We’re dubious of ad campaigns that win the Grand Prix at Cannes. A lot of them are self-indulgent nonsense. But here at Robinson & Maites we like the current and controversial Diesel Jeans campaign, because it reminds us of us.

The campaign is built around the tagline “Be Stupid,” and features attention-getting photographs of people doing just that. At first glimpse, it’s nothing more than one more example of crudeness and stupidity replacing the traditional sex and celebrities, as the chief tactic for communications to get attention fast. (On a broader culture-wide scale, think stupid pet tricks, any episode of Jersey Shore and Rod “Stupidity Is The Best Defense” Blagojevich.“)

But we think Diesel goes a good deal deeper, into a special kind of stupidity. In marketing there are three kinds of stupidity (there are probably a lot more, but this is enough for now):

1.    There are ideas that are just plain stupid all the way around. We’ve covered a few of them here in our blog, in the past. Examples: Office Depot’s Adopt A Small Business Contest, and the Google daily billboards campaign.
2.    There are smart ideas with stupid executions. In auto dealership Evergreen Kia’s “taking it all off” TV commercial, the idea is good – low prices backed by customer support. The execution? Well, they’ve got the first step right. It does get your attention, being mooned by your car dealer.

3.    And then there are smart ideas that only seem stupid – Diesel’s is one of them.

“Be Stupid” is Diesel’s external communication of an internal thinking process that we’ve used informally for years at R&M, to develop innovative marketing ideas. We adopt, for the short term, an attitude of intentional ignorance and stupidity. The idea is to question everything, and take nothing for granted. That way, instead of leaping immediately to executions, we can question the basic objectives and processes of the marketing operation.

We’re in good company; some very smart people also use stupidity as a thinking tool:
•    There’s a computer science process called Artificial Stupidity.“ Wikipedia states that “…a sufficiently developed Artificial Stupidity program would be able to make all the worst cases regarding a given situation. This would enable computer programmers and analysts to find flaws immediately while minimizing errors that are within the code.”
•    In the Journal of Cell Science, an article headlined “The importance of stupidity in scientific research” states that “Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant…The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.”

We’re not sure exactly what this contrarian thinking process has to do with the way that customers choose their blue jeans brand.  But we are sure that the Be Stupid campaign is a worthwhile challenge to the ways we all think about marketing planning and creative. It’s telling us to stop trying to be conventionally smart and to try a different way: “How stupid are you willing to be, to really achieve your goals?”

Why the little old lady from Pasadena may be your best customer

Every once in a while, marketers’ mindsets should be shocked by information that makes them think “What if everything I thought I knew is wrong?”

That’s the kind of jolt that came from a recent Wired article, Clive Thompson’s contrarian take on the traditional worship of early adopters as best prospects for technology products. He believes just the opposite – that late adopters could be the key market segment.

Late adopters are like the Jan & Dean/Beach Boys’ Little Old Lady From Pasadena, the mythical fuddy-duddy grandma who turned out to be the fastest, toughest street racer in Southern California.

“The little old lady from Pasadena
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
Has a pretty little flower bed of white gardenias
Go granny, go granny, go granny go
But parked in her rickety old garage
Is a brand new shiny red Super Stock Dodge”

Late adopters leapfrog
Like all late adopters, it just took her a while to get going. But now she’s unstoppable, “…the terror of Colorado Boulevard.” Thompson tells us that late adopters tend to leapfrog from old technology to the newest, skipping several generations on the way. In one example, they switched from an antiquated cassette Walkman to the latest iPod, in one step. “If only 10 percent of laggards leapfrog, their purchases can drive profits from a new gadget 89 percent higher than they would be without leapfrogging.”

What’s behind this surprising behavior? We’ve got a couple of informed hunches:
•    Late adopters tend to be older, more rational decision makers.
•    But once converted, they tend to be true believers – loyal customers with stronger long-term relationship potential than twenty-somethings.
•    Most important, they resist “new” for its own sake. You’ve got to show them how they benefit.

Overcome skepticism
At Robinson & Maites, we saw what happened when we developed a marketing program for a Verizon broadband product. Most of the low-hanging fruit – early adopters – had already been picked. So we reached up and out for what was left: Late adopters who were dubious about broadband benefits. We reached them in a familiar channel: Retail, instead of online. And we invited them to experience and judge benefits for themselves: “Try Before You Buy.”

A more recent and very counter-intuitive example comes from nursing homes.  Wii game consoles are very popular there, but not because little old ladies (and men) from Pasadena are thrilled by the latest technology. Instead, it’s because Wii lets them enjoy something they needed (a simple way to exercise) and wanted (fun with bowling, baseball and other games they already loved).

Technology is not the only category where late adopters are an important force. Take food, for instance (everyone does; it may be the most universal product of all). The highest incidence of organic food use is not among young trendsetters, for whom it’s PC. Instead, it’s among consumers 40-55, because they realize the health benefits, which become more and more important as you age and lose your sense of immortality.

And finally, there’s the recent launch of the Tesla electric car. We think the young and trendy may be the late adopters here. First, because Tesla is expensive, and older people have more money. But also, as my colleague Paul points out, older drivers make more rational choices and take shorter trips. And after all, the classic original electric car was the 1910 Baker, a little old lady’s phone booth on wheels.

A few weeks back in our “Slice Of The Sales” post, we used a Papa John’s pizza contest as an analogy for value-based compensation for agencies. We talked about how clients have to add a missing ingredient: More agency control over communications, as well as elements like product, price and sales force performance.

Papa John's Recipe Contest

Then we looked around to see if anyone else agreed with us. What we found led to an interesting potential solution to the value-based compensation issue – the “dessert” idea about licensing below.

How others are serving up the issue

We found agreement with our idea, especially in the responses to this Advertising Age article on Coca-Cola’s value-based compensation.
•   “Does this mean that Coke, in turn, promises to not interfere in any way, shape or form with the development of strategy and creative?”
•    “If the agency is going to be held accountable to results, then the client must be willing to go out on that creative limb with them.”
•    “My favorite client quote of late is: Can you give us a break-through idea that has never been done before and prove that it will work.”

We also found a broader view, a different kind of dissenting comment from Nat Slavin, consultant on law firm client relationships. See his comment on this Spin Sucks blog post: “The PR firm, ad agency, consultant, etc., is not the sales force. They are not commissioned employees in the traditional sales model sense. Rather they are critical tools in the arsenal of resources that companies pay for to give the sales force, the employees of the company, to achieve their goals. When the company shifts the burden to third-parties, they cede responsibility for “closing the deal” or “delivering the value” of their products.”

And we found a couple of interesting ideas that were only slightly off topic:
1.    On a NASCAR-related site (Why there? We don’t know.) we found an interesting comparison of architects and agencies, with the recommendation that agencies should either stop functioning as “ banks” for their clients, or charge for the service. But many clients and their agencies are already moving away from this kind of relationship.
2.    A blogger at a Swedish agency thinks that speeding up the internal agency process for idea generation may be part of the solution, because it would reduce cost. (Inarticulate clients could make this a problem – we remember one who kept insisting on the “big idea.” When he finally got what he wanted, it was a $1 refund on a shelf talker with a tear pad.)

Dessert is served

Unfortunately, these last two don’t directly address the real issue. A stripped-down version might read something like this:

How do you determine the value of an idea that doesn’t exist yet, that’s intended to drive a result that’s unpredictable at best?

Then, suddenly, a potential solution came to mind – the dessert for our second helping of compensation discussion above. Our possible, potential solution: If the value of an idea is uncertain, don’t “sell” it to the client.

Gyro Gearloose

License it instead. We’re not talking about some sort of Gyro Gearloose eccentric inventor scenario here, where the agency invents a better mousetrap in their basement in its spare time and then shuffles door-to-door trying to get pest control marketers to buy it.

Instead, what we envision is hybrid of the typical independent inventor situation with current agency/client relationships:
•    Client presents agency with marketing challenge.
•    Agency develops idea for solution to client satisfaction for agreed-upon minimal development fee.
•    Client pays agency a licensing fee to use the idea, for given time period, in specified geography, with specific audiences, etc.  Amount of fee may take into account amount of control that agency has in execution of the idea.
•    So the client gets what they (think) they want, and the agency gets paid fair compensation even without control they may need.

What do you think? Comments welcome – even extreme disagreement.

Todd Wasserman’s recent Brandweek column on the right age for creative work reminded me of me. Because of my vocation (writer) and avocations (cartoonist, musician, luthier), people have told me that I’m “creative.” Of course, some times “creative” was preceded by an enthusiastic “you’re really.” But other times, by the words “not very.”

I’ve persuaded myself that this lets me sit in judgment on other people’s creative efforts.  A while ago I did a pair of posts called “Which Ad Is Worse?” and “This Ad Is Worse,” comparing a very original and unusual Cloudveil clothing ad to a typical local auto dealer everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mess.

I concluded that the auto dealer mess was better – sometimes uncreative advertising is better than the alternative. At least those trite, messy me-too car dealer ads tell you what they’re selling, why you should buy it, how to find it, and so forth. These are basic bits of information you’ll find missing from many big budget famous-brand ads.

But what if the client insists on “creative” anyway?

Most clients in their right minds do not want their brands represented by car dealer-level creative.  Here are some alternatives:

1. Creativity for its own sake. Too much marketing creative today is breakthrough, clever, amusing, entertaining, engaging, compelling…and pointless. It engages the viewer with itself, but it’s a leap of faith to say that it thereby engages the viewer with the brand. Example: The current Bud Light Here We Go/our-best-customers-are-morons campaign.

2. Creative borrowing. In his Simple Business blog, Mark Richards advises us to stop being creative, to “…steal from the best.  Decide in advance what the purpose of your business is…then think about how best to fulfill the purpose and promise of that business by stealing ideas from other industries and incorporating them into your business.” Of course, this is what a lot of marketing communications already do. They pick up catch-phrases, copy trendy graphics, adapt yesterday’s homemade YouTube videos and call it creativity. I have no problem with this when it works. Sometimes it does, but by chance, not intent.

3. Actual creative marketing ideas (not just communications ideas). The real test of marketing creative is that it gets you to believe something or better yet, to do something, not just to like something or to remember it.  And there’s nothing like giving people an actual tangible reason-why, not just a slogan or a clever commercial, to get them to actually do something.  Genuinely creative and relevant advertising (Mac vs. PC comes to mind) is good. But really good creative marketing is great. For example:

• Hyundai Assurance: Lose your job and you can return your newly-purchased car, with little or no financial liability. What do you think sells Hyundais in hard times– Assurance, or their “Think About It” tagline?

• Chrysler Mini-Van Pledge: Buy a new mini-van and drive it for up to 60 days. If you decide you don’t like it, Chrysler will take it back.  Does this low-risk offer drive Chrysler sales? Or is it their “Timeless Beautiful and Functional” themed creative?

• And just in case you’re thinking that only $20,000+ products can offer these tangible reasons-why to buy now, consider the Sam Adams Boston Lager Glass. While other beers build their brands around novelty packages and silly stunts, Sam Adams actually invests in (and invites customers to participate in) an innovation that improves the flavor of the product.

There’s an implied message in all of your marketing: You ask customers to trust you to provide a quality product or service, at a fair value, delivered on time, and so forth.

But how much do you trust your customers? That’s the real question for marketers who consider “Pay What You Want” (PWYW) pricing. With PWYW, they invite customers to pay whatever they think is right, and they risk customers choosing to pay nothing.

“What! Are you out of your mind? That’s like giving it away – an invitation to disaster!”…is how some marketers respond. They see it as an airheaded throwback to the impractical idealism of the 1960s. But some others see it as a way to differentiate themselves from competition. Or as a way to cement a customer relationship based on more than pure economics.

PWYW at Panera

The most recent example is Panera Bread’s venture into PWYW near St. Louis.  This is a first for a national retail chain, but it’s only at one location. Is it a true marketing experiment, or a publicity stunt, or both?

Well before Panera’s experiment, many independent restaurants started offering PWYW pricing – the three Berlin Weineri locations and One World Everybody Eats in Salt Lake City, among others. Other categories where PWYW pops up include:
•    Music downloads: Many musicians have now copied Radiohead’s successful 2007 sale.
•    Electronic games – the Humble Indie Bundle, with a tied-in charity contribution.
•    A law firm – Valorem Law Group, in the same building as Robinson & Maites, in Chicago.
•    A chiropractor – Dr. Reed Shiraki in Hawaii.
•    A taxi service – Recession Rides in Burlington, VT.
•    And even publications – GOOD, the magazine “about moving things forward.”

Even though PWYW is still is in its infancy, there’s been some impartial scholarly research on it.  “Pay-What-You-Want — A New Participative Pricing Mechanism” concludes that:
•    Consumers are strongly motivated by fairness and reciprocity.
•    A relationship with the seller may impact consumer price decisions.
•    Participative pricing increases consumers’ intent to purchase.
•    In three field studies, prices paid were significantly greater than zero.
•    PWYW can even lead to an increase in seller revenues.

What we think

What’s our take on PWYW, here at R&M? It’s in its infancy too, but we’re pretty sure that:
•    It’s not just a fad. PWYW is an extension of successful, established participative pricing mechanisms like auctions (eBay is the best example) and Name Your Own Price (priceline.com and many others).
•    It can provide strong differentiation in an area of marketing – pricing – that usually isn’t all that creative, except for short-term promotional pricing.
•    It can be the right thing to do, as a long-term customer relationship and participation builder, not just as an attention-getter.
•    For now, at least, it probably works best when customers have immediate, intimate and frequent contact with the marketer (restaurants, professional services), or an emotional attachment to the product (music downloads), or when the product is digital (music, electronic games) where there’s little or no additional cost liability for each unit sold.

We doubt very much that PWYW would work for utility bills, insurance premiums, wireless phone bills and other payments that consumers must make to large and faceless corporations.

What do you think? Are we out of our minds, or can marketers actually trust their customers? Comments welcome.

A pizza promotion can show a better way for clients to pay their agencies.

Right now Papa John’s is running a contest that offers winners a percentage of sales from the original recipes that they create. This Win a Slice of the Sales promotion suggests what the “missing ingredient” may be, for successful value-based agency compensation plans.

So far, value-based compensation for agencies is one issue that seems to be all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Everyone talks about it; few do anything. In his recent Advertising Age article David Beals points out that according to an ANA survey, less than 1% of agency compensation agreements are value-based. He goes on to describe three reasons why.
1.    Clients have difficulty in defining value, and their agencies’ specific contributions to it.
2.    For both clients and agencies, establishing value-based compensation is time-consuming. It’s quicker and easier to use traditional methods.
3.    Value-based compensation is inherently risky for agency profits, especially when “value” involves factors outside of the agency’s control.

We believe that reason #3 is the toughest barrier to break through.  And this is where the Papa John’s contest provides a useful analogy for value-based agency compensation. Here’s a simplified version of how it works. Imagine you’re entering the contest:
•    You create an original pizza recipe idea, including crust choice, sauce choice, cheese choice and up to seven toppings.
•    You name it, and tell why it’s the next great specialty pizza.
•    As a semi-finalist, you get a marketing budget to help sell your creation to pizza lovers.
•    As the grand prize winner (determined by customer purchases of semi-finalist pizzas) you earn a 1% slice of net sales of your pizza creation for up to a year.

This is not a perfect analogy for a value-based agency compensation situation. But it’s close enough to show what the “missing ingredient” may be: Some kind of control over marketing and sales factors outside of the communications are the agency’s primary role.

Agencies would be far more willing to adopt some kind of value-based compensation system, if they could design the product, name it, develop its value proposition and determine just how it would go to market. (And of course they’d be even more willing if they had some input on price, sales force performance, and other factors as well.)

Can a client be like a pizza chain? Can an agency be like a pizza customer? Can they get together to agree on the right recipe for value-based compensation? We welcome your comments (even if you tell us no client would give up that kind of control and that we’re out of our minds), and we’d like to hear about any successful value-based compensation systems you’ve witnessed.

There is such a thing as being too successful. Tiger Woods learned this the hard way; he went from hero to goat overnight. Now Apple Inc. may be heading for the same kind of “learning experience.” Because Apple, like Tiger Woods, seems determined to demonstrate the truth of number 18 of Ries and Trout’s 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: “Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.”

Tiger Woods’ status as the world’s highest-paid professional athlete, youngest player to achieve a Grand Slam, and winner of 16 World Golf Championships was not enough to overcome the arrogance revealed by the Escalade incident in front of his home.

For Apple, the reputation launched by the legendary Macintosh 1984 TV commercial may not be enough to overcome their current “we know what’s best for you” attitude. In 1984, Apple saved the drones from Big Brother. But now, it seems, we are the drones who must conform to the Gospel of Apple.

Love can turn to hate

Customers love user-friendly Apple products. (They should – they’re wonderful.) And they love the friendly Apple marketing – the engaging TV commercial dialogue between PC and Mac, the features and benefits made fun in the iPhone commercials. But in the long term – 5 or 10 years – they may fall out of love with Apple, the unfriendly company:
•    Apple is obsessively secretive, in a business that values openness more and more.  The New York Times says: “As an organization, Apple is more disciplined in managing message than even the Obama campaign, with a culture — some would say cult — of corporate omertà.”
•    Apple is the chest-beating 800-lb. gorilla in so many categories.  Gizmodo states: “It’s Apple that conquered music. Apple that revolutionized mobile phones. Apple that might make tablet computing mainstream.“
•    Apple banned Pulitzer Prize winning satirist Mark Fiore from iPhone apps.
•    Apple is refusing to support broadly-used Adobe Flash on iPhone.
•    Apple pulled out of MacWorld in favor of its own tightly controlled events.
•    Apple sues journalists who allegedly leak information.
•    Apple product are expensive. Yes, innovative user-friendliness is valuable. But is it that much more valuable?

For now, the dissension from the Gospel of Apple is mainly among the technorati. But these things have a way of spreading from the insiders to the outsiders – a recent article in Newsweek talks about “Fortress Apple.” Think Star Wars Death Star  with Steve Jobs as you-know-who.

Apple may find itself with a credibility gap that great products and great marketing just can’t bridge. Sometimes customers’ perceptions of you are as important as the product benefits you actually deliver. Arrogance can erode customer loyalty, when what you say and show in marketing communications doesn’t match up with (more or less) what you actually do in the real world. Apple may end up being its own worst enemy – in the words of the old comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

“Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,” said Vinton Cerf, the so-called “father of the Internet.”

Maybe he was talking about what marketers go through, to take a marketing initiative from germ of an idea to a campaign that drives business in the marketplace.

At the end of the campaign development process, we know how important it is to develop clear, persuasive and exciting communications to our target audiences. So you’d think we’d be better at communicating to each other – our clients and colleagues – during the process.

But you’d be wrong. Marketers keep using PowerPoint to communicate with each other. People yawn. Their eyes glaze over. They miss the point. Clear, simple ideas become complicated. Complicated ideas pretend to be simple. And the power of a great idea goes unrecognized.

And we’re not the only ones losing power and missing the point because of PowerPoint. A story in the New York Times reports how “death by PowerPoint” has become a running joke in the U.S. military. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” said Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps at a military conference, (He spoke without PowerPoint.)

The problem is not PowerPoint itself. Instead, it’s the user assumption that slavishly following a formula of formats, condensed copy, bullet points, and elaborate charts and graphs will somehow lead to people understanding and being inspired. It gives us the illusion of well-organized, rational information flow leading to effective decision-making. But what happens is usually just the opposite, as illustrated by the famous (notorious?) Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint:
Agenda
•    Met on battlefield (great)
•    Dedicate portion of field – fitting!
•    Unfinished work (great tasks)

Mea culpa –I too am guilty of sneaking a nip or two of the addictive elixir of PowerPoint. That’s why Robinson & Maites has replaced conventional PowerPoint with a storytelling format for many of our presentations.

And it’s why I’m proposing the creation of PowerPoint Anonymous, complete with its own 12-step program to wean PowerPointy Heads away from their addiction. Note that we’re talking 12 points here, not 12 bullet points. Some of them are:
1. Admit that you are powerless over PowerPoint—that your presentations have become unmanageable.
2. Believe that there is a higher Power than PowerPoint that can restore you to sanity.
3. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of your bullet points, content condensed to the point of meaninglessness, charts, graphs and so forth.
4. Make a list of all the colleagues and clients you have bored and confused, and became willing to make amends to them all.
5. And so forth.

Are you ready to take the pledge, to wean yourself from PowerPoint?

I’m so pleased by an email I received today, announcing my qualification after many years working in the marketing business, to be in the next edition of ‘Who’s Who’. Deeply, deeply honored. I immediately imagined the editors, clustered around a table, pouring over resumes and details of some of the finest executives in the world. Hours they’ve spent. Suddenly, my details appear. The mood in the room brightens. “Yes”, they say. “Yes! He’s the one, he’s a “Who”. We’ve got to get this guy “in”. Make him part of the club.” Quickly they send me a personal email invite, hoping and praying that I’ll accept this honor. I get the email, feeling slightly like President Obama must have felt when the Nobel folks called him up. Am I really that good? Am I really that famous?

Except …

I received about five emails inviting me.

They misspelled my name on three of them.

They seem to want to charge me for this honor, by asking me to buy the book.

Oh yeah … and I never applied.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’d like to be a Who. Actually, a member of The Who would be cool. Maybe even a member of that sad little town in Dr. Seuss’ tale of Grinches and Christmas.

But what makes ‘Who’s Who’ such a non-honor is what curses many marketers in their efforts to excite customers.

For a start, they communicated to me without my permission. In most cases, this means marketers hard work was wasted on a poor list, resulting in immediate exile to the junk bin.

Next, they kept on at me, albeit using poorly written, spelled, and targeted emails, a multitude of times. Sort of how various credit card companies used to (or still do?) behave before the recession of last year. “A war of attrition” is probably how some smart guy in credit card marketing described it before turning in his resignation to go and work for “Who’s Who”.

They put a catch implicit in the ‘honor’, a sting in the tail which, unfortunately, most consumers now automatically look for in many marketing communications. “You want me to get ALL THIS? What’s the catch, buddy?” is the implicit reaction brought on by too many years using one to one media to try and ‘sell stuff’ rather than persuade and win over customers.

Bottom line: be genuine, be honest and honorable, know who you’re contacting, check your facts. Pretend your marketing communication is the salesperson calling on this customer. Ask yourself if you find it compelling to deal with a salesperson who spends all her time telling you about herself and her company/brand, pushing an offer … and not listening.

“Who’s Who”? Who cares!

Imagine this: Your competition’s new loyalty program is a big success. Sales says some of your customers are already switching over, to get in on the rewards. You can see your share shrinking.

Should you launch your own program? Maybe not, if your definition of loyalty program is:
•    The all-too-familiar “earn points for purchases, then redeem them for merchandise items, gift cards or other rewards.”
•    Or the been-there-done-that “show this card and get a discount every time you buy.”
Because the biggest problem with loyalty programs today isn’t that your competition has one. Instead, it’s that everyone seems to have one.

According to Colloquy, participation in loyalty programs has jumped 19% in the U.S. since 2007, and over two-thirds of all U.S. consumers report that they still participate actively in at least one reward program. When it seems like most marketers have a loyalty program, and most customers participate in one or more, the perceived value of all the programs is diminished.

How do you break away from me-too loyalty marketing? Start by asking:
1.    What does it mean – how do you define and measure loyalty for your brand? It could be simple preference or willingness to advocate to your brand to friends. Or it may be a harder measure, like maintaining or increasing share or purchase frequency. Then ask yourself: Can a conventional points or card program really achieve these objectives?

2.    What’s the right balance between value and excitement in a loyalty program? Conventional points and card programs need to offer an array of gift cards, digital cameras, discounts, etc. because they need to assure obvious value to a wide range of customer tastes. But they also need a way to differentiate from all the other programs offering the same things – unique items and services and exciting experiences, even if their appeal is specialized or its quantities limited.  American Express does it by offering members concierge service to find gifts and hard-to-get event tickets. And the Chicago Tribune ChicagoPoints program all kinds of ways to earn rewards points: survey completion,  trivia questions…even for correctly answering questions stories in the newspaper.

3.    Can a program member generate enough revenue to support a program with meaningful rewards? This is a big problem for low-ticket CPG products, where annual revenue per customer is small. Tropicana may have solved it by using OPM – other people’s money – in a Juicy Rewards program that offers high perceived valued savings on partners’ products and services: TaylorMade golf clubs, Adidas shoes, Coleman camping supplies, Norwegian Cruise Lines and more. In this program, Tropicana supplies the communications/distribution network, and partners supplies the rewards.

But a true breakthrough will come from realizing that there’s more to “loyalty” than “bribes,” and that relevance is more important than rewards. The ultimate example of this comes from Nieman Marcus, where customer service, limited membership and soft rewards (exclusive services) are the foundation of a loyalty program. This is  a perfect fit for rDialogue’s definition of true loyalty marketing: Rewards are just a starting point, and the “the real value of loyalty programs lies in their ability to engage customers and enable relationship marketing.  This is where executing marketing activities based on customer data creates marketing excellence, not simply program excellence.”

I needed to pen this posting, in honor of all those Duke haters out there, including Gary Maites (U Maryland), Mike Pusateri (Purdue), and most of the state of North Carolina who wear ‘the other blue’.

Duke’s magnificent triumph in the recent NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament was not a triumph of superior talent over the field (Kansas and Kentucky are loaded with soon to be NBA players). It was not about getting hot at the right time, as they shot better earlier in the season than at the ACC and NCAA tournaments. It is arguable that they had an easier draw, but when you get to this level, nothing is a certainty, as Northern Iowa and WVU can attest.

I believe Duke’s ultimate cutting of the nets was down to their Hall of Fame coach, and his ability to assess risk effectively. ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning discussed this week about the decision of Coach K to intentionally miss a free-throw with 3 seconds on the clock, allowing Butler a desperation heave that was within inches of sending Duke packing as the second best team in the nation. When asked, Coach K said that while leading by 3 points if Zoubec had made the second free-throw might have meant Butler needed to sink a three pointer to tie, and that by intentionally missing he opened Duke to a miracle shot loss, Coach K asserted that he felt the risk of a desperate heave from half court was worth it compared to what would have been an emotional overtime period. With Duke’s big men in foul trouble, he wanted to avoid that.

Now, you may ask, what in the heck is this posting doing on a marketing website, apart from irritating the pants off of all UNC supporters, Gary, and Mike? Simple. The challenge many clients face today is over-conservatism in both planning and creative. It’s understandable, somewhat, given that most CMO’s are MBA trained and disciplined, spending half their lives justifying expenditure for their department with Finance, and cognizant that on average most will only be in the job for 18 months before exiting for pastures new. Add a stagnant economy, and you have the breeding grounds for conservatism (in the non-political sense) in both the strategies deployed and the creative ideas approved for execution.

Yet Duke’s victory, or more accurately Coach K’s decision, highlights the need for intelligent assessment of risk when we do strategic planning or creative development. We know that to the risk takers go the spoils, that by taking a chance on something novel or different – think iPhone, iPod, iPad, iAnything here – you have the potential for a game-breaker in terms of results.

I’m not suggesting that marketing plans throw caution to the wind. I am suggesting that a more aggressive approach is needed, however, in how strategies and ideas are deployed, to ensure that brands achieve more than their fair share as the economy ticks upwards. So do some intelligent assessment of risk the next time your brand team or agency comes up with something a little ‘out there’. Who knows, you too could be celebrating an outstanding sales season with your own net cutting ceremony.

There is no greater pester power in the world than a 7 year old boy with his heart set on watching Sea Monkeys hatch, grow, prosper, and, in his mind, swim around like mini-chimps, smiling and waving.  His imagination, fueled by the packaging and advertising, creates the desire.  My seven year old bought into the story of the Sea Monkeys.  Hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, the excitement overflows when the package arrives a week after Mom and Dad relent based on his argument that “it’s for science, Dad”.  Following the directions, we assemble the Sea Monkey ‘World’, put in the water, the eggs … and wait. 

And as happened to me as a child, it’s total disappointment.  No tricks, nothing clever about it, just stupid relatives of brine shrimp floating about in a pool of greenish water.  In the end, a quick trip to the sink and the Sea Monkey experience ends.

The lesson in this?  Marketers are known for their ability to tell stories about their brands.  By creating the magic around the brand via each brand’s unique story, we create desire in the minds of our target audience.  They believe us, believe in us, buy our brand, and in turn augment their emotional and rational psyche by being part of our brand ‘nation’.  We are the Marlboro Man, the BMW driver, the Tide mom.

But what happens when the Sea Monkey hatches, and we realize it’s not all it’s cracked up to be?  What happens when the story fails to materialize?  As has happened recently with Toyota and other brands throughout history, telling a story and then having to change the plot based on reality creates a degree of disillusionment.  Let’s call it the Sea Monkey Syndrome.  Once you get it, it’s very hard (even impossible) to win back customers.  And it can end up with your brand being chucked down the drain!

Evidently Mark Twain was wrong when he said, “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”

Recently Tropicana did something about the weather – the wrong thing. They announced they were reducing the size of the 64 oz. orange juice carton to 59 oz., in response to freezing weather’s impact on the Florida orange crop. But they’re still going to charge the same price. “As a result of those freeze-related costs and supply limitations, Tropicana, the biggest buyer of Florida fruit and juice, is announcing some pricing and packaging moves that we hope will minimize the impact to the consumer,” the company said.

Orange you glad Tropicana cares?

How nice of them to keep our interests in mind. But will the new cartons announce “Big New 59 Oz. Size – Now At 64 Oz. Price!!” in a bright orange promotional burst? Will a new ad campaign tell how Tropicana cares about its customers, how a smaller quantity is a better value for them than a higher price? I don’t think so.

I’m not pretending to be the Ralph Nader of breakfast values here. Instead, I’m looking at this from the marketer’s point of view, trying to get across the importance of the customer-centricity that more and more marketers are adopting as an operating philosophy.

Openness and integrity are part of it. Accenture’s Customer Centric Principles states that high performance organizations will “focus going forward on fostering trust-based relationships to the same degree they have focused, historically, on managing customer transactions efficiently.”

Hershey Bar history

But Tropicana is still focusing on “managing customer transactions efficiently” – for their own sake, not for customers. Saying you’re doing what’s best for customer and then doing what’s best for your business (and not telling anyone about it) has a long history in the consumer packaged goods business. The best known example is the incredible shrinking Hershey chocolate bar, which maintained the same price for years while it got smaller and smaller. (A famous paleontologist once wondered if this was an example of evolution in reverse, and that the Hershey Bar might someday disappear entirely.) You can find many more examples from Ziploc, Softsoap, Peter Pan and others at The Consumerist. Just enter “Grocery Shrink Ray” in their search box.

Today on Wall Street

Maybe there should be a new kind of economic indicator. Along with housing starts, retail sales, the consumer price index and the unemployment we could hear monthly reports on the Hershey Bar Index. On a brand-by-brand basis, it would measure how much less you’re getting for your constant-value dollar. So consumers planning their own economies could learn which companies were truly customer-centric.

Maybe it’s time for marketing creative to stop thinking big and starting getting mini.

From the very beginning of our careers in marketing, we’re always being told that “think big” = “better.” Big ideas get your clients’ products noticed. They advance your career by getting your own ideas noticed. And they justify big budgets (whether you really need them or not).

Maybe it’s time to think again, to “think small.”  A few good reasons:
•    The current b2b marketing emphasis is on small business.
•    In today’s economy, most marketers are working with smaller budgets.
•    The Internet, and especially social media, help marketers efficiently target small audiences.
•    Smaller marketing initiatives can be green, using fewer resources.
•    Many marketers are discovering the advantages of working with a smaller agency (full disclosure: self-interest at work here).

But there’s one more way to think small….and this is the big idea.  To get your ideas notice, miniaturize your creative executions. For example:
•    Remember making dioramas in grade school? In the UK, East Coast Trains is reviving the idea to promote its “miniature” fares.
•    A different way to do dioramas – in Melbourne, Australia City Search took them out of the ad and onto the street.
•    Be smart and small with a half-size Smart Car wrap. Stand out among all the other marketers wrapping full-size Hummers and city busses with their promotional messages.
•    Use a few square inches to get noticed with a creative business card – like this graduate student’s electronic interactive card, and this security consultant’s card with built-in lockpicks.
•    When other direct marketers are sinking their hopes and their budgets into oversize dimensional mailers, consider sending something small, like this world’s smallest direct mail piece for Volkswagen Passat.
•    Billboards are big. But this report from New Zealand shows they don’t have to be, to be effective communicators.
•    And finally, the idea that claims to be the world’s smallest ad (and probably is): An Olympus mailer sent to scientist prospects for high-end microscopes, with a customer survey that could only be read through a microscope.

Give it a little thought: When everyone is shouting, why should you expect your yell to be heard? Try whispering instead. Because smaller and better can be better than just plain bigger.

The Pinewood Derby is a kids’ activity in which Cub Scouts design and build a mini race car from a block of wood and compete to win on an inclined track.

Marketing Organization Design (MOD) is a corporate activity in which grown-ups redesign the marketing department (in some cases, repairing the work of blockheads) to compete to win in the real world.

While participating in a recent Pinewood Derby with my 7 year old, it struck me that there are many parallels between the serious business of marketing organization design and the even more serious task of designing a winning Pinewood Derby car.

In a MOD initiative program, it’s usually a change agent who initiates the need to review or reorganize how marketing is structured. It may be the Board of Directors, the CEO, or a new CMO. Or it may be a outsider from a big, famous-name, prestigious firm with “management consulting” in their company description, who with the typically verbose, chart-filled Powerpoint presentation highlights that your marketing “isn’t customer centric” or “lacks insights.” In other words, “your marketing department sucks; give us a barrel of money and we’ll fix it.”

The consultant is similar to the change agent for redesigning your son’s Pinewood Derby car. Typically it’s one of your Cub Scouts’ Den friends, who blurts out that your son’s little pride and joy “sucks.” (Is this how management consultants start their professional careers?)

This leads you to want to wipe the smirk off his face, redesigning to create a kickass blindingly fast vehicle. Or in the case of a marketing department head, to redesign the department to generate kickass insights and become blindingly fast at strategic development and go-to-market programming.

Both MOD and a Pinewood Derby car start with a few simple basics. A block of wood, some plastic wheels, couple of nails, and rules in the case of the Derby. An antiquated block of a department, some plastic “we’ve always done it this way” people, and the often intransigent rules of the company in the case of MOD. Neither will get you from A to B quickly.

So you start carving your department slowly. You change the aerodynamics, trying to get the organization to improve how it does things and improve efficiency. Apply outside forces and knowledge of what works better elsewhere. Try to bend the rules a bit, to get what you need to compete more effectively.

Sooner or later, you realize the more you carve out and slim down and change, the more you need to add some weight back into the department…but in a different place. In the competitive business environment of 2010, that weight usually needs to be in the form of improved analytics, competitive intelligence, and customer insight provision. If you want momentum, you need these elements to function effectively. All too often that weight needs to be brought in from outside. But it also needs to be put in the right spot in the department: At the center of gravity for strategic planning and program assessment, not at the back of the department, or at the margins.

Of course, for both Pinewood Derby cars and MOD, friction is your enemy. For marketing departments it’s BWADITW – “but we’ve always done it this way.” So how you grease the wheels is key to success in both races. In the case of organization design, selling the need and the solution, and being open and honest in how and how frequently you keep people informed, is key to smooth out the frictions which invariably arise.

Do it well and you win. Earn a merit badge in Marketing Organization Design. And hopefully wipe that smirk off the consultant’s face!

PS:  We finished 5th out of 11 Tiger Cubs last weekend.  We’ll grease the wheels better next year!

Today, thanks to the brave new world of Internet search and ratings, we can be sure we’re getting the best value for every one of our shopping dollars. The Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study showed that 94% of online shoppers did research before their purchases.

But the brave new world breaks down a little when it comes to local search, when you’re looking for local service providers.  Imagine this:
•    It’s Saturday evening. Company’s coming for dinner. The kitchen sink backs up. How do you pick a plumber?

You can use Yelp (or Google Local, or online Yellow Pages, or eLocalPlumbers, etc).  Local search and ratings are one hot topic in small business marketing discussions today. Good for small business marketing consultants…but maybe not so good for people with backed-up sinks. What if there are no ratings, or only one or two ratings, for the plumbers close to you? Or what if the ratings are ringers, placed by the plumbers’ friends?

Today SuperPages and Angie’s List, are taking very different approaches to the problem.

•    SuperPages offers a SuperGuarantee with teeth: If you’re dissatisfied with an advertising service provider’s work, they’ll pay you up to $500.  SuperPages and the SuperGuarantee are free to consumers. Marketing support includes a major “We Make it Easy to Spot the Good Guys” TV advertising campaign and a $5 million SuperSpendingSpree sweepstakes.

•    Angie’s List offers customer ratings – lots of them. Each month they aggregate up to 40,000 customer reviews of local service providers like plumbers on a market-by-market basis. There is no direct remedy for customer dissatisfaction with an Angie’s List service provider, but plumbers and other providers can be put in the “penalty box.” Angie’s List charges member/consumers for its services: $15 to sign up plus $6.95 a month.

Which one would you – a local search user – choose to pick a plumber on a Saturday evening with company coming?
•    Thinking as a marketer, you’ve got to go with SuperPages and its SuperGuarantee . It’s the familiar Yellow Page updated for the 21st century. It’s free. The guarantee differentiates by offering  a specific financial remedy for dissatisfaction. And the sweepstakes drives traffic and builds consumer understanding.
•    But thinking as a harried dinner party host, you’d probably pick Angie’s List. Smart marketing doesn’t fix kitchen sinks. Up to $500 back at some future date doesn’t mean much with company coming for dinner. In this case Angie’s List, the less visible marketer, offers more value. Assurance before is better than a financial remedy afterwards.

What kind of innovation makes marketing succeed?  From reading the trade press, you’d think that the classic marketing mix had only three Ps. Most of the news is about Product, Price and Promotion.

But you don’t read that much about the fourth P – Place, or distribution.
•    Agencies overlook it because they can’t do much about it. It’s already in place, a given, something that most clients don’t want agencies to mess with. So agencies tend to focus on creating Product ideas, improving Price/value perception and developing Promotion.
•    On the client side, it’s often in the domain of the sales department, where the marketing department may fear to tread.  And it can involve nitty-gritty issues of transportation and trade relations that the average marketing manager knows little about.

It’s among key retailers that real innovations are rising. They know that where something is sold (preferably at their store) and how it gets there is just as important as what it is, what it costs and how it’s marketed.

Four distribution innovations

Recent examples of innovation in the fourth “P” – retail Point of distribution –include:

• Integrating virtual and “real” worlds. 7-Eleven stores will now invite online gamers to pay for virtual world purchases using real money at 7-Eleven stores, as the humble c-store bridges the gap between the virtual and the real world.

• Generating content. Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble are partnering to produce family-friendly TV programs, starting with a made-for-TV movie premiering in April 2010.

• Determining prices. Amazon.com and MacMillan, the publisher, confronted each other over the retail price of e-books sold for use on Amazon’s Kindle reader. (MacMillan won for now. But maybe not for long.)

• Making money mobile. Target store customers can now store their gift cards on the store’s mobile site, and present a web-enabled phone to the cashier to pay.

Catch the common thread in these four? It’s not just the importance of the Internet; it’s also because the “product” in each of the four is digitally-delivered information.

These are just a few examples gleaned from recent news. We think that smart agencies and client-side marketers, both of them in the information business, will see this as a wake-up call. They’ll start expanding their vision of the fourth P – distribution – beyond its traditional role as a generic pipe between manufacturer and end-user.

Read these three names – do they sound familiar?
1. Declan Mcmanus.
2. Ralph Lipschitz.
3. James Osterberg Jr.
Never heard of them? Actually you have – because all three overcame obstacles to marketing success.

As a rule, changing a company, brand or product name is risky business for marketers. But sometimes it can be necessary, and it can make an immediate measurable improvement in marketing. A recent Wall Street Journal article reports how some luxury hotels have increased their business in hard times simply by dropping one word -“resort” – from their names, in response to corporate sensitivity about extravagant spending on conventions and meetings.

What were they thinking?
They were right. But many marketers change names for the wrong reasons.
•    Brinks, the home security company, became Broadview. This one was necessary because they had to give up the Brinks name. But did they really have to choose such brand blandness?
•    Here in Chicago, we saw the Sears Tower become the Willis Tower (but you can call it “Big Willie”)– ego-tripping on the part of the new owner of the (former) world’s tallest building.
•    In an exercise of inexplicable corporate silliness, Radio Shack changed its name to The Shack. Now I think of a rundown building, or maybe a basketball player.
•    And in yet another demonstration of high-tech business mumbo-jumbo, Gavitec AG became NeoMedia Europe AG.

The Ballantyne Hotel & Lodge and the Renaissance Orlando – neither of them named “resort” any more – are only two examples of name change for the right reasons.
•    The New York Times reports how a venerable Canadian history magazine had to change its name to dodge online porn filters. (Bet you’ll click through to this one.)
•    A detailed case study shows how leading non-profit changed its name to Legal Momentum, to overcome confusion about its mission.
•    A professor at the University of Florida makes a case for marketing delicious (but negatively-perceived) goat meat as “cabrito.”

As for Declan, Ralph and James Jr:  Celebrities become brands. The wrong name is a barrier to brand success. So to market themselves more successfully, they became Elvis Costello, Ralph Lauren and Iggy Pop.

Inflation isn’t limited to monetary matters. Recently we’ve witnessed College Bowl game inflation: An increase in the number of bowl games, to 34 in 2009-10, leads to a loss of value among individual games. Somehow “Meinecke Car Care Bowl” and “San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl” aren’t in the same league as “Rose Bowl” and “Orange Bowl”.

And now, in our business, there’s marketing formula inflation: “The 4 (INSERT ALPHABET LETTER HERE) Of Marketing.” It all started back in 1960 when E. Jerome McCarthy proposed the 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

This was a good idea, but before long agencies, consultants and others got greedy. The race was on to monopolize a letter of the alphabet (“hurry, hurry, special offer limited to first 25 responders”) to create supposedly-proprietary marketing formulas.

Why settle for the “4 Ps,” when the gurus of modern marketing offer you so many ways to guide your thinking? Here are a just a few examples you can choose from:
•    The 4 As: Analysis, Attention, Acceptance and Action.
•    The 4 Cs: Consumer wants and needs, Cost to satisfy, Convenience to buy, Communication.
•    The 4 Es: Experience, Everyplace, Exchange, Evangelism.
•    The 4 Fs (not to be confused with the militarily-unqualified): Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators and Firecrackers.
•    The 4 Ms: Market, Message, Media and Measurement.
•    The 3 Qs: Quantity, Quality and Qualify. (The idea here is the Scrabble approach to marketing– Q is worth 10 points, as much as A, E, V and W combined.)
•    The 4 Rs: Recognition, Relevance, Reward and Relationship.
•    The 4 Vs: Validity, Value, Venue and Vogue.
•    The 4 Ws: Who Are You? What Do You Do? Why Does It Matter? and What Makes You Different?

This list is the result of a quick Google search. Which one’s right for you, or your agency or your company? You could review all the options carefully, comparing one against another, passing judgment on which one best fit the realities of marketing for today and for the future.

Or you could take the deflationary approach. There’s a different kind of choice that’s implied by what’s missing from this list: The Bs. At R&M, we kind of like “Marketing With No Bs.”

Like the evil monster in the 1958 B-grade drive-in movie, direct mail seems to be “The Thing That Couldn’t Die.” This horrifies the electronic media pundits, who keep insisting that marketing communications that use paper and ink already have one foot in the grave.

In May of 2009, a Borrell Associates research report predicted that direct mail spending will decline 39 percent during the next five years, from $49.7 billion in 2008 to $29.8 billion in 2013. According to Borrell, “Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover.”

Not dead yet.
But a recent Wall Street Journal article contradicts that prediction: “Despite prevalence of digital media, entrepreneurs find old fashioned direct mailings still key to winning customers.”  Some pretty convincing anecdotal evidence shows that responses and sales start declining when firms abandon direct mail in favor of e-mail.”

And direct marketing guru Bob Bly cites a BtoB Lead Generation Guide article that shows:
•    Direct mail responders are 10 – 20% more likely to convert to a qualified lead than their online counterparts.
•    Direct mail responders are 10 -20% more likely to convert to qualified leads than online responders.
•    Sales reps are 7 – 15% more likely to work a DM lead, vs. an online lead.
(Full disclosure: We do both DM and EM at here R&M. We’re good at it. Our clients get results. We make money.)

It keeps coming back to haunt us.
Here’s why direct mail is still alive:
•    It’s tangible and real in your hands, while e-mail is virtual and can be eliminated with a click. Plus direct mail can deliver the “lump” – the merchandise item or dimensional construction that inspires curiosity.
•    Direct mail can use dramatic copy and graphics together, to get recipients to open the envelope. E-mail is limited to the one-dimensional subject line. Of course, this is a meaningless distinction if you’re a credit card marketer who sends out the typical “XX% APR” direct mail in a #10 envelope.

•    A lot of direct mail hangs around to be looked at later; most e-mail gets deleted immediately. Before sitting down to write this, I opened a Valpak mailer received two days ago, to extract a coupon for the local gyros stand.
•    There’s less competition – I personally receive far fewer direct mail ads than e-mail ads.
•    You can tell a longer, richer story in direct mail. I received the spring 2010 Burpee garden catalog in the mail, during a snowstorm, and sat down to page through it immediately. But I probably would have deleted a Burpee e-mail with a link to their online catalog.

Yes, we all know that e-mail costs less and is easier and faster to develop than direct mail.  But most efficient is not necessarily most effective. And anyway, if the Borrell research is right, this is the time to be a direct mail marketer, because you’ll have the whole mailbox to yourself.

By now you’ve read all about Pepsi’s pullout from its 23 years of Super Bowl sponsorship. Instead, they’ll be running a social media program for the Pepsi Refresh Project, inviting consumers to create and vote support for thousands of worthwhile local community projects. Everyone seems to think this is a really important marketing move. But there’s little consensus on exactly why Pepsi is doing this, or what they hope to get out of it.

Reading all the press responses was like listening to the old story about the blind men and the elephant (one touched its side and said it was like a wall, a second touched its leg and said it’s like a tree, a third touched it tail and said it’s like a rope).
•    According to DM News, it’s a sign that “Direct marketing is now the centerpiece of all advertising.”
•    Advertising Age asks: “Is Pepsi’s Pass on Super Bowl an Offensive or Defensive Move?”
•    Business and technology group blog Techdirt is sure that online is the key factor: “Pepsi Drops Super Bowl Ads… Goes With Online Promotions Instead.”
•    Naturally, for Social Media Today, social media is what matters: “Pepsi Drops the Super Bowl for Social Media.”
•    For green business news site Environmental Leader, doing good is the core concept: “Pepsi Drops Super Bowl Ads in Favor of Cause Marketing.”

And so forth and so on. My R&M colleagues contributed some less biased, more insightful opinions:
•    Lowell pointed out the trade channel angle: “Since the dawn of Super Bowl advertising, in conference rooms all over the country there have been comments like: “We’ll get to take our best customers!” and “This is a great way for the sales guys to schmooze the customers.” But now Pepsi has signed merger agreements with Pepsi Bottling Group and PepsiAmericas – 80+% of their North American beverage volume. No need to schmooze your own people.”
•    Bob said Pepsi’s always been a copycat: “Pepsi looks at Coke on how to be a brand and then copies them. They act inferior, instead of having their own vision. But now that they’re doing something on their own, they’re doing a me-too again, copying the American Express Member Project program from a few years ago.”
•    And according to Alan: “What’s missing in a lot of what you read is what they really hope to accomplish in overall profitability, because between the cost of marketing and the cost of the Refresh program funding, they’re not saving any money. How does this work to build Pepsi business, and how will they know that it worked?”

We never thought we’d find ourselves classifying social media with Super Bowl advertising, but we’ve got to ask: Is this a big breakthrough for Pepsi (and other giant marketers)?  Or did the wheels just get too squeaky on the old Super Bowl bandwagon, so they jumped to the new social media bandwagon? When it you’re choosing something as simple as a cola, what’s the real driver: Clever and spectacular, or involving and relevant?

So what do you think? Is Pepsi’s pullout from Super Bowl advertising like a wall, or a tree, or a rope….or what? Comment, please.

You’d think that a retail marketer with 36,000+ stores would know how to turn online promotion for a low-ticket product into sales action in the store. And that a high tech marketer would be more likely to make big marketing mistakes, trying to create a sales-building shopper experience for a high-ticket product.

But you’d be wrong.

7-Eleven does it wrong. Their “Wake Up To A Hot Brazilian” online promotion for coffee is a classic example of creativity for its own sake, getting carried away with cleverness and technical wizardry without actually trying to sell anything. While Hewlett Packard does it right. Their movie theater lobby sampling/demo for its HP Photosmart Premium/Touchsmart Web printer lets best prospects get their hands on the product, and then gives them strong incentives to buy.

Customers can visit The 711 Club, a virtual nightclub in Rio de Janeiro, where they can try out pickup lines on other patrons, to earn a downloadable coupon for a cup of real world 7-Eleven Brazilian Bold coffee. But then marketing reality intrudes:
•    How anyone is supposed to know that The 711 Club exists at all is a mystery. There’s no evidence of any traffic-building activity to the site, or the store.
•    The offer is disguised so well that it might as well not even be there. Copy says, “wake up to a hot Brazilian.” But it doesn’t say anything like “get a free (or discounted) coffee at 7-Eleven.”
•    The whole process of pickup lines and earning points on the Mojo Meter is drawn out and laborious, just to get a coffee coupon.
•    There’s no in-store POS presence for the program, at least in the locations we checked.
•    The whole thing seems like overkill, for motivating the simple familiar behavior of running into a C-store for a cup of coffee.

Go where the customers are
By contrast, the HP program is a perfect example of how to “sample” a product that doesn’t usually lend itself to sampling, because it costs around $400.
•    Knowing that customers couldn’t get hands-on with their printer online, and that most people just don’t visit Office Depot that often, HP went where the customers are: Movie theater lobbies in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami and Houston.
•    POS and holographic 3-D kiosks turned lobbies into HP live demonstrations, complete with a $50 coupon distribution to drive retail traffic for the printer.
•    During off hours, HP used the theaters to train sales personnel from Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Staples and Office Depot.
•    A tie-in with Fandango even allowed consumer to print out movie tickets.

As more and more marketing moves online, everyone wants to show off, to do the cool digital stuff. They forget that it’s still the down and dirty stuff in the non-virtual world that makes so many of the sales.

TO:      Hizzoner, Da Mare.
FROM:     Da Marketing Agency.
RE:          Sexy Chicago campaign – work in progress

“Marketing is like sex. Everyone thinks they’re good at it.”

We learned how true that saying is, after our October 26 post called for a campaign to claim Chicago’s rightful place as the world’s sexiest city. We were swamped with ideas. But now we’ve eliminated all the business-as-usual beauty pageant ideas (and their downscale cousins, wet T-shirt contests) and come up with half a dozen recommendations:

1.  A Labor Of Lust.
The Sexy Chicago campaign will lead an initiative for the entire Rust Belt, the industrial territory stretching from New York State, across the Great Lakes States and up into Wisconsin.
•    From now on the “Rust Belt” will be known as the “Lust Belt,” and Chicago will be positioned as its buckle.
•    “Chicago Unbuckled” marketing events will include tours to visit voiceover talent agency Naked Voices, the Naked Furniture store, and the site of the notorious turn of the century luxury brothel, the Everleigh Club. In June, our guests can also participate in the World Naked Bike Ride.

2. Get Wet.
To make marketing more efficient, we’ll build on what Chicago is already famous for. For example:
•    We’re composing a new theme song for the Chicago-To-Mackinac sailboat race in August. It’s a take-off on a Beatles classic, now renamed “Why Don’t We Do It In The Lake?”
•    We’re also working on a North Side vs. South Side, Cubs vs. Sox program that invites fans to “get to first base, get to second base” and so forth.

3. Let’s Get Busy.
Of course, we’ll be getting the local business community involved.
•    To transform our brutally cold winters into something sexy, we’re in talks with Peoples Gas and Nicor to run a “Turn Up The Heat” promotion. Instead of putting on a sweater, Chicagoland consumers could win enough free natural gas heat to go naked in their homes all winter long.
•    And we’re starting a non-profit That Chicago Sensation Foundation to fund smaller businesses’ development of sexy products and services. The first recipient will probably be Dr. Elena Bodnar, inventor of a bra that splits in half to become his and hers emergency gas masks.

4. Everybody’s Doing It.
To assure participation by all Chicagoans, we borrowed inspiration from the popular Take Your Pet To Work days.
•    We’ll be inviting Chicagoland citizens to dress down during “Go To Work In Your Underwear Day.”
•    Of course, recognizing that Chicago is not Miami or LA, we’ll encourage our more modest (or less attractive) citizens to just wear a lapel button, or wear their underwear on the outside of their clothing.

5. Good Enough To Eat.
On the Chicago food front, we’ve enjoyed some unexpected help from a tourist from the UK. We want to use Aaron Everitt’s deeply sensual testimonial about his first experience with Chicago-style deep dish pizza.
•    “The whole experience is basically the dietary equivalent of sex…first of all you have a 45 minute wait while the pizza cooks…which is a time where they ply you with appetizers… think of these as the foreplay.”
•    “When you’re done you feel an overwhelming sense of elation and also a curious amount of tiredness – all you want to do is sleep.”

6. Get All Worked Up.
Finally, we believe it’s time to reconsider that classic Chicago slogan, “The City That Works.” We recommend a better fit for Sexy Chicago:  “The City That Smirks.” It’s the perfect way to pay off a campaign that does exactly what marketing’s supposed to do:
•    Begin by promising gratification.
•    End with fulfillment.

“Think out of the box!” may be good advice for creative marketers. But it’s been said so often that it’s become a meaningless catch phrase.

“Think off of the page (or the screen)!” is better advice, because it overcomes some of the traditional limitations of marketing communications. Even the wildest idea gets tamed, when it has to work within the confines of a page or a screen.

Here are five examples of thinking off the page, showing how to make marketing happen in real life, not just in the artificial environment of communications media.

1. Do it in the road.
Zappos “exposed” its expansion beyond shoes into a full line of clothing, by hiring a naked man to run through high traffic locations in New York City.

2. Do it at dinner.
A Sarah Palin Lookalike Contest helped University of Massachusetts food service tie in with Alaskan Seafood Week.

3. Take to the air.
German publisher Eichborn Verlag used mini-banners attached to live house flies to build traffic to their booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

4. Up your nose.
To get beyond conventional sight and sound in marketing communications, the Scent Marketing Institute helps companies use “scent as part of multi-sensory marketing strategies to enhance customers’ experiences of a location and its products or services.”

5.  Threaten your customers.
Some ideas should stay in the box – this prank promotion inspired a $10 million lawsuit. Instead of offering benefits, an imaginary Toyota spokesperson e-mailed potential customers that he was fleeing from the police and coming to their house with a pit bull.

The current Walmart vs. Amazon.com battle of the bestseller books points out one of the oldest marketing problems of all: Confusing the package with the product, the medium with the message, the benefit with the feature.

In 1992, back in the Stone Age of the Internet, a now-famous New York Times article declared “The End of Books,” discussing how hypertext threatened to make the traditional novel obsolete. Then in 2007, an article in the Huffington Post bemoaned the fate of books, quoting an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that showed that one in four adults had not read one single book in the past year.

And now it’s 2009, and we’re watching two of the largest and most successful retailers on the planet launching a marketing war against each other. Their weapons: Music downloads? DVDs? Video games?

Books are back.
No, books. And not e-books or recordings of books, but the old-fashioned kind of books made out of actual dead trees.

On one hand we have a supposedly soon-to-be-obsolete medium making a big comeback in the retailing business. On the other hand, we have the book business predicting the end of the world.

A reasonable response to all this would be something like Mark Twain’s, after a newspaper had reported his death some 12 years before he actually died. He said: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” But the book business – authors, publishers and independent book stores – are responding with complaints that:
•    Independent book stores will struggle as they become outlets only for lower volume, less successful books.
•    Publishers will be more reluctant to take risks on books that don’t fit the bestseller model.
•    And authors will be discouraged because they’ll be paid less, or not publish at all.

They may be right. But they’re also missing the point, because they’re confusing the package – paper that is folded, cut, fastened together and covered with a more colorful piece of paper – with the product: The entertainment and information that people have always wanted.

The enduring importance of stories.
Long, long before there were books, or printing presses or even writing, all stories were oral renditions from memory.  The storyteller was a valued member of society, satisfying the demand for a good story well told. A successful storyteller’s most important marketing principles were to remember the whole story verbatim (think of Homer memorizing and reciting all 28,000 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey), and to present it dramatically and convincingly.

Then along came writing, and the printing press and mass-produced books. And no doubt storytellers complained because their remarkable memories had become obsolete, that they were reduced to telling only less popular stories, and that they weren’t being paid as well.

That’s the position the book business is in today. Blackberries, e-book readers and video on demand may or may not replace traditional books.  But authors, publishers and retailers will continue to thrive if they remember that what they’re selling is a story, not a dead tree, and that stories will never become obsolete.

Maybe marketing doesn’t have to be dumbed down to be successful. That’s the implication of a recent Stanford University study on literacy.

Clive Thompson of Wired quotes Stanford Professor Andrea Lunsford and summarizes what she says about the impact of the Internet on college student’s prose: “’I think we’re in the middle of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.”

What this could mean for marketing

On one hand, critics of marketing have always claimed that it appeals to the lowest common denominator. Supposedly, marketers act as if customers have the attention spans of oysters, are baffled by sentences with more than six words, and are indifferent to any kind of logical expression of features and benefits. This is the result of a combination of:
a) marketers’ cynicism and venality.
b) the Internet, and all of its trivial distractions from “serious” thought.
c) declining educational standards. (Critics have been complaining about declining educational standards since the time of the ancient Greeks. It’s a wonder we don’t all have the brains of single celled organisms by now.)

On the other hand, some of us do pay attention to David Ogilvy’s famous advice that “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” Evidence that this point of view is closer to the truth include the legendary Volkswagen Think Small campaign and the current Mac vs. PC campaign.

No more lowest common “dumbnominator”

Now the Stanford Study implies there is hope for intelligent marketing. Because people who write well have the skills to read (or listen or watch) well. They can pay attention, understand ideas and follow a chain of logic in the marketing communications we send to them – if they want to.

“Can” is the key word here. Some marketers forget that customers don’t have to pay attention, understand and so forth. Customers already have their own lives and other marketers’ messages competing for their attention, so they just don’t have time for marketing communication that’s complicated, in love with itself rather than with the customer, clever without relevant content, or that hides the benefit or the special offer.

That’s why successful marketing should be simplified – but not dumbed down – even when it’s aimed at really smart people.  We’re not the only ones to notice this simple vs. smart paradox. Bob Schmidt of online writers’ cooperative helium.com says it well:  “Ironic, isn’t it? Using extensive writing skills to write in the most simplistic manner possible. Actually, that’s what has worked all along in the field of advertising.”

Here’s how to make a million dollars in your spare time: Enter the Netflix Prize contest and increase the accuracy of their Cinematch® movie recommendation system’s predictions by 10%.

Anyone can enter, which makes this intersection of marketing and technology development the richest example of crowdsourcing ever. However, “can enter” does not mean “should enter.” You and I (unless you’re a really, really smart software engineer who’d like to share a million dollars with me) would probably be wasting our time.

What you and I should do
Since we’re writing and reading a blog about marketing, we should figure out how crowdsourcing can work, or not work, for marketing challenges. Here are a few examples:
•    Doritos ran the winning user-generated TV commercial during the Super Bowl.
•    eWayDirect’s “Help Us Write Our Elevator Pitch” contest  awarded a MacBook Pro to voters’ favorite.
•    Namethis.com gives contributors earn cash (but not very much of it) for naming new companies, products and services.
•    Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s $1000 crowdsource contest invited designers to create a logo for an electric motorcycle.

•    Right now, in the UK, Unilever is offering a $10,000 prize for new creative for its Peperami meat snacks.

Questions about crowdsourcing
The examples make it seem like a good idea. But (there’s always at least one “but”):
•    Doesn’t this sound like old ideas with a new name? It’s a combination of brainstorming (but with a lot more people) and agency spec work.
•    How are the examples different from the Netflix Prize contest? They’re tactical executions – names, designs, ads, etc. You don’t absolutely have to have extensive, specialized experience and expertise to make a worthwhile contribution, although it probably helps.
•    Does more mean better? If a million people participate in a crowdsourced project and get their two cents in, does that make the winner worth $20,000?
•    How do you provide a meaningful briefing to hundreds of crowdsourcing participants without compromising confidentiality?
•    And finally, who sorts through all the submissions and picks the “best marketing?” Especially when, unlike the Netflix Prize contest, there’s no objective success measure?

Can crowdsourcing meet marketing challenges?
Our answer is a strong, clear “maybe.” It can, if “marketing” means make an ad, name a product, write a headline, design a logo or similar discrete executional tasks. But if there’s a marketing equivalent for the Netflix Prize contest – many highly-qualified contributors using in-depth knowledge of the client’s business to drive strategic thinking and complex planning – we doubt it will ever happen.

To answer our own question from the other day – Which Ad Is Worse? – the ad that’s worse is the one that doesn’t work.

And the one that’s a lot less likely to work is the Cloudveil apology. We give all the credit in the world to Cloudveil and their agency for effort, for coming up with this very clever, precisely-targeted idea. Unfortunately, it’s a case where creativity wins while business loses. The reader just has to work too hard to get to the point, which is to buy Cloudveil clothing, not dog biscuits, coffee mugs or flowers. But all is not lost. They might keep the original concept and make it work, by tieing in online merchants’ products with purchase of Cloudveil apparel.

By contrast, the car dealer ad, unoriginal and clichéd as it may be, does its job. It talks directly to people who want to buy a car (no-one else counts, especially advertising awards judges). And it tells them the various benefits, values and special offers they’ll get if they shop at a Russ Darrow dealership. AdRANTS agrees: “…car dealers, more than any other, care only about what sells. If your campaign doesn’t do it for them, you’re out on your ass faster than a car salesmen can say, “What can I do to make this deal happen today?” On the other hand, AdRANTS  also shows that tacky, unoriginal advertising is no sure road to success, with an example of car dealer ad self-indulgence that probably doesn’t work any better than the Cloudveil campaign.

Compare these two very different ads, then leave a comment and tell us which one you wouldn’t run, if you had to choose.

Is it this familiar eye-dazzling local car dealer ad? This one’s from Wisconsin, but there’s one just like it in a newspaper near you. It’s got everything – cartoon turkey, clashing colors, colliding typefaces, featured celebrity, promotional bursts, eight different special offers, and so forth. There’s probably a kitchen sink in there somewhere.

Or is it this very original ad, New York Times-reported ad that targets the outdoor-obsessed? It’s part of a Cloudveil apparel campaign inviting customers to order apology gifts for people and pets they’ve ignored while spending all their time on outdoor fun. The gifts come from three different online merchants.

By now you’ve probably realized that our headline is a loaded question. Does “worse” mean least creative and original, or least likely to generate business? We know what we mean; tell us what you think.

A recent AP story highlights the not unexpected trend away from ‘mass’ direct mail.  With marketers realizing that indiscriminate mailing is proving costly as consumers tighten belts, it’s no surprise that the USPS is suffering – to the tune of over $200m less in ‘standard mail’ between 2007 and 2008, and probably more this year.

The ironic thing is not that it took a recession to wake up most marketers to the need to target more discriminately their mail solicitations.  Nor that tightening credit has re-focused credit companies on sorting out their customers before continuing the new customer acquisition path.  Or that catalog marketers are realizing they need to deliver something smaller than 96 page catalogs to achieve improved payback.

The irony is, response rates for direct mail, at least for clients we work with, seem to be on the incline.  With fewer items in the mailbox, and better targeting, people are responding.  And positively, if the message is right (you know, at the right time, with the right promotion, and above all to the right person).

As with many recession related stories, going counter to the herd – whether it’s buying a house, or holding onto stocks, or buying a car – often means getting a good deal.  And I think that’s the case at the moment for direct mail.  With the USPS suffering, with fewer of your competitors mailing stuff, with more and more tools available to refine who you send stuff to, and with plenty of creative talents adept at turning your brand message into direct response, maybe direct mail deserves another look in your marketing communications planning?