Posts Video, Photos Direct From Email on Posterous

Check out Posterous. It is a site that allows you to post video and photos to a unique page that they create for you just by sending an email. You can set password controls or leave it open to the public. And its free.

According to Techcrunch, they apparently just got a new round of funding. It will be interesting to see how they monetize this.

They announced today a new group blogging feature that allows groups to send in posts directly to the blog. Seems ideal for groups of friends, families, reunions, etc. I started using Posterous today and it is wickedly simple to use.

Very cool service. Seems like the kind of app facebook or google will want for Christmas.

Saab Proves GM Doesn't Get Consumers

So my theory about Detroit is that they have struggled because they are not consumer focused companies. And probably haven't been in decades. Saab is a perfect example.

GM went looking for growth in the late 1990's like all the other car makers. With Saab they saw an opportunity. Unfortunately, what they saw was an opportunity for themselves. Here is what I mean.


Saab has been a quirky, little brand for years with lots of loyal Saab owners. (Disclosure: I owned three Saabs in the 90's.) The Saab loyalists loved the outsider personality of the brand. They loved the unusual, even odd, designs. They loved that their cars were quirky and considered it personality, part of the charm.

The big publicly known problem with Saabs was that they were mechanically challenged. To own a Saab was to know a mechanic on a first name basis. GM looked at Saab and said, hey we can solve their biggest problem. We can put in GM engines and share the chassis across different brands such as Subaru. It will create efficiency and reliability. We can also make the designs a little more mainstream and attract a broader consumer base once the mechanical reliability is improved. With Saab, they saw the opportunity to solve their own problem, excess manufacturing capacity.

But there was a problem with this approach. It isn't what the Saab owners wanted. The Saab consumers would not take mechanical perfection if it meant giving up the personality of their Saabs. And this is exactly what GM did.

GM put in GM engines and "redesigned" the 9-3, their base model to try and attract new, young buyers who have never purchased a Saab before. They were successful at first, but here is what has happened since then. Saab is now selling less than half the units they did in the first year of GM ownership. Saab loyalists have all but abandoned the brand and those new 9-3 buyers don't seem to be buying a second Saab.

So by creating an efficient (read as less costly to produce) product that appeals to a broader market, they managed to completely change the brand and misread the loyal customers that they inherited. Ford, in a rare example of consumer focus, understood that Volvo = safety and practicality. They have not changed the core brand values. (It still may not save them from being sold, but at least the brand is intact.) Saab used to equal interesting design and fun driving. Not so much any more.

GM made its initial investment in Saab in 1990 and took full control in 2000. US sales climbed to a record 47,914 in 2003. In 2008, they were down 31% through October. Last year, GM sold 9.55 million vehicles globally, making Saab a small, distracting brand with 125k units sold. Now it seems that Saab is on the block. Too bad. It didn't have to be like this. If Detroit understood brands and consumers, this might have been avoided.

Where Detroit Went Wrong

Here is my theory. The Big Three stopped being customer focused businesses decades ago.

Every company has a personality, which most of us call the "culture" of that company. And in every company there is one business function that really controls the company. For example, finance, manufacturing, marketing could all be the function that calls the final shots. At P&G it is marketing, at Fed Ex it is operations, at Citi it is finance. Most times this is unwritten, but understood by all.

So much of a company's culture is determined by the dominant function within the company. At the automakers, finance and manufacturing long ago became the dominant functions and ultimately drove the products that the company made. How else do you explain the Pontiac Aztec?

With perhaps the exception of their pick up trucks, the Big Three have not built cars that people really want in many, many years. Their quality is apparently equal to the other car makers now. So why don't we want to buy American cars? Because they weren't designed and built based on what we want. They were designed and built based on what the company wanted to build, the need to feed their large manufacturing operation busy, the need to pay their long term obligations. And to be clear, the dealers are not end consumers and depending upon their opinions is better than nothing, but no substitute for meeting consumers needs.

To be fair, I think Ford is now taking much more of a consumer focus and their CMO Jim Farley is their best chance at bringing the consumer's voice into the design and engineering studios.

If the U.S. automakers were consumer focused and not internally focused, their brand strategy would have made a whole lot more sense. What role does Buick play in their product portfolio? Why do they make the exact same model under the GM label and Chevy label? We all know it is exactly the same car/truck. So what is the point?

In recent years, realizing their products weren't meeting broad swaths of the market, Detroit began buying foreign automakers like Volvo, Saab and Hummer. But look what GM did to Saab. They tried to standardize their engines and platforms. The designs became more vanilla and units sold have dropped by almost half since GM purchased them.

Jim Farley and his comrades are the key to the Big Three's survival, with or without a large bailout package.

Managing Your Personal Brand Online

With the proliferation of news sites, social networking profiles and video and photo sharing, you (your name or your photo) can probably be found all around the Internet. Increasingly, people are trying to manage their online brands. But before you "manage" your mentions, you need to know what mentions are out there. There are a couple of easy, interesting ways to do this:

Google:
If you are like most of us, occasionally you type your name into google to see what you will get. To get automatic updates you can set up google news alerts with your name as the key words and you will get an email any time a news story or blog mentions you.

Addict-o-matic:
This is a site that searches major websites and services for mentions key words. It searches Twitter, Google Blog search, Yahoo News, Flickr among others. It is a great way to search a large number of important sites and services.

Technorati:
Technorati is a well know blog search engine service. They seek to make the blogosphere accessible. You can search for blogs by topic. You can see which blogs have the most traffic. You can also search your name if you so choose to see if you are coming up in any blog discussions. Unlikely for most of us, but you half-famous people may need this.

Social Media Projections for 2009

Most marketers I talk to are stunned at the speed and breadth of change in the social media space. A few years ago, no one had heard of Facebook and now 40 year old moms are sending party invites to their friends and writing on walls in Facebook.

Check out a new report published today that includes some of the leading thinkers in this space. Social Media Projections for 2009 is a straight forward title for a report that is chock full of insight about where things might be heading. You can view it inline below compliments of Scribd.
Social Media 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009

Be sure to read in Rhohit Bhargava's piece "What Marketers Did...(2008) / What Marketers Will Do (2009)" He says in essence, we will begin to adapt to the power of these networks vs. trying to force our constructs into a new world. Example, conduct "focus groups" on social media usage by customers to determine "authoritative" results to inform your strategy. In this new world, we can and should use these networks to gather the same information that expensive, formal research would produce.

How To Sell A Commodity...Like Chewing Gum

A brand that caught my attention is Stride Gum. Chewing gum is a boring, undifferentiated category. So how do you create a distinct brand? Create a personality that targets a clearly defined audience and let them know what problem your product solves for them. And their marketing mix is creative for a chewing gum, and not dependent on coupons, inserts and tv spots.

The Target: Stride's audience is 18-30, for sure, and based on their ads and web marketing, it is focused on young men. I am not exactly in the demo myself, but they got my attention.

The Personality: They have a new ad campaign that is very funny. "Office Park" is my favorite spot of this year. These ads will get them noticed.

They also have a clever viral campaign that on the face of it seems only tangentially related to the brand, but is actually central to their brand strategy. Stride is on to it...get others to spread the word about your product and you immediately get more from your ad spend. They sponsored the travels of Matt, an ordinary guy who travelled the world filming himself dancing with average people in dozens and dozens of countries.

It sounds dumb, until you watch it. Then it becomes a bit addicting and you start asking all sorts of questions. He is featured on their website under Matt's Place. He also has a website that tells his story, no college, doesn't like to work, wants to travel, dances like a goof and found someone to pay him for it. Not inspiring, but funny to the right demo.....high school and college aged guys, perhaps?

The Problem To Solve: Television brand advertising can be a colossal waste of money, but it can also be very effective if you have a strong creative brief that clearly outlines your audience, your business objective and the consumer's problem to be solved. The folks at Stride seem to be trying to solve three issues at once with their new spots: 1) attract new customers and encourage trial with strong creative that breaks through the clutter and gets Stride noticed, 2) the promise of a gum that is exciting and has long lasting flavor and 3) encourage existing customers to chew more gum.

Keep your eye on these guys. They are creative marketers.

Facebook's Scary New Service...Is Brilliant

Facebook has a brilliant new strategy. But if you are over 30, when you first hear it, you might be scratching your head. Some may even be a little freaked.

They want to launch a service that allow you to share your web activities with your facebook friends. The service is called Facebook Connect and allows users to log on to web sites and see their friends behavior on those sites. The NYTs has an interesting article about it today.

What is genius is that it allows sites that currently are not "social" sites, to be pulled quickly and easily into the facebook world. This is really the next evolution of the Share This button. Scary and wildly interesting.....

Segmenting Your Web Audience -- Google Just Made It Easy

The challenge with third party segmentations is that they are expensive and never seem to be "exactly" right for your needs. And how do leap from household address to web behavior? Google Analytics, which is quickly becoming the de facto web tracking tool, has released an "on the fly" segmentation tool.

Google Analytics Blog: More Enterprise-Class Features Added To Google Analytics

You are only as good as what you can track. It looks like a promising tool that will allow marketers and others to unlock the data that they are capturing.

A good quick explanation is available on Online Sales blog

Want to Figure Out Your Social Media ROI? Consider a Plan. | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

With social media all the rage, how does it fit into a fixed marketing budget based on ROI and measurement? What are a whole bunch of tweets worth? Beth Harte has an interesting post on MarketingProfs.

Want to Figure Out Your Social Media ROI? Consider a Plan.

"It’s all the buzz these days, what is the ROI of social media? What’s the return? How much money can I make off this social media stuff? What’s the investment? How much time and money is this going to take? You’ve heard it all, right? We know conversation with our customers is the right thing to do. But how can we justify utilizing social media even on the most basic of levels?"

Remember when dotcoms were new and investors and entrepreneurs tried to convince the world that the old metrics didn't apply any more? Well, turns out that the metrics hadn't really changed that much. If you don't have sales, you can't have profits. And without profits, you can't stay in business indefinitely."

So even though social media is new (and many of the companies haven't figured out how to make money for themselves) I am guessing the old metrics still apply and we need to figure out how to track the success of social media within our larger marketing mix.

Old School Buzz Marketing -- A Line Out The Door

In Washington a new, little shop has opened -- Georgetown Cupcake. It sells upscale (read expensive and delicous)cupcakes and only cupcakes out of a tiny shop. The shop is so small that only a few customers at a time can fit in there. And whether planned or not, this fact has led to their greatest marketing tool -- a constant line of 15-50 people at all times.

Now don't get me wrong, these ladies are doing everything right. The packaging is clean and sharp and exudes sophistication. The product is very good. Their logo is cool and the company Range Rover that tools around town is "on message."

But the line! If all those people are waiting in line, why aren't I? What am I missing? Those cupcakes must be precious.

If I had been looking for a space to open a cupcake shop, I don't know that I would have worried about customers not fitting into the shop. Frankly, I probably would worry we would have enough customers to keep the shop open. But now that a line is their problem, I say, ladies don't move the shop. Keep the line. Hand out umbrellas. Put 0ut a heat lamp. But keep the line.

What the Car Makers Can Teach Us About PR

Understand your audience: Don't spend $1,000 an hour to fly to DC to ask for taxpayers money

Tell a plausible story: If your products are horrible, don't blame consumers for not buying them.

Be truthful: You forgot you were selling a product. You were too busy running an organization. That is and was your problem, not the economy

Untenable Public Positions -- Smithsonian Trustees Exhibit #1

Rule number one of public relations - Don't take a public stand that a) sounds disengenuous b) undermines your credibility c) appears completely self-serving d) all of the above.

The Smithsonian Board of Trustees have no credible reason for not taking accountability for the situation there. Either they did know the situation and approved (which is the case) or they didn't know, disapproved, and are guilty of negligence. Either way there is no reasonable justification for how or why they escaped accountability.

They held a public Board meeting this week...their first ever as I understand it. The Washington Post, which has shamelessly exploited the situation with its New York Post-like coverage, wrote about the meeting.

At its first-ever public meeting, the regents of the Smithsonian Institution sat
around a red-covered table and announced they wanted "a lively dialogue."
The audience did not hold back. The first volley from the public, gathered
in an auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History, was essentially this: Why didn't all of you resign, since you are the
people who picked the last secretary? The tone of the question implied that
the
group was responsible for the tenure of Lawrence M. Small, which ended in
a scandal and smeared the reputation of the Smithsonian.
Regents
Chairman Roger W. Sant repeated what he
has said many times before: The board asked its members, "Do we resign or
roll
up our sleeves?"

And so I say, Roger, be a man. Take responsibility. Resign. And when you leave, take James Grimaldi and Jackie Trescott with you.

Genuine Corporate Philanthropy -- RIP

The trend has been growing for a number of years and the financial crisis may have finally put a nail in the coffin of truly selfless corporate philanthropy.

In fact, I believe corporate philanthropy doesn't exist anymore. At least not in a traditional way where giving is done with no expectation of return. Where giving is about doing the right because it is the right thing to do.

Today, corporate philanthropy has to forward the mission, the bottom line or the reputation DIRECTLY. Don't take my word for it. The Economist held and interesting conference this week where this was discussed.

Bill is trying out Ping. What a cool service. Check it out at www.ping.fm

Pepsi's Big News

Pepsi is kicking its agency to the curb after 48 years?!?!?! BBDO is out and Chiat/Day is in....is this further evidence that TV advertising is dead? Would love to know the back story to the NYT story....

Don't Understand SEO?

There is a good presentation from Ogilvy on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is the modern day version of buying prime real estate.  Every marketer needs to use this tactic.

Email Marketing Help

DM News, a direct marketing magazine and website, have just published an email marketing guide and it is quite good.  Email is cheap, quick and overused.  Very few companies seem to do email marketing really well.

The guide from DM News provides some helpful tips as well as good emerging trend info.

The Right Way to Display Data

How you display data is everything. Great data, displayed poorly is like a brilliant idea that you can't explain to anyone. When you display your data correctly, it tells a story without a single word being spoken.

The New York Times does an excellent job of displaying complex data sets, often across multiple axis. If you haven't checked out their election maps, you must. Be sure to look at the county analysis.

A Great Marketer Shares a Great Presentation

Seth Godin has a new book out named /Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us. /He has posted a presentation about the book at slideshare, another very cool resource. This is how captivating presentations are done.

I know...you are thinking, I work in a very corporate (read as stuffy, conservative, etc) environment. You won't be able to get away with an entire presentation like this, but look at the impact of the images he uses and how little text there is.

What will people remember from your presentation? 84 bullet points in 12 point font?

Polls: Exact Science or Fuzzy Math?

Polling is either an exact science or fuzzy math depending upon with whom you talk. The major polls got it mostly right this time around. And how addicting was Real Clear Politics?

There is a good article in the Wilson Quarterly, which is by the way, a great magazine. It is called, "Poll Power" by Scott Keeter.

It is funny how the Founding Father's feared direct democracy....

"It is doubtful that the Founding Fathers would have taken much comfort in the reliability of survey research. They were skeptical of public opinion and fearful of direct democracy, believing, as James Madison artfully declared, that the public’s views should be 'refine[d] and enlarge[d] . . . by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.'"

The Sound of Democracy

So I am reading an interesting book, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, by David O. Stewart. On the heels of the most exciting Presidential election in a generation, it is interesting to see how we ended up with the electoral college.

It is funny how the Founding Father's feared direct democracy....they were democrats, small d, and elitists in the kindest sense of the word. They didn't really believe that everyone had a voice. How different we are now. Now any idiot with access to a computer can make their voice heard with blog or comment box.
And yet, the noise of it all is the sound of democracy.

I wonder how many of those guys failed to vote......

Worst Advertising of the Week

Prilosec OTC

They have a new commercial, or at least it is the first time I have seen
it. And I hope it is the last. It features a 40 something year old
white woman, dancing at what looks like a 25th high school reunion. She
is dancing like Elaine from Seinfeld, but it is not meant to be a joke.
Wow. What a bad ad.

Obama Campaign = World Class Marketing

There is a great article in Ad Age 'What Marketers Can Learn From Obama
<http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=132237>' which says, "Nov.
4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history
of marketing. " This is not an exaggeration.

The Obama campaign was pure marketing genius, from strategy to
execution. They positioned their product perfectly. Built an
unprecedented distribution network, changed consumer behavior and made
purchase of their product about far more than the product itself.

The genius of Obama's campaign is that it tapped into that truly
American desire to dream big dreams. He created a movement that at its
core was about redeeming this ability to dream. It only became clear to
me last night. I knew it was about change, and I knew he had created a
movement in this country to create change, but I didn't appreciate that
the lifeblood of the movement was this desire to dream.......amazing.

Thoughts on Voting for a President

Great article from Leon Wieseletier at the New Republic about voting for a president. In marketing you learn, people are complex and as much as we desire to put them in a box and describe them as a means to understand them, most people defy strict categorization. So when we go to vote, how could any candidate accurately embrace or reflect all our contradictions? No wonder people always feel they are choosing between the lesser of two evils>

My favorite part of his article: "McCain feels with his heart, but he thinks with his base. And when he picked Sarah Palin, he told the United States of America to go fuck itself."

Comment Crazies

When Comment Boxes were created on the web so readers could leave comments, I am sure everyone thought it was brilliant, a democratization of the web, give everyone a voice.

Here's the problem, the only people who seem to comment are the same people in your (school, business, church) who are the first to complain, blame, criticize, mock or dismiss. And they are usually the most ignorant. Now, not only do they annoy you, they have the ability to annoy the entire world. I call them the Comment Crazies.

Think I am exaggerating? Go find a news story with a number of comments posted. Any story will do. The more important the better. Then look at the comments. My guess is that 80 percent of comments are angry or ridicule, 10 percent seek to clarify a point and 10 percent are too strange to classify. On rare occasion you may have someone defending a position.

It is easy to be against something. It takes knowledge and conviction to be for something. If you have an opinion and you want to post a comment on line, please ask yourself first, "Will my opinion enhance this conversation?" Or is it just mindless, grammatically incorrect, hate-laced drivel?

Think before you post! For the rest of us....

Old School Cool

Okay, so if you aren't a doctor or dealer, why would you have a pager? Old school uncool.

Saw a guy today on a cell phone with a retractable antena. Who still has one of those? Old school cool!

Barack, Don't Take The Bait

The Republicans will try desperately to force Obama to state all his policy positions. "How can we vote for him if we don't his stand on the policies?"

The Republicans want Obama and the Dems to take about policy planks because voters don't elect a president based on policy. They vote for the candidate that shares their values, inspires their hopes, and who seems like a real person.

Don't offer dizzying explanations of tax policy. Speak of economic pain. Bring back Carville if it helps to remember 1992 -- It's the economy stupid!

Creating a Cause Brand

Causes and cause brands are different than regular products or services. Typically, there is some larger engagement with consumers -- beyond purchase or use of a product. You must enroll followers in your cause, often through the actions and activities of your consumers. So how do you do that?

1) An effective cause requires:

a. A clearly stated goal to be achieved – such as eliminate malaria, get Obama elected, reduce childhood obesity

b. A sense of urgency

c. Proof points of the cause's progress/results – Obama touts fundraising, number of donors/volunteers, new registered voters

d. Clear and multiple ways to get involved beyond giving money

e. A rapid response and broad channel communications capability

2) Your brand must have an opinion and must stand for something. What does it have to say?

3) The opinion of your brand must begin with/come from your leader. Movements need leaders.

4) The mission of the cause and your brand's involvement must be authentic. Consumers are cynical and will not abide disingenuous motives. For example, it will be difficult for Exxon and BP to lead an effort to affect climate change. Their conflicted position does not allow them to be leaders of this cause. They can support it, but not lead it

Jet Blue's Pillow Talk

So Jet Blue has announced that on flights over two hours, they are no longer providing free pillows and blankets. Instead they are selling a pillow and blanket kit for $7.

So let's keep a couple of things in mind as we consider this move. Jet Bue has fashioned itself as a fairly hip, smart brand. Its customers are probably savvier than your average consumer. Owning and running an airline is a crappy business that struggles to make money in the best of times. Jet Blue customers probably read newspapers. This is also the same company that cratered when it appeared tone deaf to customer complaints during its operational melt down during a winter storm in NY.

Now we have their explanation of the new pillows. The company's comment appeared in article today in the New York Times. "Replacing our old, recycled pillows and blankets with this state-of-the-art high-quality take-home kit is an eco-conscious, health conscious and consumer-conscious decision," the general manager for product devlopment, Brett Muney, said.

Brett! You forgot the part about it saving the company a couple million dollars. And here's the joke. Your customers understand you need to run a profitable business. What they can't understand is why you would insult their intellegence with a half truth. They look like cool blankets. We can handle it.

Integrity and authenticity. This is how a company wins. And every time you try to spin you customer you erode part of a hard earned trust.

Bad Advertising of the Week

This week's winner: John McCain

I mean c'mon.  

I know Willy Horton worked well for George Bush Sr.  But have you seen John McCain's new attack ad?  It is a montage of Obama pictures, most from a large rally.  In the background we hear the crowd chanting "Obama. Obama."  The voice over talks about how Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world.  And at that point they show a picture of Britney Spears and then one of Paris Hilton, while fading back to Obama.  The actual message of the ad blames Obama for high gas prices which alone is kind of silly. 

The ad is fairly genius and pathetic.  I mean, if you got nothing else, take the worst of society and try and pin it on your opponent.  It's not racial.  They couldn't do that...yet.  Could this really work?  

I have to say.  I am bit fascinated, in a car crash kind of way.  It will be interesting to see if this ad moves the polls.  It seems too heavy handed to me, but then, I am not a swing voter.  

More Miller!

Ok. So I have been watching a lot of sports lately. I love the Miller High Life campaign. The lastest spot where their lovable Miller High Life beer delivery guy goes to a sporting event to drop off Miller in one of the suites is priceless. Seems watching a game (or not watching as the case is) from a suite is grounds for taking away real beer.

Very funny and very effective.

GM and Ford - Which Ad Strategy Is Right?

GM, primarily through its Chevy and GMC units, has been advertising heavily over the last week or so. They ads emphasize the (relative) fuel efficiency of its trucks and SUVs in one ad and then the fuel efficiency of their smaller models in another that has been in heavy rotation.

Ford meanwhile has been silent. And so it got me to wondering, what are the different strategies here? It is clear GM is trying to move inventory even in this challenging economy and spending heavily to try and do it. Ford seems to be keeping their powder dry. I am not sure what their plan is.

I think they announce earnings and a new company strategy Thursday, so I would expect to see move advertising from them after Thursday. I would not be against Jim Farley, the CMO at Ford. I am eager to see what comes next.

Bad Advertising of the Week

This Weeks Winner: Merrill Lynch

They are running an ad that has a big bull running around deserted countryside while some non-memorable male voice over talks about BLAH BLAH BLAH experience BLAH which way do you go BLAH help BLAH before the bull appears on a ridge overlooking a large city (New York?).

Who is this ad intended to reach and what am I supposed to remember? I don't remember a single line and if the bull wasn't actually Merrill's logo, I am certain that I wouldn't remember if it was an ad for Merrill or Morgan Stanley (another unmemorable advertiser).

What makes you different? Why should I hire you? What is your personality?

Same space, like the company or not, but Charles Schwab has a personality. Their "Ask Chuck" campaign at least stands out. I hope the Merrill Lynch brokers are good at signing up accounts because I doubt their corporate advertising is helping much.

Product Extensions That Make Sense

Remember Lo Jack -- the mysterious service that allows the police to track your car if it is stolen?  Was it some beacon or something? I am not sure, but I remember how cool it was and how it was "the" anti-theft product to have for your car.  

Well I was in the Apple Store the other day and saw what is possibly the smartest product extensions I have seen in a while.  Lo Jack for your laptop!  So if someone steals it, you can track down your computer.  Just like the car version, I don't know how it works, but Lo Jack is such a credible name in theft recovery, this just makes perfect sense.  

Imagine how much you would have to spend in advertising to convince people that you have a product that helps you recover your laptop just like Lo Jack can help you find your car.  Better to just call it Lo Jack for you computer.

When you can use your credibility for a providing a service in one industry and can extend that brand into another industry, that is a home run.

Simple and Irrational Can Be Wildly Successful

Look on your AMEX card and you will find a small "Member Since" at the botton. Sports Illustrated does it too with the subscription renewal forms. Why should anyone really care if they have been an AMEX "member since" college or an SI subscriber since high school?

There is nothing rational about membership. This plays to our emotional connection with brands. Brands become a part of who we are and how we think about ourselves. Why else would it matter how long I have been a member of a credit card company that doesn't really have members?

What are you doing to appeal to the emotions of your customers? And try to keep it simple.

Living the High Life

Beer advertising is one of the most crowded, at least for the male 18-45 demo. Tons of money is spent on brand advertising. And sometimes you have to wonder, do those funny bud light commercials sell beer?

So we hosted a party this weekend. And as I stood at the beer cooler trying to decide what beer to buy for the party, I bought a couple imports. But I also wanted a lighter, domestic beer. What did I choose? Miller High Life. Why? Because their recent ad campaign was effective. https://www.millerhighlife.com/Default.aspx

It is the beer for every day guys. No pretense. Just beer. And it is a bit of a throw back. Its cool.

The beer isn't great. But I felt good buying it. Nice job Miller.

Seth Godin's Post on Fear in Marketing

Check out Seth Godin's post today on fear in marketing. http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2123/29996900

Scaring people into buying your product is not a long term, brand building strategy. It is a short term sales strategy that will eat your brand reputation.

Here's a question. Does this hold true in politics?

Tell Me Who Your Are Brands Are

What are your favorite brands? Or what are those products you uses loyally?

List out five or ten.

What does this list say about you? About your interests? Your personality?

Great brands get their customers to associate their own personalities with the brand. "I am a Mac guy." "I have to have Starbucks." "I love BMW." "Can't live without my Red Sox." "Love the New York Times." Whatever your list looks like, brands both reflect and inform our personalities.

Certainly some people are more brand driven or brand loyal. But each one of us has our own brand, some might call it reputation, others personae. But we each stand for something in the eyes of others. To what extent are each of our personal brands defined or shaped by the brands we consume, relate to and embrace.

There is an old Colombian saying that states, "tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are." Can it be the same with brands? Tell me who your brands are and I will tell you who you are.

Can Fear Sell?

Can you name a strong brand that has succeeded because it has sold us on fear of something?  A brand with strong, sustained sales?

I can't think of one.

Sure, brands often try to differentiate from competitors and can be brutal in drawing the distinction -- think Apple vs. PC.  But I do not remember fear as a strategy that pays off.

And so as I look at the presidential race between McCain and Obama, I wonder about brand strategy.  Can McCain maintain his brand image as maverick and independent thinker and win the election without resorting to a strategy of fear?  And if he can't and must resort to fear, is this a winning strategy?  The only chance he may have to win is to differentiate himself by stirring up fear about a black man with a funny name running the country.  The temptation will be great.  And if Willy Horton is any guide, it could work.

This could be an amazing brand experiment: can John McCain win with his own brand going head to head with brand Obama?  Or will McCain need to play the race card, spread rumors, lies, and innuendo to boost sales (gather votes)?

In an arena where the ends often justifies the means, I suspect I know the answer.  If McCain goes with fear, I think he gains short term sales at the cost of the brand.  But if it gets you elected President, who cares right?  

Perhaps, though, his brand will be forever tarnished and incapable of its true potential as a result.  It is a choice to be made carefully.  The long term costs could be very high.

Hip? Or Creepy Old Guys

So I have a facebook profile. I started it when I got to Georgetown after I realized that most undergraduates don't really use email any more and spend hours poking and posting on walls. My wife is suspect...she thinks I am not age appropriate. Which is probably right.

Greg Anderson writes an excellent article on this for Ad Age this week in the CMO Strategy section -- "Marketers, Don't Just Blindly Follow Latest Media Trends"

Give it a read. He makes several great points. The social networking space is moving really quickly. It is still too early to tell what will last and what will be fad. And, just because people are on these sites, in these networks, doesn't mean that every marketer and company needs to be there or should be there.

Authenticity is so important to a brand these days. Trying too hard, trying to be cool or hip when your brand really isn't, is a sure fire way to look like an old dude who doesn't get it. It would be weird for a 40 year old guy to go a high school party full of teenagers he didn't know. That is how your brand will perceived if it really isn't relevant to the audience. Marketers beware.

Dumb Social Networks

Message to marketers: Don't create Dumb Social Networks

Embrace new technology and trends, but do it in a way that is consistent with your users needs and behaviors. Social networking is all the rage thanks to the popularity of MySpace and Facebook. But do your customers really need an exclusive social network for your company, product, institution?

Remember, the value of these networks lies in the size and activity. Its like a house party. Everyone wants to be at the biggest, coolest party. And when the find it, they want to hang out -- people spend hours creating and adding to their profiles on My Space or Facebook. Will they really take the time to create a new profile in your network? If you create a social network for 82 people brought together by an irrepresible interest in West Indian pottery, chances are the network will struggle to survive.

In a recent addition of DM News, an article described Intel's plans to create a social networking site for its users....which users would those be? Isn't that a bit like the freon supplier creating a social network for air conditioner installers? Or would it be everyone using their freon in an air conditioner? Either way, I don't get it.

Marketing - Corporate Strategy = Chaos

It is not possible to have an effective marketing/communications strategy without a corporate or institutional strategy. You can have effective marketing tactics, but not strategy. The whole point is that your marketing and communications efforts help drive attainment of your corporate goals and objectives.

There is a great article in the April edition of the Harvard Business Review titled Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?

Two import ideas in this article:
1) You need a brief, understandable strategy statement that everyone in the company can understand

2) A good strategy requires trade-offs. If you focus on institutional clients, you may have to give up consumers. If you focus on increasing profit margins, you may need to sacrfice sales.

Too often, corporations and institutions do not have clear, consice strategies that help guide decsion making. Without this clarity, how can a marketer be successful? It is possible, but I would argue it is likely tactical and not sustainable.

Reading Demographics, Seeing Markets

If you haven't read Richard Florida's new book Who's Your City? you should! As a follow up to his Rise of the Creative Class, his new book makes an interesting argument that directly challenges Thomas Friedman's bestselling book The World Is Flat.

Florida says globalization is real and uneven. Rather than leveling the playing field by making information and commerce flows across borders easier, he argue that globalization is causing a spiky word, a world where development and progress is uneven. It is occuring in what he calls Megatropolises. He also claims the growth of these areas is driven by the creative classes, the educated and mobile.

He uses census and other research data to make his case. Any good marketer has to use census and demographic data. These data define the four corners of any market you are trying to reach.

Read his book.

Don't Mess With My Coffee

I get coffee from Starbucks every morning on the way to work. A couple of weeks ago they unveiled their new (old) Pike Place coffee. I guess it is the coffee they first roasted and served in Seattle back in the early days. They are using this coffee as a way to "get back to their roots" I think. They have Pike's Place as the everyday coffee and usually offer one other type of coffee as well.

But their are several problems - one strategic, several tactical.


Don't Ignore Your Base
Politics 101 says, do not abandon the base in search of new voters unless you know the base has no where else to go......Starbucks is looking for new growth in existing stores. So they have introduced this new coffee. As a long time, addicted Starbucks coffee drinker, I don't like the new coffee. It is too weak. I have always liked the strong coffee Starbucks serves.

So it has me asking questions, doubting my beloved Starbucks. Is this part of an effort to attract new customers who don't like their coffee so bold? Would Dunkin Donuts drinkers really start going to Starbucks because of this coffee? At my Starbucks today, they only had Pike Place. The guy in front of me stormed out because they didn't have another option. He wanted the same coffee I wanted. The old, strong Starbucks coffee.

They are at risk of losing long time customers while not being assured that Dunkin Donuts customers will now become Starbucks drinkers. Starbucks has done lots of research that shows the taste of the coffee is only one reason why people go to Starbucks. For non-customers, it's not about the coffee. It's about personality and brand. They will need to change more than the coffee to attract non-customers. But they could lose loyal customers if they mistreat us while trying to attract non-customers.

Don't ignore the base when they have other options.

Let Your Loyal Customers Be Your Advocates
I actually want Starbucks to be successful. I want to understand what they are trying to do with the Pike Place strategy. But they haven't communicated much to their customers. They have positioned the new coffee as a return to their roots. But my question is why? What about their roots or their first coffee is important? Don't forget that your most loyal customers can be your biggest advocates when adjusting strategy. But they need to understand what you are trying to accomplish.

ROI on the Operational Impact of New Products
The new coffee is causing operational issues. The Pike Place coffee isn't available in prepackaged bags like all their other blends. The new blend requires the baristas to individually pack each bag. My limited observation is that during peak times this is slowing down their throughput. In the morning, every additional person in line creates the risk that you will lose sales. Why not just prepackage it? It is quaint to hand pack each bag, but strikes me as McDonalds trying to build your burger to order. It's not their model.

And the kicker is, I think Pike Place is their cheapest coffee. If you are going to treat a product as special, then make sure it is priced that way so you get a positive ROI on it.

How To Undermine a $2.8 Billion Ad Budget for $10/Hour

A friend of mine has been a Verizon wireless customer for at least ten years. He is an accomplished former CMO of two Fortune 50 companies, but is not a technophile and occasionally has problems with the gagets in his life. Last week he went to a Verizon store where three sales ladies provided a customer experience would make any marketing executive cringe.

First they ignored him, even though he was the only one in the store. Then when they did pay attention to him, they condescended to him and laughed at him to his face. He is dropping his service and is telling anyone who will listen how horrible the experience was.

According to Ad Age, in 2006 Verizon had a $2.8 billion ad budget, ranking it as the 5th largest advertiser in the U.S. that year. What is remarkable is that three sales associates making $10 or $12 per hour managed to render those advertising dollars useless.

This to me is part of the challenge Chief Marketing Officers face and perhaps part of the reason the average CMO only lasts 22 months. My guess is that Mike Lanman, CMO at Verizon Wireless, doesn't have control of the retail channel. At the very least, he should control the types of people who are hired for their retail stores. Create a hiring profile and partner with HR to drive it into the front line hiring.

(Seth Godin wrote about Verizon and their CMO in 2005. Looks like much hasn't changed in three years.)

The product, pricing and promotion are important. But where are your customers interacting with your product and your company? Bad service trumps a good product in a commodity business like wireless.

We live in a multi channel world. If the CMO doesn't have control of the customer experience in every channel, the life expectancy of the CMO will not increase.

What is Marketing?

My last boss was not a "marketing guy." He started our first meeting by posing this question. After spending ten years in consumer marketing, all I could do was stare at him. Well? What is it? There is an entire industry of authors and consultants who attempt to answer this. When you type What is Marketing? into Amazon, you get 8,749 titles. So if it takes several thousand authors 300 pages each to answer it, perhaps the answer actually is complicated.