Monthly Archives: November 2009

Hearing nothing from Buy Nothing.

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I’ve recently had a small banter among friends regarding Adbusters Buy Nothing initiative. The crux of the conversation was my belief that despite a noble effort, timing the event to Black Friday was a logistical mistake. I understand why they chose Black Friday from a messaging standpoint, but in terms of the American marketplace and the movement’s greater mission, I think it’s counterproductive.

Instead of getting a day of its own (like Earth Day), Buy Nothing will take a backseat to the inevitable media coverage of Black Friday, the ‘dismal retail season’(isn’t it always a letdown?), the crowds, craziness, etc.

This decision was made for all the wrong reasons. Sure, the already-zealous and already-sold on the concept of Buy Nothing Day will think its a perfect ‘stick it to the Man’move to do this on Black Friday. The remaining 99.9% of Americans will miss the message entirely. What purpose does that really serve?

We live in a mediascape that has with it some definitive realities. Those can be leveraged or ignored with significant strategic benefit or consequence.

If AdBusters is looking to reaffirm what its small core audience already believes, then this tactic will accomplish that goal. If they’re serious about spreading their message and making a difference in the world, they have missed the mark by picking the wrong date to build awareness.

A more productive approach might be to promote a ‘Buy Nothing Birthday’where each individual could adopt the concept for their birthday (“Friends, don’t send gifts, just spend time with me”). In this way the concept becomes personalized, inherently viral and happens every day of every year. A simple Facebook Buy Nothing Birthday app would be a great way to share the concept, reinforce the values of friendship over ownership and to allow people to spread the idea through their networks of friends. It would also have a more optimistic tone rather than the conspiratorial, anti-establishment, punk-rock edginess Buy Nothing Day has now. Again, the latter tone may validate the passions of a core small group, but if the aim is truly to effect change and not just stroke a fringe constituency’s collective sense of self then the punk edge will quickly lose its usefulness.

Lastly, being digital, Buy Nothing Birthdays would cost AdBusters next to nothing to produce, would consume minimal resources, and probably would reach more people in a year than a one-off stunt poorly timed to be eclipsed by a national event ever will.

It also allows for personalization of the concept. The punkers can be punky the soccer moms be soccer momish and everyone can embrace an idea which on the whole is a good one.

Until you get to the argument about our 10+% unemployment rate.

Striking up a deal, not a conversation.

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03-thumb-lets-make-deal This article from MediaPost based on a survey by Razorfish is just the latest example of ‘old’(read pre-Web 2.0) wisdom resurfacing. The gist of the story is this; more than conversation, what seems to be driving interactions between brands and people in social media is discounts and deals.

Is anyone surprised? Really?

To quote the article: “What we’re finding is that with Facebook and Twitter, marketers are assuming some deeper dialogue, but what’s really going on is — people want deals.”

Marketing 101
Not to belittle the findings – sometimes the most useful insights are the ones that should’ve seemed obvious in hindsight – but a basic precept of Marketing 101 is to always, ALWAYS answer the customer question ‘What’s in it for me?’Where businesses are tempted to talk about their features and benefits, good marketing people will retort that any discussion of product benefits must be expressed in terms of customer benefits based on their needs.

Let’s not forget, just because a brand is using social media does not mean they’re not still marketing. And there are some basic marketing premises that aren’t going to change, regardless of the medium one is marketing through.

As if to substantiate this epiphany that people are interested in deals from brands, not conversations, is the Dell Outlet story. Said case study, often held up as proof positive this social media stuff is a money-maker, did indeed result in revenue it just didn’t use conversation to do so. It used, you guessed it, offers and deals.

(Brand) History 101
As my friend Alan Wolk has said and written at some length about: Your brand is not my friend. People associate with brands, sure. We have since brands were invented. But its important to remember what exactly the role of a brand is.

Historically the emergence of brands came at around the same time that the local storekeeper’s role as purchase advisor began to wane. Until that time, you’d ask the store owner to recommend a hair tonic and he’d reach up, grab one, and explain to you why you wanted to buy that one.

With the industrial revolution product distribution expanded. Suddenly Acme Hair Tonic wasn’t just a regional elixir, it could be found in stores coast to coast. However, Joe Acme, the inventor and chief salesman, couldn’t go to every store and convince every store owner why he should stock and recommend Acme Hair Tonic. In its place, we invented advertising and brands.

The job of advertising and brands from the manufacturer’s standpoint is to sell product. From the customers standpoint, however, it is to simplify decisions. Brands are a promise and if I like the promise of a brand, I buy it. Good brands make purchasing something a simple decision. (Conversely, in absence of good brands price tends to drive decisions). In a world where supermarkets with tens of thousands of items have replaced my local corner store, that simplifying process plays an important role to both the manufacturer and the customer. Especially since your average supermarket manager is not going to be able to know enough about all the products he’s carrying to make recommendations.

Fast forward to today. Advertising and brands aren’t going away. If anything, they’re more important than ever. But the carrier of those messages is changing. Today it’s less and less the industrial-era mass media (print, TV, radio) and more and more the Internet-era social media. Digital infrastructure has enabled average citizens like us to make more recommendations to more people than ever before. In a sense, we are all each other’s shopkeepers. Like the shopkeeper we recommend products because we’ve used them or we know someone who has. For the shopkeeper it was a customer he knew. For us its a member of our social grid.

But before we’re willing to tell a friend why a modern day Acme Hair Tonic is a good buy, we have to be convinced ourself. That remains, as always, a brand’s job.

So ultimately I’m not interested in a friendship or even a conversation with your brand beyond discovering what’s in it for me. That may be something as nebulous as status or prestige or bragging rights or as tangible as durability, 20% more in the package or a discount or deal. Either way, its still all about me. If it isn’t, then your brand and I have nothing to talk about.

Requiem for the tagline.

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worth_the_wait_pc_hourglass_icon_photosculpture-p1539141672349109753s98_400Coming up in marketing and advertising the tagline was an indispensable part of any ‘big idea’and subsequent campaign. The best taglines were meant to embody the essence of a brand’s positioning (a term coined by Jack Trout and Al Ries). Positioning, in turn, was the expression of a brand’s longterm strategic place among its competitors.

From ‘You’ve come a long way baby’to ‘Gets ring around the collar and your whole wash clean’to ‘Just do it’, ‘It keeps going, and going and going’, and ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’, taglines reflected the essence of advertising; that being a one-way dictation of what a brand stood for.

These taglines were pounded into our heads on TV, in print, online, at events, in store, and on and on. Integrated Marketing was a late 90′s trend in response to media fragmentation. It held that a a company needed to pick a positioning it wanted to hold in the market and reinforce that through every available channel of communication. The tagline became a thread across media, connecting the dots and creating a whole brand image.

Positioning took time. Branding took time. Companies, in thinking through their tagline were encouraged to think about where they wanted to be five years in the future.

But what good is a five year plan in a five minute culture?

While agencies encouraged companies to think longterm, everyone from shareholders to the media, to competitors and even their own consumers were revealing shorter and shorter attention spans. Innovation happened faster. New media were introduced faster. Celebrities, fashions, trends and technologies explode onto and fade out of our collective consciousness in a matter of months, not years.

This presents a problem for traditional tagline/positioning marketing on several fronts:

  1. There’s not enough time. At the current rate of innovation many companies staking out a position through a tagline are likely to find the merits of said positioning irrelevant (from a competitive standpoint) before their marketing efforts have a chance to make the tagline ‘stick’in our heads.
  2. There’s not enough money. Ramming a tagline into someone’s head cost a lot of money back in 1980 when there were still mass channels to use. Today, to make a tagline ‘stick’in enough people’s heads takes more and more money. Don’t believe me? Spit out then first ten taglines you can think of. Then Google them to find the dates. You might be surprised to see how many are far older than you think.
  3. Not enough people are listening. Social media has given us all the chance to talk to peers about products and services. We increasingly don’t need to listen to what an advertiser says to form a perception of a brand. This hasn’t hit its tipping point yet, but as Boomers and Gen Xers age out of the marketplace, this trend will continue.

So if taglines and the traditional tactic of proclaiming your market positioning for all to hear is winding down what will replace it? It might be useful here to look at the tech sector. Of all industries, technology grapples most with a frantic pace of innovation and a lightning-fast novelty-to-parity cycle.

You might notice that many top technology names don’t bother with taglines. Apple doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t. Twitter doesn’t. Amazon doesn’t. Some that have taglines like Google (‘Don’t be evil’) don’t really use them. Other’s that do use them don’t get much from them. Do you know Adobe’s tagline? IBM’s? Cisco’s? Nokia’s? Motorola’s?

The value of values.
Maybe taglines and traditional 5-year positioning strategies aren’t helpful to technology firms. What is then? I would posit that values are the new positioning – not just for technology companies but for any enterprise.

A company’s values *should* impact every aspect of its operations from how it develops products to how it provides customer service. When a company has a clear mission and values and aligns their whole business around them, the business achieves two important tasks that are critical to surviving in a five minute culture.

First, it allows for consistency across all touch points. Few consumers ever quoted a company’s tagline in everyday conversation, even during advertising’s hayday. But by behaving consistently in accordance with the company’s values, the benefits of ‘integration’are gained without the burden of rigidity.

That brings us to the second benefit, flexibility. A company that focuses more on aligning all aspects around its values has the ability to be nimble. If a disruptive technology comes to market, the company can apply its values in adopting or competing against it. If a new industry emerges, the company can apply its values to entering that market (provided its worth migrating to). Strong alignment around values galvanizes the enterprise, keeps it oriented during rough seas of change and allows it to go with the flow when unanticipated events alter the course of its future.

For marketing and customer outreach the ‘big idea’and its tagline articulation will increasingly give way to a flexible, adaptive and demonstrative approach to engagement that has less to do with features, benefits or claims and more to do with the values an enterprise holds and how it expresses them in every detail of its operations.