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    3 Ps. The next marketing trends.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Try not to spend too much time in the present when doing marketing planning.  It’s okay to look to the past to help understand big trends and how they have changed. After you get the how, you need to overlay the why – that’s da monies, the why.  Then spend your time thinking about the future.

    Most marketers, marketing agents and the less important though well-financed consultants spend their time in the near-past. Today, geo-location services and check-ins are the near-past and though not exactly a mine denuded of its ore, they are where many marketers are spending serious time and money. Slates and tablets are the haps today and as a billion dollar business will take up a lot of time, energy and GDP but like Robert Scoble’s kid said couple of month ago, it’s just more stuff to put in a backpack.   Tech companies are now fighting over form, size and inches.

    What’s Next?

    So what’s out in front? For marketers, what is ahead of the dashboard?  I believe the answer is politics, planet and populace.  It used to be easy to not pay attention to what went on in the Congo when it was buried on page 27.  But how about when it’s in your stream. In living color? And will people pay for that?  Will people pay for the right to tune in via Google Earth any event in the world in real time?  Who needs Al Jazeera?  I wrote yesterday about the web strategy called the 3Cs: Content, Commerce and Community. Tom Friedman who has more power than 95% of us  will tell you the 3 P (Poppe knows from 3 Ps) is what’s next. Let them guide you. Peace, the verb.

    Keeping Score in Advertising.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I like the Effies.  Effie Awards are given out for, ta-dah, effective advertising and marketing programs.  I also like the Direct Marketing Associations Echo Awards — a show that awards those who quantify sales results. Cannes and the One Show are at the high end of the spectrum, with the Tellys at the other, in a long array of other hardware shows that tend to be more fashion than anything else.  I love art and creativity, please don’t get me wrong, but prefer sales with my marketing.

    The Effies are like the sports in a way, in that people are rewarded when score is kept. Did the work generate value, sales, and market share?  And how much?  To the winners go the spoils.

    I am often reminded of keeping score when I see “We’re here” advertising,” work that simply tells consumers what one does.  We’re here advertising is lazy and a blight.  A print ad today by the very reputable NYU Langone Medical Center proclaims through a one word headline “Whole.” Beneath this is the delicate, italicized and parenthetic word “hearted.”  The picture is of a physician holding a baby. Two sentences of copy mention the hospital does pediatric and adult cases, the doctors are accomplished and work for one of the nation’s top heart programs.  We’re here!   With nothing to say, they favor the say very little approach to readership.

    What in the name of Einstein, is the measure of success here? Off to the Tellys. Peace!

    Community. Yesterday and tomorrow.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The first web portal or big web project I ever worked on was ZDNet.  It was mid- to late 90s and they were in a dogfight with C|Net for audience. The key care-abouts were what they called the the 3Cs: Content, Commerce and Community.

    Content was what ZDNet owned, having come out of the print publishing area. Commerce was all about hooking up buyers and sellers rather than selling on the site and Community was more about aggregating a class of reader than about creating interaction among those readers.

    This was all before social networking and social media took off. These ZDNet guys and girls were inventing community and social on the fly. Community is still a big wielder of weight on the web. It’s mobile and location based, and, and, and, but it is still ripe fruit.

    Many builders of community look at the offline world for inspiration: book clubs, quilters, home brewers, support groups. People who used to meet in houses or libraries – willing to commune over a topic. But what’s exciting and entrepreneurial today, though, is bringing together communities of like-minds interested in topics not found in the offline world. Quora would be a good place to mine for these. Moreover, it might be a good place to start these communities. Ning attempted to cash in here, but it was cumbersome and had to be orchestrated. Quora already has the settlers. Mick Jagger might say “It’s just a click away.” Peace!

    The Muddled Middle.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    In the tech category, moving to the middle is what the revenue hungry do. Rather than perfect what they are, they see money and desire an expansive make-over.  Google’s culture of technological obesity has driven it to invest $100 million dollars in new content for YouTube.  Being king of search is not enough; now it wants to be the next video TV station.  Google suspects there will be licensing issues for playing other people’s content and so wants to create and enable new video content to drive traffic.  As we all know, public access programming and 9.5 out of 10 consumer generated videos are deathly boring.  $100M should help bring in some creativity and will work for a while, but is a poor investment.

    Case two: Twitter is talking about creating brand fan pages so they can hit some of that advertising revenue.  Misfire.  They, too, are moving toward the muddled middle; a place Facebook with its fan pages and Likes is filling. Twitter needs to let brands Tweet their stories and value, leaving the undifferentiated fan pages to others.

    The thing that made the iPhone take off is application developers.  What will make Twitter accelerate is also application developers – but marketing application developers, and here’s a secret: Twitter is so easy to use and so much of the work is done (read hashtags) that non-coders will be the app developers on Twitter.  Twitter will win many of the marketing wars, it just has to stop moving toward the middle and let the apps evolve.

    Why do all technology companies covert thy neighbor’s partner? Love the one your with.  Peace!

     

    Brand Strategy. Now, with feeling.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    There is this odd phenomenon that occurs when I present a branding brief to a client. 

    My brand brief contains a definition of the living, breathing target (not a demographic), an articulation of the target’s key care-about, the role of the product in delivering on that care-about. It covers the key market sensibility related to the product or category, and any enduring attitudes about the brand that might rise to the top. Not atypical stuff.  Of course it’s what you do with all that stuff that makes a brand strategy great.  When everything has been gathered and funneled down to a simple, no comma, no conjunction idea — when all the effluvium has been boiled away — what remains is a single declarative statement of brand intention.  That is the moment of truth.    

    When I present that statement and I’ve my job right, the client lights up like a Christmas tree. We are brothers and sisters. We are from the same parents.  We are friends. But then…then, the odd phenomenon begins to creeps in. You can feel a loving “but” coming on.  This is when they say: “I absolutely love it, it’s perfect, but do we have you use the word_____.  And it’s the pivotal word.  That’s when I know I’ve got them.

    Just like great creative, a great brand strategy has to take a client out of his/her comfort zone. It has to feel like work. It has to make clients and consumers emote. A brand strategy must aspire.  Campaigns come and go, but a powerful brand strategy is indelible. Peace!

    The biggest wealth exchange in history.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Sorry for the late post but I was at the monthly meeting of the Social Media Club of Long Island. Great stuff.  It started a little slowly in that the speaker Constance Korol did the typical context-setting commercial but it really picked up and ended being quite thought provoking.   (In this “fast twitch media world” had I not been in a seat, I might have clicked through. Glad I didn’t.)

    The topic was social media in China and its use for commercial purposes.  Sina Weibo is the social network of choice in China.  Sina numbers only 100 million registered users.  Did I just say “only 100 million?”  China is big, in other words.  And as a social media market it is going to get crazy bigger.  In fact, when Nokia and Microsoft figure out how to create a US $49 smartphone, that hundred million number is going to jump…creating the single largest wealth exchange in the history of mankind.

    The thing about China is…it’s China.  You can learn by friending people through cracks in the firewall, but to really learn you need to have feet on street.  The country is so closed off and so monitored only hacks will get you through.  But what a country in terms of marketing opportunity!  What a laboratory.

    Everywhere is not America.  To see the world through American glasses is ethnocentric.  If we open our eyes and learn about other cultures we have a chance transnationally.   As Waylon says “Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do sometimes won’t know how to take him. He ain’t wrong, he’s just different…” (Human rights, is a topic for another day.) Peace.

    A Corporate Recruiting Lesson.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I’m a big college basketball junkie; specifically a St. John’s fan. Otherwise I roll with the Big East. I’m not alone. Men’s college hoops is big business. Big squared. College recruiters start the ”watch and wait process” when kids are in eighth grade. The good news is at that age, the parents are training their future stars-to-be so the kids are fairly easily found. They play school ball but also can be found in AAU, police leagues and even church ball. You can’t teach tall, so that is one of the things recruiters look for. Also dribbling skills, fast twitch movement, hops, balance and let’s not forget shooting.

    Over the weekend I was reading about how the best computer engineers at Stanford are often recruited and signed by corporations during the fall semester of their senior year. The fall semester. Of their senior year. Any college basketball recruiter will tell you anyone left unsigned at that time in high school isn’t worth too much. In the marketing business, some smart companies do a tour of college campuses with a card table, a sleeve of pamphlets and a PPT show. Our business could learn a thing from the college basketball recruiters. Home visits, texts, phone calls, nice letters to momma – a shmear every once in a blue moon.

    If the marketing feeder system were run better, marketers and agencies would be a lot more effective and profitable. Peace.

    Electronic Payment Futures.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Okay, check it out.  Credit and debit card purchases work like this: you buy a $100 dinner and the restaurant gets $97, the card issuer (Visa, Amex) gets $2 and the restaurant’s bank takes $1.  On a per transaction basis it doesn’t sounds so onerous; credit cards are complicated, bankers have to make a buck, restaurants love the convenience and so long as there isn’t any technological fallout (sorry) everyone is happy.  But this whole electronic payment thing reminds me of the landline telecommunications industry.  To make a long distance phone call you have to pay your local telephone company, the long distance carrier, and the local telephone company on the terminating end.  ‘spensive.

    Rethinking Mobile Electronic Payment

    It doesn’t take an MIT grad to see that there are some inefficiencies in the current tripartite payment system, especially since nothing but data is changing hands.  So who is going to remove the first and last mile of money transactions as we move to smartphone payment technology? Google is thinking about it.  JPMorgan Chase is debating it.  Mr. Zuckerberg wonders. Verizon, too, has dreams. (Phone companies billing systems are very bank-like in their complexity.)  Don’t forget, American Airlines once made more money on its first-to-market reservation system than it did flying planes.

    This electronic wallet, direct from consumer payment system is a comin’.  Question is: Who will be the winner? Thoughts?

    Brand Plan…then Count the Change.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I was reading a fascinating article today on the grid system of NYC and the original map that laid it out.  Quite the transformative event, that grid system. Did you know city blocks are 200 feet long?   Broadway was a path that meandered the length of the island and was left alone, as were the funky streets of Greenwich Village.  Back in the late 1800s the grid thing was not well received by everyone, especially those whose houses were located on parts of the gird that were to be torn down to create the streets. But it was this planning and forethought that made NYC the great place it is.  Albeit, “great” with an internal design and art tension.

    Brand planning is analogous. Smart people have asked me “How do you define a brand plan?”  And I my answer, though somewhat fluid, is generally “a single brand promise, supported by three planks or proofs of that promise.”  In effect, it’s a grid.  What resides in the grid is open for discussion and debate, but everything must fit. The artistry that is brought to life within the grid is what give the brand it’s life, but whether you like the grid word or not the brand plan is an organizing principle for selling more, to more, for more, more times.  The brand plan is not just about messaging either, it guides the product itself. 

    And the tension referred to in the city planning grid analog applies to brand planning.  Sometimes an amazing idea is created inspired by a brand brief that does not fit perfectly.  It may be just a little off kilter. What to do?  Debate it. Study it. Perhaps even build it — and compare it to the plan.  Humans organize. Humans also like the unexpected. So build a brand plan, see and live its beauty, and count the change (double entendre). Too many markets today start by counting the change. Peace!

    Time to Pay the Paper Boy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Don’t shoot me, but I completely agree with The New York Times move to charge for online readership.  To assuage the infrequent online reader, everyone will be allowed 20 free articles per quarter.  At first, this will be a shock to the system. Over time it will slide through with ease. 

    The Times has always been worth paying for.  When Nicholas Kristoff has to drive across a barren desert in Tunisia to get a story on the aftermath of the defense of Benghazi, who do you think pays for the Toyota Land Cruiser rental and gas?

    To Free or Not To Free.

    Good content costs.  There is a price of good goods and the web and venture money haven’t always understood this.  The New York Times reminds us of this capitalistic notion.  Applause-applause. Free has been used in the digital world as a traffic builder. So has community. And social.  And certainly community and society have value.  As do not-for-profit and non-profit ventures.  But the New York Times and, shortly, a good many followers have decided that March 28th is the day to pay the paper boy. And it’s not a moment too soon. The first web domino has fallen. Do I her another?  Peace!

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