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“Can I get you a Starbucks?”
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Recently I referred to Mark J. Penn’s book “Microtrends” about the notion of consumers sub-segmenting themselves into niches. It is something that I firmly believe in but that being said, I think there are also what I like to refer to as “embedded” brands. My question to any readers of this post is there still such a thing as embedded brands?
What are embedded brands? They are just that, embedded into our consciousness. They are our default brands. They are the reason why companies like P&G, Kraft, J&J, SC Johnson, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and others have such a stronghold on certain categories.
Embedded brands are generally mundane brands. Things like toothpaste or laundry detergent or dish soap. Brands like Tide or Palmolive might be embedded brands. They are brands you don’t think about but interact with every day.
They are brands that enter our language. Brands such as Google. “Google it.” Starbucks has become a simple noun as opposed to a proper noun. “Hey, I’m going to get a Starbucks, can I get you anything.” Regionally being in the New England area, you will often hear people ask if they can get you a “Dunkin’s”.
They are brands that we might have adopted generationally. Our parents used it and perhaps even our grandparents before them. There is generally a perceived acceptance of quality and/or value. They are top-of-mind brands. They are safe brands. They are brands that can recover quickly from the worst of public relations debacles. They are brands we grew up with. Generally they are practical brands. They are safe.
There might be up to two embedded brands in any category. An example might be Crest versus Colgate.
However what happens to embedded brands when we consider how much the marketplace and the consumer has evolved?
There is so much more to a brand promise today than there ever was before and there are so many more influences on choice. Just think about how much the two little words “Eco” or “organic” have impacted the landscape for any myriad of products.
Subconsciously or not, brands are a representation of ourselves and as we as consumers continue to evolve and our sensibilities mature so too will our reliance on embedded brands.
What are your thoughts? What are other embedded brands?
David Lubars Thinks You’re Dumb
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I belong to a group on LinkedIn called “Re-inventing the Advertising Agency Business Model”.
Here is where my advertising and marketing brethren pontificate on the future of advertising. In my mind it’s a useful exercise if only someone would actually do anything about it.
Lately, this issue is one of the most widely discussed topics in the marketing/advertising community. Forrester has several reports on the matter. Fast Company is planning to dedicate the December/January issue to the “tumultuous state of advertising.” As a part of this issue they recently asked the three top creatives of three very different agencies to visually demonstrate the future of advertising.
David Lubars, BBDO’s chairman and chief creative officer said this, “Everything will continuously change, but people will always stay the same. Go back 70 years, go ahead 50 years, a human is a human. There are primal things that will always drive us: Will this product be better, will it help me succeed, will it make me more attractive? So the technology and the way we to speak to people will change, but those fundamentals will never change.” How he visually represented this is pictured above.
Herein lies the disconnect between the consumer and marketers.
One of my previous blog posts was about the chaos that is today’s consumer marketplace. These days we can’t even agree whether or not to call ourselves consumers. Alex Bogusky wonders if the term is a dirty word. Grant McCracken offers the term “multipliers.” No matter what, they’re far more diverse, sophisticated and interesting than we’ve ever given them credit for. And while we try various new means of reaching consumers such as geo-tagging, QR codes, harnessing viral and so forth, at the end of the day on the whole, we default to the same old same old. No disrespect to David Lubars. I don’t even know the guy and am not so sure they’d let me in the building but the same old same old is generally what agencies like BBDO produce. Advertising to the lowest common denominator.
Don’t get me wrong, BBDO has done some amazing work and continues to do so and the sheer size of BBDO globally is beyond intimidating. Nevertheless all too often it seems like big agencies are in protectionist mode as the biggest purveyors of disruption marketing.
Every day, the 30-second spot is becoming less and less relevant. Commercials are background noise. Banner ads have become plain beige wallpaper. Brian Morrissey recently pointed out that click through rates on banner ads have stabilized. Phew. Good. At .09 percent. Ummm Houston… we have a problem.
Grant McCracken has a wonderful section in his book “Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living Breathing Corporation” where he refers to the “American scholar Lewis Mumford [who] offered his vision of the world created by commerce.” It looks something along the lines of the set of “The Truman Show”. As McCracken says, “This became the intellectuals favorite thing to say about popular culture: that culture touched by commerce must be diminished by it,” when in fact the exact opposite has happened. So while Lubars would have you believe that we as consumers are primal and simple the reality is we have evolved considerably. Sure there are ways to simplify explaining consumer purchase behavior but in general consumers are extraordinarily complex.
In Mark J. Penn’s book “Microtrends: Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes” he says, “With the availability of choice has come a rise in individuality. And with the rise of individuality has come a rise in the power of choice. The more choices people have, the more they segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches of society.” In his book he offers glimpses into 82 of these “niches”. To me, that’s relatively daunting.
We talk about the notion of true change but the reality is we continue to produce mediocre dumbed-down work largely at the request of the client.
Agencies are still effectively layers upon layers of management with peer-to-peer alignment with clients. That being said, clients haven’t asked for it to change much. When the ads aren’t performing, fire the agency!
In my humble opinion it’s going to take CEO/CFO level leadership on the corporate side to force their CMOs and marketing organizations out of their comfort zones to explore agencies with new business models and to change the way in which they interact with those agencies and who takes responsibility for idea creation. And to consider bringing some of those people who generate ideas in-house.
I don’t think there is one standard “agency of the future”. I think there will be numerous solutions providers who all find unique ways to solve client’s problems and I think the more flexible and nimble those types of “agencies” are the better they will succeed.
And in fact according to Fast Company, Kraft appears to be on the cusp of doing it.
“For the enterprising client that can see clearly through the chaos, this new world holds promise. Kraft, for instance, has assembled a growing Rolodex of 70 new specialist partners. This isn’t some fringe brand — it’s Kraft, the country’s largest food marketer, which spends some $1.6 billion on marketing every year. The company is so open to new thinking that it recently hired a startup called GeniusRocket to develop a new campaign for the relaunch of its Athenos Hummus.”
My bet is that agencies will look a lot more like production companies and content will be king. I am also betting that audience segmentation will be far less about traditional demographics (age/race/HHI) and will be more about lifestyle/lifestage/interests. As we know Facebook is betting most heavily on “groups” and I guarantee you they will mine the data of the largest groups and offer up “access” to the largest groups at a steep premium. Social media in general has proven itself as a place where people with like interests congregate irrelevant of race or household income but don’t think for a second the consumer isn’t hip to what’s going on. We as marketers must be respectful and creative as to how we segment consumers.
May the best content win.
In Defense of Print
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One of my previous posts was about how we view written content via mobile devices. It got me to thinking about the debate of whether or not “print is dead?” This too is a question pondered by Stephanie (@stooffi) from the Penn-Olson blog and in which I’ve borrowed some points of data from. It’s also contemplated by Steve Laube in another excellent post.
They both share my sentiments that they don’t see print going the way of the dodo however we differ somewhat in our rationales. What I’d like to do here is offer some observational reasons as to why I think print isn’t dead to augment Stephanie and Steven’s very good more data driven arguments.
If you subscribed to conventional wisdom you might think that let’s say that within 10 years magazines would be ancient history with books to follow shortly behind them. You might think that certainly about newspapers and there is a decent case for that.
Some quick stats to initially contradict those who firmly believe print is bound for extinction (from @stooffi via Sketchee):
- 93% of adults in the U.S. read magazines
- 96% of adults under 35 in the U.S. read magazines
- Book sales are up 11.4%
- Sales for higher-education publishing have increased 27.4%
- E-book sales have increased 204% (keep in mind this is a category that didn’t exist a mere few years ago so I’d take that growth with a grain of salt)
- 60% of consumers say they plan to purchase a tablet device within three years (what isn’t known is if they say they will purchase that device in place of a laptop)
Considering the data alone, I’m not so quick to put a nail in print’s coffin. With this being said, I’d like to offer a defense of print that is more observational relative to behavior/culture.
The first is case for print is that print is tactile. People like tactile. People comment on things like paper stock and gloss or matte finish with reverence.
The second is people like pictures. Big glossy, shiny, pretty pictures.
To be fair, I think it’s necessary to place a distinction on content that can be read versus content that can be viewed. The former would be lifestyle/niche magazines and the latter being more business, news and to some degree sports publications.
Logic would tell me that business, news and sports news magazines very well might have one foot in the grave because I think there’s a dramatic shift occurring in how people consume that type of content as my previous post “Where I’d like to read it” would suggest. As I write this, US News & World Report announced it is shuttering its print edition. And to add even further support this consider this recent article from Mashable.com clearly indicating that among smartphone users mobile is exactly how they like to consume.
However, I think we’re highly unlikely to see the demise of magazines entirely anytime soon. In fact in July 2010 there were 68 new magazine titles added versus 34 in July 2007. The difference is that most of the new titles were largely specialty magazines or magazines to serve a certain niche (often content to be viewed).
Consider a reason why? Have you been in a teenager’s room lately? If you’re looking at BOP or Tiger Beat online via an iPad, you can’t rip out the picture of Justin Bieber or Katy Perry and put it on your wall. Or rip a picture out from eurotuner of that sweet tuned BMW M3. Or the rad picture of Shaun White flying out of a half-pipe.
In addition, I believe a good amount of people still appreciate the “coffee table” book. This and certain magazines are a way we brand ourselves. For many they’re forms of “decoration” carefully placed around the home.
Chief among the reasons I don’t see print as going away anytime soon is that we haven’t changed how the youngest learn to consume print. Yes, my two year old niece can take out her Dad’s iPad, turn it on, flip three screens and start a game but how she learns to consume print will likely not change anytime soon. In fact, recent research would suggest that college students haven’t taken to eReaders as expected. And this might be a logical place to begin to see a cultural shift. I’m still not entirely sure we’ve crossed the chasm with eReaders/tablets. There I said it.
Granted my father-in-law is 74 and has had a Kindle since its inception. This inspired me to ask a few people with eReaders why they bought it. Number one reason? Because they travel a lot and that way they don’t have to carry a physical book. Airport bookstores consider yourselves warned. However, this lumps those who purchase eReaders/tablets into a specific category. In this case the eReader fill a specific need that people are willing to change how they consume content.
I’ll offer one final example of how embedded the way we learn to consume written content is.
I have two daughters ages 7 and 4. The two of them participate in a program called the “Thousand Book Club”.
This is a program where at their elementary school there are some 200 bags of books. Each bag has 10 children’s books. The goal of the program is to either read (or be read to) 1000 books by the time they finish kindergarten. It’s a wonderful program as you might suspect but the point is that it’s a heavily quantitative experience with books.
At the end of the day we’ve only barely begun to change how we interact with written content and until that happens drastically, I don’t see print going away.
What do you think?
Thinking Creatively About Consumer Segmentation
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Today, one can argue that the consumer marketplace is exceptional fractured. As a society we may do things in groups but what these groups look like has changed dramatically. Companies segment consumers all sort of ways but it generally involves falling back on household income, gender and race or ethnicity. For the purposes of any efficiency in marketing it is still required to find the greatest number of individuals to market to. But the reality is as most commercials will show, there’s really very little actual insight there.
Take a look at most commercials and they either simply push a product or play off a general consumer sentiment. Beyond that there is usually very little there to actually connect with the consumer.
Not too long ago I was approached by the agency for New Era, the baseball hat and apparel company. They said that there was a flaw in their segmentation of customers and wanted help understanding what it was and perhaps a better way to segment their customers. They segmented them by “Urban”, “Suburban” and “Fan”. The flaw was simple. You could reside in suburbia, have urban sensibilities and be a fan. Furthermore it didn’t really tell you anything about their customers. We designed a segmentation based on how people wore their hats. The initial breakdown was as follows:
So how does this new possible segmentation inform?
It can inform in multiple ways. It enables us to truly understand the consumer and what social groups they might belong to. Are they action sports kids? Maybe. But that’s not good enough. Because there are sub-cultures within action sports groups. Are they action sports hip-hop kids or action sports metal kids? BIG DIFFERENCE. Are they college frat boys? Are they girls? Are they “rad” girls or “bad” girls or “good” girls or “emo” or “goth” girls or “preppy” girls?
If you map the types of hats to sales you can identify patterns or anomalies that will heavily dictate what and how much product you might supply to various retailers. You can identify where you might participate in or sponsor events. You can identify which radio stations you might advertise on or if you do at all. The insights and variables are virtually endless.
As the consumer landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, it’s not something to be scared of or intimidated by but it is necessary to get out of your traditional comfort zone and start being creative with understanding your customers. And funny thing is, the more you actually show that you truly understand your customer, the greater loyalty you will inspire.
Leadership in Unexpected Places – Things You can Learn from “The Walking Dead”
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As I gear up for tonight’s episode of AMC’s “The Walking Dead”, I was struck by something from last week’s episode.
If you haven’t been watching the new AMC series, the story is that a Sherriff awakens from a Coma to discover that the world has been overwrought by flesh eating zombies. Simple premise however character development is really quite excellent as you’d expect from AMC.
In last week’s episode there is a scene where a young man in his mid to late teens is being asked to investigate if there is a safe way out a certain situation. In this scene he’s reluctant because he’s typically been by himself and ever since he’s been a part of a group all hell has broken loose.
The Sherriff defaults to be a natural leader and tells the kid, to speak his mind. An interesting dynamic is taking place here and isn’t to go unnoticed.
He basically says he’ll do it but if he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it his way. The Sherriff agrees on behalf of the group. What happens next is interesting. With tactical precision this “kid” proceeds to say what he’s going to do and how and then gives precise orders to everyone else. Everyone has a specific job for a reason.
If I didn’t know any better, this kid has probably played a game or two of Halo or Ghost Recon.
This moment would not have struck me if I hadn’t actually witnessed something similar a several years ago (sans the zombies).
I was at a bachelor party in Montreal and a bunch of 35 year old guys were going to try our hand at paintball. We’re all smart, well educated guys with a passing interest in military and cop movies and so forth and we thought we’d do pretty well. Especially when we saw who we’d be competing against. A bunch of scrappy 16-18 year olds with pimples and ill-fitting pants. We would fail to observe that they all brought their own equipment and that they were discussing strategy from the moment they got there.
The game would commence and ten well-educated 35 year olds would be “dead” within the first 5 minutes of the game. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for these kids.
How the hell did this happen?
It’s simple. Most of these kids grew up not having read one Tom Clancy book but have all mastered every one of the Tom Clancy X-Box games and had done it in “groups” via headset with other kids all over the world. Not only were they able to live out close quarters combat via first-person shooting games and mastery of strategy but they were able to live it out real-time as well via paintball. And they were good. After two games of getting our asses summarily handed to us we did exactly what you might expect. We bribed two of their best kids to trade teams if only to save our pride. Then we proceeded to let a 17 year old tell each one of us where to go and what to do.
This was hardly a life or death situation but we recognized that left to our own devices we didn’t stand a chance. While it might seem counterintuitive for a bunch of type-A alpha males to default to some kid, it was the smartest thing we could have done.
We won by a hair.
So when the world is being overrun by Zombies… I’m looking for those guys.
Where I’d like to Read it
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I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. All three of which I access most often from my phone.
I read blogs. I read industry rags. I read magazines. I read the newspaper. About the only thing I don’t read very often are books. Often because I’m too busy reading other things. Or watching and observing TV, things or people.
Most of the things I read, I read digitally and a lot of the time I do that from my phone (BlackBerry Torch).
What I do most often besides make calls, email and text… is read.
I’ll occasionally look at a YouTube video but I really don’t foresee watching TV or a movie from my phone even if I could.
Twitter is a place where you can connect with people from various affinity groups at 140 characters a tweet. However, for me and I think many who utilize Twitter in a professional capacity it’s become my de facto clipping service. I can’t remember the last time I’ve actually held a physical printed edition of a newspaper in my hands. I read the New York Times on my phone. In my opinion the New York Times mobile edition is best in class. Here are some others that get good marks in their mobile form (please feel free to comment and add to this list)
- Mashable.com
- Boston.com (Boston Globe)
- Wired.com
- CBSSports.com
- AdAge.com
- Dictionary.com
- Amazon.com
- ReadWriteWeb.com
To be fair there are others with good mobile versions but oddly enough all too often when I’m pushed content via Twitter I get dumped in to the full site. I clicked on thirteen various links and ten out of thirteen times was led to the “full” site. Only ReadWriteWeb.com, Mashable.com and Wired.com brought me to the mobile site. This is especially true with blogs. This usually means trying to resize it to fit my browser page and to do this without having to scroll left to right and top to bottom. A frustrating exercise that usually leads me park the content via Instapaper.com. Instapaper is a helpful tool but should be unnecessary.
Now some might argue, “Well that’s your phone’s fault.” I’m not quite sure whose fault it is but I can say that if you’re to believe most advertisers from wireless carriers I’d venture a guess that within three to five years the ONLY phones that will be available to consumers will be smartphones. Wireless carriers and manufacturers have us watching football games and TV shows on our phones and doing these elaborate searches and posting and sending pictures.
Consider some thoughts:
- A recent tweet from @BrettGreene suggests that “Within 3-5 years, mobile devices will be the FIRST screen for users accessing the Web. #ProfsChat (via @davidoxstein @CKsays)”
- According to the Twitter Blog, “Total mobile users has jumped 62 percent [April 2010-Sept. 2010], and, remarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start on mobile.” Roughly about half of all Twitter users do so from a third-party mobile app.
- @jmoore700 who is the Chief Media Officer for the ad agency Mullen recently tweeted, “The power of mobile, 200mm people now use Facebook through its mobile app, a threefold increase since last year.”
Now most importantly consider the following two graphics from a recent study done by Handmark recently featured in a Mashable.com article.
Overall, it would seem to me that we have a long way to go before the way it’s portrayed that we’ll interact with our phones is actually how we’ll interact with our phones.
That being said, I think the data is a pretty big wake-up call that content providers need to be in lockstep with carriers and manufacturers. The companies that do this early and well (in addition to providing good content of course) will be the first to create the most significant brand loyalty in the mobile medium.
Why Twitter Really Works
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Recently I came across the following Tweet:
“RT @MalikYoba: RT…Twitter makes me like strangers I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.”
I couldn’t help but agree but I didn’t know why. That was until I received a copy of Grant McCracken’s new book, “Chief Culture Officer”. This is an excellent read named one of the best Innovation books of the year by Business Week and one of the best Big Idea books by CEO Magazine.
But I digress.
In “Chief Culture Officer” McCrackan references the old Nike ad “Tag”. I remember the ad vividly.
In it is a live version of tag played out in the middle of the day on urban streets. Mr. McCrackan offers a few theories on why this ad resonated and what it meant to us culturally. The third of those theories is what he calls the notion of the “generous stranger”.
Although referring to the ad, he might as well be referring to Twitter as well in saying,
“’Tag’ evoked a third trend we might call the ‘generous stranger’. For many of us first notice came in the form of a bumper sticker that read ‘Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty,’ a phrase so influential it now has its own Wikipedia entry. Several thousand years of cultural practice and religious teaching had encouraged us to think of generosity as a personal gesture that passed between known parties. The ‘generous stranger’ trend suggested that it was better when things passed between perfect strangers. “
And thus Twitter suddenly makes perfect sense.
Leaves
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Recently I was having a conversation with a colleague. She’s a director of marketing at a large .com enterprise. We’ll call her Julie.
She was describing to me how hard her job is these days and how little confidence she has in decision making.
When I look at advertising today and most marketing for that matter I believe that this is a sentiment shared by many a CMO/Director of Marketing.
We’d like to say there is tremendous innovation going on but if I’m not mistaken, didn’t the Super Bowl ads sell out a full three months ahead of schedule this year?
If you live in places like New England, around this time of year you’re faced with having to deal with leaves. The once beautiful foliage is now dispersed all over your yard and to preserve your green grass you’re advised to do something with it. Techniques vary, my personal favorite is to pay someone else to deal with it but my wife has frugal sensibilities and thus there I am on a lovely Sunday with this 2-stroke contraption strapped to my back known as a leaf blower. This is hardly a precision instrument but useful.
As leaves are flying about it dawned on me, this is what Julie was talking about. This is what consumer marketing has become. An exercise in trying to corral leaves.
Once upon a time, they sat on trees and were easily categorized. Oak, Maple, Redwood, Japanese Maple and so on.
But then they all changed colors, fell to the ground and there was no order anymore.
And so is the job of anyone who works in marketing these days. To try and create a natural, efficient and sensible order to the chaos of these leaves being blown amok.
Why Apple Shouldn’t Worry About Anyone Except Itself
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Several years ago I was with a good friend and mentor Paul McKinnon. He used to run human resources for Dell. A job which he now does for all of Citigroup. He’s a very smart and affable guy with grad degrees in behavioral science from MIT.
At the time we were talking about Mac vs PC and he said this… “You know the Apple market represents about 5% of market share for all personal computers. Always have and always will. We really don’t worry about them.” In other words, they kind of just let them have it.
Obviously Apple is a much different company from when I had this conversation but I think you’ll see the point.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Apple and Steve Jobs. Well there’s always a lot of talk about Apple and Steve Jobs. But in particular three things struck me.
- The first was a tweet I saw that “60% of Apple’s revenue was from products that didn’t exist three years ago”.
- The second was an article about whether iPhone’s “closed” or Android’s “open” would prevail.
- And the third was Steve Jobs comments about his “competition” and subsequent feedback from CEOs from RIM and Android.
Here’s the deal. Apple innovates. Period. The end. Everyone else essentially copies. Apple sets the standard and everyone else tries to reach an acceptable level to be adopted by the masses.
The question for Apple is if they’re content being that company. That’s where Steve Jobs’ comments perplex me a bit.
In my opinion, the best businesses in the world are the ones in which the CEO (and employees) know what business they’re really in. It’s not so much as knowing what to do but rather knowing what not to do.
In this case I think it’s for Apple to not even think about BlackBerry or Android or the other tablet devices and accept its position as a company of innovation. There will always be a market for those that just have to have it. The key is for shareholders to recognize this as well and not pressure Apple to be something it isn’t. Yes it’s a trade-off but in my mind a critical one. Author Kevin Maney does a great job talking about this in his book aptly titled just that… “Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Other’s Don’t”.
Because at the end of the day, as Harvard Business School Professor Yoffie said: “Apple will lose its overall leadership, but maintain a share of the market that could easily be in the 25 percent to 30 percent range… That’s enough to sustain a very large and very profitable business.”
“When I was four years old
they tried to test my I.Q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong…”Ani DiFranco
As the 2010 Census is being compiled one thing that we can most certainly be assured of is that we’ll probably recognize America as considerably different then it was say 20 years ago. We will see far more examples of other races, religions and ethnicities. While the census is used for lots of very important things, in the past it has been the single greatest overall driver of marketing decisions.
This being the case we can also be assured that marketing to said demographics will become increasingly challenging as well as remarkably inefficient and hardly cost effective. This is in large part because of what I like to refer to as “cross-culturalization”. This is simply where people from multiple ethnicities, races and religions share like interests.
In the past, marketers have traditionally marketed to people by finding the most similarities possible to reach the largest swath of people generally via demographics and household income otherwise known as “buying power”. Just consider the term, “general consumer”.
Is there really still such a thing?
Furthermore how people define themselves will hardly be answered by the census.
Zuckerburg would have you believe that Facebook’s fate to continue to remain relevant rests largely with the growing of the “Groups” functionality. No doubt he’s read Seth Godin’s “Tribes”. Interestingly enough today there was an editorial in the New York Times by David Brooks about “Flock Comedies” and shows like Dick Van Dyke, The Waltons and The Cosby Show being replaced by shows such “Friends”, “Sex and the City”, “How I Met Your Mother” and “Glee”. The editorial makes the argument that these “…shows also serve one final purpose. They help people negotiate the transition between dyadic friendships and networked friendships.”
Arguably the Internet has exploited people’s ability to group themselves and congregate together well before Facebook. Following a blog might be the simplest means of identifying with an interest or a group.
One question Facebook may want to confront is whether a group’s identity or brand is diminished by it being on Facebook. By its sheer size, Facebook is the Wal-Mart of social media regardless of whether or not it cares to admit it. ASMALLWORLD would not be the brand that it is if it were on Facebook. Perhaps there could be opportunities for Facebook to private label groups able to utilize Facebook’s functionality. But, let’s be honest, one thing about associating with a certain group is the notion of exclusion and to be a part of a certain group requires a degree of legitimacy or street cred.
Then there is the very real fact that there are some groups that people don’t want to be openly associated with. Take being gay, in which Facebook was recently accused of likely “outing” gays.
One of the simplest descriptions of Facebook I ever heard was, “It’s a TV channel I can turn on to see what my friends are doing.”
So let’s run with that. One could make the assertion that Facebook is really akin to an original big three TV network before cable where at any given point a marketer can reach the largest number of people. Let’s call Google the largest of the big three. Google however will always have search relevance for its ad platform. With Facebook though it has to provide relevance by interest. And here Facebook is actually becoming cable before our very eyes with groups becoming channels such as the Disney channel or Spike or Lifetime. However the same way marketers struggle to get a relevant message across requires understanding your audience.
And this is where groups come in.
What Zuckerberg isn’t saying is that basically groups will become a giant ad serving platform. Take for example the group “Mom’s Who Need Wine” which has about 336K+ followers on Facebook. Not too shabby a number, right? And where better to offer up any number of specific offers, Groupon like capabilities and so on based on hosts of data and data mining and insights to prospective advertisers.
At its core, I think Facebook is right culturally about the concept of groups. But I think Facebook has some considerable uphill battles. One is trust. The other is why Facebook? Facebook Groups is where the wannabes will live. The legit groups will be places like ASMALLWORLD or ShredUnion. As an advertiser, do you want to be where trends begin or where trends go to die (e.g. Wal-Mart). For that I suggest you ask Grant McCracken, author of “Flock and Flow”. Furthermore, if you start a group like “Moms Who Need Wine” why should Facebook make all the revenue off a group they didn’t even start?
Zuckerburg and the team at Facebook will position groups as what Facebook users want. And truth be told, that’s a load of crap. Groups is a way to make money. In interviews with Facebook staffers, nobody talks about the needs or wants of consumers… they talk about not being “… surprised if only 5% or 10% create groups,” noting “that’s 25 to 50 million people — not a small number by any standard.” Those are Nielsen numbers. Another factor to consider is what are real groups such as “Mom’s Who Need Wine” versus fad groups such as “Sorry But I Can’t Hear You Over This SunChips Bag” which currently has more than 51,000 friends.
So the question is what consumers do. And that, as I think we’re readily aware by this point, is anyone’s guess.
Is “Customer Service” Marketing?
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Ok.
So this is hardly a new topic but I thought I’d throw my two cents in there after an experience at an AT&T store the other day.
I was in need of a new phone but I had been avoiding going to AT&T because I wasn’t sure if I was eligible for an upgrade and didn’t want to pay full price for a phone. I was avoiding the store because I didn’t want to have a fight about being an AT&T customer for the better part of 12 years and why couldn’t they give me the promotional price for a new BlackBerry Torch.
I was avoiding the store to AVOID customer service.
However being at my wits end with my failing phone, I put my head down and headed in. Fortunately I was eligible for an upgrade and actually had a very good customer experience.
The same can’t be said for the lady next to me however. This poor woman was from another state visiting a sick relative in the hospital. Her phone died and being unable to fix it and having no contact with home she came into the store. The staff at the store was also unable to fix it and said she would need a new phone but she was two months and a day away from being eligible for an upgrade and thus would have to pay full price ($220) to replace her phone.
As my lovely sales agent was getting me all set with my new phone I stood there and listened to this woman exasperated deal with two sales agents and one customer service representative on the phone to lobby to be granted an exclusion to get a new phone. Ultimately she was given a new phone with a new contract but what it took to get there seems preposterous.
I went into the AT&T store fully ready to take my business to Verizon and although I left moderately pleased, I still left with an overall negative impression.
Folks. Customer service IS your brand.
Is “customer service,” marketing? You’re damn right it is.
A friend of mine, Joe Cronin, owns a company called Edvisors.com (@edvisors). It’s a college student marketing company.
(Full disclosure: Joe is a close personal friend and my company sub-leases space from him)
Joe started the company about 12 years ago by buying up just about every URL related to education and student loans and has built it into a nicely profitable business that employs about 12 people and has its own corporate foundation. The business is essentially an intermediary between college students and service providers. Joe is one of the nicest guys on the planet. His company doesn’t deal with shady lenders and a great deal of his sites are dedicated to helping people navigate the college universe.
He’s got a database of about 2 million students and pulls in about 150,000 new users each month. His site is the epitome of the little engine that could.
Early on when we moved into his office space we were in the kitchen and I noticed a lined piece of notebook paper on the fridge. I took a look and it was a handwritten, single spaced, double-sided letter from a college Sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering from Texas Tech University. He was writing to say thank-you.
First of all… who hand writes letters anymore? Let alone thank-you letters? To companies? Let alone college Sophomores?
This letter in particular was addressed to ScholarshipPoints.com. The way it works is simple.
1) Sign-up to ScholarshipPoints.com
2) Earn points by completing simple, fun activities (surveys, etc). Each point you earn is worth one entry into the free scholarship of your choice.
3) Enter your points into multiple scholarships, or use all of your points towards one free scholarship to increase your chance of winning.
The site has more than one million members and is growing at about a rate of 100,000 members a month. In 4 years they’ve given away more than 60 scholarships between $1,000 and $10,000.
I’ll share with you a few excerpts from this letter…
“Dear ScholarshipPoints.com management,
Though I had no specific individual to whom I could address this letter, I am hoping all of you have the chance to read it because I intend it for all of you. I am continually thankful for and impressed by Scholarship Points! The site is such a generous philanthropic venture… I hope to be a winner at Scholarship Points one day also, but I am most thankful for the incredible information provided on the site.
I have been “money-conscious” since early high-school, but Scholarship Points’ articles, which I discovered late in my first year of college, were the catalyst to my becoming money-responsible! The site is the reason I got my first credit card (Citi Dividends!) and a large contributing reason to my use of ING Direct Orange Savings. The resources on your site sparked my investment in myself and personal finance and this new learning is inspiring me to pay off my loans while in school and graduate debt free. I’m finally taking real responsibility for my money and am so thankful for the resources and encouragement I found at Scholarship Points.”
He then goes on to very graciously ask several questions about entrepreneurship. The folks at Edvisors did answer him back.
He closes by saying…
“I wish the very best for the Scholarship Points program and the various sister sites united under the Edvisors banner. I am incredibly grateful for all I’ve learned there and I hope to become a scholarship recipient. I know the others probably expressed gratitude for your program by which this short letter is overshadowed! I hope to hear back from you and until then, I am
Sincerely yours,
Dunte”
In my humble opinion, this is one of the best love letters to a company I’ve ever seen and the guy hasn’t even won a scholarship yet. That it comes from a Sophomore in college gives me hope for the future. But in all seriousness it demonstrates a few very powerful dynamics:
1) The power of a good idea and sound business strategy will win most of the time. @edwardboches had this to say in one of his recent blogs about Panera’s new non-profit endeavor, “This week’s Fast Company declared that the most important leadership quality a CEO can possess is creativity. Not operations. Not finance. Not management. Creativity. Creativity means breaking with the status quo, trying things that have never been done, innovating on a regular basis.”
2) Having a company with good core values will win most of the time and it starts with the leadership. Of course Joe desires to make money but it’s clear a greater motivation is to provide avenues for more kids to be able to have access to higher education. For the record, Joe’s dad was once a state secretary of education and a president of a local university. Education is in Joe’s DNA.
3) Consistently providing valuable, relevant and meaningful content will allow for a strong and meaningful relationship with the consumer.
4) You can do well by doing good.
Another Example of Not Getting It
Posted by: | CommentsCadillac broke new work today by BBH. All I have to say is, why?
This work is no better than the last few rounds of work by Modernista! or the work of their previous agency. I will give Modernista! props for the “My Cadillac Story” effort but Cadillac a thumbs down for abandoning it.
The line “Mark of Leadership” is meaningless especially when they’ve been playing catch-up to the Europeans, Japanese and now Korean’s (Hyundai Genesis) when it comes to quality. Simply saying it does not make it so. Sure the blokes at Top Gear found new love for the second generation CTS-V but they weren’t making apples-to-apples comparisons to other Euro (M5,RS4, C63)/Japanese (IS-F). The comments in the AdAge article are all sadly accurate. Probably the best comment was about the tagline being “destined for the ‘one year and out’ dumpster.”
Most importantly what tis shows me is that what Cadillac nor BBH seems to understand is that :30 spots aren’t necessarily the name of the game anymore. Start with a great product and build compelling content around that product at strategic touch-points. It’s great that Cadillac has a YouTube channel but judging from the total views of all of the work on their channel (885,329) the “content” is hardly compelling. You want compelling content? Have a look at Ken Block’s DC Shoes/Monster Energy Drink/Subaru“infomercial” which is at 14 million views and counting. The aggregate of the DCShoesFilm Channel is at 34 million views and counting.
Cadillac has a great story to tell. Did you know the gear shift pattern/pedal configuration as we know it is courtesy of Cadillac? It’s unfortunate that no one is able to help Cadillac try to tell it.
Before you all start to think this is going to be some freaky NSFW blog post, I assure you that’s not the case.
I will offer a disclosure that there are links to fun pop culture points of reference that might be deemed offensive. If you’re averse to strong language or content that might be deemed offensive, don’t click on them.
Lastly, I’m sure there will be plenty who will accuse this post of being simplistic, racist, enforcing stereotypes, short-sighted and I’m sure the list will go on. To you, I urge you to comment and make your case. What I can tell you for certain is that this post will pose far more questions than it answers but I look forward to a lively debate. And away we go…
Several years ago my wife had an opportunity to go to two sex toy parties.
The first was a portion of a bachelorette party among a group of women who were white and from well-to-do backgrounds. Picture the scene from the movie Old School with Andy Dick (except sans Andy Dick). Regardless, it was shall we say, tempered and at times awkward.
The second was among a very diverse group of women. One is the wife of a good friend who’s a local creative director. We’ll call her Allie. She’s Puerto Rican and Jewish and grew up on Manhattan’s lower East Side well before it was a fashionable place to be. She’s stunningly attractive and smart as a whip and has a mouth that would make a sailor blush. She could go to a Lisa Lampanelli show (strong language/content) and if Lampanelli started to give her the business as comedians are wont to do, Lampanelli would get it right back and the show would end with the two of them best friends. Allie is one of the funniest people I know by far. Among the other women at the party were a few women that I worked with and much like Allie would routinely make the guys in the agency feel like Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas when he enlists the services of Elizabeth Shue and she describes what she’s willing to do (strong language/content). There were also a handful of other women of various ethnicities, mostly Black and Hispanic and none afraid to make their opinions known.
My understanding about this second sex toy party was that it was remarkably graphic, honest and funny to the point that more than one woman had to excuse themselves to relieve themselves lest they soil a couch from laughing so hard.
What I find most interesting about the foray into this topic is that most will fail to ask the question, “Yes, but why?”
I met a sociology professor a few years ago and we were talking about a variety of things and I posed the question to him of “Why Jews were so intent on dating/marrying/procreating only other Jews?” I had dated a couple of Jewish women during college and after and was curious why the relationships seemed doom to fail. I naively believed what popular culture had told me. Nice Jewish boys want to marry their moms and nice Jewish girls want to be provided for the way their fathers had provided for them. The professor smirked and then provided a much simpler and enlightening answer. “If your race were almost systematically eliminated by a single force of evil and tyranny, wouldn’t you do anything in your power to restore the foundation of the lineage?”
I won’t digress into a debate of interracial dating in which all trends point to a ridiculous literal melting pot but I got his point. The insight was a much deeper understanding of what drove the behavior. And if I were tasked with creating advertising for a Jewish personals web site, that insight would no doubt influence the creative, perhaps not explicitly but at the very least tonally.
So my question about the sex toys party is yes, but why? Why was there such a remarkable difference?
Was it race, socio-economics, culture, birth order, a combination? Are white upper-class folks really so uptight and can’t let it all hang out? Are they inherently repressed? (strong language)
Are the Tyler Perrys or Tracy Morgans or Mo’Niques truly representative of black folks? I will say, put a bunch of black folks on a dance floor and we’ll make this summer’s most popular line dance look good. Still the question is valid, have black folks gotten white folks to chill out perhaps as Sin LaSalle played by Cedric the Entertainer from the movie “Be Cool” might suggest (strong language)?
To further confuse things, for the purposes of this post, let’s use the formal definitions of culture as:
- “the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.”
- “Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.”
In other words I’m not solely limiting culture to say that of “country of origin” which I believe is highly limiting. I myself would say that I’m defined by at least 10 different cultures/sub-cultures built up throughout my exposure to a variety of people and experiences throughout my life. This would include, Black culture specifically as it relates to the Civil Rights movement, Beat Generation writers, 60s drug culture, 80s preppy culture, 80s punk culture, early action sports culture, traditional sports culture, feminist culture, Italian-American culture, Higher Ed Academia and so on.
My wife was raised Catholic, the youngest of four kids. While young she knew modest beginnings having grown up in central Massachusetts to fiscally conservative parents. Her mom can reuse a sheet of tinfoil longer than anyone. As she got older however she became accustomed to a very fortunate lifestyle and was exposed to yacht clubs and country clubs. While she graduated from a regional high school outside of Worcester, MA, she summered on the Cape and graduated from the best private undergraduate and graduate schools and is considerably well traveled. She’s highly philanthropic and after college did Teach For America. Today she continues work as a guidance counselor at a struggling high school in a neighboring town that would literally qualify as “the other side of the tracks”. My wife has the gift of being universally and unconditionally accepting and accepted and can float from class sphere to class sphere effortlessly.
Knowing this let’s look at some similar themes of the two groups:
The first group was predominantly white women from the more insular communities in which my wife was a part. It’s accurate to say that this community represents the top five percent of the country from a socio-economic perspective. This is a group where I can attest first hand that there is a degree to what is deemed acceptable behavior/conduct.
If the second group was unified by any one thing, it is likely socio-economic. Not necessarily by current status but by background. Almost everyone in the group despite their current status came from relatively humble beginnings. Additionally, I suspect in some cases, birth order and gender played a role among several of the women in the second group as well including my wife. If you look at each of my wife’s siblings starting from the oldest, they are each more relaxed than the next with my wife being the most relaxed and most influenced (socially) by her older brother closest in age. Call it a stereotype but the most crass women I’ve ever known almost unanimously have at least one older brother.
Are there anomalies? Of course. Fellas, if you were going to Vegas for a guy’s weekend would you prefer to go with Clarence Thomas or Tracy Morgan. Ladies would you prefer a Vegas weekend with Condoleeza Rice or Mo’Nique? The former in each case have no doubt been taught and have continued to elect to conform to elite societal norms.
Maybe that’s my problem is my reluctance to conform to societal norms. But I digress.
As I said, this post creates far more questions than it answers and here’s short list of mine. Feel free to add, answer, debate.
- As a universal culture, are we becoming more relaxed and less pressured by societal constraints of certain etiquette?
- What are the drivers of relatively new found acceptance or the ability to feel less uncomfortable at things that a mere 10 years ago would make most squirm? Is it the effect of media in popular culture? Reality television?
- As a result of the impending Census outcome, how will we define cultural groups especially from a marketing perspective?
- There are no clear cut means of segmentation. There are always anomalies. Every segmentation is meant to ensure capturing the greatest number of people (customers) as possible. Will it be defined by country of origin? Generation? Race? Socio-economics?
- Will marketing segmentation exacerbate a class war, pitting the Wal-Marts against The Nordstrom’s?
- Will there be such a thing as “class acculturation” the way the there are degrees of acculturation among Asians and Hispanics?
- Will America be divided by level of educational attainment, as some suggest?
I’m not sure about the answers to all of the questions. I have a hypothesis or two but much remains to be seen about how nimble large corporations will be.
In any event, to pile on to the “stereotypes” as Mike Myers would say in his SNL “Coffee Talk” skits as Linda Richman…
“Discuss.”
Looking at the Past to Arrive at the Future
Posted by: | CommentsI’m a partner in a start-up agency called Pomegranate.
Like many of my brethren in the industry, we’re working hard to address the question of the business model as well as the compensation model. I think plenty of agencies have tried to address the compensation model (which in some instances led to huge industry shifts e.g. the segregation of media) but few have tackled the actual business model.
We’re not necessarily sure we’re going to create the template for the “agency of the future” but we’re certainly hoping to not look anything like a “traditional” agency. This is probably easier said than done but we’ll die trying and hopefully all remain housed, fed and clothed in the process.
Our bet is that it will look something like what Joseph Jaffe proposed which is sort of a hybrid model. Incidentally, Bud Caddell did a great blog post rounding up the latest and greatest pontifications on what the “agency of the future” will look like.
One of our key goals is to address the issue of extensive overhead. And not necessarily so we can put it back into our own pockets. Of course we’d like to make a nice living but don’t feel a need to be obscene.
In any event one of the first people recruited was a CFO. He’s hardly the CFO type actually but his acuity with all things dollars and cents (and other things too) is astounding. We also wanted someone from outside of the ad/marketing business. This was very much by design.
In recruiting someone with no real marketing experience let alone advertising experience required me giving him a sort of Agency 101 tutorial. This was a wonderfully helpful exercise for me because looking at the model of yesterday really got me to think about how and why we will do it differently today.
I’d love to get feedback and encourage discussion about what’s missing or am I completely off my rocker?
What drives costs at agencies is overhead. Space and people. Roughly 6-10% of an agency’s revenue goes to space. Every big agency is in A-class space and spends a boatload on it. Then it’s people who drive costs and everything essentially boils down to billable hours. (New business pitches drive costs as well but that’s a whole other blog post.)
Agencies have traditionally been built based on mediums (ways to reach the consumer) and there were four basic mediums:
· Advertising (TV and print)
· Direct marketing (direct mail, direct response, 800# call to actions)
· Public relations
· Digital (web sites)
There are also media companies which are responsible for buying ad media (places where the ads go e.g. TV, online magazines, sponsorships).
All of this is based on what’s known as disruption marketing. In other words, I as the consumer am interrupted from a program and fed an ad, like it or not. These days the world is moving more towards permission-based marketing. This is where I as the consumer am largely in control of which “content” ads or otherwise I’d like to see. There may still be some disruption marketing there but companies have to be much smarter about placement because if marketing is not aligned with content appropriately I’ll find something else to watch.
So what does this have to do with the hybrid approach? It’s acknowledged that for any client it’s imperative that we know our client’s business inside and out and we understand their customers and everything about those customers. However, gone are the days where we “push” a message out to the broadest amount of people and hope that they’ll respond which is basically what :30 (thirty second) TV spots are.
Now, for any given effort we may decide to develop say… a mobile phone application. This requires idea creation and oversight from the principals, a little art direction and then programmers to develop it. The heavy lifting is done by the programmers but that’s not a function we want to own, nor should we because every client is different every client’s need is different and every client’s customer is different and how we reach them is inevitably going to be a broad mix of mediums.
I’ll use Sunoco as an example. Sunoco’s retail strategy for the past several years has been “The Official Fuel of NASCAR”. So they put the signage on everything and then some and do a few ads with NASCAR drivers and sprinkle it with a loyalty program and presto everyone comes running. Not so much. They’ve effectively made NASCAR “the” strategy as opposed to being a part of “a” strategy and in all likelihood have probably alienated anyone who isn’t a fan of NASCAR.
An approach might be to have NASCAR as a part of a greater motorsports strategy. Sunoco is also the official fuel of Porsche Club of America (not sure how many Porsche Club folks are NASCAR fans). This is a great affinity group and ones who are likely to evangelize the brand. Sunoco also happens to be in Philadelphia within maybe two hours of something like a good 3-4 nationally known Porsche tuners. Another part of the strategy might be supporting those groups with a little more TLC and letting them organically help to grow a loyal base of customers. The bottom line is it’s an effective strategy that doesn’t require the full-time hierarchy of agency staffing that you need to find ways to keep busy.
Typical agency staffing looks something like this:
CEO
Creative (develops ads/strategy)
· Chief Creative Officer
· SVP Creative Director
· VP Creative Director
· Associate Creative Director
· Art directors
· Copywriters
Account Management (client relationships/strategy)
· SVP Group Account Director
· VP Account Director/Management Supervisor
· Account Supervisor
· Account Executives
· Assistant Account Executives
Account Planning (customer insight)
· SVP Account Planner
· VP Account Planners
Studio (prepares creative for production)
Traffic (manages timelines and information flow)
Broadcast Traffic (manages timelines and insures that TV ads get to the right networks/stations/etc)
Then of course there are the support functions for all of this (HR, admins, finance/accounting).
Mirror all these people for all of the different mediums I told you about and you’re talking about a lot of frickin’ money in which people scramble with timesheets to account for the billable hours agreed upon. As advertising agencies battle with corporate procurement, agencies are now butting up against the evil they’ve in essence created.
Our CFO also asked how long clients stayed with agencies.
It used to be forever. Literally. Up until the 80s, accounts stayed with shops for 20+ years. Now days, agencies are lucky to hold onto business for more than a few years. This is largely a result of a three things. 1) Quarterly earnings – if you’re not moving the needle, you’re out. 2) CMO tenure – on average I believe it’s less than 24 months. This is also tied to quarterly earnings. 3) When the CMO goes or there’s a significant shift in the agency such as a creative talent leaving, business often shifts with it. There is very little loyalty left in the business anymore. There are other reasons why client’s part with agencies related to poor client service management or not delivering solid creative product as well but the bottom line is agency/client relationships are often pretty tenuous.
Now after re-reading all of this I’m wondering why I signed up to help these guys?
Oh yeah I love it.
Oh and while I can’t fully predict the success or failure there is one thing that I do know and that is for an agency like thisto succeed is going to require a first client who is willing to take a risk to help the industry evolve and know that mistakes will be made but figured out. Kind of like this whole social media thing.
