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Aol, Cisco. Feed the Beast.

February 4, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

Cisco and AOL both reported earnings today. Cisco, maker of Internet plumbing, had a very nice turnaround ; AOL posted its first profit since de-coupling from Time Warner – a penny a share. Not bad, all things considered. 

Cisco Systems

If you follow Cisco you know they have invested in getting more people to push more bits over the Internet.  Think Gillette getting people to shave their entire bodies.  (Okay, bad analogy.) Cisco has pushed videoconferencing for years and not too long ago bought Flip the hot video camera company. The more digital info that goes over the net, the more routers and switches and stock Cisco sells.

Aol

This is exactly the approach Aol needs to take.  Aol makes money on advertising so it needs to create content that makes more eyeballs and fingers go to their sites. Right now that means hiring great writers, videographers, creative people and buying and adding to the fold well-trafficked sites.  Better content, better audience numbers.  But Aol is not really thinking out of the box yet. It needs to come up with content types that haven’t been done.  As the Brits might say, they need to be more inno-vit-iv. How about an easy to use, easy to read email device for the AARP crowd?  Or an educational games for infants?  Or a remote home automation portal that lets you turn on lights from the street?  Aol is still thinking in 2 dimensions, a la a publisher.  Like Cisco, Mr. Armstrong needs to feed the beast.  Let’s pick it up!

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Brand Spanking

April 22, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

Some years ago I was doing focus groups in the tech sector trying to find a way to displace Cisco Systems the market share lion in corporate switches and routers. On the creative brief I referred these Cisco buyer panelists and their brethren as “market share hounds,” people who bought from the leader just because they were the leader. Something interesting happened in one group that got me thinking that people, by nature, need something to kvetch about. Even among the most committed market share hounds, there was dissatisfaction.

 

Microsoft, also a market share leader at the time, had its fair share of detractors, and in other groups I would often hear the excitement in their voices as they piled on ther negatives. So I decided that for challenger brands, using research to spank the market leader was a good way to its soft underbelly. Brand spanking as a research methodology was born.

 

Once you get people kvetching, the stories come out…and the insights fly. For challenger brands, funneling the discussion in a way that uncovers these anger provoking insights is a great way to identify leverage-able brand values. Spank away. Peace.

 

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Cisco Demonstrates Smarts and Backbone.

March 20, 2009 in Marketing | 0 Comments

 

Cisco Systems purchase of Pure Digital Technologies, manufacturer of the Flip video recorder, is a BIG move and Cisco’s first real push into consumer products. To date, the only people who have actually bought something from Cisco are business and IT people. Consumers have seen Cisco TV commercials promoting corporate video conferencing and the “human network,” but that was really a B2B and investor stock play.  

 

The Flip, however, is one of the coolest tech products to come along in a while and will finally give Cisco some real purchase in the consumer market. Cisco will evolve the product onto a wireless platform, somehow make it videoconference-able, and take personal video recording to a new level.  The Cisco Flip will be advertised using some serious cash, making ad agencies, media companies and retailers happy. In addition, the increased usage of Flips around the world will send some serious gigs over the net’s backbone routers, Cisco’s bread and butter.

 

This was a great move by Cisco and one which may catapult the brand into Sony landin 5 to 10 years. Peace!

 

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Cisco — The Human Network?

May 21, 2007 in Marketing | 0 Comments

Cisco System’s advertising campaign is very well produced. In fact, the production is so good it hides the fact that the idea is weak. The implied strategy of Cisco’s “human network” effort is to showcase all the good that happens over the internet and take credit for it. As the Internet infrastructure market leader, Cisco has decided to put a human face on the Internet and reap its benefit. It’s there way of showing Cisco is not a “cold technology” company and that applications drive technology.
 
The problem with glorifying humans, their actions, ideas, and deeds in your advertising is that you don’t differentiate the product. You celebrate it but don’t differentiate it. Certainly this builds awareness, familiarity, and a degree of loyalty, but the real kernels of differentiation that bind consumers to you are lost.  It doesn’t pass the “Why do you like Cisco so much?” test. Were a new hardware vendor to come along with a faster switch, many of Cisco’s fans would be happy to listen.  This campaign is the equivalent of the old AT&T “reach out and touch someone” campaign, which was great monopoly advertising. 
 
The human network is an idea. And it plays well in the media.  But it is not a branding idea.  
 

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