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    Goodbye and Hello Moto

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    The King

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    Magazine Retrenchment…for now.

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    Marketing

    Brand Compliance Officer.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Compliance is a medical term with huge impact on patient outcomes. Patients who comply with prescription drug plans, treatment modalities and lifestyle changes live healthier lives.  

    Compliance is also a word that comes up in brand strategy discussions. Brand strategy, an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging, guides commerce in very predicable ways. And if compliance is high, success is high.

    How does a company insure brand strategy compliance? One way is to install a Brand Compliance Office. Typically, this function would lie with the Chief Marketing Officer. But the realities of managing revenue growth, marketing spend, staff and profit don’t really allow time for compliance. The title of brand manager might suggest someone who looks after compliance, but they don’t wield the power. It a “herding cats” type of job. And some cats are way up the corporate ladder.

    A Brand Compliance Officer needn’t be a 6 figure job but it’s an important job. Appointing someone to watch over internal stakeholders and make them comply with the plan is a sure-fire way of strengthening brand, sales and margin.

    Peace.                                      

     

     

    Apple should retire the iPad2.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Technology marches on and that was evident yesterday in San Francisco when Apple announced “the new iPad” (not iPad3 as some expected it to be called). Taking the hottest product on the market and improving it almost before it has had a chance to massify is an exciting Apple tactic.  That’s vision stuff — without the vision marko-babble, i.e., doing rather than saying.  But here’s the rub – and it’s a little rub.  Apple should retire the second generation iPad which it is now pricing at $399. That would be very Jobsian if you ask me.

    Innovation and design should never be put on hold – for a company like Apple it’s a step backward.  A second best iPad priced a hundred dollars lower encourages consumers toward the wrong behavior. Yes, it gets more people into the market and increases market share, but it’s a marketing tactic for challenger brands not leaders.

    My 2 cents.  Peace!

    Brand Bankruptcy.

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    Steve Poppe
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    When you’re a hammer most things look like a nail. I am brand strategy hammer. Today’s nail is Brand Bankruptcy.

    I worked for 7 months at a company that went bankrupt. The lawyers made money, vendors got cents on the dollar, employees were sent home and the manufacturing plant shut down. Thirty years ago, my father’s secretary claimed personal bankruptcy. Her credit card bills were astronomical.  She continued working, I’m assumed with less new clothes.

    Bankruptcy is a common state-supported financial practice. Ask General Motors.

    Brand bankruptcy happens when there are not enough assets in the brand bank to cover a massive value hit. This is when poorly prepared brands go bye-bye. Tylenol had enough value to recover from the tampering scandal. Chipotle survived its food poisoning debacle. It may even have come out stronger. Coke’s formula change made a run on the brand bank, but it definitely emerged healthier, with more committed customers. 

    Every brand, every company, is going to have a natural or unnatural disaster. Building brand value and banking it, is what smart companies do. It’s prepper stuff.

    Good brand strategy maximizes bank assets. It organizes them. Organize and calculate the assets you put in the brand bank and they grow and grow.

    Peace.

     

    Apple. An opt-in monopoly?

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    Steve Poppe
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    Apple has decided that ebook publishers and retailers, whose books make their way onto Apple devices, must allow the books to be purchased via Apple.  If you are an iPazzle owner and go to Amazon to buy “The Help” there must also be a link to purchase that book from iTunes/Store as well.  Apple will earn 30%.   Sony an ebook retailer has already balked at this dictate.

    Apple is not saying you have to buy from them, just that they deserve equal access.  Seems fair enough.  Apple Fanboys and girls may wish to give their hard-earned to their favorite brand, as is their right, but where will this taking a cut of the content stop?  Will Apple at some point want a penny for every phone call that lands on an iPhone?  And how would you sell that to your custies? “It goes to R&D to help design better products?” Might work.

    Apple, already an opt-in monopoly of almost cult-like dimension, is creating a platform (read Steve Lohr’s article in The New York Times) that stretches beyond hardware and software and into that amorphous area of services.  They had better be a bit careful though. Opt-in is one thing…dictatorship quite another.  Peace!

    Foundation in Brand Planning.

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    Steve Poppe
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    geotech

    Mining is actually a good brand planning analogy. During the planning process where one combs research and interviews stakeholders and consumers planners are searching for nuggets of ore. Ore that might direct one to a vein or the mother lode. In my planning rigor, my ore is proof. Examples of acts. Facts. Actions. It’s ironic that while searching for proof, I don’t know yet know the claim. In my consultancy a brand strategy consists of 1 claim and 3 proof planks. At this stage, I’m nugget hunting.

    (Just to level set, here are examples of things that are not proof: exception care, innovative design, tailored-to-meet-your-needs. These fall into the area of claim; and as claims they are a little wan. A little over used.)

    Discovery in brand planning is listening, watching, paying attention to detail – almost being a human Galvinic Skin Response test – then categorizing the proof into clusters. It may sounds a little backwards, hunting for proof before identifying the claim, but it’s not. People can tell stories about proof. People light up citing proof. People are reticent, however, when it comes to claim. Reticent because it sounds like bragging. Because it is not always true.

    Mine for proof first and your plan will have a stable foundation. Peace. 

    Evolution, marketing and Bumpus Mills, TN.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Some evolutionary changes – Physical:

    • Our fingers are getting smaller and more supple.
    • Our thoraxes are growing smaller in length and girth as the things we digest become more processed and prepared.
    • Our brains are getting bigger, causing brain cases to outsize the female pelvis, raising the rate of Caesarian sections.
    • Our eyesight is getting worse as we smother ourselves in commercial light and don’t need eyesight to “naturally select” food sources.
    • Our teeth are losing enamel due to a diet requiring less vigorous mastication. (Girls with gum don’t count.)
    • Antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are growing, thanks to our overuse of pills.

     

    Some evolutionary changes – Marketing:

    • We don’t read print ads because we have been conditioned to know they are blather 8 out of 10 times.
    • We’ve become inured to the lexicon of selling – especially the twenty most paid for words.
    • The clutter of choices available to consumers is so great often the best “package” wins.
    • The medium and the message have become more important than the product.
    • The convenience of hunting and gathering has become so great, our collective asses are too big for our jeans.

     

    And lastly, because of the marketing evolutions stated above, we have ceded control of brand management to social voices in Peoria and Bumpus Mills – which is like letting one cell in the body make the decisions for all. Peace it up!

    OrderNet of Things

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    Steve Poppe
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    Yesterday I tweeted about the OrderNet of Things. The phase is obviously borrowed from the Internet of Things, aka IoT. It refers to Amazon’s Dash Button. I thought the button was either named after the P&G detergent, but oops that’s Tide…not Dash. (Dash was discontinued in 1992. Brain fart). I also wondered if it was named after Anil Dash, the social media and technology commentator. Again, prob wrong.

    dash button

    No matter, the dash button is a little USB sized button, attached to the internet that allows one to replenish stores as quickly as Amazon can deliver. The Tide button can be affixed to the washing machine. The Pampers button to the baby’s diaper pail.

    The OrderNet of Things – things being consumables — may be the killer app of the IoT.  Yet the big winner will be delivery services. Perhaps the U.S. Postal Service will make a comeback. Maybe Amazon will buy FedEx.

    Groceries and consumable need to get into the house. One-at-a-time, these deliveries don’t make sense from an environmental stand point, but American’s love to push buttons. I see this as a cool fad. The idea to have an idea. It’s certain to be more of a luxury purchase until we figure out how to scale it, find economies and waste less gas. It’s still cool. The OrderNet of Things.

    Peace.

     

    Is Chrysler hitting the Wahl?

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    Steve Poppe
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    Chrysler’s new Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl Meyer has been brought in to energize this bobbing-in-the-water brand. Her background with Lexus and chops in luxury marketing is supposedly her edge. If she can actually come into Chrysler and affect real change, she may be successful. But frankly, it comes down to the cars…to the design. 

     
    Go into any mall parking lot in America and look around. Do the Chryslers stick out? Can you even see them or are they invisible? A Sebring may catch your eye, but that’s about it.   My 16 year old son likes the Chrysler 300, but I don’t see it. To me, it looks like every other Chrysler, only 5 inches taller.
     
    As any marketer knows, marketing starts with the product. Chrysler needs a design point of view. I’d like to hear Ms. Wahl Meyer articulate a mission statement for the Chrysler brand and therefore for the design team. That would be a good start.  Marko-babble like “burnish the image,” and “understand our consumers,” and “focus our marketing approach” sounds like someone without an idea. 

    Hey, Ms. Wahl Meyer. What’s the idea?

     

    IBM to Googleplex Health Care.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Data is the new content. With IBM’s $2.6B investment in Truven Health Analytics, we are seeing the beginnings of a massive bet on the data business.  IBM has always made its paycheck with data processing hardware and consulting. Sure they’ve sold software but in this age of cloud computing, where software will kinda go away, IBM seems to be appreciating that data ownership is the ticket. Watson Health (into which Truven will be folded) is more than big iron and a log-in, it will be a repository of data that will make a manifold improvement in the quality of health worldwide.

    The Obama administration has pushed for EMRs (electronic medical records), which was a brilliant first step. But as is the way in free enterprise societies there are now 70-ish EMRs available, most of which don’t talk to one another.  Where’s the big data “learn” from that?  Truven Heatlh Analytics owns treatment data from 200 million patients. Data. Not sequestered software records. This is an analytics mother lode. This is Google scale stuff — but with a mission that goes way beyond Ad Words revenue. We’re talking “saving lives and transforming care” here.

    IBM and Watson are not washing their hands of big iron and consulting, but they are def getting into the data business — in a low hanging fruit sector. Watch out Google. Watch out.

    Peace.  

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