An ugly side of marketing to beautiful people.

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It’s a timeless marketing proverb, “If you try to be something to everyone, you’ll end up being nothing to anyone.” This statement has endured because it is more or less true.

I hold that marketing is essentially appealing to someone’s sense of self. The purchases we make are exercises in narcissism. We “dress up” in our brand choices to tell people who we think we are.

If a brand decides its target is “Males, 18-34 with a household income of $75K+, who are into sports and cars”, they’re basically saying we’re appealing to everyone who thinks of themselves in these generic terms. And of course, no one thinks of themselves that way which is why those broad marketing strategies usually happen in parity categories that compete on couponing, discounting or various forms of market bribery to make their sales quotas.

The brands that stand for something and consider themselves “lifestyle brands” – almost exclusively these brands have a clear, narrowly defined target audience that is more about world views than demographic data points. And appealing to those world views, at the exclusion of others, is how they build a loyal tribe of customers.

Sometimes though, this lifestyle marketing and narrow focus can come off a bit distastefully when it’s spelled out bluntly. Check out this article and interview with the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch – one of America’s favorite near-soft-porn teen apparel brands. (Sorry, that was my inner parent characterizing it there.)

As a father of daughters, what he’s saying is offensive, elitist and about as insensitive as one can get. It’s also dangerous to young minds and arguably irresponsible from a social standpoint. His are exactly the sentiments that contribute to bullying, self-esteem issues, and eating disorders. Disgusting, really.

As a marketer though, I recognize what he’s doing and why its working. He’s very candid about his brand, his target and what he’s going after. As CEO, he is clearing establishing the vision, mission and values of his company. Which is exactly the charge of CEOs.

I’m sure more than a few Abercrombie wearers are outside his desired caste of ‘cool kids’ but he is successfully targeting a specific mindset and doing it consistently, right down to the sizes of the products he offers and the (hellish to parents, heavenly to teens) dark stores with their horribly pervasive scents, thunderous house music and barely-clad poster models.

My wife went into Abercrombie for my daughter once, looking for shorts. She emerged ten minutes later, daughter in tow, after unsuccessfully asking the salesman (a boy, really) if they had anything in stock that wasn’t “tart-y”. Nope. All their shorts were short-shorts. Next stop, Gap.

Do I want my daughter wearing Abercrombie after seeing reading this article? Absolutely not. Do I plan to reinforce in my daughter a healthy sense of body and modesty about that body? Absolutely. Will I continually remind her that people come in many shapes and sizes and that while I advocate building a strong mind in a strong body (“Mens sana in corpore sano” being a personal motto of mine) it is not right to judge people purely because they don’t fit our ideals. I will try to bestow those values on her. I will in effect be fighting Abercrombie’s marketing.

But I’m not the target audience (and I’ll be damned if my daughter will be, either). Abercrombie is intentionally excluding the likes of me. They don’t want me. They don’t share my values. They are appealing to a wholly different target. One who subscribes to their vision and values. And while it may sadden me that such a market exists, and in such great numbers, the Abercrombie message works because of its elitism.

Paradigms Drift – The iPad of the early 1990s

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Check out this video. Filmed in 1994. Now consider how quickly we all perceived the tablet becoming mass market. It felt like it happened in just a couple years. It took the better part of two decades. That’s not a sudden shift.

As interesting, he discusses a critical aspect of UX, creating a “bridge of familiarity” between the legacy technology and the new one – in this case capturing the essence of paper page turning as newsprint goes digital.

And lastly, a cautionary talk about evolution as he discusses his optimistic outlook for the newspaper industry. Too bad the industry was a little slow to respond.

Thanks for my friend Ash for bringing this video to my attention, via Facebook, which I was of course viewing on a tablet at the time.

While all the headlines, hysteria and hyperbole nudge us to continually to look forward, sometimes its not bad to take a look back and realize that as fast as things are changing, and as much as we all need to manage change, none of this really happens overnight.

There is time to think and reflect and consider.

Driverless cars are around the bend but is there a market for them?

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Spaceballs’ President Skroob got caught with his pants-down, literally, underscoring one of our fundamental discomforts with video calls, even decades after the technology became available.

Predicting the future is a risky business. Nonetheless, many of us feel compelled to try. Businesses are no exception and often they try to extend a bit of seemingly sound logic into a new product through which they hope to define a new, and high growth product category. Sometimes it works as with the iPad. Sometimes it doesn’t. (Remember “clear beer”?).

The trick is to anticipate what the marketplace will want before the market even articulates it. That’s a tall order.

I recently read this piece on Google’s driverless car. A fascinating article shedding light on some truly amazing advances in navigational technology. The benefits of the driverless car would be many fold; more leisure (or working commute) time while traveling. Better safety. Less highway congestion. Better fuel efficiency. Even the ability for the disabled to use cars.

Close your eyes, dream a little, and the mathemicatically precise, perfect driving scenario envisioned in the file version of Minority Report seems like a possibility.

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The film Minority Report depicted perfectly spaced, computer-driven cars that later allowed for manual override outside crowded cities.

Google believes its driverless car will be ready for the mass market within the decade. While it’s not exactly the hovercraft I was promised by the science fiction of my youth,  the future does appear to be upon us.

The question is, will anyone want it? And if so, who.

Marketers probably have a decidedly different perspective than the engineers behind the driverless car technology. Marketers know that in America at least, cars are sold emotionally and a lot of that emotion is the sense of freedom and control they give us. After all, cars were chosen over the railroad way back in the day because we could go where want wanted, when we wanted. The United States, after all, was founded on independence. We’re reluctant to give it up. It’s central to our self identity in the world. We talk endlessly about our rights. Even though more and more algorithms make decisions for us we don’t like having this fact thrust in our face. And we’re even less willing to relinquish our control to a robot even if, rationally, this makes all the sense in the world.

Google self-driving car

Driverless cars might be available within the decade. But will people want to let go of the freedom and control of driving?

We Build It Because We Can
Many an engineer’s passion is to create something new and useful. If the technology exists, we are eager to exploit it. That experimentation has led to incredibly important advances that have changed life on this planet. The trouble is, these same engineers don’t always (or,often) realize that they are not the “target audience” of the creations they make. Their own bias, interests and assumptions are not always aligned with everyone else’s.

Video calling, for example, has been available for decades. Apple ships it default on its iOS and Skype is a global brand. Few personal computers are made today without the embedded camera and audio components to enable video calling. You would think people everywhere would be eager to video call one another, right? Yet, except for special circumstances – like when Mom or Dad is traveling and wants to ‘see’ the kids – we usually don’t. As human beings we prefer to hide behind the non-visual nature of audio calls (or even better, text-messaging and email). Video calling brings risk. How does our hair look? Are we dressed? Are we doing something we’d want the person on the other line to know about? Do we want that person to know where we are when they call? Does seeing the other person’s face force us to behave in a certain way that takes too much energy? Whatever our reasons, most of use don’t opt to turn on that video camera except under very specific circumstances. Yet companies continue to offer video calling whether by Facetime or Google+ hangouts. If video calling is becoming more popular, it is a slow growth category to be sure.

I think the driverless car will work much the same way. It may have an important role in crowded cities like Shanghai, Delhi and Tokyo where gridlock is infamous. It may catch on faster in countries that don’t yet have a lot of drivers and therefore could ‘leap’ a step ahead similar to how some nations went wireless straight away because they didn’t have a wired infrastructure to undo first.

Part-time driverless navigation (like part-time 4-wheel drive) might become an option too. Offering the best of both worlds. But who will choose to employ it and when? And if only some people use it, will some of the benefits (like safety) be reduced because now the human ‘x factor’ will be present because of the other driver?

And then there’s the perception of driving optimally. It seems kind of boring really. Doing the speed limit feels slow to most of us. When a cab is dragging its (w)heels in front of us, we look for any opportunity to swerve out and pass. In rush hour lockups, everyone struggles to be “one car ahead” cutting off the guy next to us to sneak into a merging lane. It would be a huge behavioral change – like moving from voice calls to video calls – for us to relinquish the wheel in such circumstances. We’ve been active drivers since horse-drawn carriages.

So then might governments mandate it in the name of public safety? One could see a Bloomberg-like Mayor of the future trying to make driverless navigation a requirement within certain areas of the city known for accidents or gridlock. Good luck with that. Common sense laws like mandatory seat belts and helmets are met with hostility as impingements on freedom. Now you’re asking people to give up control of their car? That’s a tough sell.

Admittedly, I have always been something of a skeptic and sometimes markets surprise me. I struggled to understand the utility of the iPad when it first came out. Now I wouldn’t want to live without mine. So who knows, maybe the driverless car will find a mass market. And maybe video calling will become increasingly popular and one day we’ll all communicate the way they did in those sci-fi shows of the 80s.

You can’t have a successful product without understanding people.
The bigger point I’m trying to make it that just having the technical means to make something doesn’t mean the market will embrace it. And while Google’s brand is about innovation and therefore building a driverless car, even if it flops in the market, helps them retain their leadership position – for many companies in many categories – leaving R&D strictly to the engineers is probably increasing the risk overall. It might not be bad to include some behavioral psychologists and dare I say it, even marketers, in the process, early on, too.

Marketing is not about Storytelling

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storytelling

Storytelling assumes a captive audience. Marketer’s shouldn’t

“Storytelling” came into the marketing lexicon a couple years ago. It continues to circulate and some agencies have positioned their entire company around the idea. Personally, I have always been suspect of the term.

Storytelling may have worked back in the 70’s when all the advertising prior to it was dry, drab, and mostly about features and benefits. It even hung on as the dominant thought process in the 80’s while Bernbach’s ‘creative revolution’ was still playing out. Around the 90’s there were signs it was losing some steam. With more and more choices and more and more marketing noise people simply weren’t seeing and remembering as many TV commercials – and TV commercials were the dominant form of ‘storytelling’. And then there was this emerging World Wide Web thing to contend with…

Story telling in an elevator pitch world.
We all know it has only gotten worse since. More noise. More options. More ways to miss that clever joke or heartstring-tugging TV commercial.

Even today, TV (or more specifically, video) is still the best medium for story telling. Video’s strengths are in combining images and sound and music. As one who edits my own family video every year, I have sat teary-eyed in coffee shops on several occasions as I’ve laid that just-right song over images of my little girls playing at the beach. Such is the emotional power of video.

But as we conduct marketing in today’s splintered media environment when engagement is measured in ever shorter bursts of time, the notion of ‘storytelling’ seems like wishful thinking. Who is sitting still long enough to absorb a story and remember it? And do we really assemble a ‘story’ over all those brand touch points? A perception, maybe, but a story? How much ‘story’ do you really get from a mobile app? A banner ad? Search engine optimization? A Twitter strategy? Most of today’s emerging marketing tools are not especially good at story telling. Even when they do manage to eek out a story, those embedded videos or passages of well-written prose are usually surrounded by buttons, calls to action, share bars, tickers, etc. It’s a frenetic world out there. Storytelling works best with captive audiences. Today’s aren’t.

The same old story.
The other issue I have with story telling is that it assumes consumers care. I’m doubtful. If you’re like me, it feels like you have less and less time and more and more to do.

We’re all out there trying to balance our lives, further our careers, find time for friends and family, and sneak in a few moments for our own interests. Some of us even layer ‘personal brand management’ on there, Tweeting, Facebooking and Pinning lest we not constantly keep ourselves in front of our own personal audiences. With all that going on, are we really interested in brand-sanctioned story telling? If you want a good story you watch a movie, play a video game or read a book.

Frankly, I think brand “storytelling” is the old advertising model re-skinned with a modern veneer. I don’t think the average consumer or even many of your loyal customers care about your brand’s story and even if they did, I don’t think they have enough time (or the desire) to sit down and absorb it.

“Oh, but wait,” you say, “What about those brands people organize their lives around? Brands like Apple with its fanboys or Harley Davidson with its horde of weekend warrior execs-clad-in-leather.”

Yes, there are a number of these brands. I would argue, though, that it is not ‘storytelling’ about these brands that give them their appeal. Rather, I think it is our own innate narcissism at work. We’re attracted to brands that reflect back to us the values we see in ourselves.

Most viral video is funny, so in sending them along to friends, I become funny. Sometimes these videos are self affirming, as with Dove’s video portraying ‘real women’, and by sharing that around I tell you I too believe in real women. The entire premise of social media sharing is to be identified as someone who broke the story first among your friends. It is about being recognized for what you share.

In candor, I like what driving my Mini says about me. I like what Hendricks gin says about me. In the same the way I’m guessing you like what your shoes or shirt or coffee or game console or whatever you buy because in one way or another, it says something flattering about you. We don’t buy brands because we aspire to what their ‘story’ is about. We buy brands that reflect who we think we are. We dress up in brand decisions as a way of telling this to the world without having to say the words themselves.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
When marketers embrace narcissism as the organizing principle behind their efforts it does a few helpful things:

1. It breaks you out of brand-centric, myopic, echo-chamber thinking.
It’s very easy for a company to get all caught up in telling you what makes them great. This is narcissism too, on a company level. It’s understandable, a company works hard at its products. Unfortunately, it’s also inward looking at a time when prevailing marketing wisdom is to focus on the consumer. You can’t be consumer-focused if you’re trying to tell your own story.

2. It helps organize how you communicate your value proposition.
You may have a nice list of features and benefits – emotional and rational. The question is  how do you align these in such a way as to reflect back what your customer wants to say about themselves? The rational shopper may want four-wheel drive for New England winters but the consumer driving the Jeep does so because it says something about them, the outdoors and they’re willingness to go off-road – literally and metaphorically. This is the ‘emotional sell’ that accompanies the rational sell. It’s a part of every buying decision and its rooted in our individual self image.

3. Narcissism informs how your brand should behave.
We act the way we like to see ourselves. Brands should too. I’ve long held that brands are not claims or promises, but behaviors. We live in a post-advertising world where no one takes a headline at face value and where everyone can look up peer opinions. That being the case, you better live what you sing about because inauthenticity gets found out fast these days. Appealing to your customer’s self image can tell you exactly how to lay out a wireframe, what features to include (and omit) from an app, how to orchestrate that live event and what your social media community managers should do when a ticked-off customer starts flaming your Facebook page.

So what does buying your brand say to your customer about how they see themselves? Does it make them feel smart? What about sexy? Does it make them feel geek-chic? Like a first mover? Like an enlightened spirit? Knowing that (which should not be confused with taking a guess, because your own self image can interfere there) will go a long way to making your marketing resonate with the people you’re trying to appeal to.

After all, as every salesman or person on a first date knows, the best way to create a relationship is not to talk about yourself, but to talk about the person you’re with.

Musings on the Mobile Wallet

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imagesI had a digital first today. I paid for a latte and a black and white cookie using my mobile phone. I’m sure some of you have done this already, but I am particularly sensitive about financial matters and digital tools. I’m a bit of a late adopter when it comes to moving my money online. I still haven’t deposited a check via my mobile phone and I can’t bring myself to carry my plane ticket to the gate on my phone. Some of you might laugh at this luddite side, but I know I’m not alone. Trusting your money to the ether takes some getting used to for some of us.

That said, my coffee purchase experience went well and once I did it I will admit, it felt cool. I wonder how long it will take to become truly popular though because the reality is, debit cards are still far easier. This got me thinking about Apple’s Passbook, Google e-wallet, loyalty programs, mobile purchases, etc. I think the adoption of these new technologies will either boil down to perks or convenience (or both). A mobile payment option needs to satisfy at least one of these or it will struggle with longterm viability. The trouble is, winning at either perks or convenience is a challenging business proposition.

Convenience: Cash vs. Debit vs. Mobile
I have a few transactional apps but chose Starbucks to test an actual purchase – mostly for convenience (there’s one within walking distance of my office). It seems the general process for any of these apps (retailer or 3rd party) goes something like this:

  1. Download the app
  2. Set up an account with the company
  3. Acquire a gift card (for the retailer version)
  4. Register the card with the app (again or retailer versions)
  5. And then register a credit card with the app to refill the account.

That’s a lot of effort for a cup of coffee. And my Starbucks app can only be used in Starbucks. Even my Target app has limited use. From a convenience standpoint the retailer-branded apps are at a disadvantage.

What about the likes of Square Wallet and other would-be third party providers? I downloaded the Square Wallet app and set up an account there too. When I opened the app to see how many companies accepted Square for payments I was not too surprised to find the number minimal (though the Starbucks I was just in was one of them).

Without broad acceptance by merchants it will be hard for a mobile payment system to compete with the debit card in my wallet. And even if it does, is grabbing my phone and tapping the screen a few times that much more convenient than opening my wallet for cash or a debit card? Probably not. Unless you could fit attach unlimited number of loyalty programs to that e-wallet and the e-wallet would ‘know’ during the transaction which to apply points or perks to. Which means perks are a big part of the larger convenience story.

What makes a perk persuasive (and profitable)
To choose a retailer-branded app to make payments means I am choosing that brand over some obvious conveniences. What would drive me to do that?

I’d have to be in this store a lot.
Or, I’d have to really love the brand a lot.
Or, I’d have to really find value in the rewards.

These are interesting reflection points for a retailers. Some stores are more conducive to frequent visits but a whole bunch are not. Some retailers are more conducive to true brand affinity but many are not (even if it breaks the brand manager’s heart to admit this). And largely speaking the more valuable the rewards offered the more it cuts into the profit margin of the company offering it. So one has to be careful as retail margins are often squeezed to begin with.

The fuzzy middle.
Possibly the most challenging aspect of the e-wallet is that both the convenience and perks camps are not mutually exclusive. Any successful e-wallet will need aspects of both. To do that means taking on the banks and Visas of the world in terms of being accepted broadly while also offering enough true value-added perks to keep people involved with the platform as it competes with multiple payment options from cash on up.

There seems to be room for a big player here. A ‘glue’ platform that ideally would ship with the operating system of the phone, be backed by a big financial powerhouse and open enough that retailers could license into the platform and use its API to integrate their loyalty program. Oh, and someone would probably be very interested in getting their hands on that data.

That’s a tall order. My guess is it’s a ways off too. Meanwhile the rest of us will likely download more apps and be burdened with yet another decision at retail – which of these apps or options should I use to pay for this cup of coffee?

Competing against everything, always.

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putin-meteor

This post will be short. I’m making it only to underscore a fascinating aspect of modern life as made evident by today’s event in Russia. With the pervasiveness of so many digital devices – phones, video and still cameras, etc. – it seems now that most of the significant events that happen on our planet (say, like a meteor hammering a city in the Ural mountains) are now being captured in digital media… often by multiple people at once. Think about what that does to the concept of ‘exclusive footage’ in terms of disruption.

Not only that, but within minutes, the Internet responds with a steady stream of memes. These are usually entertaining, inherently “viral” and done by people for free for the sheer joy of the creative process.

This is the world anyone in communications – marketing or otherwise – must compete in. It is a world where reality is often more entertaining than the best fictions we can dream up. It is a world awash in clips, pics and posts. A world where information travels incredibly fast, and it is “mashed-up” or parodied with incredible haste (and often, talent).

Any marketer who thinks they can sell a product by being entertaining alone (venerable ad agency Clif Freeman used to isolate their entire sales proposition down to two words, “funny sells”) should realize what they’re up against. Entertainment (or being lilkeable) is important, sure, but if your communications are not immediately relevant, the next meteor shower is likely to drown your message right out. Boom.

Branding, betrayal and the ‘empowered consumer’

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I didn’t expect to be blown away by the ads. I think that job is very hard now that we live in a world where we’ve seen it all. Nonetheless, I had a love-hate relationship with the ‘farmers’ ad on last night’s Superbowl. The ad stopped me cold. The script was great. The editing and simple production values stood out against the slick Madison Avenue bluster running alongside it. And Paul Harvey’s voice, which is that of a crackling, tinny preacher’s radio broadcast of a bygone era, was one I wanted to believe.

(As an aside, in my first job out of college I got to work with Paul Harvey briefly as he read some radio tags for Allstate Insurance, my first client. It is one my first professional memories.)

The farmers spot was doing its job on me from the moment it started. It set the hook. It got my attention. It connected with me emotionally and made me want to believe…

…Then the Dodge logo showed up and the whole thing collapsed for me.

I’ve come to think that this 30-second love-to-hate journey happened because today’s commercials are inherently conflicted. To compete in a world where we’ve seen it all, commercials need to engage us. To do that they need to tell a story that captivates us.  But then they also have to sell something – even if it’s a simple brand impression – and when they go to do that it usually feels a little like a bait and switch.

Does Dodge really believe in farmers? I’m sure they do to the degree that their carefully-researched target audience profile either is, or is aligned to, farmers and the ‘values’ they stand for.

Yet, I think in this age of digital tools for the “empowered consumer” we all believe we’re in more control of our purchase decisions than we really are and that this compromises even successful TV spots.

No one has ever really thought advertising manipulated them, but that feeling is heightened now that we can read, research, rate, and review any product or services at anytime. We’re led to believe that these tools give us rational control over our purchases. They focus us on the conscious part of decision making, which is the part we humans want to focus on because the unconscious part of us is out of our control and that’s a little scary. Therefore, when a 30-second spot succeeds in grabbing our attention, connecting to us emotionally and pulling us into its story, only to flip a logo on at the end, it feels a lot like someone is trying to trick us. How dare they try to make me fall in love, don’t they know I can read about who they really are on the Internet?

In the case of the Dodge spot, it feels like the farmers, and Harvey’s speech, were being used to make us believe in something special. Then that something special turned out to be a company that manufactures trucks. This, of course, is exactly what the commercial was trying to do. Which is exactly the right thing for it to do because before I can be a conscious shopper I need to compile a shortlist of contenders to read, research, rate and review. The way for Dodge (or any company) to make that short list is to go through the messy, unconscious connections and beliefs that connect a brand to a buyer.

Unfortunately, with all these tools available to consciously shop, the art of the emotional brand appeal is a little easier to spot and a lot easier to dislike. This doesn’t really help the advertiser who because of the very same digital environment, must nonetheless up his game. To make our purchase shortlists, the advertiser must make emotional connections that will also illicit feelings of manipulation when they clash against the sense of control we all feel as buyers.

Interestingly, I did not recognize as much of a frustration with Dodge’s “Imported from Detroit” superbowl spot of the prior year. I wanted to believe in Detroit 2.0 for the same reason I wanted to believe in the soul of the farmer. But in this case Dodge’s goal, to sell cars, was also Detroit’s goal and I think that saved me from the sense of betrayal that came with this year’s spot.