fruit cocktail

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How Stuff Works Online.

May 24, 2010 in Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy by Steve Poppe | 0 Comments

Here’s how retail works.  You build, lease or buy a store, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares.  Or they don’t.

Here’s how TV works.  You build, lease or buy a program, fill it with entertaining or informational stuff, promote it and people come. Or they don’t.

Here’s how the web works. You build, lease or buy a site, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares…if you happen to be selling anything.  Sometimes the web is used to help people decide if they want to buy your stuff, because it’s sold elsewhere.  And other times the web is about entertaining visitors encouraging them to come back so ad revenue allows the site owner to buy stuff.  And sometimes still, a website is created to just simply to impart knowledge, altruism and community. 

That’s the thing about the web — visitors don’t always know if they are on a site to be sold, entertained or informed. Sometimes the builders of websites don’t seem to know either.  And when that happens the sites tend to provide a little bit of each.  And a little bit of each often leads to a lot of none. Fruit cocktail. Tricky stuff.  Focus is your friend.

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Free One Hour “Idea Audit.”

April 14, 2010 in Idea Audit by Steve Poppe | 0 Comments

                                              

I’ve been ranting for years about companies large and small that don’t have a brand idea. They think they have a brand (logo) and an idea (tagline) but were you to look at the body of marketing work, you would see lots of stuff – no idea.  An ad campaign is not a brand idea. A typeface and style guide are not brand ideas. A web engagement…nope. 

Often the most powerful brand idea a company has is its name.  It may be a “we’re here” idea but it’s an idea.  Bed Bath & Beyond is one such example. The name conveys what they do – so it works.  If you don’t define what your brand means, consumers will. And they are not that good at it; they’re busy.  Without branding context, consumers default to product (taste, utility, reliability), price, and convenience.

A number of years ago, Brendan Ryan president of FCB NY taught me a valuable lesson. Rather than getting up to speed on a client by asking for a full-on brand review with pie charts and competitive matrixes he suggested pinning all the work up on the wall. His goal? “What’s the idea?” If the work didn’t convey an idea, more work needed to be done.  

One Hour Promotion

I’m putting together a promotion to help companies identify their idea.  My plan is to offer up a 1 hour “idea audit” whereby I go into a company conference room and just as Jack Bauer might, sixty minutes later walk out the door with a “yea,” “nay” or “fruit cocktail” (Google whatstheidea+fruit cocktail).

Here’s what I propose: Put me in a room with all current marketing material: brochures, ads, last 3 promotional emails, newsletters, top 10 search terms, press stories, etc.  Let me speak to your human resources person (5 minutes), senior marketing person (10) minutes, and best sales person (5 minutes.)  Then provide me with your URL and sign me in to your Google Analytics page, if you have one. In one hour I will tell you if you have an idea, many ideas or, worst case, no idea. Then I go home. But I’ll leave my business card.

(Before I create this offer and promote it I’d like to hear readers’ thoughts. Please post here or email me at steve@whatstheidea.com) Thanks and peace!

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Rubel, Facebook and Fruit Cocktail.

March 3, 2010 in Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, twitter by Steve Poppe | 0 Comments

There’s a pretty interesting debate going on over at Steve Rubel’s Posterous stream.  It revolves around his moving his stream (sorry, guys of a certain age) to Facebook.  He’ll continue at Posterous but feels Facebook gives him more visibility, a bigger audience and a richer discussion. 

Mr. Rubel initially moved to Posterous because it was a place for him to aggregate his musings. Plus it was an easy and elegant interface.  (The aesthete in me likes the Posterous look better than the templatized Facebook frame.)  Sequestering most of his business and digital observations on Posterous and moving everything  else — business, personal, real time – to Facebook seems like a good strategy. But is it? Time will tell.

Specificity

In America and countries that look to America for tech and taste, specificity rules the day.  No one ever became president (of anything) being a generalist.  Let’s leave Mr. Rubel for a moment and use Ms. X as an example.  Say you’ve never met Ms. X but you think she’s a brilliant marketing mind. She may be a lousy partner, driver, dancer and cook but she can really mesmerize a room filled with marketers. You may be marginally interested in her meatball recipe but it is certainly not the driver of her attention.  The more meatball recipes in her stream, the less likely she is to be unique. By mixing all of her postings into one stream, Ms. X is not managing her brand very well. Her fame is diluted.

Moving Toward the Middle.

This is another example – common a couple of years ago when social computing companies were all trying to match each other’s feature sets – where everyone is moving toward the middle. It should not be. LinkedIn is about business relationships. Twitter is about real time info and immediacy.  Facebook is about friends and self and entertainment.  As Facebook moves to the middle, attempting to be all things to all people (brand fan pages included), it becomes like fruit cocktail — that can of fruit in the back of the cabinet where everything tastes like peaches. As quickly as Facebook is growing, I’m afraid it will mirror Google and turn into nothing more than an amazing advertising platform. (And then divest.) Peace!

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