Foghound

Inside marketing: the 10 questions

2006-05-31T10:08:00.000-05:00

If James Lipton, host of "Inside the Actor's Studio" BRAVO television program, were to interview a marketing person , here's how he'd probably adapt his famous 10 questions that he asks at the end of the show. How would you answer them? At next week's Corante/Columbia Marketing Innovation conference I plan to pose this questions to a number of outspoken people and share what they have to say.

In the meantime, here are my responses.

What’s your favorite marketing word?
Love. (Passion and emotion drive all decisions)

What is your least favorite marketing word?
Transformational.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally about marketing?
Finding point-of-views that spark conversations – especially when a company or its products are kind of boring.

What turns you off about marketing?
Alpha fraidy cats. Aggressive, persuasive, and scared to try new approaches.

What’s your favorite curse word when you see really bad marketing?
F…k. What are they thinking?

What sound or noise do marketers make that you love?
Absolute silence as they really listen to customers.

What sound or noise do marketers make that you hate?
Sucking up to the CEO even though they think he/she is diluting good ideas.

What profession other than marketing should marketers attempt to become better at marketing?
Teaching middle school kids or running a customer service department.

What profession should marketers never try?
Neurosurgery. Because most of us have ADD and don’t focus enough on details.

If marketing heaven exists, what would God say when a marketer arrives at the Pearly Gates?
Relax. We don’t measure anything up here.

Talking marketing in Estonia

2006-05-23T10:38:00.000-05:00

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the annual Parnu Marketing Conference where 550 of Estonia’s marketing professionals get together to learn and talk about new marketing ideas. The theme of the conference: “Marketing Without Advertising.”

See the blog postings by fellow presenters David Phillips and Robin Gurney of the Estonian internet marketing firm Altex for more.

Marketing Estonia
During a word of mouth marketing workshop 50 people came up with more than 300 ideas in 45 minutes about how to talk about Estonia to attract tourists and businesses to this Baltic country. A great testament to what can happen when you bring smart people together and remove all the traditional “branding” rules. Some of the ideas:

For toursim:

Estonia is like a fantasy land – beautiful old medieval architecture, Hansel & Gretel-like countryside, pristine beaches and forests with bears, wolves, wild mushrooms; and it’s safe, inexpensive, and almost everyone speaks English.

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is the largest and best preserved medieval capital in Europe. More beautiful than Prague.

The White Night winters in Estonia are magical, where you can really chill: pure silence amid the snow and ice; walking from island to island on the ice; barrel saunas.

And for the high testosterone crowd, Estonia is a great hunting spot – wolves, bears, wild boar; or you can tour former top-secret Soviet Union military bases.

Now here’s a sport you don’t find everywhere: While the Estonians did win Olympic medals for cross country skiing this year, they also took the gold medal in the world wife-carrying championship last summer.

For economic development:

Estonia is the Silicon Valley of the Baltic – totally E, and far less expensive than other European cities.

Estonia is the safe, friendly gateway for companies that want to do business with Russia, --- but be based in Europe and not Russia.

Estonia offers all the benefits of Scandinavia for businesses – educated population, high quality of life, great technology infrastructure -- with a MUCH lower flat tax rate.

Having spent two days as a tourist in Estonia, I can tell you that it is a gem of a country. Despite Soviet occupation until 1991, the country has preserved its national identity and the beauty of its environment and rich architectural history.

Aitäh Estonia!

New study on customer communities

2006-05-08T13:17:00.000-05:00

Are online customer communities an undervalued marketing approach?

A new research study released today by Communispace, “What Companies Gain from Listening: The Effect of Community Membership on Members’ Attitudes and Behavior in Relation to the Sponsoring Company,” found that:

82 percent of the surveyed community members said they were more likely to recommend a company’s products since joining its community.
76 percent felt more positively about the company.
75 percent felt more respect for the company.
63 percent said that membership had increased their trust of the company.
52 percent were more inclined to purchase products from the company.

Why do communities affect people so much? One reason may be that it provides a way for people to talk with a company and feel heard: 91 percent said they felt that their community allowed them to give candid feedback and suggestions to the company.

Marketing marginalizing marketing

2006-05-04T13:58:00.000-05:00

Are marketers cannabalizing marketing? Finding and keeping customers is marketing's purpose. But a new study by the CMO Council shows that marketers are disconnected from customers.

More than half of the marketers surveyed rely on sales for customer conversations. Nearly 75% lack a customer advisory board.

Then how do marketers connect with customers? They don't, really. Approximately one third of the survey respondents rely on CRM systems as their primary customer information source -- and 40 percent said their CRM systems were weak or very weak. Mmmm....

“Marketers face the danger of rapidly marginalizing their own operations. They rely on sales to engage the customer and they rely on customer support to satisfy the customer," according to Christopher Kenton, senior vice president of the CMO Council .

It seems to me that marketing still has too much of a manufacuring mentality -- producing ads, Web sites, press releases and other stuff. Maybe it's time to make customer conversations as important a marketing responsibility as creating marketing materials.

As my friend Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace, says, "Marketers need to learn how to shut up and listen."

Innovation conferences

2006-05-04T13:36:00.000-05:00

Interested in getting some fresh perspectives and practical know-how about innovation? Two upcoming conferences promise to be out of the box while also providing ideas to use when we have to get back in the box.

The 2006 Marketing Innovation Conference: Building a New Marketing To Meet a Changing Market will be held June 8-9 at Columbia Business School in New York City. Corante and The Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia are sponsoring the event.

BIF2, sponsored by the Business Innovation Factory, will be held on October 4-5 in Providence, RI. The 30 speakers are really eclectic, from big company executives, successful entrepreneurs and university presidents and professors to scientists, entertainment executives, writers and journalists. (Each speaker gets just 15 minutes to tell a personal story.)

What I like about these conferences is that there won’t be any talking heads going through PowerPoint decks promoting their companies. Both are about provoking thinking and providing a forum for talking with interesting people we don’t meet in our usual business circles.

Hope to see you in NY or Providence…

Profits and purpose

2006-04-20T08:28:00.000-05:00

During a recent strategic planning meeting, directors of a publicly traded company got into a heated discussion about goal setting for the organization. I suggested that we step back and clarify the company’s purpose and mission.

“Well that’s easy,” said one director, who then highlighted revenue and profitability targets.

But there’s a difference between purpose and profits.

Joan Magretta’s great book, “What Management Is: How It Works and Why I'ts Everone;s Business,” explains why understanding the difference is important if we want everyone in the organization to “pull in the right direction.”

“Now that we’ve become a nation of shareholders and investors, we are more likely than ever to think that the purpose of a business is to generate profits,” she writes. “But the real purpose of any business is to create value for its customers and to generate profits as a result.

“While the distinction between purpose and results may sound like hair splitting, it’s not. It goes to the heart of how managers get organizations to perform.”

In the book Magretta uses Fidelity Investment’s retirement business as an example. Fidelity doesn’t define mission and purpose in terms of profitability or number of retirement accounts. Its purpose? “Make sure people who invest with Fidelity have enough money to retire.”

Such a clear purpose then helps us create the goals and strategies to achieve the greater purpose. And to measure the right performance benchmarks.

Behind eBay soul selling: provoking conversation

2006-03-10T09:31:00.000-05:00

Michael Esordi of Connecticut is selling his soul on eBay, and so far there are 13 bidders, with the highest bid being $47. The auction ends tomorrow.

What’s up with this guy? Is he some kind of religious nut? Apparently not. His real purpose is to provoke discussion, and get more people thinking about spirituality. Another example of just how much people want to have a say and engage with others to understand ideas. The more complex a concept, service or product, the more people want a dialog to make their own meaning of the idea. That’s why effective marketing is a conversation, not a one-way lecture, advertisement or sales presentation. We need to talk to make sense of many ideas, perhaps none more so than existential understanding.

“My idea is to put the idea out there and step back,” Esordi told Providence Journal writer Bryan Rourke. “It gets people to think and maybe believe in something. Souls are sold in small and large ways every day. Often, it’s something that happens little by little, almost unconsciously because we’ve become inured. ”

Aside from buying a certificate of Esordi’s soul, the winning bidder gets the opportunity to explain the reason for wanting to buy a soul certificate on Esordi’s web site, aptly named canitbesouled.com.

Going postal: USPS’ "Deliver" magazine

2006-02-28T14:24:00.000-05:00

Should the United States Post Office be in the business of promoting direct mail?

Yesterday I received a copy of “Deliver,” the USPS’ expensively produced, 32 page magazine. USPS sends the free bi-monthly magazine to 350,000 marketers.

The business world is moving to a paper-less, digital world, but the Postal Service is trying to promote the value of direct mail and other “innovative marketing tools.”

“Finding innovative marketing tools is a must for any company that needs to promote its brand and products to the consumer,” according to USPS press release announcing the magazine last winter. “Today the U.S. Postal Service is Deliver-ing a magazine for marketers about strategies and trends that are shaping the world of marketing and advertising.”

My view is that the USPS has no business trying to be in the marketing advice business, especially as their advice is grounded in the old print world, which is hardly innovative. That's just a bad use of our tax dollars. Not as bad as the USPS' huge sports sponsorship spends a few years ago, but still rather irresponsible.

USPS should take the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on the magazine and address its real issue: how to create a new USPS business model for a world with less and less mail.

Now, back to getting my tax returns completed....

Positioning and messaging is not an option

2006-02-16T19:22:00.000-05:00

Attention PR directors and agencies: positioning and messaging is not an option.

This week a global company asked us to troubleshoot some marketing problems, including its public relations agency's performance. The national agency has received numerous national awards and been named one of the best in its class, but the client is disappointed after working with the agency for six months.

We looked at the agency's recommendations and plan: the "core" program includes all kinds of tactical things like "media outreach" and press tours and press release writing. The fifth option of the "optional" programs was positioning and messaging, after a list of things like awards, product reviews, and speaking circuit.

The client had opted for the core program, and no messaging or story lines or point of views were ever developed. The agency has been pitching nothing, save for a couple of uninteresting product announcements. Who cares? No one.

If you don't have a story -- lessons learned, insights of value to customers, predictions, customer stories, a contrarian perspective of industry trends -- you don't have the ingredients for a public relations program.

You have to be interesting for people to be interested in you.

So don't buy or sell a heap of PR tactics without positioning and ideas that make the company interesting. Idea voids only lead to failure -- and another black eye on what executives think of public relations.

Candor and Greatness

2006-02-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

It always seems ironic to me when something new gets published that links telling the truth to being successful. Surprise! People – that is, employees, customers, anybody -- respond really well when you tell them like it is, including the stuff that’s not so great. They’ll work twice as hard and come up with amazing business-growing ideas if you are real and candid and involve them.

This month’s cover story in Inc. magazine features an excerpt of Bo Burlingham’s new book, “Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.” Too bad it seems to be one or other.

Must it? No, but it takes a special breed of leader to adopt the straight talk, open books, inclusive MO that inspires and motivates employees beyond all other incentives. I know this philosophy works from my firsthand experience years ago working for Jim Mullen, founder of Mullen advertising (now part of communications conglomerate Interpublic.) (I think Inc. was a Mullen client for awhile, as Jim and Bernie Goldhirsch were close acquaintances.)

Way back in the days of acetate overheads, Jim was opening the books and showing us what we spent on paper clips and how profit sharing – which every employee participated in -- was trending for the quarter. We all went back to work knowing exactly what we needed to do to fix something or create something, and we knew how we would personally benefit. The agency was consistently and highly profitable and earned a reputation for strong values, great work and a ferociously loyal workforce. (His book, “The Simple Art of Greatness” -- out of print but available from Amazon -- would make a good companion to “Small Giants”.)

There’s no question, it’s harder – at least in the beginning – to say it like it is. But the good news is, you can start in small ways. As you look at the next speech, employee update, press release or call center script , see if there isn’t a way to say what you need to say with a little more candor, and like you really mean it. Watch what happens. I’m guessing you’ll do it again. (Imagine what might happen if our politicians started behaving this way…)

This post from Janet Swaysland

The ‘hounds digital story

2006-02-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

Does this story meet the authentic test?

In our quest to learn how to tell business stories in interesting new ways, Janet Swaysland and I recently participated in a three-day Center for Digital Storytelling Workshop. (Love the group's tag line: Listen Deeply. Tell Stories.)

We learned that stories should be short on words (250 words maximum.) You have to have a reason to tell a story. Every story – even a two-minute one -- has to have some sort of conclusion or satisfying end. Always use the first person.

We also had a crash course on Adobe Element and Premiere software, and learned much from the stories from the other workshop participants – teachers, professors, non-profit activists.

It struck us that the corporate world is behind in this new storytelling technique

Here’s our first digital story. What grade do we deserve?

Drucker's good questions

2006-01-25T16:17:00.000-05:00

This post from Lois' Foghound partner Janet Swaysland:

Peter Drucker sure had a way with questions. Today during an online tribute to Drucker, 600 of us Drucker-philes -- including speakers Tom Peters, Marshall Goldsmith, Frances Hesslebein, and David Maister -- were reminded of the simple brilliance of questions like “What needs to be done?” “Why are we here?” “How can we do things better?” And of course Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions:

1. What is the mission?
2. Who is the customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

“The leader of the past knew how to tell. The leader of the future will know how to ask,” Drucker said.

(Marketers, take special note. We can do better than asking, “What’s the ROI on that program?” )

The very best advice is often common sense. But sometimes we need a push, a reminder. Those who ask the best questions -- and who listen most intently – win.

The best questions take us off the beaten trail, they are bank shots to uncovering unexpected beliefs, desires and ideas. They are bold, heartfelt questions. That’s Step 1.

Step 2 is being brave enough to not dumb down or bury the bold, heartfelt answers…

PS -- Another favorite Drucker quote: “I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.” Asking the right questions can be a real eye opener.

Women Running Countries: Giant ears vs. big mouths?

2006-01-16T13:36:00.000-05:00

Women stepping up to run countries were in the news today.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a 67-year-old Harvard=trained economist, is being inaugurated as the president of Liberia, the first woman president in Africa. Michele Bachelet, a doctor and former political prisoner, was yesterday elected as Chile’s first woman president. German Chancellor Angela Merkel just finished a visit to the White House. And Finland’s first female president, Tarja Halonen yesterday failed to win enough votes to secure re-election, forcing a runoff against a conservative challenger.

Why is it that women are succeeding as CEO’s of countries, but not of businesses?

I believe it’s because people today are screaming to be heard and to be understood, and women use a conversational communications style that recognizes those voices.

Look no further than the online world for evidence of wanted to be heard and involved. An estimated 50,000 new blogs start every day. Millions share product reviews and recommendations online. Communities are thriving. MoveOn.org has changed political advocacy, making it easy for people to be heard and get involved.

Women‘s communications styles tend to be more engaging, involving, and conversational than men. Most men talk more than they listen, not recognizing other people’s voices. Women, it seems, may have the inside track on knowing how to genuinely connect with people.

In her fascinating book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,” Deborah Tannen explains that men are more comfortable using “report-talk” while women use “rapport-talk.”

“For most women the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships,” she writes. “For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order.”

In Alice Walker’s novel “The Temple of My Familiar,” the main character falls in love with a man because she sees in him “a giant ear.”

Maybe women are succeeding because they are giant ears, and people prefer to be led by big ears instead of big mouths.

The cookbook on constructing a story

2006-01-11T15:21:00.000-05:00

“Stories are the large and small instruments of meaning, of explanation, that we store in our memories. We cannot live without them. So why is it that when many of us are asked to construct a story as a formal presentation to illustrate a point, we go blank?”

Joe Lambert, director of the non-profit Center of Digital Storytelling, puts his finger on the question that so many marketers are wrestling with. We know the value of stories, and best selling marketing books by Seth Godin and Steve Denning offer further proof of their value.

But how do you put together a story?

Next week Janet Swaysland, a Foghound partner, and I are taking a Center for Digital Story telling workshop to learn more -- and actually put together a digital story of how Foghound came to be. I recommend Lambert’s book, The Digital Storytelling Cookbook and Traveling Companion for anyone who wants a helpful “how to.”

In the book Lambert explains that there are seven elements in constructing a story:

Point of view. Stories need to make point.
Dramatic question. What keeps people interested?
Emotional content. How do we overcome something hard part to get what we want?
The gift of your voice. Real person, conversational style vs. the scripted.
The power of the soundtrack. Music can put the story into a clearer perspective, or at least entertain us.
Economy. The hardest part of storytelling. How to tell the story with few words and images.
Pacing. The rhythm of the story is the true secret of successful storytelling.

PS – My professional story, as you can see in the picture (stop laughing), started when I was a teenager, reporting for the Arlington (Mass.) Advocate.

Listening or spin at White House today?

2006-01-05T17:31:00.000-05:00

I got excited this morning when I heard that President Bush had invited about a dozen former secretaries of state and defense -- from both parties -- to the White House today to talk about Iraq.

Imagine the potential value of putting such talented people to work to figure out how to best navigate the complexities of this situation?

But was the intention to really listen to new voices or simply to put a more positive public spin on the Bush Administration? Here's how to tell the difference.

My communications scholar friends, like Walter Carl at Northeastern University, say that there are three general categories of listening, a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of listening, if you will. People tend to feel listened to when they reach the third level.

1. Recognition: just recognizing the other person's existence
2. Acknowledgement: acknowledging what another person feels or thinks or says
3. Endorsement: accepting another person's thoughts or worldview as valid and legitimate

Were these former global public policy leaders really listened to today?

PS: This listening hierarchy is also helpful to assess whether we're really listening to customers.

More on 2006 predictions

2005-12-21T09:14:00.000-05:00

Several people asked for more details on my 2006 predictions post. Here you go. Happy Holidays.

Insourcing vs. Outsourcing
Rather than going outside to outsource low-value or transactional work, companies will see the value of insourcing marketing talent and ideas. Insourcing has helped Procter & Gamble add $3 billion in revenue per year. Rather than typical “research & development,” P&G now uses a “connect & develop” approach, insourcing more than 30% of new product ideas coming from outside the company; the goal is to get to 50 percent “insourcing.”

New market concepts vs. new products
Buying music online is a big new market concept, which is why iPod and iMusic are so successful. The Segway scooter, on the other hand, was a big new product idea but not a very big market concept, which is why it hasn’t been so successful. Companies who get innovation will focus more on market concepts, which are difficult for the competition to quickly copy, and less on new products, which can be easily knocked off.

Consumer insights vs. market research
Conventional market research is too slow and superficial to keep up with fast changing market trends and fickle consumers; what was hot six months ago is often in a deep freeze by the time the focus group results are in. Continually gathering market insights will become more important than conventional qualitative research. In a recent speech at Wharton’s Marketing Conference, Hershey CEO Richard Lenny urged companies to rely on insight-driven customer marketing to increase the odds of success.

Communities vs. Blogs
Blogs are beginning to be too hard to keep up with and are still more of a one-way conversation, with the blogger talking at the blog readers. As customers yearn for two-way conversations – and an easier interface – they’ll seek out communities of interest. Also, companies will find that creating communities for their customers is the best way to find consumer insights.

Meaning making vs. promoting
Customers are tuning out advertising, promotions and spin. What they want is trusted help in making decisions. Companies that adopt more of a meaning making approach – helping customers make sense of so many competitive choices – will out market their competition. Meaning making will become especially hot for companies selling expensive, high consideration purchases.

Point-of-views vs. messages
While messaging helps define what you want to communicate, messages themselves have limited value unless they’re translated into interesting, sometimes provocative, talkable point-of-views that gently smack people in the face, getting them to pay attention and join in the conversation. POVs jump start sales conversations, presentations, and media interviews.

Teach me vs. tell me
Educational psychologists would make great marketers. They know that the keys to teaching students of any age are 1) make sure it’s personally relevant, 2) put it in a larger context, and 3) give it some emotion. And one more: make it involving, a partnership more than a transaction. Teaching vs. telling implies a lasting valuable outcome, not just information. Marketers will benefit by taking a page from the teaching textbook.

Salons vs. conferences
People will be more attracted to small scale salon-style events where they can meet with other interesting people in an interesting setting, and enjoy a looser, more “open source” approach to the agenda. Salons provoke thinking; conferences just present information.

Podcasts vs. Webinars
Get it and go, downloading company speeches and presentations to your PC or iPod so you can listen to it at your convenience will replace set time and date Webinars. We’re all too buys to rearrange our schedules to when a company wants to host an online meeting. But we will tune in to valuable ideas, when it fits into our schedule.

Voice of the customer vs. voice of the company
“Are you talkin’ to me?” Smart companies will listen more to the customers’ voice, address what the customers want to know, and talk the customers’ language, not some artificial “brand voice” created by the agency.

Behavioral targeting vs. 18-45
Behavioral targeting vs. demographic or even psychographic segmentation is the difference between being appreciated because you’re relevant and being a clueless pest. Done right, behavioral targeting increases both profitability and loyalty. Heck, even the Federal Reserve Bank gets it – a new Fed research center is focused on “behavioral economics” to better understand how people really make their spending and saving decisions (hint: it’s rarely rational); insights will feed into the Fed’s policy work.

Analytics vs. metrics
Metrics have their place in measuring tactics, like advertising clickstream data. But metrics tend to be rear view mirror, while analytics provide predictive data you can act on to constantly improve programs and get new ideas.

Best Holiday Card for Marketers

2005-12-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

This time of year we all receive many Holiday Cards. But the best card for marketing people EVER, has to be from advertising agency Phil Johnson & Associates, written like a marketing plan. Here’s what it says:

Objectives

Evaluate existing holiday greetings

Determine which greetings work best to:

Change perceptions of the holidays

Convey sense of community and love

Reduce cynicism

Help you be the best holiday greeter you can be

Holiday trends

People are busier than ever

Fewer “Happy” or “Merry” people out there

William Hung has just released a Holiday CD

Current holiday greetings

Season’s Greetings

Generic

Universally accepted for its ambiguity and utter vagueness

Leaves the door wide open for the Greetee to assume the Greeter is denomination-sensitive

Warm Wishes

Soft and sappy

A great opener and closer for holiday toasts

Brings out the “hugger” in people

Peace

Efficient, to the point

Perfect in situations where you’d like to keep the conversation to a minimum

Happy Holidays

Has legs

Most commonly used between November and New Year’s but could potentially be used for Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, and an other “holiday”

Great in a pinch

Focus group quotes

Feedback from holiday greeting focus group participants (not a representative sample)

“These cookies are free, right?”

“I bought my wife an iron. Is that bad?”

“What’s wrong with ‘Hey you?’”

Conclusions
Each holiday greeting is relevant and unique and the market could benefit from you using it.

Agency recommendations

Use them all.

Try not to forget what’s really important this holiday

Grab as much health and happiness as you can

Drinking too much “eggnog” and trying to sing Auld Lang Syne spells trouble.

2006 Predictions

2005-12-14T08:12:00.000-05:00

Here are marketing trends likely to heat up and cool down in 2006.

Insourcing vs. Outsourcing
Voice of the customer vs. Voice of the company
Point-of-views vs. Messages
Consumer insights vs. Market research
Behavioral targeting vs. 18-45
Communications as a service vs. Publicity
Analytics vs. Metrics
Communities vs. Blogs
Podcasts vs. Webinars
Teach me vs. Tell me
Salons vs. Conferences
New market concepts vs. New products
Influence vs. Power

$1.35 BILLION for Army Recruitment Ads?!

2005-12-08T14:29:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the U.S. Army hired a new ad agency, McCann Erickson, according to Ad Age. The budget: $1.35 billion to be spent on ads to recruit for active duty and the Reserve. That’s right, more than a BILLION dollars.

This decision comes at a time when the marketing industry recognizes that conventional advertising is not effective, particularly if the value prop is weak. (Or if you’re being recruited to go to Iraq, maybe a non-existent value prop.)

Is there a better way to spend $1.35 billion of our money?

Use a slice of the money to figure out how to get out of Iraq sooner; then we wouldn't have to recruit so many people. Despite its advertising and aggressive recruiting,
the Army missed its recruitment target this year by 7,000, according to a report in today's N.Y. Times. Maybe no amount of advertising is going to work. Like Vietnam, people don’t believe much in the military's cause. And if they don’t believe, they’re not going to join.

Create an online community where active duty Army professionals can talk to
those with a possible interest? Let the people who know the value of being in
the Army – and have the most credibility – tell the story vs. ads?

The goal of the Army is to recruit 80,000 new soldiers a year. Divide 80,000
into $1.35 billion and you get $1,687.50. If the army upped the signing
incentives by another $1,687.50 would that be as effective as advertising?

Reinstate the draft. Give full college scholarships to everyone who serves. Make the military reflective of a democratic society. The added benefit: the middle and upper class would be mad as hell and would get more involved in government’s decisions. (As the mother of a young son, I hate to think of a draft....)

Maybe some of these things are already happening. I’d sure feel better knowing that the Army has looked at alternatives before committing $1.35 BILLION on trying to market something no one wants to buy.

5 tips for interesting conversations

2005-12-05T08:52:00.000-05:00

Why so many copycats? Testosterone and....

2005-12-01T16:54:00.000-05:00

Dov Gordon of The Gordon Group, a management consultancy in Israel, was surprised to learn from one of my posts that BK’s Subservient Chicken campaign hadn’t increased sales. From reading about the campaign in marketing publications, his perception was that it was hugely successful.

"When you get a chance, please tell me why you think it is that advertising and marketing people continue with these viral campaigns if sales have not gone up. What’s their rationalization?"

First I sent Dov a link to Adrants about the new Maxtor campaign, yet another Subservient Chicken copycat.

Then tried to answer his question.

1. Marketing and advertising people are getting rather desperate. Traditional advertising isn’t working so there’s a rush to create something new that will.

2. Many don’t know how – or may not want to – or aren’t responsible for – doing the heavy lifting needed to increase sales. Making less “stuff” and listening more to customers in new ways to get ideas on how to deliver more value. Developing more thoughtful insights and new ideas to help customers and create loyalty. While new roles are emerging in marketing, the silos and old rules still remain. Advertising is still very promotional and creative driven.

3. Wacky “innovative” ideas, spun right, look good on a resume Most marketers aren’t responsible for creating new customer value models, which is a real career builder. That’s usually the CEO’s domain. So they often feel stuck in the realm of tactics.

4. Now this one is likely to get me in trouble, but I have data from a study by Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus to prove it. There’s a whole lot of testosterone in marketing and advertising. The boys posture, brag, taunt, copy -- and are afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. They make more decisions based on their gut than women do. They create campaigns and promote them so well that people like Dov think they were successful, when they were not.

5. And then there’s the copycat mentality….

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Transactions not conversations

2005-11-30T10:15:00.000-05:00

I’m a little down after meeting yesterday with a respected chief marketing officer of a large fast food company. But what I learned was a valuable reminder about what it takes for change.

“I don’t care about the concepts of community and conversations and consumer relationships,” the marketing exec told me.

“What matters to me is transactions. Does a marketing tactic connect directly to sales? If it does, it has value. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t be doing it.

“The concept of a having a community for our customers is nice. So are more viral, entertaining ads. But I’m not sure the investment is worth it. For one, it would appeal to a limited number of customers. Secondly, I can’t measure its value in terms of sales.”

The exec pointed to some of Burger King's promotions, like the Subservient Chicken, which got a lot of people talking. But, he added, Burger King's chicken sales didn't budge. So the money was really, to him, a waste.

While so many of us see the value of a shift in marketing from “talk at” promotions to "talk with" conversations, we probably need to remember that decision makers are reluctant to change without measurement metrics.

We need more proof.

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U2 Marketing Lessons

2005-11-28T09:56:00.000-05:00

David Carr has a great column in today’s New York Times, “Media Business Tips From U2.” Some of the lessons on how to connect with customers are relevant to all businesses today. Here’s an editorialized summary:

Meet the consumers where they live. Know how to “feed the tribe” so they feel part of you. Five years ago U2 replaced it s fanzine Propaganda with a fan site that's constantly updated.

It’s called show business for a reason. Engage fans in the experience.

Seize the moment, but don’t steal it. Adopt new ideas, but know when to kill them.

Aim high. Make your fans think they’re part of something bigger.

Apologize, then move on. When there was a ticket problem this year with customers and scalpers, the band immediately recognized the problem and apologized.

Don’t embarrass your fans. The product needs to be great, not re-hashed product releases – or product extensions to those in the consumer products business. “Don’t embarrass your fans,” Bono said to the N.Y. Times last year. “They’ve given you a good life.”

Embrace technology: U2 didn’t fight downloading, it produced one of the first downloadable boxed sets of its music. Because that’s what fans want.

Be careful how you sell out. The Apple partnership made sense for U2’s brand. Too many other performers sell out for the money.

Embrace politicians, not politics. That’s how to get things done, regardless of the political party label.

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Friendliness?

2005-11-23T11:15:00.000-05:00

Marketing is about conversations. "So what does that mean," people ask me? How do you take the concept and apply it practically to everyday marketing?

Conversations are by their nature friendly -- people listening and chatting with an interest in the other person.

So maybe one pragmatic way to reshape marketing activities and programs is to make them friendlier. Friendly. What a small but big concept.

Here’s how various dictionaries define friendliness:
Helpful
Approachable and accessible
Hospitable
Cordial

Friendly people and companies listen because they’re really interested in what people have to say. They make it easy for people to chat with them. They share what they’re hearing about new ideas, what’s happening that might be helpful, what they’re learning. They don’t lecture or promote but converse in the best sense of the word, which comes from Latin con versare – to turn or dance together. They ask questions – and make it easy for others to do the same in a welcoming kind of way. They’re not judgmental, but offer sincere advice if a friend is doing something dumb.

The Wikipedia says that “Value that is found in friendships is often the result of a friend demonstrating on a consistent basis:

-- The tendency to do what is best for you.

-- Mutual understanding

-- Sympathy and empathy

-- Honesty, particuarly in situations where it may difficult for others to speak the truth

What if we reframed our marketing thinking around one simple idea: to be more friendly? Yes, it sounds Pollyanna-ish, but many companies who get the “marketing as conversations concept” exude friendliness. In their people, actions, business practices, and in their style of oral and written marketing communications.

Think about Southwest Airlines or Virgin Atlantic (vs. the unfriendly United, American et al). Zappos shoes vs. the big department stores. Whole Foods vs. Stop & Shop. And all the small local businesses we’re so loyal to because of friendliness.

It’s hard to change, but friendliness seems like an easy way to start. Thoughts?

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CA: Good intentions but muddled marketing

2005-11-15T09:53:00.000-05:00

Computer Associates, now to be called CA, today featured multi-page spreads in newspapers like "The New York Times" announcing the company’s new growth strategy.

But darned if I can figure out what they’re talking about, which is too bad because CEO John Swainson seems so passionate about cleaning up CA and making the company matter again to its corporate customers. I’m rooting for him to succeed, but there are a few things in marketing that he’s going to have to change to win me over – and his customers. (Newsday interviewed some of CA’s customers following John’s speech in Las Vegas, and they too are a little befuddled.)

Here’s what CA needs to do differently:

Readjust your assumptions and tap into what’s really going on with your customers. The ad headlines are “Remember when technology had the power to inspire you? Believe again.” Technology has been extremely inspiring in so many ways to so many of us. We never lost the belief. CA may have lost its inspiration along the way, which accounts for so little company innovation and growth. We don’t need to be told in ads to “believe again” in technology. What we do need, however, is to be told why we should believe again in CA and its technology and services.

Explain what you mean: Which brings me to point two. What the heck is your big new vision, Enterprise IT Management (EITM)? Your communications talk about how it “unifies and simplifies complex IT environments across the enterprise.” The press release headline says, "Unified Management of End-to-End Infrastructure Enables IT Organizationsto Overcome Complexity and Ensure Performance Of Business Services." But hello, what exactly is it? I really know technology, yet I can’t figure out what the big aha is here. More context, examples, maybe some helpful metaphors, and just plain speak would really help.

Rid yourself of the trite lines and tired talk. I’ve heard John talk and he’s engaging and direct. So why is your letter, advertising and Web site so full of empty corporate speak, which, by the by, uses phrases that date back to what other tech companies used in the 90s? Phrases like “transforming business,” “unifying and simplifying complex IT environments,” “reach a higher order of IT,” “simplify the complex,” “deliver fully against your business goals,” "align IT to reach business goals," are empty, boring, and tired.

Talk about something fresh, in your own words – not a copywriter’s: CA must have some points-of-view on enterprise technology that are contrarian, counter-intuitive, unusual, insightful, or surprising. How else can you innovate, as you say you have, if you weren't turned on by some big insights? What customer insight triggered the passion of your developers? What do you know that you can do better than any of your competitors? Talk about those ideas. In the real words of real people. In today’s business world, a new logo and name change don’t matter all that much. People want a reason to believe in you. They want fresh ideas. And they want to connect with the company and its people -- not with a new acronym.

I love the technology industry and hope that there is great thinking and innovation going on at CA. Maybe the marketing approach just needs to revamped.

When many of us see this old style marketing, with to much hoo-ha around logos and category acronyms and not enough clear explanations of what is new and valuable, we often think that there is no new strategy. Just a great shade of new lipstick that is likely to quickly fade.

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Where is Chirac? The deliverer is the message.

2005-11-10T13:44:00.000-05:00

In times of crisis, the job of leaders is to be visible -- to step up and absorb people's fears, reassure them about what's being done, and put the events within a forward looking perspective. People want to be led, especially during times of upheaval.

So where oh where is France's President Jacques Chirac this week? I don't live in France and I'm scared about what's going on with the unrest and riots in the country's slums during the past two weeks. Imagine being a French citizen?

Rather than going on TV or the radio to declare a national state of emergency, Chicrac and his administrators had a government spokesperson read a statement to journalists on Tuesday after a Cabinet meeting. Unbelievable.

The job of communications is an executive's job. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, Jack Welch, or Tony Blair. In times of crisis, communications cannot be shunned or delegated without serious ramifications.

The medium is not the message. The deliverer is the message.

For France, this means the government may have much graver problems than any of us realize.

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Red Sox & Wal-Mart: PR or Leadership Problems

2005-11-03T07:51:00.000-05:00

People are talking this week about “PR problems” at the Boston Red Sox and Wal-Mart's new War Room media strategy when the real problems are leadership problems.

At a press conference yesterday Theo Epstein talked to the media for 30 minutes about his resignation as General Manager of the Boston Red Sox. He never expalined the real reason for resigning, and the rumors about a the nature of the falling out between Epstein and Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino went suprsonic. Especially since Lucchino didn’t attend the press conference. (All the other Sox execs were there, including owners John Henry and Tom Werner.)

Sportswriter Bill Reynolds wrote in this morning’s Providence Journal:

You would think he (Lucchino) would have been there for no other reason than
he’s the public face of this franchise, its CEO. You think he would have been there to send out the message he wishes things could have been resolved, that he wishes Theo well, blah, blah, blah, the new spin. You would think he would have begun the first day of damage control, both to his image and the perception that the Red Sox are going to be fine, that the organization is strong enough to withstand the loss of anyone, Epstein ncluded.

Lucchino’s absence and the way the Epstein contract negotiations were handled tell you there are bigger leadership problems.

A front page story in Tuesday’s New York Times, “A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room/Retailer Tries Political Tactics to Help Image,” talked about how the retailer is taking a page from the political playbook to try to sell a better image to the public.

No PR tactic – or even the best political strategists – can help a company with weak leadership. And Wal-Mart is flip flopping all over the place.

Last week The New York Times also reported on a leaked Wal-Mart memo discussing the company’s strategy for selling its new employee healthcare plans to the public. The memo said the company is testing the plan’s proposed changes “to determine whether these investments would effectively ‘move the needle’ on Wal-Mart’s public reputation.”

Here’s what Wal-Mart should do to move the needle:

Get with the most innovative health care reformers in the country and develop a plan that’s good for employees and doesn’t break the company’s back (as is GM’s employee/retiree health benefits).
Take its huge PR budget and at least half of its advertising budget and use that to fund employee healthcare.

Poor management begets poor reputation. PR has nothing to do with it.

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Wind, Nick Hornby & Context

2005-11-01T10:25:00.000-05:00

Knowing how to frame ideas into the right context seems to be a common stumbling block in marketing and communications. I don't know whether it's because understanding context is diffcult or putting things in context is difficult.

Here are two examples I came across last week that may help you think about context.

Wind power. On Friday two architecture professors, Charlie Cannon of Rhode Island School of Design and Leftheri Pavlides of Roger Williams University, walked me through a presentation about why wind turbines are good for communities. The deck, written eight months ago before energy prices went bonkers and Exxon Mobil declared a $9 billion net quarterly profit, was packed with economic, environmental and health data and benefits.

“So, what do you think,” they asked. "Is it persuasive and convincing?"

Not quite. My advice was that they talk about wind in the context of the out-of-control energy prices, and the impact of those prices on poor and working class folks who are just trying to make it. (Flash back to images of Hurricane Katrina and the poor and working class with no safety net.)

Of course, the environmental and health benefits are solid, but what moves people in the current context is that wind is something we can approve locally to help local people. I can’t do anything about the big oil companies or utilities. But I can approve wind turbines for my local community, which will help some people who are on the brink of financial disaster. Wind is a simple thing we can do that can have a profound effect.

A Long Way Down. Another example of context comes from Nick Hornby’s new novel, A Long Way Down about four really different people who meet by chance on a rooftop on New Year's Eve with the intent of committing suicide. (Almost but not quite as good as High Fidelity and About A Boy.)

This excerpt is from JJ, one of the loser characters who is on vacation in the Canary Islands with his new New Year's Eve friends, and is going out to “jumpstart my libido.”

“I went back to the room to get dressed. I’m not a bare-chested kind of guy. I’m like a hundred and thirty pounds, skinny as f**k, white as a ghost, and you can’t walk around next to guys with tans and six-packs when you look like that. Even if you found a chick who dug the skinny ghost look, she wouldn’t remember that she dug you in this context, right? If you were into Dolly Parton and they played a blast of her album during a hip-hop show, she just wouldn’t sound good. In fact, you wouldn’t even be able to f******g hear her. So putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people.”

JJ dressed for the context and did indeed jumpstart his libido. I'd like to share more about the other characters and bigger context ideas but that might ruin the book for you. It's worth the read.

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Reframing the conversation

2005-10-26T08:38:00.000-05:00

It's 2006 planning time and the marketing frustration is beginning to boil. "How do we set ourselves apart?" "How do we get more of a "big bang"? "How can we make a difference with no budget increases?"

First, throw away the "brand voice" definitions and marketing "messaging" documents that haven't worked. Try something different this year. Create strategies around what your company really passionately believes in. Get your customers thinking in new ways. Reframe how they think about the industry and you. Create programs around ideas abd beliefs. Let your people talk. Use more video and podcasting and fewer words.

Beliefs and ideas are very powerful stuff and difficult for your competitors to copy.

A good way to learn more about reframing market conversations around beliefs is to read linguist George Lakoff's book, "Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate." While the book focuses on how to change the political conversation, there are many lessons for marketers who are trying to figure out how to communicate their competitive difference, and their value to customers.

Lakoff provides a lot of guidelines, but says these four are the most important:

Show respect.
Respond by reframing.
Think and talk at the level of values.
Say what you believe.

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BIF-1 Innovation Summit: Seeing new possibilities

2005-10-21T13:36:00.000-05:00

My head is still spinning (in a good way) from the stories from 25 business, entertainment, education, arts and government leaders at this week’s Business Innovation Factory Summit in Providence, RI. Hosted by Richard Saul Wurman of TED fame and Xerox PARC’s former chief scientist John Seely Brown, the conference challenged the way most of us think about innovation.

After digesting the stories, lessons and advice of some remarkably diverse and successful people, here are some patterns I took away:

Have a dream. Reframe. These game changers had an idea – a vision – that turned them and their people on to do what many might have thought was impossible. The “dream” was almost always a bigger purpose than anything financial. Stuart Moore, co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient, told the story of three stone masons. They first one said he was cutting rocks. The second said he was working to feed his family. The third said he was building the world’s biggest cathedral. They were all doing the same work, but the third one loved his work because it connected to a bigger vision, an important piece of work.

The conversations around creating a higher purpose and dream reminded me of this illustration from Hugh MacLeod.

5x Ask "why" and "why not." Innovators ask why, and then they ask why again, and again and again, and again. Ask “why” 5 times and you’ll begin to get into possibilities and obstacles. John Seely Brown suggested that we also asked “Why Not?” five times as we explore possibilities.

Dennis Littkey, founder of the Met School, recipient of multiple Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grants, fundamentally changed the success of largely high-risk inner city high school kids, by asking the question, “Why is school so boring for kids? What’s really best for kids? How do they want to learn?’ Rather than looking at how to change schools, he looked at what the kids wanted, and then designed education around that. The graduation rates are in the high 90% while graduation rates from conventional inner city schools is around 50%.

Get out of your world. Larry Huston of Procter and Gamble talked about how tapping into the world of 1.5 million “experts” for new product ideas – vs. relying on an internal 7,500 person R&D team – has helped this consumer packaged goods company add $3billion in revenue a year. Rather than a typical “research & development” approach P&G now uses a “connect & develop” approach, with more than 30% of new product ideas coming from outside the company; the goal is to get to 50 percent.

Work has to be fun and engage people on intellectual, emotional and visceral levels. “Innovating and change isn’t “hard” work; if it’s framed within a context of the “dream” and an exciting purpose, work takes on a new meaning. Jim Lavoie, CEO of RiteSolutions, and Stuart Moore, dissed the idea that change is hard. “Today’s knowledge workers want to have fun. If it’s not fun, why get out of bed in the morning?”

Innovation comes from the opposite of expectation.. The future his here, ripe with possibilities. We need to be more intellectual curious, inquisitive, brave, see – truly see – what’s going on, shun accepted “wisdom,” challenge the norm, and explore radical alternatives.

Sounds like fun to me.

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Advocates & Identity

2005-10-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

One particualry interesting piece of research about what makes people evangelists and advocates for an organization, comes from the University of Queensland, and was presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com at last week's International Word-of-Mouth Marketing Conference.

The overriding reason people advocate for an organization or product is that they identify with the organization or share a sense of community with other people who support/buy from the organization. (62%)

I was truly surprised to hear that satisfaction and experience accounted for just 21%, and trust for 9% in comparison.

Here are the standardised “path estimates” for the model.

Advocacy à Loyalty (.88)
Identification à Advocacy (.62)
Satisfaction à Advocacy (.21)
Trust à Advocacy (.09)

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Takeaways from the International Word of Mouth Conference

2005-10-12T08:58:00.000-05:00

Last week two conferences about the future of marketing were held -- the giant annual Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference in Phoenix, and the first International Word of Mouth Conference in Hamburg, Germany, which I attended and spoke at.

While the ANA conference sounded the alarms for new ways to connect with consumers amid an increasingly fragmented world, the WOM conference showed how to do just this.

Here are some highlights from the WOM conference.

WOM is a discipline with proven ways to research, plan, target, test and measure. Fergus Hampton of Millward Brown laid out the most cogent strategic approach to moving brands from “talk at me brands” to “talked about” brands. I especially liked Fergus’ example of religion as word-of-mouth at its most effective.

Content: WOM is about engaging the customer, and this can be done through experiences, ideas, and beliefs. “What starts WOM are ideas,” said Steven Erich from Crispin Porter. “Ideas also need to be killed to make room for new ideas. “ Jaap Favier of Forrester, noted that we remember 10% of what we read, 15% of what we hear, and 80% of what we experience.

Style: WOM must be authentic, truthful, provide value, and use a human voice. One of my presentations talked about the need to make meaning, not buzz, and that meaning making requires context, relevancy and honest emotion. Meaning making, done right, builds trust.

Influencers drive WOM: Alex Macris of The Themis Group, who presented with game producer Scott Foe of Nokia, explained the secrets to marketing to influencers, who he calls “superconductors”: respect their power, build relationships, accelerate their experience, and offer them status. Inus Hwang of Azooma Marketing Lab in South Korea showed how effectively engaging a community 200 women has accelerated the national adoption of new products at a fraction of the cost of TV advertising. (1/13th the cost in one of her cases.)

Internal WOM: Euan Semple of the BBC talked about the value of using blogs internally to more openly share ideas, problems and opinions. “When you get people talking internally you’re less likely to make mistakes and more likely to create better things,” he said. Added Hugh MacLeod, “How you talk internally affects how people talk externally.” Hugh thinks that you need to create an environment where internal people can have more open, frank real conversations before you can have genuine external conversations. He pointed to the example of how Robert Skoble of Microsoft has changed the internal conversations within the company and affected the company’s culture.

New Research: Several academics presented new research on WOM.
Today, just 3.4% of WOM conversations are stimulated by a company’s marketing efforts; and a whopping 77% is through face-to- face conversations. Walter Carl, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies, Northeastern University.

Netnography, with its ethnographic roots, can provide valuable insights in how to communicate with and influence consumers, and glean message themes, according to Kristine De Valck of HEC University in Paris.

Visualization of data can pinpoint influencers in WOM communities, according to Suresh Sood, University of Technology in Sydney. He presented a project where he was able to identify 25 influencers among 65,000 people through visualization of mobile phone calling patterns.

The value of positive and negative online consumer reviews differ based on the product type, said Shahana Sen of Farleigh Dickinson University. Her research shows that 61% people rate negative reviews as useful for utilitarian products. But for hedonic products (books. CD’s, etc.) just 28% rated negative reviews as useful

How do you establish consumer advocacy? A University of Queensland study presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com showed that customer identification is the most important antecedent to consumer advocacy, more than consumer satisfaction or trust.

My favorite takeaway from the conference were two remarks by Hugh MacLeod:

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

“To control the conversation, improve the conversation."

Now there’s something for marketers to talk about as they plan next year's strategy.

Leaders and language

2005-09-16T14:41:00.000-05:00

I was wrestling with the business talk around change, agility, adaptability, alignment, collaborative innovation, and the increasingly trendy “unlocking human potential.” I think I know what executives are trying to say, but the words seem inadequate, and in some cases trite or glib.

In my quest to understand how leaders can better use language to lead, I found poet David Whyte, who works with organizations around the world. And what a find David is. Instead of talking to business audiences about change, David uses poems to bring to life the experience of change.

I was struck by several of David’s beliefs about leadership, and the poems he uses to invite us in to understand those beliefs. Here are some ideas and poems that provoked me. For more, go to David’s Web site (http://www.davidwhyte.com/) and listen to one of his CD’s. (I especially liked “Life at the Frontier: Leadership Through Courageous Conversations.”)

Leaders’ conversations
Leaders’ conversations are not about the work; they are the work. Leaders must help people feel as though they belong, where their voice affects the world in which they are participating. Too many people are isolated at work and feel unheard.

“Loaves and Fishes”

This is not
The age of information.

This is not
The age of information.

Forget the news,
And the radio,
And the blurred screen.

This is the time
Of loaves
And fishes.

People are hungry,
And one good word is bread
For a thousand.

David Whyte

More than you
Treat the world as if it’s alive. That it is other than you, not just a reflection of you, and not just put there to work on your behest.

Old Chinese poem:

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.98% of everything you do and everything you say is for yourself.
And there isn’t one.

Creativity and radical attention
All your creative powers come from your ability to pay a radical kind of attention to what’s around you, to see what you haven’t seen before.

“Lost “

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner

Fat or Fabulous?

2005-09-09T09:29:00.000-05:00

Dove’s new advertising campaign is a great example of how powerful it can be to stir up the market conversation with a new point of view.

The campaign features confident, happy women of all sizes and shapes, dressed only in underwear. They’re not the super-skinny fashion models, but real women with real curves. In other words, the campaign challenges the media image that you must be thin to be attractive.

The campaign has generated enormous press around the world, including a People magazine cover article, an editorial in the The New York Times, and appearances on the "Today" show.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article, “Social Lubricant: How a Marketing Campaign Became the Catalyst for a Societal Debate,” Rob Walker hit on just how effective a debate-stirring marketing campaign can be.

“Maybe it is somehow inevitable that marketing, which caused much of the underlying anxiety in the first place, can offer up a point of view that blithely tries to resolve that anxiety.

“Moreover, as the entertainment side of the media fragments, marketing becomes the one form of communication that permeates everywhere – and is just as effective whether you’ve actually seen the campaign or you simply have an opinion about it based on what you’ve heard,” he wrote.

How refreshing to not only to see real women and real beauty, but to see a marketer stir up conversations – and brand interest.

For more about the campaign, see http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/.

PS –Happiness and kindness are the top attributes that make a woman beautiful, according to a Dove global study.

Turning pages

2005-08-29T12:47:00.000-05:00

All year long I look forward to a 20-year, late-August tradition: hunkering down on our family’s Cape Cod beach and devouring the four inch thick September fashion magazines.

I’ve driven miles to find newsstands selling Vogue, and then Harper’s Bazaar. Lugging my magazines and beach chair to the edge of the water and shutting out the world while I turn each glossy page has always been a sort of bliss.

But while the beach weather is spectacular and Vogue is as thick as ever, I’m feeling a little melancholy.

Vogue seems to have lost its appeal. The 17-year-old anorexic models wearing $10,000 designer outfits that no real woman would ever wear seem boring and out-of-touch. The magazine no longer seems glamorous and alluring; instead it seems self-absorbed and written by and for some small inner circle of jet-setting fashionistas. My once devout loyalty to this magazine is ending.

Some of the newer magazines seem much more appealing. Lucky, In-Style, and Oprah’s “O” are appealing in ways that my former favorites are not. Their formats are much different from the traditional fashion magazines. The mix of features is broader, the fashion advice more realistic, and the clothes and make-up are things that I might actually buy.

I suppose this is the struggle for all marketers: how to stay relevant, fresh, and connected in some emotional way with your consumers.

This is especially challenging when revenues are chugging along fine, thank you very much. Why bother changing something that seems to be working?

Because upstarts know that even the biggest brands can get stuck in once-winning formulas and that there’s always an opening for something new that connects with consumers in new ways. (Hello Lucky.)

Just as many of us annually purge our closets, maybe brands need to more regularly step back and toss away what worked for years and do a makeover, maybe even an extreme makeover. At a minimum, set up the right consumer panels, and then pay attention to emerging patterns.

Good-bye Vogue. It was great for a lot of years. Time for a swim.

Summer house 'poems' & marketing conversations

2005-07-18T10:53:00.000-05:00

While technology is becoming the heart of marketing and communications, conversations are the soul. And some of the most engaging conversations are around talking about ideas, beliefs, opinions, and points of view. Not products.

This week I came across two examples of companies whose points of view instantly engaged me and helped me understand what makes their companies unique and different.

“What we maybe had to relearn as a company is that we’re not in the transportation business, we’re in the arts and entertainment business,” explained GM vice chairman Bob Lutz to shareholders at a recent meeting.

GM in the arts and entertainment business? Now, that’s interesting. I immediately understood that Lutz is trying to take GM to a very different place. It somewhat reassured me as a shareholder, and I’m toying with putting my car buying plans on hold to see what GM might come out with next year.

My favorite point-of-view this week was from Dietsche & Dietsche Architects. While I often hear professional services firms talk about how difficult it is to market themselves, Chuck Dietsche’s positioning is clear and compelling, expressed through this point-of-view:

“The first house is a dictionary. The second is a poem,” he says.

Chuck talks about how our primary homes are about accommodation – “Where do I park, where do I sleep?” While the second home idealizes our lives and helps us express that to the world.

Wow, that’s interesting and compelling marketing.

I’m off to my second home, which is more of a haiku, for summer vacation. Some friends are thinking about building in the area. I’m going to talk to them about Chuck Dietsche because he’s made it so easy for me to do so.

What’s your company’s point of view?

Nay et Non on EU Constitution: Policy or Communications Issue?

2005-06-03T10:28:00.000-05:00

After the French voted “non’ and the Dutch followed with a “nay” on the European Union constitution this week, many policy experts, journalists and politicians started dissecting what happened.

One of the biggest issues, and not talked about much, is that the voters just didn’t understand what the EU constitution would mean to them.

The policy makers and politicians failed to communicate with the people. They holed up in Brussels writing dense, rhetoric-filled papers, shared these with insiders, and thought they were done. Their approach is similar to what frequently happens in the corporate world where executives develop complex corporate strategies with their seven figure management consulting firms, write a report (or a really, really big PowerPoint deck) and consider the job done.

Whoa. If people don’t understand what the strategy means to them, they will not accept it, work to make it happen, or in the case of the EU constitution, vote on it.

Talking yesterday on NPR’s “Connection” radio program, Jocelyne Cesari, Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies and Divinity School, underscored the communications problem.

“What is missing in Europe and the EU building process is a political narrative that would be appealing to a lot of segments of European society -- especially young people. Up until now the European Union has been seen as a bureaucratic process. When people say Brussels they mean a very specialized place – writing treaties of 30 pages long with technical features.

"People in Europe don’t understand what the story would be for them in this new union. This is very important. It is the responsibility of all national political classes to make a story that resonates.”

Another example of how essential strategic communications is – and the cost when executives fail to make it a priority.

Next gen marketing trends

2005-05-12T16:27:00.000-05:00

This week’s AMA “Strategic Marketing Conference” in Chicago brought together 300+ marketing executives to explore some big ideas in marketing strategy, planning, execution and measurement. The big takeaway for me was that traditional marketing is dead and we need to quickly create new approaches and euthanize many others.

I spoke on Wed. about the need to for all marketers – regardless of company size or type – to create conversation themes that make it easy for people to talk about the company or product. After all, we live in a world of conversations. Not static messages. Not traditional written copy. I talked about the 6 most common obstacles to creating conversations and the 3 ways to get started:

1. Ear-to-the-ground communications research.

2. Developing a point-of-view that gets people saying, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”

3. Straight talk. Genuine. Clear. No jargon.

Click here if you want a copy of the presentation, “Mind the Gap: Making Brand Conversations Real, Relevant & Repeatable.”

Highlights from some of the other presenters:

Brand management needs to be reinvented, with the focus on building customer equity vs. brand equity. Dr. Roland Rust, University of Maryland and author of “Driving Customer Equity.”

Market generalists and market niche players need very different strategies to prosper-- and maybe even survive. (Note: any market category only has 3 big players no matter how large the market.) Dr. Rajendra Sisodia, professor of marketing Bentley College and author of “The Rule of Three How Competition Shapes Markets.”

Consumers are trading up to luxury goods. 96% of consumers have at least one category for which they will pay more to get better products. Michael Silverstein, CEO, Boston Consulting Group.

The big consumer trends to watch: innovation and experimentation, simplicity, word-of-mouth marketing. Ed Keller, CEO of NOP World Consumer and author of “The Influentials.”

One of the biggest problems in pricing is communicating the value of the product or service to customers – why it’s fair relative to the value created, relative to competitor value/price, and relative to the cost to develop product. John Hogan, vice president of the Strategic Pricing Group.

Using concept and product engineering is an incredibly powerful way to build better – and more profitable -- products and stores, taking the guesswork out of marketing planning. Dunkin’ Donuts used this approach to analyze 16,000 data points, and come up with new directions for national expansion. Dr. Regina Lewis, direction of consumer and brand insight sat Dunkin’ Brands.

We need video to tell a story regardless of the medium. But we’re likely to see more video spots on the Internet than TV. Andrew Jaffe, advertising analyst and former editor of “Adweek."

Digital advertising is becoming more prevalent, more effective, and easier to measure. Deep search marketing is particularly compelling. Sarah Fay, president, Carat Interactive.

You can succeed even in dying categories by creating innovative marketing approaches that help you carve out greater market share. Chuck Feltz, president, Deluxe Financial Services and Direct Checks Unlimited.

Customer targeting, positioning and differentiation unequivocally remain the most important elements of successful marketing. Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus and author of “Countintuitive Marketing.”

What's commoditizing PR agencies

2005-05-05T13:04:00.000-05:00

Sun Microsystems’ use of dynamic bidding as one element of its recent agency search process has put the PR agency industry in a tizzy.

PR Week just published an article, “Dynamic Bidding: PR's race for respect heads south with dynamic bidding,” where PR agency heads bemoan the involvement of procurement in the agency selection process and say it will commoditize the industry.

“As more companies like Sun turn to dynamic bidding during agency reviews, many PR pros argue that the process turns the industry into a commodity,” reported Andrew Gordon in the May 2 issue.

Oh, puhlease…procurement’s involvement can’t turn you into a commodity. But there is something that can – and has for many pr agencies. Here’s my letter to the editor about the topic.

To: Letters Editor, PR Week

As the firm that managed the Sun agency review, I must say that PR agencies should be worried about being seen as commodities – but not because of dynamic bidding, as Andrew Gordon’s May 2 article contends.

A major obstacle for public relations agencies is their own marketing and business models. If you line up most agencies’ value propositions, marketing materials, staffing approaches, and services, it’s difficult to distinguish how they differ. As brands become more similar, purchase decisions become more heavily weighted toward low price – and this fact applies to all business categories whether it’s office supplies or public relations services.

When internal PR execs understand the differentiated business value an agency can provide, they will go to bat with procurement to make sure that the agency is hired – regardless of cost. In absence of understanding that value, all bets are off.

A case in point: the agencies Sun selected (Bite, MWW) had especially clear and unique value propositions that made the hiring decision easy and defensible – even though these agencies were not the lowest bidders.

Lois Kelly
Partner, Foghound
Providence, RI

Message Madness: Catholics & Democrats Struggle for Relevancy

2005-04-05T14:09:00.000-05:00

Forget March Madness. It’s Message Madness time. Still smarting from November’s loss, the Democrats know it and are stuck. In wake of the Pope’s death Friday, the Catholic Cardinals are tackling it. How to articulate a clear message that is relevant and influential to your audience.

Consider the advice that’s being published:

“If we want to make progress we need to focus on constructing a set of clear and concise principles and values that centralizes and homogenizes our message, but not our members.” Letter to the editor, New York Times, Sunday, April 3, 2005
“The church is self-consciously struggling to make its message relevant.” Page one article, New York Times, April 4, 2005
“The major challenge facing the church is to articulate the message of the faith in a way that’s actually influential and convincing to people.” Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuscon, New York Times, April 4, 2005
“Democrats Getting Lessons in Speaking Their Values” Democrats believe that the absence of a unifying theme or clear message cost them the election last November. New York Times, Feb. 11, 2005

Overcoming the obstacles to great messages
Creating relevant and influential messages is hard work, which is why so few organizations and companies have effective ones. My advice to the Catholics, Democrats and anyone in the corporate world wrestling with a “message makeover” is this:

Do a listening tour among your most influential and committed members. Then talk with influential former members. Ask for their advice and opinions. Really listen to their words and emotions. Why do they still belong? Why did they leave the flock? Tape record the conversations so you can go back and listen again for the nuances and language. That the Catholics are locking up Cardinals in the Vatican to select the new Pope and discuss associated implications to the Church’s messaging is a bad sign. That the Democrats are enlisting a bevy of diverse consultants and perspectives is more hopeful.

Beware of copycats and fraidy cats. When you’re losing votes, members and revenues, it’s time to take calculated risks to turn around the situation. Don’t try to copy your competitors’ messages. They’ll still be their messages and not yours. Ban fraidy cats from the messaging process. At best they’ll support incremental change; more likely they’ll suck the energy out of the process. (Note to Democrats: Beware of quoting the Bible and talking about moral values – despite some of your consultants’ advice. That’s the Republican angle. You need your own platform. I vote for “Personal Freedoms. Community Responsibilities.”)

Go to the organizational attic and review the founding vision and values. You just may find some insights worth re-exploring in context of what’s most relevant today. While my religious training was quite limited having preferred Carol Ann’s donut shop to Sunday school, I do remember being taught that Jesus was forgiving, nonjudgmental, and lived by few rules. Maybe there’s an angle here for the Catholics if the Unitarians and Congregationalists haven’t already co-opted that message. As for the Democrats, remember that Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic Party in 1792 to fight for the Bill of Rights.

Take a hard look at the issues that are most relevant to your members today. Map them out to really see what issues are increasing (or decreasing) in relevancy, and take a look at what issues are most closely connected. A visual view may help you see informative, new patterns. Then adapt your message – without altering your values – to today’s context. (Note to Catholics: preaching against birth control and condom use makes your organization appear outdated and highly irrelevant – even in areas like Africa where membership is growing.)

If your message isn’t relevant, it won’t be influential. As Louis B. Mayer once said, “If people don’t want to come, there’s nothing that we can do to stop them.”

A Life in Consulting

2005-03-16T12:01:00.000-05:00

On Friday I'm giving a guest lecture to a "Consultation Skills" class at Northeastern University. The communications and business students want to know what it takes to succeed in consulting, how they should get started, and some color commentary on my 25 year consulting career.

Here's what I plan to tell them.

First off, I never planned to be a consultant. I left a promising corporate communications position at AT&T's Western Electric division and headed up to Madison Ave. to work for a public affairs/crisis communications consulting firm on the advice of a respected -- and often feared -- executive who thought all ambitious people should be connected to revenue vs. overhead. And corporate communications to him was big time overhead.

I found that I thrived on working with demanding clients, being under the gun to deliver position papers, executive speeches and interviews with The New York Times, and being recognized and promoted for the value of my ideas vs. politics and time in position metrics.

Indeed, what makes consultants successful -- and different from their corporate brethren -- is that they are very good at quickly diagnosing problems and providing ways to solve them. Chaos, complexity, urgency, uncertainty doesn't phase a good consultant. But routine, process management, and operational minutiae certainly does.

There's a difference: contractors vs. trainers vs. consultants
Trainers teach skills. Contractors are extra hands to get work done. Consultants help cut through the organizational clutter and quickly frame problems and provide ideas on how to effectively and quickly solve them. Or they have specialized expertise for especially thorny problems. Some thorny situations I've been asked to address recently:

We spend $15 million a year on sales materials but the sales reps don't use them. What's wrong and how do we solve it?
Investors don't understand how our strategy fits within the competitive landscape. How can we explain our growth strategy so they get it?
Employees are leaving since the merger because they have no confidence in the new management team. What should the CEO do?
We just spent a year and $350,000 on a new brand strategy but our sales reps don't know how to talk about it with customers.
We're starting to be attacked by community leaders, politicians and major funders. How can we diffuse the crisis and help them understand why we're doing what we're doing?
We spend $10 million on PR agencies but the performance is lacking. Is it us? Is the agencies? How do we know we're getting value?

The 13 most important traits for a consultant:

Expertise that provides real business value
Ability to cut to the core of an issue or situation and diagnose causes of the problem
Creative thinking to develop pragmatic ways to solve the problem
Outstanding oral and written communications skills
Responsiveness
Perspective
Influence
Confidence & self-esteem
Intellectual curiosity
Thick skin (clients pay you to be frank, but they'll often push back and challenge, as they should. You can't take it too personally.)
Fearlessness
Flexibility to create "work arounds" to deliver value within every client's realities
Integrity. A consultant's only asset is her/his reputation.

How to succeed in consulting by really trying

When job hunting early in your career, look to work for the most demanding, smart, respected and disciplined manager. You don't need nice. You don't need a pal. You need someone from whom you'll learn.
For communications majors, consider starting out by working for a political campaign, a national political representative, or a crisis communications agency.
Do two career-related things every year that scare you. Give a speech. Write an article. Volunteer to help a highly visible NGO launch a campaign. You'll learn a lot and build your self-confidence.
Know your way around a 10K. If you can talk numbers, people listen to the other ideas you have. I was in a meeting recently where a CFO of a large publicly traded firm remarked that I was the smartest marketing person he had ever met. Interestingly, I don't think we ever had a conversation about marketing. We were just talking financials, but I earned my credibility from being number savvy.
Read. The Wall St. Journal. Harvard Business Review. Fortune. The Economist. Sports Illustrated (the best writing although I'm no sports fan) and Entertainment Weekly (because we all need a little fun)
Follow stories and trends from your consulting perspective. For example, there's no more fun for me as a communications consultant than the presidential elections. Aside from feeling for the shareholders who were hurt, I also really enjoyed following Tyco, Enron, MCI and AIG from crisis and executive communications perspectives. Harvard President Larry Summers is a fascinating leadership communications subject right now. (Plus I think he really understands how the power of influencers.)
If you want to become an expert in an area, sign up to teach a class. The needed research and preparation before you get up in front of a class will teach you things you never knew before.
Never stop challenging yourself. Clients have said I'm like a Navy Seal -- equipped to conduct intense, special assignments that are beyond the capabilities of the existing resources. So like a Navy Seal, I train constantly, learning about new ideas, staying up on trends, and caring for my mental and physical well being.

I have a passion for consulting. I dislike the occasional periods between assignments and some of the work it takes to develop new business. But, overall, a life in consulting is an ideal life for insatiable curious, problems solvers like me.

UFO Marketing

2005-02-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

The business world is starting to swarm around the huge opportunities for marketing to Baby Boomers, a market segment that has annual discretionary spending of $750 billion and controls more than 77% if the U.S. financial assets. Over the next ten years 78 million Baby Boomers will turn 50 years old. In less than two generations, there will be 2 billion people over 60 and the elderly will outnumber children for the first time.

The question among many marketers is, “what marketing approaches and messages will appeal to Baby Boomers?” Based on Foghound’s Boomer Market Watch, which daily monitors 30 key Boomer issues, we’re seeing three powerful themes:

1. Usefulness
2. Fear
3. Optimism

Usefulness
As we age, career quests and acquiring new things lose some of their satisfaction. Instead, people seek to lead useful lives. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “I would rather have it said, ‘he lived usefully’ than ‘he died rich.’ Or, as a character in Marilynne Robinson’s new book Gilead says, “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves; to be aimless was their worst fear.”

We believe this message of usefulness will be extremely relevant to Boomers. Here are just a few of the things we’ve begun to see that support the appeal of the usefulness.

· For assisted living communities: market how your properties allow residents to continue to live useful lives. At a new type of assisted housing called the Green House Project, “residents take pride in doing things they hadn’t been able to do for years in their former nursing homes,” according to Newsweek International. “One resident actually cried when she was able to bake corn bread again, recalls project director Hude Rabig. “They really grab onto the fabric of life again.”

· For real estate developers: tap into the emerging trend of Boomers getting together in small groups to create postmodern elder families, eschewing the assisted living concept.

· Travel: market trips and destinations that allow grandparents to share new experiences – particularly cultural and educational -- with their grandchildren. “After the gold watch, what you need to do is get work out of your vocabulary and pay attention to your fourth grade grandchildren. They have self-esteem without contributing to the GNP,” advises George Valiant, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who studies aging.

· VCs and technology and product designers: think cool canes, walkers with computers to identify obstacles, kitchen products for those with arthritis, new car designs that are hip yet taking into account physical realities. Keep an eye on what’s happening at MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

Fear

The second motivating message is fear. Here are some of the boomers’ greatest fears – all of which have opportunities for marketers:

· Becoming isolated and lonely. Losing friends. (Attention real estate developers, non-profits seeking volunteers, and employers looking for part-time workers.)

· Not having enough money and ending up in nursing homes. “Residents who leave assisted living usually do so not because they die but because they run out of money, and go to nursing homes,” according to a recent New York Times article. “There the impoverished, including middle-class men and women who have outlived their savings, are covered by Medicaid as they are not (except for a small percentage) in assisted living.” (Attention financial services companies, and long term insurance providers)

· Getting sick and needing extensive (and expensive) rehab and care giving services, yet not having adequate health insurance. (Attention health care insurers, guardians of Medicare, gyms, food manufacturers, physical therapists.)

· Not having adequate health insurance. (Attention employers.) Older workers want and need to continue working for health insurance and because they need the money. Others want to continue working for the intellectual challenges and camaraderie. Advice to employers: don’t be scared off by ageism; recent research shows that older workers can learn new technologies and are less absent than younger employees.

Optimism

And yet despite these looming fears, Boomers are inherently optimists, understanding that Americans have the power to change what is and create new possibilities. The oldest of the boomers, who will begin turning 65 in 2011, were raised on John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to action. It’s a generation of activists who know how to organize and lobby.

A recent study released by the Harvard School of Public Health says Boomers can become an unprecedented resource if they are mobilized across the nation as community volunteers.

''There's a major opportunity on the near horizon to recruit large numbers of older boomers to help strengthen community life in America,'' says Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health. Winsten is director of the Harvard-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic Engagement. But he says non-profit organizations that could use those volunteers need to create meaningful jobs for them. Boomers, he says, won't be satisfied stuffing envelopes. ''Boomers have expectations as to the kind of useful roles they can play in helping organizations.''

If your company is looking at growth market, think Boomers. And think UFO marketing messages.

Look Outside

2005-01-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

During the holiday party season I asked a simple question that surprisingly took many business executives by surprise: “What are your biggest opportunities for next year?”

“Good question. I hadn’t really thought about business in that way,” almost all replied. Then they got quite animated.

You see, most of us get bogged down in the “how to run” our business, our organization, our projects. How to increase customer loyalty 2 percentage points. How to generate more sales leads. How to improve order pace.. How to increase efficiencies. How to implement new systems. How to measure performance.

Too much “how” and not enough “what” is a recipe for slow growth, both professionally and for business. Plus, let’s be honest, too much focus on “how” without enough “what” can be exhausting and demoralizing. It’s far more energizing and strategic to ask questions like, “What are the opportunities? What are the biggest obstacles? What’s most relevant to our prospects? What new partnerships might help us grow more quickly?”

Peter Drucker has long advised business executives to look outside the company – and their industries -- to observe new patterns and connections. By doing so, we’re then able to see opportunities and focus more on “what.”

“For strategy, we need organized information about the environment,” he wrote in Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management. “Strategy has to be based on information about markets, customers and non customers; about technology in one’s own industry and others; about the changing world economy. Major changes start outside an organization.”

Yet research geeks, take note. Drucker warns about going too deep. He learns enough to see patterns and important connections but not enough to lose his point of view.

Gary Hamel, another of my favorite business thinkers, says that “a fresh way of seeing is often more valuable than sheer brainpower.

“One of the reasons many people fail to fully appreciate what’s changing is because they’re down at the ground level, lost in a thicket of confusing, conflicting data. You have to make time to step back and ask yourself, ‘What’s the nig story that cuts across all these little facts.’”

Look outside in 2005. You might just see how to be different in ways that can make a real difference.

Pigs, equities and flying barns

2004-12-02T10:17:00.000-05:00

Ever notice how successful people are masters at using metaphors?

If marketing people want to better engage people and foster understanding, they should use more metaphors in their communications. Metaphors help us make sense of ideas, and think about concepts and points-of-view in ways that language alone cannot.

“Metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action,” explain George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. “For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life…Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

Here are some of the metaphors I’ve heard in the past two weeks while interviewing influential C-level executives as part of a research project to better understand corporate change agents.

On commitment: people need to be committed like a pig vs. a chicken. When you’re eating bacon and eggs for breakfast you know that in respect to the eggs the chicken was involved. But in respect to the bacon, the pig was comitted.

On employee talent: high-performers are like equities vs. boonds. “Equity” employees are more aggressive and drive new ideas and growth, while “bond” employees are the steady Eddies who make sure that the core business functions run day in and day out. Just like a financial portfolio, you need a mix of equities and bonds in your employees.

On being focused: "We need an arrow, not a flying barn." This from author and management consultant Alan Weiss, who explains: “This metaphor creates an immediate recognition of the need to streamline and gain aerodynamic efficiency, which is easier to deal with than pointing out that we're trying to tackle too much, we have no focus, we need to set priority, yadayadayada."

On alternative perspectives: change agents don’t look at whether a glass is half-full or half-empty or even partially shattered. They look at an urn or a pitcher. In other words, these types bring very different perspectives to business situations.

On necessary disruption: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In other words, you may have to disrupt all kinds of people and processes within the organization to accomplish change. Yet at the end you say, “Man that was messy, but in the end we got it done and it was successful."

Marketing development to communities: taking a new point-of-view

2004-11-23T14:51:00.000-05:00

What can real estate developers do to avoid negative media coverage and protests by community and environmental groups?

First and foremost understand the opposition’s point-of-view: they believe that real estate development projects are the community’s projects, not the developers’ projects. Without understanding this perspective, developers are highly likely to face delays, protests or have a project killed altogether.

This was one finding from a study, “This Land Is My Land…But Could Be our Land: Developing Influencer Relationships to Accelerate Developer Success,” that Northeastern University communications professor Walter Carl and I recently completed for the NAIOP Foundation. We interviewed 30 commercial real estate developers and representatives from environmental, community, government and Smart Growth organizations to learn what it takes for developers to build effective relationships with influencers.

We also uncovered the seven most common characteristics of effective relationships between developers and those influential people who can affect a development project, positively or negatively. Here are highlights, most of which apply to all businesses that must build effective working relationships with external constituencies.

1. Early engagement: for most influencers the most irritating practice of developers was not involving the community early enough in the project process.

2. Effective listening: people want their viewpoints to be acknowledged and respected, even if those viewpoints can’t be accommodated. They need to feel listened to.

3. Education & understanding: educating friends and potential foes pays off. The more knowledgeable people are, the more likely they are to have realistic expectations, engage in construction discussions, and brainstorm ways to work around sticky points.

4. Trust and credibility: trust is based on the principle that each person feels like the other person truly understands their point of view. To build trust, present the whole picture, candidly discussing drawbacks as well as benefits. And always deliver on promises.

5. Accommodation: Be flexible and willing to give up some control. Adopt the 3Rs: respond to criticisms, redesign if necessary, and reach accommodations. If you can’t accommodate all requests, explain why.

6. Adapting: Adapt your communication style to the other party to foster understanding. Avoid industry jargon. Adapt the professional skills of coalition builders and educators.

7. Transparency: Always communicate in an open, direct and honest way.

A final point to note: building relationships isn’t about asking for influencers’ approval, but creating understanding. Similarly, it’s not about getting 100% consensus, but determining whether people can live with the proposed project.

The bland merging with the blind: What will Sears & Kmart promise the consumer?

2004-11-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

I shop at Target because I understand its point-of-view – cool stuff at good prices. While I don’t choose to shop at Wal-Mart, I understand what the retailer is all about. Wal-Mart is successful because it, too, has a point-of-view that people understand: almost everything you need at really low prices.

But Kmart and Sears? Neither company has a point-of-view. The merger announced last week is like the bland (Sears) following the blind (Kmart). What do these retailers stand for? What’s the shorthand reason to shop there? Beats me.

I’ve seen many new Kmart television ads this fall but they confused me more than helped me understand Kmart. Why exactly would I shop there? The ads seemed disconnected from any bigger positioning. And Sears? Aside from buying Craftsman tools, I’m not sure why I’d shop there.

A point-of-view helps we consumers understand what a brand is all about. It’s the promise that helps us understand why to buy. Done right, it drives brand communications so it all adds up to set the brand apart. (And it makes it easier for marketing managers to plan, prioritize and really integrate different marekting communications techniques.)

Staples gets this. Its promise is to “make buying office products easy.” And they do. Last week I bought cartridges for my home office printers and received a rebate. Rather than having to fill out forms and mail them, which I never get around to doing, Staples let me go to a Web site, fill in a couple of numbers, and presto, the rebate process was complete. That was easy.

But merging two dying brands rarely succeeds. It would have been far smarter to resuscitate K-Mart or Sears with some real marketing. I tend to agree with retail consultant Howard Davidowitz who says that the Kmart and Sears merger will produce one thing: a cadaver.

Travelocity's marketing needs to connect the dots

2004-11-12T17:53:00.000-05:00

Who knew that Travelocity is much better than competitors like Expedia and Hotels.com? Not me. All the big online travel sites' marketing sound alike to me.

A couple of weeks ago I sat in on an excellent presentation by Jeffrey Gulleck, CMO of Travelocity, at the Sales and Marketing Leaders Summit in Desert Springs, CA. Gulleck explained that most of the online travel sites confirm our hotel reservations with, hold on now, faxes back and forth to the hotels. Travelocity’s technology is far more advanced, which helps the service provide better deals, better service, more reliability. “The complexity of the travel industry is our friend,” explained Gulleck. “It provides a barrier to small companies entering the category, and helps us compete against the other major players.”

Most interesting was the strategic work Gulleck has done to create a new positioning: “Travelocity is the advocate for travelers,” a position that Travelocity can deliver on better than any of their competitors.

Most disappointing, however, was seeing Travelocity’s new gnome ads, which don’t pay off the positioning.

Why, we wonder, don’t companies use their positioning points-of-view to drive all of their brand communications, from advertising and public relations to sales presentations and Web marketing? If Travelocity really wants to be an advocate for travelers, it might think about trading in the gnomes for a Gert Boyle-like campaign. (I’d trust Columbia Sportswear’s “Mother Boyle” ads before the gnome.) Or allocate more to a content-driven advertorial campaign. Or get more from PR.

With my work schedule, I really want a travel advocate. Travelocity needs to prove that it is one.