If there’s a document more frustrating to marketers than a marketing plan, I haven’t seen it. Invariably someone devotes an entire decade to writing a single year’s marketing plan, pours a vial of his blood into the ink like KISS did with its comic books, wraps himself in a nice warm iron maiden and ensconces himself in a project-manager-infested garret, and produces a veritable Great Gatsby of marketing plans that is promptly vilified and ignored by turns, and spends the rest of its days sopping up coffee stains on a few wayward VPs’ desks.
It’s not supposed to be that way.
Marketing plans are not supposed to be DOA. They’re meant to be breathing, vital documents, like Colbie Caillat songs with pie charts. The problem is that everyone has the wrong set of expectations for marketing plans.
I know. I have written marketing plans that read like fiction (don’t say it) and marketing plans that read like schematics, and it really doesn’t matter. People read the wrong things into them and get the wrong things out of them, and frankly, I don’t know how to prevent that from happening. In a world where everyone thinks they’re a marketer, everyone has an idea of what should be in a marketing plan. Invariably, that boils down to: their stuff. And that is not what a marketing plan is there for.
So let me give my few ground rules of marketing plans, both for the people creating the plans and the people consuming them. The people who use them to sop up coffee messes may carry on.
First, for the creators of marketing plans: Stop using the marketing plan to justify your existence.
There are a lot of insecure marketers out there, people who make the lead character in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series look like Terrell Owens. And they view the marketing plan as their manifesto for empire-building, or empire-maintaining, or empire-not-shrinking-too-much. If they read this they’ll see why we need a $5 million budget, and five new hires, and iPads all around, they think, and she’ll have to marry me then! (Whoops; got my marketing-plan fantasies mixed up with my adolescent fantasies involving Traci Ludvik.) But the readers want none of that, especially in a marketing plan. They know why you exist. They’re not quite as dumb as you think in that regard. They want to know where you’ve been, where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there. Do that well enough and you’ll get your booty.
Furthermore, I’m sorry, but if you need any document to justify your existence you’re not doing your job properly. And if your document of choice is the marketing plan, you’re doubly inept.
Second, also for the creators of marketing plans: I don’t have a foolproof formula for creating a marketing plan; marketing-plan time is the season of the witch in most marketing cycles, when all the fools come out to dance beneath the full moon and eat your Life Savers. However, I do have a recipe for a virtuous marketing plan. It may not get you that unicorn, but it will accomplish its job without wasting too much of anyone’s time, leaving you that much more time to properly fashion your unicorn wishes.
The recipe starts by revisiting the brand. Spend a page – no more – and state what the brand is made of, what it does, and how you define it. If you accept the idea that marketing exists to support the brand, this is the only logical way to begin.
Next, outline what you’ve done over the year to support the brand. If you’ve defined the brand well and done your homework, your brand-building efforts should flow logically. State how much you spent in general terms; don’t break it down to the penny. If you feel that’s absolutely necessary, stick it in an appendix.
You may have to break down this section by specific brand attributes. For instance, if you’re in the business of selling educational software and your key brand attributes are product, pricing and service, you’ll probably have to spend time and space discussing how you supported product, promoted pricing and celebrated service. That’s okay, but don’t get carried away.
Just as everything you do in marketing has to support the brand and its key attributes, everything you do in the marketing plan has to support the brand and its attributes. Lose track of the brand and you’re a small boy’s idea of a marketing director, doing stuff simply because it’s cool.
The next section needs to deal with the effectiveness of your efforts. Here’s where you add the measurements – but not too many. Remember, effectiveness has to be measured in context, and in support of the brands and their attributes. The measures of choice are not necessarily the number of click-throughs, the number of awards your ads win, the new places you found to spend money, or the attitudes of core audiences towards your call-center staff.
Many columns ago I defined the key measurements as your budget, your sales goal and your actual sales. I’ll stand by that. I’ll add that many of the best customer-service attributes need to be measured qualitatively, maybe even anecdotally, and Facebook and Twitter can help. But those measurements, such as they are, exist to help explain sales. If you have numbers and illustrations that aren’t directly related to your budget, your sales goal or your actual sales, get them out of there.
And remember once again to place sales in the context of supporting your brand. Sales are the only relevant measure of brand support, but they have to be defined that way in your marketing plan. Otherwise they’re just, you know, sales.
The third section builds off the first two and a half. Because the brand is x, and we did y to support it with results z, next year we’re going to do a, b, c, and d. It has to be that clear and simple. I have been accused of being a sort of Herman Cain of marketing, simplifying complex issues down to the point of incoherence, but I think I’m okay here.
Say what you’re going to do to support the brand based on what you’ve done to support the brand. Throw in sales goals for next year if you’ve got ‘em. This takes marketing out of the we’ll-make-it-up-as-we-go-along paradigm that I love nearly as much as I realize its non-sustainability. It's the only logical approach, and it also makes it loads easier to justify a reasonable budget.
The last necessary component of a marketing plan is the most overlooked, and in some ways the most important. Say what you’re going to do to support the brand the year after next, and the year after that, and the year after the year after that.
I know, I know. I can hear the howls from here. But tell the truth: By doing that, doesn’t the marketing plan seem more like a plan, a real-life process from getting from A to B over time?
Think if other areas of the company only thought in one-year chunks. Suppose your company makes snow-throwers. Engineering might say, “Well, we’re going to make snow plows this year,” one year and, “Oh, we’re going to make snowmobiles,” the next. Packaging might wrap them in bubble wrap one year and the next forget they ever wrapped anything in bubble wrap and put the whole shebang in a packing crate. Or human resources might raise the premiums for the health plan and lower the 401(k) contribution one year, and raise the 401(k) contribution and lower the premiums the next. Only Marketing seems to want to proceed like David Byrne in a bad digital transfer of Stop Making Sense.
I can’t guarantee this recipe for a marketing plan will work, assuming that any marketing plan can truly work. It will cut most of the fuss, feathers, positioning, and politicking, and if you’re as sick as I am of that junk messing with good marketing, then it’s worth a try.
Happy Marketing-Planning. And lay off the turkey. You may be one someday.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Comedy Tomorrow, Stragedy Tonight
A friend of mine in New York got a well-deserved new job about two weeks ago, and I called him up the other day to ask how things were going.
"Good," he said. "But I'm not sure about my boss."
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad moon rising (or for those of you with marginal hearing, bathroom on the right).
"What's up?" I said.
"I don't think he has a handle on strategy and tactics," he answered. "Everything he thinks is strategy is tactics, and everything he thinks is tactics – well, that's tactics too. He's got a billion ways to get things done but no idea where he's come from and where he's going."
Heard it. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that refrain I'd have enough for a peppermint latte at McDonald's, but only for a limited time.
One of the major ailments afflicting marketing directors is their embrace of the "director" at the expense of "marketing." Along with the secret handshake and the now-obligatory iPad some marketing directors are presented with a game of Risk on their first day, one of the fancy ones that looks like your dog-eared copy of New Mexico Statutes, 1956, only this game has “design” and “point-of-sale” and “brand management” and “corporate communications” and “marketing research” instead of Europe and Asia and the rest of the Risk worlds to conquer.
Once presented with this game, the average marketing director does about what you’d expect of it (marketing directors, like so many other people in marketing, being not awfully far down the road out of childhood): She plays with it the game all the time, like a steampunk version of Angry Birds, and draws boxes and concocts spreadsheets detailing utilization of resources – her resources, because they are her small plastic pieces – all to a near-total neglect of the actual objectives of marketing direction, which is to – say it with me – direct marketing. And that means furthering the direction of the overarching brand – corporate image, mission statement, divisional imperative, what have you – through specific substrategies, including individual brand management and marketing, and then executing those specific substrategies using a variety of tactics.
It's nothing more than the old targeted application of common sense, but in the service of an overarching, all-encompassing strategy. As the master marketer Thomas Carlyle called it, “On earth, the broken arcs; in heaven the perfect sphere.” On the ground you may only see a piece of the marketing strategy, but you see the whole thing when you get far enough off the ground. The trick is to shed the lead boots of marketing administration and ascend to the realms of true marketing direction.
It’s not easy. A marketing director has to know the big picture before she can tackle any of the little pictures, but when she’s thrust into the position what does she see? A whole bunch of little pictures with their mouths open, waiting for her to regurgitate dinner. The actual rising-above requires nothing more strenuous than thinking, but the thinking requires time, and there never seems to be any time whatsoever – especially when she could be playing Angry Birds. Or Risk.
However, without that breath to ascend and grasp the larger picture, you are sentenced to forever matriculate at the Firesign Theater School of Marketing, whose motto is, “How can you be two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?” I know I’ve said in the past that a good marketer can be dropped into a metaphorical desert and market her way out of it (see Menard, D. L., “Wherever You Are, There You Is”), but you need a compass to get out of that particular nowhere, and that compass is called having the overall brand strategy ensconced firmly in your noggin, and letting your direction – your way out – flow from there.
Without that, it’s like you’re going on a trip, and you know you’re taking a Prius because it gets 60 MPG highway and you really like the new ad jingle, and you’re riding on Goodyear Assurance TripleTreds because it might snow, and you’re going to take I-94 for a stretch because it’s really straight and the trucks stay away during the week, and then turn off on Highway 29 because it’s pretty, and stay at a Holiday Inn Express because you like the breakfast, and drive six hours before letting someone else drive six hours, and stop every four hours for gas and .. well, you know, and buy exactly 1.65 roller dogs during the trip – all without knowing where you came from and where you’re going.
Choosing a road may seem like a strategy, but it’s a tactic. Knowing that you have to get from Tehachapi to Tonopah is a strategy. Once you know that, everything else is just execution and details.
There’s no excuse for a marketing director – or anyone in marketing, really – not knowing overall brand direction. It tells you what to do -- down to the nth detail, if you let it.
Look at it this way: Do you go off blithely in other facets of your life and hope you wind up somewhere appropriate? When you drive to the grocery store do you drive west hoping to find a grocery store because you like driving west, or do you drive to the grocery store? When you shave your face or your legs do you just start shaving anywhere, figuring you’ll get to the right spot in time? Completely daft, yet I can’t count the marketers who just go gaily marketing away without knowing where the merry pharalope they’re going, until they wind up in some salt marsh and have to call on sales or the CFO or someone to bail them out.
If the marketing director is responsible for overall brand identity, it's her responsibility to communicate it to --and beyond that, inculcate it in -- her department and all regions and realms that her scepter touches, including the mail room. If the person responsible for overall brand identity resides above the marketing director but south of the mail room, it's again the director's obligation to snatch that identity and inculcate merrily once more.
The real trouble starts when the neither the marketing director nor anyone at any of the layers above is thinking big brand thoughts. These cases call for a little subversive action.
Someone has to think higher brand thoughts, and if the marketing director is too tied up in her game of Risk and her spreadsheet with the stages and gates done up in carmine and chartreuse to do it and a sub-direction person has to pick up the standard, then they have to carry it with all the Salvation Army tambourine-beater spirit they have in their soul. If that's you, and you have to shout it from the housetops, shout and keep shouting. If it gets you in trouble with the boss, keep shouting, If it costs you your job ... it won't cost you your job. At some point short of that the marketing director will hear all the commotion and realize she'd better get behind this or be ready to do some 'splainin', Lucy.
What happens sometimes is that no one has a brand idea. Maybe a brand has been around forever and is operating in a sort of self-perpetuating catatonia, like George Will, or is functioning with a giant inflatable marketing director, like the autopilot in Airplane! but with prettier spreadsheets. Maybe a brand has been mandated from above to plug a perceived hole and is just commencing on a brutish life of insufficient sales and insufferable bickering about positioning. Maybe the keeper of the brand has moved on. It's not wrong to try to fill a total brand-identity vacuum, but it can't be done half-heartedly, or by substituting short-term tactical thinking for the strategy that's needed.
Marketing is too important to be wasted on things that shouldn't be marketed, or sent off on summer-camp branding exercises that fade as soon as fall rolls around. The only way to maximize marketing's impact is to have a clear idea of what needs to be marketed in the first place. Is that so hard? Apparently it is.
"Good," he said. "But I'm not sure about my boss."
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad moon rising (or for those of you with marginal hearing, bathroom on the right).
"What's up?" I said.
"I don't think he has a handle on strategy and tactics," he answered. "Everything he thinks is strategy is tactics, and everything he thinks is tactics – well, that's tactics too. He's got a billion ways to get things done but no idea where he's come from and where he's going."
Heard it. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that refrain I'd have enough for a peppermint latte at McDonald's, but only for a limited time.
One of the major ailments afflicting marketing directors is their embrace of the "director" at the expense of "marketing." Along with the secret handshake and the now-obligatory iPad some marketing directors are presented with a game of Risk on their first day, one of the fancy ones that looks like your dog-eared copy of New Mexico Statutes, 1956, only this game has “design” and “point-of-sale” and “brand management” and “corporate communications” and “marketing research” instead of Europe and Asia and the rest of the Risk worlds to conquer.
Once presented with this game, the average marketing director does about what you’d expect of it (marketing directors, like so many other people in marketing, being not awfully far down the road out of childhood): She plays with it the game all the time, like a steampunk version of Angry Birds, and draws boxes and concocts spreadsheets detailing utilization of resources – her resources, because they are her small plastic pieces – all to a near-total neglect of the actual objectives of marketing direction, which is to – say it with me – direct marketing. And that means furthering the direction of the overarching brand – corporate image, mission statement, divisional imperative, what have you – through specific substrategies, including individual brand management and marketing, and then executing those specific substrategies using a variety of tactics.
It's nothing more than the old targeted application of common sense, but in the service of an overarching, all-encompassing strategy. As the master marketer Thomas Carlyle called it, “On earth, the broken arcs; in heaven the perfect sphere.” On the ground you may only see a piece of the marketing strategy, but you see the whole thing when you get far enough off the ground. The trick is to shed the lead boots of marketing administration and ascend to the realms of true marketing direction.
It’s not easy. A marketing director has to know the big picture before she can tackle any of the little pictures, but when she’s thrust into the position what does she see? A whole bunch of little pictures with their mouths open, waiting for her to regurgitate dinner. The actual rising-above requires nothing more strenuous than thinking, but the thinking requires time, and there never seems to be any time whatsoever – especially when she could be playing Angry Birds. Or Risk.
However, without that breath to ascend and grasp the larger picture, you are sentenced to forever matriculate at the Firesign Theater School of Marketing, whose motto is, “How can you be two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?” I know I’ve said in the past that a good marketer can be dropped into a metaphorical desert and market her way out of it (see Menard, D. L., “Wherever You Are, There You Is”), but you need a compass to get out of that particular nowhere, and that compass is called having the overall brand strategy ensconced firmly in your noggin, and letting your direction – your way out – flow from there.
Without that, it’s like you’re going on a trip, and you know you’re taking a Prius because it gets 60 MPG highway and you really like the new ad jingle, and you’re riding on Goodyear Assurance TripleTreds because it might snow, and you’re going to take I-94 for a stretch because it’s really straight and the trucks stay away during the week, and then turn off on Highway 29 because it’s pretty, and stay at a Holiday Inn Express because you like the breakfast, and drive six hours before letting someone else drive six hours, and stop every four hours for gas and .. well, you know, and buy exactly 1.65 roller dogs during the trip – all without knowing where you came from and where you’re going.
Choosing a road may seem like a strategy, but it’s a tactic. Knowing that you have to get from Tehachapi to Tonopah is a strategy. Once you know that, everything else is just execution and details.
There’s no excuse for a marketing director – or anyone in marketing, really – not knowing overall brand direction. It tells you what to do -- down to the nth detail, if you let it.
Look at it this way: Do you go off blithely in other facets of your life and hope you wind up somewhere appropriate? When you drive to the grocery store do you drive west hoping to find a grocery store because you like driving west, or do you drive to the grocery store? When you shave your face or your legs do you just start shaving anywhere, figuring you’ll get to the right spot in time? Completely daft, yet I can’t count the marketers who just go gaily marketing away without knowing where the merry pharalope they’re going, until they wind up in some salt marsh and have to call on sales or the CFO or someone to bail them out.
If the marketing director is responsible for overall brand identity, it's her responsibility to communicate it to --and beyond that, inculcate it in -- her department and all regions and realms that her scepter touches, including the mail room. If the person responsible for overall brand identity resides above the marketing director but south of the mail room, it's again the director's obligation to snatch that identity and inculcate merrily once more.
The real trouble starts when the neither the marketing director nor anyone at any of the layers above is thinking big brand thoughts. These cases call for a little subversive action.
Someone has to think higher brand thoughts, and if the marketing director is too tied up in her game of Risk and her spreadsheet with the stages and gates done up in carmine and chartreuse to do it and a sub-direction person has to pick up the standard, then they have to carry it with all the Salvation Army tambourine-beater spirit they have in their soul. If that's you, and you have to shout it from the housetops, shout and keep shouting. If it gets you in trouble with the boss, keep shouting, If it costs you your job ... it won't cost you your job. At some point short of that the marketing director will hear all the commotion and realize she'd better get behind this or be ready to do some 'splainin', Lucy.
What happens sometimes is that no one has a brand idea. Maybe a brand has been around forever and is operating in a sort of self-perpetuating catatonia, like George Will, or is functioning with a giant inflatable marketing director, like the autopilot in Airplane! but with prettier spreadsheets. Maybe a brand has been mandated from above to plug a perceived hole and is just commencing on a brutish life of insufficient sales and insufferable bickering about positioning. Maybe the keeper of the brand has moved on. It's not wrong to try to fill a total brand-identity vacuum, but it can't be done half-heartedly, or by substituting short-term tactical thinking for the strategy that's needed.
Marketing is too important to be wasted on things that shouldn't be marketed, or sent off on summer-camp branding exercises that fade as soon as fall rolls around. The only way to maximize marketing's impact is to have a clear idea of what needs to be marketed in the first place. Is that so hard? Apparently it is.
Monday, September 12, 2011
If You Love Somebody, Let Them Spend Money
With great power comes great responsibility, and with great responsibility comes a nail-chomping manager who wants to take it away from you.
It’s Das Kapital all over again, with Steve Carrell as Kap. The rank-and-file push for more unencumbered control over media and message and execution and budget, and managers hang onto those things like Cary Grant clinging to Lincoln’s nose in North By Northwest, claiming they’re vital to planning and predicting and managing and wheedling and cajoling and do all those things managers pinky-swear is in the job description if you pour lemon juice on it and hold it up to a strong light.
I totally get where managers are coming from. I would rather give up Diet Mountain Dew or negotiate peace between David Stern and the Tall People than willingly relinquish responsibility and control of the things I manage, especially if they contain even a molecule of cool.
“If you love somebody, set them free,” Sting sang, but Mr. Sumner never had to ride herd on a half-dozen caffeinated creatives, grooving to The Apples in Stereo and trying to build their own little Fort Sumter north-northeast of the salty-snacks machine.
It got so bad for one of my manager friends that she said to me, “This is one of the most talented marketing staffs I have ever known, but it’s also one of the most exasperating. They think they’re all experts at their stuff.”
And with that, my pendulum swings firmly to the proletariat. Of course they’re experts. That’s why you hired them. You wanted them because they’re good at what they do. You wouldn’t want bad people in those positions, would you? In fact, would you even want good people who don’t think they’re good?
You wanted good people and got them. You wanted good people who know they’re good, and got them. You must give them latitude. Unless you have the masochism factor of a cartoon rodent you cannot encourage them to the point where they get uncomfortably close to your kitchen and then slam the screen door in their face. You have to let them go, even if it means they fail, even – worse – if it means they succeed beyond all expectations.
Maybe the problem is in the semantics. Managing carries the connotation of controlling. Managers think they have to rule people when in reality they have to ensure production. But the reverse is also true, to an extent. Managers think they have to ensure production when in reality they have to rule.The real reality is a combination play. Managers have to rule in such a way as to ensure individual production. Individuals produce when they feel empowered. Feeling empowered requires managers to give up some of their power, including the all-important power of the purse. And that can really hang managers up the most.
Now, let's return to the manager exasperated by the talents of his stuff. How should he react?
The first thing needful is to make sure the staff knows their goals and their constraints. What are they supposed to do, and what is the size of the box around them – time, rules, culture, personalities? Next, their resources. As they play in their box, working toward their goal, what do they have to work with?
If they understand their goals, their constraints and their resources, there's really not much more for the manager to do but to clear the way occasionally, stay out of the way mostly, and answer questions when they arise. And make sure the team gets the credit.
Sounds so simple. So why is it so hard?
The old reasons. Power. Control. Selfishness. A lack of managerial know-how. I know lots of schools that teach management, but darn few that teach empowerment. It seems odd that control and domination need to be taught but channeling what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" never gets taught. It's enough to make a fella want to turn big-R Red.
As for me, my hardest managerial task was trusting my staff to do it my way. But then I realized: My way might be wrong. And what we were fighting over wasn't that big a deal.
Most of it isn't. But empowering your staff always is.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
archy, ayn, and amateurs
I bought my first book for my new iPod Touch, and it’s a business book.
Sorry, it’s not The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That finished 17,168th on my list, behind Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus but ahead of Atlas Shrugged, a book I know is supposed to be great but to me is just a steaming pile of wet adjectives. (However, bonus points go to Ayn Rand for replying to an editor who wanted to cut the book, “Would you cut The Bible?” Often wanted to say it, never have.)
The book is, naturally, The Annotated archy and mehitabel.
You may not think of The Annotated archy and mehitabel as a business book. Likely you don’t even think of The Annotated archy and mehitabel at all, and that’s understandable, seeing as it’s a book of free verse ostensibly written by a cockroach but actually written by a semi-obscure, three-quarters-drunk and altogether brilliant newspaperman named Don Marquis.
So what does free verse written by a cockroach have to do with business?
Plenty. Probably the most applicable line for marketers comes in one of Marquis’ best pieces, a lament by one of the suitors of the unapologetically promiscuous feline Mehitabel, an old theater cat who decries the passing of the old ways thusly:
the stage is not what it
used to be tom says
he puts his front paw
on his breast and says
they don t have it any more
they don t have it here
the old troupers are gone
there s nobody can troupe
any more
they are all amateurs nowadays
they haven t got it
here
there are only
five or six of us oldtime
troupers left
this generation does not know
what stage presence is
personality is what they lack
personality
where would they get
the training my old friends
got in the stock companies …
finish is what they lack
finish
and they haven t got it
here
and again he laid his paw
on his breast …
for two seasons i played
the dog in joseph
jefferson s rip van winkle
it is true i never came
on the stage
but he knew i was just off
and it helped him
i would like to see
one of your modern
theatre cats
act a dog so well
that it would convince
a trouper like jo jefferson
but they haven t got it
nowadays
they haven t got it
here
jo jefferson had it he had it
here
i come of a long line
of theatre cats
my grandfather was with forrest
he had it he was a real trouper
my grandfather said
he had a voice
that used to shake
the ferryboats
on the north river
once he lost his beard
and my grandfather
dropped from the
fly gallery and landed
under his chin
and played his beard
for the rest of the act
you don t see any theatre
cats that could do that
nowadays
they haven t got it they
haven t got it
here
once i played the owl
in modjeska s production
of macbeth
i sat above the castle gate
in the murder scene
and made my yellow
eyes shine through the dusk
like an owl s eyes
modjeska was a real
trouper she knew how to pick
her support i would like
to see any of these modern
theatre cats play the owl s eyes
to modjeska s lady macbeth
but they haven t got it nowadays
they haven t got it
here
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
It’s a fact of business life that our professions are continually being ruined by amateurs. If you haven’t had your business life turned upside-down by a hotshot MBA with a Brooks Brothers suit, a Maori tattoo in an inconspicuous spot, a faintly passing knowledge of what your company does, and a Droid full of ideas for implementing Lean Six Sigma at the breakfast table, you haven’t lived, business-wise. There’s him, and the hopelessly out-of-touch Veteran of the Wars, and the metrogeek who believes all of business’ problems can be cured with a Facebook page, and the brilliant globalizer who knows English in the same way that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann know American history, and the shakeup specialist who believes he can use mind control to change traffic lights, and all the glorious clichés. They live, and they are out to ruin your particular calling.
This is never more true than in marketing, which is regarded by most businesspeople as a science softer than William Perry’s abdomen, softer even than Art Garfunkel singing a Stephen Bishop song. Everyone in business thinks they can market, right down to the person spraying Ever Clear on the tabletops, in part because they’ve been repeatedly told that they are marketers.
And, you know, we as marketers are largely responsible for this. Part of plan for exploiting social media has been to open up marketing communication to the masses within the business’ walls. “Multiple communicators!” we beller. “Multiple communicators for multiple audiences!”
Perhaps. But in our quest for brand interaction and the establishment of all of our people as subject-matter experts on everything, even the spraying of Ever Clear on tabletops, we’ve missed a very important point, namely: These people are amateurs. We can coach them and guide them and ghostwrite for them and do everything but be them, but they are amateurs. They know everything about how to spray Ever Clear on tabletops, and very little about how to convince people to spray Ever Clear on tabletops their way. And eventually that truth comes out.
So between the executives who know nothing of marketing but think they do and the non-executives who have been drafted into marketing for their skills other than marketing, marketing is overrun with amateurs – not Olympic amateurs or NCAA amateurs or even Little League amateurs, but maybe backyard amateurs. Maybe.
So how do you market around these people without winding up like Mehitabel’s suitor, clutching your brain and wailing to a very small audience, “they haven t got it here”?
The first thing to do with them is to channel them and guide them to somewhere where they can’t hurt themselves. Social media is good.
This is not an indictment of social media, necessarily. The marketing applications of social media are still being worked out. You can do social media completely wrong and still do it right. You can also do it right or wrong relatively inexpensively, with little cost to human marketing life. And finally, there are enough important people at higher levels of all organizations who regard social media as a sort of marketing zeppelin – you know, give it enough time and it’s going to blow up famously, and then we can all go back to watching tube TVs and dreaming about two-way wrist radios – that it’s a great place to stick the amateurs. Have them blow it up and then watch them try to explain it to management.
The second and most important thing to do is to find your spot. Some people are great at this. You could stick them in a Turkish prison and they’d still be able to find a corner where they could hole up with a flea-infested blanket and a hunk of black bread as be as happy as possible, running Monty Python routines in their heads and scratching out Thurber cartoons in the filth with their fingernail.
Somewhere in your amateur-infested marketing scheme there has to be a place where you can curl up and do some real marketing your way. It doesn’t have to be big; it just has to be yours. Do it your way with whatever resources you can muster, throw it out there and let it shine in comparison.
Now, the problem is that the amateurs who don’t know how to market don’t know good marketing, either, so all your good work may go for naught. But keep at it. Eventually something positive will happen. A higher-up will pay attention, customers will pay attention, or the guy who sprays Ever Clear on tabletops will say to the heavily shaded fellow who talks like Charo, “Hey, this is pretty good.” And then they’ll go Panera Bread and discuss it over a bruschetta.
At that point you should probably exit stage left with Mehitabel’s buddy the theater cat. They really haven t got it here. And both your professions are really being ruined by amateurs.
Sorry, it’s not The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That finished 17,168th on my list, behind Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus but ahead of Atlas Shrugged, a book I know is supposed to be great but to me is just a steaming pile of wet adjectives. (However, bonus points go to Ayn Rand for replying to an editor who wanted to cut the book, “Would you cut The Bible?” Often wanted to say it, never have.)
The book is, naturally, The Annotated archy and mehitabel.
You may not think of The Annotated archy and mehitabel as a business book. Likely you don’t even think of The Annotated archy and mehitabel at all, and that’s understandable, seeing as it’s a book of free verse ostensibly written by a cockroach but actually written by a semi-obscure, three-quarters-drunk and altogether brilliant newspaperman named Don Marquis.
So what does free verse written by a cockroach have to do with business?
Plenty. Probably the most applicable line for marketers comes in one of Marquis’ best pieces, a lament by one of the suitors of the unapologetically promiscuous feline Mehitabel, an old theater cat who decries the passing of the old ways thusly:
the stage is not what it
used to be tom says
he puts his front paw
on his breast and says
they don t have it any more
they don t have it here
the old troupers are gone
there s nobody can troupe
any more
they are all amateurs nowadays
they haven t got it
here
there are only
five or six of us oldtime
troupers left
this generation does not know
what stage presence is
personality is what they lack
personality
where would they get
the training my old friends
got in the stock companies …
finish is what they lack
finish
and they haven t got it
here
and again he laid his paw
on his breast …
for two seasons i played
the dog in joseph
jefferson s rip van winkle
it is true i never came
on the stage
but he knew i was just off
and it helped him
i would like to see
one of your modern
theatre cats
act a dog so well
that it would convince
a trouper like jo jefferson
but they haven t got it
nowadays
they haven t got it
here
jo jefferson had it he had it
here
i come of a long line
of theatre cats
my grandfather was with forrest
he had it he was a real trouper
my grandfather said
he had a voice
that used to shake
the ferryboats
on the north river
once he lost his beard
and my grandfather
dropped from the
fly gallery and landed
under his chin
and played his beard
for the rest of the act
you don t see any theatre
cats that could do that
nowadays
they haven t got it they
haven t got it
here
once i played the owl
in modjeska s production
of macbeth
i sat above the castle gate
in the murder scene
and made my yellow
eyes shine through the dusk
like an owl s eyes
modjeska was a real
trouper she knew how to pick
her support i would like
to see any of these modern
theatre cats play the owl s eyes
to modjeska s lady macbeth
but they haven t got it nowadays
they haven t got it
here
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
It’s a fact of business life that our professions are continually being ruined by amateurs. If you haven’t had your business life turned upside-down by a hotshot MBA with a Brooks Brothers suit, a Maori tattoo in an inconspicuous spot, a faintly passing knowledge of what your company does, and a Droid full of ideas for implementing Lean Six Sigma at the breakfast table, you haven’t lived, business-wise. There’s him, and the hopelessly out-of-touch Veteran of the Wars, and the metrogeek who believes all of business’ problems can be cured with a Facebook page, and the brilliant globalizer who knows English in the same way that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann know American history, and the shakeup specialist who believes he can use mind control to change traffic lights, and all the glorious clichés. They live, and they are out to ruin your particular calling.
This is never more true than in marketing, which is regarded by most businesspeople as a science softer than William Perry’s abdomen, softer even than Art Garfunkel singing a Stephen Bishop song. Everyone in business thinks they can market, right down to the person spraying Ever Clear on the tabletops, in part because they’ve been repeatedly told that they are marketers.
And, you know, we as marketers are largely responsible for this. Part of plan for exploiting social media has been to open up marketing communication to the masses within the business’ walls. “Multiple communicators!” we beller. “Multiple communicators for multiple audiences!”
Perhaps. But in our quest for brand interaction and the establishment of all of our people as subject-matter experts on everything, even the spraying of Ever Clear on tabletops, we’ve missed a very important point, namely: These people are amateurs. We can coach them and guide them and ghostwrite for them and do everything but be them, but they are amateurs. They know everything about how to spray Ever Clear on tabletops, and very little about how to convince people to spray Ever Clear on tabletops their way. And eventually that truth comes out.
So between the executives who know nothing of marketing but think they do and the non-executives who have been drafted into marketing for their skills other than marketing, marketing is overrun with amateurs – not Olympic amateurs or NCAA amateurs or even Little League amateurs, but maybe backyard amateurs. Maybe.
So how do you market around these people without winding up like Mehitabel’s suitor, clutching your brain and wailing to a very small audience, “they haven t got it here”?
The first thing to do with them is to channel them and guide them to somewhere where they can’t hurt themselves. Social media is good.
This is not an indictment of social media, necessarily. The marketing applications of social media are still being worked out. You can do social media completely wrong and still do it right. You can also do it right or wrong relatively inexpensively, with little cost to human marketing life. And finally, there are enough important people at higher levels of all organizations who regard social media as a sort of marketing zeppelin – you know, give it enough time and it’s going to blow up famously, and then we can all go back to watching tube TVs and dreaming about two-way wrist radios – that it’s a great place to stick the amateurs. Have them blow it up and then watch them try to explain it to management.
The second and most important thing to do is to find your spot. Some people are great at this. You could stick them in a Turkish prison and they’d still be able to find a corner where they could hole up with a flea-infested blanket and a hunk of black bread as be as happy as possible, running Monty Python routines in their heads and scratching out Thurber cartoons in the filth with their fingernail.
Somewhere in your amateur-infested marketing scheme there has to be a place where you can curl up and do some real marketing your way. It doesn’t have to be big; it just has to be yours. Do it your way with whatever resources you can muster, throw it out there and let it shine in comparison.
Now, the problem is that the amateurs who don’t know how to market don’t know good marketing, either, so all your good work may go for naught. But keep at it. Eventually something positive will happen. A higher-up will pay attention, customers will pay attention, or the guy who sprays Ever Clear on tabletops will say to the heavily shaded fellow who talks like Charo, “Hey, this is pretty good.” And then they’ll go Panera Bread and discuss it over a bruschetta.
At that point you should probably exit stage left with Mehitabel’s buddy the theater cat. They really haven t got it here. And both your professions are really being ruined by amateurs.
Friday, May 13, 2011
You Can't Always Get What You Want Unless You Really Don't Want It
Almost everything I say or do bewilders someone, but one of the hardest things for some people to fathom is my explanation for why sometimes I’d rather listen to the radio than plug in my 3,000-song iPod.
“I want to listen to something that I don’t know I want to listen to,” I tell them. And pennies descend from the firmament and pop into their eyes. But I stand by my words.
At least 2,750 of the 3,000 songs on my iPod are arms-around-the-neck familiar. When I hear the drum roll that kicks off the Raspberries’ “I Wanna Be With You” I’m immediately struck by one of two emotions: I’m flipping triple solchows that I get to hear three minutes of cherry-soda euphoria courtesy of America’s first and best power-pop band, or I’m thinking, “Oh, man; not that again.”
And the thing is, I love “I Wanna Be With You.” It’s in my all-time Top 10, along with Warren Zevon’s “Frank and Jesse James” and the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ “The End Is Not In Sight” and the Everly Brothers’ “On The Wings of a Nightingale,” and Graham Parker and the Rumour’s version of “I Want You Back” – and I turn off all of them from time to time when they pop up on the shuffle.
(The lone exception to this on my iPod is Bob Newhart’s “Introducing Tobacco to Civilization.” I never turn it off, and I always laugh.)
On the other hand, I can listen to campus radio plow through hour after hour of thrash and throat singing and never be tempted to reach for the dial. If you had told me before I turned on the radio that I was going to hear three hours of thrash and throat singing I would have told them what they could do with their kilohertz, but once it started I was there. And I wasn’t going anywhere.
So the question is “why.” Why am I at heel with music I will tell you I despise – and I actually do despise, if willingness to purchase is a measure of likingness – and more than willing to turn up my nose at my favorite songs of all time?
The answer is my explanation for why I sometimes choose the radio over the Pod: I want to listen to something I don’t know I want to listen to. I don’t want the familiar. I want the non-familiar. I want randomness beyond the proscribed randomness of the “Shuffle Songs” command on my iPod. I don’t even want the near-miss shiftiness of Pandora or the billion micro-channels offered by satellite radio. I want the sort of randomness campus radio – or just about any kind of radio, even the kind with playlists tighter than Christina Aguilera’s bustier – can provide.
And here’s the deal: I’d even be willing to pay for it.
Just so you know, this column is not about my willingness to pay for a radio service that figures out what kind of music I like and then plays the antithesis of that. Call it the Anti-Pandora, or maybe the PanDiego. (I’ve been to PanDiego. Have you?)
It’s about the difference between playing to your audience and giving your audience something they’d pay for.
Think about how you go about creating the products you market to your audience, or crafting the marketing approach involved in selling those products. In most cases you look at what’s been done before, what they’ve bought before, what you’ve said before, and who you talked to before.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se, as long as you don’t rely solely on those tactics moving forward or fail to ask the question: “Yeah, but what do they really need?”
The past can be very instructional. Knowing that a client hates mustard, for instance, is essential information if you’re in the mustard business. More to the point and further from the land of whimsy, selling an international penny-stock growth fund to someone whose observed risk tolerance is somewhere west of certificates of deposit is like walking on the treadmill with George Jetson. At best you’ll be one with the belt.
An even more tangible example: A former client wanted to sell a familiar consumer packaged good via an unfamiliar package-delivery vehicle. The packaged good and the delivery vehicle were positioned as having value. The downside was that the delivery vehicle had to be … oh, bugger it. A former client wanted to sell baseball cards in collectible cans. The problem was the cans had to be destroyed to get to the cards inside.
While the can was a new delivery vehicle, it was simultaneously an old commodity: a quasi-collectible. If you want to sell a quasi-collectible to collectors, there’s one big, black, and inviolable rule: don’t make them destroy the quasi-collectible. The approach was new but the lesson from the past was powerful, and the cards go where all bad cards go – either ashes or dust, doesn’t matter which.
The flip side of course is the geegaw that started this whole melty ice-cream cone of a discourse, the iPod.
No one was asking for an iPod. It was in no one’s shuffle, but it was what people wanted without knowing they wanted it. You could have done a billion focus groups or studied the past back to Plutarch without getting a lightbulb that screamed, “iPod!!!” Yet once Apple gave people an iPod, they embraced it and its descendants like they hadn’t embraced anything since television. The iPod is neck-and-neck with the cell phone as the most transformational invention of the 21st century (even though – don’t remind me – they were invented in the 20th) because they went beyond giving people what they wanted to giving them what they need.
So how’d they do it? Some of it was the inspiration of Steve Jobs and the Jobs-Ettes, no doubt. But some of it was also hinted at by the founder of another transformational enterprise, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
“They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things,” Zuckerberg said in talking about how Hollywood missed the point when it made The Social Network, and he’s right. Hollywood, that golden empire with the throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude of a life-insurance actuary, doesn’t make anything because it likes making it. It doesn’t flip the switch on a single klieg light without having it paid for in advance by some multiplex in North Platte.
Sometimes you have to make a product or make a marketing decision just because you like it. You like what it says or what it does, and you have a feeling that if you like it, other people will too. Especially these days, where cool stuff gets tossed around the web like Little League baseballs, that’s at the very least no worse a marketing strategy than doing something because it’s always been done that way.
The problem, to paraphrase Red Smith, is knowing when to stick to the book and when to play the bloody fool. The only measure I can suggest is your level of excitement over the status quo. Do you believe in what you make and what you do? Does it excite you? Does it excite others? Is it cool by any definition, by any stretch of the imagination? Is it what people say they want, or what they actually need?
Let’s go back to the cards-in-cans analogy. People didn’t say they wanted cards in cans, and that’s fine, but they also didn’t need cards in cans, and that’s a problem. People needed to spend $2 on something that gave them good odds of getting back something worth $5. They didn’t care much whether it was a card or a can or a card in a can. They simply wanted their $5 for $2.
Obviously my client would go broke giving everyone $5 for $2, but they made a particularly poor choice of the delivery vehicle for its version of not-quite $5 for more-than-$2.
Would something more direct would have worked? Maybe. Something less direct? Maybe. But it would have to be a little better-built than cards in cans.
Next time you’re stuck in a marketing rut, try building something, just by yourself, just because you like building things. See where it leads you. It might not take you to the next iPod, but it’ll probably take you away from your playlist. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
“I want to listen to something that I don’t know I want to listen to,” I tell them. And pennies descend from the firmament and pop into their eyes. But I stand by my words.
At least 2,750 of the 3,000 songs on my iPod are arms-around-the-neck familiar. When I hear the drum roll that kicks off the Raspberries’ “I Wanna Be With You” I’m immediately struck by one of two emotions: I’m flipping triple solchows that I get to hear three minutes of cherry-soda euphoria courtesy of America’s first and best power-pop band, or I’m thinking, “Oh, man; not that again.”
And the thing is, I love “I Wanna Be With You.” It’s in my all-time Top 10, along with Warren Zevon’s “Frank and Jesse James” and the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ “The End Is Not In Sight” and the Everly Brothers’ “On The Wings of a Nightingale,” and Graham Parker and the Rumour’s version of “I Want You Back” – and I turn off all of them from time to time when they pop up on the shuffle.
(The lone exception to this on my iPod is Bob Newhart’s “Introducing Tobacco to Civilization.” I never turn it off, and I always laugh.)
On the other hand, I can listen to campus radio plow through hour after hour of thrash and throat singing and never be tempted to reach for the dial. If you had told me before I turned on the radio that I was going to hear three hours of thrash and throat singing I would have told them what they could do with their kilohertz, but once it started I was there. And I wasn’t going anywhere.
So the question is “why.” Why am I at heel with music I will tell you I despise – and I actually do despise, if willingness to purchase is a measure of likingness – and more than willing to turn up my nose at my favorite songs of all time?
The answer is my explanation for why I sometimes choose the radio over the Pod: I want to listen to something I don’t know I want to listen to. I don’t want the familiar. I want the non-familiar. I want randomness beyond the proscribed randomness of the “Shuffle Songs” command on my iPod. I don’t even want the near-miss shiftiness of Pandora or the billion micro-channels offered by satellite radio. I want the sort of randomness campus radio – or just about any kind of radio, even the kind with playlists tighter than Christina Aguilera’s bustier – can provide.
And here’s the deal: I’d even be willing to pay for it.
Just so you know, this column is not about my willingness to pay for a radio service that figures out what kind of music I like and then plays the antithesis of that. Call it the Anti-Pandora, or maybe the PanDiego. (I’ve been to PanDiego. Have you?)
It’s about the difference between playing to your audience and giving your audience something they’d pay for.
Think about how you go about creating the products you market to your audience, or crafting the marketing approach involved in selling those products. In most cases you look at what’s been done before, what they’ve bought before, what you’ve said before, and who you talked to before.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se, as long as you don’t rely solely on those tactics moving forward or fail to ask the question: “Yeah, but what do they really need?”
The past can be very instructional. Knowing that a client hates mustard, for instance, is essential information if you’re in the mustard business. More to the point and further from the land of whimsy, selling an international penny-stock growth fund to someone whose observed risk tolerance is somewhere west of certificates of deposit is like walking on the treadmill with George Jetson. At best you’ll be one with the belt.
An even more tangible example: A former client wanted to sell a familiar consumer packaged good via an unfamiliar package-delivery vehicle. The packaged good and the delivery vehicle were positioned as having value. The downside was that the delivery vehicle had to be … oh, bugger it. A former client wanted to sell baseball cards in collectible cans. The problem was the cans had to be destroyed to get to the cards inside.
While the can was a new delivery vehicle, it was simultaneously an old commodity: a quasi-collectible. If you want to sell a quasi-collectible to collectors, there’s one big, black, and inviolable rule: don’t make them destroy the quasi-collectible. The approach was new but the lesson from the past was powerful, and the cards go where all bad cards go – either ashes or dust, doesn’t matter which.
The flip side of course is the geegaw that started this whole melty ice-cream cone of a discourse, the iPod.
No one was asking for an iPod. It was in no one’s shuffle, but it was what people wanted without knowing they wanted it. You could have done a billion focus groups or studied the past back to Plutarch without getting a lightbulb that screamed, “iPod!!!” Yet once Apple gave people an iPod, they embraced it and its descendants like they hadn’t embraced anything since television. The iPod is neck-and-neck with the cell phone as the most transformational invention of the 21st century (even though – don’t remind me – they were invented in the 20th) because they went beyond giving people what they wanted to giving them what they need.
So how’d they do it? Some of it was the inspiration of Steve Jobs and the Jobs-Ettes, no doubt. But some of it was also hinted at by the founder of another transformational enterprise, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
“They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things,” Zuckerberg said in talking about how Hollywood missed the point when it made The Social Network, and he’s right. Hollywood, that golden empire with the throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude of a life-insurance actuary, doesn’t make anything because it likes making it. It doesn’t flip the switch on a single klieg light without having it paid for in advance by some multiplex in North Platte.
Sometimes you have to make a product or make a marketing decision just because you like it. You like what it says or what it does, and you have a feeling that if you like it, other people will too. Especially these days, where cool stuff gets tossed around the web like Little League baseballs, that’s at the very least no worse a marketing strategy than doing something because it’s always been done that way.
The problem, to paraphrase Red Smith, is knowing when to stick to the book and when to play the bloody fool. The only measure I can suggest is your level of excitement over the status quo. Do you believe in what you make and what you do? Does it excite you? Does it excite others? Is it cool by any definition, by any stretch of the imagination? Is it what people say they want, or what they actually need?
Let’s go back to the cards-in-cans analogy. People didn’t say they wanted cards in cans, and that’s fine, but they also didn’t need cards in cans, and that’s a problem. People needed to spend $2 on something that gave them good odds of getting back something worth $5. They didn’t care much whether it was a card or a can or a card in a can. They simply wanted their $5 for $2.
Obviously my client would go broke giving everyone $5 for $2, but they made a particularly poor choice of the delivery vehicle for its version of not-quite $5 for more-than-$2.
Would something more direct would have worked? Maybe. Something less direct? Maybe. But it would have to be a little better-built than cards in cans.
Next time you’re stuck in a marketing rut, try building something, just by yourself, just because you like building things. See where it leads you. It might not take you to the next iPod, but it’ll probably take you away from your playlist. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Brand Interactions: Mean, Clean, and Charlie Sheen
Bob Garfield, the Huckleberry Finn of marketing and advertising who insists on being present at his own funeral (or at least the ongoing funeral of The Way Of Life As He Used To Know It), wrote in a columnette several days ago that no one wants to interact with a brand.
I couldn't agree more, but since I am an old-line editor I have to modify it ever-so-slightly, like so: No one that you want to interact with your brand wants to interact with your brand.
People do interact with brands. They write fan letters to the most god-awful foods, White Castles and Krispy Kremes, they compose love notes to Shout, they make movies where a stick of Old Spice is the star, and they even kidnapped Captain Crunch's Twitter account.
But these people are not all people. They're not even a significant minority of all people. They're brand groupies. If it weren't for their untoward love of Oatmeal Cream Pies, they'd be stalking Flounder from National Lampoon's Animal House.
Furthermore, these people love the brand so much that they would buy it without interacting with it, and in roughly the same quantities. They don't buy significantly more Mountain Dew because they entered an online sweepstakes that almost netted them a beanie. The Captain Crunch Twitterers don't eat more Captain Crunch because they have the Captain Crunch Twitter account; they eat less if anything, because they have to spend Cap'n Time actually tweeting about the stuff they used to spend that time eating.
And finally, the people who love your brand are not necessarily your best brand ambassadors. Imagine the Oatmeal Cream Pie stalker; is she your best salesperson?
None of this has really changed over the course of the modern advertising-and-marketing era. If anything, there's less of it now than before.
I'll prove it to you. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the major advertising media were the newspaper and the radio.
America was much more provincial then, and much more distrustful of any voice from outside. Getting used to the idea of a disembodied voice pouring out of a box in a living room took years; deciding to buy something because that disembodied voice told you to required another Beamonesque leap. To compensate, almost every ad sounded like an over-the-back-fence chat. Announcers stopped reading off of scripts and talked to you like a neighbor. And like a good neighbor, these new neighbors were eager to hear what you had to say about Rinso or Mum. Letters from Mrs. B.V. Mungo in West Neither, New Hampshire, peppered the airwaves. Slogan contests and jingle games filled the spaces between testimonials.
The most successful salesperson of the era, Kate Smith, pitched only the products she tried in her own home, and if they worked for her she sold 'em hard, with a Girl Scout's giddy zeal. Then if people tried the products and liked them as much as Kate they wrote her and told her, and she read the letters on the air – a double word-of-mouth whammy. Only today we call it "retweeting."
So all the hot talk in marketing circles about brand interaction is another case of old talk being run through new channels – Twitter instead of radio, Facebook instead of Life magazine. There is no evidence that the level of brand interaction has increased in any tangible form since the widespread employ of these “transformational” marketing tools. More people are not ascending from brand like to brand limerance to brand love, more brands are not getting the Kate Smith treatment, significantly more people are not communicating their brand experiences, and the people who couldn't care less ... still couldn't care less.
And the messages are absolutely unchanged. "We like you" and "give us stuff" and "you messed up" still goes up; "buy our stuff" and "tell your friends" and "we're sorry" still goes down.
As you can tell, these quasi-dialogues that form the bulk of brand interactions aren’t really conversations; they’re one-way messages passing each other. They pass each other faster than they used to, but minivans can do 85 these days without breaking a sweat. Everything moves faster.
So outside of a couple of tweaks to the sheet metal, this is your father’s Oldsmobile. Essentially the same messages are being passed back and forth by essentially the same people.
The implications for your brand are staggering. If your current strategy includes a brand-interaction component, stop. Step outside. Forget about what you want for your brand, focus on what really is happening with your brand, and ask, "Are people who wouldn't normally interact with my brand interacting with my brand because of anything I’m doing?"
The answer is probably going to be "no."
If this process of questioning makes you want to cut off Twitter and Facebook, stop that, too. That's another wrong answer. Twitter and Facebook are this era's Kate Smith. If you were Jell-O back then you needed to be there, and if you're Tide today you gotta be there, too.
How should you react? First, accept the inevitable: A desire for brand interaction fuels a tiny portion of brand encounters and brand decisions. Your fans are the fringe. Second, acknowledge that most decisions involving your brand are made not out of brand relationship, brand loyalty, or brand recognition. They’re made out of antipathy.
Brand decisions are rarely, rarely made out of burning desire. Even the brand decisions that hit closest to your heart – and I’m thinking Caribbean cruises and churches here -- are picked just as often because they’re handy as because they alone are the must-have.
The overwhelming majority of brand encounters are brief, casual, poorly thought out, and generally unimpressive. If they were human relationships, they’d make some of Charlie Sheen’s dalliances look like Paul Harvey anniversaries. Wham, bam, thank you Spam.
Making sure you get your share of these strangers-in-the-night brand interactions, then, is a matter of being there – being at the cash register, being on the shelf at eye level, being first in the search engine, being on your friend’s lips. It even includes being what you read about first on Twitter and Facebook – provided you can take these situations quickly and easily from brand talky-talk to brand action.
And as every marketer knows, actually being there, in position for the casual brand encounter, is a lot harder than being here and encouraging customers to come find you. It requires old-fashioned work with new-fashioned tools. It does not include the margin for failure built into most social-media marketing campaigns. It requires grunt work on a squillion fronts. But it works.
Ask Coke and Pepsi. Pepsi is dropping billions into conventional advertising because it slunk further behind Coke during Pepsi’s foray into social media, the Pepsi Refresh Project.
Note: I’m not blaming Pepsi Refresh for the sales decline. That could have been caused by a billion factors, including the fact that Mountain Dew Live Wire tastes like WD-40. But the people running Pepsi must think it’s Pepsi Refresh – and they also must think that conventional advertising is the cure.
We’ll see on both fronts. But whatever happens, the idea that widespread brand interaction leads to increased brand sales is lying low for a while. And that’s about right.
I couldn't agree more, but since I am an old-line editor I have to modify it ever-so-slightly, like so: No one that you want to interact with your brand wants to interact with your brand.
People do interact with brands. They write fan letters to the most god-awful foods, White Castles and Krispy Kremes, they compose love notes to Shout, they make movies where a stick of Old Spice is the star, and they even kidnapped Captain Crunch's Twitter account.
But these people are not all people. They're not even a significant minority of all people. They're brand groupies. If it weren't for their untoward love of Oatmeal Cream Pies, they'd be stalking Flounder from National Lampoon's Animal House.
Furthermore, these people love the brand so much that they would buy it without interacting with it, and in roughly the same quantities. They don't buy significantly more Mountain Dew because they entered an online sweepstakes that almost netted them a beanie. The Captain Crunch Twitterers don't eat more Captain Crunch because they have the Captain Crunch Twitter account; they eat less if anything, because they have to spend Cap'n Time actually tweeting about the stuff they used to spend that time eating.
And finally, the people who love your brand are not necessarily your best brand ambassadors. Imagine the Oatmeal Cream Pie stalker; is she your best salesperson?
None of this has really changed over the course of the modern advertising-and-marketing era. If anything, there's less of it now than before.
I'll prove it to you. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the major advertising media were the newspaper and the radio.
America was much more provincial then, and much more distrustful of any voice from outside. Getting used to the idea of a disembodied voice pouring out of a box in a living room took years; deciding to buy something because that disembodied voice told you to required another Beamonesque leap. To compensate, almost every ad sounded like an over-the-back-fence chat. Announcers stopped reading off of scripts and talked to you like a neighbor. And like a good neighbor, these new neighbors were eager to hear what you had to say about Rinso or Mum. Letters from Mrs. B.V. Mungo in West Neither, New Hampshire, peppered the airwaves. Slogan contests and jingle games filled the spaces between testimonials.
The most successful salesperson of the era, Kate Smith, pitched only the products she tried in her own home, and if they worked for her she sold 'em hard, with a Girl Scout's giddy zeal. Then if people tried the products and liked them as much as Kate they wrote her and told her, and she read the letters on the air – a double word-of-mouth whammy. Only today we call it "retweeting."
So all the hot talk in marketing circles about brand interaction is another case of old talk being run through new channels – Twitter instead of radio, Facebook instead of Life magazine. There is no evidence that the level of brand interaction has increased in any tangible form since the widespread employ of these “transformational” marketing tools. More people are not ascending from brand like to brand limerance to brand love, more brands are not getting the Kate Smith treatment, significantly more people are not communicating their brand experiences, and the people who couldn't care less ... still couldn't care less.
And the messages are absolutely unchanged. "We like you" and "give us stuff" and "you messed up" still goes up; "buy our stuff" and "tell your friends" and "we're sorry" still goes down.
As you can tell, these quasi-dialogues that form the bulk of brand interactions aren’t really conversations; they’re one-way messages passing each other. They pass each other faster than they used to, but minivans can do 85 these days without breaking a sweat. Everything moves faster.
So outside of a couple of tweaks to the sheet metal, this is your father’s Oldsmobile. Essentially the same messages are being passed back and forth by essentially the same people.
The implications for your brand are staggering. If your current strategy includes a brand-interaction component, stop. Step outside. Forget about what you want for your brand, focus on what really is happening with your brand, and ask, "Are people who wouldn't normally interact with my brand interacting with my brand because of anything I’m doing?"
The answer is probably going to be "no."
If this process of questioning makes you want to cut off Twitter and Facebook, stop that, too. That's another wrong answer. Twitter and Facebook are this era's Kate Smith. If you were Jell-O back then you needed to be there, and if you're Tide today you gotta be there, too.
How should you react? First, accept the inevitable: A desire for brand interaction fuels a tiny portion of brand encounters and brand decisions. Your fans are the fringe. Second, acknowledge that most decisions involving your brand are made not out of brand relationship, brand loyalty, or brand recognition. They’re made out of antipathy.
Brand decisions are rarely, rarely made out of burning desire. Even the brand decisions that hit closest to your heart – and I’m thinking Caribbean cruises and churches here -- are picked just as often because they’re handy as because they alone are the must-have.
The overwhelming majority of brand encounters are brief, casual, poorly thought out, and generally unimpressive. If they were human relationships, they’d make some of Charlie Sheen’s dalliances look like Paul Harvey anniversaries. Wham, bam, thank you Spam.
Making sure you get your share of these strangers-in-the-night brand interactions, then, is a matter of being there – being at the cash register, being on the shelf at eye level, being first in the search engine, being on your friend’s lips. It even includes being what you read about first on Twitter and Facebook – provided you can take these situations quickly and easily from brand talky-talk to brand action.
And as every marketer knows, actually being there, in position for the casual brand encounter, is a lot harder than being here and encouraging customers to come find you. It requires old-fashioned work with new-fashioned tools. It does not include the margin for failure built into most social-media marketing campaigns. It requires grunt work on a squillion fronts. But it works.
Ask Coke and Pepsi. Pepsi is dropping billions into conventional advertising because it slunk further behind Coke during Pepsi’s foray into social media, the Pepsi Refresh Project.
Note: I’m not blaming Pepsi Refresh for the sales decline. That could have been caused by a billion factors, including the fact that Mountain Dew Live Wire tastes like WD-40. But the people running Pepsi must think it’s Pepsi Refresh – and they also must think that conventional advertising is the cure.
We’ll see on both fronts. But whatever happens, the idea that widespread brand interaction leads to increased brand sales is lying low for a while. And that’s about right.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
That's Balderdash, Spaldermash
If you’re old enough to remember Harry Chapin you’re old enough to have strong feelings about Harry Chapin.
If you’re not old enough to remember Harry Chapin let me give you a contemporary reference point. He’s like … well, something like … or maybe …
The fact is, Harry Chapin isn’t like any current musician except maybe Tom Waits – and not just Tom Waits, but Tom Waits if he sang like the principal soloist from the Sewage Disposal Workers’ Glee Club. And if you know Tom Waits you’re likely old enough to remember Harry Chapin, and here we are again.
(By the way, congratulations to Tom Waits, Alice Cooper, and Neil Diamond for making the Rock-‘n’-Roll Hall of Fame. Three of my favorite rock-‘n’-roll creeps enshrined at once. I haven’t been so excited about an HOF enshrinement since Whoopee John made the Polka Hall of Fame.)
Harry Chapin wrote “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which I liked ell enough when it came out until I realized that this was as light and cheery and singable as Harry Chapin got. Listening to one of his albums was like being trapped in the slow parts of Les Miserables—the book, not the musical.
The reason the lugubrious and overwrought Mr. Chapin is the lead subject for this week’s blog is that he did one thing very right to this listener’s way of thinking. He titled an album Verities and Balderdash.
Verities and Balderdash might be the perfect album name for marketers, because 98 percent of the time we’re dealing in one or the other.
Sometimes they’re the same, as they are in this week’s topic.
One of the verities in modern marketing is that you must communicate to people in the manner in which they are consuming information. If they live on an iPhone, in other words, you have to be at iLevel.
This is also balderdash.
Like so many things in marketing, life, and hockey, the truth lies somewhere between the poles.
It is a verity that if you communicate to someone through a channel they ignore that your message will not be heard. A tree that falls in the forest makes no sound if there is no forest. (I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I just love the zen-ness of that statement. It’s like having Buddha do your root canal. [See football-with-1-stick-gum.blogspot.com for an extra helping of Buddhist existentialist dentistry.])
However, is there any channel left standing that people routinely ignore? They read their mail. They’d read a telegram, if such a thing can even be sent and delivered. They pick up the phone. They grab a handbill. They look up in the sky when a plane is towing a banner. They rip the hanger off the doorknob. They read a text. They glance at a billboard. They scan a newspaper. They take the piece of neon-green paper from under their windshield wiper. You shout at them, they pick their heads up. They even read the words that go, “Try this one weird trick to cut down a little of your belly every day,” though they’ve read it a zillion times before.
So the idea that people ignore channels is balderdash.
All channels are monitored, which leads to the next marketing revelation: All channels matter. It’s not about mobile. It’s really not. It’s not about being on the iPad or having a Groupon. Sure, those are great for reaching people the technological hoi palloi, but most organizations can’t make a living off those people without turning skinnier than their glasses.
Even though the phone book is going the way of the manual typewriter, you could be successful doing nothing but Yellow Pages advertising – if you did it right. You could be the Prince of Doorknob Hangers – if you owned doorknob hangers.
And the funny thing is, doorknob hangers do not have to be the A-number-one way of reaching your target audience. Maybe it is mobile – but mobile’s too crowded. Maybe it’s TV – but TV’s too expensive. Doorknob hangers are the way-back fallback. Plan N, on a good day.
So what does it take to own doorknob hangers? Well, here’s another verity: It takes hard work to own doorknob hangers. You have to know doorknob hangers, whether that involves researching doorknob hangers and the people who love them or simply having doorknob hangers entwined in your DNA right alongside the genetic code.
One reason people are so excited about mobile is that no one’s done the really hard work and converted it into a repeatable formula. You can be totally biblically bad at doing mobile and still come out fine because everyone else is getting turned into a pillar of salt, just like you. The ground rules are changing so fast that a successful mobile/social campaign might last a couple of hours, like the Old Spice viral-video campaign, and the effect on sales might be a collagen-implanted 0.01 percent.
So the next time someone – an inside semi-expert or an outside demi-consultant – tries to tell you that you need to be somewhere because everyone who buys is there, you know what to say, don’t you?
That’s right – balderdash.
And you know why, too: You don’t need to be there because everyone who buys is there. You’ve decided to be elsewhere because it’s ownable and figure-outable, and guess what? Everyone who buys is there, too.
And that’s the verity, Garrity.
If you’re not old enough to remember Harry Chapin let me give you a contemporary reference point. He’s like … well, something like … or maybe …
The fact is, Harry Chapin isn’t like any current musician except maybe Tom Waits – and not just Tom Waits, but Tom Waits if he sang like the principal soloist from the Sewage Disposal Workers’ Glee Club. And if you know Tom Waits you’re likely old enough to remember Harry Chapin, and here we are again.
(By the way, congratulations to Tom Waits, Alice Cooper, and Neil Diamond for making the Rock-‘n’-Roll Hall of Fame. Three of my favorite rock-‘n’-roll creeps enshrined at once. I haven’t been so excited about an HOF enshrinement since Whoopee John made the Polka Hall of Fame.)
Harry Chapin wrote “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which I liked ell enough when it came out until I realized that this was as light and cheery and singable as Harry Chapin got. Listening to one of his albums was like being trapped in the slow parts of Les Miserables—the book, not the musical.
The reason the lugubrious and overwrought Mr. Chapin is the lead subject for this week’s blog is that he did one thing very right to this listener’s way of thinking. He titled an album Verities and Balderdash.
Verities and Balderdash might be the perfect album name for marketers, because 98 percent of the time we’re dealing in one or the other.
Sometimes they’re the same, as they are in this week’s topic.
One of the verities in modern marketing is that you must communicate to people in the manner in which they are consuming information. If they live on an iPhone, in other words, you have to be at iLevel.
This is also balderdash.
Like so many things in marketing, life, and hockey, the truth lies somewhere between the poles.
It is a verity that if you communicate to someone through a channel they ignore that your message will not be heard. A tree that falls in the forest makes no sound if there is no forest. (I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I just love the zen-ness of that statement. It’s like having Buddha do your root canal. [See football-with-1-stick-gum.blogspot.com for an extra helping of Buddhist existentialist dentistry.])
However, is there any channel left standing that people routinely ignore? They read their mail. They’d read a telegram, if such a thing can even be sent and delivered. They pick up the phone. They grab a handbill. They look up in the sky when a plane is towing a banner. They rip the hanger off the doorknob. They read a text. They glance at a billboard. They scan a newspaper. They take the piece of neon-green paper from under their windshield wiper. You shout at them, they pick their heads up. They even read the words that go, “Try this one weird trick to cut down a little of your belly every day,” though they’ve read it a zillion times before.
So the idea that people ignore channels is balderdash.
All channels are monitored, which leads to the next marketing revelation: All channels matter. It’s not about mobile. It’s really not. It’s not about being on the iPad or having a Groupon. Sure, those are great for reaching people the technological hoi palloi, but most organizations can’t make a living off those people without turning skinnier than their glasses.
Even though the phone book is going the way of the manual typewriter, you could be successful doing nothing but Yellow Pages advertising – if you did it right. You could be the Prince of Doorknob Hangers – if you owned doorknob hangers.
And the funny thing is, doorknob hangers do not have to be the A-number-one way of reaching your target audience. Maybe it is mobile – but mobile’s too crowded. Maybe it’s TV – but TV’s too expensive. Doorknob hangers are the way-back fallback. Plan N, on a good day.
So what does it take to own doorknob hangers? Well, here’s another verity: It takes hard work to own doorknob hangers. You have to know doorknob hangers, whether that involves researching doorknob hangers and the people who love them or simply having doorknob hangers entwined in your DNA right alongside the genetic code.
One reason people are so excited about mobile is that no one’s done the really hard work and converted it into a repeatable formula. You can be totally biblically bad at doing mobile and still come out fine because everyone else is getting turned into a pillar of salt, just like you. The ground rules are changing so fast that a successful mobile/social campaign might last a couple of hours, like the Old Spice viral-video campaign, and the effect on sales might be a collagen-implanted 0.01 percent.
So the next time someone – an inside semi-expert or an outside demi-consultant – tries to tell you that you need to be somewhere because everyone who buys is there, you know what to say, don’t you?
That’s right – balderdash.
And you know why, too: You don’t need to be there because everyone who buys is there. You’ve decided to be elsewhere because it’s ownable and figure-outable, and guess what? Everyone who buys is there, too.
And that’s the verity, Garrity.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Fat Bastard Vs. Powerman And The Money-Go-Round
So what I want to know is: Since when did a snowplow driver become a Fat Bastard?
For those of you who don't know sports (and some of you who do) let me explain a Fat Bastard. A Fat Bastard is a player, most often a football lineman, who on the basis of one quasi-All-Pro season signs a five-year, $175 million contract, reports to camp looking like he swallowed Jonah, tweaks his hamstring in the first workout, and spends the remainder of his contract shuttling between the trainer's room and gentlemen's clubs.
Albert Haynesworth is the reigning Fat Bastard. Redskins fans hate Haynesworth because he's only in it for the money, and he quit trying once he got the money. Plus he was never that good to start with.
Somehow, astonishingly, in Wisconsin that same sort of hate is being leveled on snowplow drivers and second-grade teachers and all manner of public employees.
Walker's line is being accepted because there is a current of society which holds to a complex belief system consisting of this: teachers make too much money.
Ever since there have been teachers there has been a segment of society claiming that teachers make too much money. When the first mother archaeopteryx nuzzled her baby archaeopteryx out of the nest and coaxed her into flight there was a equus on the ground saying, "She got two lizards for that?"
For those of you who don't know sports (and some of you who do) let me explain a Fat Bastard. A Fat Bastard is a player, most often a football lineman, who on the basis of one quasi-All-Pro season signs a five-year, $175 million contract, reports to camp looking like he swallowed Jonah, tweaks his hamstring in the first workout, and spends the remainder of his contract shuttling between the trainer's room and gentlemen's clubs.
Albert Haynesworth is the reigning Fat Bastard. Redskins fans hate Haynesworth because he's only in it for the money, and he quit trying once he got the money. Plus he was never that good to start with.
Somehow, astonishingly, in Wisconsin that same sort of hate is being leveled on snowplow drivers and second-grade teachers and all manner of public employees.
(Yes, this is a marketing column and not a political screed. Stick with me on this.)
The attack is being led by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is sort of the Jim Rome of politicians minus the occasional zinger. His line is:
- Wisconsin needs to cut government spending; and
- Breaking the public-employees' union is the way to get there.
Walker is much loved by the Tea Party, a group that can be described as the reactionary version of Wavy Gravy coming out of retirement and organizing all the flax-weavers and organic goat farmers in support of legal mushrooms for everyone.
Walker's line is being accepted because there is a current of society which holds to a complex belief system consisting of this: teachers make too much money.
Ever since there have been teachers there has been a segment of society claiming that teachers make too much money. When the first mother archaeopteryx nuzzled her baby archaeopteryx out of the nest and coaxed her into flight there was a equus on the ground saying, "She got two lizards for that?"
I've seen a lot of teachers, and from what I've seen 90 percent of them do not make too much money. Their benefit packages have been brought more in line with private industry, and they'll be graded on outcomes and paid on merit within the next 10 years regardless of whether Scott Walker dons a tiara and declares himself King of Brodhead and Greater Juda.
Public employees' compensation is generally built on a formula that pays less in wages and more in benefits. As a university official told me the other day, "When we recruit we know our wages are 15 percent below the market, but we used to make up for it by saying, 'But we have a really solid benefit package.'"
Because the benefit package is really solid – really solid, mind you, not outlandish in any dimension -- it is declared to be too much (definition of "too much": anything more than what I have) by those whose self-assembled retirement package consists of a handful of acorns stuffed into a hollow tree. And a twelver of Keystone.
Gov. Walker's remedy to this problem which is not really a problem is to strip the union of its collective-bargaining rights, which is like the old Monty Python sketch that has a couple of Bruces bagging a mosquito with a bazooka.
The Tea Party's message (and here's where the marketing comes in) has been communicated very successfully through Gov. Walker and his minions (who actually are little yellow pills, just like the characters in Despicable Me). Then again, it ought to be, seeing as it consists of four words: Taxes are too high.
The problem is it's inaccurate – or at the very least unfair.
Railroad workers have a fabulous retirement package, mostly funded by the government -- and by extension taxpayers -- but you don't see fiscal Luddites marching on Washington, the earpieces from their transistor radios pumping Glenn Beck into their shared left brain, demanding that the railroad workers give some back. Yet just as assuredly railroad retirement is paid for by the taxpayers, and railroad workers' benefits are paid for by consumers in higher prices for everything from bouncy balls to ball bearings.
And railroad workers are just one example. Think you don't pay for the severance and retirement packages of BP executives in terms of higher gas prices? Think you aren't paying for someone's cottage in northern Wisconsin every time cable rates go up? I know of some executives in an arcane nook of the financial-services industry who just voted themselves $20 million into their 401(k) accounts. Think that has something to do with the 0.5 percent you get on your money at the local bank?
Fact is, just about everyone is paying for everyone else's retirement, Social Security notwithstanding. But when the non-union private sector does it it's all right with the TP'ers, and when a union or a public-sector group does it they howl like a wounded panther.
Okay, so what happens next?
The Tea Party and its Republican shills, as mentioned earlier, hold the marketing high ground by virtue of their simple all-purpose message. No matter the issue the answer's the same. The environment is a mess. Taxes are too high. Discrimination is rampant. Taxes are too high. Corporations are taking the incentives and offshoring anyway. Taxes are too high. Health insurers and drug companies are making zillions and an inner-city mom still can't get to a doctor. Taxes are too high. John Boehner's hair looks like it was dropped on his head from a helicopter. Taxes are too high.
The Democrats, in contrast, have a couple of disadvantages. Their rebuttal is shorter – no, they're not – but far less versatile. Also, there has not been a ripe political situation since the Great Depression that the Democratic Party has not managed to spill all over themselves. They're the Exxon Valdez of political parties: They carry a lot of important stuff, but they run aground at the most inopportune times, and cleanup's a bitch.
In essence, what we're seeing is effective marketing of a lie versus ineffective marketing of the truth. In a case like this, sorry to say, bet on the lie every time.
There is hope for the truth, however. The images from Madison, the firefighters walking through the capital rotunda, are powerful tools for an outside organization with the bucks to spew it everywhere. Social media has already proven its worth in that regard.
History has also shown that a simplistic movement like the Tea Party breaks down when presented with a situation that does not lend itself to a simple answer – "A school-choice program requires taxpayer dollars" comes to mind – but does lend itself to divisions within a previously unified movement. Also, political pendulums do swing.
The 2012 elections will be interesting. And expensive. Count on seeing the images from Wisconsin 2011 over and over again. Count on hearing the Tea Party mantra repeated like ... well, a mantra, only with fewer people reaching fiscal nirvana for the buzz. And count on seeing a new Fat Bastard crowned sometime during the process.
This time, let's hope it's a real Fat Bastard. I have a few ideas if you're interested.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Consumers And Canteloupe, Qualitative And Quantitative
Pleased to meet you, Miss Five-Foot-Seven, Chai-Drinking, Coon-Cat-Loving, Versa-Driving, Hair-Dyeing “Toddlers & Tiaras” Watcher. I’m Mr. Six-Foot-One, BMW-Driving, Golden-Retriever-Petting, Downhill-Skiing, Pokemon-Watching Foreign-Currency trader. Only I’m not.
I’m not any of those things. Oh, I’ll pet a golden retriever if it’s handy, and I’d drive a BMW if my income as a blogger let me afford one, but I’m not most any of the things the ad profilers and online targeters think I am. And too bad for them, because they’re investing a whole lot of money, and a goodly chunk of the southwest Asian ex-pat community, into convincing advertisers that I am.
Let me put it another way. One of my favorite marketing quotes of all time comes from that fabled business text – you see it at Wharton and Harvard all the time, tucked inside an upstanding copy of Practical Cost Accounting – The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, And Bubble-Gum Book.
The quote goes like this: “If you’re looking to build a large cantaloupe, it’s best to start with a small cantaloupe and not a collection of cantaloupe parts.”
Are you digging the marketing connotation? If not, let me place both my hands on your back and push. If you’re looking to know your customers, it’s better to really know some of your customers and not just be a collector of customer parts.
I’m an eclectic guy. If someone were to borrow my iPod, I guarantee they wouldn’t last five songs. Maybe the grunted Bahamian gospel songs would do it, or the scratchy Hawaiian-guitar songs, or the hardcore Cajun stuff, or maybe the one-man-band recordings of my own compositions. And if by miraculous means that wouldn’t drive them over the edge, I’d tailwhack them into the abyss with a 40-ounce chunk of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
My whole life’s like that, and targeted ads can’t keep up. In fact, all they do is amuse me with their Mr. Magoo-like focus on what they think matters to me right now. As sharpshooters, they’re Brazilian rainforest tribesmen trying to take down stealth bombers with blowguns. I checked out all the hot hatchbacks from Mazda to Subaru and bought a van. I don’t want a McPherson guitar. They’re $9,000 and they don’t even have the soundhole in the middle of the top. Today I want the album from Nat “King” Cole’s brother; yesterday I wanted The Kooks. At no time was I even remotely contemplating the new release from Sugarland.
However, what I wouldn’t mind is a company that wants to sell me something sending a person to sit across from me and ask me what I like and don’t like, and especially what I like and don’t like as pertains to their product.
And the funny thing is, as a marketer I want the same thing. In a world where quantitative data drives Mark Zuckerberg’s limo, I would much rather have one really good piece of qualitative data, shaded and nuanced beyond measurability. I would rather truly understand one of my customers than watch the numbers of the masses pass before me like Oompa Loompas.
I was going to call this decision is a no-brainer, but actually it’s the antithesis of a no-brainer, which I suppose would make it a “brainer” if that term didn’t sound … well, like it was created by someone with no brain. Emotional connections are formed in shades and nuances, and once purchases move outside of the sustaining-basic-needs range, emotional connections are the driver.
And they’re not just the driver of a single purchase; they’re the driver of repeat purchases, which are the Treasure of the Sierra Madre to most sellers of stuff. And they’re not even just that: They’re the foundation on which Apple was built, and Starbucks, and Fender, and Gucci and Harley-Davidson and Disney and all the other brands with Fill-In-The-Blank Stores on Times Square – not to mention Times Square itself. Hey, an iPod is a limited-access hard drive in a box. Starbucks is a cup of coffee. The head says you need a cup of coffee (especially this morning); the heart says you need a Starbucks.
The problems with going qualitative are pretty obvious, and never more so than when you’re scanning the columns to either side of whatever you’re trying to read on the internet. Qualitative is pretty much numbers-proof. Hard data can’t be captured from qualitative research any better now than it could be back in the days when advertising two-stepped to the theme from “Bewitched,” less Elizabeth Montgomery and the elephants in the living room. And the major selling point of today’s fin-de-siècle media landscape is that everything can be measured.
Not yet. IBM may have invented a computer that can beat Ken Jennings at “Jeopardy!”, but it has no idea how Jennings feels about that. Could be that Jennings will now devote his entire life to defeating the computer, riffing on Boris Karloff one minute and playing Rocky the next. Running up the library steps and raising your arms exultantly may take on a whole new meaning.
Qualitative also requires a different sort of front-end work. Instead of tapping the masses’ data vein and just letting it pour into a bottle, qualitative requires endless sorting through the flow to find the killer T-cell.
What’s interesting is that the electronic landscape exudes qualitative potential like Sarah Palin exudes faux compassion. And Oil of Olay. The experts and agencies who view the internet as a sea of quantitative data aren’t wrong per se; they’re just missing the ocean of qualitative data right next door. Twitter and Facebook are the keys to a qualitative castle that will not – I repeat, will not – tell you everything you need to know about your customers, but will point you in a direction where you can find everything you need to know about your customers.
It’s a fine line, I know, and the temptation to stop at Facebook and Twitter is greater than the urge to scarf a Thickburger when the rational mind says, “Salad. Ranch on the side.” But these über-destinations are the mere jumping-off points, the home of cantaloupe parts and small cantaloupes alike. It’s up to you which you choose, and what you do with them next
But leave me out of it. I don’t like cantaloupe. And I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
I’m not any of those things. Oh, I’ll pet a golden retriever if it’s handy, and I’d drive a BMW if my income as a blogger let me afford one, but I’m not most any of the things the ad profilers and online targeters think I am. And too bad for them, because they’re investing a whole lot of money, and a goodly chunk of the southwest Asian ex-pat community, into convincing advertisers that I am.
Let me put it another way. One of my favorite marketing quotes of all time comes from that fabled business text – you see it at Wharton and Harvard all the time, tucked inside an upstanding copy of Practical Cost Accounting – The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, And Bubble-Gum Book.
The quote goes like this: “If you’re looking to build a large cantaloupe, it’s best to start with a small cantaloupe and not a collection of cantaloupe parts.”
Are you digging the marketing connotation? If not, let me place both my hands on your back and push. If you’re looking to know your customers, it’s better to really know some of your customers and not just be a collector of customer parts.
I’m an eclectic guy. If someone were to borrow my iPod, I guarantee they wouldn’t last five songs. Maybe the grunted Bahamian gospel songs would do it, or the scratchy Hawaiian-guitar songs, or the hardcore Cajun stuff, or maybe the one-man-band recordings of my own compositions. And if by miraculous means that wouldn’t drive them over the edge, I’d tailwhack them into the abyss with a 40-ounce chunk of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
My whole life’s like that, and targeted ads can’t keep up. In fact, all they do is amuse me with their Mr. Magoo-like focus on what they think matters to me right now. As sharpshooters, they’re Brazilian rainforest tribesmen trying to take down stealth bombers with blowguns. I checked out all the hot hatchbacks from Mazda to Subaru and bought a van. I don’t want a McPherson guitar. They’re $9,000 and they don’t even have the soundhole in the middle of the top. Today I want the album from Nat “King” Cole’s brother; yesterday I wanted The Kooks. At no time was I even remotely contemplating the new release from Sugarland.
However, what I wouldn’t mind is a company that wants to sell me something sending a person to sit across from me and ask me what I like and don’t like, and especially what I like and don’t like as pertains to their product.
And the funny thing is, as a marketer I want the same thing. In a world where quantitative data drives Mark Zuckerberg’s limo, I would much rather have one really good piece of qualitative data, shaded and nuanced beyond measurability. I would rather truly understand one of my customers than watch the numbers of the masses pass before me like Oompa Loompas.
I was going to call this decision is a no-brainer, but actually it’s the antithesis of a no-brainer, which I suppose would make it a “brainer” if that term didn’t sound … well, like it was created by someone with no brain. Emotional connections are formed in shades and nuances, and once purchases move outside of the sustaining-basic-needs range, emotional connections are the driver.
And they’re not just the driver of a single purchase; they’re the driver of repeat purchases, which are the Treasure of the Sierra Madre to most sellers of stuff. And they’re not even just that: They’re the foundation on which Apple was built, and Starbucks, and Fender, and Gucci and Harley-Davidson and Disney and all the other brands with Fill-In-The-Blank Stores on Times Square – not to mention Times Square itself. Hey, an iPod is a limited-access hard drive in a box. Starbucks is a cup of coffee. The head says you need a cup of coffee (especially this morning); the heart says you need a Starbucks.
The problems with going qualitative are pretty obvious, and never more so than when you’re scanning the columns to either side of whatever you’re trying to read on the internet. Qualitative is pretty much numbers-proof. Hard data can’t be captured from qualitative research any better now than it could be back in the days when advertising two-stepped to the theme from “Bewitched,” less Elizabeth Montgomery and the elephants in the living room. And the major selling point of today’s fin-de-siècle media landscape is that everything can be measured.
Not yet. IBM may have invented a computer that can beat Ken Jennings at “Jeopardy!”, but it has no idea how Jennings feels about that. Could be that Jennings will now devote his entire life to defeating the computer, riffing on Boris Karloff one minute and playing Rocky the next. Running up the library steps and raising your arms exultantly may take on a whole new meaning.
Qualitative also requires a different sort of front-end work. Instead of tapping the masses’ data vein and just letting it pour into a bottle, qualitative requires endless sorting through the flow to find the killer T-cell.
What’s interesting is that the electronic landscape exudes qualitative potential like Sarah Palin exudes faux compassion. And Oil of Olay. The experts and agencies who view the internet as a sea of quantitative data aren’t wrong per se; they’re just missing the ocean of qualitative data right next door. Twitter and Facebook are the keys to a qualitative castle that will not – I repeat, will not – tell you everything you need to know about your customers, but will point you in a direction where you can find everything you need to know about your customers.
It’s a fine line, I know, and the temptation to stop at Facebook and Twitter is greater than the urge to scarf a Thickburger when the rational mind says, “Salad. Ranch on the side.” But these über-destinations are the mere jumping-off points, the home of cantaloupe parts and small cantaloupes alike. It’s up to you which you choose, and what you do with them next
But leave me out of it. I don’t like cantaloupe. And I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Leonardo da WHO?
Knute Rockne would have you believe there’s a direct connection between success in football and success in business, but since he’s dead you’ll have to believe me. There is a direct connection between success in football and success in business.
However, the direct connection is not always the one you think.
Here; let me explain.
A week ago the home team, the Wisconsin Badgers, played in the Rose Bowl against the mighty Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University.
Now, far be it from me to disparage the institution that brought the football world Doak Walker and Sammy Baugh (not to mention Tonsillitis Johnson and Artis Toothis from Dan Jenkins’ delightful quasi-sequel to Semi-Tough, Life Its Ownself). However, Wisconsin didn’t exactly put its best foot forward in Pasadena.
The mighty mighty Badgers made it to the Rose Bowl by virtue of the off-tackle play and pretty much just the off-tackle play. You can read more about that over in the football blog (football-1-stick-gum.blogspot.com), but the idea is that Wisconsin built up a Rembrandt offense – painting and only painting, and furthermore only paintings of the off-tackle play.
The problem with that is Paul Chryst, the Badgers’ offensive coordinator, wasn’t happy being Rembrandt and running a Rembrandt offense. He wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci and invent the helicopter, too. He wanted to run bubble screens and skinny posts and toss sweeps just to show he could, and he wound up losing the most important game of his life because he couldn’t just face facts and be Rembrandt.
In terms of his job, Paul Chryst makes a great Rembrandt but a lousy Leonardo, and that got me thinking: What do you do as a marketing professional when a genuine Leonardo appears in your midst?
In terms of his job, Paul Chryst makes a great Rembrandt but a lousy Leonardo, and that got me thinking: What do you do as a marketing professional when a genuine Leonardo appears in your midst?
You know the marketing type: the person who can bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan, the person not only equally adept at research and product design and creative, but so overdept that they’re better at all three things than any one person in your department is good at one of them.
The easy answer is just to defer to them and let them do everything. That’s what I do, for I love the easy answer the way a wino loves muscatel.
However, I also acknowledge there are big problems with that, starting with the fact that letting them do everything runs like Cam Newton over every process and workflow in your organization.
Now, workflows and processes and I get along about as well as Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, but I have to say if you want your own personal series called The Office renewed it’s probably not the best idea to ignore them entirely, even in the face of greatness.
The trick is to maximize use of your renaissance person’s skills without pushing aside everyone else in your department, and fostering the impression that you respect The Way Things Get Done Around Here, even if The Way Things Get Done Around Here is that nothing gets done around here.
Unfortunately, there’s no shining path to enlightenment in a case like this. What you do depends on the temperament of the individual, the collective mood of the department, and the culture of the organization as a whole.
It’s important that the factors be considered in that order, though, starting with the individual. The No. 1 question is whether you want this person in your department long-term. I know the temptation is to say, “This person is a fargin’ genius! Why would I not want them in my department?”
Because they know they’re a fargin’ genius, for one. Because their fargin’ geniusness disrupts everyone around them, for another. Because what your department and your organization needs right now is not genius but order – and there are times even an old chaos-theory guy like myself would take order over brilliance. When an advertising campaign has already been launched and simply needs to be maintained, for instance. When there’s a whole lot of gruntwork to be done and a shortage of grunts, for another. Geniuses tend to rebel at gruntwork, or do it so haphazardly you’d think it was done by a goat – and not one of the better-educated goats.
Assuming the renaissance individual is capable of working productively in a team setting, the next step is to build a department so that everyone’s happy and the best talents are best utilized.
I’m a big proponent of ownership. I believe an organization functions most effectively when everyone is given ownership of a piece. It can be a tiny piece, but it’s theirs and they have control over every phase of it – including deciding where the money is going to be spent. If you own the hood ornament on the company limo and you’re given the power to spend money on its upkeep, you’re going make sure it’s the best hood ornament in the universe, even better than the Petty Girl ornaments on the old Nashes.
As it applies to the renaissance individual, give them a little piece of everything from your department – or better yet, give them ownership of one entire marketing program, top to bottom, start to finish. Remember Standard Oil; vertical integration can work even better than horizontal integration in the proper setting.
Organizations are sort of the anti-Paul Chryst. They refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a Leonardo in their midst. It’s understandable; organizational behavior is all about predictability, and genius is by nature unpredictable.
Given that, if a master of all trades should materialize in your midst like The Last Mimzy the best approach may be to pretend to the organization that such a phenom does not exist at all. It certainly expedites things. Things have come to a pretty pass when you have to hide such a light under a bushel, but considering that most organizations operate by shoving people into silos it’s not unexpected.
So to bring it all back home, the connection between success in football and success in business is in recognizing your Rembrandts and your da Vincis, and not allowing one to be the other.
Good luck with that. And Go Badgers!
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