Monthly Archives: August 2009

Marketing Promises

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Brand experience. Operations as marketing (Zeus Jones). Brand experience design (Starfish). These smart schools of thought surrounding branding all encourage marketers to operationalize a key brand promise into product development and delivery. People who practice this craft are marketing winners.

 

The strategy “best groomed mountain in the northeast” for ski resort Windham Mountain wasn’t just about moving snow around the mountain, it was about cleaning stains off the carpets, providing dental insurance to employees, handing out mud mats to cars owners leaving on warm days.

 

This may sound like a no-brainer – deliver, even over-deliver, on what you promise – but many companies don’t have the stomach for it. It adds expense, some say. Well it’s not a promise unless you do it.  If you don’t do it, it is a lie — marko-babble. Marketing fluff. Noise.

 

Grooming was a business-winning strategy for Windham. Was it defensible? Every day! Peace. 

The Brand Planning “Boil Down.”.

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The real art of brand planning is in knowing what not to say. 
When brand planning, I use something called the 24 Questions to help find the money. Once the money is found, job two is how to position. For this a number of hunting and gathering techniques are used; tools that are now vastly improved thanks to the Web. Information is amassed about the product, the competition, corporate leadership, the market, and current buying culture. Then future buying culture is projected, based upon trends. Only then, does the “boil down” process begin. 

 

The boil down is the point at which things are prioritized and edited. Evaporation occurs over time until only a powerful branding idea is left.  By itself, the idea may come off as mundane. But when presented to executive management along with the boil down logic, that’s when the magic occurs.  Marketing executives love logic and strive for simplicity, but are often too close to make it happen. A powerful brand strategy can set marketers free, but it is the logic of the boil down that sells it. Peace!

End of Life Discussion

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I’m not a euthanasia guy but having just revisiting a brief I wrote a while back for Hospice Care Network on end-of-life care, it brought back some thoughts on this sensitive topic. The highly publicized couple that went to Europe earlier this summer to end their lives also brought the subject to mind. Was their choice selfish? Yes and hell no. Cultures deal with death differently; more sophisticated cultures deal with death in what we think are more humane ways. I’m not so sure.

 

A NYT article today reported that 1/3 of all Medicare expenses go to funding chronic illnesses in the last two years life. My research suggests that prolonging death is often the choice of the family, not the dying. The dying comply because they think it’s what the family wants, but it often prolongs the patient’s emotional and physical pain. They lose control of their body and their will.

 

Conservatives can scare people with death panels (nice ploy, by the way) but the reality is families need to make end-of-life decisions…and the patient must be heard. Some of these decisions may have economic repercussions on family pocketbooks and the economy, but the real discussion should be about quality of life at the end. The discussion should not be ignored. Big peace!  (If you’d like to read the brief, hit me.)

We are…So-cial.

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Pic by NY TImes Photog.
Charlene Li is writing a book targeted for May publication on the topic of leadership. The overall thesis seems to be that good corporate leaders give up control and allow consumers to make more product and service decisions. Her first book The Groundswell, co-authored with Josh Bernoff, got the ball rolling. There is no doubt social media is the haps in marketing today and that lots of smart people are on board. Social media marketing can teach us a lot.  

 

An interesting article appeared in The New York Times today discussing how college tours are taking more of a conversational approach to selling — even to the point where tour leaders are asked to not walk backwards or recite school statistics.  This is a nice analogue for what’s going on in social media marketing today and one that sidles up to the premise of Ms. Li’s new book.

 

All too often in marketing today companies decide what’s important to consumers by mining statistics — then they use media to face customers and walking backwards reciting the selling benefits. It’s a one-way exercise that does not engage consumers and doesn’t encourage easy interaction. It’s hard to listen when you are reciting from a script.

 

Social media marketing is about listening. Understanding patterns of behavior, needs, and then acting upon them.  By packaging the learning into a story, not a recitation, the selling becomes more palatable. And memorable. Oh yeah, and when you are walking backwards you can’t see what is before you. Scuffing your shoes is the least iof your worries. Peace!  

The Pedal Dividend.

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The Lowes Companies reported poor earnings this quarter. Though a lot of people are doing home improvements themselves, sales are down because contractors are not as busy and luxury extras aren’t moving. Big box stores are of great value to consumers in a tough economy but gassing up the guzzler to make ad hoc trips to Costco just doesn’t make sense.

 

Mom and pop stores are certainly hurting too, but they have an advantage — they are reachable by bike. Mom and pop and/or local grocery stores, in addition to giving a dollar off to people who bring in sustainable bags, should provide spiffs or economic incentives to bike riders. More people on bikes is a good thing. A really good thing. Exercise aside, it creates less demand at the pump and sends a good message to all kids. Pedaling is a better form of short transport and it also keeps us shopping closer to home, supporting our communities.

 

Mention it to your local retailer. There is only upside. (Except, maybe, for the big box stores. But they want you to live longer too.) Peace.

Reverse Supply and Demand

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DentBetty.com is an exciting example of supply and demand in reverse. Car owners post dent and ding photos to the site so car repair shops can provide competitive estimates. Ain’t the Web grand? When body shops compete, you win! (DentBetty is in Beta and not available everywhere, but has bust-a-move upside.)  Currently free until they prime the user pump, DentBetty has a business model that will be mimicked across the Web benefiting both consumers and wired entrepreneurs.  As my kids used to say “I yike it.”

 

Which brings us to AOL.  Huh? AOL’s new shtick is to become the single greatest source of advertising supported content on the Web. (They should leave off the advertising supported part of their mission; it’s irrelevant and brand-limiting.) You might think being a content provider is being in the supply business — and it is — but as AOL uses that content to analyze and learn about online behaviors, it will find itself in a better positionto create new, un-thought of content. And if it develops new online inventions and conventions, like DentBetty, will attain revenue heights not yet seen. Content is king for sure, but it is not always one way.  User generated content isn’t just text and party pics. Peace!

A Search Is Not A Tweet.

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So (All the cool people start their sentences with “so” today.) search is a major force in marketing. No doubt. It’s driving Google’s revenue, helping software nerds buy big houses, making Ad Age and Adweek boring to read, and giving ad geezers apoplexy.

 

Search is very important and needs to be in every marketing plan.

 

That said, social media is an even newer marketing darling. (I can’t imagine any of the Wendy’s pitches not having 20 minutes of silly social media ideas, can you?) But here’s an interesting distinction between search and social: A search is not a tweet. Search is an inbound information gathering exercise, while a tweet is an outbound broadcasting exercise. And though one can certainly search Twitter, that search is taking place in a smaller pond filled with influencers.

 

Twitter is filled with Posters (original content creators) and Pasters (referrers of content). Every marketing plan needs to target Posters for maximum thrust. If you reach the Posters, you will reach the Pasters. If you reach the Pasters, you will reach the searchers.

 

This is how we do-oo ii-it. 

Gooing Goggle.

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No, that’s not a typo. Gooing Goggle is the obverse of Google’s new ad campaign “Going Google.” Ad campaign? Yes, ad campaign. Fueling its insatiable need to make mo’, mo’ money, Google is now targeting Microsoft Office with an out of character  campaign to promote Google Apps. The Going Google campaign will take many forms, including outdoor billboards, but most noticeably we’ll see it infect Twitter – a component will look more like a virus than viral.

 

This effort, if not shut down quickly, will do Google more harm than good. Going Google is fine, being told to go Google is ham handed (what ever that means). Google continues its pursuit of dominance in all things digital (Google Voice is next) and has  been drinking so much Kool-Aid they forget America and many countries dislike the overdog.   

 

Sorry Google, this effort is going to ratchet up your negs. Start watching the comments in the social stew. (Come on? Asking people to print out anonymous nuisance notes and pin them to bosses computers: “Please, please, please, can we go Google?)  You had better clean the goggles quickly.