Sock-Puppeting Puerilism Jul 17, 2007
Posted by magnostic in Blogs, Brand building, Leadership, Marketing, PR.add a comment
Normally smart people seem to lose all common sense when it comes to joining an online conversation under a fake name. The cloak of “sock puppeting” (a terrific phrase to describe the act of masking your identity when posting comments on a Web forum) can be incredibly empowering, even for people who already possess gobs of power.
John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, is the latest poster boy for this inane and brand-damaging behavior. I’m sure you’ve heard the story by now: For more than seven years, Mackey posted comments on Yahoo message boards talking up Whole Foods and dumping on the competition. He posted under the handle “rahodeb” and never disclosed his true identify. Now he has the SEC on his back. Nice leadership. Nice irony too, considering his comments in the current issue of Fortune about his blog:
“We want to communicate as honestly as we can. I am talking about the things I most care about. I don’t do what other bloggers do. I don’t post all the time. The great thing about blogging is that I don’t need you journalists to interpret me anymore.”
Yes, honesty. And integrity. And credibility. When you misrepresent yourself to others, you’re blowing off all three of those traits. I understand the limits that the CEO (or any officer) of a publicly traded company is under regarding what they can say about their business on public forums, but how that leads someone to make the leap to post anonymously on matters directly related to their company and business is beyond me.
I guess the Web feeds our subconscious desires to perform uncivil acts without repercussions. Just as drivers hidden safely in their cars do unseemly things without pause – things they would never think of doing outside of their vehicles (cutting others off, tailgating, swearing in front of their kids) – the Internet (and its precursor, the online bulletin-board system) is a playground for drive-by postings from people lacking the confidence (or the balls) to stand behind their verbal attacks or contrarian opinions with their real names. (When I was with PC Week, a reader reacting to a negative column I wrote about Apple posted anonymously to express his desire that I would some day end up in prison getting gang-raped by a bunch of guys named Bubba, though he used far more colorful language to describe his fantasy. But I digress.)
Just as troubling as Mackey’s deception was his unapologetic response to being unmasked. Clearly, his actions aren’t in sync with the ideals for which his company supposedly stands. His own blog posting about “open, honest, candid communication” certainly rings hollow. When the actions of a company’s employees – from executives down to the rank and file – differ from the company’s brand promise, it will eventually lose the trust of its customers.
Negative Influencer May 23, 2007
Posted by magnostic in Brand building, Customer Loyalty, Customer service, Marketing.2 comments
My 9-year-old son Conor was engaged in his usual hypermultitasking activities last night - simultaneously watching TV, building something out of Legos, visiting the Webkins site, hugging the dog – when a Circuit City commercial came on. He stopped everything he was doing and proclaimed to no one in particular, “I will never shop at Circuit City again!”
You see, Conor and I had a bad experience at a local Circuit City store when an overmatched and undertrained sales clerk couldn’t figure out how to ring up the three items we were purchasing. His incompetence was both comical and frustrating. Twenty minutes into the transaction, I gave up, stopped a manager on the way out of the store, and ripped him a new one for putting staff on the floor who obviously weren’t prepared to do their jobs.
Not a big deal, right? Especially for Conor, who as a consumer-in-training is endlessly bombarded with brand messages and has trouble remembering where he left his socks 10 minutes ago. The negative memory will surely fade into the background, and all will be well. Except for one thing: That in-store experience happened nearly four years ago, when Conor was 5. No amount of slick advertising will ever convince this young consumer to spend his allowance in a store that wouldn’t let him buy a PlayStation game.
Brain Dead Mar 2, 2007
Posted by magnostic in Advertising, Brand building, Conferences, Customer service, Marketing, Procter & Gamble.5 comments
A lost week for me, blogwise. Immersed in a couple of new projects on top of a couple that are just wrapping up, ferrying the kids around to various camps and activities during school vacation week, the blog has calcified. Too brain dead at this point for a real post, so here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.
BT’s Next Stage: Custom Creative. An interview with EchoTarget CEO Greg Smith, who claims his hotel and travel clients see a 200% to 400% lift in transactions when the EchoTarget behavioral network sends the right destination-specific creative to targets. I have experienced this targeting a few times over the past few weeks after checking a few travel sites for flights to Florida. I didn’t make a reservation, but received a few follow-up emails from Expedia, Travelocity or whatever sites I checked (they all seem the same to me) promising “low fares for your trip to Orlando.” Pretty cool stuff.
Snack Attack! Wired’s current cover story on the bite-sizing of our culture. At first I thought it was a lame idea, but the more I read, the more I liked it. The Biz and Music sections were my faves.
AAAA Media Conference coverage. Microsoft’s top marketing exec, Mich Mathews, said that by 2010, the majority of the company’s media mix will be in the digital space, a signal that the company is simply following its consumers. Mathews followed P&G global marketing officer Jim Stengel, who talked about the need for brands to be authentic, trustworthy and generous. “It’s not about telling and selling,” Stengel was quoted as saying in AdAge. “It’s about bringing a relationship mind-set to everything we do.”
Killing the Golden Duck Feb 21, 2007
Posted by magnostic in Advertising, Brand building, Marketing.add a comment
Aflac CMO Jeff Herbert is clipping the wings of its ubiquitous duck, Advertising Age reports. Despite an astounding 85% brand awareness – attributable largely to the duck – Herbert is retooling the insurance provider’s marketing plan around education, not awareness. From Ad Age:
His plan is to focus more marketing on what Aflac does — supplemental insurance — while expanding its offerings and growing the category.
“Our industry is a difficult one for the average consumer to understand,” Mr. Herbert said. “We want to move our brand from being known to owned.” And that means new creative, new products and a rethinking of the media plan.
I’m sure a deep dive on the benefits of supplemental insurance is just what the average consumer wants. While it certainly makes sense to augment the duck with a broader strategy (one that is less reliant on TV advertising) to help turn brand awareness into sales, Herbert should not turn his back on a brand icon that most other services companies would die for. This is the problem when a “classically trained packaged-goods marketer,” as Ad Age refers to Herbert, tries to apply a “classic” (outdated?) CPG formula to a wildly different market like financial services. Selling insurance ain’t like selling Macaroni & Cheese.
Update: Aflac said in a press release that contrary to stupid media reports, it “has no intention of abandoning its use of the Aflac duck.”
New Life for Tired Brands Feb 14, 2007
Posted by magnostic in Brand building, Customer Engagement, Marketing.add a comment
An article I wrote for the February issue of The Advertiser, titled “Putting a New Shine on Your Brand,” is here, courtesy of The Pohly Company, which publishes the magazine for the Association of National Advertisers. The article is about how companies can restore life to a tired or maturing brand and make it relevant to newly empowered consumers.
The piece has some terrific insights from brand consultants like Hayes Roth from Landor, Brad White of (r)evolution partners, and Daryl Travis from Brandtrust, along with practitioners including Becky Saeger (Charles Schwab), Sharon John (Hasbro) and Alan Hallberg (Cisco). Money quote from Saeger about Schwab’s new approach to customer research:
“No one walks down the street wondering if Schwab is better than Fidelity. They’re thinking about how they’re going to get their kids into college. That’s the relevance we needed to tap into.”
Ethnography and Coprophagia Nov 21, 2006
Posted by magnostic in Brand building, Customer Engagement, Marketing.4 comments
I just filed an article for the January issue of The Advertiser on the topic of re-branding strategies. The consensus from my interviews was, not surprisingly, that marketers need to get really deep into consumer behavior and attitudes in order to figure out how to build (or rebuild) a relevant brand. One of the techniques gaining some traction with marketers is ethnography, a fancy word for observing people as they go about their daily lives. Procter & Gamble does a lot of this field research; Charles Schwab did it before launching its “Talk to Chuck” campaign.
I was thinking about all this yesterday as I conducted my own ethnographic study: watching my chocolate lab eat her poop in the front yard. This has been an annoying habit of hers for the past few years. At first, she dined only on frozen excrement in the winter (the “poopsicle”), but now her munching has turned into a year-round activity.
Beyond her fetid breath and room-clearing belches, this habit apparently is not harmful to the dog. It even has an official name: coprophagia. No one really seems to know definitively why dogs do it, though there are plenty of theories. And there are several options for addressing the problem, although the only foolproof one is clearing the soon-to-be snacks out of the yard soon after the dog does her doodie. It keeps me busy.
Anyway, this is the crux of the ethnography issue for marketers: As Brandtrust CEO Daryl Travis told me for the re-branding article, figuring out why humans behave the way they do is a lot harder than observing what they do. Cracking the “why” strikes me as the secret sauce for customer engagement.
I Drink Alone (With My $200 Bottle of Scotch, at a Museum) Nov 14, 2006
Posted by magnostic in Advertising, Brand building, Experiential marketing, Integrated campaigns, Marketing.3 comments
Mediapost writes today about Diageo’s multimillion-dollar holiday campaign for its premium single-malt Scotch, Johnnie Walker Blue. The campaign reinforces the Scotch’s positioning as a high-end luxury item – which, at $200 a bottle, certainly seems to qualify it as such. The program is heavy on experiential tactics, with a Traveling Art Gallery traversing New York, “bottle engraving” at a kiosk in NYC’s Time Warner Center, and sponsored free-admission nights at museums in New York and Miami. Mediapost quotes a Diageo spokesman saying the company has tripled its spending for the holiday season.
Might sound like Diageo is a bit loose with its marketing pursestrings, but that’s far from the case. Last year around this time, a former CMO colleague and I interviewed Rob Malcolm, the president of global sales, marketing and innovation for the spirits behemoth. He walked us through the economic profit valuation model that his group uses to allocate resources across its broad brand portfolio:
“Our CFO [Nick Rose] is a strong believer in making sure that we’re looking at all of the costs that a business incurs, not just the profit line, when we’re making allocation decisions. For example, in our Scotch whiskey business, because the nature of Scotch whiskey being aged three years to, in some cases, up to 50 years, we carry a pretty heavy load of working capital in inventory. So we make sure, in the economic calculations, that we load those brands with the inventory-carrying costs. Since we don’t have that same phenomenon, say, in vodka or Bailey’s Irish Cream, [those costs] don’t get loaded. So we’re able to look at the true, fully loaded contribution of our various investments. And then we look at our spreads and the overall profitability.”
Malcolm had this to say about how the formula helps with specific marketing spend decisions:
“Through experimentation, testing, trial and error, we’re able to determine on a geography-by-geography basis what we think are the right investment levels. For our brands that are strong and growing, we’re always testing upside potential of incremental investment and we’re always testing some reallocation and some different growth drivers. It is through that process, and the rigorous testing and learning in our annual analysis, that we determine where we should be stepping up the investment. We tend to have a philosophy of fueling those brands that have momentum.”
The full interview was never published (CMO: RIP), but through the magic of this blog you can now read it here. Worth the read, I think – and maybe Malcolm will forgive me now for wasting his time on an interview that never saw the printed page.
Alive and Kicking Nov 8, 2006
Posted by magnostic in Advertising, Brand building, Marketing, Marketing books.2 comments
The latest marketing book to cross my cluttered desk is Living Brands, by Raymond Nadeau, founder of the agency LBLM (Living Brands, Living Media) and former global creative director at fragrance giant Coty. It’s a different read than most business/marketing books – think Carlos Castaneda as brand strategist – but there are some good takeaways on consumer empowerment and collaborative marketing:
“You need to understand the difference between [the consumer's] real needs versus the commercial and competitive landscape that best suits the reality of your brand. As marketers, our job is to focus … on creating great products that are inspired by the consumer’s actual versus perceived lifestyle patterns by tapping directly into people’s unexpressed and/or unfulfilled desires as opposed to trying to ‘create artificial demand.’ “
“Instead of being seen as static, controlled ‘intellectual property’ belonging to corporations, brands will need to be viewed as cultural property that belongs fully to consumers. Brands will need to become more malleable so that they can respond to consumers’ growing appetites for personal expression.”
“The notion of media as message is evolving – and has now come to mean something far more encompassing, far more direct and profound. Consumers are now media. And their lives constitute the messages that to this day still seem to remain largely unheard.”
The book has several interesting, sometimes obscure case studies, along with contributions from an eclectic cast of cultural trend agencies, experiential experts, and other “cultural marketing geniuses,” as Nadeau calls them in his introductory chapter. (He seems to take his collaboration theme seriously by getting a lot of other voices in the book.)
I interviewed Nadeau earlier this week for a cover story on rebranding strategies that I’m doing for The Advertiser. “Brands are not graven images,” he told me. “That is where marketers in the ’80s and ’90s wanted to take brands. I think that’s just silly. Religion has evolved; why can’t branding?”
