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Microsoft Tiles

By
Steve Poppe
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The more I see and hear about the Windows 8 Operating System by Microsoft, the more I realize Steven Sinofsky should have named it “Tiles.”   Language is a funny thing.  Market research is great, ideation is great but user ballast is greater.  We don’t really have the foresight sometimes to see the words the general population will adopt surrounding a product, so we try to force language on them.  But organic user language, the linguists will tell you, trumps marketing.

I believe in this name so completely, I predict it will be adopted by Microsoft and replace Windows as perhaps the most known brand names in technology. (And BTW, Stop Brand Diaspora!)

Short post. Big claim. Peace.

The R Word.

By
Steve Poppe
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Windshield time is a great way to learn from the people who make sales happen — to travel with sales people and see how they sell and customers buy.  Everyone in a company would benefit from exposure to this type of “belly to belly” selling.

I’ve used the windshield time over much of my career: with light bulb manufacturers, telephone companies, hardware and healthcare providers. Invariably, when you ask sales people what makes them great or what makes the company great they all agree on one thing:  It’s about relationships. Okay, maybe price too…but relationships are most talked about.

If 50% of sales energy is invested in relationships, I say we are leaving an awful lot of product sell on the table. I’m not saying relationships aren’t important: “Hey, want to go to a Knick game?” I’m saying relationships are the price of business.  Being able to communicate, be friendly, and provide empathy (the basis of relationship-building) is not a sales strategy. 

A sales rep who only gives good lunch is not the SME (subject matter expert) I want to have a business-building relationship with. Again, I’m not saying a sales person cannot be a friend. I’m saying relationships are not brand building blocks – the are the air surrounding those building blocks.  When brand planning, you must push past relationship speak. Peace! 

Clint, Chrysler and Sales.

By
Steve Poppe
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Full disclosure: I’m an ad-rat and therefore not your average Super Bowl commercial watcher. Also a liberal, I’m a fan of lifting up the bottom and tamping down the top.

Watching the ads during the game the NY Jets did not play on Sunday, I was taken aback by the black and white Chrysler ad.  Though the sound wasn’t great because of all the chatter in the room, I immediately knew it was part two of Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden +Kennedy.  Not sure if the music bed was similar to last year’s brilliant Eminem spot or what it was but I could tell it was a Chrysler spot way before the logo cameup.

I was ready to enjoy it, but sadly, didn’t.  It felt derivative.

Perhaps not the uber target for the ad, though certainly closer in age to Clint than Marshall, I felt the crusty, just-under-the-skin angry tone (a Clint specialty) lacked the energy and visceral side of last year’s heroic spot.  I’m sure the script was good, the film and editing certainly were, but it didn’t make me want to jump up and buy a Chrysler. Or move to Detroit. Or buy American everything the way the original ad did.

Karl Rove over the weekend said the ad was a big pay-back to president Obama for the government bail-out of Chrysler. I doubt there was any agenda, yet if there was  (even a hint) the best payback would have been to move some cars.  And though this year’s spot was probably better than 90% of the other pap, I’m not sure as many cars will be driving off the lots this month as were last February. Peace!

What is the plural of “new”?

By
Steve Poppe
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I saw Jonah Peretti speak at a social media conference a year ago and though I had heard of BuzzFeed was not aware it was his baby. He co-founded the Huff Post, by the way. Mr. Peretti is a didge native and gets the whole Poster Vs. Paster thing.  His content is king school is the approach I believe Yahoo and AOL need to jump their sites forward.  AOL bought some serious properties to make me think they were on the right path, but fumbled them and weren’t able to jump on the ball.   Yahoo didn’t even try, it seemed.

Mr. Peretti has two marvelous quotes in today’s New York Times – quotes that media properties in the digital world should heed:

“There is nothing more viral than news that no one else has.”  

And “News is the killer app and does not depend on search optimization.”

The common denominator here is news.  Not everything is news. That’s why there is SEO. But as we hunt and peck our way to site traffic gains, we need to think about news. And what is new. 

Today in marketing and advertising, 90% of everything is old. Perhaps served up with a new color, a new flavor, a new voice – but  old it is.  As Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg infuse our digital worlds with more and more marketing and crowd noise, as the buzz gets louder as something akin to a scene out of The Hunger Games, it would be smart for marketers to be chase new. Think new. And sell new. Peace.

Brand planning. Soft claim, hard proof.

By
Steve Poppe
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The best definition for brand planning I’ve come up with is “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”

The way I organized a brand plan is with one claim and three proof planks. The support or proof planks must be connected and prop up the claim.  Interestingly, the support planks don’t have to be in harmony…and often aren’t.  For instance, if one plank is “brilliantly engineered” and another is “competitively priced” those two things are often at odds. But that’s a different story.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the brand claim or promise, as some call it, needs to be soft.  When soft it can cover a lot of ground — meaning nuanced things to different people. A good soft claim is friendly, strong and conveys approachable meaning.  Product cheer leading is not appropriate, but cheer leading may be. A good soft claim is like an emollient.  It should offer a bit of whimsy.

Proof, on the other hand, must be hard.  Oak hard. Because these are the things that drive product development, company behavior and consumer perception. They are the reasons to believe the claim. They are hard because when you conceive and array demonstrations beneath each proof plank there should be no room for interpretation. They are either “on plan” or “off.”

One soft claim, three hard proofs.  This is how we do–oo it.  Peace!

 

Leave custies asking for more.

By
Steve Poppe
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There was a time not long ago when the only people who could sit in a chair all day with eyes glued to a monitor were video game players. Not any more.  TV show creators and licensors have found that if they sell box sets of TV shows, by season, there is a big market. 

I know — my daughter has been watching “Modern Family” for weekends.  Seasons of “24,” “The Sopranos.” “Deadwood” and “Breaking Bad” are making the rounds and being consumed in in fairly short timeframes across the country. People are binging.

Selling these box sets makes near-term economic sense but does not create the kind of traction serialized, once a week viewership does.  As a very young ‘un, strawberry shortcake was my favorite confection.  Until one was left in the refrigerator and I had my way with it. All of it.

Box sets kill water cooler time. They create burn-out. And even expose warts. I really want to buy the box set of Showtimne’s “Homeland” but will wait until I can have it meted out in smaller gulps.  Marketers should always leave custies asking for more. Peace!

Cook and the Apple Overdog.

By
Steve Poppe
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Over the last two weeks I’ve read some great stories on Apple and its production situation in China.  The writers of the stories, both appearing in the New York Times, are certainly not Apple haters, but their point of view appears set.  The loss of American jobs is not a good thing but is justified by the low cost of production in China.  Factory workers there make about $17 a day. 

Anyone who reads the story, including references to 4 deaths and 77 injuries, might come away pondering avarice, patriotism, the quality of the American education system, population growth.  This is wonderful reporting and might, were Charles Dickens alive, make for a fascinating novel.  Do I smell a Pulitzer?  Mabes.

But here’s the real deal.  People want iPhones and iPazzles. The way to make them available is to offer them at a low price.  Apple wouldn’t have sold 200 million iPhones if they had cost $1,000 a piece. So this was just good business. It is a flat world.  Chinese production is our new reality.  African production will be our next reality. Then Antarctica.

We have pocketbooks and brains.   We can boycott Apple or buy Apple.  Americans love an underdog and we tire easily of the Overdog.  Apple, for decades, was the underdog – not anymore. Tom Cook’s job is going to be a hell of a lot harder than Steve Jobs.  Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t what? Peace!

The price/convenience trade-off.

By
Steve Poppe
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I’m a man. Here’s how I shop: I go to a store, walk around, talk to a salesperson, maybe another shopper and I buy.  If the store doesn’t have what I want, I either go home or visit another store.  More often than not, it’s a one store and buy experience.  Price is important, but usually only when comparing choices in the store.  Convenience.

As technology wends its way more and more into the shopping process and the best price on a skew (product number) is only a click away, (#bestpricesamsungTV) many of the shopping choices we make will be made for us. And price variation will be minimized.

There will be Amazon for eshoppers and for those who want instant gratification there will be SuperRetailStoreCo or something.  Variability will be minimized in marketing. All that will be left, variability-wise, will be the brands. But marketers who spend too much on branding, will have reduced margins and will likely fall off.  Will it be a brand new marketing world in 2050?  Oh yeah. Should be exciting. Peace!

The form… it is a changing.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

When is a newspaper article finished?  Well, maybe never.  I’m was reading today about Apple’s new educational releases, e.g., iBooks 2, iBooks Author, iTunes U, in The NY Times paper paper and wanted to save the article to my OneNote document.  (Not many people know about Microsoft OneNote — but should.)  Anyway, in order to save the article I went to the NYTimes.com and while lighting up the URL noticed the article, first published at 10 A.M., had been updated at  9:02 last night.  Now that update may have made the paper paper but it may not. So why read the paper paper which may have old, perhaps, less than accurate news? The reason is the form factor.

When the accuracy of the content in news reporting out-weights the form factor (user interface, e.g. paper vs. screen, vs. Siri) the war will really be over.   

But back to the first question. When is a newspaper article finished?  Will publishers be interested in changing stories in a year because they know it to have inaccurate info?  Will it be legal to do so? If it’s on the web and accessible, shouldn’t it be the truth?  Now there are some more things to nosh on.  Peace!

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