tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77087630471641952942024-03-21T19:23:20.385-04:00TranslinearAbove the line marketing. Below the line marketing. Why is there a line in the first place? Translinear explores what would happen if direct, interactive, social and brand marketers cooperated more closely.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.comBlogger133125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-48322223636187221422014-10-24T12:25:00.000-04:002014-10-24T12:25:01.097-04:00Change, like candy corn, is only good up to a pointIn my recent post about <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2014/10/sometimes-only-thing-you-can-change-is.html">changing your mind</a>, I discussed how to address failure by changing your mind about what you want to achieve and then following accordingly with action.<br />
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One thing, though: too much change can do as much damage as not changing at all.<br />
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Think of it like the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/candy-corn-hate_n_4158096.html">candy corn</a> that we, OK I, enjoy this time of year. A little is good. A little more is better. Too much is kinda gross.<br />
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Part of using change in marketing hinges on when to <i>stop</i> changing<br />
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<a name='more'></a>For example, in the PC boom of the early 90s and the Internet boom of the late 90s, Dell computer became the leading manufacturer of PCs based on its brand platform of <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19981212034342/http://www2.dell.com/">mass customization</a>. You could get your computer any way you wanted, like a sandwich at Subway. This positioning worked well until economies of scale geared up and less expensive production from Taiwan and eventually mainland China made it just as economical for consumers and small businesses to buy fully-loaded PCs.<br />
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While Dell backed off customization, they then tried a number of brand platforms that didn't have the same impact: "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Curtis_(actor)">Dude, you're getting a Dell</a>," "<a href="http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/dell-unveils-global-push-107926">You can tell it's a Dell</a>" and most recently, "<a href="http://adage.com/article/btob/dell-a-beginning-latest-campaign/291906/">The power to do more</a>," a paean to its startup heritage. So the good news: no one associates Dell with made-to-order anymore. The bad news? Dell doesn't stand for anything else, either. While factors such as smartphone adoption and the rise of tablets also challenge Dell's earnings, its branding certainly hasn't helped.<br />
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Change, then, ought to come with a time delay built into it. As with any initiative, marketers should set an objective, determine the best metrics for measuring that objective. And, dammit, give it a minute.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-14960073138132250002014-10-21T13:02:00.002-04:002014-10-21T13:02:47.603-04:00Sometimes, the only thing you can change is your mindSo, you failed.<br />
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OK, let's not be too hard on ourselves. Instead, let's say your marketing program didn't live up to the expectations you set. What now?<br />
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No marketing program ever improves on its own. We all know the expression "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," even if we really don't know <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-therapy/200907/the-definition-insanity-is">who first said it</a>. Unfortunately, we can't change all of the elements of a marketing problem as easily as we can change, say, our socks. After all, marketing teams have limited budgets and limited time which, in turn, mean that they may not have the wherewithal to change process, message or technology.<br />
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Sometimes, the only thing a marketer <u>can</u> change is her or her mind.<br />
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More often than not, however, changing one's mind will work just fine. Here's how it works. To make the approach more clear, I'll use the example of a consumer credit monitoring company for whom I had designed an unsuccessful program.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>For the credit monitor brand, I had designed a welcome program for a 30-day free trial. Welcome programs rank as some of the <a href="http://www.towerdata.com/blog/bid/116388/Why-Email-Marketers-Should-Utilize-Welcome-Campaigns">most effective campaigns</a> in customer relationship marketing. After all, customers often engage the most when they first become customers. Think of how excited you felt to drive your new car for the first time. Then think of how excited you feel now.<br />
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Welcome campaigns generally involve encouraging the the new customer to interact with the product to enhance their comfort with it. For this client, we used email to drive customers back to the site to check their credit rating multiple times during the trial period. We hoped that getting the trial users accustomed to the site would encourage them to start paying for the service. <a href="http://www.moviepooper.com/1/004.html">Spoiler alert</a>: it didn't work. In fact, welcome program recipients converted to paid users at a lower rate than those treated with fewer, more vague emails.<br />
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<a href="http://www.sadtrombone.com/">Fail</a>.</div>
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What to do now?</div>
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<li>First, change your <b>perspective</b>. If your marketing program doesn't perform to your liking, ask yourself, "does it do what we intended it to do?" Perhaps you had the wrong perception of the task, which naturally led to building your program on bad assumptions.<br /><br />In this case, we failed to take something vital into perspective. Your credit rating doesn't change much over any given 30-day period, except due to credit fraud or a major purchase such as a house. So we asked people to visit the site and look at a number that didn't move. Why would anyone pay good money to watch something that doesn't move much? Please, no <a href="http://www.pga.com/news/leaderboard-schedules/golf-tv-golf-tournaments-tv">PGA</a> jokes.</li>
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<li>Next, it helps to change <b>objectives</b>. Don't take this suggestion to mean "<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0912-07.htm">declare victory and leave</a>." Rather, it follows from the change of perspective. If you perception of the challenge changes, so should the ultimate goal.<br /><br />The goal for the credit monitoring trial switched accordingly. We stopped focusing on getting people to look at their credit score, although we certainly didn't discourage them from doing so. Instead, we started focusing on educating them about the benefits of a healthy credit score, such as enhanced access to loans of all types. We included more educational material in the emails and pointed trial users to additional resources on the site.<br /></li>
<li>Finally, don't forget to change <b>measurement</b>. A change in objective generally means changing measurement.<br /><br />Our measurement of the credit monitoring trial email welcome campaign changed, too. We looked at traffic on the education parts of the site as a better indicator than whether they looked at their credit score.</li>
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Have you ever successfully changed your mind about a marketing plan? Tell us about it in the comments.</div>
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Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-25468357211124459442014-10-15T11:16:00.000-04:002014-10-15T11:16:10.207-04:00The How-Tos of Phone ResearchIn my <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2014/10/reach-out-and-research-someone.html">last post,</a> I discussed the benefits of conducting telephone research in the Internet age. Today, I'd like to discuss how it works. Basically, first you need to find phone numbers and then pick one of two approaches: white hat or black hat.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><b>Getting phone numbers</b><br />
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For once, business-to-business (B2B) marketers have a much easier time than their colleagues in business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. Naturally, businesses want to be known, so they put their phone numbers on business cards, brochures, novelty t-shirts and, of course, the Internet. Try reaching business contacts at the start of their business days (e.g. before 9 for office workers, before 10 for shop owners, etc.) to catch them before they get busy.<br />
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Consumers, however, offer a much greater challenge. Many consumers keep their phones unlisted or have abandoned land lines altogether. Moreover, consumers have expectations of privacy that business people don't. If someone called you seemingly at random to ask you about paper towels or what-have-you, you'd probably freak out.<br />
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Instead, researchers hoping to connect with consumers should try reaching out to friends and friends of friends. It's much easier to get something going by saying "Bob gave me your number." Of course, this approach necessarily limits the types of people you'll interview. However, given the nature of qualitative research, this limitation shouldn't matter much.<br />
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In either case, don't forget to ask for additional names and numbers to call.<br />
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<b>White Hat</b><br />
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Now that you'd gotten people to call, how do you actually go about asking for the information you want?<br />
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Just as with any other qualitative research, the researcher needs to begin by creating a discussion guide. As always, this guide should cover the questions that will get at the key learning objectives. However, given the nature of the research, the guide should differ from typical interview or focus group guides in that you must Get. To. The. Point. There's no warm-up. No icebreaker exercises. Unless you have a really controversial or hard-to-discuss topic, start with the questions you really need answers to first.<br />
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When it comes to the interview itself, introduce yourself clearly and tell the respondent why you're calling. Quickly. Something like "I'm <a href="http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/bewitched.asp">Darrin Stephens from McMann & Tate Advertising</a>, where I work on the Acme Supply Company account. I got your name from Wile E. Coyote. I was hoping I could pick your brain for a few minutes about roadrunner removal products."</div>
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You'd be surprised how well this direct approach works.</div>
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You might need to add some standard disclaimers such as "we won't use your name" and "we're not trying to sell you anything; we just want your opinion." Even in this age of social media, most people feel their opinions don't matter, so in cases where opinions clearly do matter, people like to speak up. Besides, talking to someone on the phone now actually has something of a novelty factor to it these days.</div>
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From there, it's pretty much like any other interview, with one key difference: be more vocal. In face-to-face research, you can nod, change your body language or use quiet vocalizations ("uh huh") to signal that you're listening. Not on the phone. Don't interrupt your respondent, but do say things like "that's interesting," "I hear you" or "tell me more" to let him or her know that you're listening.</div>
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<b>Black Hat</b></div>
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First, let me say that you reeeeeaaaaallllyyyy shouldn't do this. It's dishonest and honesty is something that few marketers can afford to take lightly. I can't say that a younger Plannerben never donned the black hat, but I wouldn't try it now. As noted marketing research authority Danny Glover said, "<a href="http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3sbvv1">I'm too old for this shit.</a>"</div>
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That said, well, I'll share this write-up from my old fellow traveler Thomas Kouns:<br />
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When I was a junior account planner at the advertising agency <a href="http://creativity-online.com/credits/mad-dogs-and-englishmen/1417/2">Mad Dogs & Englishmen </a>I was assigned to work on the MovieFone new business pitch [previous to their acquisition by AOL]. Early on in the planning process, we identified that a key target audience of MovieFone’s business model were media buyers at advertising agencies who bought advertising on MovieFone which was one of their main revenue generators. </blockquote>
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I desperately wanted to interview this key segment but couldn’t as they worked at competing ad agencies. However, I decided to take a somewhat "alternative" approach in order to obtain the needed information. I decided to call agencies in the Los Angeles area posing as an account planner from an affiliate agency in another city who was working on the MovieFone pitch. </blockquote>
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I went by the alias "Dave Fleishman" from McCann, Ogilvy etc. and would speak to media planners asking them the same questions I would have had I been interviewing them in an actual focus group. They were more than willing to speak with me as I was playing for "their team," so to speak. </blockquote>
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As it turned out, the insights we generated from this novel and unorthodox research was a key factor in our agency winning the pitch as it demonstrated our "out of box" thinking as well as uncovering new information that was even MovieFone was unaware of.</blockquote>
In our open-plan office, we must have heard Tom say "hi, I'm Dave Fleishman" about a dozen times. We all thought it was funny that Tom, blessed with blonde, surfer-boy looks chose that pseudonym. "I guess I always wanted to be Jewish," he said later. Atta boy, Tom. Such a <a href="http://www.jewish-languages.org/jewish-english-lexicon/words/620" style="font-style: italic;">yiddishe kop</a>, that one.<br />
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And that's how phone research works. Now, it's your call.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-78479043494306492092014-10-10T09:53:00.000-04:002014-10-10T11:29:55.631-04:00Reach out and research someoneIs that an extremely powerful research tool in your pocket, or are just happy to see me?<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/1896_telephone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/1896_telephone.jpg" height="320" width="311" /></a></div>
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<i>Back then, we had phone cords, and we LIKED it</i></div>
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We've all become so accustomed to the concept of all the world's information at our fingertips via the Internet that we can joke about wasting that power to <a href="http://www.themachinestarts.com/read/2013-01-the-promise-of-technology">argue with strangers and look at pictures of cats.</a> You want the GDP of Botswana? Duh. <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html?countryname=Botswana&countrycode=bc&regionCode=afr&rank=111#bc">$34 billion</a>. Ever wonder why you never see baby pigeons? <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/55626/where-are-all-baby-pigeons">Here you go.</a> Why does God allow evil to exist? Yawn. <a href="http://www.bethinking.org/would-a-good-god-allow-suffering/q-why-does-god-allow-evil-to-exist">Take</a> <a href="http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/367866/jewish/Did-G-d-Create-Evil.htm">your</a> <a href="http://www.buddhanet.net/tsunami.htm">pick</a>.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>While Google puts nearly all known facts at our disposal and sites like <a href="http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia">Wikipedia</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora">Quora</a> get at some of the information beyond mere statistics, websites rarely give the qualitative detail marketers need to develop lateral responses to challenges.<br />
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For instance, years ago, I helped my employer, an ad agency, pitch a credit card aimed at women business owners. In fact, they had partnered with an association of women business owners to issue a <a href="http://www.mastercard.us/merchants/cobrand-cards.html">co-branded</a> <a href="http://promotions.bankofamerica.com/MLB/yankees/">card</a>. As someone who had never owned a business or an ovary, how the hell was I supposed to know what the audience wanted?</div>
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Enter patent #<a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US174465">174465A</a>, Improvement in telegraphy issued to one A. G. Bell of Salem, Mass.</div>
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I started smiling and dialing. I called women business owners I knew, from the owner of <a href="http://www.greenbook.org/company/Focus-First-America">Focus First America</a>, to a fingernail shop that my mother frequented. When I exhausted that list, I went to--yes--the Internet to find members of the women business owner's association.</div>
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I asked them what they wanted in a credit card. I asked them how they used their current cards and what they did and didn't like about them. To get an understanding of context, I asked about how they started and built their businesses. I asked them what pressures they faced and what accomplishments they celebrated. I asked them about how products and services marketed to women or women business owners made them feel. I also just let them talk.</div>
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For all the detail I requested, no call lasted more than 20 minutes. Complete strangers happily shared their thoughts with me. Very few people flat out refused to talk to me.</div>
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As a result of 25 phone interviews, I developed a series of insights and a strategy that merited one of my most ego-satisfying moments of my careers. We lost the pitch. The client said "you brought 10 men to pitch a women's business and the only one who knew what he was talking about was the planner." That would have been me.</div>
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What the phone allows--and what the Internet really doesn't--is fast access to the "why?" Unlike surveys or polls, phone interviews allow the marketing researcher to change the path of inquiry in a heartbeat when new ideas emerge. Active questioning gives the kind of insight that passively scanning websites or message boards can't.</div>
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In a follow-up, I'll share some of the techniques I've used. Feel free to wait by the phone.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-3398752959281955412014-06-04T08:02:00.002-04:002014-06-04T08:02:43.884-04:00China and RussiaToday marks the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.<br />
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<i>Still a "wow"</i></div>
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China, as is their wont, has<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-china-chokes-google-social-chatter-20140604-zrw19.html"> censored the event--and its anniversary</a>--extensively. Meanwhile, at this very moment, Vladimir V. Putin has put forth less than zero effort to hide <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/world/europe/for-crimea-its-russian-troops-in-tourists-out.html">his country's incursion into Ukraine</a>.<br />
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While these events sit firmly in the political sphere rather than my paltry marketing sphere, they do illustrate something about branding. China, perhaps in some cockeyed nod to <a href="http://www.patheos.com/Library/Confucianism.html">Confucianism</a>, has employed broad censorship to enforce a kind of harmony. They pretend that Tiananmen Square never happened, kind of like an uncle in prison.<br />
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Russia, or at least Mr. Putin, wants you to know what they're capable of.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-77343847898372036982014-05-08T11:11:00.001-04:002014-05-08T11:11:06.222-04:00Data's Dirty Little Secret<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you ride New York City subways, you have probably come across <a href="http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/">Poetry in Motion,</a> a noble attempt by the MTA to deliver us from <a href="http://gothamist.com/2009/05/08/dr_z.php">Dr. Z</a>. One of these missives really stuck with me:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/nyregion/07nyc.html?_r=0">“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing entirely straight can be built.</a>”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">This quote came from Immanuel Kant. I had no idea what Kant meant when I read "<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280">The Critique of Pure Reason</a>" in college, and I understand why I didn't know why then. Herr Kant was warning me about marketing data.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">I know, again with the data. Stick with me. You might learn something. If not, you can at least tell people you read an impassioned exegesis of Kant today without really lying.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">I've talked before about how <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2012/06/fallacy-of-purchase-data.html">purchase data can mislead marketers</a>, even though marketers generally prize purchase data above all other types of data. When I visited the topic two years ago, I made the argument that purchase data only record what people did, not necessarily what they wanted to do. For instance, a buyer may want to buy khakis, but if all she only sees corduroys at the store, she may buy them instead. In turn, the retailer doesn't learn what the buyer really wants, which may mean mis-targeted communications down the road.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">The Kant quote reminded me of another scary thing about data: people are <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/weird-florida/">f***ing weird</a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><i>And this is a guy who started a rock band without a bass player</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">OK, more accurately to Kant's point, people often behave inconsistently. As the old jingle went, "<a href="http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_lyrics_to_the_almond_joy_nut_song">sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.</a>" People buy the same soda every day until they don't. Or they never like grapefruit until one day, they do. Happens every day.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">Well, so what? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">"So what?" is that marketing data are <i>data</i>. We expect data to have precision. Data points are things like "<a href="http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html">water covers 71% of the earth's surface</a>" or "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/23/nyregion/new-york-killings-set-a-record-while-other-crimes-fell-in-1990.html">New York City had 2,245 murders in 1990</a>." Exact. Unwavering. True.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">Marketing data don't enjoy the same claim to truth. Sure, Ford sold <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/03/259395010/ford-tops-resurgent-u-s-car-industry-2013-sales-results-show">763,402 F0-150 trucks</a> in 2013, but those are over three-quarters of a million people who might never buy another Ford product again. Or they may never buy anything else but Fords. Who knows?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">Someone biased against data might take this exercise as a reason to write off marketing data entirely. After all, if you can't trust marketing data the way you can trust, say, <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2012/08/blog-sports-media-and-data-part-i.html">sports data</a>, then why bother?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">On the contrary, I think this ambiguity should encourage marketers to embrace data more strongly. Murky data give marketers a chance to experiment. On the chance that the data don't show what you think they show, you have the opportunity to test out new ideas and new approaches knowing that, what the hell, it just might work.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">This "</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_the_torpedoes" style="line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">damn the torpedoes</a><span style="line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">" approach has limits, of course. If your audience buys electric guitars, don't use that as an indication to test offers for accordions. (Seriously, <a href="https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2209/2065578455_22915e81f3.jpg">don't</a>.) However, if data on electric guitar buyers suggest that they won't buy acoustic guitars, it might make sense to test that inference.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 22.815000534057617px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 22.815000534057617px;">See what you can make of those crooked timbers.</span></span></span></div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-36656525232022626942014-04-30T11:26:00.000-04:002014-04-30T11:26:34.057-04:00Citibike: A Marketing Opportunity RevisitedNow that we New Yorkers have lived with <a href="http://citibikenyc.com/">Citibike</a> for nearly a year, it seems like the time to revisit two posts I wrote nearly two and a half years ago about how brands could use the service as a marketing channel. One post was <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2011/09/bicycle-and-buy-cycle.html">serious</a>, the other...<a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2011/09/top-10-list-best-uses-for-nyc-bike.html">not so much</a>.<br />
<br />
To recap the Citibike saga, the service launched in May of 2013 after some delays stemming from teething problems and Superstorm Sandy. New Yorkers and visitors <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579137871298361010">quickly embraced the service</a>, which allows members to borrow bikes for up to 45 minutes at a time from over 300 stations in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. However, Citibike has faced <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304256404579451770072629130">adversity</a> as well, including losing money at an alarming rate. Some called it <a href="http://gizmodo.com/calm-down-people-citi-bike-is-gonna-be-just-fine-1548929336">winter</a>. Disclosure: I am one of those nuts who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/nyregion/snow-ice-and-wind-no-issue-for-citi-bikes-die-hards.html?_r=0">rode on chilly days</a>.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The Wall Street Journal said "<span style="line-height: 21px;">Finding additional sponsors has proved challenging because the program has become so closely associated with its eponymous supporter."</span> So, what could Citibike do to engage marketers? Or, put another way, what opportunities could marketers exploit with Citibike?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As a New Yorker since the waning years of the <a href="http://www.city-data.com/forum/new-york-city/1546030-how-bad-new-york-city-during.html">crack wars</a>, I staggered at the rapid adoption of Citibike. It seemed that within days of the program's launch, I saw bikes everywhere in Manhattan--making loops in <a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8132/8938604821_fb6b0b15a4.jpg">Central Park</a>, under the <a href="http://www.thehighline.org/sites/default/files/images/Juan-Valentine-Citibiking-to-the-High-Line_0.png">High Line</a> and everywhere else. Citibike became as much a fixture of New York as the subway, Times Square or <a href="http://ihateduanereade.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html">Duane Greed</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By the same <a href="http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_Tokens">token</a> (pun intended with extreme prejudice), don't think about as treating Citibike like a shiny, blue billboard. Instead, think of it as becoming part of the urban firmament.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here are some ideas:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sponsor a station. When the subway first began connecting New Yorkers, once-obscure neighborhoods became hot properties because the train stopped there. Longacre Square gained a new tenant, a certain newspaper of record, and it became Times Square. In a similar vein, retailers and real estate developers should sponsor bike stations as an amenity and as a feature. "Steps from Citibike!"</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Citibike should sell <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmwMydTQxOq9_EnUmHR44CNTFS7wWiAwy7NIj-Ga6_8641YfAcGZ4dwApnTJGt4dhnrOcpgSiXck_tsehHHqby2YhvVEG9vMqCEPs2pPUVSLaYghafyj9l9ZioE91Jb_PziRW9X3d5ZdM/s1600/nice+rack+jokes.png">bags that fit into the luggage rack</a>. Further, they could partner with retailers to offer their NYC customers a bag that fits on the bike. Put the retailer's logo on said bag. Boom. Done.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Bike picnics. Why <a href="http://www.cafemetrony.com/">Cafe Metro</a>, <a href="http://www.pret.com/us/">Pret a Manger,</a> <a href="https://www.paxfood.com/">Pax</a> or any of NYC's other quick lunch joints don't offer a lunchbox sized for the Citibike luggage rack mystifies me. Citibike and the participating restaurant could actively encourage office workers to take a real lunch break somewhere other than their keyboards.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Got any other marketing ideas for Citibike? Let's hear 'em in the comments.</span></div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-69184064435610777772014-04-23T10:54:00.001-04:002014-04-23T10:54:22.169-04:00Dicing with Danger: Using Data Insights in Your Marketing<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you've suffered through my last two blog posts (#1 <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-most-dangerous-thing-in-your-office.html">here</a>, #2 <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2014/04/playing-with-danger-how-to-ask.html">here</a>), you've read my reasoning that while marketing data potentially can lead your business into danger, they can also provide meaningful insight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Now what?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">With insight, you can start placing bets with data.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hit it, Frankie:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/QIfinjlLPF4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">While you will never out-cool Albert Francis Sinatra, you can probably make smarter bets. Here's how.</span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Start with your insights. Review all of the insights you've generated from data. Remember, these insights consist of guesses made on what you know. They offer no guarantees of success, only increasing levels of certainty.<br /><br />Let's go back to insights we hypothesized in the last post. Let's say you sell industrial coatings used in the electronics business and that you found large groups of electrical and chemical engineers in your database. Based on discussions with subject matter experts, you learn that electrical engineers want to know detailed tech specs whereas chemical engineers will always request an MSDS, or Materials Safety Data Sheet.<br /></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Turn your insights into testable propositions. An insight means nothing until you expose it to reality. If you have an insight, it usually means that you have an idea that breaks from the conventional wisdom. Fortunately, many types of marketing offer the ability to test insight vs. conventional wisdom.<br /><br />In the case of our industrial coatings insight, let's test out our insight in email. (Wow, an email about industrial coatings! This must be how <a href="http://www.sofeminine.co.uk/celebrities/album884211/celebrity-mug-shots-stars-in-trouble-with-the-law-22076441.html">Robert Downey Jr lives</a>!). We could create a version of the email with a link to tech specs for the electrical engineer another with a link to the MSDS for the chemical engineers and a generic version with a link to a brochure. In turn, we can split up the electrical and chemical engineer segments into control and test segments and...blah blah blah. If you don't know how to do this yet, here's a good <a href="http://alistapart.com/article/a-primer-on-a-b-testing/">primer</a>.<br /></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Make sure you read the right results. Direct response media, especially online direct response media, have lots of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshyX6Hw52I">numbers that go up and down</a>. However, not all of them matter.<br /><br />With our breathtaking industrial coatings example, we'd sure want to know whether the engineers preferred the tech specs, MSDS or brochure, of course. However, we'd also like to know whether they followed up. This follow up might include a call-to-action on the downloaded material, response to a subsequent outbound call or even simply increased interest in follow-on emails. What matters is that we calculate which insight--if any--provided meaningful results.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
It doesn't take a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0024559/">Nathan Detroit</a> to make good guesses with marketing data. But it does reward practice. Fortunately, you don't have to get it right all at once. Every gamble you take gives you more feedback on how well your guesses work. So now that you've learned how to play with danger, game on! </div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-34572010882014748932014-04-15T12:14:00.000-04:002014-04-15T12:14:24.967-04:00Playing with Danger: How to Ask Questions of your DataIn my <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-most-dangerous-thing-in-your-office.html">last post,</a> I discussed marketing data as the most dangerous thing in your office and outlined how to tame it. Now, let's talk about how to draw insights from your data.<br />
<br />
First, ask yourself a question: are you <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/23/nate-silvers-genius-isnt-math-its-journalism/">Nate Silver?</a> If you are...um, hi, Nate. Thanks for reading. But more importantly, if you're Nate Silver or an honest-to-God data wizard, then you already know what you can and can't do with data. You can run all kinds of exotic analyses and make wild predictions that come to fruition. In short, you have nothing to learn from me. Godspeed.<br />
<br />
If you're still reading, then you need to understand one thing: data don't tell you anything other than how to guess well. However, good guesses can help you more than you might think.<br />
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<br />
<a name='more'></a>Let's go back to the previous discussion in which I suggested running banners in your data to see what you knew about your customers in the aggregate. Initially, this exercise helps you avoid the infamous <a href="http://www.techterms.com/definition/gigo">GIGO</a> or "garbage in, garbage out" problem. However, it also allows you to start making good guesses.<br />
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Start asking yourself what you can infer from the data.<br />
<br />
For instance, if you know that you have a sizable population of customers who live in <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/weird-florida/">Florida</a>, you guess that they have a need for warm-weather clothing and outdoor sporting goods year-round. If your prospect list includes a lot of electrical engineers, you can guess that they have an interest in hard-core technical data. You generally don't have to be an expert to make these kinds of guesses, but you do have to take the time to make them.<br />
<br />
In other cases, you may want to borrow <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-use-subject-matter-expert.html">subject matter experts</a> to help you make guesses. Maybe you not only have electrical engineers in your prospect list, but also chemical engineers. I don't know much about what differentiates the two, but if I had to make guesses, I'd enlist someone who does know. Similarly, I have no idea what consumers in another country might want.<br />
<br />
Your subject matter expert could help you make guesses. Maybe he knows that chemical engineers always want to see an <a href="http://www.msds.com/">MSDS</a> instead of the specs that the electrical engineers want. Maybe she knows that German consumers would never buy kitchen implements in green or that Argentinians really like video reviews.<br />
<br />
As above, make a record of these guesses.<br />
<br />
Next, we'll talk about what to do with these guesses.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-86366317409753242662014-04-02T11:00:00.000-04:002014-04-02T11:53:20.844-04:00The Most Dangerous Thing in Your OfficeTake a look around your office and pick out the most dangerous thing you see.<br />
<br />
Is it <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5939234/7-deadly-weapons-you-should-never-ever-make-out-of-harmless-household-items">cleaning fluid</a>?<br />
<br />
Is it your <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dreqttZtho">espresso maker</a>?<br />
<br />
Maybe your <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Swingline-ClassicCut-Guillotine-Trimmer-Capacity/dp/B00006IATG/ref=sr_1_7?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1395450208&sr=1-7">paper cutter</a>?<br />
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No, no and no. Well, unless you have a REALLY big paper cutter.<br />
<br />
No, friend, the most dangerous thing in your office doesn't have sharp edges, heating elements or questionable chemicals. The most dangerous thing in your office has something far more treacherous: your marketing data.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Like nuclear power, your marketing database has the potential to do something very beneficial at a low cost. However, like nuclear power, your marketing database can, if used improperly...well, you know.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SimpsonsRadioactive.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/SimpsonsRadioactive.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Lenny's the one on the ladder, right?</i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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More to the point, marketing data have an inherent liability: good data look pretty much like bad data. Think of it this way: imagine a warehouse. Not a data warehouse. Certainly not <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/mens-wearhouse-finally-buys-jos-a-bank/2014/03/11/4143ca88-a93f-11e3-8d62-419db477a0e6_story.html">Men's Wearhouse</a>. Just a plain old warehouse. Even if you knew nothing about warehouse operation, you've probably been to Costco and you'd sure know whether a warehouse had anything in it. With a little bit of experience, you'd probably even know whether the warehouse worked well, whether the manager had organized the inventory efficiently, whether the forklift drivers ran over people or what have you.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
How do you know when your data work well? It's not like your database has a big red light that goes off when your data are crap.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
To make matters worse, most marketers only find out they have lousy data the hard way: by using them to power campaigns. If your results significantly trail past performance or industry benchmarks, you've very possibly used bad data.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Fortunately, marketers <u>can</u> get a good idea of how well their data work without making an embarrassing misstep. It requires a little elbow grease, but really gives the marketer a clear indication of quality.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Step 1: Profile your data</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Take a look at the major fields in your database by running banners of key variables such as:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Demographics such as age, gender and family composition if you market B2C</li>
<li>Firmographics such as company size and industry if you market B2B</li>
<li>Location (city, state or country depending on the scope of your business)</li>
<li>Preferences elected via your preference center</li>
<li>Any fields you may have that matter to your industry</li>
</ul>
<div>
Preferably, you should have nice clean tables and graphs showing how each field breaks down across all or most of your customers and prospects.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Step 2: Look for <a href="http://worldtaekwondofederation.net/">WTFs</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Do any numbers look funny to you? Do you have a preponderance of customers or prospects in an unexpected place? Perhaps your brand appeals to men and women equally, but men outnumber women in your database 6:1. Perhaps a staggering number of your customers live in Delaware when your business focuses on the Midwest. I've seen crazier things in perfectly nice databases, like the time I found that a hotel chain had 20,000 members of its loyalty program listed as living on an island of 40,000 in the Arctic Ocean.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
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Step 3: Keep WTFs from becoming <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism/wmd">WMDs</a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
By identifying questionable data, you and your organization can either work around them or correct them. Working around bad data might mean simply not using that field to power marketing communications. For instance, in the hypothetical example of the Midwest company with suspicious Delaware addresses, don't use a dynamic field to insert maps of your lone Wilmington location. Correcting data involves more work--either appending data or contacting customers to ask for corrections--but allow for more positive use of that field. In either case, a company can avoid making a costly mistake with bad data.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Keeping a close eye on your data makes them more useful and less dangerous. Now then, let's talk about why you need such a big paper cutter.</div>
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<br />
<br />Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-26301095892735439842014-03-25T19:24:00.000-04:002014-03-25T19:24:01.396-04:00Where the creativity HASN'T gone on cableAs this season of <i><a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/undeniable-proof-that-the-walking-dead-and-toy-story-have-th">The Walking Dead</a></i> draws to a close, it reminds us how how great cable TV--once the province of wrestling and <i>Andy Griffith</i> reruns--has become. With tight scripting, intense characters and even serviceable CGI, cable has become a go-to outlet for great TV. Even apart from HBO, cable has given us <i>Mad Men</i>, <i>Breaking Bad</i> and <i>The Americans</i>.<br />
<br />
More than one critic has complained that, if anything, cable gives us <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/media/fenced-in-by-televisions-excess-of-excellence.html?ref=television&_r=0">too much good programming</a> to watch.<br />
<br />
So why do ads on cable TV fail to engage as well as the programming they fund? More to the point, why hasn't this <a href="http://drtvinfomercial.wordpress.com/">haven for direct response TV advertising</a> (DRTV) emerged as laboratory for breakthrough creative?<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Let us briefly acknowledge three aspects of good cable programming that hinder risk-taking DRTV. <br />
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Cable TV probably suffers more from digital video recorder (DVR) use than broadcast due to cable's inherently richer demographics. As a result, perhaps DRTV advertisers won't use anything but the tried-and-true.</li>
<li>Popular cable programming commands ad rates higher than the remnant space that drive the economics of DRTV.</li>
<li>Experimenting with DRTV requires the patience and money to try new things.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<br />
Still and all...<br />
<br />
Strictly speaking, this thinking applies not just to the <a href="http://www.sharkclean.com/">Shark Vacuum Cleaners</a> of the world. Every brand should consider itself a direct marketer. I've long maintained that with the advent of mobile marketing, every channel has become direct marketing, <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2011/09/direct-like-it-or-not.html">like it or not.</a> So why not ape some of the tropes of good cable drama, stick a hashtag, URL or 800-number on it and have at it?<br />
<br />
Some humble suggestions that seem to work well on cable:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Kill someone off (not literally, of course). Cable dramas take pride in confounding fans by killing off beloved characters. Yes, I'm looking at you, <i><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/07/showbiz/tv/game-martin-red-wedding-ew/">Game of Thrones</a></i>. Won't some brand take a big risk by publicly and unexpectedly killing off an old brand? Surely you don't need all <a href="http://www.cheerios.com/products">14 flavors of Cheerios</a>, do you, General Mills? Imagine the craziness they could create by asking viewers to vote on which one to feed to the walkers via SMS.<br /></li>
<li>Nudity & language. Daryl Dixon gets to say "shit" and we've seen various boobs and butts on <i>Mad Men</i>. Why doesn't Durex or Trojan break the barriers? I can't imagine that anyone would boycott them who isn't already. Heck, why not ask people to sign up for official sexts?<br /></li>
<li>Gripping plot. Years ago, people made a big deal out of <a href="http://metro.co.uk/2008/02/12/nescafe-ad-most-romantic-of-all-time-629986/">commercials run by Nestle</a> in the UK as Gold Blend and in the US as Taster's Choice because they told a story of a couple who flirted over coffee in their apartment building. Surely someone could create a storyline to run over a 10-13-episode arc that would keep viewers guessing and visiting the website for more.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Got any cable-friendly ideas? Share 'em in the comments!</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-31805194367028765902014-02-09T10:03:00.000-05:002014-02-09T10:03:36.086-05:00Even Amazonians Get the Blues<div dir="ltr">
Cheer up, marketing folks. Even Amazon gets it wrong sometimes.</div>
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If you've worked in digital marketing, you've heard a client ask why you can't do something that Amazon does. Maybe they asked for an email campaign <a href="http://www.act-on.com/products/email-marketing/trigger-email-campaigns">triggered by browsing behavior.</a> Maybe they asked for a <a href="http://www.genroe.com/blog/using-next-logical-product-to-maximise-cross-sell/459">model</a> to guess what a customer might want <u>to</u> purchase next.</div>
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Amazon is to digital marketers what Nike or Apple is to brand marketers: the go-to paragon of excellence. In some ways, all these brands succeed in their respective fields because of the same reason: heavy investment. We know "<a href="http://theoatmeal.com/blog/justdoitlater">Just Do It</a>" and Apple's various <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zhHwim6cV8">advertising</a> platforms because they invest heavily in media weight. Similarly, Amazon invests heavily in technology to enable their wizardry.</div>
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Amazon has another advantage as well: time. Or, rather, lack thereof. Because Amazon's systems only date to the start of the Internet age, they have no old, cranky technology to limit growth.</div>
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Still, even they mess up from time to time. Perhaps more to the point, they also know how to make good when they do.</div>
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Last Saturday (1st February). I put in an order for several books, a Chromebook and a cheap envelope-style case for the Chromebook. I selected free shipping because I'm a <a href="http://spongebob.wikia.com/wiki/Eugene_H._Krabs">tightwad</a>.</div>
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Amazon informed me that I would receive most of the items by the 10th, which suited us fine since we intended to give the books to our kids for Valentine's Day. However, one book was on back-order and would be shipped separately. No problem.</div>
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As is my wont, I began checking up on my order status every few hours from the moment I placed the order. After a few days, I became concerned that the order hadn't shipped. I chatted with Amazon's customer service and they assured me that the order would still arrive by the 10th.</div>
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The following Saturday, the 8th, the order had still not shipped. So back to Amazon's chat I went. Eventually, the customer service representative explained that the cheap computer case was holding up the order. They didn't have it in stock.</div>
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Let me put it another way: Amazon told me they didn't have one item I ordered in stock but not another item. Even more perplexing, the computer case was an Amazon-branded item sold by Amazon itself rather than a partner. Dish out a big bowl of WTF.</div>
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Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. The rep helped me find another case that was in stock and then (after I mentioned that I had hoped to give the books to my kids for Valentine's Day) upgraded me to two-day shipping at no charge. Amazon kept a loyal customer and I get my purchases in time.</div>
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What should marketers take away from my (admittedly prosaic) experience? Not even the best technology can account for every eventuality. Even Amazon drops a stitch now and again. However, people can succeed where technology fails.</div>
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So, marketing pals and gals, think about your own technology challenges and what you can't do when a client or stakeholder asks you to do something "just like Amazon." Then think about what your people can do to fill the gap.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-40697763571839552862013-06-25T10:10:00.004-04:002013-06-25T10:10:47.648-04:00Winning in the Post-Brand Era (post 4 of 4)Read post 1 <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/welcome-to-post-brand-era.html">here</a><br />
Read post 2 <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-brand-era-happened-post-2-of-4.html">here</a><br />
Read post 3 <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/defining-post-brand-era-post-3-of-4.html">here</a><br />
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Now what?<br />
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Marketers have reached an era when branding has lost some of its mojo. The ongoing excellence of highly targeted marketing tools counterweigh the classic brand by making it possible to drive sales at a sharply reduced cost. Marketers now must ask themselves "what's the best mix of approaches to accomplish our goals?" How do marketers win in a world where they can't expect the brand to serve as the organizing principle?<br />
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Marketers must shift their focus from the destination, so to speak, to the Journey.<br />
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<a href="http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/journey-escape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/journey-escape.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>No, not that Journey</i></div>
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<a href="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTkDsh0ZrPlvreeqdO3ewyO4MIK65NmNCx4cuPqsE1CgrMqLFNH" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTkDsh0ZrPlvreeqdO3ewyO4MIK65NmNCx4cuPqsE1CgrMqLFNH" /></a></div>
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<i>Still the wrong Journey</i></div>
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<a href="http://hundredfathom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CDJ.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="http://hundredfathom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/CDJ.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Now you're cooking with gas</i></div>
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McKinsey Consulting promulgated the concept of the Customer Journey a few years ago as a means for comparing disparate purchase paths. However, it also doubles as a nifty way for organizing marketing communications.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>The Customer Journey serves as a template for marketers. Understanding the decisions that consumers make along the way to purchase and repurchase helps marketers figure out what roles individual communications or campaigns can play.<br />
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For those unfamiliar with the Customer Journey, it describes a generic sales cycle starting with an awareness of need (Initial Consideration Set), followed by pursuit and consideration of the need (Active Evaluation), followed by the purchase and post-purchase experiences. The Loyalty Loop describes a brand that has so successfully met the consumer's needs that she decides simply to re-purchase the brand rather than to look anew.</div>
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If this approach seems familiar, it should. Customer Relationship Marketers (CRM) have been using similar frameworks for years. As a result, it helps to employ some CRM-type thinking to understand how brand fits into the picture.</div>
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CRM excels at engaging <u>customers</u>, a subset of consumers who have expressed some interest in a brand. Typically, customers equal purchasers. However, CRM also recognizes interested parties who have not yet purchased, using terms such as hand raisers or prospects. Once consumers signal some kind of interest, CRM can lead the way with addressable media to drive that interest towards purchase and, of course, re-purchase.</div>
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In turn, CRM generally employs direct marketing channels with their attendant capabilities for segmentation to enhance their effectiveness. Email, direct mail, addressable banner ads and targeted website modules all can contribute to driving the consumer towards sale. These channels benefit from using data and segmentation to give the consumer the right information or offer that drives her towards purchase. At point of purchase, tactics such as shopper marketing and dynamic pricing can further hone in on the consumer's specific needs.</div>
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Where does this leave good old brand advertising?</div>
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Direct or addressable marketing suffers from a prominent, but rarely-discussed Achilles' Heel: scale. Certainly, digital addressable channels can serve limitless numbers of impressions at added costs that approach the negligible. However, these channels rarely have the opportunity to deploy that many communications.</div>
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From personal experience, I can tell you that most marketers struggle to capture even 15% of their customers' or prospects' email addresses. On top of that, only a minuscule percentage find themselves targeted by tactics such as retargeting, where visitors to a brand's site will find ads for that brand in third-party sites.</div>
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Brand advertising brings <u>scale</u>. Yes, it costs a lot of money to reach a broad audience with untargeted mass media, but mass media remain the only opportunity to do so. As a result, marketers should look at branding as a device to feed consumers into a CRM system. Branding should serve as a broad-based call at the Initial Consideration Set shown above and hand off to CRM to begin the process of Active Evaluation.</div>
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How should that work, exactly?</div>
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For starters, marketers need to appreciate what consumers actually do. Sofa-bound critics of advertising (e.g. <u>everyone</u>) like to dismiss TV commercials by asking others "did it make you get up and buy it?" Naturally, this criterion dooms almost every ad ever made to failure.</div>
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Yet consumers routinely respond to TV spots--and other types of ads--by voting with their thumbs.</div>
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<a href="http://deathandtaxesmag.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/roger-ebert-thumbs-up-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="http://deathandtaxesmag.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/roger-ebert-thumbs-up-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>No, not like that. (RIP, Roger)</i></div>
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<a href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/TECH/mobile/08/06/try.before.you.buy.apps.mashable/t1larg.iphone.typing.gi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/TECH/mobile/08/06/try.before.you.buy.apps.mashable/t1larg.iphone.typing.gi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Yeah, like that</i></div>
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Well into the second decade of the Web, consumers have gotten used to following up on things that interest them with a quick search or visit to a brand's home page. In fact, with the ubiquity of smartphones, these searches often happen moments after a commercial airs.</div>
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<i>See, I told you so</i></div>
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Thus, for one thing, marketers need to align their search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and home pages to take advantage of fleeting interest from consumers. As part of that alignment, they need to have clear signals of what the consumer needs to do to learn more.</div>
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Such next steps might include dedicated microsites that go into more detail on the substance of the commercials or signups for social media, email or other continuous updates to keep the consumer engaged. In turn, marketers should evaluate mass media advertising on how well it drives traffic to these acquisition vehicles for CRM.</div>
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At the same time, the themes, ideas or focus of the brand need not make a complete transition into the CRM process. Once the consumer has expressed interest in a brand, the mechanics of CRM stand a better chance of finding the right offer and timing than the vagaries of a brand.</div>
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In the real world, any marketer trying to accomplish his or her goals will need to go into much greater detail than I have over the past four posts. I have yet to address measurement or learning in any depth. However, as a basic framework, the re-alignment of brand and non-brand marketing gives marketers greater flexibility to build out marketing tools as the Customer Journey requires.</div>
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At this point, I'd love to hear from my readers any examples that illustrate or challenge what I've written. Whatcha got?</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-16762895926977073162013-06-21T09:55:00.001-04:002013-06-21T09:55:07.370-04:00Defining the Post-Brand Era (post 3 of 4)<a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/welcome-to-post-brand-era.html">See Post 1</a> (Welcome to the Post-Brand Era)<br />
<a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-brand-era-happened-post-2-of-4.html">See Post 2 </a>(How The Brand Era Happened)<br />
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Most marketers can recognize the calling cards of the Brand Era--USPs, mass media, sponsorships and so forth. However, they may not recognize the Post-Brand Era. Simply put, the Post-Brand era describes the present marketing environment in which brands no longer comprise the only--or even the most efficient--means for finding and keeping customers. Other marketing approaches have arisen to shoulder the burden. These approaches all share one common trait: situational relevance.<br />
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In other words, we now market in an environment where we can predict the right place, the right time or, sometimes, the right price that will overwhelm the right brand.<br />
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To understand the Post-Brand Era, we should first consider the factors that led to its emergence. As many would expect, technology played a major role. However, the technology in question isn't <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/04/30/solomo/">SoLoMo</a> (social, local, mobile), the Internet or even the computer. Instead, a <a href="http://www.nmc.org/news/toward-model-technology-ecosystem">technology ecosystem</a> enabling communication and commerce with widely dispersed and decentralized tendrils reaching nearly everywhere on the planet led the way.<br />
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You call it the <a href="http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/archive/segment/john-ratzenberger%3A-postal-service-lacks-common-sense/514cfc0efe3444426e0002b1">Post Office</a>.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Here's what happened. Postal Services, led by the United States Postal Service (USPS) allowed <a href="http://www.searsarchives.com/history/">retailers</a> and <a href="http://www.rusticgraceblog.com/2011/10/whoever-said-duck-boots-are-solely-for.html">direct-selling manufacturers</a> alike associate customers with specific addresses. Over time, they learned that they could make increasingly accurate educated guesses about what customers wanted to buy and, in turn, promote those items to them. From the consumers' perspective, they bought from direct marketers not because the offers seemed like a good idea for <u>most people</u>, but rather because the offers seemed like a good idea for them <u>as individuals</u>. <br />
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<a href="https://www.ronco.com/">Some marketers abandoned traditional brand marketing entirely,</a> relying instead only on direct mail or its followers, direct TV and eventually online direct (among other direct channels). Indeed, the addition of online marketing to the mix only increased the scope and effectiveness of direct marketing. A few years into the 21st century, brand marketers have the ability to <a href="http://www.crowdscience.com/2011/07/what-is-real-time-bidding-rtb/">segment and change offers in near-real time</a>. In short, marketers now have an easier time than ever forgoing the Mr. Right of branding for the Mr. Right Now of direct marketing.<br />
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Brand marketers might argue that this kind of direct marketing constituted <i>de facto</i> brand marketing. That is, direct marketing tactics like <a href="http://www.brucemayhewconsulting.com/index.cfm?PAGEPATH=Best_Practices/Johnson_Box&ID=2055">Johnson boxes</a>, <a href="http://www.netzon.net/Starburst-design.jpg">starbursts</a> and the venerable "<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButWaitTheresMore">but wait, there's still more!</a>" constituted a shoddy sort of branding. These brand marketers may, in fact, have the right of it. However, successful direct marketers laugh their way to the bank. They find success in selling despite, or perhaps because of, their disregard for traditional brand thinking.<br />
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Moreover, direct marketing represents only one alternative to brand marketing. Marketers can segment offers not only in terms of tightly-defined groups of people, but also tightly-defined segments of time and place. <br />
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Airlines, for instance, have long understood that branding doesn't get them all that far. Rather, people pick flights based on timing and pricing. Thus, while air passengers routinely <a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/08/27/absurd-airfare-pricing-fuels-increase-in-consumer-complaints/">complain about the Byzantine system of airline ticket prices</a>, airlines realize that tickets for the same routes have different values to different passengers at different times and places. For instance, a businessman making a last-minute trip to save an account will inherently value a ticket more than a grandmother planning a visit to her grandchildren weeks in advance.<br />
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Demand-based pricing has exploded recently due to the Internet (think of <a href="http://www.stubhub.com/">StubHub</a> or even <a href="http://www.ebay.com/">eBay</a> for that matter). However, the tactic has existed for millennia (<span style="color: red;">WARNING: nearly pointless aside from classical history</span>). The <a href="http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/thales.htm">pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus</a> reckoned that anyone with half a brain could make money if he wanted to. When his friends laughed at him, he decided to prove his point. After the olive harvest that year, he bought up all the olive presses, the contraptions used to make olive oil. His friends asked him what he was going to do with all those olive presses <u>after</u> the harvest. He said nothing. Guess what he did when the <u>next</u> harvest came along?<br />
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Traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers have a similarly distinct perspective on consumers. While a customer may only visit a store for 20 minutes, the retailer she visits has nearly 100% of her attention while she shops. By contrast, a consumer might watch hours of TV, but even if commercials make up a <a href="http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/average-hour-long-show-is-36-commercials-9002/">third of that time</a>, the brands producing those commercials have only a slim percentage of the overall time to connect. As a result, many retailers and their supplier partners have used the store to change consumers' minds on the spot.<br />
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I'll give you an example from a cell phone manufacturer I worked with a few years ago. They told me that when a consumer has a specific brand <u>and</u> model of a cell phone in mind when he goes into a store, he'll buy that brand, but not necessarily that model, 85% of the time. However, if that same customer only has the brand in mind, the chances of buying that brand drop to 20%. Suffice it to say that retailers have any number of ways to change your mind, even when brand preferences exist. If a gift-with-purchase, an in-store demonstration or a clever package has ever changed your mind in-store, you already know that.<br />
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How does brand marketing relate to tactics such as direct marketing, dynamic pricing and in-store marketing? Sometimes, the brand drives those practices, such as when Wal-Mart promises the <a href="http://challenge.walmart.com/lowpriceguarantee/">lowest prices</a>. In this case, they forswear dynamic prices. Dell made direct selling a cornerstone of their <a href="http://www.dmnews.com/dells-transformation/article/224956/">growth in the 1990s</a> by promising custom-tailored PCs. And, of course, branding often determines the design and offers of in-store marketing. You would never see a Coke display in yellow and green.<br />
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However, the brand doesn't have to lead all of the efforts, as I suggested in the direct mail and dynamic pricing examples above. They may act in parallel, as with an airline's dynamic pricing and its brand campaign. A branding purist might equate this situation with anarchy. However, sometimes it makes good business sense to operate these approaches independently of the brand. For instance, L.L. Bean trades on its history as a folksy New England institution, but that doesn't stop them from employing extremely sophisticated direct marketing efforts.<br />
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All told, tools such as direct marketing, dynamic pricing and retail marketing offer marketers cost-effective complements to brand marketing. Brand marketing is no longer the only way to <a href="http://clicheweb.cambiaresearch.com/clicheweb/classiccliches/cliche_list.html">skin the cat</a>, so to speak. More to the point, these alternative tools have only grown more effective over time. In short, the changes in technology and other factors mean that relying only on brand as an organizing principle for marketing may do more harm than good, such as when <a href="http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2013/04/4-brand-transformation-lessons-from-jc-penney.html#.UcRbI5XrhjY">JC Penney used new branding to upend a popular--or at least well-understood--pricing model</a>.<br />
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In the conclusion to this post, I'll discuss how marketers should align their brand and post-brand marketing efforts to maximize their opportunities. While other approaches have diminished brand marketing, it still has a vital role to play.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-40681926572010828792013-06-14T09:52:00.000-04:002013-06-14T09:52:14.210-04:00How the Brand Era Happened (post 2 of 4)<a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/06/welcome-to-post-brand-era.html">See post 1 of 4 here</a>.<br />
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As we'll discuss, marketing has evolved into the post-brand era, a time in which the traditional promise-driven brand means less than it used to mean. Instead, alternative approaches--largely addressable--have emerged to challenge the brand's dominance. In other words, we can no longer build marketing campaigns around a single idea and must instead complement branding with other approaches to convince audiences.<br />
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However, before delving into the post-brand era, we should spend some time defining the brand era and how it got that way. Simply put, the brand as we know it today arose in 19th Century America to serve manufacturers and service providers amidst changing technologies. They used brands to augment and/or replace traditional salesmanship.<br />
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Understanding the 19th-century technologies that led to the rise of brands will help us give context to the 20th- and 21st-century technologies that currently challenge the brand construct.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Brand advertising would not exist had three mass technologies come to the fore in United States in the decades around the Civil War. Mass production, mass transportation and--most crucially--mass media all played a role.<br />
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<li><u>Mass production</u> While <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts">interchangeable parts</a> predated Eli Whitney's famous <a href="http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/machine_2.htm">standardized musket production</a>, they found a ready audience in the early 19th century, both in the U.S. and the U.K. Manufacturers could now crank out essentially identical items using <a href="http://www.ushistory.org/us/25d.asp">cheap labor</a>. It became cost-effective to mass-produce a wide number of finished goods. Moreover, any one of these goods would work as well as any other produced by the same pattern.<br /><br />In short, mass production enabled the <a href="http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=11195599#page:showThread,11195599">consistency</a> that has become a <i>sine qua non</i> of branding.</li>
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<li><u>Mass transportation</u> Before railroads, manufacturers had severe physical limits to their markets. Most could not sell anything in quantity beyond a few day's travel in expensive animal-drawn carts. Once railroads overcame technical hurdles, the calculus of market size changed. Now, marketers could sell the same goods anywhere the railroads could reach.<br /><br />While railroads (and, to a lesser degree, clipper ship <a href="http://www.authorama.com/old-merchant-marine-8.html">packet service</a>) created opportunities for manufacturers, they also created a major challenge: selling. When a tinsmith sold cookware out of his workshop, he needed only to hang out a sign and glad-handle his neighbors for business. On the other hand, a cookware factory had too much product to sell in any one market but no obvious way to make consumers in other markets aware of, much less interested in, its products. While many factories employed <a href="http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070819224826AAsmL3g">traveling salesmen</a>, this solution provided a merely <a href="http://www.mathwords.com/a/arithmetic_sequence.htm">arithmetic</a> increase in sales despite a <a href="http://www.mathwords.com/g/geometric_sequence.htm">geometric</a> increase in production. In more contemporary terms, traveling salesmen didn't scale well.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br /></div>
<ul>
<li><u>Mass media</u> Fortunately for manufacturers, mass media provided that ability to increase sales efforts geometrically. Newspapers had existed for ages, but they circulated to a small list of subscribers who paid for their entire writing, editing and printing. The advent of steam-driven presses made mass circulation possible by slashing the cost of printing.<br /><br />In 1833, Benjamin Day launched <i><a href="http://www.newseum.org/news/2009/02/back-to-the-future-of-the-penny-press.html">The Sun</a></i>, the first penny paper. By 1835, the paper had a daily circulation of 19,000. Naturally, advertising became the ingredient that allowed Day to sell his newspaper so quickly and so broadly.<br /><br />Other media would emerge to challenge newspapers' advertising success--radio and TV most notably. However, newspapers pioneered the model of using advertising to subsidize an information or entertainment channel on a broad scale.</li>
</ul>
So now, manufacturers had three mass phenomena at their disposal. By 1923, the great copywriter Claude Hopkins would popularize the term "salesmanship in print" in his seminal book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Advertising-Scientific-Classics-Library/dp/0844231010/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370984419&sr=1-2">Scientific Advertising</a>." Hopkins's approach, to build advertising around a reason why as opposed to simple announcements or pictures of pretty girls, would become the norm.<br />
<br />
This "reason why" approach would take many names. Rosser Reeves, of Ted Bates & Company (later absorbed into Saatchi & Saatchi), would pen the term <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition">Unique Selling Proposition</a>, or USP. Other marketers would use terms such as Focus of Benefit or Main Idea, but the concept became universal in the industry.<br />
<br />
Of course, the nature of the USP would change as well. Hopkins envisioned the USP as a distinctly physical property--something that only one brand could say, such as use of a specific ingredient or an endorsement from a prominent individual. Later, especially during the <a href="http://historyofads.the-voice.com/the-creative-revolution">Creative Revolution</a> of the 1960s, agencies would inject increasingly emotional or even psychological insight into the USP. Again, however, the role of the USP as the North Star of a campaign remained the same.<br />
<br />
Moreover, this approach worked. People began to associate ads or their taglines with products and from there, <a href="http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25897/origin-of-the-phrase-now-were-cooking-with">bring them into the vernacular</a>. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-Qiyklq-Q">Some jingles</a> even became top 40 hits. With TV, radio, billboards and print at their disposal, marketers could blanket the country with an idea, an idea that overcame objections and in turn encourage consumers to buy what they had to sell.<br />
<br />
As I said, it worked. Until it didn't.<br />
<ul>
</ul>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-15137414167186240432013-06-10T09:58:00.000-04:002013-06-10T12:58:11.365-04:00Welcome to the Post-Brand EraThe modern brand has a had a good run.<br />
<br />
Born in the years after the <a href="http://civilwartalk.com/threads/define-southern-apologist.15722/">U.S. Civil War</a>, the modern brand owes its genesis to the near-simultaneous emergence of three mass phenomena--<a href="http://www.willamette.edu/~fthompso/MgmtCon/Mass_Production.html">mass production</a>, <a href="http://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/">mass transportation</a> and, most importantly, <a href="http://www.loc.gov/item/jots.200014490">mass media</a>. The brand developed and grew over a century and a half and has, I think, reached its zenith due to the emergence of more <a href="http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-3521/fs">diversified production</a>, <a href="https://www.fedex.com/ratefinder/home?cc=US&language=en&locId=express">just-in-time delivery</a> and, most importantly, the <a href="http://mailchimp.com/">ubiquity of addressable (read: individualized) media</a>.<br />
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Brands and branding will never die; nothing useful ever does. However, the brand will recede in its importance, giving ground to ever-more personalized and individually-relevant forms of marketing. Marketers who continue to ply the trade will have to adapt for the post-brand era.<br />
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Over the next few posts (I'm planning three, but you know how I like to prattle on), I'll outline the specifics:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>The brand and how it got that way</li>
<li>What the post-brand era means</li>
<li>How marketers should work in the post-brand era</li>
</ol>
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However, let me summarize as briefly as I can.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>As I said above, brands developed because manufacturers gained the ability to sell the same products across a very large country using, at first, the <a href="http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring04/vance/pennypress.html">penny press</a> and then moving on into new media such as <a href="http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photographers/all-color-issue.html">color magazines</a>, radio and most significantly, television. Advertising replaced one-on-one salesmanship for a broad variety of products and services.</div>
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From the very beginning, this kind of advertising revolved around a promise--whiter clothes, <a href="http://www.snopes.com/risque/porn/chambers.asp">gentle cleaning for children</a> or the <a href="http://www.chacha.com/question/what-does-th-front-of-a-budweiser-label-say">choicest materials</a>. The nature of this promise evolved over time from purely physical characteristics to more emotional ones. However, brands and branding revolved around a consistent promise repeated across time and space. Manufacturers had to adopt branding because they had no other way of getting a message out across the Republic.</div>
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This approach worked very well during the reign of mass media. A <a href="http://www.pg.com/en_US/index.shtml">soap-maker in Cincinnati</a> could ask its <a href="http://www.saatchi.com/">agency in New York</a> to buy time or space that would reach a very large portion of homes in the United States. When the media consisted of three major TV networks and only a handful of nationally-circulated magazines that mattered, the task didn't take all that much effort. In fact, according to cable TV, the <a href="http://www.amctv.com/shows/mad-men">advertising folks</a> had plenty of time for drinking, smoking and spouse-stealing.</div>
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Then a lot of things happened.</div>
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With most consumer needs readily met, manufacturers and service providers diversified their wares. Automakers went from small(-ish), medium and large to multiple sizes across multiple types of vehicles. Beers arrived in light, ultra-light, dark and <a href="http://beeradvocate.com/articles/222">other kinds of styles</a>. Washing soaps reformulated themselves for different fabrics, different machines and even different <a href="http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/laundry/msg0800100417963.html">types of water</a>. And so on. FedEx and other carriers made it easy for manufacturers and retailers to get their customers products faster.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Most importantly, media outlets blossomed. First, mass-media publications such as "<a href="http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/about">Saturday Evening Post</a>" died because their readers wanted just <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/10/10/history-of-newsweek.html">news</a>, just <a href="https://twitter.com/tailsmagazines">news about pets</a> or just news about <a href="http://www.parrotmag.com/">parrots</a>. Radio added the FM band and an attendant increase in popularity for different genres. AM responded by giving <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/">blowhards</a> the ability to <a href="http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/">blow <i>really</i> hard</a>. TV added cable which, in addition to chronicling the lives of wayward advertising executives, also launched <a href="http://www.hallmarkchannel.com/">niche channel</a> after <a href="http://www.jltv.tv/">niche channel.</a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And then, the <a href="http://websearch.about.com/od/internet101/f/al-gore.htm">Internet</a> happened. Not only could everyone buy just about anything from just about anywhere, absolutely everyone could say pretty much anything about anything. And <a href="http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/music/ubg/">the funny ones got repeated</a>. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26wwln-medium-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">A lot.</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
It became harder and harder for marketers to rely on simple promises in their advertising.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Accordingly, smart marketers understand that the brand can only take them so far. They need to think less of the mass market and more in terms of many, many smaller markets. They need to realize that consumers have the ability to up-end any promise they make, if they choose to make promises too grandly.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In sum, the dynamics of the modern market have given marketers many, many ways to skin the cat and consumers many, many ways to stay unskinned.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
It's a brand new world out there. A post-brand world.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Stay tuned for more after these messages.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-91937359115301159942013-06-03T11:26:00.003-04:002013-06-03T11:26:57.894-04:00When Your Logo Isn't a LogoMinor controversy emerged here in New York City last week as the Mayor's office unveiled a new symbol to indicate accessibility for people with disabilities:<br />
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<a href="http://proxy.storify.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphaonenow.org%2FAO_communications%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F05%2Foriginal_gordon_access_icon.jpg&resize=1&w=490" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://proxy.storify.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alphaonenow.org%2FAO_communications%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F05%2Foriginal_gordon_access_icon.jpg&resize=1&w=490" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>New Icon</i></div>
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<a href="http://proxy.storify.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Feditorial.designtaxi.com%2Fnews-wchair22052013%2F2.jpg&resize=1&w=490" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://proxy.storify.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Feditorial.designtaxi.com%2Fnews-wchair22052013%2F2.jpg&resize=1&w=490" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Old Icon</i></div>
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The new symbol garnered some negatives from critics, as noted in <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/05/revamped-handicapped-icons-coming-to-new-york-city.html">this article</a>. Among other things, blind people objected because the icon seems to equate disabilities with mobility disabilities only, thus leaving blind or perhaps deaf people out.</div>
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Moreover, others simply didn't see a need to change. After all, the traditional wheelchair symbol enjoys universal recognition in the industrialized world.</div>
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So why change? I'd argue that more than saying "this facility offers access to people with disabilities," it serves another perhaps higher purpose--branding disability.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>According to the article, the designers (from <a href="http://www.gordon.edu/">Gordon College</a> in Massachusetts) believe the old icon depicts people with disabilities "as limited, helpless and inaccurately passive" while the new one suggests the disabled as "dynamic" and "leaning forward." (Steady, <a href="http://leanin.org/">Sheryl Sandberg</a>).<br />
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I couldn't agree more.</div>
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The handicapped symbol (yes, I know that many people with disabilities <a href="http://www.csun.edu/~sp20558/dis/lang.html">hate that word</a>) has become a de facto logo for people with disabilities. While it nominally defines the parking spaces, bathrooms and doors they can use, it has become shorthand for an entire group of people, much in the way that gays often use rainbows or pink triangles or, for that matter, religious people use crosses, stars or other simple icons. </div>
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Normally, I believe in keeping recognizable elements the same--recognition trumps most things. However, while many people--with and without disabilities--may have given little thought to the old icon, the new look forces them to think about this one. It encourages people to think about what people with disabilities <u>can</u> do rather than what they <u>can't</u> do. I think it also encourages people with disabilities in particular to challenge themselves, or at least challenge those without disabilities to think about them differently.</div>
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While the new icon won't bring life back to damaged spinal columns, retinas or cochlear nerves, it will make people think again. It will, I think, rebrand disability.</div>
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What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments.</div>
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Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-53183465671240573962013-05-28T13:32:00.000-04:002013-05-28T13:32:14.997-04:00Marketing Challenges as Inefficiencies. AKA: Bullpoop Removal.Just for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4lSavSepc">ships</a> and giggles, let's try to categorize marketing challenges as inefficiencies.<br />
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Not the most exciting thing you can imagine right now? OK, how about this: what [naughty word describing the manure of male cattle] would you get rid of to make working in marketing communications more fun and less arduous?<br />
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<br />
<a name='more'></a>You see, inefficiencies should matter to everyone in marketing, not just the accounting folks. It goes back to my belief that <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2012/10/strategy-economy.html">strategy really means economy</a>. As a result, anyone who considers strategy part of his or her job (e.g. everyone) should think about the inefficiencies that hamper good marketing practice.<br />
<br />
For starters, I'll talk about three common inefficiencies and how marketers can address them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li><a href="http://www.infoplease.com/almanacs.html">Information, please</a>! Assuming that your mass media advertising has done its work, consumers will want to know more about your brand. Here's a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Secret-Daughter-Compulsive-Hoarding/dp/B005EP1R5S">dirty secret</a>: you should let them have it. I know, right? Crazy talk.<br /><br />Unfortunately, many marketers make their prospects jump through hoops to get the information they want. They overload websites with <a href="http://lutrov.com/blog/flashturbation-hall-of-shame">flashturbation</a>. They flood the prospect too much information at once or not enough at all. They train a fire hose of email at consumers who register some level of interest. The list goes on and on.<br /><br /><b>How to fix it:</b> Simple. Audit consumers' information needs along the <a href="http://www.google.com/think/tools/customer-journey-to-online-purchase.html">customer journey</a>. Then act like these consumer types and see if the information available corresponds to the needs they have. If these don't match up, <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/38477">fix it!</a><br /></li>
<li>What next? Consumers not only want information, they also want to know what to do next. Do they need to visit a store? Pick up the phone and call someone? Even though every communication these days effectively serves as a direct response communication, many marketers leave consumers hanging. Here in New York, <a href="http://progress.audiusa.com/">Audi USA</a> have been advertising the diesel version of their A8 luxury sedan pretty heavily during broadcasts of the <a href="http://www.hamiltoncollection.com/products/901174013_new-york-yankees-flags.html">27-time World Champion New York Yankees</a>. Yet the TV spots have little in the way of "what next?" communications. In fact, until this week (as near as I can tell), they had no information on their website about the car.<br /><br /><b>How to fix it:</b> As above, consider what channels consumers will use throughout their journeys. Then make sure that each channel points consumers onto the next step.<br /></li>
<li>Technology. I saved technology for last because in many ways, it represents the most intractable kind of inefficiency. We've all dealt with old technology or with technology that lacks a key feature. More often than not, ineffective technology stems from a decision made under different circumstances than the ones you face now. That is, your company may have chosen a marketing database years ago, and thus had never thought of integrating it with social media. Or, procurement demanded the most cost-effective solution and...you get what you pay for.<br /><br /><b>How to fix it: </b>Well, you often can't. Unless you can make the business case for new technology, you simply have to work within the confines of what you have now. Going rogue and authorizing proprietary technology often meets a short-term need, but often ends up adding complexity later on.</li>
</ol>
<div>
What other kinds of inefficiencies do you face in your marketing? Share 'em in the comments below, please!</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-7032894459826630892013-05-24T14:18:00.001-04:002013-05-24T14:18:20.862-04:00Get a Database and Get in the Game!With the advent of cheaper computing and sharper tactics, <a href="http://indigoblue.co.uk/strategic-consulting/article/white-paper-death-and-rebirth-crm">CRM has risen from the ashes of the promises it made in the 1990s</a>. While many marketers once associated CRM with meager results and NASA-level costs, the approach's full capabilities have come to the fore, with companies such as <a href="http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-business-revenue-models/amazon-case-study/">Amazon</a> and <a href="http://leadingcompany.smartcompany.com.au/sales-and-marketing/tesco-a-measurable-marketing-case-study/201207261892">Tesco</a> serving as glittering examples of success.<br />
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And therein lies the problem: fledgling CRM marketers look at these paragons of customer focus and throw their hands up. These marketers feel frustrated because their own systems, data, content, personnel or management can't live up to the very best the industry has to offer.<br />
<br />
Well, quit feeling sorry for yourself and try anyway. Here's how.<br />
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<br />
<a name='more'></a><ol>
<li>Take a deep breath. Rome really wasn't built in a day. Trust me, <a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/academics/classics/alumni-reflections.xml">I majored in ancient history</a>.<br /><br />Amazon built itself from the ground up with an eye on integrating all of their assets around understanding a customer's needs. Tesco spent millions on it over years. They did not spring, as <a href="http://www.greek-gods.info/greek-gods/athena/stories/birth-of-athena/">Athena did, fully formed from the head of Zeus</a> (see, I wasn't kidding about ancient history).<br /></li>
<li>Instead of focusing on what doesn't work, look for something that you can <u>make</u> work.<br /><br />In my experience, marketers consider a lack of <u>available</u> customer data as a major roadblock to creating a successful CRM program. Indeed, CRM lives and dies by available data. (I stress available data because many companies have boatloads of data, but for technology, legal or just plain orneriness reasons, fail to make those data available to the marketing folks.)<br /><br />Other times, organizations struggle with wonky email service platforms (ESPs) or the high cost of direct mail. As pretty much <a href="http://www.forrester.com/eBusiness-%26-Channel-Strategy#/search?tmtxt=crm">every Forrester Report</a> recommends, operations such as CRM require support and evangelism from the executive team, and not all executives show interest in CRM.<br /><br />Recognizing these shortcomings, marketers should instead figure out what they <u>can</u> do that will advance a CRM agenda. Don't have great data? Use your ESP to generate preference data based on what people actually choose to read. Don't have a great ESP? Send out simple emails to see what topics, in general, drive interest and interaction. Don't have executive buy-in? Do SOMETHING and show off your results.<br /></li>
<li>Try something. Try anything.<br /><br />Really, you won't know what you'll get with CRM until you try. A colleague of mine used to say "anticipate the pain," meaning that marketers should accept that things will not work perfectly the first time out. However, the possibility of failure should not pre-empt the need to try.<br /><br />The time for proper CRM discipline can wait. Yes, you'll need to integrate data to enable single view of the customer which in turn will inform lifetime value and whatnot. However, you first have to prove that you can learn about your customers and keep them engaged. Once you take that first step, you have the opportunity to lobby for the resources you need.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Even Julius Caesar understood the groundwork necessary for successful CRM. In his book "<a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.1.1.html">The Gallic Wars,</a>" he began by writing "All Gaul is divided into three parts." In other words, Caesar started with segmentation. Let's hope your attempt to build a CRM practice takes less than the 10 years it took Caesar to subdue Gaul.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-12252373007046962962013-05-20T14:42:00.001-04:002013-05-20T14:42:47.851-04:00Is Disney the World's Best Marketing Organization?The more I watch the Disney Channel (don't judge; my kids are animals and need distraction so they don't hatch their plans of global domination), the more I respect Disney as a marketing organization.<br />
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Mobile? <a href="http://tv.disney.go.com/disneychannel/mobile/">They got it</a>. Social? <a href="http://mashable.com/2011/08/03/disney-social-media/">Please</a>. Adver-gaming? Sport, <a href="http://disneychannel.disney.com/games">they pretty much invented it</a>.<br />
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No, what really blows my mind is how they manage to integrate <u>everything</u>.<br />
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Disney keeps most of its clips under lock and key, so let me share a recent bit of adver-torial from the channel. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1942207/">China Anne McClain</a>, star of the Disney Channel show "<a href="http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/ant-farm">Ant Farm</a>" travels to <a href="http://www.mousemaps.com/MouseMaps/Introduction.html">Disneyland</a> with her real-life family. After riding <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-space-mountain-to-reopen-20130503,0,7447053.story">Space Mountain</a> and the like, China and a Disney Channel host visit <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/downtown-disney-district-anaheim">Downtown Disney</a>, a shopping and entertainment complex attached to Disneyland. Among other things, China and her host peruse Mickey Mouse t-shirts at a clothing boutique there.<br />
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As Jon Stewart might say, "see what they did there?"<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Disney integrates their content brands and locations as perhaps no other brand has--or even as no other brand <u>can</u>. Most brands do not have their own cruise lines or theme parks in four countries. More to the point, content and location brands freely mix to the point of complete overlap. Characters like <a href="http://phineasandferb.wikia.com/wiki/Phineas_and_Ferb_Wiki">Phineas and Ferb</a> show up at the theme parks just as the theme parks make appearances on TV.<br />
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On the one hand, I congratulate Disney for actually doing what all marketers say they do--integrate their offerings seamless. On the other hand, I suspect they've taken it too far.<br />
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Call it one parent's opinion, but Disney's live-actions shows really, really irritate me. Non-watchers of kids TV may say "so what? You're not the intended audience. And while you're at it, shut off the TV once in a while." However, I've also watched more than my fair share of live-action programs on Nickelodeon (<i>pace</i>, "<a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/downtown-disney-district-anaheim">iCarly</a>!") and PBS, and they seem to manage to create shows that kids and adults can watch together.<br />
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More specifically, I find Disney's shows irritating because they tend to focus on one or more smart-ass kids who over-emote for an entire 22 minutes. Y'know that kid in school who had to stand out in every class? I suspect Disney put all of those kids in a room and then picked out the 10 who stood out the most from that crowd to cast their shows.<br />
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Further, I think Disney comes by the precocious brat strategy with intent. Unlike Nick or PBS, Disney markets these kids beyond their shows. Most notably, Selena Gomez, star of "Wizards of Waverly Place," has put out a record on the Hollywood Label (part of Disney) and appeared on other Disney channel programs. But even some actors with smaller roles have moved between Disney and ABC-TV, which Disney of course owns.<br />
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In other words, I think they use the shows as marketing vehicles to create stars for future use. I hate to invoke <a href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/#b">Godwin's Law</a>, but it's kinda like "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077269/">The Boys from Brazil</a>" with slightly more singing and dancing.<br />
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Of course, you can't argue with success. Disney Channel has <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2012-03-19/disney-channel-nickelodeon-ratings/53658872/1">begun to make inroads</a> on Nickelodeon's stranglehold on kids. (Wait, that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean.) And the opinion of one annoyed dad doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.<br />
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Nevertheless, I've got to take my<a href="http://www.disneystore.com/accessories/ear-hats-mickey-mitts/disney-parks-authentic/mn/1000292+1000809/"> mouse-ear cap</a> to the brand for integrating as no one else has.<br />
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<br />Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-18473199574673266332013-05-17T14:07:00.000-04:002013-05-17T14:07:16.402-04:00How to Talk Smack to Your ClientsIf you want to make French toast, you need to break eggs, right? And, no, don't bring that <a href="http://www.eggbeaters.com/">Egg Beaters</a> crap around me.<br />
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<a href="http://www.chelationtherapyonline.com/articles/images/newhome2_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.chelationtherapyonline.com/articles/images/newhome2_02.jpg" width="191" /></a></div>
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<i>Begone, impostor!</i></div>
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Similarly, if you want to improve your client's marketing communication, you need to find out a way to suggest, ever-so-delicately, that their current program has, how shall I say it? Well, that it needs...um, well, let me allow someone else to say it for me:</div>
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<i>Thanks, Stewie</i></div>
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How do you criticize a client's program without calling his or her baby ugly?</div>
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For starters, I have a go-to word, "inconsistent." As in "your previous program works inconsistently." While starting this piece yesterday, I asked my friends on Facebook for some terms they use, and they seem to work for all the reasons that "inconsistent" works. One friend offered "other audiences to reach." Another shared "still so many important opportunities to be seized."<br />
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In other words, acknowledge the work that went into the extant program, even if you had good reason to suspect that lower primates actually did that work.<br />
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I believe this approach works even in those rare cases when the client recognizes the, erm, inefficiencies, of the work. Even if your particular client has recently taken on her role and has inherited the program from a previous manager, it pays to stress the work done previously, if for no other reason that the previous work actually has something of value.<br />
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Marketing requires learning from experience. By writing off previous efforts as a complete waste of time, marketers risk losing valuable information, even if that information amounts to "well, that didn't work."<br />
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And if that doesn't work, at least have the courtesy to get the client drunk first before saying nasty things.<br />
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Any other tips? Leave 'em in the comments.</div>
<br />Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-22405814937833515572013-05-15T10:31:00.003-04:002013-05-15T10:32:39.529-04:00Advertising and other DisastersI nearly spit out my coffee when I got <a href="http://www.emarketer.com/">eMarketer's</a> daily newsletter this morning. I read this newsletter every morning because, more often than not, it has at least one insightful article about marketing tactics. (You can send me a check, <a href="https://twitter.com/geofframsey">@GeoffRamsey</a>).<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That said, I turned up an eyebrow at this headline: "<a href="http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Case-Study-With-Spotify-Playlist-Carnival-Engages-Millennial-Audience/1009890">Case Study: With Spotify Playlist, Carnival Engages a Millennial Audience</a>." I have few doubts about the power of music marketing; I have many doubts about the technology-savvy Millennials' ability to ignore Carnival's more prominent appearances in the media.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/carnival-disaster-timeline-in-photos-2013-3?op=1">Business Insider</a> reminds us of some recent Carnival Cruise memories that probably won't make the brochure:</span><br />
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<li>The Carnival Triumph, the infamous "poop cruise" in which the ship lost power leaving only a few toilets operable</li>
<li>The Costa Concordia, a Carnival-operated ship that ran aground off the cost of Italy, leaving 32 passengers dead</li>
<li>The 2010 incident aboard the Carnival Splendor, another generator failure that spurred from a fire (the US Navy had to deliver supplies to the ship)</li>
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So, while Carnival considered the Spotify promotion a success, having created 450 solid leads, it stands to reason that the cruise line might want to think more broadly about how to address their issues in marketing.</div>
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More to the point, how can marketing communications help rebuild a brand after a disaster?</div>
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<a name='more'></a>Naturally, public relations plays the initial role in recovery. Countless successful examples of companies using PR after a disaster (<a href="http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall02/susi/tylenol.htm">Tylenol's cyanide scare in 1982</a>, e.g.) illustrate the dos and don'ts. The examples go back to the time of the Caesars in Rome. Augustus once quelled fears of a theater's safety after an earthquake by sitting in the most dangerous-looking seats during a performance.</div>
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Crisis PR generally serves to stop the brand's image from getting any worse and return it to a habitable form. In this respect, PR works like the National Guard during and immediately after a disaster. It then falls on brand communications to bring the brand to "like new" condition, much in the way a contractor might work on a storm-ravaged house.</div>
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Rule one is always change the conversation. On a recent assignment, I worked on a brand in need of a turnaround. We pointed out several examples of how other brands have recently done it. General Motors and American Airlines both declared bankruptcy, but they chose different ways to change the conversation.</div>
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GM began to speak of "<a href="http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/COMPANY/Investors/Corporate_Governance/PDFs/StockholderInformationPDFs/Annual-Report.pdf">the new GM</a>" (<a href="http://get2.adobe.com/reader/">PDF</a>). Most visibly, they focused on a car that had its roots in the old GM, the <a href="http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car.html">Volt</a>. Despite its genesis, this focus on a completely different kind of car helped consumers--and taxpayers--believe that GM had in fact changed. Personally, I can vouch for the change in attitude at the General. I pitched GM on a project in 1995 and found them to be extremely arrogant, and this from a company that had was still producing the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buick_Skylark#1992.E2.80.931998">Skylark</a>. After bankruptcy, I found the same GM ready to listen and consider, rather than order and dictate.</div>
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While GM chose something that seems to <a href="http://www.industryweek.com/budgeting-amp-reporting/gm-posts-gains-global-sales-market-share">work for them</a>, American Airlines chose another route, one that seems more likely to me to succeed. They wrote a <a href="http://www.aa.com/edgedownloads/restructuring/aadvantageEmail3.gif">letter</a>. In it, they explained that AA would continue to serve them as they had in the past and that their AAdvantage Miles would still be good. They then placed these letters in the seats of First and Business class on all their flights.</div>
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In other words, AA took a segmented approach to rebuilding their brand. Airlines live and die by their frequent fliers, so their marketing communications had to work with them first. If the frequent fliers didn't have confidence in AA, no one else would either.</div>
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I suppose that GM took the same tack, insofar as every U.S. citizen became a shareholder in GM after the bailout. However, AA took it one step further by setting up a direct line of communication from the airline to its most important audience.</div>
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By that token, if I had to steer Carnival's marketing, I would make sure that its most valuable customers--satisfied passengers with several cruises under their belts--retained their confidence in the brand. Emails, direct mail and loyalty communications to them would encourage their advocacy on behalf of Carnival. If nothing else, a good old-fashioned <a href="http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/blog/2011/07/bulk-sms/member-get-member-recommend-a-friend-schemes-can-really-help-grow-sales/">member-get-member strategy</a> would probably work wonders.</div>
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Either that, or get an emperor to take a cruise.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-83275837362494832402013-05-09T10:28:00.000-04:002013-05-09T10:28:39.701-04:00Giving the Devil his DueSometimes you just gotta take your hat off to a smart gimmick, even if you really, REALLY hate the folks who did it. Witness:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmHa2mxcsUGjX73rWdsisysalaQl3V5_NhZvpXs9hxv96BCo9fXEm9nQYbnUE8q04ZmwYIExnSG2AdT3WEUmXvK5CBvhEPIx-ZRPLBhMibfcZWkPQHbEdUf4cI7o3mk2rKri-3IKoCWb8/s1600/IMG_2545.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmHa2mxcsUGjX73rWdsisysalaQl3V5_NhZvpXs9hxv96BCo9fXEm9nQYbnUE8q04ZmwYIExnSG2AdT3WEUmXvK5CBvhEPIx-ZRPLBhMibfcZWkPQHbEdUf4cI7o3mk2rKri-3IKoCWb8/s320/IMG_2545.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Fox News does something smart. There, I said it.</i></div>
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When<a href="http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/6639"> Lyle Overbay</a> homered over this sign in the fifth inning last Saturday (with three generations of Rothfelds in attendance), I finally noticed this sign and its genius.</div>
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For those of you <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2011/08/make-marketing-not-war.html">not attuned to baseball's terms of art</a>, "power" refers to what Mr. Overbay did--hitting the ball over the fence. Thus, when the ball cleared this sign (and in turn made its way into untold highlight shows), it made a nice impression on the viewer-- Fox News = Power.</div>
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It doesn't matter that Fox has had this sign up for at least a year, judging from a recent <a href="http://www.yankeenumbers.com/classics.asp">Yankees Classics</a> rebroadcast I saw from last year. I also recognize that other marketers have done this before. The Gap placed signs in--you guessed it--the <a href="http://www.livestrong.com/article/386742-what-does-into-the-gap-mean-for-baseball/">gaps</a> in left center and right center field at both Candlestick Park and AT&T Stadium. I just give kudos to Fox News for being clever.</div>
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Now, if they were only half so clever in their analysis of national politics...</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-23786897813806441992013-05-07T11:48:00.001-04:002013-05-07T11:49:31.507-04:00Can You Tape a Penny to a Website?For all the jokes about<a href="http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp"> Al Gore's inventing the Internet</a>, I think we can all agree on who invested interactivity.<br />
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Lester Wunderman.<br />
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Wait, who? You mean not <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/">Tim Berners-Lee</a>? Not <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/">William Gibson</a>? Not <a href="http://www.darpa.mil/">DARPA</a>?<br />
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If the name <a href="http://wunderman.com/about/people/lester-wunderman">Lester Wunderman</a> seems unfamiliar to you, you probably know his best-known creation if you ever owned a record player:<br />
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<i>Grand Funk Railroad. Cool.</i></div>
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Yes, one of the founding fathers of direct marketing also invented interactivity <a href="http://steveleeds.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-columbia-house-record-club-and-how-we-learned-to-steal-music/">way back in the mid-1960s</a>.</div>
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OK, Wunderman really invented what direct marketers call an "involvement device." Simply put, asking consumers to take an additional, essentially meaningless step, actually <u>increased</u> the response to the ads for Columbia House. That is, an ad that asked consumers to tape a penny to the reply form actually got more new subscribers than a similar ad without the penny request.</div>
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I could go on to discuss why this phenomenon works (sometimes, at any rate). However, I think we should discuss instead whether the involvement device has an analog in the digital world.</div>
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User experience practices vary from designer to designer. However, they rather agree on one topic: the user should accomplish his or her goals with as few mouse clicks as possible. A snippet from <a href="http://uxmag.com/articles/guiding-principles-for-ux-designers">this article</a> recapitulates the party line:<br />
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<span style="color: #274e13;">Leave complexity to family dynamics, relationships, and puzzles. The things you create should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to find, and easy to adapt. Intuition happens outside of conscious reasoning, so by utilizing it you are actually reducing the tax on people's minds. That will make them feel lighter and likely a lot happier.</span></blockquote>
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Kinda flies in the face of taping a penny to a piece of cardstock or asking busy moms to <a href="http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/10/20/just-add-an-egg-usability-user-experience-and-dramaturgy/">crack an egg for an instant cake mix</a>, doesn't it?</div>
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In my experience with such things as <a href="http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=113">preference centers</a> and other web forms, I've always subscribed to the less-is-more approach described above. However, I'd be willing to test a few involvement devices in my next project to see if we can increase conversion by <u>adding</u> fields or steps.</div>
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For instance, what if a preference center had fields for questions that really don't add anything to the subscriber experience, such as asking them their favorite food (on a non-culinary site) or favorite genre of music (on a non-music site)? What if we asked them to fill out a free-text field with a sentence or two about why they like or dislike the brand?</div>
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I'm willing to be (someone else's money) that there's an involvement device out there that would increase conversion. Anyone have any experience with this idea? Please share below.</div>
Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708763047164195294.post-88036800478282251122013-05-03T11:33:00.000-04:002013-05-03T11:34:04.065-04:00Presentation Layer is Branding for the Connected WorldIn my previous two posts, I discussed the limitations of using branding as the primary focus of marketing communications. In short, the branding focus often ignores the cornucopia of information available about a brand and, perhaps more alarmingly, assumes that consumers want to engage with brands and not with content or functionality.<br />
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Before finding the solution to this problem, let's talk about something <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Not_entirely_unlike">almost, but not quite, entirely unlike</a> marketing communications, application development. Developers create applications to help people or machines create specific tasks, such as analyzing financial trends or keeping you from <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drunk-dial-no!-block-mistakes!/id309080055?mt=8">drunk-dialing ex-girlfriends</a>.<br />
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While application development takes many forms, they all have some key similarities, such as the use of a presentation layer. The presentation layer is the part of the program that users see and interact with; the heavy-duty number crunching happens below the surface. In all consumer-oriented applications, the thousands or millions of lines of code remain invisible.<br />
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This opacity does not mean, however, that the presentation layer does not play an important role. The presentation layer determines how the user understands and relates to the application. If gives him or her a concrete sense of what the application does.<br />
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By now, you should realize that, in fact, application development is at least somewhat like marketing communications. In fact, I'll argue that presentation layer should serve as the basis for how branding works best in our connected world.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>App developers think first about what the application they're charged with building should do and how it should do it. While the presentation layer plays an important role in the success of the application, it nevertheless must take a backseat to what the application does.<br />
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Marketers, I think, should work this way, too. When thinking about a marketing communications program <u>in its entirety</u>, marketers should first ask, "what are we trying to accomplish here?" Of course, these objectives generally center around "sell more." However, most marketers have adopted the <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/using_customer_journey_maps_to.html">customer journey</a> as a model for understanding how consumers actually move through the purchase cycle. Based on that customer journey, marketers need to understand how each channel or each communication program moves the consumer along the journey.<br />
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Here's where the presentation layer comes in.<br />
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Once the marketer has mapped out the role of the communications streams--and only then--should she think about how these streams will appeal to the audience. Many of the traditional brand rules apply, such as consistency in design, copy and tone. The website and the TV commercial ought to look like they came out of the same factory. <br />
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However, the branding should focus on <u>initiating</u> engagement and let the other elements of the program focus on <u>maintaining</u> or <u>building</u> engagement. Just as an application presentation layer doesn't do much in the way of executing the purpose of the program, the brand should not take on the burden of, say, directing the conversation between consumer and marketer.<br />
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In more concrete terms, let's look at the Mountain Dew example I cited in the <a href="http://translinear.blogspot.com/2013/04/brand-hubris.html">last post</a>. The brand's content site fits under the brand umbrella as an extension of what consumers see in channels such as TV. As I argued, the Mountain Dew content faces great difficulty in competing with the oceans of content available to the audience.<br />
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What if, instead, Mountain Dew relied on its branding as a presentation layer, insofar as it created an identity for the brand that appealed to the audience of young men? What if that presentation layer then funneled the audience into a loyalty program (e.g. collect codes on the packaging) or a relevant social marketing effort (e.g. make a movie involving a Mountain Dew bottle and post in on YouTube)? Those efforts might feel less constrained by the brand and more independent and effective in their own right.<br />
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In other words, instead of force-fitting objective-driven marketing programs into a brand umbrella, simplify branding so that it acts as a carnival barker for other programs. Ad folks may not appreciate the comparison to a carny, but I'm sure they've been called worse.Ben Rothfeldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14712189058038774975noreply@blogger.com2