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    Innovation in Branding?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Innovation is a word I hear in brand planning meetings all the time.  Executives, brand managers and marketing partners love to camp out on it claiming its importance to their brands. If you don’t count technology, two categories come to mind as the primary innovation hounds: healthcare and banks.  In healthcare, marketers and their agents scurry around the hospital looking for innovation under every bed and when found hit publish.  Right next to their awards ad.  Banks are so mired a commodity status (TD Bank’s only claim to fame is the color green) that they create innovation just so they have something to say other than rate and service.   

    News flash!  Innovation is not a brand plank.  It’s lazy, fleeting and often a refundable deposit in the brand bank. Even Apple doesn’t get caught up in the innovation game. Their schtick is design. They innovate but don’t talk about it, showing design and apps.  If you did a tag cloud of every piece of copy Apple has run on TV over the last 15 years, I bet the other “i” word would turn up in only 4 point type.  Lee Clow, you on the tag cloud thing?

    Innovation is the price of doing business —  it’s not a branding value. Coddle it, couch it and canoodle it into your story but don’t try to be the Innovation company.  Peace@\!

    Shit My Brand Planner Says

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    A good brand planner has to love his or her brands. With that love in hand the planner can spend enough time and mental capital to really get close.  Past the label. Past the brand manager’s bias.   That means seeing a brands warts. Knowing the warts and working around them are the goal.  Consumers at their very core love patterns and predictability, but they also like new and optimism.  Have you ever tasted lettuce grown in your own garden?  It tastes better, no?  That because you want it to taste better. Optimism.

    In the advertising business there are a lot of people who live on snark.  Creatives don’t like clients who don’t buy their work.  Managers don’t like people who can’t make decisions or won’t follow directions. No one likes those who are focused on the broken not the fix.  Have you ever read the comments following an Adweek story?  There is so much envy and loathing it’s scary.  

    But brand planners have a nice job. A Zen job. To do it well  they need to like consumers  — to watch and listen. To find the love.  But don’t advertising it.  Are you listening Blackberry and Subaru.  Peace!

    Pepsi Earnings and Pepsi Refresh

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Here I go again about Pepsi Refresh.  Broken record,  I know. And please don’t think me a geeze for seemingly dis’ing media socialists and their heartfelt efforts to do good’s work on behalf of brands. (Liberal I am.)  But count the likes and clicks and friends and authenticity and opacity and, and, and in the soda category this week and two numbers stick out: Coke’s North American volume is up 3% and Pepsi’s is up 1%.  2 percentage points in market research may not seem like a lot, but in a billion dollar consumer business that some serious.  Especially in the much attacked sugar water marekt. Right Michelle?

    Coke’s earning, announced this week, were kicking on all cylinders. First time in a long time. And Pepsi’s were down, overall.  No wonder Pepsi chief Indra K. Nooyi took a couple on the chin in the analysts call.   To be read in a whining voice “Commodity prices, really killed us. Considering the economy we did gre- ate.”  Well watch Mad Men.  Commodity prices have always been a problem for which one must be prepared.  Playing with pop marketing tactics, not well integrated into your core value prop or linked to an ersatz brand plank, do not a great earnings report make.  Head down. Sell soda. Peace!

    Fiat Chrysler Omelette.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Chicken or egg?  What comes first, consumer demand or product building intended to create demand?  Most media socialists would say the former.  I favor the latter.  Case in point: For as long as I’ve been blogging I’ve railed about the American car business, its focus on gas guzzlers and how that focus has driven Detroit into the ground. It took a national melt down and a global economic recession for De-twah to find the new smaller car path.

    Chrysler has a neat new European-sized car (beep beep) called the Fiat 500 which will be in the States soon. You can see it driven by a professional driver on Owen Mack’s Cobrandit.com site. Owen is a whazoo videographer, by the way.  Fiat has been building this type of car for years. Small, economical and with a more reasonable environmental footprint.  Short of the VW Beetle and Mini Cooper few companies in the states made an effort to play in this market space.  It was a mondo opportunity zone.

    Customers weren’t demanding the cars, but automobile makers should have been creating that demand. They didn’t like the margins. The oil companies bought them too many dinners. The designs were funky.  May all three.  What I do know is this — had a car company gone all egg and seen beyond the dashboard, they would have known small cars were going to be a growth market.  That’s why I like the Chrysler-Fiat combination.  Fiat will help Chrysler step up to this current market need.  A few years too late, but it will happen and off we go. Egg it up. Peace!

    Only as Good as Your Next Refresh.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     

    In the reporting today following the AOL purchase of Huffington Post there were two points of note worth highlighting.  One suggests that since AOL purchased TechCrunch traffic to the TechCrunch site has increased 30%.  I’m not sure if that as a good or bad thing.  Was the reader gene pool slighting diminished by that add?  I suspect so.  But if TC holds to its editorial mission, that growth may find its proper level.

    Secondly, Tim Armstrong was quoted as saying “We are essentially two years away from a growth business on the Internet.”  Hello? It’s the Inter-neck.  It’s a content strategy.  In the content business you are only as good as your next refresh.  I understand about building a mission and infrastructure and team and all that, but if Egypt can change a country in three weeks, I think AOL with some imaginative thinking and mad content posting can add some readers in less than 2 years.  BTW, did anyone read the AOL memo from Mr. Armstrong circulated on the web about his plan to turn the business around?   Maybe that’s why he said 2 years.  Dash that plan and start dialing up the original, thoughtful and creative content. (Oh, and Patch isn’t it.) Peace it up!

    Smiles at AOL.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post 8 hours ago was very smart.  I Googled my blog  (whatstheidea+AOL) to see if I predicted said purchase but did not. Maybe I should use Bing.  (Full disclosure, client. Hee hee.)  Anyway, if AOL’s strategy is to provide the best content on the web, this is a great move.  And I loved Arianna Huffington’s quote in the paper paper — her first as head of the new media property group — that she won’t let her politics get in the way of her job.  Yeah right. That’s what makes the Huff Post great.  She can put on her transformer hat when overseeing other media properties, but don’t change a thing on the Huff Post. Ima (pronounced eye-mah) have to start reading I guess.

    And, oh, by the way, this story was not on the front page of the NY Times business section, it was on the front page.  Just under the mast head.  Geezer for important.

    Tim Armstrong articulated the strategy to be a content leader… and he is delivering.  Yahoo articulated the same strategy and is not. Nice move AOL. Nice move.  Even Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) is probably smiling.  Peace!

    Apple. An opt-in monopoly?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Apple has decided that ebook publishers and retailers, whose books make their way onto Apple devices, must allow the books to be purchased via Apple.  If you are an iPazzle owner and go to Amazon to buy “The Help” there must also be a link to purchase that book from iTunes/Store as well.  Apple will earn 30%.   Sony an ebook retailer has already balked at this dictate.

    Apple is not saying you have to buy from them, just that they deserve equal access.  Seems fair enough.  Apple Fanboys and girls may wish to give their hard-earned to their favorite brand, as is their right, but where will this taking a cut of the content stop?  Will Apple at some point want a penny for every phone call that lands on an iPhone?  And how would you sell that to your custies? “It goes to R&D to help design better products?” Might work.

    Apple, already an opt-in monopoly of almost cult-like dimension, is creating a platform (read Steve Lohr’s article in The New York Times) that stretches beyond hardware and software and into that amorphous area of services.  They had better be a bit careful though. Opt-in is one thing…dictatorship quite another.  Peace!

    New Facebook Ad Program :-(

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The Like button on Facebook is an opt-in endorsement. It was a good idea for these fast-twitch social media times.  It was also a way for Facebook to serve smarter ads without looking like privacy hacks (both meanings).  But that monetization things is getting in the way again, and it coming to Facebook in the form a something called “sponsored stories.”  I don’t know all the nuances of the advertising offering but I do know that if you “like” something or “check-in” somewhere, Facebook is putting your face on a product endorsement.

    Can you say slippery slope?

    This one, IMHO, will have a shelf life of about 2 months.  I don’t see it working and can imagine quite a backlash.  Both for FB and the sponsoring advertisers.  Time will tell, but this one doesn’t feel right. The influentials will have field day with this.  And blame in on the ad guys. Peace!

    Pepsi Give Away.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    I wrote recently about Pepsi’s 2010 decision to not run Super Bowl ads in favor the “Pepsi Refresh” project — a corporate effort to take the $20 million it usually spends and fund social projects like new playgrounds, high school band uniforms, etc.  The money would be distributed via a social media circus taking place on Facebook and Twitter.  

    Apparently there were over 77 million votes registered in the ether, 120,000 idea submissions and 400 winners to date. The only losers seem to be TBWA/Chiat Day who helped come up with the dog of an idea and Pepsi itself, who saw sales drop 6% in a category that slipped 4.3%.  That’s a delta of 1.7% for those who are counting.    

    “True that” I’m all about companies doing go.  But in order to do good, one must be a thriving brand.  Pepsi is not. Colorful, yes. Stylish, yes.  Happy and friendly, dittos. It’s not even holding its own in a tough sugar water market.

    Pepsi Refresh was a bold step. Stealing refresh from Coke was an interesting notion. But marketing is about selling. Head of Pepsi Digital, Shiv Singh, says the project was “an investment to build brand awareness and cultivate a long term relationship with consumers. It was designed to drive brand health.”  Let’s get back to brand strategy Pepsi. That’s where health is…not in media strategy. Peace!

    The Internet’s Role in Evolution

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I read in the paper paper today of a hypotheses on the ascent of man.  It suggested modern humans were able to leave the African continent and move to Asia —  getting past those pesky Neanderthals –due to…

    “the emergence of some social or behavioral advantage — like the perfection of the faculty for language” (source: NYT 1/28/11)

    If you think about it, it’s quite logical.  If spoken language (beyond signing and guttural grunts) might be responsible for the “out of Africa” movement and huge evolutionary change, then what might the Internet bring in terms of geopolitical evolution?  A global language, a global governance, peace in the Middle East?  I’m not talking tomorrow, I’m thinking 1,000 – 10,000 years out.

    Help me here, comment with your thoughts? Peace!

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