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Zeros for Customer Care.

By
Steve Poppe
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There’s a whole side business in marketing devoted to customer care.  And there should be.  Caring for customers is important.  Back in the 90s as telephone and computers were learning to get along, call centers were investing heavily in computer telephony integration.  Software was reading inbound telephone numbers and matching them up with database records, putting customer information at customer service people’s finger tips. It was a great use of technology.  Problem resolution was making great strides. But the equation required putting people in the call center, which was a recurring expense.

Along came something called IVR (interactive voice response) “for credit cards press or say 1.” This invention helped keep headcount down in the call center by providing recorded information via prompt. Enter the web, which allowed the web to provide problem resolution via FAQs and tutorials – again less people. 

I received a call from Chase Bank last night – automated, of course – asking me to call a toll-free number because someone was trying to change my account access code or some such. In a panic I called and for 15 minutes was pushing prompts. McCrazy!  They called me. Luckily, the wifus (pronounced why-fus) was nearby, because I stalled at a prompt number 12 when  asked for my debit card number…which I don’t own.  “They want your ATM card number honey.” Turns out everything was fine and it was false alarm. So they say.

I’m so glad JPMorgan Chase is developing iPhone apps to make people’s banking lives easier.  But do you think they – and everyone else with customers – could employ a universal “I want a human” telephone prompt like 0-0?  That would be progress. Peace!  

Brand Planners and Strategists.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

There are two kinds of marketing strategy people: brand planners and strategists.  Brand planners create a brand architecture comprising brand strategy and support planks that organize the 4 Ps of marketing. Once that architecture or band plan is done, so are the brand planners.  Then it is up to the brand managers to toe the line – to make sure all things marketing align with the plan.  If you want to keep the brand planner around to handle that function, you can, but the key is sharing the plan with all interested managing parties. You rarely find brand planners in marketing jobs, they tend to work at agencies or consultancies.  Frequently they’re involved in new business.

Strategists have the brand planner bone, but tend to spend their days improving the focus or the quality of specific tactical work.  Good strategists mine market insights, behavioral insights, even product insights and present them, usually in deck form, to the makers of things – the creative teams. Say you are strategist at Wieden and Kennedy in NY working on ESPN — right now you might be getting ready for the men’s NCAA basketball tournament.  What are you doing?  Writing creative briefs. By the end of the week you may need two briefs for radio, one for TV and two for an in-arena mobile programs. The paper you make (the strategy) will be judged by the quality of the creative ideas generated.  And with good creative people to work with it’s a fun, nice living.

Brand planners take their orders from the brand.  The brand is their master. Strategists often view the creative product as master. It’s why strategists will allow good work through when it is off plan. Because it is good work. And it will get noticed, and talked about, and may even spike sales.

It is this dual marketing planning reality that drives Naked Communications.  Naked is a brand planning organization. As the marketing business gets more exciting, granular and complicated, the need for more Nakeds will emerge. Bright Sun in the 90s understood this…they were first. Peace.  

Branding: Scorch, drone or look ‘em in the eye.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

It was not long ago that advertising was governed by a scorched earth approach. Fire up a message and spray it in every direction.  If you bought the top TV show, the best read magazine, the leading radio station and newspaper in the 10 largest cities, you reached everyone.

Extending the metaphor, following the scorched earth approach, thanks to the web, we are now more in drone attack mode. We don’t target those not interested in our products and messaging, that would be wasteful, we conduct due diligence then hover over our targets and bomb the shit out of them. Behavioral targeting, search engines, opt-in vehicles all enable drone attack kills.  The problem with drone attacks is that there are often lots of accidental casualties. Drone attacks are not only singularly expensive, they can give a brand a bad name. Drone attacks are preferred to scorched earth because corporate executives feel more in control and can see immediate results.  

The reality is, drone attacks do have kills (sales) though as a marketing tools they dilute our brands. Brands today are defined by campaigns, not brand values.  Ask a consumer about Old Spice and the first thing they’ll say is “that football player” or the “guy who rides the horse” or “guy with the great pecs.”  They rarely play back the human connection to the value of body spray.  

What I love about new media – social media – is that corporate executive can tune in to consumers from street level. That’s where it counts. Scott Monty of Ford is tuned-in where it counts. Sure he’s Mr. Twitter and Mr. Fotchbook, but he hears his audience every day. And Alan Mulally, his boss, and the shareholders benefits. Mr. Monty is on the ground listening, not operating a drone remotely. That’s the way to build a brand. That’s how you build a marketing program. With a brand, a plan, and a policy. Not a campaign dashboard.  Peace!

Bullets vs. Tweets.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Which is more powerful the bullet or the Tweet?  I’m not likely to keep my ass down if someone is firing off a Tweet at me, but one can safely say the Arab Spring and its Gandhi-esque approach to changing the world is way more a function of Tweets than bullets. That’s power.

As we get nearer to UN Resolution 194 on a Palestinian State I’m very nervous about bullets.  Very.  The Arab Spring uprisings have, for the most part, been internecine struggles.  But the Palestinians and the Israelis are anything but.  Leading up to the U.N. vote on the Sept 23rd, the world will be watching.   And this is no platitude or verisimilitude, the world will be watching.  Thanks to Twitter and Twitpics and YouTube. 

If there is bloodshed over the resolution it will be front page news and winners and losers. And certainly lots of spin.  If there is no bloodshed, just civil disobedience and true debate, there will only be winners.  It will provide new steps toward real compromise. 

Gandhi didn’t need Twitter…but had he a smarty and some agile thumbs, independence in India may have taken months. Peace!

A Tale of Two Cities.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Demand generation is the key to marketing.  Say what you will about branding, design, user experience, promotion, engagement, flah, flah, flah..if you can consistently create demand for your product or service, you’ve done your job.

Target created demand for its new Missoni line of low-cost clothing and other things (patio furniture, vases, etc.),getting it right from the get-go.  The products were superb, the promotional mix perfect, the price come hither, but the place – the web – was a disaster.  Like www.pearljam.com during a presale, the Target website went down faster than a Sears radial. Target generated demand but not only didn’t deliver online, they pissed off lots of loyal customers.  They also took a number of first-time Luddite customers and taught them the web is no place for commerce. Black eyes all around. (Nice move letting Amazon hosting services go 3 weeks before sales day.)

In Anaheim, CA yesterday at the Microsoft Build Conference Windows 8 was unveiled during a live and web broadcasted demo. It is a game-changing new operating system. (The product should be called “Tiles” not Windows because it slides and shimmies across the screen but that’s a story for a different post.) It will have mad impact on sales when released but the demo was only 90% there. As is the case with live demos and Microsoft products in “pre-release,” there were a couple of moments of machine freeze.  With 12 back-up machines for quick cut-overs (good boy scouts) there were no real long pauses.  That said, the demo would have better had there been no hiccups at all.

The two cities referred to in the headline are marketing (demand creation) and technology (delivery).  It’s a rarity when marketing hits on all cylinders, but when it does, the tech has to be ready. Tis a far, far greater thing I do… Peace! 

The Logged and Tagged Workforce.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Last winter I worked on an assignment for two of the world’s biggest brands (pat on back); one an ad agency, the other a software company.  And I used the following quote from Larry Ellison to help make my point about the logged and tagged workforce:                                                 

“If you want to go faster and you want a
system that is more reliable, you have to
be willing to spend less.”

Larry Ellison, Oracle, 9/10

Because of technology and the powerful corporate drive to improve shareholder value, the once invaluable knowledge worker is more easily replaced in American business.  Those owners of corporate history, those who understand, live and propagate the culture, those who have seen good times and bad, are no longer a company’s strength. Their work product, however, still lives at these companies. Behind the fire wall. 

Why?  Because if you have a log-in at a company and your work is tagged (searchable); any goober behind the firewall can come along and access it. Your replacement. A freelancer. An intern.

Salesforce.com, perhaps the most successful enterprise software product of our time, is based upon the logged and tagged workplace. And it’s brilliant. It is not only a repository for all company sales data, it is a platform for the “logged in” to work more efficiently.

This is no screed against technology. Or against two-tier pay levels. No poo-pooing of freelance nation here.  This is progress and we have to learn to manipulate it to our advantage. My recently graduated daughter has two jobs. One, at a low-ish annual wage, is for the benefits and experience. The other, at a restaurant, is for beer money. Were she really working the new economy and the logged and tagged workforce, she might have 3 jobs. And make more and in less time.

These are exciting times. We need to see trends like the “logged and tagged workforce” and exploit them before our neighbors.  Have at it people! Peace.

ADD. Nature or Nurture.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Twitch Point Planning was born out of today’s fast twitch media world. Twitch point planning attempts to understand, map and manipulate consumers — moving them closer to a transaction via  the various media types we digital agers touch every day.  Though much fast twitch media is technology-based (tablets, smart phones, geolocation, video, etc.) the actions that support it are behavioral. And it is all attention deficit related. So which came first the behavior or the technology?

According to a new study reported by CBS, SpongeBob Square Pants cartoons, with its fast cuts and jumpy story lines, contribute to attention deficit in kids.  The study analyzed a small sample of kids (60) but the results are still predictable.

And if kids are becoming predisposed to media twitching thanks to cartoons, wait until they grow up. Many children are hyper enough — no need to fuel that fire.  Can someone say “quiet time?”   Will these kids be able to sit down for 3 hours and read text books or in later years snuggle up to a good Kindle? 

I’m all for using twitch point planning to make a few bucks, but long term this may be a bigger issue worth studying.  And fixing.  Or the pharmaceutical companies will be investing in the cartoon business pretty soon. Peace.

 

 

Google To Generate Electricity?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s a wacky thought: As the processing power of computing and mobile devices increases and the price of those devices come down, and as cloud computing reduces the cost of software, it won’t be long before the most expensive part of information technology is electricity. Even now, many huge data centers are being located nearer electric plants to reduce the transmission costs. See where I’m going with this?

As Google gobble, gobble, gobbles its way into our lives in more and more day parts (I love Google, btw), it shouldn’t be long before it invests some of its advertising related war chest in energy generation.  I’ve read where they are investing in alternate energy sources (Offshore wind, was it?) and for that I applaud them.  Google’s mission to put “the world’s information one click away” is a tight mission.  As they expand that mission in all directions, is electricity and the next energy technology (bio-atteries?) on the flight plan? We will see.  Peace.

 

Authenticity. Hacks and Hackers.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was reading a thread in The Brand Strategy Discussion Group on LinkedIn this morning and it touched a nerve.  The post was entitled “How do you define brand authenticity?”

Whenever I’m in a meeting and hear someone go on about “authenticity” or “transparency” it is usually surrounded by a bunch of other marko-babble and I know we’re in for a long hour.

Some people in the discussion group define authenticity as the core values of a brand, suggesting that keeping to those values is what moves brands forward and closer to consumers. With these people I agree. But others talk about being truthful and not manipulating consumers with salesmanship.

The fact that the word authenticity tag clouds (verb) so high in marketing blogs suggests our business is infested with prevaricators. And hawkers.  I don’t necessarily agree. I do believe the business has way too many hacks and not enough hackers. And with the economy opening the flood gates to interns and youthful social media posters, who are all nice people but  probably never raelly sold anything in their lives, it is a cause for concern. Brands are organic things. They are not tofu-like inaminates to be dressed up daily in costume. Peace.

Yahoo. A Portal and Pages Strategy.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Carol Bartz was let go yesterday and not a moment too soon.  A smart lady out of her element – she, a good enterprise tech blocker and tackler – Ms. Bartz in the near term will be replaced by an army of herself.  An army of bankers and financial advisors that will chase the numbers — chase and plot the lines of business.  An army that will evaluate global growth, sales, competitors whiles using Wall Street formulas to predict market capitalization.  Not one Carol, 20 Carols.  And while this is happening the call will go out to high level search firms and tech recruiters.  The board of directors, headed by adman Roy Bostock, will do some trail covering and soul searching and become a story in and of itself. This is how we do-oo it.

But what needs to be done here, as well, is a brand audit and a brand plan. A brand plan is an operating principle guided by consumer needs…delivered in the form of the product experience, marketing and messaging. People think a brand plan is about messaging alone and they are wrong.   

All the financial work the numbers consultants will do is important. The CEO hire is important, but what Yahoo IS and what Yahoo DOES (for consumers) is more important. This is called the Is-Does.  Right now Yahoo IS a Portal. And what it DOES is serve web pages.  Yahoo wants to be an innovative content company, but hasn’t delivered.  If consumers can’t pass the Is-Does test, it’s a fail.  Right now Yahoo’s Is is weak. And the Does doesn’t.

My prediction:  in 12 months there will be a new CEO, a new logo, a new campaign (Yahoo would be smart to keep ad shop Goodby), and no brand plan.  Brand diaspora, brand diffusion is what kills great companies.  Stop the madness. Peace!

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