Monthly Archives: February 2012

The R Word.

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Windshield time is a great way to learn from the people who make sales happen — to travel with sales people and see how they sell and customers buy.  Everyone in a company would benefit from exposure to this type of “belly to belly” selling.

I’ve used the windshield time over much of my career: with light bulb manufacturers, telephone companies, hardware and healthcare providers. Invariably, when you ask sales people what makes them great or what makes the company great they all agree on one thing:  It’s about relationships. Okay, maybe price too…but relationships are most talked about.

If 50% of sales energy is invested in relationships, I say we are leaving an awful lot of product sell on the table. I’m not saying relationships aren’t important: “Hey, want to go to a Knick game?” I’m saying relationships are the price of business.  Being able to communicate, be friendly, and provide empathy (the basis of relationship-building) is not a sales strategy. 

A sales rep who only gives good lunch is not the SME (subject matter expert) I want to have a business-building relationship with. Again, I’m not saying a sales person cannot be a friend. I’m saying relationships are not brand building blocks – the are the air surrounding those building blocks.  When brand planning, you must push past relationship speak. Peace! 

Clint, Chrysler and Sales.

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Full disclosure: I’m an ad-rat and therefore not your average Super Bowl commercial watcher. Also a liberal, I’m a fan of lifting up the bottom and tamping down the top.

Watching the ads during the game the NY Jets did not play on Sunday, I was taken aback by the black and white Chrysler ad.  Though the sound wasn’t great because of all the chatter in the room, I immediately knew it was part two of Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden +Kennedy.  Not sure if the music bed was similar to last year’s brilliant Eminem spot or what it was but I could tell it was a Chrysler spot way before the logo cameup.

I was ready to enjoy it, but sadly, didn’t.  It felt derivative.

Perhaps not the uber target for the ad, though certainly closer in age to Clint than Marshall, I felt the crusty, just-under-the-skin angry tone (a Clint specialty) lacked the energy and visceral side of last year’s heroic spot.  I’m sure the script was good, the film and editing certainly were, but it didn’t make me want to jump up and buy a Chrysler. Or move to Detroit. Or buy American everything the way the original ad did.

Karl Rove over the weekend said the ad was a big pay-back to president Obama for the government bail-out of Chrysler. I doubt there was any agenda, yet if there was  (even a hint) the best payback would have been to move some cars.  And though this year’s spot was probably better than 90% of the other pap, I’m not sure as many cars will be driving off the lots this month as were last February. Peace!

What is the plural of “new”?

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I saw Jonah Peretti speak at a social media conference a year ago and though I had heard of BuzzFeed was not aware it was his baby. He co-founded the Huff Post, by the way. Mr. Peretti is a didge native and gets the whole Poster Vs. Paster thing.  His content is king school is the approach I believe Yahoo and AOL need to jump their sites forward.  AOL bought some serious properties to make me think they were on the right path, but fumbled them and weren’t able to jump on the ball.   Yahoo didn’t even try, it seemed.

Mr. Peretti has two marvelous quotes in today’s New York Times – quotes that media properties in the digital world should heed:

“There is nothing more viral than news that no one else has.”  

And “News is the killer app and does not depend on search optimization.”

The common denominator here is news.  Not everything is news. That’s why there is SEO. But as we hunt and peck our way to site traffic gains, we need to think about news. And what is new. 

Today in marketing and advertising, 90% of everything is old. Perhaps served up with a new color, a new flavor, a new voice – but  old it is.  As Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg infuse our digital worlds with more and more marketing and crowd noise, as the buzz gets louder as something akin to a scene out of The Hunger Games, it would be smart for marketers to be chase new. Think new. And sell new. Peace.

Brand planning. Soft claim, hard proof.

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The best definition for brand planning I’ve come up with is “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”

The way I organized a brand plan is with one claim and three proof planks. The support or proof planks must be connected and prop up the claim.  Interestingly, the support planks don’t have to be in harmony…and often aren’t.  For instance, if one plank is “brilliantly engineered” and another is “competitively priced” those two things are often at odds. But that’s a different story.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the brand claim or promise, as some call it, needs to be soft.  When soft it can cover a lot of ground — meaning nuanced things to different people. A good soft claim is friendly, strong and conveys approachable meaning.  Product cheer leading is not appropriate, but cheer leading may be. A good soft claim is like an emollient.  It should offer a bit of whimsy.

Proof, on the other hand, must be hard.  Oak hard. Because these are the things that drive product development, company behavior and consumer perception. They are the reasons to believe the claim. They are hard because when you conceive and array demonstrations beneath each proof plank there should be no room for interpretation. They are either “on plan” or “off.”

One soft claim, three hard proofs.  This is how we do–oo it.  Peace!