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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!
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Tags: antibiotic resistant, bumpus mills, ceding control of brand management, Evolution, marketing, whats the idea
There is an interesting strategic disagreement going on in the men’s body wash category these days. The commercials and video on TV and YouTube from competitors Axe and Old Spice focus on different targets. Old Spice, acknowledging that 70% of men’s body wash (a more expensive, soap substitute) is purchased by women, is using the much talked about “smell like a man” campaign from Wieden + Kennedy directed toward those women buyers. The campaign is smart because the message in not lost on men. Conversely, the Axe work shoots straight at men, suggesting “Use Axe body wash and you won’t have to aks (New York for ask) girls out, they’ll flock to you.” Axe is attempting to change behavior. That is, they’re trying to convince men, young and old, that it’s okay to use cleansing gels rather than the traditional, inexpensive, manly soap.
Bud Light convinced young men that it’s okay to drink light beer, so growing the body wash category is not a bridge to far.
It should be interesting to see who wins this strategic battle. Will the guys without dates who are most motivated to spruce up not respond to the Old Spice work targeting women? No, I think they will. They’ll get the message. But probably not ask strongly as they will receive the “chick magnet” ads from Axe and BBH. Will lady-less men’s mothers buy them body wash? I hope not, that certainly will be counterproductive. “Honey, I saw something on TV….” Peace.
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Tags: Axe, bbh, body wash, bud light, commercials, marketing, old spice, whats the idea, whatstheidea, wieden + kennedy, wieden and kennedy, youtube"
Sir Ken Robinson, in a TED video I watched yesterday on the state of education, mentioned something pretty profound. He said most people are often “good at something they don’t really like doing.” His point being, that mom-ism, “If you do something you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” His broader point was students today are broadcast to, not engaged, and that’s why education is in such a sorry state.
Broadcast Selling.
I was mowing the lawn last night and thinking about this as it relates to advertising and marketing. With media exploding into more and more, always-on devices (ding-a-ling, Good Will on the phone), and those devices containing advertising, the bombardment of selling is growing exponentially. Moreover, that selling is being done by more craft-less people, creating the advertising equivalent of fast food — poorly constructed and not good for you. (Ads by SEO kids, videos by moms.)
How to sell.
As a young ‘un in the ad business I drafted an article for Adweek that suggested people read ads to be: educated, entertained or to see something they’ve never seen before. I think this still applies. We are so inundated with selling messages today we shut down. Ingest too many antibiotics and you become immune. Hear the word “quality” too many times and you become similarly immune.
Our Job
Our job as marketers is not to say the same things with new messaging devices, it’s to educate, entertain and present the artful unseen. (In the 70’s my dad Fred Poppe used to call this “engagement.”) Engagement starts with getting someone to let down their message defenses. My ramble. My peace! Happy 4th.
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Tags: adweek, education, engagement, fred poppe, good will, marketing, seo, sir ken robinson, ted, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Clearly, innovation is always in. Perhaps the bigger question is whether innovation should be pursued inside the company or out. It’s happening both ways. Innovation is big, big business. Ad agencies, digital shops and marketing companies have Chief Innovation Officers. Lots of money is spent in internal innovation departments and outsourced innovation companies…and the crowdsourcing phenomenon is contributing. Pepsi outsources its innovations and it has done remarkably well with it.
Innovation is the result of hard work and serendipity. I am of the mind that it’s most likely to occur from people doing not people sitting around thinking. The famous story of the 3M’s Post-It note resulting from a lab spill comes to mind.
The answer to the in or out question is a little bit of both, but working together. Inside to set the product or service stage and context — and outside for the random, unfettered thinking and consumer insights of trained selling and marketing minds. Peace!
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Tags: chief innovation officer, innovations, marketing, outsourcing, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Mission Control is a well-produced 76 second video by PepsiCo’s Gatorade ‘splaining how Gatorade marketing monitors the web for comments, chatter and potential product improvements. The “war room” at mission control is filled with AT&T NOC (network operations center) -like people in front of multiple monitors — their fingers on the pulse of Gatorade enthusiasts. Looks like they are a busy bunch.
Interspersed with the mission control pictures are great shots of Kobe, Serena, etc., helping viewers work up a sweat…which is what Gatorade is and should always be about.
Right now this vid is kind of inside baseball for the marketing, advertising and social community – plus I think it’s being used in and around Cannes to round up votes. It’s a great spend, by Gatorade as they “set the stage for digital leadership.” I’ve written before that every large corporation in America will have a social media dept. and I believe it. Smart senior agency people have nodded in agreement yet told me that the truly creative ideas and productions that hit wire/less will still come from agencies. That, too, I believe.
After a while though, after all marketers have jumped on this listening bandwagon and consumers are conditioned to provide product input, message input and marketing input, it will begin to dull the strategic senses. It will turn the world into a place filled with screen-scratching marketing interns, when what we really want to do is listen to the influential “Posters.” (Google whatstheidea+posters.)
Let’s watch out for that monster that we are creating. Peace!
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Tags: at&t, Cannes, digital leadership, gatorade, Gatorade mission control, google, Kobe, marketing, pepsico, Posters, Serena, social media monster, whats the idea, whatstheidea
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that about 90% of the workers in advertising and marketing are consumed by tactics. “I want a new website. We need an acquisition program. Our sales force is up 8% year over year. The innovation team is cranking out some really great ideas.”
We build things, we buy things, we read, write and communicate. We hire and manage, then count the metrics and the change. But are these efforts always undertaken towards a strategic purpose? More often than not the answer is “no.”
Every company needs to have a strategic mission. A brand strategy. And it needs key operating principles: Brand planks. Every employee at the company needs to know the mission and the planks. Go out today and ask a worker what their company strategy is, and with the possible exception of Zappos you are likely to hear “make money” or “be more profitable.” Then probe “What are your company’s three key operating principles?” and you’ll get that look dogs give you when you put the ball behind your back. Try it. Peace!
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Tags: Advertising, brand planks, Brand Strategy, marketing, tactical world, whats the idea, whatstheidea, zappos
Slide 4 in Mary Meekers’s Morgan Stanley presentation entitled “Internet Trends 2010” shows the pace of mobile internet adoption. It compares iPhone/iTouch to that of AOL’s desktop, Netscape desktop and NTT docomo iMode; laying out growth by users, by quarter from launch.
iPhone’s Internet access tipped 86 million users in its 11th quarter – less than 3 years. Let’s just say the others never came close to coming close. (Check out the chart on slide 4.) Smartphone growth is hockey sticking. Motorola is starting to get it. HP bought Palm and should buy some corporate share. Blackberry is too big and too rich to fail, even though they’re getting a little paunchy around the middle. And we haven’t even started to talk about the software guys Google (after its trivestiture), Microsoft (drawing a blank) and carrier switch provider Alcatel-Lucent.
Ladies and germs, smartphones are the future of computing, commerce and community. They will dock next to monitors and keyboards, but they are the device. Think about the iPhone4’s new videoconference app. Wait for fingerprint apps, and galvanic skin response apps, sobriety apps…. Cool times, these. Marketers, put on your thinking apps (I mean caps), innovation awaits! Peace!
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Tags: alcatel-lucent, AOL, apple, blackberry, docomo, google, hp, iphone4, marketing, mary meeker, morgan Stanley, motorola, netscape, ntt, smartphone marketing, thinking apps, whats the idea, whatstheidea
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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Tags: fruit cocktail, marketing, online, retail, strategy, tv, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Two business trends are happening today, both accelerated due to the web — one is good, one not so. They are collaboration and crowdsourcing. Their shared intention is the production of good, efficient work.
In the case of collaboration the work is done by more than one party and web tools are used which put more information at the fingertips of participants. Many minds work together toward a goal, feeding off of one another. Smart companies like the Dachis Group in Austin are playing here; they call their product Social Business Design. Collaborative software has been around since the 90s but it was more about cursor sharing and application sharing than a delve into the culture of collaboration. The new view is about changing the tools and the process.
Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, is a project jump ball where participants compete against one another for a cash prize. It is often the antithesis of collaboration. The pay is poor (but not always) and the work product quite variable. In the case of a crowdsourced logo design, for instance, a number of art directors are briefed and the winning logo designer is awarded some Benjamins. (A good professional logo goes for thousands.) The losers click home. Crowdsourcing is leading to crowdsouring, but it still is a growing practice. In defense of crowdsourcing, at the high-end, with really talented players and a fair remuneration, it can work effectively.
Two trends to watch. Peace!
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Tags: collaboration, crowdsourcing, crowdsouring, dachis group, marketing, social business design, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Just as farmers are toiling now with herbicide resistant weeds, members of the marketing community are having trouble connecting with advertising resistant consumers.
Roots.
Roots is a concept I discuss with my consulting clients; the return to a simpler, more prideful lifestyle. Don’t throw away your million iPazzles — not that type of simple. But do watch old black and white, finely crafted movies on them. (Etsy is a hot web property that plays to the roots phenomenon — catering to the hand-made crowd.)
Because of herbicide resistant strains of weeds, many farmers are back in their fields plowing and manually pulling weeds, a practice hey had long forgone. Roots. Advertisers, on the other hand, rather than creating more meaningful and sales-appropriate messages — also roots — have decided to take their selling messages to new places. Advertising is now all over our favorite web applications and phones and and and… As we become more resistant to sales message we don’t need to invent new media to carry those messages; we need to reinvent the messages themselves. The introduction of account planning to advertising was the first acknowledgement of that. It’s use in digital media is growing and not a moment too soon.
Marketers, here are some words to live by: don’t overly complicate, message the benefit, avoid sameness, read Maslow, and smile (whistle) while you work. Peace!
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Tags: Account Planning, digital media, etsy, herbicide resistant weeds, ipad, ipazzle, marketing, roots, smart phones., whatstheidea. whats the idea
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