Dim Bulb

2008 Prediction #1: Finish Conversations

 

It's very likely that we're going to hear lots more in 2008 about the magic and glory of endless conversation.  I'm going to suggest that we might see just the opposite start happening or, if not, that we should.

It's a sexy proposition, this idea of incessant sharing, swapping, forwarding, and incrementally adding or subtracting from someone else's somethingoranother.  Communication is one massively infinite combination soap box, rumor mill, and chain letter; with no objective reality or truth to consider, everything and anything is an infectious meme, nothing more. 

More of it is therefore good for brand marketing, because it's awareness.  And we already have buzzwords for the phenomenon -- social media, viral marketing, word-of-mouth -- and a fast-evolving eco-system for helping clients spend money on such digital activities, and then feel good about doing so. 

We should expect more in 2008.  Better, faster, more pervasive ways to converse and share.  Lots of marketing budgets earmarked to prompt or contribute to conversations. 

I say maybe we should be figuring out how to stop them.  Conversations, that is. 

It's so easy to be cavalier and recommend that brands throw money at a phenomenon that never concludes, ends, or resolves.  You'd think that it would be a guarantee for billings and fees (who'd dare stop doing the hip, easy thing?). 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that riding that gravy train might get a little bumpy in 2008. 

At some point, conversations have to result in behaviors, right?  Getting eyeballs to a web promotion is no different than counting viewers of a broadcast media ad (funny how we tend to use the same measures, to make it easier for clients to spend their money).

There's still this giant gap...a chronology of events that we hope lead to purchase, but over which brand marketing takes little responsibility.  Conversational media makes this chronology more complicated, important and, oddly, easier to understand, if anybody tries.

But if we stop at the conversation itself, we're missing the point.  Forgetting to consider a real payoff.

If pointless engagement with digital media provides no more tangible benefit to the bottom line than the vague awareness and intent of the analog advertising it replaces, we've just renamed a problem, not solved it.

I say maybe we should be figuring out how to solve the problem of linking brand spending with consumer behavior.  One of the places we could start is in strategizing how to conclude conversations, not just diving into them. 

• Think about where conversations lead
• Where do the participants go after they've conversed, and what actions (not just comments) do they influence next?
• How can brands participate in conversations about reality -- motivating facts and opportunities -- and not just about themes or topics relevant to brand attributes?
• What does the brand do to preserve the connection made via conversation, and migrate it to purchase? 

I'm guessing that we'll see more thinking this coming year about how to finish conversations. And perhaps that'll enable us to better monetize them. 

And if we don't see it, I suspect we might see some visionary clients start questioning the merits of endlessly purposeless conversations.

Creating Market Demand

Yesterday's ugly murder of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto challenges our conceptions of communications strategy, not to mention violating every legal and moral rule of civil society.

Every aspect of what happened is just so wrong.  Murder is an atrocious crime, and mass-murder beyond comprehension or excuse.  The perpetrators will likely remain anonymous, but suspicions and allegations will prompt more violence and pervasive unease.  As a communications strategy, it should accomplish nothing: nobody will understand with any certainty why Bhutto was murdered, who did it, when something like it (or worse) will happen again, or what they can do about it.

And yet that's the whole point, isn't it?

No population wakes up one morning and decides that it would be nice to live under a totalitarian government.  It happens only when the alternative seems worse.  The terrorists behind yesterday’s carnage are busy creating that comparison.   

It's a terribly efficient equation, really:

• Terrorists promote some vague theory of government that makes the rules and behaviors of the Inquisition seem enlightened.
• It prompts its opponents, some of which may actually be democrats, to embrace strong-arm tactics that some times resemble the capricious violence they hope to curb.
• But you can't kill enough terrorists to stop their random acts of violence, and the only way to to do is to have their higher-ups call it quits.
• The higher-ups won't give up until they get their totalitarian government.  They'll happily wait years, if not generations, for that to happen.
• So, at some point, a weary and frightened public gives a collective shrug, and chooses between two authoritarian options, picking the terrorists' backers because only they can get the nutcases to stop killing

Then, say hello to the 14th Century, and make sure you get out to the public stoning tomorrow, or you could be next.

Looking at all this from a communications standpoint, there's no amount of pro-democracy propaganda that will turn this tide.  The game is fixed.  Even the most soaring rhetoric or staged events won't outweigh the impact of the next senseless bombing. 

TV news shows can endlessly debate the causes and effects of terrorism, but for families at Ground Zero there's a concerted and incessant effort to set up a choice: pick abstractions like voting for public officials or speaking your mind, and risk random suffering or death, or let the religious authorities limit your freedoms, and thereby ensure that your kids can get to school without being blown up.

Humm.  I wonder which government they'll choose?

If governments simply "fight the terrorists," democracy will lose.  This is the ugly, unfair reality that makes the recent battlefield progress in Iraq a sign of a bigger opportunity, and the recent protests by Pakistan's lawyerly class on the denigration of the country's supreme court (not to mention the declaration of martial law) such an ominous one. 

For democracy to win, the fight against terrorists can't itself help create the market demand that will ensure the terrorists' victory. 

That's why there needs to be political progress in Iraq (it's not just a nice-to-have, and it doesn't mean more sham, symbolic votes).  Real institutions in and of the public interest  need to emerge: a truly independent judiciary, a free press, services to help protect women and children.  The Iraqi clans that have been working together to "out" the terrorist murderers need to be further encouraged, and nudged in the direction of actual political agreements and governing structures.

Same goes for Pakistan, if my theory is correct.  The worst thing Musharraf could do to fight the promised totalitarianism of the terrorists was to declare his own totalitarianism.  The country needs its public institutions strengthened, not destroyed.  It's the people's battle against the forces of darkness, not the government's.

There's much the United States could do. 

More funding for the institutions of civil society would be a nice start.  Create more ways for individuals to get involved, irrespective of ideological perspectives.  Host fewer speeches and forums about democracy, and deliver more actions to create the institutions that support it.  Healthcare.  Small business investment.  Women's rights.  Education.

Help people argue their differences without killing one another.  Let them disagree and hate one another just like we do in the Western World.  The more the terrorists want us to become like them, the less like them we must become.

It's a long road, but everyone seems to agree that their scourge will be with us for a while.  While we keep fighting the battles against the murderers who would kill us, the world's democracies need to make greater investments of time and resources in winning the war.

If terrorists can make their inane ideology seem like a reasonable answer, we need to start changing the question.    

If we succeed, the acts of violence will be seen as nothing more than the isolated, random acts of evil that they are.  Terrorists without claims to legitimacy are criminals, at best, and insane, at worst.  No market would tolerate, let alone demand, solutions that came from such crazies. 

That's the communications goal, isn't it?

The Illogic of Sales

Isn't sale pricing the antithesis of branding?

Now that stores are in full-swing with after-holidays markdowns, discounts, red-liners, or whatever else they call them, they're really telling consumers the same, basic thing:

What we charged you before wasn’t what our stuff was really worth.

Now, I know that there's no merchandise theory of value like Marx once postulated underwrote the sweat equity of labor, but CAGR is an approximate measure of at least a core cost for products and services.  Add up the expenses of gruel, lead paint, and large shipping containers, and you've got a base price for most toys sold this year.  Oh, and don't forget the cost of all that glossy branding, and anything else that can be legally, if not wholly credibly, attributed to requirements for getting "on shelf."

So Brand Name X costs Y.  Got it.  I might not like it, or agree with (or understand) the calculation, but I acknowledge it.  Price/benefits = value.

It's only when you get into the complicated dance routine of supply vs. demand that the picture gets all out of whack. 

Christmas, being the biggest gift-giving moment for the largest number of people in the Western World, creates a natural deadline: prior to December 25th, consumers need to buy things, so demand should push prices up.  With that pressure relieved Christmas morning, prices can fall, as few shoppers are thinking ahead 364 days.

Now, think of that switch on any given day, as any business changes pricing.  Maybe it's prompted by some complicated computer model identifying the optimum pain consumers will endure at any given moment.  Or perhaps it's because the store manager saw too much stuff gathering dust on the front table. 

If the worth of stuff can change within days -- and sometimes quite dramatically, as a review of sale offers in today’s newspaper attests -- how does brand stay constant?

Branding absolutists will say that we're talking apples and oranges. 

Brand equals emotional, associative, social, and then, perhaps lastly, functional benefits, while price is quite literally the ever-shifting cost for acquiring those benefits.  Sure, they correlate -- I can't sell a Hyundai for the price of a Lexus -- but people engage primarily with brands in a way irrespective of place, time and, generally, cost.

Putting a brand on sale means consumers can get all those same benefits for a lesser price.  Sales are broadstroke CRM, or blunt, mass-media rewards for people who desire one brand or another.

I say that such reasoning is illogical. 

Consumer experiences of brands are inexorably woven within situational and behavioral details of space and time...i.e., experience isn't with brands as much as by, among, because, thereupon, with, and resulting from them.  The context of reality is far more important that imagined position of brand. 

Businesses know it picking prices, whether MSRP or sale.  So do consumers, when they learn to play the sale game. 

Slashing prices the day after Christmas is a ritual, really, for which consumers plan.  So is the half-life of any apparel pricing, especially women's fashion.  Technology products don't age well, mostly, and car models change prices almost in lock-step with the calendar.

With any number of bloggers, chatters, and Internet sites ready to remember, track, and predict these patterns, you'd have to be willfully blind to its implications for valuations of brands. 

Because, as retailers try to make up with sale items all the sales they were unable to realize with regular pricing, they’re daring consumers to revalue what they're buying.  The greater the pricing variability, the less qualities of brand have any inherent value.

Something that costs less due to the exigencies of sellers can never fully be worth more when it comes to the needs of buyers.  Sales are a chronic affliction for businesses, and a constant reminder to consumers that all the imagined promises of branding don't necessarily connect to the reality of prices. 

This week's sales aren't price discounts; they're proof that sales the remainder of the year were attempted at inflated prices. 

Holiday Insurance

In our era of heightened expectations and outsourced responsibilities, I'm surprised that we aren't able to insure a holiday.

A single family get-together -- say, for Christmas yesterday -- adds up to an apparent endless number of interconnected variables.  Change one, and some and/or all of the others are affected.  Weather, guest health, personalities, mood, food quality, presents, order of presents given, music, conversation topics, you name it. 

Our mental pictures of a happy holiday are idealized and usually static, while our experience is dynamic and multi-dimensional.  And thus full of risks.

So why can't we insure them?

I mean, I don't want to simply hope for a nice holiday event, or wish it had been more satisfying after-the-fact.  And it's not like I'm ever going to be surprised by what happens, at least not completely, and certainly not if it's at an annual holiday shindig.  Past events and behaviors already give me a range of possibilities, or identify the variables that might most impact the gig.

It shouldn't be surprise that no snow on Christmas might make everyone's mood slightly less cheery.  There's a solid chance that my kid with find that Guitar Hero III wasn't the be-all/end-all gift she claimed it was on her wish list.  Uncle Fred (or someone else) could arrive with a head cold, and the chicken might get overcooked.  Some younger cousin will enrage an older one, whether by declaring an affection for anarchism, or simply refusing to answer questions in anything longer than grunts. 

But if i can list these variables, why couldn't I assign values to them -- likelihood, casual links, the "cost" of resulting outcomes -- and insure myself?

I'm thinking three-levels of holiday insurance:

• Pre-Event Planning Services: If some outside agency could help me identify and assign values to my event variables, it might also assist with planning to avoid or overcome the negative ones (and encourage and expand the good ones).  I'm too busy worrying about getting the card-chairs from the basement to think about how unpleasant cousin Daphne will be for the entire evening if she hits her head on the doorway like she did a few years ago.  It would be great for some service to make a note of it, and give me a preparatory solution that let me (and my guests) reduce the risk of that variable to zero.  Ditto for seating arrangements, trade-offs between what I cook vs. what I buy pre-made, and whether the field of Republican hopefuls can be safely discussed at all
• Real-time Event Support: One of the hardest aspects of any holiday gig is that once it's happening, there's usually nothing you can do about it.  The event simply occurs, or unfolds.  You ride the wave and hope you don't drown.  When the appetizer singes, a friend of the family drinks too much, or the guitar for the video game my kid wanted only works once before going silent, there's no customer service to call for immediate assistance.  What if I could call some real-time support line, kind of like an event concierge, who could get things done while getting them done still mattered to the quality of the experience?’  Need more ice delivered?  A homemade fix for radio game controllers?  A new conversation topic for your niece who is sitting in the corner staring strangely at ornaments?  Maybe there are a set of event health indicators -- number of arguments about God, sidelong references about how small my house is, percentage of food left untouched on napkins and plates, or gallons alcohol consumed -- that a service tracks in real time, and proactively offers advice before they lead to irrevocable changes to the party?
• Post-Event Payoff: Sometimes, planning an annual holiday event is like getting ready for a hurricane or earthquake; you can try to minimize the damage, but the thing is going to hit pretty much not matter what.  If I can insure my roof or basement from damage, why can't I insure my party?  If an argument is bound to happen, or the beans come out cold even after repeated irradiation in the microwave, it would be nice to get some monetary recompense the next day, just to soothe my jagged nerves.  Assessing the cost, and then finding the investor parties interested in assuming such risks, would be far less dicey than spinning those cute-rate, never-going-to-get-paid home mortgages, wouldn't it?  Maybe a post-party user assessment would canvas all party-goers, and come up with a conclusion review that triggered payoff not just to the host, but to everyone involved.  We could all be "insured" from the possibility of having a bad time.

We can already insure our physical existence, and things like vacation travel commitments.  It isn't such a stretch from insuring the material aspects of life, to insuring our ephemeral life experiences, is it?

Think holidays, secular events, even daily routines (imagine being able to insure your average weekday).  The services and technology development opportunities might be immense. 

It would also make the brand marketing a lot easier, if not simply a lot more fun.  Who needs to get consumers to engage with cavemen or bulldog mascots when you can promise them great life experiences?

The Night After Christmas

Twas the night after Christmas, when all through the store
Every employee was working at an annual chore:
The sale signs were hung by the windows aplenty,
In hopes that tomorrow, the store wouldn't be empty.

The merchandise all piled on every surface,
Hung on hangers, and displayed for one purpose:
For all the branding consumers weren't enticed,
The market requires the products repriced.

When out on the parking lot arose such a clatter,
One of the employees sprang to see what was the matter.
Away to the door, she flew like a flash,
Happy to stop bemoaning the store's lack of cash.

The moon glow on the pavement proved,
As illuminating as a video on YouTube.
When, what to her inquiring eyes should appear,
But the branding guru, and his in his eye, a tear?

The marketing had failed, the sales not triumphant,
The guy sneaking away was the company's consultant.
More rapid than eagles his course was quite plain,
A getaway with successful branding he would claim.

"Now Viral! now, Social! now, Awareness and Retention!
On, Creative! On, Catchy! on, seeking only mention!
The brand was made memorable, I won't take the fall!
Didn't they know it wasn't supposed to sell at all?"

As the store was chocked full with images and colors,
Assumed to have uses by exploited dullards.
On TV and online the ads, they still flew,
But there wasn't much of anything they'd do.

And then, in a twinkling, she heard only silence,
No customers, no visitors, no interested clients.
Turning around, she surveyed a store haunted by vague hopes,
As the branding guru seemed to say "adios, you dopes!"

He was dressed all in black, from his head to his shoes,
His clothes stylishly modern, a necktie refused.
A messenger bag of work samples flung on his back,
She could tell by his eyes that he'd never come back.

With his examples of what branding can do,
Off to find other clients' budgets to burn through.
Supported by branding claims so esoteric,
Unquestionable, like a Church of Branding cleric.

So what if consumers didn't show they cared?
Paying for the brand attributes they weren't prepared.
Ev'ry abstract claim, all that clever stuff,
To prompt purchase behavior, it just wasn’t enough.

And at stores like this one, left high and dry,
With very few options left to try.
No time for more hype, for people don't buy air,
Expecting them to magically arrive is unfair.

So a righting of wrongs, a balancing occurs,
The process of matching wants and needs endures.
Give consumers real reasons for them to buy,
And sales results may warrant more than a sigh.

The staffer returned to repricing merchandise,
Ignoring the branding blather, to be precise.
Then the guru added, as if to her labor regale:
"Happy Christmas to all, and good luck with the sale!"

A Paper Trail

I bought about $11 worth of incidentals at Walgreeen's (a tube of toothpaste, a handful of candy, and 2 boxes of #10 envelopes).  Ready to hit the road with my small bag of merchandise, all I had to do was wait for the receipt to scroll out of the printer.

The cashier stood with her hand opened, poised above the machine as if she could coax the paper sprouting up in a gentle coil from the printer:

Only it wasn't done.  The machine continued to hiss, the paper now pinched firmly between her thumb and forefinger, and curling into a second loop under her wrist.  The people behind me in line shuffled impatiently:

Was it finished?  No, and now even the cashier smiled apologetically, grabbing the second loop of paper as the machine went on spewing out the receipt:

Finally, the machine paused, as did we all, wondering if there was more to come.  Beat...beat...beat...ok, the printer stayed silent.  The cashier tore the receipt from the gizmo and handed it to me with an awkward 'thank you.'  Instead of immediately throwing it in the garbage can conveniently located (in part for this very purpose) right outside the front door, I looked at the 3+ feet (almost a meter) of paper tape: I'd been handed:

• An ad for Chantix, which is a prescription drug to help smokers quit their habit
• A discount coupon for Head & Shoulders shampoo, which is targeted at dandruff sufferers
• A sales pitch for using the Discover Card, a not-so-friendly credit card

Now, did someone (or something) in that Walgreen's size me up as a smoker, dandruff-sufferer in need of an exploitative card, or does this behavior violate just about every rule of good brand marketing?

If the coupons were related to my past purchase behavior, I could understand and support the intent.  And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I did buy a pack of cigarettes there last October, as part of a Halloween costume.  One pack of cigarettes in 7 years of shopping at Walgreen's.  Maybe the system tried to match promos with my purchase behavior, and Chantix was as close of a match it could make.

So let's presume that there's actually a method behind the madness: Walgreen's has a system that studies past purchaser behavior, and is actually trying to make the coupons relevant to my buying needs.

Here are a few thoughts on how its brand marketing could actually get paid for the effort, and make an excellent opportunity something other than a less-than-excellent customer experience:

• Ask me if I want the damn thing.  For all I knew, Walgreen's was printing out a recipe or some mouseprint warnings about the paper envelopes I'd just bought.  Giving the buyer control to say 'yes' or 'no' -- instead of forcing us to endure a painfully slow printout process -- would be a nice first step toward making a nicer experience
• Tell me what you're doing.  One of the first rules of communicating is to identify yourself and what you're doing.  The store brand would get a lot more credit if the cashier simply announced "would you like X value (as a % or $) off your next purchase?"  Everybody waiting in line would hear that, too, so even if the purchaser declines the printout, everyone can't avoid being aware that Walgreeen's passes savings to its customers. 
• Don't print out so much paper. Duh.  Murdering trees in an era of global warming is not so politically correct, and I don't grasp the value of 3 offers instead of 2, or 7.  Why not make it one offer, clear and simple?
• Link to trends, not items.  The smoking-cessation drug offer was laughably irrelevant to me; I've bought far more tubes of toothpaste there (usually the same brand), so you'd think my mouthcare habits would be more relevant (and susceptible to) discount offers.  Could Walgreen's build on that trend to sell to me related items?
• Use replenishment as a trigger. Maybe trend is only sort-of important, and a generic expectation of replenishment could be just as compelling.  Did I buy mouthwash a few weeks ago, and should I be due for a refill?  Why not give me that coupon?
• Skip the mouseprint.  There's some naggingly small typefaces covering the receipt I got last week, and mouseprint automatically suggests to me (and to many people) that the large-print offer isn't really all it claims to be.  Match the message to the medium, and only feature offers that can be described fully, as well as comply with the law, in print large enough to read without a magnifying glass.
• Adapt to circumstance.  If the checkout line is longer than X people, the cashier should be empowered to cut the coupon printing time in half...or stop them altogether.  No point in pissing people off because you're, er, trying to give them savings.  Letting folks opt-out of the process would also make things run lots more smoothly.

Bricks-and-mortar retail faces lots of intriguing challenges to capture and retain customer loyalty, but it also possesses incredible and unique strengths.  What happens to/with/because of the customer being physically in-store is the key: what happens there should be orchestrated to exploit those unique strengths, and checkout is a major component of that overall experience.

Walgreen's -- and any store that tries to bring a value prop to checkout, like Blockbuster -- could do well to rethink its couponing.  If they've gone to the trouble to try and actually understand customer purchase behavior, it would be too bad to lose any brand marketing benefit because of a kludgey execution.

Then again, maybe its just blunt and stupid promotional behavior.  That should actually hurt the store brand, not to mention the health of the planet.  I know. 

I have a paper trail.

I Miss David Ogilvy

The results of "an intensive three-year study" about branding have been in since late October, and in case you missed it:

• Consumers get "engaged" with stories instead of facts about brands
• This means that advertising with broad, thematic, and entertaining content is better than stuff that sells the functional benefits of actual product or services
• But there's no connection between better and sales

Read that last line again.  The best ads doesn't link to sales.

The report, called "On the Road to a New Effectiveness Model," comes from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and American Associate of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).  So you could alternately imagine seeing something called "The Worldwide Need For More Nails," coming from the Hammer Manufacturers Association.

Although the ARF home page promotes its annual David Ogilvy Awards, its supposed research has little respect for the history that Ogilvy wrote.

The report looks back less than wistfully to those halcyon days of the 20th century, back when advertising was dominated by one-way, transactionally-focused media.  Such archaic media, and the creative that clogged it, is just out of date in our modern world of collaboration, co-creation and interactive media, moving one guru quoted in a story about the research in Adweek (10/29/07) to bloviate, "What worked 30 years ago with a 30-second spot doesn’t work today."

Talk about confusing the medium with the message.

I thought getting people to buy things was the ultimate, most important, and really the sole purpose of communicating with a marketplace in the first place.  We can review reactions to commercials as if we were watching movies or tasting fine wine, but no amount of esoteric "engagement" takes the place of tangible business results.

Yet the ARF sees in its research "...powerful pieces of evidence for the impact of advertising."

David Ogilvy would have seen something else in the results.  A problem. 

Ogilvy spent his career building brands through compelling, actionable advertising.  I know his chosen medium was print -- how Dark Ages of him! -- but he saw, and delivered for his clients, brands through simple statements of fact wrapped in creative that got your attention. 

I doubt he would have endured more than a few seconds of blather about engagement, emotional connections, or relationships with brands without asking "so, how do we translate that into sales?"

I know it doesn't sound marvelously 21st Century expansive or sexy, but branding and advertising used to be sorta synonymous back in prehistoric times.  Or at least both activities were grounded in the same sales goal.  The media might have change since then, but the central importance of the message remains, doesn't it? 

If we've decided that our purpose is to entertain, no wonder the researchers can't find a connection to sales.  The idea that branding is now so esoteric, vague, and distanced from reality to require a three-year study to say that consumers like stories is, well, quite a tall tale. 

Credit to Mark Truss of JWT, who is a lone voice of reason in the AdWeek story: "Without the tools to measure and link back to business metrics," he says, "marketers and advertisers are not going to embrace [this approach]."

Mark, meet David.  I suspect you miss him, too.

Google's Inertial Momentum

Irrespective of the massive innovation and advertising efforts of its competitors, Google commanding share of search has increased >11% this year, from 52.6% in January to 58.5% in October.

And these ComScore estimates are the conservative ones: Hitwise has the percentages well into the 60s.

Why the success?  The gurus quoted in the AdAge story on it cite Google's "viral and branding power," and that it has "...dong a heck of a job continuing to build its brand."

If that's true, it's the most unique, contrary-to-accepted-wisdom, sneak-up-on-you branding case history ever not written.  No wonder it makes for a facile citation for everyone; nobody is diving into the why.  Here's my take:

• Don't underestimate the value of habit.  I wonder how many people us Google without even knowing it?  It's the default search engine in my Safari browser, and in Firefox, too (isn't it?).  Consciously choosing search is kind of like having to worry about the brand of freon gas in my fridge.  I don’t really care how it works.  Technologists often step over the fine line between offering choices and requiring unnecessary, sometimes uncomfortable, and therefore unlikely decisions.  Getting users to use something out of habit could be a viable brand strategy: subscriptions and auto-replenishment contracts prove this point.  How many lovers of the Google brand are really routine users, whom Google should love?
• Becoming a generic term maybe isn't so bad?  Conventional branding theology argues against brand names becoming generic nouns or verbs.  Xerox and Kleenex spent lots of time and money in hopes that people would "make copies" instead of xerox things, or blow their noses in "tissues" rather then kleenexes.  Maybe they got it backwards?  Every time somebody thinks they need to google something, doesn't that promote brand awareness?  Further, it almost has a negative connotation for other engines that don't google, but simply search.  Googling is better because, well, that's just what you do.  It owns the behavior

• Customer satisfaction is a great branding competitive barrier.  Google awareness has very little to do with its brand promises; in fact, I'm not sure most consumers know what to expect from search at all (the number of searches completed satisfactorily is shockingly low, probably because people don’t know how to use it).  In fact, low expectations in this category probably work in Google's favor, both because there's less incentive to seek an alternative, and less reason to embrace a nuanced or slight improvement.  We're back to routine and being generic as more powerful attributes than the most imaginatively brilliant brand advertising
• Corporate behaviors matter more than brand marketing. Back in 1999, Google considered a strategic branding plan from Zyman Marketing Group, my former employer, and rejected it for a "press first" approach to promotion (according to John Battelle's great book, The Search).  Another factoid that most marketers miss is that press usually results from actions, not simply declarations or hype; a successful pitch needs to promote a substantive business behavior, if only to have any relevance to people who hear or read about it.  It begs the question why lots of companies (especially in consumer packaged goods) waste time and money getting press coverage for marketing activities.  Google has been busy doing things, like offering email, office services online, yadda yadda.  It's an engine not just for search, but for generating credible news stories

• Could brand communications cheapen all of the above? Imagine if Google did things like hire acrobats dressed in its corporate colors to repel down the sides of buildings, or ran hilariously obscure creative ads and viral videos?  Ah, awareness has absolute value...only not when it comes to business results or, in this instance, search engine usage.  Had we been forced to endure the same nonsense from Google that we got from, say, Ask (incomprehensible ads on the intricacies of search algorithms), it would have strengthened the imaginary brand while actually harming the reality of the business

It's quite possible Google is gaining market share because it just keeps doing what it does.  It requires no branding secret, or none that anybody in the branding racket would want to highlight. 

The Google brand has inertial momentum. 

A New Online Ad Model

Eureka!  I think I've solved the riddle about measuring online ad efficacy:

Don't run ads.

Lots of companies are running online ads, of course.  AP reports they'll spend $20 billion this year, which is 25% increase, and a likely under-estimate.  Considering the time people of all ages are spending online -- which is somewhat additive to time spent with analog media, but the physical reality of only so many hours in a day means there's substitution going on, sometimes significantly -- there's an ongoing debate underway within the Media Creative Industrial Complex on how to compare it to traditional media.

You see, there's been an elegantly simple equation supporting the ad world for almost a century now, and it goes something like this:

• Consumers are receptive to new products and services
• Making them aware correlates with sales
• Media outlets deliver that awareness
• Therefore, you buy exposure (readers, listeners, watchers) and place ads

This equation stopped adding up long before there was something called the Internet. 

Back in the 1960s, while some collegians were messing around with a glorified science-fair project called ARPAnet, the rest of us woke up, and got very cynical and distrusting of advertising.  It was:

• A generational thing (the Boomers were the first to come of age in a mediaverse of information, albeit analog)
• A technical thing (media choices had started to multiply, so there was no ‘authorized’ voice to obey)
• A cultural thing (the era of 1950s affluence and conformity had bred rejection among its progeny)

So, while we remember ads getting funnier, edgier, and marketing more pervasive along with them, we readers, listeners, and watchers were already getting less trusting, more distracted, and harder overall to convince or keep loyal.  The seeds of today's churning, chaotic mediaverse were sown back in those days.  Like most epoch-changing moments, we really didn't see what was happening when it was happening.

But the equation started to break down, just as the system set up to benefit from it -- companies allocating massive budgets, agencies ready to create ways to spend it, and media outlets with places to put the ads -- chugged along, and does so to this day.  Its correlation between brand awareness and sales is somewhat vague (and often times wholly unconnected), but it still yields sums, generally and sometimes, to keep lots of people employed.

Enter the Internet.

It kind of seems like people are reading, listening, and watching the same ways they used to consume via traditional media, sort of.  You can create stuff, and people experience it.  There are new ways to make that happen, like user-generated content and social activities like sharing and comment, but it's still an advertising medium, right?  People click and we can measure it, but they used to change TV channels and, after all, we figured out how to measure that.  So the question we should ask ourselves is "how can we make the ad equation work the same way online?"

Maybe not.  The Internet can't fix an ad model that was crapping out before anybody went online.

We can try to measure clicks, logs, cookies, page views, forwards, comments, edits, stalagmites, or whatever, but it's never going to be the same as buying access to an interested consumer audience that can be told things that they'll believe and follow.  That's because they're not there anymore.

It's possible that there is no ad model for the Internet, no easy way to migrate a practice  born of, and wedded to, a particular time and circumstance in world history, and replicate it so that everyone can burn through those budgets allocated for advertising and enabled by comfortable measurement standards from Nielsen, Arbitron, etc.   

Perhaps it's not just a different medium, but not a medium at all?  Maybe it's a place?  A behavior?  Who knows?

Imagine if we'd not spent the 20th Century perfecting the practice of marketing and branding (I know, impossible, but humor me), and just discovered this newfangled gizmo that lets people do new and different things at the touch of a button.

How would we use the medium to connect with them in meaningful, relevant ways?

I might be through ads.  It might not be. 

It would help to solve the riddle if we stopped trying to make our favorite answer fit the question. 

Warrior, Brown & Rubinstein

A new Silicon Valley VC?  A hoity-toity law firm?  Maybe the latest power-chord rock trio?

No, just three execs with three different pedigrees when it comes to handling the confluence of technology hardware and software.

First, there's Padmasree Warrior, who left Motorola after 23 years, serving most recently as its chief technology officer, to wreak the same havoc at Cisco.  Ms. Warrior's claim to fame is her conviction about "seamless mobility," which is one of those catch-phrases that feels like it's saying a lot generally, while not really saying anything in particular.

The last dozen or so iterations of Motorola have been stunningly unsuccessful at producing anything more than catch-phrases that might have momentarily mollified its stock critics, but consistently failed to manage the relationship between hardware and real life. 

Can anyone say Iridium?  How about Razr and then...well, good question. 

Mobile phones are about as mobile as you can get with communications these days, and there's little that's seamless about anything you do on a Motorola product (or any handheld, really).  It's hard to wax poetic about postage-sized video ubiquity when calls get dropped, the interface is kinda kludgey, and customer service varies by carrier.

There's the rub. 

Motorola is in the hardware business world, but its customers live in the hardware-meets-software-and-service world.  It's grossly unfair, I know.  Imagine if a musician recorded a brilliantly beautiful CD and then, when the player malfunctioned at a consumer's home, she blamed the band?  Or how about a company builds a great car, but a buyer drives it into a foot-deep pothole...so he holds the automaker accountable for the road?

But that's the way it is.

So having a hardware vision of "seamless mobility" is kind of like architects designing an artistically perfect public square without accounting for the fact that people will actually have to walk, drive, use, or otherwise loiter in it. 

It's not a hardware thing.  If Cisco has imported this so-called vision, I humbly suggest that you sell its stock.

Greg Brown is the new CEO at Motorola, and he might have a slightly different take on hardware and software.  Although publicly vowing to he'll stick to the politically-correct branding nonsense, he acknowledged in the Chicago Tribune that "...software will be an even more important driver of Motorola's success."  He stated in the same interview that he wanted to focus also on "functionality," which sounds scarily gearheaded of him, but he actually ran a software company for a few years, so maybe there's hope. 

Motorola needs as new gizmo like it needs a hole in the head, yet there are endless opportunities to build, market, and serve uses for devices that integrate communications -- not just talking, songs, and inane video clips, but information and knowledge, sometimes behind-the-scenes -- into everyday experience.  We're going to be living in a world of ubiquitous information sooner vs. later (see yesterday's and last Friday's Dim Bulb entries on the nascent world of Augmented Reality, or "AR"), which will entail connecting every one to everyone else. 

Call that future "seamless mobility" or call it "Fred."  Just do it.  There's a slight, course-reversing sort of possibility that Motorola might actually build hardware and software combinations, and thus become relevant again.

Speaking of relevance, there's Jon Rubinstein now running Palm.

Here's a guy who lived with one foot each in hardware and software during Apple's rebirth last decade, and helped conceive and deliver home-runs like the original iMac and the iPod mp3 player.  These elegantly designed hardware artifacts (remember the iMac teardrop?) would be incomplete without the software and services that support them.  In fact, in the case of iPod, one could argue that it wouldn’t matter much at all without iTunes as an integral component.  Apple's products fully blur the line between hardware and software.

Palm is pretty much only a blur.  Maybe a smudge. 

It has given up its relevance, and much market share, to other hardware companies.  Now Apple has entered the fray with iPhone.  The world needs another handheld manufacturer like, well, like Motorola needs a new gizmo, and that fact probably weighs heavily on Rubinstein’s mind as he is reportedly frantic with efforts to shore up the quality of Palm’s hardware. 

I suspect what he’ll accomplish next, however, is come up with products, software, and services that are truly integrated. 

There's little reason to believe that Cisco's Warrior even grasps the potential for such an approach, or that Motorola's Brown will be able to steer such a mismanaged, giant ship in its direction.  But Rubinstein could do it with Palm, mostly because 1) he's done it before, more than once, and b) Palm is small and desperate enough to actually make it happen.  After all, these are the guys who pretty much invented the PDA category, didn't they?

If this dim bulb had to bet, that's where I'd put my money. 

Augmented Reality Pt. 2

In last Friday's essay, we explored the concept of "augmented reality," or "AR," which is the label for the integration of information into the context of everyday experience.  We're not far away at all from a future wherein search, user rankings, reviews and directions, and any/all other information and knowledge will no longer be relegated to little devices and screens, but rather (and literally) superimposed on (and integrated into) our lives.

This isn't sci-fi; in fact, we could see the technology start hitting the consumer electronics shelves in time for Holiday '08.  It's already commonly applied in manufacturing, medicine, and in the military.  Lots of people are developing it, all over the world.

Once AR breaks into the consumer world, it will make information ubiquitous and real-time, giving everyone the same chance to access the same pools of data.  In addition to fundamentally changing how we live our lives, it'll have some serious implications for how brands are conceived and delivered. Here's a what if for what I think the three biggest, most broad impacts might be:

• Decisions will be outsourced -- Imagine having the combined power of Consumer Reports, Internet search, and the opinions of your most precious friends or groups of like-minded individuals available to you at any given moment of the day.  We'll start checking (or collecting) input to answer even the presumably easiest questions; it'll just be too easy to do, and too useful not to do.  That means a lot less decision-making based on unique or discreet personal opinion, and regularly outsourcing it instead to the communities and services that will augment our reality.  It's already happening online, as community groups (bloggers, their minions, and chat rooms)  are where brand marketing information is distilled, reviewed, and ultimately blessed (or not).  When AR arrives, the grocery shopper, for instance, may be able to see satisfaction rankings for clothing detergent superimposed on the shelves, or maybe check for qualitative comments with a group of moms.  The subsequent decision will have a lot less to do with the inert declarations of brand marketers
• That's why brand attributes will need to be actionable -- In a world wherein all media consumption is real-time, brand marketing will become inexorably intertwined with experience.  Think of all the viral media noise that makes the rounds via social media; AR will demand that it have a purpose by linking its consumption to reality.  This will mean that there’ll be little time or space to contemplate marketing, or to establish emotional (or other non-functional) attributes of brand. Information will need to become actionable...either supporting the conversations that influence or determine purchase decisions, or prompting behaviors by consumers at those moments they search for information, ask for a price, or do other real-world things.  It won't matter what people feel about a brand, as much as what they choose to do
• Brand management will be real-time -- Gone will be the cadres of marketers who "manage brand" via imagery, web copy, design standards, and all of the other pre-produced tools of communications.  The primary function of brand management will be to influence and direct (when possible) the conversations, searches, and to gather experiential prompts coming from consumers.  AR will integrate brands with living, so I could see customer service functions being greatly expanded to more actively participate in conversational media; creative directors looking outward to inspire and nudge viral media creators, as well as helping propagate it, versus focusing internally on producing creative that's on brand; publicists will need to locate almost every minute new information about company behaviors, or that of its communities, and share it so as to help influence the content of the ongoing conversation.

The imminent arrival of AR into our lives could end up a blessing for brand marketing, come to think of it.  It will take more people doing more things to influence and guide consumers' greatly enhanced need for -- and experience of - information. 

It might even make it easier to explain the stuff. 

Augmented Reality Pt.1

Forget the differences between reality and virtual reality, or that one is cooler than the other.

They're just going the merge.

The working label for this new experience is "augmented reality," or "AR," which I confuse with alternate reality, and which it isn't:

• Think of the jet fighter pilot who has gauges and other information illuminated in his goggles, or beamed onto the windows of his cockpit.  When he moves his eyes or head, the information moves with him, literally superimposed on his view
• Imagine a widget getting manufactured, and a vision of what it's supposed to look like superimposed over it, so you could see the assembly instructions in real-time, or a quality checker could more readily see discrepancies.  Imagine somebody using that technology to check structural integrity of bridges
• How about corporate trainers, or psychology therapists, using insertion of images into real-world situations in order to allow people to interact with them?  Imagine soldiers shooting at things actually "in front of them," and not relegated to the computer screens of simulation software.  Remote surgery is another example

You've encountered lots of emergent AR in everyday situations wherein additional information -- from the Internet, housed locally, whatever -- has been a part of your real-world, real-time experience, like credit checks when your card gets swiped, or store associates locating inventory from hand-held devices.  Conversely, you've probably visited a website that was able to call up information (like your stock portfolio, or list of previously-sent emails), which became a integral aspect of your experience. 

Now, imagine these experiences merged into a seamless experience of one reality:

• Restaurant reviews appear over doorways before you enter.  Ratings from other patrons hover in front of every item on the menu
• Various indices -- truth-telling, percentage of being right, likelihood to betray -- flash above people's heads, whether in a business meeting or floating through a party.  Ratios that are important to you -- like stock market activity, or the moving percentage of a project completed by your team -- are visible to you whenever you want
• Distances, whether completed or upcoming, hover before a jogger's head, as a constantly-adjusted time remaining figure appears before commuters stuck in rush-hour traffic.  Directions appear on car windows, just as if it were a jet fighter

Take it a step further, and 3-D objects are superimposed in your field of vision.  So you interact with tabletops and file cabinets that might reside in your office in Shanghai, or on a server in Bulgaria.  Ditto for people, so "teleconference," "IM," and "meeting at my desk" all become the same thing .  Factory workers in the innards of China "operate" machines and move materials that are tangible to them, only they physically exist exist in a different facility on the other side of the planet.

Things aren't real or virtual anymore, and you won't necessarily switch from one to the other.  Augmented reality integrates everything into a cohesive, new experience. 

It won't happen in time for this holiday season, but I predict that we're going to start seeing consumer tech product that deliver AR experiences.  They'll get all the media hype, rendering the most recent web-only (or reality-only) devices archaic, if not downright moot. 

What will it mean for brands?  Let's see...a democracy of non-commercial-controlled information, ubiquitously available 24/7...maybe not so good for traditional branding, and some interesting applications (and required behaviors) for social media and search, as every individual becomes a constantly engaged member of voting/assessing/commenting groups.

The things we now do "online" will become what we do anywhere along the line, just like everything we do as disparate individuals in the geophysical world will get linked into enties larger than ourselves. 

That's the subject of Augmented Reality Pt. 2 in Monday's Dim Bulb post.

By Any Other Name

Is customer relationship management just promotional selling by a classier and more nebulous name?

It is to the UK's Purple Parking, which recently sent the above-pictured email to a fellow dim bulber.  Pause for a moment, and stroll with me through the gloriously cluttered communication:

• The lead offer promotes a strange amount -- 12.5%, when most consumers "get" numbers in increments of 5 or 10, if they don't automatically default to "half" or fahgeddabouit -- and says that it's a discount on some total amount that appears nowhere
• A partner offer, I think, that has nothing to do with parking whatsoever.  Is it another discount deal?  A secret webstore shopper program?  Who knows?  But there are lots of brand logos to drive home the point...whatever it is
• A "club member" offer that promises reduced prices to registered users.  Yet my friend is already registered, which is why she got the email!  Also, are these discounts on top of the deal promised next to it?
• A "super offer" to forward the promo to friends...only what offer?  The member discount, or the holiday promo?
• More secret shopper stuff clutters the bottom-half of the email, making more than half this communication from a car parking firm utterly irrelevant to parking a car

There are two more amazing qualities of this CRM communication that aren't apparent in the above-pictured example:

1. The email misspelled the recipient's name.  Well, it left off the last letter of her admittedly long last name, as if the software ran out of character fields.  But it was a glaring error, all the more visible because it was at the opening of the communication
2. She'd already booked her holiday car park! Purple possessed her reservation, yet sent the email anyway, as if she were nothing more than an anonymous name on a list.

Which, of course, is exactly what she is to them.  A target.  A statistical possibility for revenue, offering the potential for a transaction upside with no apparent downside for trying.  At least not apparently to Purple.

I've struggled with the idea of managing relationships ever since the software started appearing late last century.  I just don'€™t believe people manage such things.  We manage entries in calendars with a pen or click, or manage CD collections by alphabetizing them.  There's an understanding of what we're trying to accomplish underlying the things and activities we hope to manage. 

But the tools we use don't do the managing; rather we do it, via our intentions and expectations.  CRM is a selling tool.  Customer relationships come from, and relate to, your brand.

In other words, while the goal of CRM should be to be able to see, understand, and somewhat predict sales and profitability -- and this would include all of the data integration and knowledge, so correspondence was not just accurate, but had some relevance to the user -- there should be a brand strategy that identifies and creates the content on which relationships with customers/consumers are based? 

This strategy wouldn't define brand as ad creative or colors of a logo or website.  It wouldn't be somehow "integrating" marketing activities or sharing content.  In fact, it wouldn't come from marketing at all, but rather from a collaboration between all of the operations in the business...to create the brand strategy, not just get lec