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.
Friday, May 13, 2011
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!
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Here's Your Christmas Bonus
Sorry, gang, but I'm taking a short break from Here Lies Marketing, both because of the holidays and because I have a kids' book that was just released titled Jake The Grizz And The World's Fastest Snowboard that I should probably help market. If you want to know more about the book check my LinkedIn or Facebook pages. Until the next time, thanks, and Happy Holidays!
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