a matter of when. And the world, including marketing, may never be the same.
One ad campaign that resonates with me surprisingly comes from a bank. HSBC’s “Point of View” airport campaign is impactful, open-ended and sometimes humorous. The creative is unexpected and a strong example of a powerful voice, free of industry jargon that stands out from the hum of the marketplace.
Regardless of how you felt about Michael Jackson when he was alive, it is difficult to deny the extensive and irreplaceable contributions he made to music. It is also difficult to deny his truly amazing ability to reinvent himself as an artist in spite of --and in the face of-- personal tragedy and public scandal. As frail as he seemed, especially toward the end, Michael never stopped working on his image and music. A life lived in the public eye taught Michael from a young age to never stop moving. Sometimes forward, sometimes backward, and often times in circles. The Michael Jackson brand was truly malleable. For four decades he captivated us, for better or worse. Even in death he continues to do so.
The very notion of “agency” is becoming a footnote in today’s technologically reshaped marketplace and media. And it is within this environment that the bold, if not always adored, Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post, has decided to act as others sit idly. Ms. Weymouth and others at WaPo decided to host sponsored “salons,” bringing together reporters, lobbyists and corporations for quiet conversation and, one assumes, a deeper understanding of each other’s interests. Call it influence if you must. It is, after all, only new to discuss this type of paid access, not to grant it. Denying such is as charming and annoying as newsprint itself.
The new iPhone with video - coupled with GPS, compass and future iPhone applications - ushers in the Brave New World of augmented reality. And mobile marketing, which until now has been a relative afterthought for brand marketers outside of Japan, is about to go gangbusters.
According to the dictionary, “confluence” describes the flowing together of two or more rivers -- for example, where the smaller Missouri joins the roaring Mississippi. There is a similar confluence of strategy forming between the for-profit and non-profit sectors. And considering the reputational challenges damming many for-profit revenue streams, the non-profit sector may prove its contributions to the union to be more Mississippi than Missouri.
Steven Brill’s TSA “fast pass” company and creator of the Clear card has imploded. Verified Identity Pass takes with it more than $100 million in investor cash, the registration fees of approximately 200,000 travelers, and a dumpster-load of sensitive biometric data. The company provides only a message that it has ceased operations as of June 22, 2009 due to creditor problems, and posts a link to its privacy policies. The one message that seems to be coming out clearly in media is that Brill stepped aside from daily management some time ago. Got it: you are not responsible. Unfortunately, Brill isn’t done with us yet. He has one more bad idea that, like Clear, involves gathering up data, segregating worthy information from unworthy, and charging for it: Journalism Online.
The mouse may be dead to many netbook users, but if Disney has anything to do with it, The Mouse will remain alive and well for young technophiles. This week, Walt’s little company announced that it has collaborated with the unfortunately-named ASUS to launch the Disney Netpal.
The TED conference began in 1984 with the simple goal of bringing the top minds of the Technology, Entertainment and Design industries together for short, thought-provoking talks with their peers. The for-profit, invitation-only gathering was largely unknown in its early years outside of the small community of innovators who spoke at and attended the annual conference. Twenty-five years later, a very different TED announces TEDx, independently organized local events designed to share recorded TED talks with and capture new inspiration from a global network of community leaders. The brand’s evolution is a case study for what our institutions of higher learning should be doing: leveraging digital strategies and new technologies to create global resonance for content traditionally constrained by bricks and mortar.
It’s not easy to buck entrenched conventional wisdom. Ask Galileo. When he advanced heliocentrism publicly, all hell broke loose. None of which had anything to do with the fact that the central notion was true. The earth really did revolve around the sun.
A recent trip to the recycling market in Bamako, the capital of Mali, was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had in a long time...visually, olfactorily, but most of all acoustically, as the market announces itself long before one actually sees it. The cacophony of sounds comes courtesy of hundreds of blacksmiths hammering, scraping, melting and polishing every bit of material they retrieve from carefully dismantled car bodies and other branded materials.
A fairly brilliant spoof of GM’s “re: invention” spot is making its way around the Net. It’s easy enough to make fun of GM from A to Z (A is for Aztec...B is for Buick...C is for Cimarron...), but this spoof points to something broader: a complete distrust of GM’s voice, message and methods. Any advertisement that begins with “let’s be completely honest” is setting itself up for mockery (and failure), especially in a networked world. Shame on IPG’s Deutsch and McCann agencies for letting that line make the spot, much less lead it.
There has been much talk lately of data overload. Of marketing noise and the struggle to attract and maintain consumer attention. A weekend outdoors with my toddler reminded me this isn’t a new problem, nor is our selective attention a new response. My daughter still notices every soaring airplane. Every buzzing hedge trimmer. Every distant siren. The sights and sounds I have learned, over time, to tune out as irrelevant. When faced with data glut in the marketplace, most consumers respond like me. That is to say, they don’t respond. So how do brands help consumers see their information through the eyes of a child?
Anyone who’s seen me flail at Guitar Hero understands - even encourages - my reticence to play Rock Band. In spite of my enthusiasm, intense concentration and true desire to rock out, I once performed so poorly that a kind friend suggested to the room that “perhaps the signal isn’t getting through.” That, combined with the overt disappointment and head-shaking from the animated characters on-screen put me off the game. I must say, however, that for the opportunity to play some Beatles Rock Band, I would again risk such embarrassment.
Alfred P. Sloan’s famous quote epitomized the strategy that built GM into what was once the largest company on the planet. And while an entire laundry list of problems led to GM’s bankruptcy, the mismanagement or gross misinterpretation of Sloan’s strategy is what ultimately led to the behemoth’s demise.
Yesterday, I came across the most outrageously ludicrous fake marketing story about Del Monte and a James Bond tie-in from the geniuses at the Onion. Hoot! Holler! Sides splitting open! Then I realized it was REAL. I swear, I haven’t been so crippled by fear since Denise Richards was cast as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones in “The World is Not Enough.”
At a brand seminar last week, TIME’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel was straightforward: he doesn’t consider TIME to be in the news or the information business like, say CNN. He says TIME is in the knowledge and wisdom business. He was explaining how his team tried to differentiate TIME (the #1 magazine brand on college campuses – go figure) from the deluge of information raining down on all of us. “What can we do?” he asked as he flipped through recent covers. “We can convert information into knowledge and wisdom. We can be a trusted guide through the chaos.”
This weekend I joined Home Depot’s online Garden Club. I spend hundreds of dollars a month at their garden centers every summer, and I’m always looking to learn more and find new ideas for my yard. The site succeeds in providing helpful resources for DIY project planning and detailed information on plants, tools and gardening techniques. It fails, however, to provide features the company could use to offer personalized product recommendations, direct users to the most relevant content and translate the hours members spend on the site into more frequent store purchases.
LEGO made its first brick in 1958 and has been building ever since, but not without difficulty. Facing major competition from interactive electronics and computer games, the Danish company almost crumbled into bankruptcy in the late 1990’s. Then LEGO redesigned the brand blueprints, with a little help from its amateur architects.
Music has played an integral role in branding since commercial radio welcomed product advertisements in the early 1920s. During the past two decades, popular music has evoked consumer emotions around brands and, more recently, has been used to reach specific market segments. When executed smartly, music can truly change the way consumers view brands and products. However, when used willy-nilly, music can expose a brand’s confused and clumsy search for self.
Nearly two months after we first met Lauren, Mac has tapped its own laptop hunter. Like Lauren, Giampaolo, Lisa and Jackson, Megan values big screens and fast processors. But unlike her PC-loving predecessors, Megan's final factor is usability.
Although I am a novice knitter, I have a yen for yarn. I love to go to knitting shops to peruse the different colors, textures and sizes of the skeins. I imagine myself a master at the craft, fashioning jaw-droppingly gorgeous and unique scarves, hats, gloves, socks and sweaters out of sustainably harvested, hand-dyed Peruvian wool. The reality of my current knitting ability limits me to monochrome scarves and fingerless hand warmers but, still. I can dream. The popularity of knitting, and crafting in general, has been on the rise for a few years, so it’s always cool to learn about knitting retailers that are taking a new and different approach to brand, aesthetic and voice. Enter the cleverly named Wool and the Gang.
Over the years, I’ve admired IKEA’s ability to consistently create unique experiences that engage consumers in unexpected ways. IKEA has a knack for showing rather than telling.
Something shocking has happened at McDonald’s, the likes of which we haven't seen since the embezzlement scandal that sent Mayor McCheese to white collar prison in the mid-80s. For the first time in its almost 30 year existence, the Happy Meal's freebie is a piece of media rather than a cheap, plastic doodad. Clouds part, angels sing. And sing they will, to the jaunty tunes of Kidz Bop.
I can remember being just out of college, freshly installed in Providence, RI, dropping by Brown University to investigate their MFA program. I had graduated fully decorated, done graduate scholarship work abroad and had no reason to believe my academic record made me anything less than a desirable candidate. I was also living with my husband-to-be, sharing the day to day responsibility of his two-year-old. I was stunned when the woman behind the desk, with no knowledge of me beyond my physical presence - not even a transcript, mind you – announced officiously, as she eyed the baby girl grasping my hand, that there would be no way for me to pursue graduate work part time. I walked away from “formal” education that day because it didn’t fit my life.
The hunt for my wife’s new laptop just got more difficult. Apple recently announced a planned reduction in prices for a pair of to-be-announced Macs. And the blogosphere is brimming with speculation.
Someone call a doctor. Swine flu (hysteria) is spreading. Newspapers are dying. Automobile companies are on life support. Mutants draw box office millions, as marketers engineer the next viral video. The U.S. economy sneezed, and the world collapsed. Politicians scrambled to resuscitate. And our climate is clearly running a temperature. Disease is America's metaphor du jour, and brand managers best check their vitals.
On July 30, 1993, the Missouri river’s Monarch Levee buckled, flooding Chesterfield Valley, Missouri. The rising waters quickly submerged a 10x30 public storage locker a few miles from the breach, drowning 15 years of my family’s accumulated artifacts. 15 years of photo albums. Within hours, our Kodak moments dissolved in a toxic bath of runoff and gasoline. Gone forever.
Microsoft wants to help you advertise. Let’s pause on that for a moment, shall we? The people who respond directly to a smaller competitor, cannot present a consistent image to save their own markets, promote the idea that brand does not matter and release broadcast spots created on a Mac. That Microsoft. The Microsoft so in touch with consumers that they are boldly going into retail with nothing but a tightrope of user frustration upon which to dance or hang. That Microsoft. They want to help you advertise. To women. Specifically, something called “women (25-54).” We assume this is not geek speak for the code to activate some Redmondian Fembot. It might as well be, because what Microsoft proposes in its recent online campaign (proof of its own advertising pudding?) makes the fairer sex seem more foreign than ever.
Everyone wants to be a designer! Retailers are competing with the name brands on their shelves by focusing on private-label packaging. And some of them are simply doing it better. Last year, sales of private-label food and other consumer products jumped 10% to $82.9 billion, from $75 billion in 2007. Here are a few design standouts pushing those numbers higher:
As interesting and important as micro-blogging and other momentary, disposable bits of culture might be, I tend to be more interested in the larger patterns they can help reveal — not the chatter itself. Recently, the former has helped me tune into something intriguing: an emerging meme about brand voice.
If Disney’s latest strategy works, moppets across China will be saying “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” in a most delightful way. And with perfect diction.
Ad Age released five new rules for marketing this week and invited emails for other “new rules.” At Patrick Davis Partners, we agree that these times demand new thinking by marketers. We even released our own thoughts about new priorities for a post-agency age last November. So with a nod to the “radical transparency” Ad Age cites, and a sense that one ought to practice what one preaches, we’re responding in an open letter instead of an email.
I’m no fan of Microsoft’s laptop hunter campaign. I’ve said my piece on the Lauren and Giampaolo spots, both desperate attempts to bolster sales in a down economy and paint PCs with the “cool” brush CPB so effortlessly wields. On the plus side, the third installment stops playing HP favorites, and the mother-son duo moves us away from the SAG-gy hipsters we’ve stomached to date. Still, there's no brand advancement, and when there’s a chance to land a hard jab on Apple, Microsoft manages only a glancing blow.
To expand on the excellent piece The Good Business of Good Citizenship, it is worth looking at some additional data. As Daniel Yankelovich and Isabella Furth observed in 2005, corporations and government have been subject to waves of mistrust reaching as far back as the 1930's Depression. Not surprisingly, we are in the midst of another wave, and consumer trust has eroded severely since last year. Every major industry in the U.S. is affected, with banks and automotive leading. Why does trust matter so much?
For most Americans, the conspicuous consumption of the late 20th century was not just a show of status or an assumed birthright in the land of plenty, it was an act of justified (if not inspired) patriotism. Prospering and buying things proved the American system worked. In our greatest moment of national crisis, George W. Bush called us to arms post-9/11, with the rallying cry of “go shopping” to support our economy and stabilize our nation. Consumption was the way to fight back; it was our role as citizens. Economic policies followed that fueled this citizen-consumer march into battle. But something else happened along the way, too. We didn’t just shop. We reconnected. We found new ways of expressing citizenship, and they can serve us well now as marketers, if we follow a few, new citizen-based rules.
If brand abuse was a crime, Ovaltine would be sporting unflattering horizontal prison stripes for a long, long time. The beloved chocolate drink, trusted by parents for nearly 100 years to get nutrition into kids, has squandered its positive reputation in a horrifying 41 seconds.
Microsoft’s laptop hunters are back. This time we follow Giampaolo, a tech-savvy Roman import with “really big hands” (heh... good one, CPB). He’s looking for “portability, battery life, and power.” Portability you say? In a laptop?
Fully aware it’s ironic to blog about listening - here I am, “talking” about “listening.” Still, it seems a worthy topic right now - the value of the oft-neglected art of closing your mouth and opening your ears.
As the Swiss bank's century-old secret slowly unravels, so goes the long-held, traditional notion of “trust me.” Of course, that isn’t true for Swiss banks alone, but no other banking system has been built on as strong a promise as “we will keep your money AND secrets safe.” As with any brand, the promise is only as strong as the operational realities that back it up.
So in the 70’s, marketers embraced the fact that sex can sell anything from shampoo to car batteries. And over the past several decades, we’ve been treated to an endless array of genetically altered babes and double entendres, so much so that we became numb to the obvious methods of product whoring. Those were good times, in retrospect, considering the skin-crawling fetishism of two current sandwich peddlers who have spoiled my appetite.
What’s the better recession strategy: being the pricier brand everyone wants, or being the more affordable second choice? Microsoft is betting the farm on the latter with its latest attempt to counter Apple’s I’m a Mac campaign.
Advertising Age’s Garrick Schmitt recently wrote that “Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling.” He celebrates the brilliant New York Times/IBM Visualization Lab and others for “turning bits and bytes of data... into stories for our digital age.” Admittedly, the Times’ work is groundbreaking, and I applaud Many Eyes and other “visual scientists” for their valuable work in helping us see complex data in clear, useful ways. But storytelling it is not.
Social media platforms, blogs, smart phones, online video conferencing and a host of other technologies will facilitate revolutionary changes for brand research and innovation. Many companies are already leveraging these technologies for more traditional types of data collection, such as survey research. However, few have taken advantage of the real opportunity these technologies collectively provide: crowd-sourced research models for consumer-driven innovation.
New York City’s Museum of Modern Art recently dropped “rogue” adman, Douglas Jaeger and his agency Happy Corp. While the incident is worth a write up in itself (I will revisit it towards the end of this post) a broader discussion about nonprofits and their mostly uncomfortable relationship with all things related to brand needs to come first.
Recently, I wrote of my interest in branded commodities and provided some fine examples of how this complex form of brand management can be done correctly. In the “never do this” category, I must now offer the other end of the spectrum.
It’s always weird when a once genre-defining band comes back after a hiatus. The risk of the new material potentially marring one’s view of their original material is pretty high, let alone the pain of seeing once-held pop idols embarrass themselves on the global stage (I’m looking at you, Boy George. Oh, and you too, Madonna. Oh, and you too Pet Shop Boys). Enter Depeche Mode.
There’s plenty of chatter about Microsoft’s new viral video. Great. You got some people to watch it, and with this post, even more. At a technical level, the spot is working (pun intended). At a brand level, I am at a loss.
We already know Dora the Explorer can crank dat, but who knew that a brand extension would crank out such controversy?
The free markets are my friend. I love the business of business. I believe in the power of hard work and intelligence to create competitive advantage and great value, both economic and social. I tend not to be a fan of regulation (I am an entrepreneur, after all) but mainly because I have faith in people and companies to conduct themselves with a very high standard of ethical conduct. My faith is more than challenged these days. Thanks, AIG.
Pity poor CNBC. Oh, the horror. To be taken on by a comedian - a comedian! - and lose. To have the comedian come off as more serious, more substantive, more tuned in to the zeitgeist, more honest. To have a funnyman call you out for not doing your job. And then to have that showdown not just air and be forgotten, but pick up speed virally and, for gosh sakes, make the front page of the Financial Times, among others, despite all the media weight you use (Stewart’s term: “all those peacocks”) to try to downplay it.
After ten years, Companion was embarking on an ambitious plan to expand its bakery/cafe business. In conjunction with the expansion, Saint Louis-based designlab and Atlanta-based Patrick Davis Partners developed a unique identity. The wordmark and logo—birds holding various conversations about life, bread and friendship—provided the foundation for an extensive brand strategy. Because a majority of the design would be produced in-house, a Brand Expression Guide was developed to assist designers and vendors with creating a cohesive presence.
Welcome to the new Unbound Edition. For the past two years, our readers have made Unbound Edition one of the Web’s most read marketing news aggregators and blogs. Along the way, we have laughed with you, listened to you and learned from you. Thank you. Now, we are making some changes to serve you better and to take advantage of new technologies.
De-commoditizing categories has proven hugely valuable for more than a half-century in building specialty and niche markets. But the resetting of the economy and the emptying out of the Starbucks cup suggests a macro shift back to the big brands that have the price flexibility to deliver real consumer value for the long-haul. Branded commodities are poised for a return to growth, even as the ultimate commodity still floats about in the air.
I have been following a brand for a while, on Twitter and in general. In 2004 I was walking down the fresh drinks aisle in my local supermarket in Amsterdam when it caught my attention. It was appealing, kind, real, and it stood out. It was innocent.
A strong brand voice can be expressed with nary a word. Behold the joy of Cadbury.
While banks across the U.S. were pleading for bailouts, ING Direct posted a 10-point Declaration of Financial Independence to a simple microsite and invited people to sign it. 20,000 people have. And as the surviving financial services companies struggle to find the right tone and message to comfort and reassure consumers in the new year, one clear voice speaks plainly and directly about personal responsibility and the basics of saving. Consistently delivered online and through frank messages by CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann, the ING voice is genuine, distinguishable in the market place and perfectly aligned with the company’s brand position and identity.
A strong voice is instantly recognizable, regardless of the messenger. Wieden+Kennedy’s 1995 masterpiece demonstrates the power and flexibility of such a voice. Translated myriad ways through the words of amateur and all-star, Nike’s timeless imperative is always individual, urgent and authentic.
Much has been written about President-elect Obama’s opportunity to globally rebrand America. I propose it’s not the “brand” that tens of millions of Americans voted to change, but rather how the brand is expressed and operationalized at home and abroad. One of new management’s first challenges is to determine whether one of the country’s most cherished sub brands, namely the American automobile industry, can create and market products that reflect this new brand expression. History suggests they can.
This week, as debate over the Detroit bailout rages on, we look back at the Big Three’s record of foresight and innovation... Suburbanites refusing to be tamed by their dowdy minivans trade in their Town and Country for an Explorer, Mountaineer or Bronco. Hockey moms dream of conquering the unincorporated wilderness a zip code away.
Patrick Davis Partners, the global brand consultancy, today announced that the firm has relocated its headquarters from St. Louis to Atlanta, where the company has operated an office since 2002.
As debate over the Detroit bailout rages on, we look back at the Big Three’s record of foresight and innovation: The 80s. A rejection of the free-spirited 70s and celebration of conspicuous consumption epitomized by the "Greed is Good" mantra of Wall Street's Gordon Gekko. Ford Motor Co’s Mercury Cougar is ahead of the zeitgeist in this '78 spot for the XR-7.
Um, no. I am most decidedly not ready for that. Thanks.
This morning, I brought my daughters' remaining Halloween candy into the office, determined to no longer spend three hours every night at home gorging on Kit Kats (the genius behind Kit Kat Dark deserves a shiv in the kidneys). Rather, I spent the last six hours at work gorging on Kit Kats.
It was no surprise that during the 2008 presidential election the candidates were compared to brands and perceived as brands. And yes, the final two candidates did have trademarks. But does that really make them brands?
The post-agency age is upon us. With remarkable speed and effectiveness, technologies and consumer preferences have coalesced, forcing a broad and deep cultural demand for direct, honest relationships. The go-between agent is less relevant than ever before, and the global financial crisis is likely the final blow to the inefficient and long-suffering agency structure. Winning in the post-agency age will require these new priorities.
Regardless of your political persuasion, it is difficult to deny that brand Obama made participating in the political process cool again. MC Yogi is just one of many who took Obama’s voice, messages and logo, mashed it up and made it their own. The result: a malleable, inspiring brand that was expressed in myriad unique ways by the people, for the people.
In brand strategy we talk about the necessity of giving people a reason to believe. That intangible aspect of a brand that causes one to pause, consider and ultimately feel right about their choice. People are turning out in droves this election to support their political brand of choice, their reason to believe. Whether it’s Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin, there is passion and belief in the intangible aura that surrounds these candidates.
To many, Coco Chanel, single-handedly invented the look and fragrance of the 20th century, if not the woman itself! Who doesn't know or even covet the quilted handbags, the No. 5 square-cut perfume bottle, the little black dress, the braid-trimmed, brass-buttoned two-piece suit, the dark-toed sling pumps, or the fashion jewelry? Who doesn’t recognize the elegant simplicity of the interlaced double C, the minimalist color palette of white, black and gold…each piece telling the story of a woman with an extraordinary gift for fashion, social trends, and business? Enter Karl Lagerfeld, the man who is in charge of her legacy.
Instead of letting panic rule your agenda in these uncertain days, a strong brand can function as a compass to navigate the troubled markets.
What is happening in the global financial markets is stunning, surely. I am more stunned, however, by the complete absence of dialogue in the marketing community about this historic moment. Like most stockbrokers who fell into success as markets expanded, most marketers only know how to carnival-call their offerings to cash-flush consumers. Say goodbye to that easy effort. The age of true strategy is at hand. It is make or break, to be sure.
It is, perhaps, one of the few times that brand managers may consider a higher power than themselves, but the differences between traditional media and interactive media requires a relaxed grip. Put away your lexicons and logo specs for a moment and consider three thoughts.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) yesterday sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben ‘n Jerry’s Ice Cream fame, asking them to replace the cow’s milk they currently use with human breast milk. While I don’t doubt that this moove (sorry) would make some cows very happy, the idea of a dessert made with human breast milk gives me the willies.
By developing an application, brands have the opportunity to strengthen their relevance in the daily lives of consumers.
Luxury retailers are finally feeling the pinch. So, how is Prada responding? Under pressure, the company has decided to go public.
With 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, we see a China that is a powerhouse of contemporary, iconic architecture. We see a China that is global host, not a walled world. We see an entire culture struggling with freedom, technology and the environment. From this view, China is a massive case study -- a window into -- the global future.
Ad Planner service from Web giant announces age of advertising brokerage.
I’d like to offer an alternative interpretation of Barak Obama’s recent reinvention of the presidential seal.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama spoke today in Chicago in front of a seal surely meant to convey a presidential image and his readiness for the job at stake. Instead, he made me giggle.
Love him or hate him, Obama has finally put his campaign money where his mouth by opting out of the public campaign financing system.
These days, consumers are used to having the opportunity to be actively connected to the brands they love through personalizing, customizing or designing their products. Quick examples that come to mind are NIKEid, RbkCustom, Become an M&M and the Coca-Cola Creator.
Earlier this month I was discussing fad products in my Marketing class and brought up 80s icon Chia Pet. Immediately my senioritis-inflicted students burst into renditions of the now infamous jingle. That’s impressive name recognition for a brand that peaked in popularity when they were fetuses and sustains itself today only through nostalgic impulse buys and endless line extension. It got me wondering whether manufacturer Joseph Enterprises, with a little outsourced design help, could retrieve the Chia brand from the compost pile.
London-based designer Orla Kiely has extended her brand to stationery. In so doing she is growing a design language that seems familiar and global at once. It is the right way to build the next major brand.
Perhaps I’m letting my nationalism get the best of me, but Absolut’s “Reconquista” ad is a little insulting:
We've avoided politics, largely, until now, when there is a question of brand to explore. Much has been said already about "Brand Obama" and "Brand Clinton," and which is more compelling or divisive to the Democratic party. That's not a question I'll approach to answer here, but I would like to ask which of the two is actually a brand at all.
Maytag’s century-old brand owes much of its equity to Ol’ Lonely, a lethargic Mayberry gent in a blue jumpsuit and replica 40s policeman's cap. Created by Leo Burnett in the late 60s, the ad campaign’s clever premise - expert repair services you’ll never need – emphasizes the brand’s dependability promise.
It’s no surprise Burger King likes to take chances. But their recent “Morning Tongue” spot takes things to a new level.
It's true that there's nothing new under the sun. Also true that sex sells. Oh, true, too, that outrage gets news coverage. And true, so it seems, that Abercrombie & Fitch have become hopelessy lost in marketing cliches with the beautiful boredom of their new Gilly Hicks underwear brand.
In a recent issue of California Management Review (CMR), author David Aaker makes a compelling case for the necessary link between innovation and branding. While I think it’s a good article, the suggested union between innovation and branding led me to focus on a larger topic about value creation within a company.
There’s something about Svedka’s Svedka_grl that creeps me out. Maybe it’s because Daryl Hannah made me feel a little funny as the, um…acrobatic android in Bladerunner when I was far too young to know why.
Super Bowl XLII reveals brands in-flux, searching for meaning, making a case for their own relevancy, and showing just how flexible they can be with the new consumer.
With Target’s wholesale dismissal of bloggers, America's favorite retailer said more than it realized about the tired PR industry and its own relevance going forward.
There are a lot of left turns engineered into DLD . There is always the possibility you might look at a scheduled session and think, “what does this have to do with anything?” and then come away with a completely new idea. You might hear someone speak about their work and be certain they are brilliant and equally certain you don’t completely understand what they’re saying or what it actually applies to. Sometimes you are just knocked out by the beauty or ingenuity of thought processes and topics
A Brand on Any Other Platform Can Still Smell as Sweet There was a lot of talk at DLD about Millennials – 3 billion under age 25 in the world, but fewer of them in the audience. They’re probably at home on Facebook, listening to their ipods, surfing YouTube or canvassing door to door for Obama.
It’s warm in Munich at DLD , and we are talking about audiences. Or what used to be called audiences and now might also be known as fellow users, producers, consumers, colleagues or all of the above. A conference session called “Exploding Media” focused on both the exploding media world and our exploding notion of media – and the implications of that explosion for not just media, but inevitably, also for brands.
To me, the French luxury brand Louis Vuitton has just taken the cake with its Christmas windows. The following imagery is from Basel, Switzerland, but it could have been taken anywhere around the world, since it has been featured in all of its 380 stores:
Yesterday’s over-the-top launch for the 2009 Dodge Ram at the Detroit Auto Show didn’t go quite as planned.
I never really liked Jared, Subway’s original lovable oaf with the ultimate customer testimonial. But the message was clear: eat Subway and lose weight (provided you don’t like mayonnaise or anything else at Subway that tastes good). But Subway’s brand endorsement from the imaginary portly doofus, Peter Griffin from “Family Guy,” doesn’t make sense to me.
Consumer Reports claims $8 billion was lost last year on unused gift cards. The industry's auction and trading leader responds here first.
Given tight deadlines today, this blog post arguably has neither. But I thought this article on OpenAd.net, “The Biggest Creative Department in the World,” was worthy of discussion.
The retail giant's new slogan suggests Wal-Mart is part of a higher standard of living. There's more than one problem with that claim, from internal policies to a lack of marketing vision.
In this age of celebrity endorsements and entertainer-based empires, we delve into the disappointment and bad business that is Britney Spears.
I knew a guy who was worried about his teenage son. He was a good kid, but he was struggling and he had just called to tell his father he was going to drop out of college. Years ago, the father fretted, he’d have shipped the kid off to the military – forced some discipline on him to help him grow up. That had worked for his generation. But the inflammatory world situation no longer made that a viable option in his (or his wife’s!) mind. He was at his wits’ end. So what did he do?
Alcohol companies, by nature of their product, have a greater degree of permission from consumers. People bring their beverage of choice into golden moments of relaxation, celebration, and even hard times. In a hotly competitive market such as alcoholic beverages, it’s vital to capitalize on this permission and the social nature of sharing a drink with a friend.
Marketers seem a bit surprised today that Volvo is evolving its core brand positioning to evoke some sexiness alongside its legendary safety. Anyone who has a confused reaction to this is way behind the times. The tired notion of brand as repeated “one-note” song has hobbled some of the biggest companies in the world. (Wal-Mart’s challenges might be tied back to its singular focus on “low prices,” which led consumers to see the entire company – rich as it is – as “cheap.” And everything Ford is doing is “bold,” right? Except sales.)
Last week I started to address what’s wrong with U.S. tennis, reviewing the United States Tennis Association’s (USTA) misguided attempt to interest younger consumers in tennis.
It appears Baby Einstein isn’t the only company peddling products that may retard our children. On Tuesday, toy maker Mattel announced its second major recall in as many weeks.
AT&T, what were you thinking? First you divested an arguably more relevant, fresher, younger and hipper brand for “the new AT&T.” Now, by censoring Pearl Jam’s relatively benign comments criticizing George Bush during your broadcast of Lollapalooza, you’ve given an entire generation of consumers a reason to hate you for being an “evil corporation.” Not to mention you’ve created a rallying cry for net neutrality activists the world over.
Let’s role play. You’re a pharmaceutical company who (allegedly) covered up the dangers of your last billion-dollar drug, for which you’re mired in costly and reputation-damaging litigation. You’re eager to launch a new, ground-breaking drug you can legitimately claim prevents cancer, and you want to avoid a barrage of articles comparing your new rising star to its fallen predecessor. You also need to break through consumer hesitation to early adopt, given your less-than-glowing track record. The new drug vaccinates against an STD. What do you do?
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I learned this the hard way when I was about 10 years old and found out I could stand up on the frame of my bicycle with no hands.
Step right up! Have you seen the recently unveiled logo for the 2012 London Olympic Games? If not, here it is.
Would you trust a skin cream from Pepsi? PepsiCo and Aquafina brand licensee Added Extras are betting you will with their Aquafina Advanced Hydration RX.
Kinder Schokolade, one of Germany’s most famous brands is getting ready for a facelift…literally. For forty years, the chocolate brand has been a sweet staple in countless kids’ diets while promising parents that the treat would provide an extra portion of milk to their tots. Don’t laugh.
Thinly veiled PR ploys, corporate-image ads and traditional notions of CSR-as-afterthought are outmoded. As one brand consultant puts it, “corporate sheen is dead.” Unfortunately, most marketers are still hanging out at the wake, too drunk and reminiscing about the good ole days to realize their consumers (and other stakeholders) are light years ahead of them.
Horacio Silva, the New York Times critical shopper, recently detailed the rough handling he suffered amidst the unbearable preciousness of Tom Ford’s new menswear boutique on Madison Avenue.
Mr. Murdoch wants the take it up a notch and buy Dow Jones & Company and the world’s leading financial paper, the Wall Street Journal. Who can blame him, really. His portfolio of holdings could be more balanced, and the Journal certainly could benefit from his legendary approach to cost management.
The cover article of Inc. Magazine’s latest issue asks companies how they are utilizing their intangible assets: brands, customer information, business models, employee expertise, to name a few. While this subject can be a quantifiable nightmare (especially for smaller companies…and auditors), it is imperative for companies of all sizes to address.
Starbucks and other "experience brands" need to evolve into the age of brand meaning quickly. Why? Because the brands that win today are ones that drive social agendas.
Today's New York Times title page announced: Firefighters Symbol of Pride Gets Image Upgrade. Sounded like a rather innocent piece of news. But, as I read on, it became clear that the New York Fire Department's unofficial patches are either being refashioned, or eliminated all together, if deemed inappropriate. These patches are worn on the right sleeve, opposite the department's official patch.
Skurban. Yes, that’s Skater + Urban. As a branding person, I nearly laughed out loud when I read that word atop a Nike display during a recent trip to the mall. And I’m sure quite a few jaded, Vans-wearing teenagers did as well.
Usually I would argue that service is no more than a price of entry to do business. If companies cannot provide good service, they have no business to be in business. Ironically, service is at the airline industry’s very core, and despite them completely ignoring this fact, many of them are still in business!
Recently Car and Driver posted an April Fools Day blog entry claiming Ford was bringing back the Escort – and I bought it hook line and sinker. Why did I fall for the gag? Because an increasingly out-of-touch and all-too desperate Detroit has been so enamored with its familiar formula of nostalgic branding that the absurdity of an Escort reintroduction didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.
Maybe, but solid brand strategy and management might be a more tangible and, frankly, smarter move for England’s monarchy. Why? Because Queen Elizabeth II is a brand in and of herself. Look no further than to the movie The Queen and you realize her majesty is an iconic brand in her own right.
There's something desperately wrong with consumer brand marketing. We all know it. The brand-building talent and expertise that created the CPG manufacturer are gone. Marketers with the ability to identify an unmet consumer need, develop a product to meet it, create a brand, and then lead it to market dominance are missing. Product managers with a fear of ambiguity have replaced the creative, forward-thinking brand builders. Our biggest consumer brands are now managed by nerds.
On March 13, a Virgin America flight from Los Angeles to New York was diverted from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Stewart airport in Newburgh, N.Y., due to severe weather, and the passengers and crew waited in the plane on the tarmac for over four hours. The crew was anxious, babies were crying, mothers were anxious, and the passengers were unruly — to the point that one woman was taken off the plane by police. The entire ordeal was documented by David Martin, the CEO of Kontain.com, on his company's iPhone social-media application.
Indeed, the results of our 2009 Leading Global Brands study, which includes responses from 20,000-plus global marketers who work on over 200-plus brands across all industries, employed by companies like Unilever, Diageo, and GlaxoSmithKline, indicate that getting the proper local vs. global balance is a top challenge. Almost 65% of respondents confirm that global brands have become more important over the last five years. But only 15% fully agree that their global brands are effectively leveraging their scale. Even fewer believe that their organizations excel at quickly rolling out successful global brand initiatives.
In today's world of endless choice and prolific product options, brands are confronted with the challenge of gaining mindshare and market penetration. Combined with a stalling economy, many brands have addressed this challenge by rethinking the way they have always done business, altering their core product or trying to attract customers through promotions, giveaways and campaigns. Yet one of the best strategies, if thoughtfully prepared and executed, remains one of the most visible and well-known in the food industry: co-branding.
That limited, old-school perception of design is missing out on something important: Today's increasingly complex and multi-faceted marketing campaigns are, in essence, design projects. With the splintering of "old" media and the explosive rise of social networking, marketing messages now are constantly morphing and being reinvented--taking new forms that range from highly innovative viral stunts and films (such as Volkswagen's Fun Theory) to branded social networks (Nike Plus) and even sponsored save-the-world movements (Pepsi)'s "Refresh Everything" project).
It looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo. Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told the audience, and Mr. Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their companies and call them “AppleGoo.” Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.
A top Chinese minister warned Google Inc. "will have to bear the consequences" if it stops filtering its search results in China, suggesting there is little room for compromise in the high-profile showdown over censorship. Friday's remarks were the sharpest words yet in an unusual duel that could set a precedent for international business in the country and could escalate tensions between the U.S. and Chinese governments.
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.
Toyota has announced three major recalls covering a total of eight million vehicles globally since October 2009. The recalls are for defects that have been associated with 52 fatalities and 38 injuries so far. Not surprisingly, the business media and notable Toyota experts are starkly pessimistic. We looked at 108 Wall Street Journal articles discussing Toyota during February, 2010, and found that 106 were negative to Toyota. In a recent column by Dennis Seid, Jeffrey Liker, an economist and author of The Toyota Way observed that the hearings and the resultant lawsuits could severely damage the company in many ways.
Recessionary darling Walmart saw the first down sales quarter in its history and a surprisingly weak top-line over the holidays as aggressively expanding dollar stores and hard discounters swiped at its positioning. Additionally, last year it lost modest market share in package-goods sales for the first time since Information Resources Inc. began tracking the data -- while supermarkets, dollar and club stores all gained. In short, Walmart is increasingly finding itself caught in the middle between higher-end retailers and value players and, at least in recent quarters, is losing share to both.
I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that product crises aren't communications crises. Suggesting otherwise is like giving the play-by-play announcer credit for a sports score, or holding a translator responsible for presenting an untenable negotiating position. Our selective vision makes us focus on how issues are communicated at risk of losing sight of the business reality it narrates. Bad news doesn't influence or have an impact on brands as much as reveal them for what they are. CMOs need to see someone else's misfortune as the opportunity to review and perhaps change how you see your function before the inevitable spotlight finds you.
I’ve been working with a major retail brand and my engagement has included an audit and assessment of retail best practices. Although most of my work is proprietary, I wanted to share some of my findings here because I’ve found some really interesting patterns.
If any company seems well-positioned to both influence and profit from a generation of environmentally aware youth, it's Walt Disney Co. And Robert Iger, president and chief executive of Disney, insists the company is doing just that. Mr. Iger sat down with The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray to talk about the new green strategies the company applies to everything from its theme parks to its movie studios, as well as changes Disney has seen in consumer attitudes. They began the conversation by talking about the company's conservation campaign—Friends for Change—which so far has reached more than a million children, he says.
With embarrassing vehicle recalls and testy congressional hearings behind it, Toyota Motor Corp. is planning an assault next week on its critics as the company digs in for a mammoth legal battle. In a media event planned for Monday and a Tuesday address to 1,000 suppliers, the Japanese auto maker plans to defend its electronics systems. It will roll out independent experts like the head of Stanford University's auto-research center to discredit a study that suggests electronics are to blame for sudden acceleration in some Toyota vehicles.
Move over, Amazon. Consumer-products makers, squeezed by private-label goods at retailers like Wal-Mart, are hawking their wares directly to buyers online.
Renzo Rosso, the tattooed, Ducati-driving founder of denim giant Diesel, owns some of fashion's most cutting-edge labels. In addition to the popular jeans-maker, Mr. Rosso's holding company, Only the Brave, includes celebrated European fashion houses Viktor & Rolf and Maison Martin Margiela. But Mr. Margiela is gone, as is the designer of Diesel, which Mr. Rosso founded in 1978. Mr. Rosso has replaced them with unknown teams that rank lower in the brands' hierarchy than business executives. The new creative director at Diesel is a magazine editor, not a clothing designer. Mr. Rosso believes his brands need trend-spotters more than someone who can craft a hemline.
At a time when other financial services firms are rolling out flashy multi-million dollar advertising campaigns aimed at rebuilding consumer trust, Citigroup is unveiling something that seems far more simple: a blog and videos featuring top executives. The company this week launched a new branding campaign including a fresh Web site, new.citi.com, and print ads directing people to it. The Internet roll-out features personal blog posts from Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit, as well as testimonial videos from CitiMortgage President Sanjiv Das and CitiRisk's Chief Risk Officer Brian Leach. By featuring the executives, the company aims to position Citigroup ( C - news - people ) as a more transparent, accessible and conversational corporation.
There's a struggle with defining "branding" in digital. Some people claim that brands should be about utility, others that we need to build brand platforms and yet others think that brands should entertain us and give us something to talk about. Yet overall, surprisingly little has changed in the actual branding strategies in the industry. Something is wrong here.
"Good taste" is rarely used to describe great advertising, but Domino's is going to town with it. It just announced that it has doubled its quarterly profits after telling its customers that it had fixed the taste of its pizzas. It didn't "improve" things or follow any other standard operating procedures of the marketing world; in fact, it violated some of the basic tenets of advertising, such as telling the truth. Critics lumped it into the category of "mea culpa ads" (such as the billboards London's Evening Standard newspaper ran last year apologizing for the crappy quality of its content). Domino's went one better, though, by running documentary-style spots of consumers likening the crust to "cardboard" and topping to "ketchup." It was called extreme and even bizarre. Comedian Steve Colbert got in on the commentary.
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is selling more ad spots to big companies like Wal-Mart Stores, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. But the site’s pages are also home to countless ads from smaller companies that can be funny, weird or just plain creepy — those suggesting you are, say, eligible to get a free iPad because you are exactly 26 years old, or entreaties to see what your offspring would look like if you had a child with a celebrity.
Ford Motor Co. surpassed General Motors Co. in sales last month for the first time in at least 50 years, presenting a new headache for the government-owned car maker as it struggles to return to profitability. Hours after the sales results were disclosed Tuesday, GM announced an overhaul of its top managers—the second executive shuffle in three months. The news underscored the impatience of GM Chief Executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr. and the heat the company is feeling from a resurgent Ford.
"Caution. Not all hazards are marked." I couldn't help but notice this sign on the side of a ski trail during a recent vacation in the mountains. As I slowed my descent I thought about how this sign could apply to any number of things in this crazy world. Being in the brand business, I also thought about how apt they were relative to navigating the current marketplace. It's one thing to watch as consumer attitudes shift and you alter your product or service to meet the new conditions. It's another to sense that something's on the horizon and be the first in the category to address it. The ability to do so has always separated the good brands from the best brands.
Judging from its branding and the griping of its competitors, Apple customers are hip, aware, and enlightened, yet its shareholders recently defeated resolutions to make the company more environmentally responsible and affirmed instead their uncool unconcern about anything other than profits. There isn't just a disconnect here, but an entirely topsy-turvy arrangement.
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo, it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and the “ready, fire, aim” game plan of Facebook and the other young guns is eating their lunch. Even the massive Google is still trying to shake things up with new and controversial products. Yahoo’s strategy seems more like “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…”
I am in Tampa waiting to fly back home to New Jersey and, thanks to the snowicane but rather than sitting in the usual information vacuum to which airlines subject us, I am watching as Continental shows us the status of the flights that were supposed to bring our jet in from LA to Cleveland to Newark to Tampa. I saw the flight to Cleveland canceled, then the one to Newark canceled, and I figured we were doomed when I saw the aircraft number for my flight erased. But then I saw us assigned a new jet, one that flew into Tampa from Houston last night. That’s simply amazing. Continental is practicing operational transparency. It opened up information is already has to us, the customers, so we can be informed and empowered.
“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services. In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute. But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.
Ever wonder what is really behind this thing we call "identity? " It's one of those words that attracts a variety of meanings, ranging from a company's name and logo, to its business definition (Fuji: We're a digital imaging company), to its image in the marketplace, to its values.
General Motors said on Wednesday that it would shut down Hummer, the brand of big sport utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term gas guzzler, after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart.
With its traditional video-rental business under assault, Blockbuster Inc. has brought in restructuring advisers, looking to buy yet more time to remake itself in the face of new rivals and technologies. In recent days, Blockbuster tapped law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges and investment bank Rothschild Inc. to look at ways to reduce its roughly $1 billion debt load and explore other strategies, such as acquisitions or partnerships, said people familiar with the matter.
Sears Holding Corp. has undertaken a huge task: To completely revamp and relaunch approximately 450 Kenmore appliance models. The move is part of a larger effort for the home appliance brand, which is sold exclusively at Sears. Right now, the changes are rolling out on washing machines, and soon, on refrigerator units. Kitchen appliances will follow later this year. The goal is to contemporize Kenmore, an 83-year-old, iconic American brand, said Betsy Owens, Kenmore vp and general manager. Female consumers, primarily, saw Kenmore as a brand that their grandmothers and mothers bought, but that didn’t necessarily speak to them, Owens said. So to update the brand and its image, a new television, in-store and social media campaign was launched.
Brand loyalty is crucial for brand health. Ad agency founder Jim Mullen once said: "Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth."
The wave rolls in every day at noon Manhattan time. It gathers invisibly, out in the digital netherscape. A few minutes before the hour, the online retailer Gilt Groupe blasts out an e-mail, and a hush falls over many a workplace, as phone calls are cut short and spreadsheets minimized. Gilt Groupe is in the business of selling high fashion at deep discounts, and as you might deduce from the company’s name, with its Frenchified “e,” it presents itself as an exclusive club. In reality, that’s just artifice—Gilt is a viral-marketing phenomenon. During the hour after its weekday sales kick off, between noon and 1 p.m., the company claims, its site is visited by an average of roughly 100,000 shoppers. For that time, it might as well be the most crowded store in New York.
Hundreds of messages on the boards at PampersVillage.com have criticized changes to Pampers Cruisers in recent months, but a closer look shows an outsized portion of them came from a couple of posters. Social media might be all about big numbers, but in a surprising number of marketing mishaps, a relatively small handful of people were the sparks that turned into online brushfires.
One thing I learned from my days in traditional advertising is that a brand doesn't exist on shelves—it exists in the hearts and minds of people. Your brand is the sum total of perceptions about your product in the heads of your relevant audience. If that's true, then online media are the most important place for your brand image to be established, defended and grown. This is where your offering comes face-to-face with your audience and where its responses can be measured, shaped and—if need be—countered in real time. This is where perceptions can be built, person by person.
Let's get this straight right away: Return on investment in social media is not measured in how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. It's not calculated in trending topics or YouTube comments. It should, in fact, be held to the same criteria other marketing channels are: Did it move your business? It's done just that at Starbucks, which is a digital marketer worth watching.
The Kaiser Foundation recently released a study documenting the astounding fact that 8-18 year olds in the United States have increased their media use from 8hrs 33 mins per day in 2004 to 10hrs 45 mins in 2009, which means that except for when they sleeping or in school they are almost always consuming media. I call them the 10:45 generation. Regardless of whether you think this is bad news signaling the demise of our children, or good news expecting our progeny are on the way to be becoming more literate in rich media world, as a business leaders we all must face this new reality. In particular, this short post will deal with the issue of managing your brand for the 10:45 generation.
Consumer package-goods companies found a rare point of agreement at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference this week: the need for continued increases in marketing support. Marketers battling private label from Kraft to Procter & Gamble and General Mills promised bigger investments in advertising, in-store promotion, shelf signage, coupons and packaging. Hershey and Heinz, which have lagged the package-food industry in marketing spending, are racing to bridge the gap. Heinz CEO William R. Johnson noted "the industry's renewed focus on innovation and marketing in response to the challenge of store brands."
Richard Saul Wurman is an architect and graphic designer known for sparking debate. In 1984 he founded nonprofit TED and began holding annual events to stir up conversations about technology, entertainment and design. More recently, Wurman is appearing in Web videos to create chatter about a new topic: emissions, cars and the hope for a cleaner environment. Nissan Motor tapped Wurman and other thought leaders in December as part of a year-long marketing effort geared to make more people aware about the impact of emissions on the environment. Wurman and other luminaries, including Swedish designer Marcus Eriksson, appear on in videos a Web site called Journey to Zero that many might miss as being a message from Nissan.
Disney, the company that created "the happiest place on earth" and cornered the market on pink, is embracing a darker aesthetic as it reaches out to an unlikely audience for new merchandise: female "goths." In the run-up to the March 5 opening of director Tim Burton's movie "Alice in Wonderland," Walt Disney Co.'s consumer-products division is aiming its marketing firepower at young women and teenage girls, particularly those who gravitate to darkly romantic entertainment like the "Twilight" series.
Think of someone you know who is graduating from high school in 2010. Maybe it’s your younger cousin, or a niece or nephew. Perhaps it’s your son or daughter. Or perhaps it’s some young folks in your town you may know. Take a minute to think about someone you have watched grow up for the past 15 or so years. Furthermore, let’s acknowledge that your young high school graduate represents, quite literally, the “18” in the coveted “18-35 demographic” that many marketers are constantly trying to reach. Now think about the fact that the high school graduating “Class of 2010” was born around the time that Netscape Navigator arrived—the time when the Web was born.
I believe strongly that, rather than business injecting business values onto our communities to business ends, we really need to turn the tides and teach business how to espouse human values again…or as Gary Hamel writes in his excellent column, put soul back into business. It is human beings, after all, that are necessary to the success of any business (whether employees or customers).
The bowls are getting bigger and steamier, but the soup spoons are going away. Those are among the biggest changes Campbell Soup Co. is making in decades to the iconic labels and shelf displays of its condensed soups—the company's biggest single business, with more than $1 billion in sales. The changes—expected to be announced Wednesday—will culminate a two-year effort by Campbell to figure out how to get consumers to buy more soup. Condensed soup has been a slow-growing category in which budget-conscious consumers have little tolerance for price increases.
Some prestigious brand-name pharmaceutical companies that once looked askance at the high-volume, low-cost business of generic drugs are now becoming major purveyors of generic medicines. Just don’t call them no-name drugs.
Don't be shocked if you can't find your favorite salad dressing or mouthwash on your next trip to Wal-Mart. Large retailers -- including Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), the world's biggest -- are wrestling with having too many types of brand-name products. At the same time, shoppers are buying less and looking for bargains. So unless a particular brand is a top seller in its category, it's getting knocked off the shelf -- and sometimes getting replaced by a cheaper store brand.
Fashion designer Carolina Herrera says she was "shocked" a few months ago when she noticed her $7,990 gray sequined tulle gowns were "selling like hotcakes," relatively speaking. During the downturn, she has had to walk a fine line, trying to cater to frugal consumers without damaging quality or image. But in December, she also opened an elaborate high-end boutique in Las Vegas that sells what she's known for: $3,000 cocktail frocks, $10,000-plus ball gowns and $1,800 skirts. Women who used to buy three dresses at a time and had cut down to one or none have started to spend again, she says.
Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods company behind products such as Tide and Pampers, hopes the Olympics will help it score with penny-pinching shoppers. The Cincinnati company rolled out a $10-million ad campaign Monday, integrating corporate and brand messaging, to win over consumers watching the 2010 Winter Games. The goal? To convince shoppers to buy its premium products. TV and Web ads, themed "Thanks, Mom," announce P&G's efforts to subsidize travel costs for every mother of a Team USA athlete.
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has become one of the more commonly talked about corporate designations in recent years. Given the tremendous marketing potential offered by the new media and proliferation of distribution channels, companies have begun to realize the huge potential of marketing in guiding corporate level strategies and substantially contributing to the financial bottom line. In spite of such an understanding, it is startling to note that the average tenure of a CMO is merely 23 months compared to a CFO that typical lasts 4-5 years on average. Further, not many companies have a senior marketing representative in their C-suite. This begs the question – do companies need a CMO or is the role of a CMO a mere hype? This article probes this question and offers companies some guide posts for better strategic directions.
We all know the statistic and scratch our heads: The average tenure of a CMO is around two years or less. Why? Usually it takes that long to fully understand the intricacies and true insights of most industries, companies and brands. Repeating an action over and over again anticipating a different outcome is a humorous definition of insanity. So are CEOs and boards insane?
No one has seen more changes to the MTV brand than Judy McGrath. The CEO of MTV Networks started with the network in 1981 as a copywriter and eventually ascended the ranks to her current position in 2004, where she has seen many different iterations of the network and its programming even as fellow pioneering executives such as Tom Freston and Robert Pittman have come and gone. One of those changes came as recently as last week, when MTV unveiled the first major on-air update to its logo in its 28-year history. The redesign was met with mixed reaction. "I don't think what they did is wrong," George Lois, creator of the network's historic "I want my MTV" campaign, told Ad Age. "I think what they did is strategic. And it just proves to me that MTV is dead."
Daring Fireball's John Gruber — a Drexel University computer major turned professional blogger — is perhaps the most forceful and articulate defender on the Web of all things Apple (AAPL). He came to Macworld Expo 2010, however, not to praise the company but to probe its vulnerabilities.
As soon as Buzz was announced — before I could try it — I tried to intuit its goals and I found profound opportunities. Now that I’ve tried it, reality and opportunity a fer piece apart. It’s awkward. I’d thought that I had wanted Twitter to be threaded but I was wrong; the simplest point quickly passes into an overdose of add-ons. Worse, Google didn’t think through critical issues of privacy — and it only gets worse (via danah boyd). I won’t go as far as Steve Rubel and some others, who instantly declared Buzz DOA; there is the essence of something important here (which I think will come out in mobile more than the web). But there’s no question: Buzz has kinks.
I came to the conclusion today that marketing is destroying the internet, and a part of the reason why many companies are struggling online.
General Electric, for one, still believes in advertising. As the Olympics begin, the company is introducing its biggest campaign ever aimed at consumers. Called Healthymagination, it publicizes G.E.’s role in the world of doctors and hospitals. In the United States alone, G.E. expects to spend more than $80 million this year on the campaign. Its role in health care is technical: G.E. makes and sells medical devices, like machines that measure bone density and perform M.R.I. scans. But the advertising focuses on the personal.
One of the greatest challenges I encounter today is not the willingness of a brand to engage, but its ability to create. When blueprinting a social media strategy, enthusiasm and support typically derails when examining the resources and commitment required to produce regular content. Indeed, we are programing the social web around our brand hub, which requires a consistent flow of engaging and relevant social objects. Social objects are the catalysts for conversations — online and in real life — and they affect behavior within their respective societies.
The world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, and Procter & Gamble, the world's biggest consumer-products maker, are jointly creating a made-for-TV movie, in an effort to promote "family-friendly" alternatives to what they say is increasingly risqué TV fare. The two advertising heavyweights have teamed up on the two-hour "Secrets of the Mountain," to be broadcast in April on NBC. The movie, which focuses on a single mother who brings her family to a mountainside cabin, highlights values—such as generosity, honesty and togetherness—that Wal-Mart and P&G executives say are in short supply on television.
Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future. I’m not saying for certain that there won’t be agencies in the future, only that the future doesn’t necessarily need agencies. Just like the future doesn’t need printed news but it needs journalism; the future needs commercial communications, but who creates them, the agency or the brand or someone else, is unwritten. And though the future of the agency is unwritten, I have real doubts that agencies will survive or should survive.
PepsiCo ditched the Super Bowl this year to make a major social media play. Instead of spending money for ad time on the Super Bowl, it's relying primarily on digital initiatives to spread the word about its Internet-based Refresh Project contest and charity campaign. The cause-marketing effort is a good one. Word is spreading through traditional media, online networks, social media and celebrity chatter. But I believe Pepsi made a big mistake in giving up its long-held Super Bowl ad real estate. A more integrated media approach--one that included the Super Bowl--would be a savvy play for Pepsi. And such integration is something top marketing executives need to keep in mind in their rush to embrace digital initiatives.
We've seen and heard this commercial a thousand times, the one with the flawless model posing in an ad for facial-blemish cream... an extremely powerful cleaner that removes every trace of dirt in one effortless wipe... the picture-perfect baby modeling the 100% waterproof diaper. In these scenarios, there's not even a hint of a single red spot, a stubborn stain, or a bedraggled mother. This is the story of the past 50 years of commercials, and they all have one thing in common: perfect brands in perfect environments. But there is a strong case to be made for imperfection. Nothing is ever perfect, and even when it appears to be so, we are subconsciously looking for the flaw. Because our point of connection lies in imperfection--it's what makes something unique and, ultimately, authentic.
Be afraid, Madison Avenue. Be very afraid. That seems to be the message in the aftermath of the crowded, frenetic advertising bowl that took place inside Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday. Among those commercials consistently deemed most effective, memorable and talked-about, many were created or suggested by consumers — or produced internally by the sponsors — rather than the work of agency professionals.
Hello, Hollywood. On the heels of the Foursquare-Bravo TV deal, news of several additional major media partnerships involving the location-based social networking app have dropped this evening. According to various reports, Zagat, Warner Bros., HBO, the History Channel and ExploreChicago have all been added to Foursquare’s media and entertainment mix. Here are the partnerships that appear to be live or coming very soon:
Panicky poultry, a battered Betty White and a series of violent ads for Doritos provided plenty of laughs during Sunday night's Super Bowl, even with the weak economy prompting several heavy-hitting advertisers to sit out the Big Game.
Pepsi's Refresh Project, a first-of-its-kind experiment in social media that invests the brand in community-building projects, won't simply leave a legacy for the recipients of its financial grants. It's also a pivotal test case for other brands trying to navigate an ad-cluttered, cynic-rich marketing landscape.
If you're a marketer who has steered clear of Twitter, your (non)strategy may be paying off! It's possible that this Twitter thing may just take care of itself. In the middle of last year, Twitter's growth slowed from 7.8 million new users a month to 6.2 million, according to a recent study from RJ Metrics. That report also found that only 17 percent of Twitter users updated their accounts in December -- an all-time low. An earlier study by the Nielsen Co. revealed 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Taking that into account, it's tempting to conclude that Twitter is following in the footsteps of another social-media ghost town, Second Life.
Chances are, a good portion of your target audience is actively engaged in online games. And if they're there, you should be there, too. Gamers are not passive observers; they're active and motivated participants. Brands have a chance to be part of that experience -- often in the very moment when players are willing to give something to get ahead in the game. This is a level of attention that few, if any, other media can offer.
Toyota’s recalls and disclosures in recent months are part of a lengthy pattern in which the automaker has often reacted slowly to safety concerns, in some instances making design changes without telling customers about problems with vehicles already on the road, an examination of its record shows.
What does your search engine say about you? Well, if it's Bing, you're probably an early adopter, but you also visit, shop and ultimately make purchases from Walmart more than other search-engine users. Google searchers, on the other hand, are partial to Target and Amazon, and Yahoo searchers have a strong preference for wireless service from AT&T and Sprint.
Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every division from the inside out. What starts with one champion in any given division, be it customer service, marketing, public relations, advertising, interactive, et al, eventually inspires an entire organization to socialize. What starts with one, a domino effect usually ensues toppling each department, gaining momentum, and triggering a sense of urgency through its path. And, it also marks the beginning of our journey through the ten stages of social media integration. But where do we start?
Today, as the globe struggles with an historic economic decline, it's time for a new revolution. I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Today's great competitive challenge isn't going from Good to Great. For people, companies, and countries, it's going from great to good.
Are companies, with all their good intentions, getting the most from open innovation? We suspect that the initial successes, encouraging as they are, represent only the beginning. What if open innovation were defined more broadly and more ambitiously? Could even greater value be realized? If so, what would the next wave of open innovation look like?
$560 million and counting in 17 days — that's how much donors have given to 40 U.S. charities surveyed by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Why the outpouring of cash? It's not just because people are dying. Innocent people are dying by the hundreds of thousands every day under the most horrific circumstances, but we don't see $560 million pouring into any of their causes in two and a half weeks. It's not because people are buried alive. People are buried alive every day by the scourge of AIDS and malaria, and literally in diamond and precious metals mines, but we don't see half a billion dollars materializing overnight for these causes.
A new report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report indicates that marketers are under-valuing perks, discounts, deals and additional service opportunities, as customers give them high marks. Both customers and marketers agree that deeper engagement and personalized contact drives loyalty.
While the reviewers pick apart Apple's iPad, one unassailable argument remains: We are not just living in digital times, but on digital time. From getting news to reading the latest best-selling novel, to watching reruns of Gilligan's Island, most of the content, products, information and entertainment we enjoy is available with a click. Consumers are conditioned to get what they want when they want it. I'm not sure this "double-click mentality" is necessarily a healthy thing, but it's real, and the reality has huge implications for marketing and media executives. People want things that are immediate and convenient. Woe to marketers--even bricks-and-mortar retailers--that don't get this. Double-click gratification is a table stake.
My first exposure to the term "social media" came courtesy of Ted Leonsis, former VP of AOL, back in 1998. At the time, I was one of the leaders of Procter & Gamble's first interactive marketing team, and Leonsis was briefing us on a new tool called ICQ ("I Seek You"), created by an Israeli company AOL had just purchased, Mirabelis. What Leonsis put on our lap was akin to instant messaging on steroids. He had no clue how P&G might take advantage of this curious tool. There was no "ad model," per se, and he even had doubts whether advertising was appropriate. He just thought we needed to internalize its capabilities -- what with tens of millions of global consumers, mostly teens, using an insanely wired and networked desktop device with so many hieroglyphic style icons, it would make your head spin.
There certainly will be advertising winners (and losers) on Super Bowl Sunday but let's hope that the Monday morning quarterback chatter doesn't obscure the larger shift at hand for marketers this year. 2010 will be the year of the "platform" for advertisers. Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal is to meaningfully engage consumers on multiple levels.
The frequent question asked of the design community is of its value to business. The query itself makes little sense. Quite simply, the role of designers has always been to translate and communicate the value of a business idea to consumers. The best designers can do far more—they can help companies connect and establish a dialogue with consumers, thus enabling firms to innovate more efficiently. The challenge for most corporations today is about how to innovate while mitigating risk. For consumers, choices are made by balancing the need for evolution with the force of habit. Designers are trained to understand how people think and how to make things. For this reason, there are four basic areas in which design has an important role to play in value creation.
Fueled by the music industry's ongoing turmoils and, finally, books going digital at a very rapid pace, there is a lot of debate on how to deal with the fact that many people habitually share i.e. redistribute digital content without any of the upstream users making their own payment. How can you monetize content when the copy is free? This question is a key issue across the board, whether it's in music, eBooks, news, publishing, TV or movies. The fear is, of course, that once a digital item has been purchased by one person it can be easily forwarded to anyone else if it is in an open format, thus seriously reducing the possibility that someone else will actually pay real $ for it, as well (of course, the same is true for supposedly locked or protected digital content as well - it just takes a bit longer). No more control over distribution = no more money. Right?
The mea culpa and brand-saving by Toyota Motor Corp. began today, as the embattled carmaker launched a public relations defensive on all fronts -- print, TV and social-media networks -- in a bid to salvage its image in the wake of the 2.3 million vehicle recall.
Though there's still widespread disagreement of just when the industry will put the recession firmly behind it, one thing's clear: Whenever it happens, marketers had better be ready. Forward thinkers such as Allstate, Walmart, New Balance, Macy's, Procter & Gamble, McDonald's and Bank of America are already paving the way to recovery by spending on marketing and product innovation, cementing relationships with new consumers and rewarding loyalists who stuck by their brands during the bad times. They are also creating products and messaging that bridge from recession to recovery.
When the Vancouver Olympic Games kick off on Feb. 12, visitors will find café furniture made from pine-beetle-salvaged wood, drink out of bottles made from 30% plant-based materials, and their beverages will be delivered via hybrid vehicles and electric cart. All are elements of Coca-Cola's first zero-waste, carbon-neutral sponsorship. The effort has been years in the making, beginning with a relatively simple recycling effort for the Athens Olympic Games in 2000. Since then the company has layered in additional elements, like environmentally friendly coolers and shirts made out of plastic bottles.
The more, the better. That’s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.” Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we’re told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence. Yet Apple, a creativity factory meticulously built by Steven P. Jobs since he returned to the company in 1997, suggests another innovation formula — one more elitist and individual.
Not so long ago, financiers ruled the roost at the glitzy annual gathering of the global economic elite here in the Swiss Alps. At this year's gathering of the World Economic Forum, the unofficial theme seems to be, "First, kill all the bankers." The ire directed at bankers from all sides is palpable, acknowledged Donald Moore, chairman of Morgan Stanley in Europe, as he stood alone reading some charts amidst the hubbub at the forum's Global Village cafe. Asked which other groups of people have been similarly unpopular in Davos in the past, he said: "terrorists."
Long the quality and efficiency standard-setter, Toyota now has an ostrich-sized egg on its face — a problem with sticking accelerator pedals that led to global product recalls and a suspension of production and sales. There are important lessons to be learned from Toyota's stumble: Competitive success is fluid. It depends on continuously discovering better ways to do work. The capabilities to do this are powerful but fragile and need constant reinforcement. Relentless attention to their development can lead to great success; conversely, a loss in attention can have grave consequences.
You have to give it to Apple. The company has an uncanny knack for seizing the moment and whipping journalists and consumers into a frenzy. The latest wave comes from today's launch of the iPad tablet with iBookstore content store. As always, there's a lot to like about Apple's device. The user interface looks great, the bookstore seems intuitive, and Apple set a price point (at least for the entry level iPad) that positions the device well in the marketplace. The hype bar was set so high that inevitably some people were disappointed - Dan Frommer from Silicon Alley Insider called it a big "yawn" that won't define publishing the way many experts projected.
Modern capitalism can be broken down into two major eras. The first, managerial capitalism, began in 1932 and was defined by the then radical notion that firms ought to have professional management. The second, shareholder value capitalism, began in 1976. Its governing premise is that the purpose of every corporation should be to maximize shareholders’ wealth. If firms pursue this goal, the thinking goes, both shareholders and society will benefit. This is a tragically flawed premise, and it is time we abandoned it and made the shift to a third era: customer-driven capitalism.
When it comes to innovation, many executives in the consumer goods industry are chasing Apple. Who can blame them? While most retailers spent the holiday season slashing prices, Apple reported record earnings by enchanting audiences with iPhones. Now, as retailers try to re-engage consumers this year, executives are trying to replicate the "Apple thrill." But focusing exclusively on product innovation is a mistake for most companies, say executives who gathered recently at Berglass + Associates, my company, to discuss innovation.
Steve Jobs is walking the same path as Walt Disney. As soon as California’s Disneyland was completed, Walt knew he had made a terrible mistake by not securing the surrounding real estate. He had built this wonderful destination but his oversight allowed hotel chains and restaurants to come in and make more money off his customers than he did. So Walt immediately went to Orlando, FL and built Disneyworld the right way. The moral of the story is that Steve Jobs is not someone you want to depend on for your livelihood. His goal is to build a closed digital neighborhood where Apple (AAPL) controls who makes money and who doesn’t. I'll bet that in one of those Apple board meetings that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt used to attend, he realized that Jobs was on the verge of building AppleWorld and he's been scared ever since.
One of the most common fears I focus on defeating among executives and brand managers is that in new media brands lose control by publishing content and engaging in social networks. The general sentiment is that by sharing information and creating presences within public communities that they, by the nature of democratized participation, invite negative responses in addition to potentially positive and neutral interaction. By not fully embracing the social Web, many believe that they retain a semblance of control. The idea is that if brands abstain from providing a forum for hosting potentially disparaging commentary, it will prevent it from earning an audience – in this case, an audience that can impact the business and the reputation of the brand.
When Time Warner Cable was tussling over fees with the News Corporation, it did something that would have been unthinkable in the backrooms where deals were once struck: it hired a political consultant to mount a public campaign against its own client.
According to the 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, an online survey by Opinion Research Corporation among a representative U.S. sample of 1,048 adults, comprising "new media users," 44% of American new media users are searching for, sharing or discussing information about corporate responsibility (CR) efforts and programs and are highly confident they can have an effect on business.
Quick: Describe your company's business model. Having trouble? That wouldn't surprise me. In reality, there isn't really any consensus about what the term "business model" even means. Suggestions range from the all-encompassing, everything-in-your-value-chain approach to the reductionist "A business model is nothing else than a representation of how an organization makes (or intends to make) money."
NBC has mopped up its late-night mess. The network now faces a more challenging task: rebuilding its evening hours after years of cost cuts and creative missteps. NBC executives are saying they plan to spend at least 30% more than last year to develop TV series for the fall, and 20% more to market the shows, although they didn't attach a dollar figure to the estimate. The General Electric Co. network, which has seen its ratings and profit slide since 2005, is working on 18 to 20 pilot episodes for new shows, up from 11 last spring.
2010 is the beginning of a new era for business. We've mastered quality. Squeezed every drop out of efficiency. Saturated the marketplace with innovation. And we're using advanced information and communication technologies to reshape the very fabric of our marketplace concepts and relations. So what's next? Certainly not "branding;" at least not in the conventional sense. The notion that a marketplace offering is a static, transactional thing that needs the right injection of cosmetics and communication to bring it to life is flawed thinking in today's environment.
Here's what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th. "They built giant, globe-spanning organizations, that employed tens of thousands of people working around the clock, to produce... sugar water, fast food, disposable razors, and gas guzzlers. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the paradigm of 20th Century capitalism was its astonishing lack of ambition. Rarely in history has such a void, a poverty of imagination been so deeply woven into the fabric of humankind's economic systems."
With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry—and expand Apple's influence and revenue as a content middleman. In developing the device, Apple focused on the role the gadget could play in homes and in classrooms, say people familiar with the situation. The company envisions that the tablet can be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email in homes, these people say.
Having a great product is no longer a guarantee of success. A Bain & Co. survey notes that 80 percent of CEOs believe that their product is differentiated, but only 8 percent of consumers agree. To truly stand out in the market, a product must embody the characteristics of its brand. But, with all the hoopla around branding, it’s no wonder that companies are continually lured into believing that their brand is their product and their product is their brand.
In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No Label." The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters."
During my early years in large scale project management with GE, I was exposed to an idea by an outside advisor which he referred to as the three knobs. In essence, every project is ultimately controlled by turning (up or down): 1. The time knob - The duration of a project (e.g. implementation, ROI, etc.); 2. The money knob - The dollar investment; and/or 3. The people knob - The human capital investment.
The irony of the report that The New York Times is going to start metering readers and charging those who come back more often is this: They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least.
Yahoo’s Chinese partner issued a scathing criticism of the US technology company at the weekend, calling it “reckless” for publicly supporting Google’s threat to quit the country in protest over a wave of Chinese cyberattacks. Alibaba Group, in which Yahoo holds a 40 per cent stake, said it had “communicated to Yahoo that Yahoo’s statement that it is ‘aligned’ with the position Google took last week was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence. Alibaba doesn’t share this view”.
At its height, NBC was the very model of what a television network should be. With iconic programming, enviable ratings and spectacular business success, the peacock network delivered plenty of laughs along the way with “The Cosby Show,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” Nobody is laughing anymore. Today the network is in shambles, brought down not just by the challenges facing broadcast television — fragmenting audiences, an advertising downturn — but also by a series of executive missteps that have made its prime-time lineup a perennial loser and, most recently, turned its late night programming schedule into a media circus that threatens the lucrative “Tonight Show” franchise.
For most marketers, the growth of multicultural segments became a business imperative after the 2000 Census and the generational focus shifted from boomer to Gen Y. If you're managing a large brand today, you are likely addressing these opportunities through some combination of targeted Hispanic, African American or Asian, and youth-marketing initiatives. But today that segmentation is not enough; a bigger change is emerging that is more meaningful than just demography.
In the post below, on Google standing up to China over its spying on dissidents and censorship, I note how Zeit Online calls Google a quasi-state — in a post under the headline “The Google Republic” — and Fallows says Google “broke diplomatic relations with China” as if Google were a nation. What this says, of course, is that the internet is the New World and Google is its biggest colonizer: the sun never sets on Google.
A hill, a giant chasm, and a cloud-covered peak. Close your eyes and picture a lopsided "M" for a second. That's the new landscape of advantage. And the recent skirmish between Google and China is its best example yet. On one side is the old high ground of the industrial era capitalism; on the other, the new high(er) ground of next-generation capitalism. The yawning chasm in between them is the gap between the 20th century and the 21st.
After years of bidding up fees for the rights to televise sports, U.S. media companies are putting on the brakes. Richard Carrion, a member of the International Olympic Committee's executive board, said the organization is seriously considering delaying until next year the bidding for the U.S. media rights for the 2014 and 2016 Olympics because of the ongoing struggles of broadcasters hurt by a rocky advertising market.
When Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn said two years ago that he was determined to zoom past Toyota to become the world's biggest automaker, the notion seemed laughable. At the time, the German automaker sold 3 million fewer vehicles than Toyota, was losing ground in the U.S., and had a reputation for iffy quality. Toyota, then set to pass General Motors as the best-selling carmaker on the planet, seemed unassailable.
When Barry Judge, chief marketing officer of Best Buy, started his Twitter feed in mid-2008, he was anxious. He recalls fretting: "What if my tweets are boring, and what if no one follows me?" He had worked at Best Buy for more than eight years at that point but he was a social media neophyte. Now Judge finds himself tweeting a couple times a day. He has nearly 14,000 followers. Now he can't imagine doing his job without using social media, which he uses to communicate with Best Buy colleagues and customers.
U.S. government officials and business leaders were supportive but wary of taking sides in Google Inc.'s battle with China, a sign of the delicate tensions between the growing superpower and the West. The White House said it would wait to comment until China responded to Google's threat to bolt from China, over censorship and alleged cyber spying. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke called Google's charge that it and dozens of companies were hacked "troubling" and encouraged China "to work with Google and other U.S. companies to ensure a climate for secure commercial operations in the Chinese market."
Most of the marketing rules we lived by just five years ago are practically obsolete. The industry has faced more changes in the last five years than in the previous 50. Let's face it, there's no point in improving broken legacy models. Since necessity is the mother of invention, let's not waste this recession and instead use it to rethink how we go about branding in this new decade.
In a post-recessionary world, trust has moved from the individual to the corporate realm. It is one of the most important issues that business organizations face when it comes to the future of their brands. A 2008 study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council found that some 99% of customers surveyed said they would either scale back or terminate relationships with companies that fail at building customer trust. In the past, trust may not have seemed like a natural part of management's role, but these days it is a critical part of every business, one proven to have an effect on the bottom line. Customers need to see that a solid foundation has been built within a business and that their needs will be addressed--especially in times of crisis.
I gave myself a deadline of January 15 to do a recap of identity work in the 2000s, assuming that it wouldn’t be an editorial faux pas to do a list of this sort well into the new year. So here it is. An admittedly incomplete — it would take months to do this exhaustively — compilation of the most relevant identities of the past decade. The choices are listed chronologically and there is no ranking system, they are simply there as records of the corporations, products and services that shaped the decade and the identities that helped (or didn’t help) shape their perception in consumers’ eyes and minds.
In the midst of every marketing meeting, there comes that point where the entire room leans forward in their seats. The tension heightens. There's an almost palpable sense of voyeurism; everyone strains toward the reveal of that titillating morsel that represents insider access. And the question is asked: "So, what's the consumer insight?" The strategist slowly rises and says, "We always knew that the consumers say this, but did you know that they really do this?" Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's shock and awe time. As a planner at heart, that's my bread and butter. What this very authentic example of consumer-insight fetishism raises is the question of what to do when your brand represents one thing but consumers are searching for another. Said differently, what can be done when your brand marketing becomes more about reflecting the reality of your consumers and less about your brand's aspirational identity? To keep your unique brand-driven narrative alive and prevent it from turning into a slow-moving episode of "60 Minutes," there are a few things that I believe every marketer should strive to do.
UBS AG Tuesday issued an employee code explicitly banning staff from helping clients cheat on their taxes, as part of the Swiss bank's effort to restore its reputation after a messy U.S. probe into hidden offshore accounts. "We do not provide assistance to clients or colleagues in acts aimed at deceiving tax authorities," according to the code, which is prefaced with remarks from UBS Chairman Kaspar Villiger and Chief Executive Oswald Grübel. The code, which also addresses issues such as financial crime, competition, confidentiality and diversity, is meant as a response to wrongdoing in UBS's U.S. offshore arm, which has since been shuttered.
This interview with Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos.com, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned? A. After college, a roommate and I started a company called LinkExchange in 1996, and it grew to about 100 or so people, and then we ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998. From the outside, it looked like it was a great acquisition, $265 million, but most people don’t know the real reason why we ended up selling the company.
A decade ago, America Online merged with Time Warner in a deal valued at a stunning $350 billion. It was then, and is now, the largest merger in American business history. The Internet, it was believed, was soon to vaporize mainstream media business models on the spot. America Online’s frothy stock price made it worth twice as much as Time Warner’s with less than half the cash flow.
Sir Richard Branson has begun his assault on the financial industry with the purchase on Friday of a little-known private bank as a launchpad for a fully fledged business. Virgin Money, the personal finance arm of Sir Richard’s company, is buying Somerset-based Church House Trust, which has 3,000 customers and no branches, for £12.3m.
A decade ago, Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had an epiphany. The leadership at his son’s elementary school had asked him to meet with its retiring principal to figure out how it could replicate her success. He discovered that the principal thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy — the same approach taken by the managing partner of a successful international law firm in town. “The ‘Eureka’ moment was when I could draw a data point between a hotshot, investment bank-oriented star lawyer and an elementary school principal,” Mr. Martin recalls. “I thought: ‘Holy smokes. In completely different situations, these people are thinking in very similar ways, and there may be something special about this pattern of thinking.’ ”
By now many marketers have probably played around Foursquare or Gowalla or know someone who has. For the uninitiated, these are location-based mobile applications that allow people to "check in" from stadiums, bars and bookstores and compete for "mayorship," collect badges and share tips. They are practical, addicting and lots of fun. Users of these services number in the hundreds of thousands today. That's small by national advertiser standards, but it's significant for many local advertisers, which are offering discounts to frequent visitors and offers to people who are physically nearby. This is a trend in local marketing worth noting because it promises to give national advertisers the opportunity to conjure up or attach to an emotion among smaller niche groups.
The buzz is palpable about Apple's plans to announce a tablet computer later this month. I think it's instructive as to the function and uses of conversation. Apple is a company that has utterly shunned the social media campaigns that have displaced more old-fashioned ways to waste consumers' time. It has no Twitter feed, provides no payola to twentysomethings so that they’ll blog about its products, and I bet it would happily ignore a request for comment from the President if asked. It doesn't talk. Apple does.
A number of retailers raised earnings forecasts Thursday after reporting healthy December sales gains, the fourth month in a row of year-over-year sales increases. Sales for the five weeks ended in early January rose 2.9% compared with the prior year, the best monthly showing since April 2008, according to a Thomson Reuters index of 30 retailers. Total holiday-season sales grew 1.8%, overcoming a tepid start in November with a late surge before Christmas, according to a similar index of 33 retailers by the International Council of Shopping Centers.
Ford recently wrapped the first chapter of its Fiesta Movement, leaving us distinctly wiser about marketing in the digital space. Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, "agents" used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.
Board members at Cadbury PLC, resisting a hostile takeover bid by Kraft Foods Inc., have held talks with directors at Hershey Co. to encourage a rival offer, several people familiar with the matter said. The Cadbury board members have told the Hershey directors that they would support a bid by the Pennsylvania company, and they have provided some guidance on the kind of price that would draw board support, these people said. In these talks, Hershey has sought direction from Cadbury and disclosed financial terms and the structure of a possible offer. Hershey has also inquired whether Cadbury would be open to selling certain assets, these people said. In response, Cadbury has provided "reasonable guidance without specifics," said one of the people.
General Motors Co. will make money in 2010, its chairman said Wednesday, a bold and surprising forecast for a business that exited bankruptcy proceedings just last summer and hasn't turned an annual profit since 2004. "My prediction is we will be" profitable in 2010, Edward E. Whitacre Jr. told reporters at GM's Detroit headquarters, a sign of rising confidence that also sets a tough benchmark for the still-struggling car maker's employees. "Do we have obstacles in the way? Yes. But we have a good management team and a good plan in place."
So Google's got a new phone now. Internet coverage is predictably hyperbolic, though Scott Anthony smartly puts the phone's potential to make waves into the future tense, and the New York Times' typically giddy David Pogue was downright snarky in his review. Nevertheless, the tech industry is atwitter with a fresh new rivalry. Mac versus PC is so last decade. Now, it's "Hello I'm an iPhone." "And I'm a Nexus One." I vote for Rainn Wilson playing Google in the commercials.
Coca-Cola today has a market capitalization in excess of $100 billion because the perceived value of its brand is significantly higher than the sum total of all the assets of the company. In my years with Procter & Gamble and Heinz, I have come to realize that no matter what the product or service, the key principles for building a great brand remain the same. By staying true to these seven principles, a marketer can weather economic highs and lows while building an iconic brand for target consumers.
The coverage of Google's Nexus One "superphone" - officially unveiled today - was swift and almost universally positive. The HTC-designed device looks beautiful, its functionality sounds fantastic, and by all accounts it looks like a viable competitor to Apple and Research in Motion in the smartphone market. In this case, however, there's more to the story. Google's distribution approach has the potential to dramatically accelerate a broad disruption in the mobile phone market where the balance of power shifts from carriers and retailers to device, software, and applications providers.
Special K, the 54-year-old Kellogg brand, has in recent years aimed at women with its “Special K Challenge,” which recommends replacing two meals daily with cereal and curtailing snacking to lose up to six pounds in two weeks. The popularity of the plan led the brand to expand to nine flavors and develop noncereal products like frozen waffles, protein bars, crackers, shakes and powdered drink mixes that can be substituted for cereal at mealtimes or eaten as the two daily snacks the plan permits. Despite all those products to sell, a new series of Special K commercials, by the Chicago office of Leo Burnett, part of the Publicis Groupe, features none of them.
Kraft Foods Inc. sweetened its hostile takeover offer for Cadbury PLC on Tuesday, offering to tweak the cash-and-share mix of its $16 billion bid, but Cadbury and some of its investors quickly dismissed the new bid as still too low. The new offer follows an agreement Kraft reached to sell its U.S. and Canadian frozen pizza business to Nestlé SA, the Swiss consumer giant, for $3.7 billion. Kraft said it would use net proceeds from the deal, which it estimates at 60 pence (97 U.S. cents) per Cadbury share, to give Cadbury shareholders a "partial cash alternative" to its existing offer, which had been made up of 60% Kraft stock and 40% cash.
Happy New Year! I hope you had a great holiday and you are as excited as I am about kicking off 2010! After the long hard haul of 2009, I’m eager to see business get off to a fresh start this year. It’s impossible to know exactly what the New Year will bring, but I’m confident more attention will be paid to brands and brand-building. That’s because there are at least three key areas that I see brands having an immediate and significant impact in.
In a manifesto-like e-mail message sent last month to all Google employees, Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president for product management, told them to commit to greater transparency and open industry standards. Rather than hoard knowledge to exploit it, he wrote in “The Meaning of Open,” share it and watch Google and the entire Internet prosper. With the Chrome browser, however, Google’s inclusive principles are being put to the test: a new version of the browser allows, one might even say encourages, users to stop Google ads from appearing. How Google got to such a position speaks to the inherent dynamism (or is that chaos?) of business on the Internet.
Imagine a planetarium-style presentation about the future of technology, followed by a tour of dozens of hands-on exhibits — whether of sandlike microparticles that flow like liquid in a beaker, pictures that appear three-dimensional or concrete that floats. Is it the latest science museum, or a new Disney attraction? No, it’s the “World of Innovation” showroom, a cornerstone of the 3M Company’s customer innovation center at its headquarters in St. Paul. In a world of online user communities, social media, interactive blogs and other technological means for companies to elicit customer feedback, you might think that face-to-face interaction is a thing of the past. Think again.
Some have asked, Where does social media live? Is it marketing? Is it public relations? Is it IT or corporate? Is it a combination of multiple business units and functions, and if so, who leads the efforts and how does an organization choose partners? These are valid and complex questions, currently with no simple answers. Social media is still emerging and being defined in real time. There's a question missing from that litany, one that organizations or individuals rarely ask themselves: Do you live social? Many organizations simply skip this question because they assume that they themselves don't have to be social (open and collaborative) to reap the rewards (cost savings, marketing ROI, effective reputation management, and search engine juice) they think they might get from social media.
Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. pulled its Food Network and HGTV channels off Cablevision Systems Corp. early Friday morning after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement in a year-end negotiations over carriage fees. Cablevision's agreement to carry the Scripps channels expired at midnight Thursday, and Scripps warned subscribers Thursday that its Food Network and HGTV channels may be "dropped from your TV lineup," as another contentious negotiation over programming fees spilled into public view.
Yesterday we posted the first five digital-marketing predictions from Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic, which looked at mobility, geo-location, viral marketing, gaming and online display. Today, we bring you the final five. And we want to know -- do you agree? What do you think will be the big issues of 2010? Here's the rest of the predictions for 2010.
In our discussions about what will happen in the digital marketing industry during the next 12 months, one overarching trend emerged: The basic rules of brand building are just as important for innovations in the digital space as they are for traditional forms of communication. Using new technology won't in itself bring success; your digital communications still need to be creative, engaging and relevant if they are to cut it during the second decade of this century. Here are the first five of our top 10 trends for 2010.
YouTube, the video site owned by Google, is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. But Hunter Walk still thinks of it as an underdog. For Mr. Walk, director of product management at YouTube, the competition is not other Web sites: it’s TV.
Time Warner Cable Inc. and News Corp. traded barbs on Wednesday as they face a New Year's deadline in their landmark fight over TV-programming fees. If the fight remains unresolved it will threaten millions of cable-TV subscribers with the loss of Fox broadcast programs, including big football games, in coming days.
At year’s end, I have an unhappy thought, that some of the creative professionals who rose to prominence in the first decade of the 21st century will be eclipsed by the end of the decade coming, that the first decade of the 21st century will be, for some creative professionals, a brief moment in the sun. This suspicion turns on three propositions.
Reasons to feel bearish about Microsoft aren't hard to find. But it's the software giant's diminishing profile in the mobile world that is the talk of Silicon Valley right now. The explosion of mobile applications on devices like Apple's iPhone and Motorola's Droid presages far-reaching changes in consumer behavior. Google gets that. Aside from helping develop the Android mobile operating system, the company plans to buy mobile ad firm AdMob. And now it is working on plans to sell its own phone. It's a different story at Microsoft.
Think back, way back, to the last time you were in a 7-Eleven. Recall the smell, the light, the products on the shelf, the linoleum under foot, the clerk behind the counter. It’s as if everything that is bad and wrong in the ordinary world has assembled in a kind of jamboree of awfulness. When I used to frequent one in downtown Boston, I would shuffle around endlessly looking for something to eat. And I came to the conclusion that with the exception of a token apple or two, only artificial food is allowed in this place. If you ate here exclusively for a month (instead of at McDonald’s), there is no chance you would complete the assignment.
Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it. A blizzard of speculation is building over Apple's as-yet-unconfirmed release of a tablet computer. Among other things, the tablet is expected to offer e-books and TV programs. Apple has been trying to get TV networks to license their programming for a subscription service planned as part of a revamp of iTunes, presumably with the tablet in mind.
Google will start the new year with a mobile product announcement, setting the stage for what is turning into a showdown with its former ally Apple over mobile computing devices. The search group revealed earlier this month that it had issued employees with a mobile device to test, though it did not give details. On Tuesday it disclosed that it would hold an event at its headquarters in Silicon Valley next Tuesday for a mobile announcement, prompting speculation that the device would be unveiled.
When asked what his title as president of Google’s sales operations and business development means, Nikesh Arora answers: “I’m basically responsible for the business side.” At Google – whose engineers can sometimes be accused of being on missions unconnected with the bottom line – this means working out the future of advertising in the digital economy Google helped create.
Media companies would be better off handing their online video activities to Google’s YouTube video-sharing site than pursuing home-grown efforts such as Hulu.com and the US cable industry’s TV Everywhere initiative, according to senior Google executives.
It’s hard to argue that 2009 wasn’t the year of Twitter. Yes, the questions about monetization loomed over the young web company as soon as it started gaining popularity, and they’re still largely unanswered. But people loved this new way of communicating via 140 character messages that go out to everyone who wants to hear them. So much so, that everything else (even money) wasn’t very important.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain Remember that quote. In 2010 the very best marketers, PR professionals, and social media consultants will put data at the center of everything they do. For anyone unfamiliar with these concepts, just as with social media, data marketing may seem opaque or intimidating at the beginning. The only way you ever learn is by jumping in headfirst — become a data nerd, because data nerds are changing the world.
What’s the future of videogame controllers? Microsoft is betting that it’s no controller at all. The company’s new Xbox 360 interface, codenamed Project Natal, uses a depth sensor, directional microphones, and a lo-res camera to read your gestures — grip an imaginary steering wheel, for instance, to control a car onscreen. The technology is bound to be a game-changer, so we asked three industry visionaries what kinds of games they’d design for it.
Apple has something big up its sleeve for next month. The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans. Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.
What's the best business reaction to a recession? How about none at all. Unlike many outfits in the struggling restaurant industry, Panera, the soup and sandwich chain with more than 1,300 stores in 38 states, has stayed strong by standing still. "The key to Panera's success lies in what the company hasn't done," says Nicole Miller Regan, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. "Panera hasn't fallen victim to discounting. It hasn't levered up the balance sheet. It hasn't tried to change." Such calm amidst the storm has paid off for shareholders. Panera stock is up 26% this year: in fact, it's one of the best performing stocks of the decade, having generated a whopping 1,560.65% return.
The AP lists the status of six newspaper companies that have declared bankruptcy: Tribune, Freedom, Philadelphia, Sun-Times, Journal Register, Star-Tribune, representing 66 daily newspapers among them. Mostly they are using bankruptcy merely to restructure the debt they shouldn’t have gotten themselves into in the first place — the debt that nearly killed them. Often they are leaving in place vestiges of the legacy management that made those bad decisions and did not make the brave strategic moves the digital age demanded. Tragically, none of them has used the great if difficult opportunity bankruptcy gives them to reinvent their businesses and themselves.
Last week I sent an email to Googlers about the meaning of "open" as it relates to the Internet, Google, and our users. In the spirit of openness, I thought it would be appropriate to share these thoughts with those outside of Google as well. At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important.
CBS Corp. and Walt Disney Co. are considering participating in Apple Inc.'s plan to offer television subscriptions over the Internet, according to people familiar with the matter, as Apple prepares a potential new competitor to cable and satellite TV.
To understand the challenges that faced businesses the past 10 years, consider the household names that didn't make it through the decade: Anheuser-Busch, Compaq, Gillette, Enron, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, WorldCom. Companies always fail or get acquired. But the past decade was unusually tumultuous: Two investment bubbles grew, then burst, each followed by a recession. The Internet matured into a crucial cog of commerce and spawned innovative upstarts while ravaging one traditional industry after another. Global players from emerging economies muscled their way into business's top ranks. Wall Street was remade almost overnight by the financial crisis. And governments reversed a decades-long retreat to lay a more forceful hand on the global economy.
Condensing The Economist’s thoughtful articles into 140-character bursts may challenge the synthesising skills of its reporters. But that this most established of media organisations should embrace social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook shows the value that publishers and broadcasters attach to them.
In 2007 Steve Jobs launched the iPhone with a fanfare of fiery rhetoric. The iPhone, Apple's chief executive claimed, was three "revolutionary" devices in one. Combining a touch-controlled iPod media player, a phone and an "internet communicator", the iPhone was "a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been". In contrast, when Mr Jobs introduced the App store a little less than 18 months ago, his vocabulary was considerably more muted.
Stung by criticism that their megastores shutter mom-and-pop shops, Wal-Mart officials are offering to rent space in the lobby of a new Chicago store to neighborhood businesses. Wal-Mart’s tenants already include a dog groomer at a store in north suburban Zion and an Uncle Remus fried chicken outlet in its only Chicago store, on the West Side.
As we begin a one-year celebration of the ANA's 100th anniversary, we have created the Marketers' Constitution, which contains 10 essentials of marketing for the next 100 years. Its purpose is to ensure that our industry continues to thrive and contribute to the growth of the U.S. economy and to the well-being of our society.
"We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world," writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. "Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves." Brooks' explanation about choice of narrative can apply to leaders seeking ways to navigate our recession. The relentless tide of bad news may tempt those in charge to adopt a pessimistic view point, but leaders owe it to their followers to spread optimism. Without excluding reality, leaders need to inspire not simply hope, but also resilience. Storytelling can help in this effort. Here are some suggestions for crafting your own story to make sense of adversity.
Oracle Corp.'s quarterly profit jumped 12% and sales exceeded its expectations, a sign that corporate technology spending may be poised to rebound from one of the sector's worst-ever slumps. The business software company also said it expects European antitrust regulators—after months of delays—to approve its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January without conditions. Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., is seen as an industry barometer because it sells a wide variety of software to a broad mix of businesses. It is also among the first tech companies to report results that include the month of November. Throughout the fall, a number of companies in the sector have released upbeat forecasts or earnings results, but most still posted year-on-year revenue declines.
Popular culture, including TV shows such as "Mad Men," would have us believe the practice of marketing in an ad agency is a straightforward exercise, calling only for understanding the customer, coming up with a big idea, then creating something interesting and relevant to engage consumers. Not quite. Marketing organizations today are under the gun as never before -- from a media landscape growing increasingly convoluted and a fleeting consumer universe to the mounting pressure of accountability for any marketing dollar spent. Today's new universe demands a different approach to the design and execution of any marketing effort. And yet, little intellectual brain power or emotional energy is being invested in improving the fundamental marketing process.
Snapping a 23-year streak on the gridiron, PepsiCo's beverages will sit out Super Bowl XLIV, as the soft-drink and snack giant puts its advertising muscle behind a new cause-related marketing program. The move is an about-face for Pepsi, which was the biggest advertiser on last year's broadcast of the big game and has long made the National Football League championship the centerpiece of its marketing strategy. Pepsi has used the event, TV's priciest showcase for ads, to launch splashy spots starring celebrities such as Britney Spears, Cindy Crawford and Ozzy Osbourne.
In an effort to turn around Blockbuster Inc., Chief Executive Jim Keyes is trying to get customers to think of the struggling video-rental chain as more than just a pit stop for DVDs. By offering a broad array of entertainment options and ways to get them, Mr. Keyes hopes to beat back competition from companies that provide movies via mailed rentals, kiosks and deeply discounted sales. But even with a detailed plan, Mr. Keyes faces a tough slog. He has already closed unprofitable stores and slashed inventory, and the chain is still struggling to turn a profit. In three of the last four quarters, Blockbuster posted losses, and it got a going-concern warning from its auditors in April.
Back in the good old days, Microsoft did desktops, Google stuck to search and Apple made toys for people in polo necks. No more. The superpowers of the technology world are at war, and like real wars, the battle is happening on several fronts. They're fighting on the desktop, they're fighting on mobile phones, they're fighting in the browser and they're fighting in your front room. Who will prevail, and who will end up in a bunker?
In order to compete in this new economy, chances are you've already pared down your operations. You've also probably adopted "flat revenue" as the new measure of growth. Even typically profit-focused Wall Street is looking at sales growth to see how people are spending money again. I have news, growth is the only real measure of growth. And with your operations streamlined, now is the perfect time to grow.
Does your company truly care about its customers or are you--and your employees--just saying you are "customer focused"? These days, customers won't be fooled if your company's actions don't live up to its promise.
How Ashton Kutcher is pioneering a new kind of media business, bridging Hollywood, technology, and Madison Avenue. Really.
Weighed down by lackluster programming and declining ratings, NBC has been a problem for many different people: programming honchos Kevin Reilly and Ben Silverman; NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker; GE chief Jeff Immelt; and even one-time top-rated late-night comic Jay Leno. Now the hot potato is soon to be passed to Comcast -- which, oddly enough, doesn't see the broadcast network as a burden at all.
Cadbury's chief executive will today make a staunch defence of the confectionery group's future as a standalone company as he urges shareholders to reject Kraft's £9.9bn hostile bid. Todd Stitzer, along with Cadbury chairman Roger Carr and chief financial officer Andrew Bonfield, will unveil the company's formal defence to several hundred investors in a 90-minute presentation.
Sunday was the second anniversary of the sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. At that time, a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends. Here we are, two years later, and The Wall Street Journal still hits my doorstep every morning as one of the nation’s premier newspapers. But under Mr. Murdoch’s leadership, the newspaper is no longer anchored by those deep dives into the boardrooms of American business with quaint stippled portraits, opting instead for a much broader template of breaking general interest news articles with a particular interest in politics and big splashy photos. Glenn R. Simpson, who left the newspaper back in March, is not a fan of the newsier, less analytical Journal.
Warren Buffett believes his best deals during the economy's biggest belly flop since the Crash of 1929 may well turn out to be the ones he didn't do. Mr. Buffett slammed the door on one opportunity after another during the most harrowing stretch of his storied career. That impulse, he says, left him with the financial firepower he needed last month to strike the biggest deal he has ever done -- Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s $26.3 billion purchase of railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 25-year-old chief executive, is finding out first-hand what it is like to reveal a bit too much about himself on the internet. Since the social networking website began revamping its privacy settings on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg has made much more of his personal information available to all of Facebook’s 350m users. Once private pictures of him hugging his girlfriend, drinking from a plastic cup next to a keg of beer and shirtless at a pool party, are now doing the rounds on gossip sites. Facebook graphic for ICN Similar scenarios are playing out across the globe as Facebook’s users are prompted to reset their privacy settings, and encouraged to make more information available publicly.
U.S. retail sales rose in November nearly twice as much as expected, making a broad-based increase that suggested consumers were buying aggressively and supporting the economy in the holiday shopping season. Retail sales rose 1.3% last month, the Commerce Department said Friday. Wall Street had predicted a 0.7% increase.
As web-based augmented-reality applications have exploded, it's more important than ever to remember AR is a technology based on utility and not gimmicks. Unfortunately, as with most new and emerging technologies, it's quickly becoming overhyped and abused. Usability and user experience have been thrown under in the stampede of agencies and brands saying "Hey, look -- me too!" Even more disturbing is that most marketers are overlooking the most unique aspect of AR itself: that it's a technology that can create innovative and sustained engagement between a brand and its target consumer through utility.
Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which have long thrived without treading on one another's turf, are vying to acquire some of the same Silicon Valley start-ups and developing products that put themselves in more direct competition. Google was in serious discussions to acquire online-music company La La Media Inc. before Apple won the deal this month for $85 million, people familiar with the matter said
Bowing to calls for restraint in tough economic times, Goldman said that its most senior executives would forgo cash bonuses this year. Instead, the 30 executives will be paid in the form of long-term stock — an arrangement that means they will not get big year-end paydays, but one that could turn out to be enormously lucrative if Goldman’s share price rises over time.
Video entertainment was “the one that got away” from Apple, but recent moves reveal the company is taking a second stab at the category, and that streaming video will play a major role. The addition of video cameras to Apple’s latest iPhone and iPod Nano were just the first hints of the company’s new personal-media strategy. The company is also building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could provide the massive bandwidth required for ubiquitous streaming video. And Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala suggests it’s interested in rebooting iTunes into a streaming service, according to Wall Street Journal. That means music, in Lala’s case, but the same infrastructure could be shared with streaming video.
Apple Inc., the company that restructured the music industry around its iTunes service, is exploring an overhaul of the way it sells and stores music that is aimed at extending its influence to the Web, according to people briefed on the strategy. The key vehicle for the move is Apple's newly acquired music-streaming service La La Media Inc. for which Apple paid $85 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, said on Wednesday his generation of business leaders had succumbed to “meanness and greed” that had harmed the US economy and increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Mr Immelt’s attack on his fellow corporate chiefs – made in a speech at the West Point military academy – is one of the strongest criticisms by a top executive of the compensation and business practices that prevailed before the financial crisis.
Gone are the days of relying solely on boasts about towing capacities and horsepower to move the metal. Ford and Chevy dealers soon will start talking more about fuel economy and iPod outlets as the companies roll out new compact and subcompact cars.
Nike is changing directions to go places it's never gone. But the floor leader directing this isn't legendary co-founder Phil Knight– as well-known for his ego as his vision. It's his unassuming, hand-picked replacement, Mark Parker. After four years as CEO, Parker is growing Nike from a brand that you slip on your feet or pull over your shoulders to one that follows you off the field into your life of digital socializing and New World hobbies.
From Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC brought Milton Berle, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson into the nation’s living rooms, then broadcast local news to New York City for decades. Last Thursday, it was a stage for a cable takeover as Comcast announced a plan to acquire NBC Universal. There, in Studio 6B, a town hall meeting for NBC employees opened with Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal chief executive, introducing “our new friends from Philadelphia,” and closed with a formal welcome to the Comcast family by Ralph Roberts, the cable operator’s 89-year-old patriarch. Mr. Roberts received a standing ovation. For employees of the oldest and most storied part of NBC Universal, the broadcast network, one question lingered: will we fit into this cable family?
Bloomberg is planning a further year of aggressive investment and may make more acquisitions as the financial data group seeks to broaden its reach to become the world’s “most influential source of news”.
General Motors has shaken up its management team just three days after Fritz Henderson was sacked as chief executive. Ed Whitacre, GM’s chairman and acting CEO, put his stamp further on the majority US government-owned carmaker by announcing a new management line-up. Nick Reilly, head of GM’s international operations, was sent to Europe to finish the contentious restructuring of Opel and Vauxhall that has taken nearly a year, and 77-year-old industry legend Bob Lutz has moved into an advisory role.
Comcast Corp.'s deal to take control of NBC Universal from General Electric Co. will create a television and movie giant that faces challenges in an uncertain media business and a lengthy review from regulators. Comcast, which is paying $13.75 billion in cash and assets, gains 51% of a joint venture that will own two broadcast networks, more than a dozen cable networks, a major movie studio and theme parks. As part of the deal, Vivendi SA agreed to sell its 20% stake in NBC Universal to GE for $5.8 billion.
In today's fiercely challenging marketing environment there's a popular line of thinking that the new ultra-savvy and demanding consumer is now in charge--that they in fact, "own the brand and they're not giving it back." We're all aware that in 2006 Time magazine gave their much-heralded "person of the year award" to "You," the consumer. User-generated content is many advertisers' favorite new method of involving users. Social media is being touted as the magic elixir capable of breathing new life into every brand. And just this month, Forrester Research released a debate-fueling report claiming that brand managers should be renamed "brand advocates" so they can more easily "go with the flow" of consumer input and opinion. To all of this I say: Let's take a minute to step back.
It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right.
McDonald's is going to change its logo in Germany, casting its iconographic golden arches against a green background to invoke its respect for the environment. I can't decide if the idea is irrelevant or insane. Or both. Central to the decision would be the premise that fast-food customers make eating decisions based on corporate environmental policies. If comparisons between hamburgers or fries net out in a tie, McDonald's must believe that it'll win because it's doing good things for the planet.
Comcast's long-awaited bid for control of NBC Universal will value the joint venture with General Electric at a larger-than-expected $37.25bn, including a higher valuation on the US cable group's pay-television stations and the potential for a larger cash outlay than analysts had foreseen. Final terms of the deal had been settled in preparation for an announcement this morning, people familiar with the negotiations said, after months of haggling with GE, NBCU's 80 per cent owner, and Vivendi, the French media and telecoms group that holds a 20 per cent stake.
Microsoft’s top search technology executive on Wednesday all but dismissed the likelihood that the company would pay newspaper owners and other publishers for removing their content from Google. His comments came a week after it emerged that Microsoft had been in talks over a News Corp-led initiative that would have paid publishers to leave Google as a way to boost Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing.
Jack Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter and is now its chairman, has unveiled Square, his new start-up. The idea: anyone with a mobile phone can accept credit card payments. Mr. Dorsey has been working on the idea for a while, and on Tuesday the company’s Web site went live. Square makes a small square device that plugs into any gadget with an audio input jack, including an iPhone or iPod Touch, and turns the device into a credit card machine.
As newspapers and old media companies have seen their revenues shrink, they have essentially done one of two things: found ways to embrace the web or blamed Google for their problems. Now with the heat being turned up on Google (Google) by News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, the search giant has decided to appease angry media outlets and give them more control over how their links are treated in Google Search and Google News.
Has Wikipedia really peaked as The Wall Street Journal's recent headline "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" suggests? The data presented by researchers cited in the article present a good case to support the headline. However, this is where our ongoing strategy process with the Wikimedia Foundation comes in. Wikimedia is engaged in the community's first-ever strategic planning process. The challenge of participation in the community is a primary thrust of the work. Our animating question is: what will it take to cultivate, grow and sustain a strong community to support the next stage of Wikimedia's development?
General Motors ousted Fritz Henderson as chief executive on Tuesday night in a surprise move that will see ailing US government-controlled carmaker get its second new boss in less than a year. GM directors – who include Ed Whitacre, chairman and now interim chief executive, and David Bonderman, co-founder of private equity firm TPG – decided that the company would be better going into its intial public offering with a different chief executive, according to people familiar with the situation.
General Electric has reached a tentative agreement that clears the way for the sale of NBC Universal, including the flagship NBC network, to Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, people briefed on the deal said Monday. Under terms of the deal, G.E. will buy Vivendi’s 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for about $5.8 billion. It removes one of the few remaining hurdles in its plan to sell control of the television and movie company to Comcast in a $30 billion agreement that reflects the changing landscape of broadcast television.
It may have been easy to miss if you don't work in the world of corporate led cause related marketing, but Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR) programs are in the midst of a crisis. The subject of the debate mainly centers around two big issues: brand value and authenticity. On the one hand, CSR programs are attacked by shareholder groups and business investors who argue that they are a needless distraction and remove money (and value) from the investors of a business. CSR programs are also attacked by industry watchdogs and groups who argue that businesses only engage in CSR programs to create an artificial connection with consumers and claim allegiance to causes they don't really care about. On the other side, those who work on these programs make a more idealist argument - that companies can do well and do good at the same time.
AOL is putting the finishing touches on a high-tech system for mass-producing news articles, entertainment and other online content, the linchpin of Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's strategy for reviving the struggling 25-year-old Internet company after Time Warner spins it off next month. Mr. Armstrong's goal is to make AOL, which has been losing visitors and revenue, a magnet for both advertisers and consumers by turning it into the top creator of digital content. He hopes to do so in part by turning some media and marketing conventions on their ear, and potentially blurring the lines between journalism and advertising.
Looking for a good flick to watch tonight? Visit Instantwatcher, which marries New York Times critics' picks with the Netflix streaming-movie catalog. Interested in updating your music collection? Visit ArtistExplorer, which combines the Billboard charts with BestBuy.com's inventory database. Neither Netflix nor Best Buy made the applications—but both made them possible by opening up their APIs. You've likely been hearing a lot about APIs lately, and the concept isn't as confusing as it sounds. An open API simply means you've launched an interface that lets third-party software interact with your data; and those third parties can then mash the data up and build useful new tools on top of it.
In the discussion about news, there’s always a divide – because news loves divides. The splits have been old v. new, MSM v. blogs, professional v. amateur, institutional v. entrepreneurial, and lately paid v. free. But I fear another divide we’re beginning to see develop is walled v. open. The legacy players – in what I believe is their last-ditch effort to save their old ways, models, and empires — are threatening to put up walls. News Corp. is forever rumored to be putting up both pay walls and more walls to keep Google’s hordes of Huns (aka us useless asshats) out. Some say: Fine, digital suicide couldn’t happen to a better mogul. But I say we should fear the precedent, the balkanization of the web into isolated worlds. It’s true that all the data on the web is not today available via search — content trapped in data bases, in Flash, in comments, in video — though I see continuing efforts to bring that content into the tent. The momentum is toward including ever more data. But now come Murdoch and Microsoft, threatening to take their balls and go home. It’s their right to do so; as Google always points out, it’s also easy to do so.
When a media industry insider last week floated the idea of an exclusive deal to list News Corp. content on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, stiffing Google in the process, it drew some predictable responses. Bloggers and technology analysts crowed that Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s septuagenarian chief executive, had conclusively proved that he just didn’t understand the Internet. Some people in the newspaper business said hooray for Uncle Rupert, standing up for the value of old-fashioned content and telling the geeks with their algorithms to get lost. Google, meanwhile, made the reassuring noises it does anytime anyone raises the possibility that its goals, and those of the media companies whose content it indexes, might not be 100 percent aligned. Google said it provided news organizations’ Web sites with 100,000 clicks a minute, every one of which “offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.”
Todd Stitzer, Cadbury chief executive, has signalled support for a possible tie-up with Hershey, declaring the US confectioner a better cultural fit with the chocolate maker than Kraft, the food conglomerate that has launched a hostile £10bn bid. Hershey, which has owned the licence for the Cadbury brand in the US since 1988, is contemplating a bid for Cadbury after the decision by Kraft of the US this month to go hostile. If Hershey can finance the bid, it is likely to make a friendly offer.
Attention shoppers: It might pay to just sleep in this Black Friday. The conventional wisdom is that the most stupendous bargains of the year are to be had on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But the marketplace has become so packed on that crowded shopping day that some retailers are shifting their strategy. Deals on certain products are likely to be just as good, perhaps even better, in the days and weeks after Friday. In this economy, retailers need to stand out — and some of them are betting they can do so by offering bargains later in the season. Also, while chains are not discounting as deeply as last year, they know the primary way to get penny-pinching consumers to spend is to keep the deals coming all season long.
When Sir Martin Sorrell, Executive Chairman of the WPP Group and for two decades arguably the most powerful individual in advertising, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show last May, the conversation was more remarkable for what he didn’t say than for what he did say.
Digital is so yesterday. It will soon be 20 years since the advent of commercially available digital services such as America Online, multimedia, mobile phones and widespread use of personal computers. The American household went digital long before marketers embraced technology and the Internet. Now, as companies struggle to get their "digital strategies" in order, they will be surprised to discover consumers have moved on to the "post-digital" age.
The Empire always strikes back. Every revolution inspires a counter-revolution. Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance didn't win independence overnight — and neither, it seems, will the www. Microsoft is negotiating with News Corp to pay it to remove its content from Google's index. Uh-oh: the Empire — industrial-era business as usual — is striking back. Will the rebels be crushed? Not a chance. Blocking Google is about as smart as eating a pound of plutonium. Here's why MicroFox is making a big mistake.
I believe if Social Media warranted a mantra, it would look something like this, “Always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back…it’s how you got here and it defines where you’re going.” This is the credo I live by and something that has only been reinforced as part of my daily regiment, online and in the real world. Paying it forward and paying it back is the balladry of reciprocity, the undercurrent of social media and the currency of the social economy. The words, “what comes around goes around” and the overall spirit of karma reminds us that there may be personal rewards and satisfaction for helping and contributing more than we take away from our environment. In sociology, this form of alternative giving is referred to as “generalized reciprocity” or “generalized exchange.” In the same vein, the idea of giving something to one person by paying another is credited to Benjamin Franklin, which would ultimately serve as the defining foundation to “Pay it forward.”
Bad news isn't bad wine. It doesn't improve with age. According to Bain & Co, 80% of CEOs think their brands offer a superior experience, but only 8% of their consumers agreed. AOL seemed to have gleaned that fact. AOL's running man (logo) had already run off the cliff, revealing a brand that was desecrated, unoriginal, normalized and downtrodden. The business goal of any brand is to create more users, new users or new uses by continually innovating to add value to customer's lives. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong needs to ask himself: What is AOL's true brand ambition? What does he wish his AOL brand to be capable of achieving? With great brands come great benefits -- including higher customer loyalty, increased opportunities and elevated profits.
The Washington Post is closing the last domestic bureaux it had outside its home town, in a tacit admission that it will no longer attempt to compete with the few US titles attempting to be national newspapers. The one-time home of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal hastened the resignation of President Richard Nixon, will shut its offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles at the end of the year.
Facebook Inc. took steps to solidify the control of founder Mark Zuckerberg and other existing shareholders in the event the social-networking company goes public. The closely held Silicon Valley firm, emulating one of Google Inc.'s well-known strategies, established a dual-class stock structure that would increase the voting power of Mr. Zuckerberg, who is the company's chief executive, and other existing shareholders if they hold onto their shares during an IPO.
A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast are planning to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people with knowledge of the plans. The formation of a new company to run the online newsstand — sometimes characterized as an “iTunes for magazines” — may be announced in early December. Time, Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith all intend to be equity partners in the new company, although the deals have not yet been signed.
A new study from The Boston Consulting Group confirms what many on the agency or consultancy side already suspect – that many large organizations aren’t fully capitalizing on the potential of marketing research. The study, titled “The Consumer’s Voice – Can Your Company Hear It?”, finds that most companies are using marketing research tactically – to validate and optimize marketing messages with consumers, or to develop new products – vs. designing and executing research strategically to impact a company or brand’s direction moving forward. BCG finds that more than 70 percent of the study participants apply research in those two more tactical contexts, whereas less than 40 percent use consumer insights to set product prices, develop promotions, forecast financial results and forge channel and distribution strategies.
As the high season of holiday shopping pain (or gain) arrives, I find myself fixated -- perhaps irrationally, and certainly emotionally -- on Best Buy's Twelpforce. This is the viral army of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer questions and solve customer problems via the customer-care channel we know as Twitter. Self described as "a collective force of Best Buy tech pros offering tech advice in Tweet form," the program has nearly 15,000 "followers" and it's growing. Think Apple Genius Bar but without the physical counter.
Now Wal-Mart, the mightiest retail giant in history, may have met its own worthy adversary: Amazon.com. In what is emerging as one of the main story lines of the 2009 post-recession shopping season, the two heavyweight retailers are waging an online price war that is spreading through product areas like books, movies, toys and electronics.
Consumers are generally cautious heading into the critical holiday shopping season, with preseason trends suggesting that electronics sales may be solid while sales of apparel, particularly women's styles, could get pummeled. Spurred by the release of a hot videogame and earlier-than-usual promotions on televisions, U.S. shoppers spent 6.1% more on electronics in the first half of November the month, through Nov. 14, than a year ago, according to a recent analysis from MasterCard SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Advisors.
International Business Machines and a handful of other major marketers, including casino operator Harrah's Entertainment and software giant Microsoft, are experimenting with developing ad campaigns based in part on what consumers are chatting about on the Web. For decades, advertisers have relied heavily on sometimes-dated consumer surveys and focus groups to provide grist for their ads. Now, some are using new technologies to scan the Web for key words to find out what consumers are—and aren't—saying about their brands.
At some point in our schooling, we all learned about the ancient Greek marketplace called the "agora." The agora was a place where people gathered to shop, discuss politics and meet friends. Merchants built early commerce around one essential element: human interaction. But gradually, the marketplace changed. Along came the industrial revolution, the creation of mass communications and long-distance travel. We suddenly found ourselves in the 1950s, the true dawn of the consumer society.
Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
In case you haven't noticed it, almost every public and commercial establishment blew up this year. Your reputation and brand aren't what they used to be. Citizens no longer believe in their governments. Investors don't trust the markets. Science, history, and even the very definition of what constitutes facts are up for debate, quite often contentiously so. Even though our planet is evermore wrapped in the knowing embrace of instantaneous communications, networked conversation, and access to literally infinite amounts of information, people seem to agree less, distrust more, and rely on a shrinking list of common beliefs.
Some 300 attendees gathered at the Saatchi Gallery last week for Ad Age sibling Creativity's technology conference, Creativity and Technology, were treated to musings on bleeding-edge digital communication from Europe's top talent in advertising, technology and design. Speakers ranged from agency creatives and technologists to writers such as Adam Greenfield, author of "Everyware" and head of design direction at Nokia. Here are a eight takeaways from the conference if you missed it.
Here's something I've been thinking about for some time now. You see, there is this company. It publishes over a hundred RSS feeds and several email newsletters, but not a single blog. The only conversations this company entertains are the ones it starts itself or is subpoenaed into. Conversations it doesn't like, it tries to silence.
A growing number of big marketers have circumvented the middleman and launched their own mainstream media and entertainment properties. The revolutionary development has moved them into direct competition for audiences with traditional media companies. But are these projects just novel anomalies, as some suggest, or a powerful trend that will ultimately reshape the media business? Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom addresses the issue in his talk at the ANA annual conference in Phoenix.
A recent study revealed 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. Now we learn that Twitter users are actively paying attention to brands on the popular information network. According to research conducted by Performics and ROI Research, about half of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information.
Design thinking translates rigorous trend research into meaningful experiences that lead markets and foster brand loyalty instead of merely following the cult of now. Blue may be the new green, but how is that relevant to an industry, a brand and the evolving desires of its customers? Times and trends can change so quickly that a campaign, product or service can be rendered irrelevant by the time it gets to market.
Have digital and social media leveled the marketing playing field so much that scale is losing its power?That this prospect has big marketers increasingly worried -- and smaller ones pleased -- was clear at the recent Association of National Advertisers conference in Phoenix. But while much evidence points to a leveling effect, plenty also points to scale remaining a powerful and even growing force in marketing.
Whether you think digital agencies are "ready to lead" or not, failing to bring a digital mindset to marketing and communications challenges is no longer an option. Yesterday, Ben Malbon tweeted a quote by Garrick Schmitt from the Razorfish FEED 09 Report: "Brand marketers neglecting digital is akin to showing up to a cocktail party in sweatpants." This reminded me of the Shel Silverstein poem and illustration above (which Johanna helped me to track down). The digital age is here. And it's permanent. This means that regardless of whether your career has been labeled digital or not, it is essential that you bring a digital mindset to all of the work that you do. This is beyond tools, platforms, and capabilities. This is a new way of understanding our world that changes every aspect of our work.
There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the chores that social media puts in front of us. The best writing I’ve found on how to manage your time in social media is via Amber Naslund’s social media time management series. Her efforts in crafting this should become a little ebook that you hand around to everyone. If you skipped over that link, go back, click it to open a new tab/window, and then read it when you’re done with this (or skip mine and read Amber’s- it’s that good). If you’re still with me, here’s what I want to say on the matter.
Shocked -- again. That's how I felt when I saw in BusinessWeek yet another example of marketing being totally misunderstood. An article titled "At Amazon, Marketing Is for Dummies" said, "Instead of lavish ads and splaying its logo everywhere, it invests in technology and distribution -- and the results are startlingly effective." Last time I checked, product and distribution are two of the essential pillars of marketing. What the article didn't say, but should have, is that Amazon has built its business without much advertising. So? This stands in stark contrast to the dot-bomb when hundreds of companies were created, and CMO became the title du jour. The prevailing "get large or get lost" wisdom drove companies toward publicity stunts, Super Bowl one-offs and multimillion-dollar sweepstakes and away from anything resembling marketing strategy. Brand-building gave way to branding. Marketing became soft, and credibility faded. Here we stand, on the verge of economic recovery, with brands having nowhere to go but up. Marketing should be leading us through growth, but it's not. And we all have a role to play.
Web 2.0 has changed the way companies look at their brand – ceding more and more responsibility to their brand communities - the people who surround the brand. The ubiquity of social media has created awareness of the role customers play in building (or destroying) brands. That awareness of the human impact on branding has rubbed off on the people who build the brand from the inside out.
The origin of Google’s power and monopoly is to be traced to the invisible algorithm PageRank. The diagram of this technology is proposed here as the most fitting description of the value machine at the core of what is diversely called knowledge economy, attention economy or cognitive capitalism. This essay stresses the need of a political economy of the PageRank algorithm rather than expanding the dominant critique of Google’s monopoly based on the Panopticon model and similar ‘Big Brother’ issues (dataveillance, privacy, political censorship). First and foremost Google’s power is understood from the perspective of value production (in different forms: attention value, cognitive value, network value, etc.): the biopolitical consequences of its data monopoly come logically later.
In the October issue of Fast Company magazine, Linda Tishler profiles David Butler, who she describes as the man with a nearly uncontainable design challenge. Among other projects, Butler is behind the new Coca-Cola Freestyle fountain, which can serve up more than 100 varieties and brands of coke products - and style to boot. System thinking is what led him down that path - as in system that stimulates behavior that produces results. A chain of interdependencies and a a more expansive way of looking at problems, and to deal with complexity.
You've probably heard by now that "your brand is no longer yours." The assertion's based on simple math. In the era of blogs, discussion boards, Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 tools, virtually everyone can get online and talk about your company and its offerings. As a result, the amount of information your marketing and PR departments can generate is only a small percentage of the total volume of content on the Internet about your firm. What's more, if some of the external voices become as popular, or perish the thought, more popular than your official voice, then they're going to show up high in organic (as opposed to paid) search results.
With Google's Social Search experiment, Bing's integration with Twitter and Yahoo!'s partnership with One Riot, social search clearly has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how?
“Volkswagen is really down-to-earth.” “Nike is exiting.” These examples show that consumers use personality traits when they communicate about brands among each other. Brand personality is the set of personality traits that consumers associated with a brand. Brand personality is related to human personality theory that explains human behavior and preferences on the basis of personality traits. Personality traits are distinguishing characteristics of a person. They are a readiness to think or act in a similar fashion in response to a variety of different stimuli or situations. So, the traits of a person define behaviour to a large extent and consistent over time: an extravert person will behave in an extravert way, while an introvert person will most of the time behave in an introvert way. The value of human personality is found in the potency of the model to forecast human behavior. If a person is introvert he or she can be expected to behave in this way most of the time. Next, personality steers preference. For example women prefer more than men people who show higher levels of socially desirable traits. Brands, like people, can use the potency of personality.
The wretched economy has forced many consumers to, well, consume less, or at least less avidly than they did before the bubble — or bubbles, if you count Wall Street and real estate — burst. What, then, has that meant for the cause marketers, which depend on the kindness of shoppers to raise funds for nonprofit organizations, associations and assorted other doers of good deeds?
Maclaren is a small private company with a big public problem, one that it has not handled well. On Monday, Maclaren announced that it was issuing repair kits for up to 1m pushchairs it had sold in the US over the past decade after 12 cases in which children’s fingertips were chopped off in the pushchairs’ hinges. By that afternoon, its website had frozen and its phone lines were overwhelmed by parents. Meanwhile, the British company founded in 1965 by Owen Finlay Maclaren, the inventor of the “umbrella-fold” buggy, told non-Americans they would be treated differently.
Every brand makes a promise. But in a marketplace in which consumer confidence is low and budgetary vigilance is high, it's not just making a promise that separates one brand from another, but having a defining purpose. This point and its implications were made clear to me at the recent Association of National Advertisers conference in Phoenix where CMOs from some of the smartest organizations explained why purpose-driven branding is essential to success in this "new normal" environment. While it may sound a bit like Philosophy 101, a company whose employees can answer the question, "Why are we here?" will be the company that makes stronger connections with consumers in search of solutions to life's new normal issues.
Monday, I reported my recent culturematic experiment, the tweeting of my train ride from Chicago and Detroit. Today, I thought I'd look at the marketing implications. Specifically, can a culturematic help a marketer help a client? Can it help build the brand? Can it help the brand participate in culture? I think the reply is emphatically "yes."
The role of influence is changing and diversifying and with it, the rules and responsibilities of engagement are also reshaping. While PR, analyst, and investor relations were clear yesterday, the rise of new influencers, tastemakers and authoritative users and customers becomes both pervasive and uncertain. As such, new opportunities for engagement emerge; creating new opportunities for cultivating distributed relationships. However, each new connection requires management, a support infrastructure, including a dedicated host.
What if the magazine article of the future, the album of the future, and the novel of the future are all the same thing? And what if they’re all events? Start here: TED is one of the surprise media successes of the last few years, but not by chance. Their insight was that a conference can be a machine for making media—media that can build a big audience on the web. They invested in media production, and it paid off. But TED is just a starting point. They’ve done a remarkable job, but—this always happens—it’s almost too big at this point. Too homogenizing. You could squint your eyes and recognize a TED talk by its red-blue glow. And—snark aside—it has a real weakness.
Businesses are made of people, many of them in the middle. While everyone loves to talk to the C-level, the shift in the way people at all levels work, select and recommend service providers, and get things done is more notable in the thick of things, so to speak. Technology has made it even easier for people to connect with peers, collaborate, and get and give direct and indirect (through search) feedback. There's a reason why social media has put a spotlight on being human - brands forgot how to tell stories. Along with a "me, too" characteristic of many B2Bs always in search of benchmarking and way to validate their value props, companies forgot (more likely stopped funding) media integration. This first set of considerations presents some difficulties in the connected world we live in.
Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information.
Companies approach social in one of two ways: The first way, companies experiment with little order or goals, the second way, companies have clear goals and intend to invest in a deeper relationship.
A year ago, 1,200 executives in marketing, advertising and the media attended an annual conference that by coincidence took place a month after the financial crisis began. Together, they stared into the abyss, wondering what conditions would be when — or if — they met again. The sky has not fallen, at least so far, and most of those executives are now gathering for the 2009 conference. Many of them are saying, “What a difference a year makes.” Others, however, are wondering, “What difference does a year make?”
Think about all the brands you interacted with today. Nearly everything you have done so far today involved a brand, was enabled by a brand or was accompanied by a brand. These interactions are just one of many touchpoints with a specific brand. Touchpoints, or touches for short, work in a way similar to that of how blood flows through our bodies. Your heart pumps blood through your body, providing it with the oxygen and nutrients it needs, but the heart alone isn’t solely responsible for enabling a steady, healthy heartbeat. Every vein, artery and vessel has an impact on your heartbeat. No matter how small a constricted vein may be, it has an impact on the flow of blood.
Senior marketers, ask yourselves: Is marketing's inability to get the type of traction it seeks within your organization real or self-imposed? In other words, do you actually have control over the perception, power, influence and abilities that marketing can truly bring to the table? A recent study by Prophet and the Association of National Advertisers revealed several alarming findings that point to the need for marketers to start taking back control of the dialogue, and their destiny, within their own organizations. Some of the more startling findings: While almost 70% of those surveyed view themselves as visionary marketers or leaders, the vast majority of them state that the way they actually spend their time is heavily focused on tactical behaviors, such as working the budget, operating month-to-month and being guided by a short-term marcomm plan.
Have you noticed that most conversations about branding inevitably include references to Harley-Davidson and Apple? Sprinkle in mentions of Coke, Facebook, and Zappos, and you get the context of every agency pitch for more spending on brand engagement, loyalty, or whatever else these examples might suggest. I suggest you ban these references from your next conversation. Forget about them altogether.
Google's Android software will soon be powering Motorola phones, but for the 11-year-old Internet giant, advertising is still king. Google beat analysts' estimates last quarter, thanks to brisk advertising sales. In October the company announced that its third-quarter revenue increased 7% from the same period last year, to $5.94 billion. Net income rose 27% to $1.64 billion. Google accounts for roughly a third of all online ad spending in the U.S.
What's a megatrend, you ask? It's something big. I'm talking really big. Think of a giant unstoppable tsunami of change transforming society as we know it. Think global warming scale -- then apply it to mass human behavior. Think glaciers carving the grand canyon of consumer sentiment. So what are the new megatrends that I believe will transform society in the coming years? What brands are taking advantage of them? And what can you learn from them?
Ritz-Carlton has become a leading brand in luxury lodging by rigorously adhering to its own standards. It is the only service company in America that has won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award twice, and Training Magazine has called it the best company in the nation for employee training. Its unique culture starts with a motto: "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." One of its remarkable policies is to permit every employee to spend up to $2,000 making any single guest satisfied. Ritz-Carlton codifies its expectations regarding service in "The 12 Service Values," "The Credo," "The Three Steps of Service," "The 6th Diamond" and other proprietary statements that are taught to all 38,000 employees throughout 73 properties in 24 countries. Simon Cooper, who has led Ritz-Carlton for the past eight years, talks about what makes Ritz-Carlton, well, the Ritz.
In this thoughtful analysis, Roberto Saco and Alexis Goncalves map the landscape of service design. They define the discipline and key players, and sketch its potential vis-à-vis growth and profitability. Saco and Goncalves elaborate on the multi-faceted realities of this work with examples from the Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Herman Miller, and Egg Banking. And they wrap things up with a discussion of key principles related to practice.
So what is customer advocacy anyway? Well for starters, they don't have to be your customers—they can be any part of your entire constituency. Employees, business partners, friends—you name it. But here's the point. You need them more than ever. Right now, if you are planning social initiatives, your biggest challenge is going to be manpower. Someone has to do the listening, the outreach, the customer service, the participation, the engagement with others in the ecosystem. Some parts can be automated (such as an algorithm in a listening tool technology), but many other parts require actual people. So at some point you'll have to scale, and you're going to need a passionate, engaged group of people to advocate on your behalf. So how do you do it?
The recession has battered some of the nation's biggest companies. Even so, top marketing executives believe social media and behavioral targeting technologies will help them boost business as the economy stabilizes and consumer sentiment improves. A cautiously optimistic group of marketing executives from big companies, including Bank of America, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Mercedes-Benz USA and Xerox, gathered in Palm Beach, Fla., at the Fifth annual Forbes CMO Summit late last week. There they discussed ways they can rebuild trust and boost sales at their companies as the economy stabilizes.
Businesses that want to create long-term sustainable growth will be increasingly moving towards connected company status. That is the place where being social benefits the business by providing insights, strengthening relationships with partners and customers, and building and connecting a community with common grounds and needs. In many organizations, the listening post resides within the marketing group. As we discussed yesterday here and on Twitter, customer service should co-own the space and collaborate to develop big ears during customer conversations and interactions. In many B2B organizations, the customer support role is much expanded and works hand in hand with operations.
We attended the Forbes CMO Summit in sunny Palm Beach last week to learn what's on the minds of executive marketing leaders. The conversation from this group regarding social was more sophisticated, which my colleague Charlene Li and I don't think is reflective of most chief marketing groups. What's unique about these Forbes CMOs? Perhaps they are more progressive, well read and tuned into the rapid changes coming. In consideration to attendees of this event, I won't be giving any specific individual quotes, (this wasn't a media event) but instead, I'll focus on the insights related to emerging technologies, overall budgets and market economics.
If you run a business or are in charge of marketing one, you know that your Web site is often the first interaction a potential customer has with your brand. For many of today's businesses, particularly those in the digital media and technology space, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have become the primary point of customer interaction. With online experiences contributing so heavily to how people feel about brands, an effective union of user experience design and brand strategy has become critical to sustaining business success.
Dear Google, Eric Schmidt recently said, "CIOs are trapped in a 1980's architecture." Actually, the world is trapped in a 1970's architecture: a financial architecture that was designed for a bygone era, without the prosperity of future generations and the natural world in mind. So here's my challenge to you. The global IT market is worth a few hundred billion bucks. But you're (still) the most innovative company in the world — and there are bigger fisheries to rescue. A better global financial architecture is worth 10x more: at least $12 trillion, if the amount spent on the bailout is any indication. Can you build one?
The other day I got an email press release from a technology company crowing about a partnership with another organization. It read, in part: "We believe the alliance between xxx and yyy represents a synergistic win-win with significant value add for both solutions, allowing each to utilize and leverage their unique strengths in the market." Huh? If the news was worth covering, I couldn't tell, because the press release was stuffed to the seams with jargon-filled corporate-speak. I deleted the email almost immediately, sat back in my desk chair, and thought about EB White. EB White was, of course, the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. But he was also the co-author, with William Strunk Jr., of The Elements of Style.
Procter & Gamble Co.'s new chief is ready to deal. Facing mounting pressure to boost sliding sales and recalibrate his company, P&G CEO Robert McDonald is stepping up the hunt for acquisition and divestiture candidates, people close to the company said. Since assuming the chief executive role in July, Mr. McDonald has been trying to shake-up P&G's slow, process-heavy culture. He has increased scrutiny of P&G brands including Braun small appliances, Iams pet food, Duracell batteries and Pringles potato snacks. While those businesses have long been considered extraneous to P&G's focus on beauty, health and nonfood household staples, Mr. McDonald now is presenting an ultimatum: The leaders of those businesses are on heightened notice to prove their brands' prospects or face a sale.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do." It consists of thousands of people who stand ready for tasks send them by Amazon or others who may wish to use Amazon's MTurk service. MTurk "providers" work alone, often in their spare time. Standing in line at a 7/11, they can bang out a few turns. They get paid a small fee for each decision. No one gets rich working in a mechanical turk, but many find it interesting.
Private label is at something of a crossroads. Rising out of the shadows of its humble, “no-name” generic past, private label today has blossomed into a $100 billion industry. While the media and analysts are fixated on sales numbers and growth expectations another story frequently gets little air play: Private label has the freedom (and not the baggage) to seize opportunities to leapfrog name brands in such critical areas as ingredients, flavors, preparations and even packaging. Looking through the lens of contemporary consumers and shoppers, we see that the rapidly changing private label landscape is far too complicated to be adequately explained by aggregate sales or customer transaction sales data alone. Our Private Label 2010: Redefining Meaning of Brand report moves beyond simplified discussions of sales data to present a holistic consumer and shopper perspective on private label that accounts for the role of the economy, new meaning of value, distinctions in retail formats, product categories, name brands and, of course, private label brands.
As my original career was in biology, when I started working with stories I naturally wanted to consider the natural history of stories, including their life cycles. Now this is a much more difficult thing with stories than with tadpoles or mushrooms, because stories mingle and morph in ways that creatures can't. But here is try at it, based on my experiences and what I've read. I've been pondering this cycle for a long time and playing with it in mind, and this is what I've got to lately. Of course this cycle will be nothing new to anyone who thinks about stories, and it's obviously a greatly simplified metaphor, and I'm merrily making up terms as I go. But this sort of thing can provide a scaffold for discussions about helping people tell and share stories to attain goals.
Open source, open access, open standards, open architecture — all are part of why so many have fallen in love with Facebook, Firefox, WordPress, and — I’ll say it because everyone else is saying it — Twitter. They’re all flexible platforms, invite user opinions, and enable co-development and co-creation to varying degrees. The “open web” and its underlying set of technologies have indeed made a big impact on how we interact and engage with online properties, sites, social networks, and the like.
They're off! Although trick-or-treaters are still days away from ringing doorbells, the nation’s retailers are already starting their mad dash toward the Christmas finish line. The efforts to stimulate holiday feelings ahead of schedule are, of course, a result of the dire economy, as retailers remain anxious about the parsimonious mood among shoppers. The National Retail Federation predicts that Christmas sales will decline 1 percent from Christmas 2008 — not as bad as last year, when retail holiday revenue fell 3.4 percent from 2007, but still not in positive territory.
I wrote about Stern as a pioneer in my book. He rethought radio networks and built his own. He brought satellite radio to critical mass. But satellite radio was always a transitional technology, waiting for ubiquitous connectivity that would enable on-demand programming anywhere. Now our phones can give us radio and soon Stern will be ready for them; they will make him portable. There’s a larger trend at work here: Entertainers (radio, music, comedy, books, columnists, even filmmakers) will have direct relationships with their audiences. Like Stern, they won’t have to work for companies or go through them for distribution.
A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend prior to an evening speech. After some small talk about life, the universe and everything, our conversation naturally turned to the abysmal U.S. economy. “Things are really tough right now,” she explained. “I’ve tried to get everyone to understand the importance of branding in this very difficult environment, but I don’t think they get it. In fact,” she added. “Our customers hate that word.” “What word?” I asked. “Brand?” “Yea. The non-profits we work with have a real aversion to the whole notion of branding. I guess they don’t really understand the concept and how it applies to them.” They’re not the only ones.
Just when brands thought they might muster a passable social-media "sense and respond" defense against the brutal realities of consumer nastygrams or Google search-result hogging, or just when they figured out a few tricks for managing Wikipedia and all those activists and product recalls that make their way onto your entry, brands must now contend with yet another trust broker that wraps candid conversation around their cherished homefront, whether they like it or not.
Chief marketing officers, like coaches and other leaders, who seek dream teams must assemble remarkable individuals to generate remarkable results. In the past, CMOs knew who they needed on their team – some smart brand managers and some functional experts in research and media. But the marketing landscape has changed dramatically and the skill sets and experiences needed on a CMO’s marketing bench have changed just as dramatically. New media, market fragmentation, and brand proliferation have given birth to new ways to go to market and new challenges in doing so. Today CMOs need to rethink the types of marketing expertise they need on the team.
The imminent publication of Forrester’s new report on the challenges facing clients - “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age” is a welcome turning of the spotlight toward client organizations. Without question agencies of all sizes, shapes and persuasions need to get their collective acts together and transform into leaner, more agile, more creative, & more technology- and data-fuelled businesses. The best in the business are no doubt all plotting how they can come out of this recession leaner, meaner, quicker, better. But that’s kind of pointless unless clients adapt too.
How Sean Maloney and brand guru Deborah Conrad are helping Intel's first carpet-dweller CEO reengineer the company once known as Chipzilla -- and free the bong.
Image is everything to luxury fashion companies. Preserving prestige is what sets brands such as Gucci and Hermes apart from Gap and H&M. But that same elitism is keeping certain luxury brands from engaging in social media, one of the most powerful forms of marketing at the moment. Luxury fashion companies are known for setting trends when it comes to their products, but their media preferences are surprisingly dated. Most prefer to simply buy ad space in publications where they can present--and control--their image in glossy two-page spreads. While traditional media will remain an important advertising vehicle for high-end fashion companies, social media needs to be part of the marketing mix too.
In our June 2009 Trend Briefing, we covered FOREVERISM. But even then, we pointed out that the need for everything that is (right) now/current/real-time, is being satisfied in numerous novel ways, with (wait for it) the online world showing the way forward. Dubbed 'NOWISM', this mega trend has, and will continue to have, a big impact on everything from your corporate culture to customer relationships to product innovation to tactical campaigns. And yet you probably only have a few minutes to spare on it so we’ve done our best to keep this Trend Briefing digestible.
It's an increasingly common dilemma for CMOs with brands in the middle or top end of the market. Should you tackle the threat head-on and reduce existing prices on your premium brand, knowing it will reduce profits and potentially damage brand equity? Or should you maintain prices, hope for better times to return, and in the meantime lose sales from customers and support from your CEO? With both of these alternatives often proving equally unpalatable, many marketers have decided on a third option: launching a fighter brand.
No successful web company (not eBay, Flickr, Amazon, Facebook...) succeeds because of a significant technological barrier to entry. It's not insanely difficult to copy what they've done. Yet they win and the copycats don't. Few organizations succeed in the long run because of proprietary technology. Not Starbucks or CAA or Nike, certainly. Not Caterpillar or Reuters either. Technologists often tell me, "this product is very hard to build, that will insulate us from competition and protect our pricing." It might. For a while. But once you're successful, the competition will figure out a way. They always do.
What's the difference between personalization and customization? Are consumers really in control? Do brands (and designers) want them to be? Nick de la Mare considers curation and the myth and reality of control.
All content is not created equal. While valuable content is the linchpin of an organization's marketing strategy, different types of content map to different part of the buyer's journey. McKinsey published a report earlier this year that confirmed what many of us with the ear to the digital space have known for a while - people don't like to be funneled into a neat graphic. We're way past calling buyers consumers. Even as the term may be technically correct, it has an image problem. I prefer to talk about customers and since last week was customer service week and I was traveling, I thought we could have more than one customer conversation this week. In the digital space, your content is likely to be activated by participation.
Managing a brand has always been a slightly odd concept, given that consumers are the real arbiters of brand meaning, and it's become increasingly outmoded in today's two-way world. That's why a new report is going to recommend changing the name "brand manager" to "brand advocate," and fundamentally changing marketer organizations in response to the onset of the digital age. The report, due out next week from Forrester, finally puts the onus on marketers to change their structures -- a welcome conclusion for media owners and agencies who keep hearing how they should change, but often complain that their clients have done little to shift their organizations to cope with an increasingly complex world of media fragmentation and rising retailer and consumer power.
Sheraton is giving away free nights in dozens of its locations as part of a campaign to promote the $6 billion it has spent on renovations. It's a missed opportunity to do more for its brand and business. Staying at a Sheraton has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. I don't know if the differences in facilities are due to uneven franchisees and/or poor central management, but I can attest from personal experience that some Sheratons have been shockingly terrible, and others have qualified as just stunningly OK. An overhaul has been long overdue, and it's a really good thing. But the project is incomplete; less than half of the hotel's locations have been updated.
For all the focus on marketing ROI, some companies miss the forest for the trees, because improvements won't happen through tactics alone. They need a new approach, applying marketing analytics to business decisions -- call it return on brand -- that can more than double marketing ROI through a cross-functional implementation of integrated business analytics. Many companies use accountability programs to measure and optimize marketing and media investments; their valuable insights can dramatically increase revenue and profits if implemented correctly. They often fall short, however, in their ability to act on this information and realize true marketing accountability ROI.
Branding Is Dead! Long Live Brands?! Many pundits have declared the death of branding and it would be difficult to argue to continue typical branding activities. Creating an image to serve as the “face” of a company, refreshing a logo or tagline in an attempt to reinvigorate the business, developing advertising campaigns to “get our name out there” – the business value of these efforts can indeed be questioned. Today’s savvy consumers are likely to see through a brand façade. They can easily find out if the business practices, products, and people behind a brand are what their ads say they are. And they’re more likely to trust their own experience or the recommendation of a friend or even an online reviewer than a company’s own chest-thumping. In fact, one could argue that the historical role which brands played – that is, serving as symbols to guarantee a certain of level of quality – is no longer relevant or useful today. But that is not to say that brands themselves are no longer valuable.
Leo Laporte, creator of This Week in Tech and the TWiT network of podcasts, spoke before the Online News Association this week and presented the very model of the new media company: small, highly targeted, serving a highly engaged public, and profitable.
Having just returned from vacation, (hence the break from blogging) I had the distinct pleasure of keynoting Silicon Valley AMA last night at Cisco’s Telepresence suites in Santa Clara. In my opening keynote, I had a specific message to marketing leaders in the valley to think holistic about social. I outlined some of the major impacts to other departments beyond marketing.
You can hardly have a conversation about social media today without discussing the concept of transparency. More and more, companies are incorporating transparency into their marketing efforts. Why? The reason, according to Debbie Weil, a corporate social media consultant and author of The Corporate Blogging Book, is because customers and stakeholders increasingly expect it. “It (transparency) is the new operating standard,” she said. Transparency is about being open, honest, and accountable. It’s about responsibility. People are listening to you and making evaluations and decisions based upon what you say, and as such, it’s important to take responsibility for the messaging you put out there. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh explains it best, “I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business, when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal.” For those looking to refine their social media messaging, here are five ways to become more transparent.
Niels Bohr once noted that "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," but then he didn't have access to predictive loyalty metrics. Happily, we do. And, as they measure the direction and velocity of consumer values 12 to 18 months in advance of the marketplace and consumer articulations of category needs and expectations, they identify future trends with uncanny accuracy. Having examined these measures, we offer 10 trends for marketers for 2010 that will have direct consequences to the success - or failure – of next year's branding and marketing efforts.
Neuroscientists have found patterns in brain activity that correlate with single digit numbers. They can literally watch your mind count. Research into the physiology of how our noggins work has advanced mightily in recent years, especially when it comes to witnessing perception and memory. Technologies like fMRI -- an imaging tool that notes differences in water pressure, sort of -- have been heralded as objective ways to measure what happens in brains when things that were once believed to be solely subjective occurred in minds. The numbers recognition happens in the intraparietal cortex, and suggest that there are unique "signatures" for single digits, at least. The idea is that we possess some ancient ability to understand groups of things we'd encounter in an average day of gathering plants or running away from mastadons. The researchers thing they'll eventually figure out how brains make calculations, as well as learn more about how people learn. Marketers get really excited about this stuff.
I’ve been doing research on some companies and have spent quite a bit of time looking at companies’ corporate reports – e.g., annual reports, official statements, corporate presentations, etc. I’m amazed at how many companies completely overlook these reports as touchpoints through which people experience their brands. Often the reports are dry and pedantic or fluffy and full of corporate-speak – they don’t communicate or reflect what is differentiating or compelling about their brands. What’s ironic is these reports are becoming increasingly important brand touchpoints.
I was watching Stephanopoulos yesterday morning and I saw this IBM ad. And I thought, "hey, I've seen that guy somewhere before." And sure enough, he's in a Castrol Motor Oil ad. I think it's the same guy, right down to the wrinkles in his forehead. Does this matter? Maybe what happens in an ad for Castrol Oil stays in an ad for Castrol Oil. Or do actors have "transmedia" properties? Do they carry anything with them between ads? Here's what the "meaning transfer" theory says.
Three months ago I did something that many considered virtual heresy. After five years and 5,300 posts I shuttered my blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of a lifestream which you can find at SteveRubel.com. I thought I'd share why I went this route, what I learned these past three months and the implications for brands. As I have written many times, the world is facing a quiet crisis of attention. There are more shiny objects and information vying for our attention than ever -- with no end in sight. We're coping by making choices.
In April, when Domino’s suddenly had to grapple with the fact that a YouTube video of a couple of employees doing disgusting things with the company’s food was circulating rapidly across the Web, it was bad for the pizza chain’s business. But Domino’s problem turned out to be good for business for a fast-growing segment: companies that track Web chatter. Text mining, which is already used by some Wall Street traders to track issues that could affect stock prices, is now employed by many top marketers, including Cisco, Hormel, Microsoft and Intuit, as a sort of blunt instrument to gauge online sentiment about a brand.
It's very easy to underrate the value of cultural wisdom, otherwise known as sophistication. Walk into a doctor's office and the paneling is wrong, the carpeting is wrong and it feels dated. Instant lack of trust. Meet a salesperson in your office. She doesn't shake hands, she's fumbling with an old Filofax, she mispronounces Steve Jobs' name and doesn't make eye contact. Visit a website for a vendor and it looks like one of those long-letter opportunity seeker type sites. In each case, the reason you wrote someone off had nothing to do with their product and everything to do with their lack of cultural wisdom.
This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren't renters, now they own.
Every day, legions of new web sites appear, each competing for eyeballs and dollars. This presents an acute problem for companies. As consumers are presented with a vast array of online campaigns vying for their attention, businesses are grappling with the best way to target and engage them. Many are increasingly adopting an aggressive web-based strategy around sub-branding. So that rather than plaster the internet with, say, glossy blue-and-white logos, Ford, the motor company, is creating online communities for each of its vehicle lines.
While Americans have spent the summer seeking new remedies for their financial ailments, attending noisy town-hall meetings on health-care reform and trying to find something to occupy their time besides the travails of Jon and Kate, it was pleasing to read that these issues have not had a completely negative effect on what the rest of the planet thinks of us. This was made known in a recent New York Times op-ed in which the author noted that, over the last several months, the United States' brand has been seen more positively in the eyes of the world. This bit of news was reassuring to me and got me thinking about how the very idea of "good brand, bad brand" has taken on new meaning in this age of renewed thriftiness, environmental consciousness, corporate responsibility (or, flagrant lack thereof) and, most of all, consumer vigilantism arising from our all-digital-all-the-time marketplace.
Social media can be an incredible tool, both for producing and consuming incredible amounts of information. Over the last few years, there is no question that an unprecedented change has taken place, putting tools for publication and discovery in the hands of everyone – from simple text to photos and video. Social media tools are changing businesses in terms of how they can connect with customers, partners, peers and even the competition. But the non-stop promotion of the tools and, yes, the individuals who think they are “experts” is getting a little overwhelming. I believe that social media activity, be it Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, blog comments, Flickr, SlideShare or any other service, is part of the infrastructure. It is quickly becoming part of everything we do – both for our work lives and for personal lives.
Marketers caught on early that emotion sells product. "Would your husband marry you again?" screams a Palmolive ad from 1921. (Not unless you scrub with Palmolive soap, honey.) Today, Heineken has promised warmer international relations via handoffs of Premium Light from mountain men to Indians to ballerinas. And, of course, Axe has sold young men on the fantasy of hooking up with deodorant-loving nymphomaniacs. Emotional appeals are ubiquitous. They're also interchangeable. It would be just as easy to pitch Heineken as an aphrodisiac and Axe as a global harmonizer ("Peace starts in the pits"). And that's the problem: It's all stick-on emotion. Sometimes that works brilliantly (see: Corona). Other times, it's as weird and clumsy as an adhesive moustache -- remember Carl's Jr. and Paris Hilton's sexed-up hamburger ad? Fortunately, there's a better and more sustainable way to create emotion: Mean it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby that personality is forged by an "unbroken string of successful small gestures." And as with people, so with brands. Brand personality takes root in the soil of its own heritage and history. Some brands have to make up a past. Others have ancestry galore to utilize if the brand's stewards can strike the right tone without relying too much on nostalgia. I call this brand mythos -- the archetypal true back-story, the legend of itself told to itself and its fans.
It doesn't matter much which marketing publication you pick up or which industry trend piece comes across your desk, it is simply impossible to miss the constant attention being paid to shopper marketing these days. No one should be surprised. With 72% of shoppers deciding what to buy in-store, the marketing world is acutely aware of the importance of the "last mile" and the ultimate moment of truth. Today, clients and agency folk alike are rushing to shopper marketing, searching for the experts and digging for the insights that will lead to stronger commercial programs and real marketplace advantage.
Companies that try to make progress within a highly political and negative culture have a very tough time. They constantly find themselves placing more energy into selling and navigating choppy internal waters, than being externally brilliant. Without a positive internal culture, life is extremely difficult. While communication and ad agencies may believe they can turn around a company with a brilliant campaign, so often, their best efforts are hampered by internal politics and a general lack of understanding that "everything is the brand". Zappos, on the other hand, owes it's success to a fundamental belief that a positive internal culture is everything. Creating a happy organization is so important for them because they know it has a knock-on effect to business performance. Delivering a unique service experience, (customer service agents have no time limits or scripts), is something that gets talked about and builds business.
Meet the man with a nearly uncontainable design challenge: making Coke even bigger (and staying ahead of Pepsi).
Companies as diverse as McDonald's, Ford, and American Express are revamping their marketing to win back that most valuable of corporate assets.
For corporate communications specialists and reputation managers in the post financial crisis universe, the combined elements of distrust for authority and demand for transparency converge on the internet, specifically in the realm of social media. Hardly a day goes by without a breathless email announcing yet another conference, video, webinar or book providing the definitive answer to the mysteries of bending social media to one’s will. However, the relentless hype that has accompanied its growth may exaggerate or misconstrue its impact. Professionals would do well to take a deep breath and begin to think about how to build a detailed business strategy that includes but does not necessarily focus on social media so as to create sustainable value.
While the concept of personal branding has taken off corporate branding seems to go in and out of favor. Economic cycles may have a lot to do with that. With the growth of the Internet and social technology tools, personal branding activity and opportunities have exploded. On the other hand, in some ways, the arc of Web 1.0 to 2.0+ (not to mention this current economy) has seduced many marketers into being focused on tactics at the expense of strategy including branding. Hot media tactics often substitute for the "strategy." If you are skeptical that brands still matter in the age of 1-1, millennials and social media, or if you are trying to run a business and make numbers and don't have the patience for brand consultant-speak or theories, here is a quick, simple refresher on good old fashioned branding that works today, that can help you frame your marketing and other operational tactics...to drive business results.
The financial markets' collapse and a growing distrust of global leaders both public and private has increased the importance of thinking strategically about communications and its impact on reputation. Government officials, political candidates and all those operating in the public realm are increasingly asking how they can measure with greater certainty the dynamics that drive their communications performance. With upcoming battles in the US on climate change, healthcare, Supreme Court confirmations, financial reform and a new Middle East peace initiative, among others, there is ample opportunity to evaluate communicators’ ability to drive public opinion. The corporate sector has been measuring the impact of communications and reputation for some time, using the results of these analyses to determine how their allocation of resources and themes affect financial outcomes such as stock price, P/E ration, revenues and profits. The earliest iteration of measurement centered on clip counts and evaluations—the most basic tenets of media relations—but has since evolved to include more robust scientific metrics. This is spurred by the diminishing effectiveness of traditional advertising. One recent survey revealed that only 13% of respondents believe advertising claims.
"My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." U.S. President Barack Obama felt compelled to speak these words to the leading U.S. bank CEOs at a White House gathering to which they had been summoned on April 9, 2009. Driven by public anger at the financial crisis, the President employed a metaphor invoking images of "peasants with pitchforks" rising up to demand better treatment. That Iranian students, indigenous Peruvians and Somali pirates feel similarly inspired to take violent actions affecting global businesses reinforces the point. Based on recent polling data, it is would seem that his uncharacteristic use of alarmist imagery was not misplaced. According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, 49% -- or fewer than half of the people surveyed in an annual assessment of US attitudes -- support an independently functioning free market.
Conventional wisdom about how to “get the word out” about your products is focused on finding and relating to the “influencers.” If you do this, so we’re told, you will get the “big hit” from a mention in a powerful blog or mainstream media publication and that will drive traffic to your website, generating leads that turn into closed business. Now, there’s no doubt that a TechCrunch, Scobleizer, or New York Times can, sometimes, serve as kingmaker, but here’s the equation to consider. Is the return on your effort really worth it?
Every so often the vocabulary of business adopts new words that filter into the mainstream business psyche. For example, the language of brands and branding is now commonly used and understood across a range of sectors— from universities to social enterprises to small businesses. Over the past year or two, the new vocabulary has brought in “sustainability,” whether it is to talk about the environment or general business operations, about communities or the future. Google the term and you’ll see that “sustainability” has 28 million definitions—only a few million short of the 34 million entries for “branding." Words that become common business parlance can shift in meaning and, in doing so, become open to a multitude of interpretations.
Crises are particle accelerators for brands that reveal their fragility, as we've recently witnessed with bankrupt banks, tampered-with pizzas, poisoned pistachios, dodgy cookie dough and lethal drugs. While there are impressive tomes on crisis management, we still are littered with embarrassing reminders of the recurring gap between preparation and accomplishment. It's time to stop repeating the same mistakes when it comes to crisis management. It's also time to recognize the CMO's role in negotiating crises. As social media has enabled consumers to more actively participate in brands, the CMO arguably now has an even greater role to play in activating customer support or other mechanisms necessary at a time of crisis. That's because CMOs are more in tune with consumers; they are using social-media tools to interact with them, and they can harness those tools in a time of crisis, turning those most loyal consumers into brand ambassadors.
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.
Given that innovation is the only sustainable advantage these days, advertisers need to allocate at least 10% of their marketing budget to foster it, even in these economically challenged times, said former eBay and Best Buy CMO Mike Linton, who spoke to an audience at the Aberdeen Group's Chief Marketing Officer Summit here yesterday. Innovation, by Mr. Linton's definition, is any action taken by the brand that changes consumer behavior in favor of the company, and that can range from a new product to a new way to service customers.
For decades, companies from Cisco Systems to Staples to Bank of America have worked to embed the basic techniques of Six Sigma, the business approach that relies on measurement and analysis to make operations as efficient as possible. More recently, in the last 5 to 10 years, they have been told they must master a new set of skills known as “design thinking.” Aiming to help companies innovate, design thinking starts with an intense focus on understanding real problems customers face in their day-to-day lives — often using techniques derived from ethnographers — and then entertains a range of possible solutions.
For most businesses, being part of the social-media evolution is no longer a new opportunity; it's a necessity. And yet for many, one of the most basic elements of a successful strategy seems dangerously undercooked: the "what?" What exactly is this currency we're now wielding? What are its different forms, how do they travel, and do we have a real understanding of them? What makes the content we're creating socially, culturally and distinctively relevant? For multicultural audiences, this is an especially crucial consideration. For the growing "non-general market," social media means much more than just Twitter, Facebook and blogs. It includes a wide range of content and channels, paths to entry more nascent than the staid mediums and content we're all familiar with.
We try so hard to build the first circle. This is the circle of followers, friends, subscribers, customers, media outlets and others willing to hear our pitch. This is the group we tell about our new product, our new record, our upcoming big sale. We want more of their attention and more people on the list. Which takes our attention away from the circle that matters, which is the second circle. The second circle are the people who hear about us from the first circle.
Customer support is tactical, a cost-center, and the clean-up-kids at the company. Well, that’s the mentality that needs to change. Instead, customer support can be strategic, a value center, and proactive towards customer needs. The lines between marketing and support continue to blur, as customers share their experiences (most recently, Dooce vs her Whirlpool washing machine) the support experience she has becomes a PR task. Support organizations must quickly evolve as customers connect to each other –and share their stories –using social technologies.
"The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way." - Richard Stallman A paradigm is nothing more than a set of assumptions, values, and practices that constitute a way of viewing reality. For example, if you view business as a competitive endeavor, then you place yourself, metaphorically, on the same track as the "other guy." You think about beating the other guy. You value beating the other guy. You put practices in place to beat the other guy. Unfortunately, customers could care less about you and the other guy. Customers care about themselves. Today's paradigm shifting is about new, out-of-the-box consumer experiences.
Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses. What should Google do? I think it needs to become news’ best friend.
For more than 100 years, marketing has largely operated as a push paradigm. We create messages and funnel them through the media to reach stakeholders. Push remains viable. However, with time on social-networking sites and search engines rising, we need new ways to engage and reach people multiple times across different sources. That, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, is when consumers will trust what we have to say. That's what the "power of pull" is all about.
Anthropological dreams are made of this: helping Disney and Marvel manage their rapprochement. Nothing short of heroic effort will do. Disney is, after all, a pretty good marker for all that is mainstream about American culture. Marvel is, by deliberate contrast, darker and less predictable. One corporation turns in towards the gravitational center of our culture. The other prefers to plot a course for the margin, for the uncharted, for the unknown. I mean, this can't be a match made in heaven. It's going to be tricky, complicated and, possibly, agonizing. Right?
Failure to recognise the value of building a brand internally will cost a company its competitive advantage. Failure to implement internal branding should cost the CEO his or her job. Sustainable competitive advantage can only be achieved by the consistent meeting of customer expectations. In simple terms, this means that the brand has to keep its promise. While the more glamorous application of external brand-building — through campaigns in a variety of visible media and communication channels — is necessary for connecting with customers and other stakeholders, it should follow the brand platform established internally, and not lead it.
I recently gave a talk titled Free the People! at the Potomac Forum’s Government 2.0 Leadership, Collaboration, and Public Engagement Symposium in Washington, DC that generated enough interest for me to post my slide deck and write a summary for a wider audience. These thoughts constitute some of my early ideas about “offensive social media” for organizations (this talk was particularly geared towards a government audience, but the fundamentals apply to the private and public sectors more broadly).
The folks at Blackcoffee have been inviting folks to complete the thought, “A Brand Is…”. I was so fascinated to read the range of responses that I decided to take a closer look. I wanted to see what common themes emerged among people’s definitions of “Brand” and what we could learn from them.
Here's a test. Ask five to 20 of your employees to explain what your company's customer value proposition is. How many different answers do you guess you'll get? Answer: somewhere between five and 20. This is, of course, in addition to the response, "What the heck do you mean by a value proposition?" This is slightly exaggerated to illustrate a point. But, in the many years with which we have advised on and written about customer-driven strategies, there has been a common pattern: massive inconsistency in people's ability to clearly articulate their company's value proposition.
In reality a product is all about the experience. It is about discovery, purchase, anticipation, opening the package, the very first usage. It is also about continued usage, learning, the need for assistance, updating, maintenance, supplies, and eventual renewal in the form of disposal or exchange. Most companies treat every stage as a different process, done by a different division of the company: R&D, manufacturing, packaging, sales, and then as a necessary afterthought, service. As a result there is seldom any coherence. Instead, there are contradictions. If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense - the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product’s components.
This concept of going from macro to micro must be the most significant development brought by the social Web. While in the past, the official position of a company was the *only* public position a company would have, today, a company's public face is a composition. In fact, if it's done its job well, an organization could have a myriad voices, all different, yet all on the same cultural page.
Practically the only thing guaranteed that social media will kill is your free time. Maybe it will kill your real-world social life too, but that's only if you choose to have an intimate relationship with your computer, at the pure neglect of the world outdoors. While it's popular and tempting to say that social media is poised to eliminate core business elements, such as marketing, public relations, or advertising, the truth is that the latest Web tools are simply infrastructure, to be used well. More traditional departments in business, and the third party vendors who provide their services, will need to adapt to a changing world, but they aren't going anywhere.
What's still one of the most important consumer trends out there? Transparency. Of prices, of opinions, of standards. So let’s look at what’s new, happening, upcoming and important, including the inevitable countertrend. There’s no hiding ;-)
I hear versions of the same conversations almost weekly. While they're not necessarily new conversations, the tenor of them has grown considerably tenser as a result of the struggling global economy. The conversations run something like this: The chief financial officer says: "Before I spend any money in this environment, I need to know the impact of this investment. I need to see an ROI." The CMO responds with: "It's not about ROI; it's about creating awareness. Having people understand our brand will create engagement, which will lead to revenue."
Every 90 days, I report to Wall Street and our shareholders on the financial health of our company--called to the carpet when results are bad, receiving a pat on the back (if memory serves) when numbers are good. Many years ago, we put corporate social responsibility on the agenda for these quarterly financial calls, because as a critical component of our effort to be a responsible business--fiscally and socially--it felt not only appropriate, but necessary. Guess how many times I've been called to the carpet by shareholders for not delivering satisfactory CSR results, or how often we've received a comment or question about our CSR programs on these quarterly calls? Never. The silence isn't an indication that we've perfected corporate responsibility--far from it--it's an indication that shareholders don't find CSR performance relevant.
Rapid commoditization of products. Jaded consumers. A tough economy that has changed customers’ spending habits. Perhaps permanently. How can a consumer product company grow, or even survive in this new paradigm? I’ve been mulling this over for a while and it seems to me that it’s time to become “disruptive.” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive technology” in his 1997 bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma. The concept has been widely discussed ever since. Christensen’s argument states there are two kinds of companies: those that use sustaining technologies and those that employ disruptive ones.
In 2008, the only advertisement any marketer could talk about was Cadbury's drumming gorilla. The advert was made for television but was also viewed millions of times on YouTube. Agencies were delirious at the crossover success to the video sharing site. Here, finally, was proof that traditional agencies could conquer the web with old-school marketing skills. Gorilla scooped the grand prix in film at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. By June this year, Cannes was a very different festival. For a start, the Croisette - normally packed with partying ad men - was deserted as agencies stayed away to nurse their shrinking budgets. But in any event, rather than television adverts winning awards for online work as Gorilla had, it was the online campaigns that impressed the judges across every category.
Are you more loyal to brands than you were 10 years ago? Are there any businesses that provide such a great product or service that you would never price-shop, and you'll declare your brand loyalty across your social networks? My guess is that you and your customers are much less loyal than you were in the '90s.
Street fashion designer Rick Klotz has announced that he's going to forsake any brand logos or names on his Freshjive products next year. Is it an anti-branding move, or something more? I say something more.
Last month I shared what search taught me about running a business. Today, I'd like to list 10 lessons Google taught me -- and the rest of the world, for that matter -- about marketing.
There is a vital lesson buried in the August 19, 2009 Jet Blue announcement that they were suspending sales of the $599.00 "All You Can Jet" promotion they'd debuted only seven days before. Any student of Behavioral Economics could have predicted that an "all you can eat" approach would inspire vastly different behavior than if Jet Blue had charged a lower fixed fee plus $1 per mile. Similarly, over a decade ago when AOL switched to a usage-independent flat price, connection time increased four times more than they anticipated. "All you can eat" is an entirely different price than "very, very cheap."
When consumers make purchase decisions, they're spending anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds - according to surveys and research conducted by consumer behavior experts. Studies show that consumers ignore up to two-thirds of category products when they shop. That kind of statistic points to just how difficult it is to successfully package products. And clearly demonstrates why so many products fail at retail.
Most companies have turned from feeling paralyzed by the economic shocks of 2008 to plotting response strategies appropriate for today's tough markets. One thing companies need to carefully consider is how to confront the new reality of increasingly value-conscious customers.
Following a recent study, "Fortune 100 CEOs Are Slackers," social media pundits have entered a heated, one-sided debate on the subject. In today's culture, current expectations are that CEOs who opt to utilize social media must essentially agree to an ongoing and continuous dialogue with anyone interested while managing their other duties. While social media has attracted tremendous attention, it has made few agencies - and only a small handful of people - any money. Why? Because the current rules of social engagement are completely unrealistic for corporate America.
Repeat after me: "Your customer doesn't have the answers!" I thought we put this to rest fifteen years ago, but apparently there are a number of companies still trying to create innovative consumer experiences by asking people what they want. Consumers want what their neighbors have. They have no idea what's next--they consume!
“If I am I because you are you. And you are you because I am I. Then I am not I and you are not you.” ⎯ Unknown Rabbi. It may sound like double-talk, but the wise Rabbi’s message is a profoundly important one for those trying to navigate today’s complex and rapidly evolving marketplace. And it’s this: We are not separate. We define each other. We are fronts and backs of each other⎯producer/consumers; government/citizens; manufacturer/suppliers; consultant/clients; management/talent; and, especially, brand/customers. In fact, a brand only knows what it is in terms of its customers. Unfortunately, we tell ourselves a very different story.
According to market research firm Hartman Group, consumer loyalty is shifting -- from products and brands, to the experiences offered by retailers -- in a radical transformation that started before the recession. I think the change is much bigger than that. Hartman is onto something because it specializes in enthnographic market research (among other tools), which is an attempt to understand consumers in the context of their lives, both in terms of their knowledge and beliefs, and through their behaviors. I believe the firm is saying that capturing consumers' attention with creative and/or compelling marketing communications no longer carries the water in our busy, confused, noisy lives; experiences are what stick, bring differences into sharp focus, and compel purchases.
A few years ago, we were asked by a regional coffee roaster to redefine the coffee experience for fine dining. We knew that Americans drank coffee after dinner for functional purposes (to wake/sober up), but we wanted to understand how we could create a more emotional experience. We grabbed our notepads, went into the field, drank a lot of coffee, studied coffee rituals from different cultures and ultimately crafted a compelling coffee experience that could have resurrected the after dinner coffee ritual in America. The client loved it, but never brought it to market. Why?
An old yet dominant definition of branding is emotion-driven storytelling in which the brand works to attract and guide us by projecting a desired lifestyle. An established yet fringe definition of branding is storytelling inspired by the tangible qualities of the objects or systems the brand supports. This later definition and approach to branding reverses out of transcendent, emotion-based brand experiences and gives more responsibility to the customer's intelligence to create the experience and meaning. What would our branded world look like if this approach was widely adopted?
Just about every company has a Web site. But today, many marketers are going further. They are transforming their digital presence into powerful media channels, direct to consumers. The practice is prevalent enough that, as the research firm Outsell Inc. reported in July 2008, about 62 percent of marketers’ online advertising and marketing budgets are spent on their own digital media, up from 58 percent in 2007. These marketers recognize that with the right mix of content, utility, community, and product, they can create compelling premium experiences for consumers. And they see that these efforts deliver powerful benefits in branding, relationship building, and lead generation.
One of the best parts of vacationing in a small town is visiting the local video store, where the proprietor--a scruffy guy who loves everything related to movies--will recommend films that he thinks you'll love. There's no scientific algorithm to his suggestions, no data analysis or statistical assessment. The owner makes his recommendations based on bits and pieces of casual conversation with customers. I was thinking about that video store as I read about the contest hosted by Netflix, which offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could significantly improve its recommendation system and ended in July. While digital technology has made our lives more convenient in many ways, especially in the way it helps people make buying decisions, smart companies realize that there are some things even the most sophisticated digital applications can't do. Above all, they can't replace the personal touch that often helps consumers distinguish one brand from another.
In a world where the real social media players count their subscribers in the tens or hundreds of millions, Friendfeed hardly moves the needle. Mired at a million or so unique visitors a month and facing the likelihood of being crushed to a fine powder when Google Wave hits the streets, Friendfeed's investors and managers decided to take the first convenient off ramp when Facebook came a-calling. By now you've probably heard the specifics, since practically anyone with a keyboard has been breathlessly tapping away since the deal was made public late Monday: $50 million, most of which will be paid in Facebook stock. A nice payday for Friendfeed's small team (and most likely a relief to the company's investors, who must have known Friendfeed wasn't going anywhere as a solo act). But not a vast sum of money for a company that pays a million dollars a month just the keep the lights on. So why all the attention?
We all know what our customers want. We’re confident that we understand the problem. We look at reams of marketing reports. We conduct the focus groups. We survey them. We have plenty of data. Guess what? It’s not enough. Data can only indicate facts.
In the U.S., the average tenure for a CMO is roughly 23 months. In the U.K., it is even shorter. Al Ries states over at AdAge that of all the firms in the Fortune 1000, only 7% of the most highly paid executives have marketing in their job title, and only 15% of those same firms even have a senior level marketing position, such as CMO.
Are you building a business? Or are you building a brand? Silly questions, you might be thinking. Naturally, you are trying to do both. But that might be a mistake. What's good for the business is not necessarily good for the brand. And vice versa.
New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don't need as much approval and support to launch them. As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita's candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.
Far be it from me to lament the ability for anyone to build or publish virtually anything now that the age of the consumer and age of information have intersected so gloriously. We are truly blessed to live in a day when, with a little time and instruction reading, even the tech-tarded can have their own blog or website and publish anything they want. The more adventurous and creative, or all-night code-bender freaks, can build platforms and tools and toss them out there to see if the public bites.
I got a recommendation from someone to read Martin Lindstrom's book, "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." It describes the new neuromarketing sciences exploring how the brain's physical reaction to our thoughts, sensory stimulation or even rituals can evoke brand loyalty or apathy. According to Lindstrom, this new understanding of the biology behind our unconscious mind's ability to make "decisions" faster than our conscious mind represents a "historic meeting between science and marketing. A union of apparent opposites."
We live in a conversation driven world. Even if your brand is not an active user of social media, your customers and potential customers are. This is revolutionizing the way brands have to think about themselves and how they choose to compete. In a conversation driven world, the real threat is not conversation itself, but commoditization. Unless customers have reason to talk, they won't. And a brand that generates little or no conversation will be killed by one that does.
After years of calling the shots, the traditional Mad Men of advertising -- the creative types who cooked up memorable sell-lines like "the ultimate driving machine" -- are increasingly sharing the spotlight with, you guessed it, the nerds. Or as Jon Bond, a co-founder of Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, which has done work for Target and Panasonic, says, "If we were in India, it would be as if the untouchables had suddenly become the ruling class." What has allowed the lowly quants to sit at the same table as the advertising Brahmin is a new way of thinking about the creation of desire.
Consider for a moment that the humble Amazon product review can nullify millions of dollars of ad spend, that a search for "best razor" on Google can route around all of Gillette's best efforts to communicate the "best a man can get," and that a "hate Comcast" group on Facebook has the power to drive a consumer straight into the arms of DirectTV.
Remember how crazy, desperate United and Delta got when JetBlue started making cheap flights cool? With those nutty flight attendants' ad libs, TV in the seats and interesting snacks? They thought they couldn't compete with that tonality, so they created two new sub-brands; Song even got Kate Spade to design the uniforms. Starbuck's 15th Avenue may be the Starbucks' version of TED and Song.
Marketing researchers of note, Forrester Research and McKinsey & Company, recently conducted studies on the nature of consumerism today. Their results are important because they point to a shift away from the classic “consumer purchasing funnel.”
Ever since I’ve started blogging about technology a couple of years ago, I’ve been consistently growing an immense feeling of hate towards press releases, and it’s not getting any better. It’s not that I dislike the PR industry in general, although I often wonder how so many of these firms continue to be in business when the large majority of them have been doing it exactly the same way for the past few decades, instead of evolving.
After participating in a Digital Brand Think Tank in Munich a couple of weeks ago (a lively discussion with 20 marketing executives from Audi, BMW, Google, Continental, and other top-tier brands), I must admit that I’m a bit tired of having to evangelize (or even justify) the value of brands using social media. It is astonishing to me that companies still ask for evidence when the tweet is on the wall. The event showed that there is a new Digital Divide that cuts straight through the ranks of the marketing industry--some executives get the Social Web, some don’t. No one has figured it out yet. Most would admit that they need to catch up and keep learning.
The focus on the role of the leader in society has been at the heart of the development of much of modern political and social thought. Aristotle captured the essence of the proposition of the “altruistic” or “virtuous” leader: "But since we say that the virtue of the citizen and ruler is the same as that of the good man and that the same person must first be a subject and then a ruler, the legislator has to see that they become good men and by what means this may be accomplished." But for the want of a few good men (and women) at the top of the world’s financial services industry and its regulators, the world’s economic system was nearly destroyed. Now, business leaders are as ill-regarded as politicians. Indeed, there is a crisis of confidence in them that is global and worsening.
After months in development, the new product is ready for worldwide launch. The product manager tells the creative team to use a picture of a globe. "But our brand is about what we do for people. Our brand guidelines specify images of humanity," the designer pleads. "I don't care. Use the globe," the product manager demands. Unfortunately, there's always the need to balance business objectives with branding goals. Says the VP of Global Branding for a major commercial information data base company, "It's not that product managers ignore branding. They don't understand how to leverage it."
A popular blogger can create as much impact as a 30-second spot. Should personal influence be the next CPM? Marketers seem to have realized only recently that people can be brands. Madonna constantly reinvents herself. Martha Stewart is now a redeemed domestic diva. But personal branding has been around for as long as mass media. In the heyday of the silver screen, studios managed their stars like brands in a portfolio. They carefully positioned, packaged and presented each one. Stars could launch a look or a way of walking and could influence millions of consumers.
When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth. Discover what makes them different.
Successful businesses are always making choices and sacrifices, strategically looking as to how they are going to prioritize their resources, including human capital, budgets, and, of course, time. As the world around them adapts, so too do they need to make changes internally to respond, or to predict where trends are going – and if they guess right, the business could catapult ahead of less-agile competition.
Marketers are finally beginning to understand that, like any intimate relationship, a dialogue works better than "talking at" someone. When a marketer has a deep understanding of people's habits and needs, it's a pretty intimate thing. Who else knows about the double fudge ice cream buried in the grocery cart under the reduced calorie, low-fat frozen dinners?
To really incite the full range of customer reaction to a brand -- and by full range, I mean everything from bitter rage at the low end to fantastic appreciation at the high end -- traditional advertising is not the way to do it. In these postmodern times, where every interaction with the customer is a marketing event, the real crunch point comes when the customer meets your customer-service department.
Why should we fear Google? There's an easy, obvious answer to that, particularly if you're a media or marketing person: because Google is killing us. It is, duh, blatantly steamrollering the business models of countless business sectors, from Madison Avenue to print media. (Despite all the Bing hype, it appears that Microsoft's refreshed search engine -- er, decision engine -- isn't making a dent in Google's dominance.) Annoyingly, it's a cute monopoly -- with a cute logo, a cute motto ("Don't be evil"), cute executives and a cute corporate culture -- that bewitches a lot of people into somehow doubting that it's a monopoly, and prompts even otherwise cynical media people to be unnecessarily polite about it.
Over the years, I’ve actively called for Twitter to contribute to its own culture and direction by leading instead of following. It would effectively serve as a source of inspiration and orientation for consumers and the businesses hoping to connect with them, which would ultimately increase the alarming 40-percent user retention pattern. I suggested that the company actively define user scenarios and offer a quick-start guide for the unique groups of users seeking guidance in order to not only increase user retention, but also accelerate adoption and the evolution of the service. If I had a bit more time, I would have gladly written a series of educational and instructional guides for them to own and publish on their site. But now, with the help of Sarah Milstein, Twitter is on the right track and is showing signs of a company that is ready to once again lead us to new digital and sociological terrain.
A recent Nielsen study revealed that people most trust what their friends say about stuff, and that they trust generic online consumer opinions as much as they do branded communications. I think this has more to do with the contextual reality of the expectations than it does with any inherent trustworthiness in a particular communications medium (or lack thereof).
I want to love my cable company – honestly, I do. They bring me things I love and depend upon. I love TV. I really, really love the internet. (The phone? Well, I love that, too – but unfortunately for the cable company, it’s my iPhone I adore.)
Two items in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye today. Both show us the American corporation as it struggles to divine the mysteries of American culture.
The newly reformulated Powerade contains "ION4," and the branding emphasizes the secret code for this new concoction at the expense of the name of the product. I'm not sure that’s such a smart thing to do.
Brands have a unique opportunity to understand how they can matter more to consumers by delivering beyond the product and value proposition and contributing to an individual's experience. Too often, sponsorships and promotions are viewed as secondary efforts to a brand's above-the-line efforts. In flush times, they are nice to have. In bad times, they are easy cuts. And, with the digital channel serving as a direct conduit to a brand's consumers, it is even easier to dismiss live efforts as expensive and hard to measure.
Amazon just announced that they're spending $800,000,000.00 (looks better that way) to buy Zappos.com. But wait. Amazon already has plenty of shoes. Amazon already has great technology. Amazon already has relationships with Fedex and UPS. What you buy when you spend that kind of money is what matters now.
If you couldn’t make it to the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey last month, you missed a lot of good content, networking and discussion. The big question that came out of the conference for me was, “what does capitalism look like in a dematerialized world?” In other words, is a sustainable brand an oxymoron?
A wise Rabbi once said, "If I am I because you are you. And you are you because I am I. Then I am not I and you are not you." We are not separate. We define each other. We are fronts and backs of each other." In order to describe a particular brand -- what it is -- you must describe its behavior -- what it does. And to describe what it does, you must describe it in relationship to its audience and its audience's behavior (customers, fans, members, et al). Which means that a brand is one, interdependent system of behavior, and not a separate thing.
In a recent white paper, "The Future of the Social Web," Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang predicts the social web will soon morph through five stages, wreaking havoc on the way brands market. Owyang states: "Today's social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them ... IDs are just the beginning of this transformation ... Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. "
GM's CMO Robert Lutz was recently told an awful truth: "In my group it is just uncool to drive a GM car -- even if they are as good as the imports." He replied: "I guess it depends whether you have your own personality or whether you are a lemming-like follower of current trends. I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership and see that our new vehicles easily trounce the foreign competition. . . . It's uncool to drive an import." It's hard to assess how many ways this violates the marketer's handbook...but I'm going to try.
It landed with a resounding electronic thud. On Tuesday evening, the Silicon Valley based Techcrunch blog received a zip file containing 310 stolen documents from the micro-blogging start-up Twitter. That thud is still echoing through Silicon Valley. It is, of course, all-too-easy to bash Arrington as a William Randolph Hearst 2.0 willing to use any unscrupulous means to dramatically compound his publication’s already significant readership. But given that I’m writing this in the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that published “leaked” content about MPs expenses, I’m certainly not going to join the bloodythirsty mob baying for Michael Arrington’s head.
Few concepts in business have been as popular and appealing in recent years as the emerging discipline of “open innovation.” The overarching notion is that the Internet opens the door to a new world of democratic idea generation and collaborative production. Early triumphs like the Linux operating system and the Wikipedia Web encyclopedia are seen as harbingers. But a look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators.
Paula Courtney found "wow" when she took her daughter to the employee washroom at her local grocery store. A sign by the door instructed workers to remain physically by the side of any customer experiencing a problem until that problem was resolved. Later, when Courtney was in the checkout line, the cashier noticed Courtney's blueberries were squishy. The cashier insisted on walking back to the produce section to find a fresh box. For Courtney, chief executive of The Verde Group, a Toronto retail research and consulting firm, that was a "wow" shopping experience.
There is no centralized location in the digital world. Increasingly, digital content spans platforms and devices seamlessly, connecting users with information and with each other. In doing so, it democratizes and levels the traditional playing field for the persistently connected audience, becoming a global platform capable of providing ubiquitous access to content and experiences. For brands, it represents a new priority, influencing the digital tribe.
Budgets continue to be slashed. Brands are disappearing. Media is getting more fragmented. The only thing getting bigger is our federal deficit. So as a marketer, how do you capitalize on a world that is getting smaller in so many respects?
With all the news coverage today on financial mismanagement, I can tell you from first-hand experience about a company that continues to prosper amid all the chaos. And I think it is worth trying to understand why.
Marketing people, and the minds of the people they are trying to influence, are often in conflict. Unfortunately, these arguments are being presented to minds that really aren’t up to dealing with all that glorious information. Our perceptions are selective. And our memory is highly selective. We are cursed with the physiological limitation of not being able to process an infinite amount of stimuli. This means that in a crowded category, your difference might not be enough unless it is a dramatic difference.
In an economy as whacked out as this one is globally, the tired "customer is king" adage is actually a wicked understatement. Consumers have seemingly infinite choices from good brands--many of them desperate to move the merchandise to generate cash and survive. In an unforgiving marketplace like the one we are enduring, brands better build products and services around real, differentiated and defensible insights. "Here's what I hope you want to buy" is a merchandising strategy for failure.
There are two kinds of brand: national and niche. National brands are their own planets. They have the incumbent's advantage, channel control, big reputations, deep pockets, and, if they're lucky, consumer loyalty.
Social media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable content publishing, sharing, and discovery into a genuine, peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.
While the mind may still be a mystery, we know one thing about it that is for certain—it’s under attack. Most Western societies have become totally ‘‘overcommunicated.’’ The explosion of media forms, and the ensuing increase in the volume of communications, has dramatically affected the way people either take in or ignore the information offered to them.
If you are like many people, you enjoy chocolate and eat it frequently. That’s okay, you might think. After all, chocolate has antioxidants and it boosts your mood. Although this may be true, it is not the real reason why you eat chocolate: it is just a line of reasoning you follow to feel less guilty about eating something high in fat and sugar. People often rationalize in this way, telling themselves stories of sometimes dubious merit to justify their behavior. New work by Timothy Feddersen (Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management) shows how rationalization—once studied mainly in psychology—impacts choices and can help economists understand why people make decisions that violate standard economic theories.
These are austere times, but the logos recently loaded onto Logo Lounge.com–nearly 35,000 since 2008 – certainly do not reflect it, writes Bill Gardner. And that is how it should be. Wary homage may be paid to marketing in lean times, but not to identity design. These are two wholly different efforts with different goals. Identities should set a long-term course for clients, not fall into the pits carved out by economic phases. Our seventh annual logo trend report, as always, is as much a forecast as it is a study of the past 12 months. The past informs the future, and the recent past has such momentum that designers would be well-advised to stay this course, even when clients are only maintaining the brands they have, not creating new ones. Business may be slow, but it does not have to be dull.
Since the video game console industry began with the Atari 2600, every successive generation has been touted for its better graphics, faster processors, and increasingly complex controls. In 2005, when the latest generation of consoles was first announced, many assumed Sony's Playstation 3, which had the boldest specs, would prevail, following on the monster success of the Playstation 2. As it turns out, Nintendo's Wii has been the runaway success.
Marketers focus on their brands and customers as the family jewels--and they are. But there is another kind of marketing asset that I call "runways" and if you don't have them, you will miss huge opportunities. In this ADD world of rapid-fire Twitter streams, long-tail options, and media multi-tasking, you must be in the right place at the right time or the moment is lost. Runways are relationships your company can create with trading partners and consumers that make your brands accessible, and give YOU access to markets and marketing options you otherwise would not have. Let me illustrate.
Is Google’s OS the end of the OS – the long-predicted moment when Google and the web take over the PC? Or is it merely the disruptive OS throwing marbles on the floor for Microsoft and to some extent Apple and the software industry? Or will it be a platform and boon for app developers and PC makers and cloud companies? Or all of the above? Yes.
You don’t have to build relationships to sell things. McDonalds is sinking over $100 Million USD into their McCafe program, because they expect sales of those products to account for $1 Billion in sales. Do you think they give a rat’s anus about getting to know me? Not at all. Will their efforts work? I’m guessing yes. Even if they miss that Billion mark, it will be a pretty decent ROI in the end for their efforts. (We like coffee.)
Mad Sheep Rage. There - what a satisfying way to introduce a new column. No, I'm not nuts. Mad Sheep Rage is an acronym you might find useful. But first, let's get some perspective from another world where an important debate is raging.
Customer service is the new marketing because it is grounded in competency, people, and contact - all things that can help you with innovation and relationships and that cannot easily be outsourced. They in turn create the experience your customers have that contributes to your story - that of your company and your brand.
Every now and again, a PR meme appears on the Web – almost to the point where you could set your watch by it. This time around, Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times sparked the conversation with an in-depth article, “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley.” I respect Claire and I believe she wrote an extensive article that chronicles the launch of one particular startup and also featured supporting quotes from those PR professionals who are helping to usher in a new breed of corporate communications. While an exposé makes for an interesting read, PR is undergoing a much more significant renaissance that receives almost zero attention in this article. P.R. in Silicon Valley is far more sophisticated and effective than what’s actually spotlighted in the story and it’s much more potent than most entrepreneurs, investors, and executives realize.
The recent debates about the redesigned Tropicana orange juice packages that made a brief appearance on the market and disappeared after an outpouring of customer complaints brought to light again the need for caution when changing the packages of major brands.
Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.
Let’s face it: Your regular customers are on autopilot. When a purchase is repeated enough times, it becomes habit. However, market shifts can disrupt even the most powerful habits, and the current financial meltdown is the single biggest market disruption we’ve ever lived through. Customers are altering their behavior because of uncertainty about the future: laying off employees (maybe even your contacts), hoarding cash and postponing routine purchases. All purchase decisions are now up for conscious review. This is a daunting challenge, but it also creates opportunities.
It's almost impossible to escape the constant reminder that we are in a recession. While it's easy to criticize the media for playing up the downturn, marketers in general--and technology marketers specifically--feel obligated to lead with the message, "In these tough economic times..." Enough already!
One of the things that you probably learned by hanging out with me here at Conversation Agent is that I tend to bring together a lot of ideas in a short space, show you how those ideas are connected, and why you need to care. But, here's the thing, you care only if I catch you in the right frame of mind, if when you're reading this post you wrestle with the very same thoughts.
Word has it that Yahoo is going to debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO who has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus. There's nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand. It's what they do.
Creating an enduring brand is a huge challenge in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. It’s similar to raising a child: it requires focused attention, intuition, and a lot of patience. It also requires a desire to change and adapt. Our natural instinct, however, is to shelter our brands, like our children, from the knocks and bumps that come in life. We want to keep our arms around them, keep them safe and under our control.
Consumers are bombarded with more messages than ever before. Refining and clarifying your target segment is becoming evermore important as mass-messages are falling upon deaf ears. Specific, tailored and relevant messages, combined with consumer engagement and empowerment are elemental in the new marketing era. Less and less are market leaders dictating consumer needs through “push” advertising. By way of digital networking and publishing tools, consumers are creating consumer needs. To identify the key forces driving this marketing shift, we synthesized insights from over 40 industry professionals.
While Professor Joe Plummer and I may not see eye to eye on everything (see my post on the definition of engagement), there is one thing we definitely agree on: an enterprise can achieve optimal results only when its business and its brand are aligned to work in synergy. When business and brand are out of synch (as happens all too often), the return to the company and shareholders is compromised.
Consider this: conversation is to selling what cooking is to eating. Process. Not ingredients, nor consumption. How, not what. You wouldn't know it from the hype and confusion that surrounds the social media space, though. Conversation is an absolute good, an ideal that, once achieved, spins off numerous lesser benefits. It's a synonym for selling. If only our businesses talked to consumers more often, the brands would be strengthened, and the bottom-lines improved.
Customers will talk about your company, its products and services, whether you want them to or not. And online there are a multitude of places to do so. The question is, do you as a brand facilitate or participate? I will argue that you should do both, and tell you why.
Marketing is possibly the most widely misunderstood business topic in the managerial world today. The problem of marketing ignorance stems not from the difficulty of the topic. After all, marketing at its core is just about as simple as it gets. The problem is that to understand what a concept like marketing means is one thing, to actually apply the marketing principle to your day to day business life is an altogether more difficult challenge.
What can consumer companies do to make sure that their brands aren’t among the losers? Our research revealed that the most successful brands today — including Adidas and iPhone and Pixar and Wikipedia — resonate with consumers in a special way: They communicate excitement, dynamism, and creativity in ways that the vast majority of brands do not. We call this quality “energized differentiation,” and we have identified, out of dozens of brand attributes in our consumer-research database, the metrics that capture this quality. By focusing on these attributes, marketers can keep their brands constantly moving and gaining value. In a world of excess capacity and diminishing trust, creating these kinds of energy-infused brands can help companies reinvigorate their brand management practices.
Big brands’ best customers have been defecting in droves since the beginning of the US recession, according to a study. By this year, more than half of a typical US brand’s most loyal shoppers in 2007 had switched to rival products. A two-year analysis of 685 grocery and pharmacy-stocked brands, using data from 32m consumers’ supermarket loyalty cards, found that in 2008 the average brand lost a third of its formerly highly loyal customers. The study will alarm packaged goods groups, as the most loyal customers – those choosing one brand for more than 70 per cent of their purchases in a category – should also be their most lucrative.
Aiming to please too many different types of customers can be a fatal flaw. Focus on your core audience and don't waste money on the rest.
If I were on some weird reality show (I know, the "weird'" is redundant), where they made me hire a search strategist, and they only let me give one instruction, it would be this: To understand search, you have to understand human behavior.
Times are tough. People are hurting. Your mission to help people is critically important. But please don't confuse "mission" with "strategy."
I miss the good ol' days of global brand strategy. It used to be so simple: Develop a single, absolute definition of your brand, then produce content -- mostly TV spots and print -- that was generic enough for local voice-over talent to translate, perhaps augmented with an image or two for local color. What was important was that those absolutes of brand were constant; the delivery component was tactical. "Think global, act local" was the mantra we stole from the world's do-gooders in the 1970s, and it was supposed to save money on production costs while ensuring consistent delivery of our messaging.
I’m taking a break from the series on brand value creation for a post on a topic I’ve been reading a lot about lately — saying “thank you.” For people in general, service providers specifically, and companies, communicating sincere gratitude, it seems, is a lot more complicated than you might expect.
I guess you’ll have heard about the Versace hotel, the Ferrari laptop, and the Apple cell phone. Yet, had I suggested any one of these products to you fifteen years ago, you might have been forgiven for thinking that a few extravagant typos had made it past the editor. Yet today, we’ve become perfectly used to extreme brand extensions like these. But, can you go too far? Brands have been stretching their way into such new and unexpected product categories that some product progeny can be impossible to link to their brand parents.
I've thought a lot about "thinking global, acting local" since I moved to the UK to help launch an American brand two years ago. It's a constant tug-o-war between global consistency and local adaptation. Recently, I had coffee with Patrick Cairns, CEO of Plum Baby, who spent a lot of time in global roles with Unilever. He described the standard dichotomy as being either "mindlessly global" or "hopelessly local".
Brands have adopted a variety of tactics in response to changing consumer attitudes and behaviors. In the first quarter of 2009, we monitored more than 100 brand responses to the recession. We found that most approaches fit into six buckets: optimism, humor, nationalism, nostalgia, consumer empowerment and value/price.
News broke this week that Yahoo has hired a cost-cutting specialist as its new CFO, with references that he'll help "...weed out the bureaucracy that has been dragging down its profits." Is that what Yahoo needs to fix?
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been talking a lot over the past two weeks about Yahoo and how it competes against Google and Microsoft. Each time she does, I feel like she’s digging the hole even deeper for Yahoo’s prospects in search. Rather than communicate a clear search strategy — which you’d better have if you’re in a war against Google and Microsoft — she resonates mixed messages that Yahoo can ill afford to send.
Until recently, the yardstick used to evaluate the performance of American corporate leaders was relatively simple: the extent to which they created wealth for investors. But that was then. Now the forces of globalization and technology have conspired to complicate the competitive arena, creating a need for leaders who can manage rapid innovation. Expectations about the corporation’s role in social issues such as environmental degradation, domestic job creation, and even poverty in the developing world have risen sharply as well. And the expedient, short-term thinking that Wall Street rewarded only yesterday has fallen out of fashion in the wake of the latest round of business busts and scandals.
I’m well aware that I have been painting myself in a corner - or rather, I fear that media and journalism are: I’ve been arguing that charging for content online - news content - is futile and that print as a vehicle for advertising and a source of profit is unsustainable. Thus, online advertising is our only hope. But advertising will decline. For I’ve also been saying that the internet enables direct relationships among companies and customers: Your product is your ad and customer your ad agency. It’s only when that doesn’t work that you need to advertise. Advertising is failure. Welcome to the chaos scenario.
Once, just having a smartphone application was enough, but the era of novelty -- the blowing, shaking, one-trick-pony app -- is pretty much over. To rise above the clutter, an app has to be truly useful, whether it's created by a brand or by an entrepreneur.
According to former Vice President Al Gore, the importance of sustainability doesn't just apply to the environment. It also is key to the future of advertising. "It really comes out of the environment, but in my opinion the key theme of this century really is sustainability," Gore said. "This theme of environmental sustainability has become a part of our culture, it's a part of our discourse, and I'm very optimistic that it will soon be a part of our policy."
You have to love - or at least pay attention to - Digg’s new advertising system enabling users to vote on ads: The more that users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. That’s a reversal of advertising but it’s the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you’ll have to pay to market it. That is the ideal. Advertising is failure.
GM says it is reinventing itself. And what makes them or the government think they can do that on top of old infrastructure and old ways even with our billions? Good fucking luck.
Time Warner is going to spin off AOL by the end of the year. It should hurry up. It paid $124 billion in 2001; while that's less than a decade ago, it might has well have been a different planet. The Internet was fast becoming the superhighway for business and entertainment, and AOL owned one of the first and largest tollbooths. It was the Google and Twitter of its day. AOL made money, and seemed poised to be perhaps the dominant portal for Internet experience. Some critics even worried that it was poised to take over the Internet.
Our friend Peggy Ann Salz over at M Search Groove mentioned the diminshing utility of using demographics in marketing segmentation and targeting. I wanted to return to this topic, and argue loud and clear, that the evidence is overwhelming, that we (marketing professional) have experienced in the past few years a total shift where customer demographics have gone from utility to futility. Yes, futility. They are now counter-productive. You, reading this blog, need to start to remove all references to demographics in all of your company marketing.
Perceived quality is a brand association that is elevated to the status of a brand asset for several reasons.
When I first got into the ad biz and during my college studies the big thing that was repeatedly hammered into my young, impressionable mind was the need for every ad and ad campaign to have a "concept." A concept was that big idea, that creative aha that would simultaneously capture the consumer's attention and drive home a key benefit of the brand being advertised. And in the world of interruption based marketing, that makes sense. And to a lesser degree, today, it still does. But here is the rub. Here is the big thing that I think many of my fellow advertising folk haven't quite figured out. In the world of social media and web based marketing, you don't need a concept. Why? Because social and by and large digital isn't an interruption based communication platform. It's invitation based.
With social networks like Facebook transforming the way companies communicate with consumers, it's time for the ad industry to get its head out of the sand.
It's the place senior managers gather to deliberate. It's the place where the most pressing decisions are made. What's the metaphor that best captures the C-suite?
Design thinking is currently an "It" concept, the topic of countless books and blogs and conference panels. While it can mean a lot of different things to different people, for me, design thinking is a methodology, a tool, a killer app, and a problem-solving protocol to be used on virtually any problem. It can be equally effective in designing a new product or creating a new brand, to envisioning a new approach to health care or to reinventing city management. Mayor Daley in Chicago, where I live, is a pretty effective design thinker. That's right, Mayor Daley.
Say goodbye to surfin' dudes and babes, the amoral party that is Hollywood, and any fashion or legislative references that might imply peace, love, or pukka shells. California is rebranding itself. Yesterday, its Supreme Court upheld the voter-passed ban on same-sex marriage by a 6-1 margin. The state has a seriously (and frighteningly) direct, participatory democracy thing going on, which allows the ballot box to directly set legislation and regulations (they decided they didn't want to pay too much in property taxes a while back, for instance, so a referendum made it so). It turns out that a simple ballot initiative can also make verbatim changes to its constitution. California has been crowdsourcing its government for years.
It's both, and that's the problem. Some marketers are scientists. They test and measure. They do the math. They understand the impact of that spend in that market at that time with that message. They can understand the analytics and find the truth.
There are many ads today from our imperiled banks, insurance companies and automakers telling us that we can still trust them and should still buy their products. But there's one word consumers haven't heard much that might serve these companies better than their current dirges: sorry.
In the eyes of imaginative and opportunistic advertisers and marketers, bloggers and online influencers are the new celebrities and athletes. Brands are showering them with endorsement deals rich with products, cash, trips, exclusive access to information, and VIP treatment each and every day, creating a new genre of star spokespersons.
“We thought we’d update the logo a little.” “It’s not a new tagline. It’s just a catchy phrase that we are using instead of the tagline.” “We thought the icon would make a great decorative element.” “We are thinking about creating a new name for the organization.” “We developed a new product so we created a new brand for it.” “We created a different tagline for each audience. Pretty clever, huh?” “We were getting so tired of the old logo.” “It’s more fun to present the brand in a wide variety of colors.” “There was no room for the icon so we left it off.” “This is a funky stylized version of the logo targeted at younger audiences.” What is it about marketers that cause them to want to create something new all of the time?
Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they're beginning to have about our online friendships.
To extend or not to extend? With apologies to the Bard, allow me to suggest that is the question -- for marketers. The lure of sales growth combined with lower advertising and promotion costs makes brand extensions an attractive move, but success is not guaranteed. For every brand extension win (iTunes), there are countless failures (Google print ads, Hooters airline, Bic underwear ...) Brand extensions are risky - but by following the methods of successful extenders, marketers can increase their chances of a win. Looking at what drove recent brand extension success stories, we find the questions of why, what, and how have been carefully considered.
For more than 100 years brand marketers have largely focused on push - a mix of tried-and-true tactics that include paid and earned media. However, that was before the Attention Crash, which is changing the economics of digital marketing. The endless supply of content is taking a toll. It has forced consumers to make hard choices about where and how they spend time. Today people are browsing less and going deeper into a small number of sites. The exact mix of destinations change. What they have in common, however, is that they are all useful.
Today, everyone knows we have to be smarter about how we spend marketing dollars regardless of whether we're increasing, decreasing or holding steady. But with an ever-changing media landscape and our country in an economic slump, the question becomes: is now the time to focus on short-term success, or do we wait patiently with a long-term vision in place?
Today's reality consists of multiple media channels, new technologies and consumers who have a short attention span. Traditional communications are no longer sufficient for creating loyal fans or bringing the brand to the forefront. This new reality demands a new approach to engaging consumers; this is where corporate social responsibility (CSR) as branded content comes in.
In the days of old: circa 2007, social-media marketing meant monitoring the blogosphere and managing forums, but today marketers are jumping in by actively creating and managing brand communities. Dave Balter is the founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of-mouth media network headquartered in Boston. His company recently launched BzzScapes, a network of brand-centric communities, created by advocates and dedicated to the collection and ranking of the most relevant digital content for each brand. I asked him what it takes to create a truly exceptional brand community, and these are his top ten tips:
Have you seen Starbucks new campaign? The one designed to remind you of the "Starbucks story?" From the announcement video to the ads themselves, Starbucks is making the first mistake of modern advertising - they're telling you when they should be showing you.
Cisco, Corning, IBM, Intel, and Schwab have weathered worse economic storms. Five strategies to come out of this one even stronger.
The press release is over 100 years old and for the most part, its evolution is mostly stagnant for the majority of its lifespan. However, the press release has evolved more in the last decade than it has over the century thanks to the proliferation of the Internet and most notably, the Social Web. The tired and oft disregarded press release is finally tasting reinvention as it transforms to chase the new channels of influence as well as adapt to the rapidly shifting behavior of content discovery, consumption and sharing.
In this week’s kerfuffling on Twitter and blogs about the Wall Street Journal’s anti-interactive interactivity rules regarding Twitter et al, a New York Times editor took a few of us to task for not recognizing that this was just a case of a CYA - cover your ass - memo from lawyers. I responded that CYA can now BYA - burn your ass - when such memos become public, as they will, and speak for you.
The mad men of Madison Avenue are really mad these days, creating a spate of angry advertising campaigns that seek to channel the outrage, frustration and fear felt by consumers hit hard by what some are calling the Great Recession.
What do guns, burglar alarms and condoms have in common? Their sales all boomed in 2009, with condom sales jumping 22 per cent over the same period in 2008. But why? The answer can perhaps be found in Nigeria and Chile – two countries I visited on my world tour promoting Buyology. Surprisingly neither of the two countries was familiar with the “R” word. When asking government officials why that was the case, the explanation was simple – the media hadn’t paid that much attention to it, and as such no one had effectively read about the Recession, so the Recession simply had not yet arrived.
Not familiar with BRM? Perhaps you are more familiar with its cousin CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. As technology has improved CRM tools and functionality, it has changed the way marketers connect to people by helping to organize and filter information about buying habits to better serve customers going forward. But with people connecting more and more to brands on social networks, the next wave of marketing may be providing people the information they need/want through social media, making it a "Brand Relationship Management" (BRM) tool.
The Scientist magazine reported last week that pharma giant Merck had invented its own peer review medical journal in order to better hype its products; of 29 articles, almost two-thirds referred to Fosamax or Vioxx. And we're surprised?
The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today's real-time world.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about monetizing social networks. MySpace has swapped out much of its senior leadership with talent more experienced in marketing. Facebook is floating plans to launch an ad network someday. Both services already put ads on their sites, sell sponsorships, etc. Most, if not all, of these kinds of efforts focus on using social networks as glorified channels for branding. Companies hope to sell things by paying to put their brands in front of consumers as they’re on their way to, doing things at, and planning to leave their networked communities. How is this any different than putting up billboards on the way to the fair? Is it possible that the true value of social networks could be derived from seeing them as places?
It takes a while for changes to sink in—for the full ramifications of market shifts to impact how we actually do business, what we plan to achieve and how we communicate our intentions. Up to now, what I’ve heard from clients has had mostly to do with money…budgets have tightened and spending decisions have slowed. But now clients are realizing that today’s market is reshaping not just what they spend but what they say. They are starting to look at their brand messages and ask themselves, what do we talk about now?
Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google.
For the past 15 years, marketers have lived like kings online. We built ornate palaces in homage to ourselves in the form of websites and microsites. Each acts as a destination that embodies our meticulous choice of aesthetics, content and activities. We still put a lot of time, effort and money into erecting these palaces, much as Louis XIV did in planning Versailles. And, for the most part, we have been rewarded handsomely for our efforts. For years consumers flocked to our sites, reveled in all we had to say, played with our toys and sometimes were motivated enough as a result to buy our stuff. That's what life was like in the good old days. But now we're in the age of online enlightenment.
Yesterday we got the results from the Treasury regarding the stress tests. The results were on one hand extraordinarily troubling, i.e. how is it possible that banks still need another $75 billion in funding to withstand future buffeting? On the other hand with this additional capital, the US Treasury deems these institutions financially capable of handling whatever future financial troubles befall them, which provides the confidence we need to grow our economy. The market has responded by bidding these banking stocks up, the NYSE Financial index is up about 10% this week and 87% off its low. While I am encouraged by the strong response of the market to these financials, I told you earlier in the week that I would be revealing the results of my own “brand” stress test.
Yesterday, I wrote about how I didn't necessarily understand (or believe) Best Buy's plans to expand significantly its private label technology products business, and its hopes that incorporating customer feedback would let it make simple improvements that the big name brands might miss. I think there's a far bigger, far more radical, and much more likely sustainable opportunity for the company to pursue: Services.
It’s one of the most important concepts on the web today—perhaps the most important for social media—but it’s one of the least understood. When James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds in 2004, he explored the stock market and other classic social psychology examples, but “web 2.0” was still nascent. It’s time to connect his ideas to the social web, where they can reach their full potential.
Best Buy plans to expand significantly its private label technology products business, believing that customer feedback in its stores will let it make simple improvements that the big name brands might miss. Such vertical integration might be torn right from Capitalism 101, but I'm not sure that I buy it.
Last year marked several significant transitions for Seattle-based Starbucks. Howard Schultz returned to the role of chief executive officer, the company shuffled its leadership team, closed stores, introduced new products and shifted its focus from opening new stores to maintaining quality and customer loyalty. Though Starbucks was already in transition before the economic slump worsened, the recession intensified the need for corporate changes. Starbucks is an image company, one in which words matter. In 2009, executives described the coffee giant using a different set of terms than they used in 2007. The word clouds below show us how different.
By now, virtually everyone has chimed in on how innovation is the only way out of the recession. So instead of adding more theory, let’s have a look at actual B2C innovations from recession-defying entrepreneurs and brands around the world.
Elevator pitches, 30-second spots, viral videos, strategic PR, the brand called "you." Today’s commonly accepted view is that great brands are great at telling us their interesting stories. That’s a misguided view. In reality, we use our interaction with brands—their sceneries, props, set decorations, scripts, and actors—to construct our own stories, ones that we want to tell about ourselves. And since we define ourselves both according to what we identify with and what we reject, and given the abundance of marketplace choice, we now choose interactions which we feel will produce the best story possible. And we reject the others.
March Madness lasts only three weeks, but Metric Madness goes on all year long. What is Metric Madness? It's the notion you can run anything by the numbers, and it's become the hottest concept in business today. One scientist recently predicted that the great discoveries of the future will come from finding patterns in vast archives of data. "The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician, not a doctor." The marketing community eats this stuff up. Nobody generates more data than they do. Hallelujah! "The Singularity is Near," as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book of the same name, and marketing people can't wait to join the revolution. I'm not too sure.
People expect companies to do more than just sell stuff. They want to know what you stand for, what choices you make as a result and what difference that could make in the world. So when it comes to people making their brand choices, Cause Marketing can be a tiebreaker. Almost 80% of Americans are more likely to switch to the brand supporting a good cause over a competitor with the same price and quality. But Cause Marketing is not just about photo opportunities, oversized checks and warm fuzzies. It can be an opportunity to turn commercial interest into real change.
Recent news coverage of the cosmetic name change from AIG to AIU at the failed company's New York headquarters reminds us that a brand is a precious asset. The value of any brand asset depends upon whether it has delivered on its past promises and is believed likely to do so in the future. It takes years of effort to build brand trust but only a few months—or minutes—to squander it. A brand that has lost consumer trust is no longer a brand; it is merely a name.
In this new "enlightened" era of joining the conversation, it appears that the ship has set sail once and for all on the debate as to whether or not brands should participate in online conversations. But today I'm going to talk about avoiding the conversation and I'll offer five diverse perspectives on when it's (arguably) better to remain on the sidelines and observe in silence.
In a loud and proud public announcement, Facebook said it didn’t care whether its members visited Facebook.com at all. The company said it would provide a set of technology tools that will let other companies create programs that tap into the heart of the social network — the endless stream of photographs, status updates and comments that people post to the service. Saying it is unable to provide a range of access to the service from every possible gadget, Facebook expects developers to create Facebook programs that sit on computer desktops, run inside Web browsers and are tailored to a wide range of mobile devices like the iPhone.
In a couple of weeks we’ll be partnering with Microsoft to give a joint presentation to some IT and Marketing directors about the idea that their two disciplines are starting to (or needing to) work much more closely these days. Regular readers will recognise this as a favourite theme of ours - we like to think that the best marketing ideas are actually company operations that happen to be really appealing or compelling to customers too. One of the many advantages of this line of thought is that marketing is completely integrated into the business and you don’t have to spend money to build marketing programs that then build your business, you simply spend money on building your business.
In light of rising childhood obesity rates and the general confidence in supermarket sales, Disney, the world’s top licensor, is steadily making the push to realign its brand with a healthier image, targeting kids with fruits and vegetables instead. The savvy marketing move appears to be working too, as sales of the Disney Garden line were up 70 percent in 2008, a trend that can at least partially be attributed to consumer attitudes about the products.
The question many marketers are trying to answer now, is “Who do people trust?” I’ve been spending more and more time pouring over data, medium usage, behavioral and preference data for clients, and am learning more and more about how humans behave on the web. So who do people trust? Three research studies indicate it’s peers, or people they know. And social clout from bloggers, or those with a lot of online friends ain’t it.
Marketers consistently pick up their best lessons in times of crisis. We think differently about ROI. We act more intuitively. We become more agile and flexible. We "sense and respond." We really don't have much of a choice but to act and not allow yesterday's rules to justify complacency. Two weeks ago, for example, many in the marketing community got their first exposure to the massive power of online video via the disgusting Domino's video by (former) Domino's employees on YouTube and, later, the pizza chain's president's highly effective video apology. There's no question that hundreds of C-level memos crying out "we need a social media strategy" flowed from that crisis.
One of my pet peeves is the elevation of corporate mascots and celebrity spokesmodels from sales promotion tactics to brand strategy. Only now I'm thinking that in certain circumstances, they really are one in the same. Almost. Consider Geico and Priceline. Both businesses offer pretty generic, unsexy products (insurer and travel agency, respectively) that compete primarily, if not solely, on price. Good luck trying to attach emotional or other intangible attributes to such brands, right?
Salmonella. Drug violence. Now swine flu. You think Mexico's development and tourism marketers are having a few sleepless nights? Only this nightmare is real.
I read with interest today the removal of Chris DeWolfe as CEO of MySpace. According to the "growth" model of capitalism, MySpace has a problem. If senior management can't renew growth, change is called for. But what if this growth model is, at least for new media purposes, mistaken? If we embrace a new model of the kind someone like Henry Jenkins, David Weinberger, or Don Tapscott might endorse, then this might be precisely the wrong way to think about things.
No, not its inane brand image campaign and logo nonsense. I'm talking about its announced intention to spend $6 billion to take control of its bottling and distribution operations. I think it is the smartest branding move the company has made in recent memory.
AT the entrance to almost every shopping mall in the country, you will find a directory that, if you are spatially coordinated, will give you an approximate lay of the land. You can gauge the distance from Abercrombie & Fitch to its younger-skewing cousin, Hollister, or its older cousin, Ruehl, and find the way to their closest competitors in the teenager and young adult category, Aéropostale and American Eagle Outfitters. But you will be no closer to discerning what drives the modern youth from one store to the next; what differentiates one’s frayed cargo shorts from another’s; or why one of them, Abercrombie, is facing a consumer revolt, while others are paradoxically upbeat. A clue: It has to do with price.
As the executives at Apple (AAPL) were passing around the Dom Perignon, their counterparts at other companies which design and manufacture smartphones were putting all sharp objects out of reach. In a recession, there is only so much air in any room. Smart phone sales are suffering like all consumer electronics. If the iPhone is doing extraordinarily well, others are doing badly.
For a long time now, I’ve been pushing hard the idea of journalist-as-curator. Every priesthood, it seems, is having a fit over loss of its centralized control: How dare people pick what they like without history degrees or share what they know without journalism degrees! The nerve!
As the recession deepens and stretches out quarter after quarter, more companies will close or will shut divisions. More brands will disappear because their parent firms fold or can no longer afford to support them. Other brands will be obliterated by mergers. We have compiled a list of 12 brands that we believe will not survive until the end of next year. Each brand and the major reasons for its demise are listed along with some of the public information 24/7 Wall St. examined.
As Twitter and Facebook compete for your attention and social status, there's another story that serves as the undercurrent for something much more important, a fully pervasive and functional social operating system (OS) that serves as a open platform to connect you, your content, updates, and activity to your friends, peers, and followers across your social graph, regardless of network, browser, or device.
Differentiation, of course, exists, but does so on the basis of a product or service actually owning values — real or perceived, rational or emotional — and occupying a real place in the consumers’ minds — beyond the consumers just being aware of them. And the degree to which they possess these values and have meaning in the consumers’ minds (beyond primacy of product) determines whether they have differentiated themselves. But fewer and fewer products and services are able to demonstrate any degree of actual differentiation.
Much has been made of savvy marketers using "crowdsourcing" to connect their brands with customers, and plenty of pixels have been published on the success of crowdsourced programs like Dell's IdeaStorm, Starbucks' MyStarbucksIdea, The Netflix Prize and Lego's invite-only community. But quite recently a much different discussion has emerged, as crowdsourcing is starting to change the very way we think about creativity, both online and off.
Detroit has never had a Chief Culture Officer, someone who could help the GM, Ford and Chrysler manage the opportunities and dangers that come from culture. (By "culture" I do not mean the corporate culture of Detroit. I mean the "software" with which we run the hardware of our world, the shared understandings, assumptions, rules and practices that inform how we see and act. This culture is rich, complicated and changeable. It needs someone standing watch all the time.)
Anytime a brand's advertising slogan begins with "We do more than _____," you know the brand is making a major mistake. This is exactly the case with the UPS Store’s new slogan: “We do more than shipping.”
Last October, Gartner unveiled a study that stated that by 2010, 60 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies with a web site will be involved in some form of online community that is utilized for customer relationship purposes. What the research also goes on to state is that 50 percent of those that set out and establish or become involved in these communities will fail in their efforts. That's about 300 Fortune 1000 companies that will fail at social media: a striking number, especially in light of recent economic pitfalls.
You're probably familiar with the concept of Dunbar's number. The Wikipedia entry defines it as a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. This number is set at 150 connections.
Brands aren't simply brands anymore. They are the center of a maelstrom of social and political dialogue made possible by digital media, said Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Simon Clift, who warned that marketers who do not recognize that -- and adapt their marketing -- are in grave peril.
Perhaps no word in the marketing lexicon has been abused as much in the past six months or so as “value.” Marketing messages of this stripe are one strategy for addressing the fact that consumers are loath to open their wallets these days. But they’re also only one alternative to cutting prices. It seems like marketers aren’t exploring others.
We've written much on what we know will be virtues of a successful 21st-century brand: trustworthiness, durability and accessibility, distinct from the core values (or motivators) they ultimately support. For instance, a brand may value Independence (Harley-Davidson, say), and exercise its virtues of Trustworthiness, Durability and Accessibility to ensure that its core value is understood, and motivating, at every turn. We as a practice don't assign values to brands; we simply apply these virtues to brands in when designing for their values, whatever they may be.
"Do you Yahoo?" "Did you Xerox the report?" "Did you FedEx it?" "Did you see the messenger Rollerblading?" It's the branding of language. Once upon a time, using a brand name as a verb was anathema. It was behavior that would drive a trademark lawyer crazy. But more and more marketers are deciding that the grand slam of branding is to become part of the language - in effect, having your trademark substitute in everyday usage for the type of action or service that your mark identifies. Could there be, they argue, any clearer expression of a leadership position?
We have big problems in this country. Wall Street played recklessly with our money. Banks made bad loans. Insurance companies guaranteed stupid risks. People took out unrealistic mortgages and borrowed too much to buy things they couldn't afford. Companies are going out of business and laying off workers. And, the government is bailing people out and billing our kids. It would be easy (and tempting) to go on. But we have one more, deeper problem that's making all these other problems worse. No one is apologizing. No one is taking responsibility for what they did to contribute to our problems. They're all blaming someone or something else. We have a kindergartener's problem and it's tearing us apart.
If the "backlash against bling" is real, then we really have to ask ourselves, what on earth is marketing going to look like to millions of people who don't want to buy like they used to—who are marketing weary? People just like my dad, only more digitally savvy. Not only that, but beyond marketing, what's the effect on companies who make their profits by continually producing new products? Bigger, better faster—guaranteed to make your life meaningful. Business and brands have a problem.
I have good career news for those of you on the recession front: When the economy improves, the skills and approaches you perfect during these troubled times will better position you for greater riches and fame. The trick will be surviving until then.
Marketing is a long-term proposition. A company can get in trouble if it changes its marketing strategy to cope with a short-term problem.
A recession-induced need for cash, and an ever-growing infrastructure enabling individuals to act as (part-time) entrepreneurs, are fueling concepts that help ordinary consumers make money instead of just spending it.
In today’s turbulent world, people are hungry for a sense of connection; and in lean economic times, every company needs new ways to do more with what it already has. Unfortunately, although many firms aspire to the customer loyalty, marketing efficiency, and brand authenticity that strong communities deliver, few understand what it takes to achieve such benefits. Worse, most subscribe to serious misconceptions about what brand communities are and how they work.
Marketers have spammed, lied, deceived, cluttered and ripped us off for so long, we're sick of it.
A new executive brief by IBM Global Business Services, based on an in-depth study by the Institute's research team, reports that to compete in the new era of advertising will require a fundamental change in media and entertainment companies' capabilities. The study findings show that four trends are raising the bar for consumer-centric marketing: consumer adoption of new distribution formats, a shift in advertiser spending, the digital migration of platforms and the emergence of new capabilities due to game-changing moves by both new entrants and existing players.
Cable station AMC has announced a new slogan -- "Story matters here" -- and plans to market new original programming and themed movie nights. I'm intrigued by the idea that the station could give itself an identity, of sorts, perhaps in the spirit (if not the exact execution) of a Disney and its kid movies. It makes sense as a branding strategy, especially when you consider the wash of cable programming, and how tough it is to make money in the content distribution business.
This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing. Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you... Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they'll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat. If they don't love it, you need a new product. Start over.
For marketers and publishers of the social Web, design matters. Creative matters. Ideas matter. It is true that properly utilized data can drive better decision making, but it is also true that all the data in the world doesn't create innovation without interpretation, and data doesn't always lead to great design (especially when the data is about the wrong thing -- clicks, anyone?).
Everyone's (or no one's) favorite redesigned brands, Tropicana and Facebook, came up yet again at this weekend's Y Conference as Liz Danzico, chair of the new Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, focused on the concept of "designing in real time." She thinks redesign recalls are about to get a lot more common as designers are more likely to launch alpha or beta versions of experiences and then monitor user behavior to get feedback.
What follows is a detailed mission statement and instructional guide to help you successfully endeavor into the social world of online communication and relationships building.
The separation between search and social media is melting away, and a new paradigm is taking hold. Finding the right content is as much about whom it comes from as where you find it. By building a network of credible sources via social media, we're able narrow our "searches" to a select group of people whom we trust. For brands, this means a host of new challenges and opportunities are emerging beyond the traditional search channel.
Why spend $10,000 to do a photo shoot for a magazine? After all, all your profit is in the ads. Sometimes it seems like people who build websites and magazines that take the high road aren't paying any attention at all to conversion and revenue and manipulation.
Right now the biggest challenge to being successful on the social web is through high quality micro-interactions with high quality human beings. But organizations will find this difficult to embrace. The industrial revolution has taught us to mass produce and move away from human dependency. Here's a few ways to be "more human".
We’re all fighting against attention clutter. Our email inboxes are creaking. Our media consumption habits (from newspaper to magazines to TV to radio) are all sporadic and random and very hard to track. It takes more and more for someone to capture our attention and convince us to change our course of action. Let’s consider this to be the continuum: awareness, attention, engagement, execution, extension. I’ll explain all five, and thread into them how social tools can help.
Losing control is a primary reason stated by brands who are unwilling to open themselves up to the conversation - and a major reason why most continue to use social media as little more than a brochure on the web. And yet the illusion of control is just that – an illusion. By not involving yourself you actually do more to remove control than if you did.
Over the last decade, Social Media has slowly evolved not only as a new content publishing, sharing, and discovery medium, but more importantly as a peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent. Socialized media didn't invent "conversations," it simply organized and amplified them.
Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age.
Life today can be complicated. The accelerating pace of innovation, ideas and technology, and the pressure to keep up with it all in real time can make just getting by quite an effort. So, people don’t have the time or attention to go out of their way to understand things that are confusing. In fact, the more complicated something is, the greater the need for simpler ways of understanding it.
Marketers are good at looking ahead. We predict/create the future, working to build an idea or a product into something that will matter more tomorrow than it does today.
My latest Adweek column is up and it's already getting its fair share of comments - with some particularly negative ones leveled at me. The piece is about where I think "social" media really fits and why - based on this assessment - I think it's a flawed strategy to charge a digital or PR agency with the AOR responsibilities associated with this imperative.
Pop quiz: Who has the most popular page on Facebook? Barack Obama. Who's second? Coca-Cola. Yes, sugared water runs second only to the leader of the free world. Who was it again that said people don't want to be friends with brands?
If you’re interested in trends and ideas and how to use them in your work then you have to add the writing of anthropologist Grant McCracken to your must-read list.
Is the future of marketing about marketing to marketers? Sounds a bit preposterous, but the answer is yes. Put another way, I've discovered the ultimate marketing channel to the consumer, and it is "we." Indeed, we're witnessing the rise of a 6th Estate of power and influence -- the marketing community -- and I'm not talking about what we create, copy-test, place and target, but what we actually say and express. Cultivate us if you can. Avoid us at your peril.
While severe financial woes may hold back some eco-initiatives, the future has never looked greener. Mainly because creating more a sustainable economy is not an option, but a necessity. Which is why this month, amidst crumbling banks, G20 meetings and stimulus plans, we highlight 12 eco trends that any marketer or entrepreneur can act on today.
Over the past decade, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. has closed magazine titles, cut staff and developed a mounting sense that its French parent has little regard for the U.S. unit's management or its brands, which include Elle and Woman's Day. This week, the New York publisher will take what it says is a big step toward fortifying itself, reorganizing its women's magazines, which make up the bulk of its business.
People are scared. Have you finally figured that out? They want to make sure that their marketplace decisions are "good" ones; that they'll receive "value" for their exchange of precious time and money. So how do you help them do that? The first step is to think and feel what your audience is feeling.
Last week, I began the journey by talking about two different types of brands: Brand Promises and Brand Religions. Today, I'd like to paint a hypothetical scenario of where awareness marketing might go for those brands that are implicit promises. Next week I'll tackle religions.
We're now in what I am starting to call the perfect storm for social media. On one side we have lots of very smart and accomplished professionals who are and have been using these tools to network, learn, and some to market themselves successfully to new jobs and careers. On the other we have many companies that are starting to see the need for different answers to growth than the diminishing returns not guaranteed by traditional channels.
Why should anyone care about brands in times like these? Because it's during these times of transition, internally or through market shifts, that businesses simultaneously have the highest level of vulnerability and opportunity. Those responsible for shaping and maintaining a brand have much more influence over whether the current news climate weakens or strengthens their brand than they may realize.
Marketing works. If you spend time and money (with skill) you can tell a story that spreads, that influences people, that changes actions. Marketing can cause people to buy something that they wouldn't have bought without marketing, vote for someone they might not have considered and support an organization that would have been invisible otherwise. If marketing doesn't work, then a lot of us are wasting a great deal of effort (and cash). But it does.
So what is effective brand building in the new digital world? What is the best way to prime the pump? As I started to think about that, I realized the answer depends on the nature of the brand to be built. And, as I was chewing that over, the Microsoft story hit my inbox and I realized that it captured the essence of two distinct characters of brand: promise and religion. These two characters of brand occupy two totally different places in our mindscape, and so have to be treated differently, no matter what branding channel you choose to use.
The peanut butter recall is expanding, and now includes some Clif bars, General Mills products, Kellogg cookies, Keebler crackers, and a swath of private label products. Little Debbie voluntarily recalled its peanut butter crackers, just in case. A bunch of brand names have vociferously declared that their products are "safe," have no connection to the culprit factory, or simply haven't been named in the recall. Are you reassured?
The Super Bowl hype is blissfully long gone, and lazy media outlets can no longer reprint press releases and dissect multi-million dollar wastes of time and money. The lesson of these ads is simple. Putting on a show is expensive, time-consuming and quite fun. And it rarely works.
"Why do we have trouble selling our ideas to top management?" I recently asked my daughter and partner, Laura. "Dad," she replied, "they're not like us. They're left-brainers." And therein lies the biggest problem in business today: Left-brain management and right-brain marketing don't see eye to eye. Management is verbal, logical and analytical. Marketing is visual, intuitive and holistic.
Marketing expert David Aaker argues that to succeed in today’s global arena, marketers must learn to appeal to consumers whose interests transcend individual products and regions.
When The Wizard of Oz goes from black-and-white to color, the story springs to life all the more vividly; extraordinarily. In the eyes of today’s audiences, many companies’ stories, images and messages are missing a richly individual character: a truly distinctive color, contrast, aura, personality.
Marketers are using digital and video technology to reach shoppers at the moment that matters most.
Polaroid is going to stop making film for its once-ubiquitous instant cameras later this year, and in doing so close the last shutter on the way we used to see our past.
In Manhattan to accept a top marketer award, Mark Gambill, chief marketing officer of CDW, offered his observations and advice for the coming year.
If only one idea emerges from the profundity of "bests" lists and prognostications this holiday season, here's my entry: Need is the new want. It's a loaded statement. Here's what I think it entails:
Isn't sale pricing the antithesis of branding? Now that stores are in full-swing with after-holidays markdowns, discounts, red-liners, or whatever else they call them, they're really telling consumers the same, basic thing: What we charged you before wasn’t what our stuff was really worth.
Around the world, marketing and sales executives are being asked to do more with less. It’s a demand many have heard in previous hard times, and most managers muddled through then. But the nature of the current downturn—and of the changes the marketing and sales environment has undergone since the 2001–02 recession—suggests that those who follow the survival techniques of past slowdowns risk betting on the wrong markets, customers, advertising vehicles, or sales approaches.
For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers. We interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. From those conversations and further research, we identified a set of emerging principles for marketing.
First competent mover advantage is real. The first person with a great product or story that matches the market establishes the narrative, sets the bar and forces followers to conform to her specs.
We’ve all heard about dumbing down. But there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is also true. Is this, in fact, the age of mass intelligence?
There are two reasons that gravity has had so much better marketing than evolution, and both may impact the way you market your product or service as well.
Retailers will eventually recover from the consumption tailspin that threatens this holiday season. But quite apart from the recession, there are other, profound changes underway in the retail sector. As the evidence mounts about the power of social networks to reconfigure individual behavior, the crucial question facing industry is: How to leverage this phenomenon into actual profits?
In many ways the story of General Motors since the 1960s is a tale of accelerating irrelevance. Customer preferences changed, competition tightened, technology made big leaps, and GM was always driving a lap behind.
The post-agency era is upon us. With staggering speed and efficiency, consumer preferences and digital technologies have coalesced to create a broad and deep cultural demand for direct relationships. In this disintermediated market, do we need go-betweens at all?
For brand marketers today, "global" is increasingly the name of the game. Long the prerogative of American and European brands, now Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Brazilian brands are seeking to establish their position as global players. Underlying this push to globalize brands is the assumption that the world is becoming more homogeneous.
Ask a dozen advertising agencies for advice on marketing in a downturn and the chances are that each will begin with a lecture on the dangers of cutting budgets. Even for those having to do more with less, however, there are lessons to be learned about how to return stronger.
Advertising Age honors the top brands of the year -- and the brains behind them.
Competition? Sure. Rotten economy? No doubt. But there's a larger, deeper reason the green giant is drinking the dregs: It ignored everything that made its customers loyal.
In the digital age, we’re told, the critical difference between success and failure is human capital — those heartbeats and fast hands that can make a good business great. So are newspapers reacting to their downturn as Circuit City did?
It is no secret that consumers are cutting back, anxious about jobs, plummeting home values and shrinking retirement savings. But that belt-tightening seems to have also prompted a reconsideration of what is acceptable consumerism even for those relatively unaffected by the economic cataclysm.
Marketers are confused these days. The things that have worked for decades aren’t working anymore. Can you imagine if you worked for 30 years in your given vocation and then, almost over night, all the rules changed? In truth, marketing is only now becoming what it truly should have been - a conversation.
Country second. Political expediency first. Strategic rigor about 18th. My friends, what a terrible campaign.
Given its recent financial struggles—at the core of which are weak sales that have forced the closing of about 600 of its U.S. stores through the first half of fiscal year 2009—the question many people are asking right now is: Can Starbucks get its mojo back?
If your brand commands a price premium, you had better understand the nuanced way that your audience defines and intuits value. And then make sure that your brand - including your facilities, people, web site, et al. - deliver a bundle of value components that provide "good value" for your customers' investment of time, money, attention and identity.
Four years after delivering the speech called "The Audacity of Hope" that would launch him toward the White House, Barack Obama has become a case study in audacious marketing, an object lesson on why you should forget inherited notions of whom your audience can be.
In a way, there’s something kind of cool about a company that changes its logo every decade or so: Each new logo is like a cultural milestone - a snapshot if you will, of that decade’s graphic flavor, and how tastes change over time. But I guess once you get past the cool time capsule thing, you kind of have to wonder: Has each change in logo actually resulted in some kind of benefit for the Pepsi Cola company?a
Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing.
It's obvious that this is the most talked about election in the history of the world, and I think there are some lessons for every marketer, regardless of nationality or political leanings.
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