Dim Bulb

They're Here

A new strategy of installing TV monitors at Borders to show original programming, ads, and weather, will bring "knowledge and entertainment" to the affluent book browsers who spend an average of an hour in the store.  It'll also direct traffic to its web site and pave the way for more "cross-promotional deals with large media companies."

Voila.  Thus has this week's dim bulb award been won.

It's too easy to dis the concept of putting TVs in bookstores.  A million consumers are reminded each day of the inanity of the idea when they endure the white noise of monitors in Blockbuster outlets...and that's a video business.  Monitors sort of make sense in elevators.  Maybe in airport hallways. 

But not in a bookstore, or even in a cross media integrated entertainment content whatever they're calling themsleves-store.

I know that every aspect of our lives is becoming like every other aspect of our lives.  Each moment is an opportunity to interact with media, commerce, and the infinite cosmos.

So it's no great insight to exploit your customers for that brief time you have their attention.  Why stop with TVs?  Borders could install vending machines, sell space to jewelry kiosks, stock more impulse candy and plush, and allow Jehovah's Witness proselytizers to buy customer lists. 

But any bozo can find ways to waste someone else's time.  That's not branding, and it's not even good business.

I'd suggest instead that Borders -- and any brand name -- might want to figure out ways to differentiate offerings instead of mucking them up exploitative detritus.  Add real value.  Create a nowhere-else offering. 

The way to do that wouldn't be via communications tools -- which anybody can buy or promote -- but, rather, with behaviors.  Do things in unique ways, especially when it comes to businesses that offer experience instead of a particular proprietary product or service.

In this sense, the combination of things that happen in a Borders store, along with anything it might send to consumers directly or otherwise tell them via mass media, could be the elements of a truly integrated brand offering.

Here's what Borders could consider:

• Use multimedia to enhance the book business, not distract from it: There are probably cool ways to integrate multimedia with book displays, from simple links to movie versions (perhaps discounts), to screens that let browsers enjoy soundtracks, etc.  There's content upon which to organize the store, whether by title, genre, and/or release date, that could provide opportunities to make book browsing -- still the primary business, right? -- more engaging.  TVs running commercials are a distraction.  Tell people about better browsing experiences, and it might actually attract customers to stores
• Help consumers get more from books: I wonder how Borders could provide more context for the books it offers; right now, tables and shelves filled with titles is a pretty poor way to display them (especially when compared to the info available far more easily online).  There's got to be a better way.  Ditto for book reviews, reading clubs, special events.  I'd focus on things that must and can only happen in real world/real-time
• Do one better than the Internet regarding finding books (or any other media formats): It's unlikely that anyone would brave the weather, traffic, and our fellow citizens to go to a store and hope to find something that they would have a far better chance to find online.  Of course, some people might prefer looking in the geo-physical world, but the opportunity would be to make every possible aspect of that visit useful.  Using real people...employees...to provide information is a giant, useful variable in this regard.  Yet there are more people ready to help me at a Home Depot than there are in an average Borders (or in any book store)
• Make the entertainment component truly interactive, not canned: Readers are a uniquely involved, odd bunch (I consider myself one).  They have opinions, are curious, etc.  Couldn't Borders invent ways for its customer to interact with one another, not necessarily with canned advertising?  So, for instance, why not offer some real-time tracking of customer interests...maybe there's a "top 10" list to which every visitor contributes upon arrival to the store

Borders has lots of opportunities to approach its brand as a business, not a label that it puts over whatever it chooses to do. 

Televisions blathering on with commercials does little for the former, and isn't the strateregic idea for the latter.

Was It Any Elf’n Good?

26.4 million Americans -- one out of every 10 -- visited a holiday site that let them paste personal pictures on top of dancing elves, and then send the movie to friends.

Quick. What company sponsored it? 

If you guessed Office Max, you're right.  The company name was included in 6 of the 20 most common Internet search terms during the 4 weeks of December.  Maybe you were one of them.  We got elf emails from a half-dozen friends and family members.  It definitely was funny the first time, sort of.

The idea was that visiting the Office Max site, and making the connection between the movie and the company, were good things for the brand.  "We were looking to build the brand, warm up our image.  We weren't looking for sales.  We are third-place players in our industry, so we are trying to differentiate ourselves through humor and humanization," explained the company’s marketing honcho in Advertising Age.

Now that the store has been duly branded, I wonder what Office Max could have done to see impacts on its actual business:

• It could have had something to do with paper clips: If you buy the merits of thematic associations in branding (and I don't), couldn't the elf movie at least have had some element that linked it to an office products store?  Conceptually, Office Max could have run a spot showing a gun pointed at a dog's head, with the VO "come and buy something immediately, or the puppy dies."  The mid/long-term benefits of content-neutral branding is questionable.  Perhaps the dancers could have used giant pencils as canes or something
• What else could have happened on all those site visits? 26.4 million people showed up to download a stupid movie, and all they have to show for it is a statistic? There could have been anything added to the site, from a mercenary sweepstakes to some registration/engagement element, to better exploit all that attention.
• In the end, it still wasted my time, however pleasantly: Sure, we're still "talking about it," but so what?  The only people who collect a surcharge from such branding "results" are  the gurus who make a living claiming that such branding has any value (don't you just love that circular logic?).  Office Max makes zilch on it.  Could the funny spot have included some benefit, like a discount?  Maybe an incentive to visit the store?  How about some follow-up, as the promo is invisible on the site now?
  

Ultimately, what matters isn't brand awareness, but sales, and there's no reason why even the most obtuse, funny, and irrelevant branding tool can't (or shouldn't) have a connection to prompting sales.  To think that there's reason for it otherwise is to ensure that your communications stay obtuse, funny, or irrelevant. 

Which is what the Office Max's elf campaign may well be, in the end.

Note to self: let's watch how retail and Internet sales did during the period the elf video was available.  That would be a quick measure on whether the movie was any elf'n good.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

A record $27.5 billion in ad agency accounts went into play in 2007, as clients elbowed one another to get chairs closer to the railing on the Titanic.

Those are some expensive chairs.  Half of the total amount spent the year prior was up for grabs.  The numbers, compiled by Adweek, cover accounts worth more than $20 million.  You can imagine similar turmoil in smaller accounts.  Or perhaps more. 

Are clients looking for fresh ideas?  New ways to engage with consumers?  Interactive tools to propagate branding via distributed technology devices?  Digital brilliance?  Branded entertainment content, cool software tools, and inventive metrics for ROI?

Nope.  They're looking for customers.  And to sell things to them.

That's why all this chair rearranging feels less like a game that nobody can win.  There are different people sitting in different chairs.  Everything moving into different positions.  Maybe a few new chairs added to the arrangement.   

But the ship is still sinking.

It's interesting that the five most active categories of industries swapping ad agencies are each racing headlong to become commodities: computers/software, telecommunications, packaged goods, automotive, and retail.  It seems the more they try to differentiate themselves through the magic of brand marketing, the more they appear the same.

Yet that's exactly what the $27.5 billion was spent on last year, and why the amount could well be surpassed this year, as more clients get more frustrated by the lack of any business results for their branding efforts.

I know that old habits are hard to break, but you'd think someone would start questioning the very premise of allocating such vast sums of money to a process that you could say sort of looks like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Consumer disinterest in the traditional approaches of marketing is not a problem that ad agencies can fix.

Technology, experience, economics, and a host of other factors have changed every aspect of how consumers learn about, choose, use, and repurchase products and services. 

Advertising, or any marketing function...and any old or new media through which it’s delivered...doesn't influence, and certainly doesn't control, many of the ways consumers interact with businesses. 

Brand matters far less than operations, customer service, product sourcing, manufacturing integrity, human resources and return policies, not to mention all of the third-party conversations, ratings, and inquiries swirling through the blogosphere.   

It's these functions and activities that drive sales.

So agencies can ‘experiment’ as much as they want, but they're just busy finding new ways to spend money on an old approach to influence consumers.  And busy spending client money.

What would be truly experimental would be for clients to take some percentage of the billions they waste on brand marketing, and give it to the rest of the organization, with the challenge of finding ways to influence sales.  Don't call it branding.

Call it good business.  Relevant business.

Instead of rearranging the chairs, maybe the rest of the organization could help come up with a design for a new boat.

Ask Has the Answer

Search engine upstart Ask might have the right idea for building market share and profits, but only after years of aggressively pursuing the wrong ones.

The silver bullet strategy?  Start attracting segments of searchers based on particulars of place, topic, or detailed requirements.  Or at least that's what I think it is going to do.

The news from Ask has been pretty consistently inconsistent ever since IAC bought it in 2005.  It used to be called "Ask Jeeves," and featured a logo of a butler holding a serving plate.  I seem to remember that it was the search engine into which you could comfortably type a complete sentence, literally asking it a question.  Get it?  Ask.

The brand numbnuts completely destroyed this memorable (and actionable) branding, because they felt the company shouldn't target  "novices" ( i.e. most consumers).  It scrapped the Jeeves connection, and then plowed $123 million in advertising to, er, novices, with the biggest chunk going to TV spots.

Its print ads were either incomprehensible, or touted some abstraction of its service that read like a case for one oxygen molecule providing a better breathing experience than another.

Ask's share of the search market hovers around 4.3%.  Google's has grown to 58.4, and it has spent on marketing about a fourth of what Ask did to get it.

My hopefulness stems from the appointment of Jim Safka as Ask's new CEO.  He comes from running Match.com, which he successfully built by understanding who was using the service, why, when, from where, and then got busy finding more of those people.

This is smart business, and forms the basis for smart branding in the search business.  Here’s why:

• The world doesn't need a handful of generic search engines.  I'd argue that most consumers "choose" Google by default, if not wholly unconsciously.  There just aren't awfully noticeable differences between search results on one engine or another
• Most searches take more than a few tries before users are happy with the results.  Lots of them are abandoned entirely
• There's lots of talk about engines (like Google) getting smarter at guessing what people are looking for.  But this innovation presumes that people know what they want in the first place
• It doesn’t help that all search interfaces are clumsy, so there's a UI hurdle, too: not only do people not know what they're looking for, but most searchers really don't know how to phrase, parse, or otherwise tell the computer terminal what it is they’re trying to do anyway
• The added fact that the engines tee-up paid and free results makes it all ever-more confusing.
• So I'd wager that achieving differentiation on functionality isn’t going to come from providing better answers, but rather from helping users ask better questions

Ask.  Get it?

It could do this via any number of strategies:

• Developing a series of vertical search functions that made Ask the go-to destination for, say, travel searchers, or shoe shoppers
• Creating a new UI that simplified the search process.  Could this be separate fields for each word (to this day, most people don't know what, if any, impact using a comma, semi-colon, or other punctuation will have, or if putting a phrase within quotation marks changes the search parameters from those of a mere series of words)?  How about some better customer service that helped searchers (automated or off-shored)?
• Inventing some better delineation between paid and organic search results.  The whole point now is to confuse the two, contrary to what Google, Yahoo, or the other biggies might claim.  Imagine if Ask could go to a dedicated group of searchers, deliver a uniquely useful interface to them, and provide greater credibility of the fairness of the results it delivers?  All it has to to is to shelve the inane branding stuff it’s been throwing at consumers, and focus on the who, what, where, when, and why that will give it a real chance to differentiate itself.

I think that's where Safka is going.  "We have to be the first place some audience goes to," he said when his appointment was announced.

Search "bright bulb," and you might find his name. 

Sprint to the Finish

Is Sprint's problem its branding, or its business?

Subscribers are leaving like rats scurrying from a sinking ship.  It lost almost 900,000 subscribers last quarter.  The company is going to fire nearly 1 in 10 of its employees, and close 8% of its retail stores.  It has warned Wall Street not to expect anything even close to good news this year.

Sprint merged with Nextel Communications in 2005.  After realizing whatever immediate gains were to be got from firing people and cutting other corners, the company got to work on the fact that it was now operating two different, apparently incompatible networks. 

It didn't work so well.  Still doesn't.  Customer complaints went way up.  So did dissatisfaction.  Naturally, defections have followed.

Competitors like AT&T have had their own technical issues to overcome (merging with Cingular didn’t "fix" AT&T's spotty record), but come out with sexy product offers to distract and win new customers.  T-Mobile's innovative pricing plans have stood out in an industry full of offers that are notoriously and numbingly complex.

What did Sprint do to deal with the impact its technology issues were having on its customers? 

It created really pretty branding.

You've likely seen it, either on TV, the Internet, or in print.  People "painting" pictures in the air with lights, kind of like leaving the camera aperture open so a flashlight becomes a pen?  The spots were artsy and different, and clearly cost a lot of money to produce and then plaster all over the place.  They inspire me in a purposeless, feel-good way.

The campaign wasn't any dumber than those of its competitors, and perhaps marginally better than AT&T's incomprehensibly expensive and inert rebranding (Sprint didn't commission its own rock theme song, only to play 3 seconds of it). 

And there's usually a disconnect, or gap, between the soaring aspirations of branding and the mundane operations of business.  The mobile industry collectively has spent oodles on pretending otherwise.

The problem is that the gap between Sprint's branding and business was (and is) just too huge. 

So does Sprint have a problem with its branding, or with its business?

Yes.

The company is a stunning example of the fallacies inherent in traditional approaches to branding.  No marketer should have been asked to create marketing communications so utterly divorced from the reality of the business, or allowed to present it to customers who very likely knew of that reality, either directly or otherwise.

It's also evidence of the shortcomings of operational programs that aren't also considered branding efforts.  Every dissatisfied customer was a branding event, not a problem or issue that brand could overcome.  Users didn't experience the Sprint brand...they were the brand, and every company dysfunction a branding element.

Sprint's branding and business aren’t separate, or even as complementary.  They are one-in-the-same. 

So what could it do differently? 

Well, first and foremost, it must integrate its reality into its communications, and find ways to get consumers to endure, if not outright embrace, its service woes.  This could mean finding distractions, like AT&T's iPhone, or incentives, like making use of its promised WiMax network a benefit for customer loyalty.  Perhaps plain 'ol disclosure of its efforts, combined with ongoing recognition of the lingering issues, would go a long way toward being credible and relevant to consumers again.

But I'd get the brand marketers and operations folks into the same room to figure it out.  I love painting in the air with bright lights as much as the next guy. 

It's not enough. 

Customer Loyalty is Real-Time

I put "customer loyalty" in the same category of happy myths as those of creation science, voter intelligence, and brand equity.

Most loyalty programs are just another form of sales incentive.  Call them what you want, but point or mileage accrual engenders little more trust or conviction than an annual holiday bonus check.  Repeat customers as likely to be trapped by habit or circumstance as by any sense of commitment. 

Dogs are loyal to their owners.  People are rarely, if ever, loyal to products and services.

That is, other than every time they buy or use them.

Loyalty isn't something that builds over time as much as gets delivered, proven, and enjoyed every time consumers interact...either with what they've bought, or with who sold it to them.  It's not what they do, but what companies do. 

In a very real sense, loyalty is something that companies provide to their customers.  And it's real-time.

This is one giant bummer for all of the gurus who preach about emotional relationships with brands that can transcend demands of price and performance.  Branding is supposed to create happy myths with which customers engage.  In this alternate reality, words speak louder than actions, and companies can invent things to say that don’t necessarily connect with what they do.

In reality reality, most of this branding is nonsense.

What brands businesses instead aren't the touchpoints of communications, but each and every instance of customer experience.  It's not enough that the main ones are more likely positive than not, or that customer complaints result in some after-the-fact make-good reward.  Don't record the phone conversation "to ensure customer satisfaction," or "for training purposes." 

Satisfy me.  Every time.  Prove your loyalty to me, and I'll keep giving you my money.

So, for instance, while I've been a happy Verizon customer for many years now, my phone recently crapped out, so I went to the store to get a cheap replacement.  Only there's no such thing; instead, all the harried salesperson could do was "move up my two-year renewal period" and, if I committed to another 24 months of service, I could get a $50 credit on buying a new $100+ phone. 

This was Verizon challenging me to prove my loyalty, not earning or reaffirming it.

Blockbuster does the same thing when it wastes lots of money on mailers and library title deals with no apparent regularity, then refuses to credit an account when a frequent renter missed the new release return window by an hour (not a real story, mind you).  Ditto for the airline that keeps its super-dooper elite customers waiting in the dark on a delayed flight, or just as bounced from a cancelled flight as everyone else.  So does every nuisance IVR menu that dares customers to reenter name, rank, and serial number, or Internet retailer that doesn't pay postage on returns.

There are a zillion little moments in which companies can prove loyalty to customers, only few are realized or delivered as such. 

I think that's what makes customer loyalty a myth. 

Nobody these days has a residual desire to reward companies when they come up short.  Yet there are immense opportunities to use those instances to benefit the business and the brand.

My Radical Plan for Saving Sears

With profits expected to be less than half what they were this time last year, Sears has announced plans to restructure itself out of the department store business.

Chairman Edward S. Lampert will divvy the company into 50 or more separate operating businesses, each with its own operating exec and structure.  Some famous Sears brand names, like Kenmore and Craftsman, will be among the new, stand-alone businesses.

This new structure will create "greater control, autonomy, and authority," and, according to the Wall Street Journal, breathe new life into a slow-moving Sears' culture that Lampert has characterized as "inefficient."

Now, I'm a dim bulb, but this move seems bass-ackwards.

Sears has lost customers to specialized retailers.  Not only can people buy electronics at Best Buy and clothing at Abercrombie & Fitch, but Wal-Mart has assumed the role of one stop shop for people shopping on price.

Successive waves of traditional brand "repositionings" have give us slogans ("the softer side of Sears"), celebrity clothing lines (Cheetah Girls), and store inventories that seem at once filled to excess, yet fail to include the one item you’re looking for.  Many millions have been squandered on advertising, Internet sites, and the other standard tools of marketing communications, in hopes of convincing consumers to overlook these limitations and toothless inventions

So what does Sears do?  Break up its brands and departments into separate companies.  The new corporate strategy is to disconnect the dots that gave consumers a department store concept, albeit a dysfunctional one. 

It's unclear how or by whom the actual stores will be managed, nor how these various independent entities will coordinate, let alone cooperate, to fill them.  It's quite possible that one or more businesses might look elsewhere to reach consumers, or get spun-off altogether.

Lampert could make a ton more money on the move, as you can almost see the 'ol corporate raider nonsense about "unlocking shareholder value" lurking in the shadows of the as-yet unreleased deal details. 

But if there wasn't a compelling reason to visit Sears before, it's highly unlikely there's going to be one now.   

I have a radical plan it could follow instead.  With the benefit of no inside knowledge, and certainly no accountability, here’s my wild recommendation:

Become the geophysical front-end for the Internet.

Make Sears stores the places where people can peruse a variety of products, order and than take delivery of any products available online, and provide the service and support for those transactions. 

Yup, I know.  Nuts.  But think about it.

Sears was founded in the late 1880s as the on-stop shop for the material aspirations of entire generations of Americans.  The Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog was a de facto search engine, delivering a guide to what consumers believed were not just the best things available to them, but effectively everything that they could buy. 

Lampert bemoans the risks of predicting consumer trends long before there's enough information to qualify those estimates as anything better than guesses.  So imagine Sear skipping the predicting entirely, and redefining itself as the gateway to whatever is hot.

Sears as the bricks-and-mortar access-point for today's online shopping experience:

• Could host branded boutiques for the right price
• Provide not just Internet shopping access sites in-store, but create intellectual capital that provided context, ratings, whathaveyou (how about marshalling its customers to become the ad-hoc raters of all things buyable?  Talk about managing social networks with a purpose...it might even be able to charge for such access and info)
• Offer some easy payment options that were an improvement on PayPal and/or your credit card of choice?  Maybe some sort of insurance, or accrual points?
• Add delivery and storage options, so there was a reason to buy things and have them shipping to the Sears store.  Maybe create some easy attachment sale option, so taking delivery of, say, a stereo receiver meant that consumers got a great, one-time deal on cables
• Serve as the sales & support venue.  This is potentially the biggest opportunity, I think, as no matter how "easy" it is to return stuff bought online, it’s still kinda hard.  Also, when it comes to gizmos, lots of people want to bring devices to repair vs. ship them.  Could Sears become the sales & support advocate for consumers buying online?

Oh, and by the way, all of the above behaviors would drive people to its stores, so it could also sell loads of merchandise that had nothing to do with Internet shopping (with the right price/value strategy, it could use the Internet services to draw consumers, and then flip them to Sears purchases)

It would be a reach.  A radical proposition.  A risky venture.  Maybe it's the wrong idea entirely.

But I can pretty much for sure tell you that tearing apart the company so it can "better compete" is a cover story for dissolving the company, piece by piece.  That's what equity people do best.

What brand marketers do best is inspire and motivate customers.  They should stop throwing good money after bad, and coming up with lame branding campaigns, and get their heads around a truly radical proposal.

Branded Waiting

After all of the zillions in hours and money spent on making the world's corporations customer-centric, there's one brand experience that most companies seem dedicated to delivering: making consumers wait.

Need to call customer service, billing, technical support, or reservations?  Be prepared to wait.  Going shopping at a retail store?  There's almost certainly going to be a line.  Buy something online, and there's a better than one-in-two chance that you’ll have to wait for your delivery. 

You're going to wait to get through an airport, find help in a hospital emergency room, or get into a sporting event.

In fact, it's as if we consumers wait longer for everything, even as the technology with which we interact is faster, smarter, and more pervasive than ever before.  Even the stuff that doesn't take so long feels like it does, thanks in part to how fast we get the things that we usually get fast (like Internet search results).

What's going on?

I'm not necessarily interested in why...there are probably lots of reasons, from an over-dependence on automated systems, and under-dependence on retaining real employees instead of slashing payrolls, to the independence of customer service departments from the rest of the enterprise (and from marketing in particular).

I'm more interested in the what of waiting.  Business that would sacrifice little animals if it got consumer attention don't know what to do with it. 

On the phone, it's sometimes filled with a complex series of IVR prompts.  Maybe a little elevator music in the background.  Mostly, it's just a chore, usually transformed into a series of hurdles erected to "serve you better" when the outcome requires you to repeat everything you entered into the keypad if you're lucky enough to reach a warm body.

Waiting in geophysical reality is usually occupied with not knowing: the lack of information on why the plane is delayed; what that store associate doing in the back room; why are all of the sales people avoiding eye contact with me; or where is the service guy? 

I guarantee you that few brand strategists consider these experiences as being branded, yet that's exactly what they are.

Consumers already assign value to waiting, most strikingly by how much they're willing to pay (or do) to avoid it (using special entrances, exclusive clubs, secret phone numbers, and other work-arounds, if they qualify/can afford them).

But for the rest of us schlubs who can't pay our way past it, waiting is an ugly, ever-present factor in almost every purchase or service experience.  Our "engagement’"with brands is often not so engaging at all.  Or worse.

So would it be possible to turn these moments into brand-positive experiences?

Could we brand waiting?

I have no idea.  But some enterprising businesses might want to look at understanding the what of waiting, by doing such things as:

• Add waiting to your brand attributes: The first thing to do is to incorporate the experience into your overall measures of brand.  Waiting is not an externality, at least not to anything except beautiful branding PowerPoint slides.  Is it a negative that somehow reduces the value of your brand, however you calculate it?  Does it impact customer value individually?  Are there additive impacts, per customer or by segment or product family?  Come up with the math that makes waiting a real component of what your marketing delivers
• Once you’ve done the math, you can decide 1) how to track it, and 2) what you will, and won’t, tolerate.  Should there be a real-time measure of wait times?  What would you do with that knowledge if you knew it?  Perhaps add additional service staff to the system after wait times passed so-and-so threshold?  Is there some automatic incentive or reward that goes to customers once wait times have gotten too long (an automated voice telling me that "...the average wait time is 34 minutes..." is great transparency, but doesn't do a lot for your brand).  Or maybe you don't care at all about the waiting, but at least you'll know if and how much it impacts your business
• If waiting is unavoidable, find ways to use it.  Sharing information is an obvious element, especially if your business isn't necessarily responsible for the wait.  For instance, I don't know why airlines don't make a steadfast, ironclad habit out of updating delayed passengers every 10 minutes.  Giving people more options is another one, like opting-out of the wait and putting the onus on the company to do the contacting (if only there were guarantees on it, too).  Here's a whacky idea: why not monetize waiting, so consumers who are willing to wait longer are given some value -- frequent waiter points, that accrue and can be used on purchases or repairs -- while those that aren’t can get connected immediately?
• Admit that nothing is unavoidable, really.  The best solution might be to make sure you fix the problems that cause waiting (or, put negatively, waiting is the result of a company outsourcing its inefficiencies to its customers).  Put in place the ROI metrics to see whether it impacts your business.  My bet is that it would.

One way or another, waiting gets branded.  For most brand marketers, it's the corollary of a giant, invisible pause.  Only with teeth.

I'm still waiting to talk about it more.

Karl Marx Was Right

Communism's erstwhile propagandist Karl Marx predicted that capitalism’s corporations would tend to merge, agglomerating into ever-bigger monopolies that dominated markets and commoditized experience.

He was right, only not in the ways he expected. 

Just look at McDonald's and Starbucks.  And blame branding, not capitalism.

Both companies seem hellbent on becoming like one another.  Sure, Starbucks started out selling cups of java in stylishly dark bohemian settings, while McDonald's began selling burgers in jarringly bright family settings.  But now they share:

• Menu: You can get a slimy sandwich at Starbucks, and a cup of fancy coffee at McDonald's.  Overall, the menus are similarly detailed and confusing
• Patrons: Hear that screaming baby or inane teenager rant?  You could be in either restaurant, as they seem to attract the same people (or at least share an attraction to families)
• Experience: Both restaurants have counters lined/surrounded by various machines that make noise.  All of the junky impulse chotchkes for sale at Starbucks make it about as visually jarring as a plastic-covered McDonald's
• Service: A line is a line, and a harried employee is not so much fun, whether you call her an associate or a barrista.  There's often a wait involved for your order at either restaurant, yet no accommodation for it.

So, while recent news coverage has focused on how McDonald's plans to employ coffeemakers (machines and people) to compete with Starbucks, I think there’s been a bigger trend underway for far longer:

These companies, like many businesses, seem to think that all it takes to sell the same things to the same people is a unique name, logo, or other invention of branding.

But we know that merely calling a country a 'people's republic' never made it a democracy.  In branding, just like in politics, actions (eventually) speak louder than words.

Perhaps the market for caffeine and junk food is large enough to support both businesses; the real differentiator might simply be location, in that consumers will choose the brand name that's closest to them when they're hungry or thirsty.

At some point, the functions of these businesses really do merge, perhaps not as legally united entities, but certainly in the reality of consumer experience. 

Brand marketing can declare conceptual differences forever, but can't change the fact that both companies operate restaurants that generally look and feel (and taste) like one another.

Changing reality would mean doing things...in reality...like having the guts to target a particular type of consumer (or consuming moment)...maybe skip adding that next menu impulse item, even if it looks so lucrative on a spreadsheet.

But, no.  I bet we're just going to get more brilliant communications.  And McDonald's and Starbucks will more aggressively chase one another's customers and, in doing so, become more and more similar.

Ok, so it's not a monopoly, as Marx warned. 

It's just so damn boring.

Listerine's Simply Smart Ad

Listerine's latest TV commercials suggest the benefits of using mouthwash at night. 

The creative isn't all that distracting, and there's no inside joke or smarmy self-contemplating humor to wade through.  Viewers are not accosted with a brand extension, differently shaped bottle, or other invented wrapper intended to draw attention when none is warranted.

Instead, the ad does two things simply, and simply smart:

1. Demonstrates functionality: the spot highlights all of the nasty goop that procreates in our mouths overnight, and reminds us that Listerine kills most of it
2. Creates new relevance: By using the product at night, consumers can preempt the microbial dance party in their mouths and get a running start on fresher breath in the morning

Now, Listerine can brand itself silly on those two qualities.  But first it has established a connection to consumer needs and desires. 

Seems like putting the horse before the cart, for a change. 

It won't win awards for the creative, and it's possible nobody watching it will remember it five minutes later.  And if you make the mistake of going to the Listerine web site, you'll find an incomprehensible interface, and lots of differently colored bottles that, I suspect, all contain the same glop (so the brand gurus still get to exact their measure of consumer time-wasting).

But for those consumers lucky enough to see only the TV ad, I bet they'll remember functionality and relevance.  And I think that means Listerine gets them a hell of a lot closer to becoming buyers.

Now, how could this form the basis for some smart branding that would continue to move people to purchase?  Imagine using social media with a purpose:

• Forget hoping that consumers will talk about the ads themselves...how about prompting conversations about gingivitis and all the other nasties that haunt mouths?
• Even if there were controversy -- do you really need to do it, does it really work? -- it would prompt more interest and investigation, and every one of those queries to Listerine could represent a potential sale
• Getting something into Internet Search to support the new relevance would help...if you look today for "use Listerine at night," you won't find one iota of info about it (not even a reference to the commercial)
• Ditto for bloggers: it would be great to get the wags wagging about the pros and cons of killing those little buggers, not about the ads themselves
• Why not figure out how to hawk a free sample that consumers could share with a loved one who usually wakes up with the Breath of the Dead?

Skip reiterating the ad creative/content on the web site, and promoting all the different colors of Listerine...how about the same color, only using it at different times? 

I think Listerine could have lots of fun with this one, and focus that joy toward influencing consumers.  It's just the right start to branding (or extending the purview of its brand).  So it could be much bigger for the business.

For now, it's simply a smart ad.

It's Time for Brands To Arise

World stock markets are crumbling.  Financial institutions are writing-off losses in the billions.  Workers are in fear of losing their jobs.  Home-owners are scared of looming mortgage payments.  The dismal holiday sales and ongoing economic uncertainty suggest that nobody is feeling too comfortable with spending money.  And the mid-term outlook doesn't look any better.

Sounds like a great time for brands to arise.

Better branded products and services should be more attractive to consumers than lesser competitors, right?  People should be willing to pay more for them, too.  There should be value to all of that value associated with brands, and consumer preference and purchase behavior should help great brands weather the economic storm.

Why else would any company pay to engage with consumers?  We need to be able to count on the power of branding when the chips are down.  Activate all of those emotional needs.  Meaningful associations.  Nth dimensions of connections between consumers and the icons, images, themes, and other communications constructs that cost companies...I mean, companies invest in...to the tune of billions every year.

In fact, now is the time, when it's a dog-eat-dog competition for every sale, that the best branding should show its true colors, and trump lesser or also-rans.  Let's talk about companies that are calling those chits.  Companies relying on branding now that the going has gotten tough...

...it's time for brands to arise...

...only it doesn't work that way.

Turns out that what matters during tough economic times isn't brand, it's price.

For those consumers who dare to overcome their reasonable resistance to spending anything at all, they spend as little as possible.  It's not a perfect equation, and the only purchasing inclination that any two people share is that they'll do it in divergent, not-always-sensible ways.  But generally, people get stingy.  So good brands suffer pretty much just as stinky ones do.

We see pricing matter most when Wal-Mart reports better sales than most all of its competitors.  Or when automakers can't move metal without lots of promotional givebacks.  Ditto for apparel retailers. 

After price, the other quality that matters to consumers is functionality.

Something has to do something that somebody needs done.  Associate with celebrities, humor, or some astral projection of nirvana, but if a product or service doesn't scream utility or necessity, it's in for a long, tough slog. 

Again, of course there are exceptions, but it seems to me that price and function become the most important brand attributes in times of economic uncertainty.

And I think price and function add up to relevance.

So how do the latest social media campaign conversations deliver relevance?  Do marketers try to making branding creative relevant, or use branding to communicate relevance?  Capturing consumer attention, or wasting their time (however entertainingly) is not synonymous with communicating relevance.  Not even close. 

I may be a dim bulb, but tough times demand tough expectations of brands.  And, if branding won't help you sell better, easier, faster, or more often..right now, when you need it most...maybe it's time to reconsider what you're doing?

It's time for brands to arise.

Super Bowl Redux, Redux Pt.2

Fart jokes.  Bad puns.  Scantily clad models. 

That's what the commercials on Super Bowl Sunday will give us next month.  Created to appear but once in the light of TV, the spots will endeavor to out-dare one another in a virtual arms-race of foolishness, ribaldry, and expense.

The wags will act like a cross between beauty pageant judges and movie reviewers, celebrating some spots, while panning others.  The talk at work the next day might include mention of egregiously good or bad commercials, though most consumers won't remember the name of the company that paid for them.

Then everyone will forget about all of it, until we repeat this awkward minuet next year. 

All in the service of branding.

Do companies that advertise on the Super Bowl perform better than those that don't?  Nope.  Does their promotional marketing cost less than that of their competitors?  Naw.  Will purchases of their products better endure the talk of economic recession that's putting a crimp in consumer spending?  Probably not.

Are companies investing in anything when they buy those spots?  Yup.

It turns out that fart jokes, bad puns, and scantily clad models build brands.   

Now, that truism of our professional aside, probably there are better reasons to advertise on the Super Bowl.  Selling things is nice starting point.  But coming up with better answers on how to do that would first require asking different questions.

Companies wouldn't ask "How can we make our ad stand out?" or "Will the spot be true to our brand?"  Rather, they'd ask something like this:

"Who's watching; what would we want them to do; when might they most likely do it; where would that behavior happen; and why would it be beneficial to the consumer, as well as to us?” 

Who, what, where, when, and why.  How gloriously simple. 

But if you take awareness, and all of the ethereal benefits of branding, out of the equation, those variables require far more substantive definitions.  Coming up with a rationale that has a directional flow, and associating every step with tangible qualities, is a hell of a lot harder than delivering likeability and buzz.

The good news is that you don’t need a popularity vote to figure out if the expense was worth it.  You could pretty much connect it to sales.

Here's a five question guide for such a development process:

• Who: Why would you want to talk to a large, diverse group of people?  What are the specific characteristics of viewers that make them of interest to you (beyond a broad demographic profile)?  Are there better ways to reach them?
• What: What do you want them to do?  Check a billfold, send a mobile text message, schedule something?  You could even decide to try and link a term or idea to a subsequent action.  But identify the takeaway from your spot as a behavior, not a thought.  What will people do as they witness your ad brilliance?
• Where: How does the action take place within the context of people watching a football game (the most likely viewer configuration)?  It's not reasonable to ask them to visit a web site or remember a name.  I've never understood why beer and fast food companies waste time with viewers who are likely already drinking and eating away.  Rather, what works in the context of the viewing moment?  Dial.  Click.  Do something.
• When: Can you get people to do whatever it is you want them to do that very moment?  Messages start to fade the moment the game starts again, so your what has to happen pretty much when people experience it.  Perhaps this prompt to action is the most creative element of the spot.  It's certainly the most challenging.
• Why: Connecting the immediate action to another action -- or building it on one prior, as you could be talking to a demographic about something they've already done, and which you want them to repeat, or expand -- is perhaps the key element of the entire strategy.  What happens in/with your spot is only a step -- albeit a really gigantic, expensive, all-or-nothing sort of step -- in a series of actions that your customers follow, from awareness to purchase.  A marketing plan that treats people who see your Super Bowl spot like just so many other would-be consumers is bordering on the irresponsible, if not outright criminal.

Think direct response, only with context and really nice creative.

Of course, I'm a dim bulb.  I'm talking to myself. 

Nobody is going to do anything different, even though the media will play up various online or virtual elements as earth-shattering innovation.  Still, the "best" commercials will do nothing more than generate lots of immediate attention, focused almost exclusively on their merits as entertainment, not marketing.  Visits to web sites might follow.  Maybe subsequent, more pointed marketing campaigns will meet with a higher conversion rate. 

Once the hubbub is over, however, the brand marketers will go back to slogging it out in what's fast becoming a very difficult economy.

You think rising above the clutter is hard during the Super Bowl?  It's worse the rest of the year.  And that's when advertising is expected to actually sell something.

For now, let's bring on the farts, puns, and babes.  We deserve to smile, even if only briefly. 

I'm just glad none of my clients are paying for it.

Super Bowl Redux, Redux Pt.1

I've written for the past few years now on my utter befuddlement over Super Bowl advertising.

We live in an age when making a connection between the fleeting exposure of mass-market awareness and subsequent sales keeps getting harder, less dependable, and certainly more expensive.  Yet some bold, damn-the-torpedoes brand marketers seem committed to not just thinking otherwise, but putting their employer's/client's money where their, er, bravado is.

We're about to witness the annual kabuki drama:

• Companies will announce that they've bought time on the show
• The ad trades will do stories on the total expenditure, and "leak" creative
• Some companies will run ads prior to the show, promoting the upcoming spots
• Most all of the advertisers will develop ads intended to 1) shock, and/or b) amuse
• The ads will run, and stories written ranking them by qualitative consumer reviews
• The ad trades will follow-up with stories giving us expert analysis of the ad creative

And then, we'll all fahgetaboutit until the same time next year.

"Jane, stop this crazy machine!"

Super Bowl spots have evolved into a special breed of communications.  They're mostly one-timers intended to make a splash in one specific context, designed based less on actual products or services, and more in relation to one another.  Each spot hopes to differentiate itself primarily by being different.

Think of dinosaur species, forced to evolve into strange shapes in order to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. 

With the exception of the trailing tale of comments in the blathersphere, the recognition half-life among consumers is just shy of 24 hours, maybe less.  And it's usually awareness of a joke, or an insult: you've likely yourself said to someone the day after the game, "I liked that spot where that guy did that funny thing.  What was that for again?"

So why do companies pay millions for the privilege of airing these rare, exotic, doomed breeds, in hopes of somehow winning in a brief, artificial, arbitrary ecosystem?

Branding, of course.

While consumers are busy misquoting or forgetting the spots, companies make the case for their expenditures by adding together viewer numbers, articles, blog mentions, video mash-ups, chat room comments, and all other available snippets of attention, however brief or imprecise.  It's this "buzz" that somehow promotes brand and, therefore, warrants the cost.

And, in some alternate universe, dinosaurs avoided extinction.

Super Bowl spots are the most extreme and rarefied example of the glorious bane of brand marketing: the lack of accountability.

Sure, everyone talks about metrics and measurement these days, but what we usually get are ever-more complicated equations intended to prove what we hope is the value of branding, versus identifying what that value -- beyond simple awareness -- might be.

And that's how we get to this incredible moment of broad exposure...the Super Bowl...millions of expectant eyes trained on television screens...ready to actually pay attention to the commercials...this one time...and what do they see?

Fart jokes.  Bad puns.  Scantily clad models. 

You'd think that if this one special moment of exposure were to have any value in today's marketplace, it would have to reach beyond the traditionally hazy, imprecise benefits of branding.

In tomorrow’s essay, I'll give you this dim bulb's ideas on what that reach might be.

Greed is Good?

UK private capital firm Terra Firma Partners is expected to announce that it will slash 2,000 jobs at EMI, the large music company it acquired in 2007.

An earlier, leaked memo attributed to the Terra Firma CEO threatened to drop thousands of artists from the label, and he demanded that artists work harder so EMI could more than double its profits.

Over in the US, Chrysler announced late last year that it would cut about 15 percent of its work force, only six months after being acquired by another private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, L.C.  That was on top of the 13,000 heads the company had cut in order to make itself attractive to buy-out suitors in 2006.

Sounds like a lot of unpleasant, messy, people sacrifices and punishment. 

What happened to all that glowing doublespeak about the value of brand equity?

Rock bands, like cars, are only as good as their last releases.  You'd have to imagine that the hard-nosed private equity folks valued the EMI and Chrysler buy-outs on the very tangible specifics of offers, production costs, distribution channels, purchase rates and margins, etc. 

Sure, there are groups of people who could be depended upon to buy a Rolling Stones album if all the band did was burp, or buy a Dodge vehicle that dragged its transmission along the pavement.  But that's not brand loyalty, it's insanity.  And it's not what you base a realistic business plan upon.

Rather, the vast majority of would-be purchasers upon whom EMI and Chrysler depend for profits are a bit more sane.  Consumers know that EMI's aging artist roster and Chrysler's tired vehicle badges don't have any implicit value beyond the specific criteria of offer, time, and place.  They'll buy good songs, and drive cars that are competitively attractive. 

So what do the private equity sharks do when they acquire a company? 

They certainly don't throw money at branding; rather, they adjust levers in every other functional department.  Employee rosters are slashed, processes are streamlined, sourcing is improved, financial management is fine-tuned, etc. 

Whether we're talking music or metal, the equity firms' tool of choice is efficiency.  In doing a better job of making things, they presume that the things they make will be better, too.  And that better stuff will sell better.

As for marketing, they just fire the people who've been responsible for it.  I'd wager there's no expenditure underway or planned at EMI or Chrysler that isn't somehow linked not to brand awareness, but rather to prompting sales. 

So greed is good?

If consumers make purchase decisions based on reality, and not on the fantasies of brand marketers, and the private equity people are realists, perhaps it's match made in spreadsheet heaven?

I think it depends. 

Financial rigor could prompt an entirely new approach to branding, by viewing it as a function of measurable behavioral inputs and outputs, like any other corporate activity.  It could dissipate that hazy cloud of brand formed by expensive marketing with no other purpose, and from which immensely important, yet vaguely undependable and often invisible, benefits descend. 

I have no idea what the programs would look like, but a different measurement  criteria -- branding needs to make real money, not fantasy equity -- would certainly yield different ones, so much so that private equity people might do branding without ever calling it "brand," per se.  It might arise from the functional attributes of their more-efficiently-made products.  Maybe in this way, brand marketing could gain a new lease on legitimacy

Conversely, they could simply slash and burn their way to better margins, squeeze the supply side of the equation, and hope it prompts demand.  Perhaps they intend to flip these companies before anybody figures out what'll eventually happen.

It's just interesting that we never hear anything about branding from these people. 

Maybe they know something we don't? 

Of Balls and Band-Aids

After an 18-month development process, Xerox has unveiled a new corporate logo: a "friendly" font, and a red ball wrapped in band-aids.  It promises to spend many millions this year to promote its new brand.

There are any number of reasons to dis this latest example of branding run amok.  The idea that it took over a year to develop, and involved interviews with 5,000 people, is laughably incomprehensible, as is the resulting imagery, which looks derivatively like a logo for Xbox 360, AT&T or, more aptly, just a red ball wrapped in bandages.

Interbrand, the gurus behind the obviously very profitable project, claim that the new branding evokes a bunch of ideas, emotions, and connections.  It has made the logo "...an even more valuable business asset," according to its home page.  For the amount of money Xerox likely wasted on it, that value better evoke the sturm und drang of an epic symphony.

Only there's one meaning the new branding fails to evoke at all: the reality of Xerox's business.

You see, Xerox has been busy these past few years reinventing itself. 

Most consumers might still associate the company with copiers -- making a xerox meant copying for any of us old enough to remember existence prior to the 1980s -- but it now makes billions from corporate clients, providing services and technologies for managing documents and the flow of information.  Lots of times that flow ends up getting printed, so Xerox still makes printers and inks, too.

It has morphed itself into a consultative muddle of a business model, wherein it is
"a customer-centric company" that competes with a wide variety of similar companies that have abandoned archaic hardware pasts (like IBM and HP), or that have never manufactured anything other than slide presentations telling other companies what to make (like Accenture and BearingPoint). 

To my continual surprise, there seem to be an infinite number of valuable technostrategicprocesssystemschangemanagementweb-enabled contracts to be chased in this muddle.

And guess what?  Xerox was doing it up to now with the old logo!

Customers handed it about $12 billion in the first three quarters of 2007 alone, and all of it for products and services branded with the good 'ol outdated X. 

Maybe the company could have earned more if people didn't hate the old logo so much, but I doubt it.  Perhaps too many folks associated it with copiers, and didn't include Xerox in bids for new, consultative projects, but then again, the company was (and is) utterly thrilled with its business results.

No, it seems that Xerox successfully moved its business into the future, enduring -- if not actually benefiting from -- its old branding, logo, and historic association with copiers.

Humm.  Maybe brand communications didn't need to tell anybody anything; there was no value, or cost, embedded in its iconography beyond awareness and, in this instance, memories of many decades of business performance having legitimized the old X by associating it with doing things to documents. 

But it was (and is) what Xerox did -- its behaviors -- that defined its new brand proposition for its customers. 

And now, after having worked its way smack dab into a generic, consultative business muck wherein it's really hard to differentiate one "customer-centric" management blather-provider from another, Xerox has made a strategic decision to throw away the graphic evidence that linked it to its past, and trade it for a criss-crossed red marble that nobody will recognize.

Don't you wish you could have been in the room when the branding gurus explained away the entirely of reality and history, and convinced Xerox management to opt for some nonsense that connected to nothing but vague, imagined notions?  That's some brilliant selling.

But, like I said, it's too easy to dis.  I'd like to propose an alternate version of how Xerox could have gone about its branding:

• After, say, a few years into "The Document Company" reinvention, it could have announced a company-wide assessment of what made it unique
• Individuals and teams could have been incentivized to find, or to create, the services, products, and processes that made what Xerox does different from what its com