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    Bye Jersey.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Poor New Jersey.  Even before Snooki and her tanning bed crew stepped into the limelight, it had a sullied reputation build upon the smoke stacks and cat crackers lining the turnpikes.  For years it was unfairly labeled the “armpit of America.” For anyone who has ever walked the Kittatinny Ridge or driven the roads of western New Yersey (what my Norwegian forefathers used to call it from high atop Cedar Lake in beautiful Denville), the love and understanding of New Jersey’s true colonial beauty runs deep.

    I’m digging Cory Booker who I believe will leapfrog Chris Christie into the national spotlight soon, and I’ve long been a fan of Newark – a tough city. There are lots of positives going on in this beautiful state, but what can we do to fix its image. Even the tourist board is advertising the other New Jersey to combat the power of the Jersey Shore TV Show. 

    So how do we fix this, Mr. brand planner?  Stop referring to it as Jersey. And start calling it by its respectful full name New Jersey. It has a formal name and if people and promoters start using it and allow the riff-raff to focus on the shortcut “Jersey” the brand will begin the ascent it deserves.  Even Rutgers University ran an ad in the paper today referring to the state as Jersey.  Stop it!

    Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Peace!

    Walking the planks. The brand planks.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Let’s talk about brand planks.  Brand planks, like political planks, are areas of discussion important to the people. In the case of marketing it’s the people who buy products. Across all categories price is important, service is important, so is availability – but these are prices of entry. A brand plank, all afore mentioned being equal, is a care-about that predisposes consumers toward your product. It’s a reason to buy or a reason to prefer.

    Wal-Mart over the weekend was dinged for smearing Mexican government officials with cash to improve its move into the country.  Yesterday its stock took a 5% dive. Money traders felt the news would have an adverse effect on company earnings.  Brand planks, well managed, have the opposite effect.  They create value for a brand. 

    Research, brand planning and science – the ability to predict outcomes – are what smart marketers concern themselves with.  Find the perfect troika of brand planks, message and demonstrate them daily and sales will happen. The tactics can change, the campaigns can change, but the planks are sacrosanct.  If the brand planks are right, it’s even possible they can survive a change to the brand strategy. Peace it up!

    Content Socialist.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    My current company Teq is looking to hire a person who is part blogger, part videographer, part brand raconteur. At JWT there is a great writer and mind — Kyle Monson, whose title was Brand Journalist. Today, he is titled Editor and Content Strategy Director.  I like his previous cognomen better.  I’ve used the words Media Socialist a few times in my blog but never put a job spec together for it. Media socialist, to me, suggests all media are important and all parts of the target are important.  But my company is in the business of selling educational development, with the emphasis on selling, so I’m going to use the title Content Socialist, putting the focus on the message rather than the media.

    The hire will have to manipulate readers and viewers with strong content, but that will only work if the content is good for the community – the tribe.  Too many social media professionals are about their brand and the pass along.  They should be about what’s good of the target community.  One of my guard rails for social is “be interested in what your target is interested in.” That’s social. 

    Social media professionals will abound in corporate marketing departments in coming years. Soon, ours will have its first content socialist and I am ecstatic. Peace!

    Education is the best software.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    As a student of B2B advertising and someone who has made a nice living helping corporations sell technology, services, even processes, I am amazed by how few marketing promises are served up in the tech space.  SAP will be the latest such company with a new campaign built around the word “Run.”  Ogilvy does the work, and I suspect it will look much the same as its IBM “Smarter Planet” work.  One headline from the new SAP campaign is “Run 10 years of numbers in seconds.”  A smart brand planner at BBDO once said to me good planning is about poetry, and there is very little poetry in this type of tech advertising – but there are lots of bucks in it.

    I’ll tell you what makes companies and countries and planets smarter: Education.  Teachers. School administrators who love their jobs.  Technology people in inner cities who mine garbage bins to find PCs for students. Parents who care more about their kids educations than watching “Family Guy.”  Education moves societies. It moves cultures.  Software is nice. Hardware is nice…but it won’t stand in front of a bullet to save your life. People will.

    Education is a right in America.  Now let’s make great education a right.  If we get great education right, we don’t have to worry about “clean technology” and porous borders and religious zealotry.  Peace.

    The Craft (Beer) Economy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    This Saturday will mark the third year I’ve volunteered at the Long Island Cask Ale Festival hosted by the Blue Point Brewing Company and put on by Starfish Junction Productions.  I know, I know…dirty job, but someone has to do it.  Each year the weather is great, the brew terrific and the people and vibe — best of all.  This, my friends, is part of the Craft Economy.  It didn’t start with ETSY, but Etsy amplified it  The fun thing about the craft economy is that it’s really only a part of an economy, because its more about doing things yourself than paying others. And the work product is better.

    So watching a plumbing video on YouTube to assist in changing your P trap is part of the craft economy. Cooking dinner with natural or at least unprocessed ingredients is craft.  Making beer at home or with a craft beer club, another example.  It’s about doing things for yourself and others (giving a neighbor some homemade spaghetti sauce, for instance) that take time, care and require some learning. Some experimenting.  Smelling the roses along the way.

    Now you are not going to see me knitting anytime soon, and I’m still going to buy Levi’s button down jeans, but working with my hands and brain and not sending my hard earned to China or Omaha is where my head is.  Saving the planet along the way by not purchasing packaging and other non-sustainables doesn’t hurt. 

    So as I volunteer and savor the occasional quaff at the Cask Ale festival this weekend and talk among fellow beer lovers and makers, I’ll be immersed in the craft economy. I will be among friends. (Oh, and the sour pickle guy will be there too. Yay.) Peace!

     

    AT&T Drafting Mobile.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    AT&T, a brand that taught me many things about advertising and marketing, is rudderless from a branding standpoint.  Yeah, they are making ads. Yeah, they have a branding idea “Rethink Possible.”  And now they have a campaign idea “It’s what you do with what we do” intended to make the brand idea work harder.  But frankly it’s a qualifying idea that waters down the already watered down. Ester Lee and David Lubars know better.  This is a billion dollars of nothingness in one man’s opinion.

    Back in the 90s both of these ideas would have been corporate advertising efforts for AT&T — a company that didn’t like to do corporate advertising.  AT&T liked products and services.  Bell Labs, now AT&T Labs, was a hotbed of innovation. It was innovation. I’m sure there are hundreds of engineers who will argue this from a patent point of view, but the labs have lost their way.

    AT&T has become a mobile phone company with a bad rep for network, thanks to the iPhone’s history of dropped calls. For 20 somethings that has defined the company.  So Rethink Possible is simply a tag-along mobile strategy drafting a category whose imagination is being captured by Apple.  BBDO can do better. AT&T can do better. The labs can go better. Peace! 

    Symmetry.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    We love symmetry in our lives. We love it on our design. In our music. Symmetry is balance. Order. Brand planners like order and symmetry yet they also know a strategy must not be replicable. It must be unique. Others can lay claim to the “refreshment” strategy, but when Coca-Cola says it, it has unique meaning. Why? Because nothing refreshes like a Coca-Cola. It’s doesn’t own the word, it owns the idea. That’s due to the coca bean and a special highly guarded recipe. 

    Many brand ideas are replicable as are many products (there just aren’t that many Coke’s out there), so the notion of creating an organizing principles in the form of “one idea supported by 3 brand planks” allows for that differentiation. It also allows a brand flexibility and the ability to cover new ground. Sameness is not symmetry. Geico is beginning to realize that. 

    Campaigns come and go, a powerful branding idea is indelible. And supported by symmetry and smart brand planks, a brand plan can last many lifetimes. Peace.

    Porous Marketing

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    My brand plans contain a call to arms brand promise, atop three business winning proof planks. The planks must support the promise. Separately the planks are business building, together they are business winning – market share winning.  This is the organizing principle behind banding and good marketing.  It helps define and decide the way forward.

    I often say “Marketing is simple. It’s all about claim and proof.”  Organized proof. But sometimes brand planks are aspirational — there isn’t a lot of proof yet.  In those cases it’s important to share the plank theory as well as the proof, limited though it may be. The theory sets up the plank goals and guides development of how one might productize, develop and pursue the proof. This is especially helpful in a services business.    

    Claim without proof is why advertising and marketing is often so porous. Claim and proof is how to win. See? Simple.  Peace!

    Flipping the Video Teacher.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I’d like to advance a hypothesis. Working in the educational development space as I am, I often wonder about creating learning environments (K-12 in particular) that are more conducive to student engagement and lesson retention.  The latest theory – and there are many – is that “student-centered, teacher-facilitated” is the winning approach.   In the vein of the Khan Academy (a kind of a YouTube for lessons) what if for low performing urban kids, the videos were offered in the patois of the street – complete with appropriate urban music beds?  Perhaps a naughty word once in a while for emphasis.

    The culture of learning has always been so counter to some kids.  Why not wean those with difficulty learning into more conventional environments by using the familiar?  Get these students attention, win them over through exploration and context, then begin to slowly exfiltrate them towards more mainstream teaching. If teaching is to be student-centered, needn’t we meet students of all kinds half way, yo? 

    Silly perhaps. Probably been tried in real life, with a smidgen of success.  But I bet a Khan Academy-like video might do it.  Brand planners understand the importance of “feeling” the audience. Is it time for eduators to do the same?

     Peace!

    PS.  The views here expressed are not the views of Teq, Inc.  They are simply the thoughts and crumbs of a marketing blogger with his head above the clouds.

    Curating the Curators.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    A colleague sent me a nice post on social media curation — all the points of which I agree with.  (See my SlideShare preso from a year ago.)  The one point I could take some issue with is the first point suggesting we use the media each demographic group is most comfortable with. It cites Baby Boomers, who more comfortable having content shared via newsletters containing embedded URLs.  Quite logical but not particularly media-forward. I’d prefer to find Boomer “Posters” with my curated content and let them reach the Pasters.  Those Posters are typically not reading newsletters with the voraciousness they take on social.

    That said, check out the Linked Media Group article, heed its advice then practice, practice, practice.  Peace. 

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