Jan 31, 2011
Ice Skating and NASCAR
I had a tick box moment this weekend. Never been to an ice skating competition, so with the US Figure Skating Championships in Greensboro, I figured 'why not'. Dragged my 8 year old son along too - probably the only major sporting event where we passed the concession stand and I was not pestered into buying a jersey, bobble head, pennant, or giant foam finger. Somehow petite skirts and t-shirts proclaiming "US Figure Skating" doesn't hold much appeal - guess the playground street cred just isn't there among many boys.
So a few reflections on this event. Let's face it: in our 'agony of defeat' culture, we often tune in to watch these events not just to see the winners but also to see the disasters, spills, crashes. Watch any sportscast showing highlights of a NASCAR event, and the formula is the same: winner crossing line, burning rubber, and the inevitably fiery crash. And ice skating was no exception: after every competitor in the pairs and ice dancing came off the ice, the jumbo-tron in the center of the Coliseum displayed a quick snippet of the performance, always showing the section with the slip, miss, crash onto the ice. So much so that my 8 year old often said "oh, that's gonna hurt tomorrow", much like he also says after watching the Steeler's James Harrison take out a receiver.
Now I'm not going to go off on the 'society revels in the violence' diatribe, and link it back to Roman times. But it is interesting how the media - be it ESPN, the local sportscaster, or the operator of the Coliseum video - all seem to play to this desire to show what happens when things don't go right. Why are we fascinated? Is it simply schadenfreud, which a German friend once translated as 'the pleasure one experiences watching your neighbor fall off his roof when installing a new satellite dish that trumps yours'. (As the word is derived from the 18th century, I someone doubt his definition was the original intent.) Or is it that in the quest for perfection, in the hours that these performers invest in attaining their peak at the right time, to fall reminds us that they are human? That they're sort of like us. Like hearing that Tiger Woods didn't break 80 in a round. Or Federer and Nadal not making a Grand Slam finals.
It's clear that in the sound-bite marketing world in which we live, in which getting standout for a brand is not only challenging but highly temporary, marketers work hard to avoid 'the disaster' which generates negative publicity so quickly. They do whatever it takes to avoid reminding the general public that companies are run by people - very human people - who occasionally make mistakes. Yet when marketers realize that some aspects of displaying the humanity in their brand can be productive - witness the resurgence of Domino's Pizza when they acknowledged their crummy product - it offers an opportunity to increase the dimensionality of the brand's personality. Am I suggesting they display warts and all about their inner workings of their company? No, although in the transparent world in which we live, and with more companies pushing into the social media space as if it were a magic panacea for increasing sales, it's likely we'll see a lot more 'negative insights' come through.
So steel yourselves for more frequent examples of the 'agony of defeat' from companies - and the need for more crisis management and issue positions. And if the figure skating championships come to your area (San Jose, CA in 2012), check it out. Tick the box. And if you have an 8 year old boy who'd rather shoot aliens in a Star Wars game than watch waifs on ice, think about how much you've saved in concessions.
Jan 21, 2011
Chess Anyone?
My personal experiences of playing chess usually involve copious amounts of alcohol, a chess board of shot glasses, and very little memory of the outcome. And Kevin winning! Hence for health reasons, I avoid the accursed game.
Yet if we think about how many brands develop their marketing plans, it has similarities with my experiences of chess: start with a plan and good intentions, then watch as the game progresses into chaos.
Let’s be quite clear: I’m not an expert at chess. Yet I know that to start a game with a series of programmed moves, without regards to your opponent, is foolhardy at best, and a surefire way to lose the game. In the case of the marketing team, however, this is exactly how many traditionally work: take two to three months for ‘planning’, get as much insight as possible during that period, develop the marketing plan, cast it in stone. When in 12 months time they’ve not achieved checkmate, it’s usually a case of either ‘circumstances beyond our control’, or conveniently forgetting the original plan objectives and moving on to the next year’s plan development cycle. And on we go, a never ending game.
Part of the problem is in how most marketing departments approach planning – an intensive process, designed to define and justify a budget allocation from the Finance Department. And as often happens, once the plan and budget are approved, it’s then a race to ensure funds are committed as early as possible, to prevent the inevitable clawback by Finance later in the year to ‘make the numbers’. Another game played in many corporations, sort of like sacrificing a rook to get a knight.
So how can marketing departments get out of this quagmire and onto a firmer strategic footing? It starts with recognizing that the two dimensional chess board for marketing planning is actually a multi-dimensional board. It’s not a game of outperforming the competition and their moves on the board. It’s also trying to determine your ever changing customers’ attitudes and beliefs. Gaining insights into how your customers are reshaping their beliefs will help you plot your moves on the board. There’s also the internal and external factors which need to be managed within the planning – government or industry regulations, unions, employee motivations, and more. The simple move of taking the bishop has now resulted in a myriad of consequences in our multi-dimensional chess match.
Yet recognizing the challenge does not resolve it. I believe the days of time specific planning, and a static marketing plan, are numbered. Marketing planning needs to be a 12 month, on-going activity. Change is too ever-present for any brand to expect a plan to remain valid without constant review and adjustment. Plans also need to be far more flexible, catering for different scenarios or opportunities which may arise and then validating or refuting these scenarios as the year progresses.
Marketers who continue to develop static plans will find they’re playing checkers down at the old general store, while their competition is getting better and better at winning multi-dimensional chess. They’ll always lose in the endgame.
Jan 12, 2011
The Story of 'Wild Onion': 2011
What they needed were voices they could trust. And that, we argued, created a huge opportunity for brands to engage with their customers more deeply than ever before.
Ten years later, we can say we were right. The most popular words in our marketing lexicon are now ‘engagement’, ‘advocacy’ ‘WOM’ and of course, ‘social’.
Everyone wants to have a conversation with their customers. But mostly, customers aren’t listening. At least, they’re not listening to brands.
And whilst marketing executives know that TV isn’t going to deliver the numbers, they’ve seen no evidence that increasing investment in digital and social platforms will either.
That’s where we come in. Just as consumers need a voice they can trust amid all the noise, so do marketers. We don’t have a vested interest in any particular creative solution or media mix; that also means we’re not digital evangelists who want to move all your marketing money into ‘engagement programs’ or customer collaboration. Sometimes a good old-fashioned promotional strategy works far better. In fact we might even go further and suggest that you should outsource less to agencies and bring some of the skills and expertise in-house.
What we do have is decades of experience in which we’ve accumulated a casefile of literally hundreds of campaigns across all sectors, through all media, and in every region of the world. Not just the ones that worked, but the ones that didn’t. This has helped us answer questions as diverse as:
- How does an industrial manufacturer create a consumer movement to solve the world’s biggest problems?
- What are the differences between men and women online and what does that mean for brand strategies?
- How do you increase sales and reduce new product development costs by engaging with your best customers?
- What are the six secrets that every successful social media campaign shares?
So we’re not peddling yet another creative, media, digital, PR, branding or even engagement agency. What we are selling is a small group of very senior, very talented people who believe we’re at a ‘once in a generation’ moment where the way we’ve always done things isn’t working; who also believe that many clients know this and want to do things differently; but who have come to realise, sadly, that it’s a brief most agencies have failed to deliver against.
We think we know how to crack this brief, now we’re looking for like-minded clients.
What we offer is a framework you can use to maximise the potential of what you’re doing already, and shape what you do in the future. It’s a simple framework, deliberately so to make it robust and capable of channelling limited resources into delivering against client's most important business objectives.
Want to know why people don't respond?
Simple solution: ask them. Now I appreciate that sounds a bit daft - after all, why would someone who didn't respond to your marketing communication tell you why and, uh, respond. But for an established brand, done in the right way, with a suitable incentive, the learnings of non-responders can be invaluable in helping to refine your communication programs. For a number of Fortune 500 brands I've worked on we did just that, in one case receiving over 5% response to a short questionnaire resulting in thousands of valuable insights from 'unresponsive' customers. Of course, in hindsight, we wish we'd done some things differently - like building into the questionnaire enough profile points to be able to attempt a 'mapping' of the results to the main database and support development of predictive modelling. But bottom line was, we learned a lot - so if at first you don't succeed, just ask!
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