Random reflections during my latest jaunt this week between Boston and Milwaukee:

Innovation: As I went through airport security and heard the drone of “all laptops must be removed from their cases,” I was reminded of a recent NY Times article on the new “checkpoint friendly” laptop cases that the TSA has blessed and that bag makers Pathfinder Luggage and Targus are now “rushing to produce.” My question is, what took them so long? My goodness, Crocs can churn out multiple generations of its butt-ugly footwear in the time it takes briefcase and backpack makers to make a single security-friendly bag that passes TSA muster. Where are our priorities?

Bluetooth in bathrooms: I’ll never understand how men can talk on their cellphones while relieving themselves in a public restroom. Dude, those Bluetooth headsets can pick up all kinds of background noise, including all the unzippings and tinklings and flushings that the person you’re talking to doesn’t really need to hear. Another blow against commonsense phone etiquette, though it does give new meaning to the term “hands free.”

Earbuds: I have to wear bulky headphones when I listen to my iPod. I can’t wear earbuds - they always fall out. I’m not talking about when I’m exercising either - sitting in an airplane seat, if I turn my head slightly or inadvertantly tug on the wires, boop! they’re out. Even the models that hang over my ear don’t stay snug. Does anyone else have this problem? Do I need custom ‘buds? Should I try Superglue?

I’ve been to two CMO conferences this month, and here’s what I don’t get: Marketing execs love to stand on stage and talk about innovation and the changing marketing model and the influence of digital media and yada yada yada. Inevitably, however, when it comes time to wow the audience with some multimedia, what do they offer as a shining example of this innovative thinking? A 30-second spot. Oh, sometimes they put a YouTube wrapper around it, but it is what it is - a 30-second spot. Yes, it’s great to pull the heartstrings of conference attendees with an emotional spot on incontinence. But that’s missing the point. If 30-second videos are the primary vehicle that CMOs (or their speechwriters) choose to demonstrate marketing and advertising prowess, well, they may be talking the talk, but they’re not walking the walk. Any capable agency can do good creative; show me something I haven’t seen a thousand times before.

Some consider “broadcast journalism” an oxymoron, but Tim Russert defied that derisive view. He was the ultimate newsman. In these days of stream-of-conscsiousness blogging masquerading as news, Russert stood out as a relentlessly prepared and fearless journalist, an objective reporter who had no other agenda than to get the truth out of politicians and other Washington power brokers. But as colleagues and friends noted in the many tributes pouring in since his sudden and unexpected death yesterday at age 58, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

As someone who always believed in the ideals of journalism, the art of interviewing, and the thrill of pursuing a hot story, I loved watching Russert perform his craft. He was a true master, and both journalism and politics will be much worse off without him.

Catchy headline, eh?

Was in Montpelier, VT this past weekend for a family wedding, and was fortunate enough to catch, from our hotel room window, the tail end (so to speak) of a nude bike race through town to protest rising gas prices and oil consumption.

Today, Ad Age reports that GM is considering selling off its Hummer brand. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The newly appointed CMO for a Fortune 500 company is seen dining in the company cafeteria with two colleagues. Who has joined the marketing chief for this high-powered strategy session? The two receptionists from the main lobby.

This is what internal marketing is all about - getting buy-in on your brand message from the front-line personnel who often are the first point of contact with customers, partners, suppliers and prospects. This company seems to get that. The receptionists are “greeters” - they don’t sit behind an imposing desk with a sign that coldly states ALL VISITORS MUST SIGN IN. They will open and hold the door if they see you coming up the steps to the main entrance; they’ll ask you how you’re doing, where you’re coming from, and how long you’ll be staying; they’ll offer to take your coat, or have a cab waiting for you once your meeting ends; they’ll even recommend places to eat in town.

The loyalty this CMO engendered by taking the time to sit and have lunch with these two receptionists will pay off in spades as the greeters deliver the brand promise to each and every visitor to this company’s headquarters.

I was travel-challenged this week. First, I left my phone adapter at home for my trip to Milwaukee, so my mobile died on day 2. Then, I left my laptop power cord at the client site, which combined with the 30-minute capacity of my Vaio battery left me very unproductive on the flight home. Losing your cell phone and your laptop capabilities in the same day is very humbling; I was instantly antsy at my inability to connect, to log in, to download. I was reduced to a passive state, reading a newspaper and wondering what was happening that I wasn’t aware of. Troubling.

A couple of articles I wrote for MarketingNPV Journal are now available on their website. The first, “How Do You Measure Engagement?”, examines the emergence of customer engagement as a hot new marketing metric. The problem is that marketers define engagement in many different ways, which makes it difficult to come to any common understanding of its importance. The article looks at the more accepted view of engagement - the emotional connection a consumer makes with a brand - but argues that a better way to frame engagement is around behaviors, not emotions:

It’s important to note that behavioral engagement is not limited to a purchase of a product or service; it encompasses all the interactions that a prospect or customer has in relation to a brand. There are any number of pre- or post-sale activities that can be (directly or indirectly) predictive of a future purchase or re-purchase; they include visiting a Web site, downloading a whitepaper, calling customer service, recommending a product, or even commenting on a blog.

Such behavioral measures of engagement hold the potential to displace awareness and brand preference as interim measures of marketing effectiveness.

The second (related) article is “Calculating the Value of Referrals: Easier Said than Done.” This piece looks at the emerging methods for determining the economic value of customer referrals and other word-of-mouth marketing activities:

Current methodologies and research give us small glimpses of a great universe, but in many ways our current approach to charting WOM is like being an astronomer back in the pre-Galilean era. We can see the moon and the stars, but we have no real frame of reference around how big the universe actually is or the activity that’s taking place outside of our view.

Consider, for instance, that even the most advanced third-party tools primarily track online WOM — a severe limitation when you look at studies like the 2006 Keller Fay Group survey, which concludes that only 8% of brand-related conversations take place online. “Online tracking mechanisms make it easier to track who’s recommending what,” says V. Kumar, the ING Chair Professor in Marketing at the University of Connecticut’s School of Business and executive director of the school’s ING Center for Financial Services. “But still the hole is there, because the offline activities are not captured.”

The good news is that the tools and research methods are improving — much as the modern telescope has evolved from the early models built by Galileo — helping us to gain more informed insight around the real drivers of WOM. 

I came across two important papers while researching the WOM article, which are cited in the feature: “How Valuable is Word of Mouth” from the Harvard Business Review, and “Measuring the Ripple,” a joint effort by Northeastern University and BzzAgent. Good reading if you’re into that marketing geek analysis stuff.  

An About Us page is a checklist item for any business’s website (and many personal blogs, in its more informal About Me variation). Here’s what NOT to do on your “About Us” page:

• Don’t put your “About Us” page in the “Past News” section - this implies that, well, you are old news.  
• Don’t put embeddable ads in the text. That tells me a lot “about” you - all of it negative.
• Don’t say you have an experienced staff, but then provide no information about or access to those people.
• Don’t post text with numerous typos (and compound the oversight by calling yourself an “award-winning” media publication).

If you don’t think any established website could possibly allow any of these egregious errors to go unchecked, think again: I found one that features ALL of them. And I’m sad to say I used to work for them. What a disturbing decline for a once-great publication.

The art of the press release:

London, UK 16th April 2008 - A survey by Infosecurity Europe (www.infosec.co.uk) of 576 office workers have found that women far more likely to give away their passwords to total strangers than their male counterparts, with 45% of women versus 10% of men prepared to give away their password, to strangers masquerading as market researches with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for filling in the survey. The survey was actually part of a social engineering exercise to raise awareness about information security. The survey was conducted outside Liverpool Street Station in the City of London. 

 

This year’s survey results were significantly better than previous years. In 2007 64% of people were prepared to give away their passwords for a chocolate bar, this year it had dropped to just 21% so at last the message is getting through to be more infosecurity savvy. The researchers also asked the office workers for their dates of birth to validate that they had carried out the survey here the workers were very naïve with 61% revealing their date of birth. Another slightly worrying fact discovered by researchers is that over half of people questioned use the same password for everything (e.g. work, banking, web, etc.)

Chocolate wouldn’t work on me. Ply me with a few complimentary rounds of Jameson’s, however, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.

This is one of those recurring theme stories that pop up every time the economy takes a dip. “Don’t stop marketing!” the marketing pundits scream, as if saying it over and over again will actually make it so.

Sure, it’s common sense that you need to continue to entice customers to buy your product or service at a time when they are less likely to do so. But the reality is, when sales are tanking, something has to give, and usually it’s the marketing budget. Why? Because marketers have the most trouble justifying their investments. (So, to a lesser extent, does IT, which is why you see similar headlines proclaiming, “Don’t stop investing in IT during a downturn!” Same message, different audience.) They’re not equipped to say, “If we stop advertising, our sales will drop X%.” By speaking in generalities, marketing becomes vulnerable to any belt-tightening effots to offset falling revenues.

Some confuse marketing with innovation. Even Ad Age, which should know better, fell into this trap with a lamebrain story on innovations spawned during economic downturns:

Retail sales have gone from slow to declining, and the consumer-spending binge that propped up the U.S. economy for years may not return for a long time.

In short, it’s a great time to be in marketing.

Previous recessions have provided big opportunities — spawning the brand-management system, soap operas, modern cable networks, airline loyalty programs, the IBM personal computer, the iPod, Crest Whitestrips, Axe body spray and — for better or worse — fast-food value menus.

It’s safe to say that the success of most of those items had more to do with the quality and uniqueness of the products than the marketing campaigns around them. I guess the takeaway is that you still want to take risks during a downturn - but the bigger point is that you have to be operating from some baseline of reality. That’s where the real marketing innovation needs to occur; if you can’t start to draw a straight line from your marketing initiatives to some economic benefit for your company, you’ll never gain enough cache to protect your budgets when times get tough. Of course, you can always fall back on sending out more coupons.