Dim Bulb

Three Airline Tails

Jet Blue, American, and Southwest airlines have all experienced events that challenged the integrity of their brands, and I wonder if anybody even noticed.

The weather problem Jet Blue encountered last holiday season is the stuff of PR awards by now, as its inability to match up its planes with the people necessary to fly them caused innumerable delays and disgruntled travelers.  It was otherwise an Act of God, but the airline tore entire pages from the crisis communications canon.  The CEO apologized via full-page newspaper ads, and the company rewrote its policies and procedures.

More recently, American (and Delta) were forced to cancel hundreds of flights for a few days because of the discovery of faulty wiring on some of its MD-80 aircraft.  Whether due to wear-and-tear or not, the event inconvenienced thousands of travelers.  I flew on a flight the day after all of the cancellations; I presume that my plane had already passed some test.  Nobody said a word about it. 

Finally, Southwest had to pull a few dozen of its 737s from service because it discovered that they hadn’t been properly maintained.  Four of those planes had fuselage cracks.  Three employees connected with its safety inspections were suspended.  Hundreds of flights were cancelled as the CEO did his media mea culpas.  News coverage rated a big story in USAToday about some marketing tool called the BrandIndex that went down with the bad news.

Does anybody really care?

Our expectations for air travel are so abysmally low.  The efficiencies of deregulation, combined with rising fuel costs, have given us a commodity business.  The driving force behind most travel decisions is price. 

Some airlines can do their best to minimize the pain of long wait lines and short distances between coach seats, but it's rare that they can charge more for it.  They compete the way grocers do...hoping to offer some consistent "face" to consumers while scrounging to change the ways they get things done "behind the scenes" so as to wring out a profit.

Add the vagaries of weather and mechanics, and it's an almost impossible equation.

Despite any promise of being smart, fun, or reliable, I'm not sure the idea of brand in airlines really flies at all.  It's hard to make promises that pretty much everyone knows you're not going to be able to keep, or at least not keep them all of the time.  The best anybody can do is make the flying experience as painless as possible, and few airlines spend money trying to do that (ads are cooler).

Southwest's discovery of human-error in its maintenance program should be astoundingly shocking.  It’s like your doctor revealing that she didn't really do the tests on you the right way.  Or McDonald's revealing that its patty-makers had a systemic problem with washing their hands before touching your food.

The BrandIndex "buzz score" interprets how people interpret current events, and one of its top gurus suggests that Southwest's reputation (also tracked via a proprietary index, of course) is so positive that the brand will withstand the bad news. 

I’ve got a different prediction: nobody cares.  Brand has nothing to do with it.

Nobody cared more or less after Jet Blue publicly flagellated itself, and there's been no outcry for more or less information about American/Delta's grounding of planes.  Well, the only loud voices we've heard on any of these events are the crisis counsellors and brand experts, all of whom have a vested interest in the airlines thinking about branding.

Instead of tracking something as insubstantial as buzz, I wonder what the graph of ticket purchases looks like against the public rollout of these various news stories.  I would bet that the influences on that graph won't likely be consumers' perceptions of their vague intentions concerning imaginary constructs of brand.

For instance, it turns out that part of a wing flew off of a US Airways plane a week ago -- caused by improper maintenance -- and the airline has caught the problem on a handful of other planes.

Performance issues are failures of business, not branding.  And, since I suspect there’s been no real impact from any of these events on ticket sales, there haven't really been any performance issues at all.

It's a scary thought, actually. 

Let'€™s Buy Motorola'€™s Phone Business!

Though it took Motorola two-months of a strategic review to decide to jettison its $18.9 billion handset business, I say we just go for it and buy the damn thing. 

Here's my plan:

• Each of us kicks in, say, $100 (that's practically pocket change in real currencies like Pounds, Yen, or Euros!)
• Cool. Now, many millions of us own our own hardware company.  Sounds like a coordination nightmare, but the old owners couldn't get their acts together, so maybe we could.  Maybe it's a question of focus
• We each commit to three things: first, we'll never take a dividend; second, we will buy at least one new phone every two years for a decade and, third, we'll sign-up with our company's service provider
• We'll use chat, virtual polling, etc., to nominate and elect the company leadership, as well as determine their performance criteria and salaries.  The team will get contracts for work that guarantee employment for a decade, presuming the performance criteria are met
• Then, we'll each submit a list of what we think are the 3 most important things we want our phone to do.  These lists can be reasonable or visionary, so feel free to include a request that, say, your phone could read your mind, or find water hidden underground
• Our management compiles and prioritizes functionality
• They go find a service provider willing and able to co-fund and support development
• Our company builds the phones, we buy them, and the world is a beautiful place

Sounds kinda simple, doesn't it?  I say it's worth $100 and a few minutes' of voting on your computer to get the phone you've always wanted, isn't it?

My plan is no less nutty than Motorola's plan to simply spin-off the company so that it will "have better luck attracting a new chief executive to run it and revive the company's reputation."

Huh?  That's the headline for a strategic plan?  Maybe not so much a plan as a vehicle to enable activist shareholder Carl Icahn to realize lots of profits from a newly-valued separate entity.

Motorola's new CEO can drone on about "execution" and "innovation" and all of the other useless buzzwords until the stock analysts stop listening; the company's problem is that it hasn't been able to listen to customers, and then translate that into knowledge that yielded products to lead, as well as apply to, whatever they've learned.

The company has wasted many millions on branding that told us about phones we didn't ask for, couldn't easily use, and weren't all that reliable.  The spin-off plan tells me that they don't have a clue about what to do next. 

We recognize the name "Motorola," but, then again, lots of us are familiar with other words, like "Edsel" and "LaserDisc."  Brand names have no inherent value (the blather of brand gurus aside).

Business creates value.  Brands are labels.  So here's a headline for you: Build an amazing phone.

So I say we take matters into our own hands.  We can call our company "Motorola," or rename it "The Dim Bulb Co."  Getting started inventing a phone that matters...is what matters....not coming up with a new line of infinite variations on the phones we can already buy everywhere else.

After we build something that's truly meaningful, we can get ourselves some of that branding stuff...

...so who is with me?

Spamalot

I saw the musical "Legally Blonde" on Broadway Saturday last night, and now I'm a marked man.

You see, soon after being seated, my daughter caught the blow-in offer that fell out of the program: "send a text, and you could win a CD of the show before it ends."  We normally resist all of the exhortations to share an email that come with every product, magazine, or web site my teen daughter visits. 

I don't know why I caved this time.  Perhaps I was giddy at the possibility of getting a "free" CD after spending hundreds of dollars for the live version.

OhwhataduckIam!

Long before intermission, I received a text reply from "Elle," the eponymous lead character.  She wanted my email address, and to confirm that I was older than 13.  Where was my CD offer?  Had I won or lost?  I assumed that a second entry was required, and threw caution to the wind.  I clicked on send with a gulp, suspecting what was yet to come.

Another message followed before the show ended, thanking me for replying, and telling me that she hoped I might win (the messages are from Elle, so it's very personal in a marketing-invented impersonal sort of exploitative way).  It also offered to let me Elle-ify my phone screen with a wallpaper download.

The first email dropped at about the same time, also from Elle, and giving me a .jpeg that I could "forward to friends," and an "exclusive fan club" I could join.  Links also led to join her friends on Facebook and MySpace to "...meet other fans and dish about the latest Blonde buzz."

So much buzz.  Not so much purpose or relevance.

What's the single most desirable behavior the show's producers could hope to get out of me?  Recommendation.  They want me to tell everyone I know that it was a great musical, and get them to buy the songs on iTunes and jump on tickets either in NYC, or when the show goes on its inevitable tour of the hinterlands.

That's loyalty in the theater-going business, right? 

Instead, I'm getting subjected to seemingly endless social marketing dreck, constructed to get me engaged with marketing stuff...without bothering to understand what would get me involved.

• Forward the email I got? Why?  It says nothing about me recommending it, nor does it obviously share anything back with me for having sent it.  There are links to the show website and tickets, but I've already seen the show.  This isn't a referral as much as a nice piece of pink junk mail
• Join a social network?  Why?  What's getting shared about the show -- did the lead trip, or was a band instrument ill-tuned during one performance or another?  A social network without real stuff getting fed into it is just the shell of a community
• Go to the special web site?  Why?  Where's the additional show content -- like videos of rehearsals, or tidbits on other content -- instead of more glossy marketing stuff?  Another show website is, well, another show website
• Download wallpaper?  Why?  Did I join a club of fellow show-lovers, and will I get other benefits or content after I dedicate my phone to the image? 

There have to be really smart and fun ways to incentivize recommendations.  Sending me a lot of spam isn't one of them.  So much buzz actually distracts me from my original reaction to the show...which was very good, by the way.  I'd completely recommend it, only in spite of all of the stupid digital marketing I'm likely to receive from the show until I can figure out how to block it.

But first, I sure hope somebody will tell me whether or not I won the free CD.

Borders as a Social Medium

Borders has lost a hunk of its financing, suspended its dividend, and hired Merrill Lynch & Co. to "review its strategic alternatives."

I've got an alternative for them: stop going to the usual suspects for answers.  Enough with the strategic reviews of the book business.  Skip the expected branding nonsense, and start asking different questions, like why couldn't the business be recast as a social medium?

No, not just some chatting experiment prompted by a twentysomething in the marketing department.  Skip creating inane video or other viral contagion.  And turn off the dumb TV monitors they recently announced would be added to the stores.  It's clear the marketers at Borders haven't been allowed to market their way out of a paperback.

I'm talking about a model for the entire business. 

First, can can anybody say "book club?"

• What if buying a book at Borders got you some access to a living community of fellow fans of the author, genre, or subject?
• Perhaps there could be inputs into these communities from authors and critics, thereby increasing the value of the media 
• Participants could accrue points for contributions and/or breadth of involvement, which would dovetail into a loyalty program of some sort. 
• Reading a Borders book could be made a different experience than that of any other retailer (online included), and the experience gets more valuable over time. 
• Let the competitors bemoan the lack of "big books" to drive traffic; anyway, that's like clothing retailers complaining about the weather.  Real communities don't rely on such invented and inconsistent prompts

What about becoming a home for user-created content?

• Everybody and their brother feels inspired and technically-empowered to create extended riffs on their favorite movies, TV shows, and books
• The Internet is awash in these homemade episodes of Star Trek and "what happened then" chapters of The Vampire Lestat.  Borders could become the official, sanctioned home for this copyright-daring content, so buying some packaged media product there would include access to all the other stuff that commands so much time and attention (from would-be customers, thank you very much)
• If authorized (it would take some work to make this happen), these communities could truly thrive, and not exist in fear (or under the radar) of the original content creators.  Borders could bring all of this content together

Couldn't Borders stores get stocked to serve local buyers/specific communities?

• Retailers of all sorts are struggling to invent answers to the question "why do I, Mr. Consumer, need to visit?"
• With detailed purchaser data (Borders should know what books I buy just like Blockbuster remembers all the movies I’ve rented), couldn't stores get allocated media products based on the interests of people who live near them?
• Ditto for one or more of the communities that it formed via social media: perhaps there could be sections within a store, corollated with local tastes, on "leading" titles by genre or subject...voted and reviewed by neighbors (and augmented with "expert" involvement)
• This would allow stores to take deep dives into subject areas of particular interest to local customers.  So forget about putting the same "bestsellers" into every store, displayed the same way.  That’s not branding; it's boring

There'd have to be real business models based on these ideas (or others like them).  It would represent a fundamental reconfiguring of the book store model.  And it could all fail miserably.

But, clearly, that model is broken right now, and no amount of remerchandising, financial wizardry, or hopeful branding is going to fix it.  Dire circumstances require bold action, not just a standard list of actions for which we can all pretty much see an outcome.

Maybe it's time to print a new version of the Borders strategic plan?

New Balance Trips

New Balance is forsaking its heritage of communicating with its consumers with low-key, credible honesty, and embracing instead a flashy ad campaign.

Called "Love/Hate," the spots feature the typical lifestyle nonsense that we've come to expect from athletic shoe brands like Nike and Adidas: little vignettes that purport to capture the essence of the experiences and relationships people have with their running shoes.  The company is doubling its marketing budget to make sure as many folks as possible experience this all-important communication.

The branding comes courtesy of Robert DeMartini, a new CEO with experience working on consumer products brands like Gillette razor blades and Pringle's potato chips.  In other words, he has deep expertise in an avocation that could less-then-charitably be called "making something out of nothing."

But New Balance has something, or at least it did, before the glossy makeover.  This is the company that:

• Sizes shoes for narrow and wide feet
• Eschews paid celebrity endorsements
• Makes about 25% of its products in the U.S.
• Fulfills retailer orders almost in real-time, so they can cater to consumer demand

How the new CEO got from this heritage to a bland lifestyle feel-good ad campaign is hard to imagine, unless you factor in his promise to triple company revenue by 2012.  Such bold, Big Picture vision usually requires businesses to forsake the proven reasons for success so far, and embrace lots of management strategy and branding blather to support its wild hopes and dreams.

Am I a dim bulb for missing something here? 

New Balance has built its brand on real, meaningful differentiators, as recapped above.  You could easily imagine marketing that promoted any one (or all) of them, and then extended the reach and relevance to new consumers: 

• Target infrequent or new runners, especially those like me over 40, who have (or fear) foot pain problems.  The sizing variability could translate into more comfort and better results.  Think introductory programs, a trade-in campaign, or even new products developed for such a specific segment (or segments)
• Go to town with the authenticity theme...I bet there are celebs who use New Balance and would never talk about it publicly.  The company should find them and create campaigns based on that fact: "So-and-so uses New Balance, and doesn't get paid for it.  Just like you."  Or whatever.  How about featuring real people as endorsers?
• Get real with online interaction.  Its lame foray into work-out tracking gives little reason to participate, and requires registration to view anything more than a static example page
• The "made in the USA" theme could be motivational to many consumer groups, especially if they linked the shoe manufacturing to all of the supporting vendors and others involved in the process.  This would only work in America, of course, but we're talking a large market.  Imagine social media tools built around each shoe production "ecology."
• Promoting the retailer support angle could get translated into consumers expecting to find (or quickly get) their ideal shoe when they go shopping.  This speaks to credibility and authenticity (i.e. you want it, you get it)

There's ample fodder within the business -- again, looking at presenting reality, not trying to recast it as some creative invention -- to dream up ads, pr, social media, viral whatever, and any other tools to communicate with consumers.  I just don't understand how the company could chose to ignore all of these wonderful brand attributes, and choose to recast the company through some esoteric ad campaign about love and hate. 

The new branding tells consumers absolutely nothing about New Balance, though is says a lot about the new CEO and his branding gurus.

By 2012, they'll all have moved on to wreak their branding brilliance at other businesses.   

Four Orange Pages

A retail brokerage firm ran 4 full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times (at least) a few weeks ago, and I can't remember one thing they said.

As a matter of fact, I can't tell you which firm paid for the space.  I do remember that the pages sure were orange, though.

Every newspaper ad is really an impermanent repository for smudges of one color or another.  You can't turn a page without getting a little something on your hands.  God forbid you fold or flatten it.  So I get black residue on my fingers simply from reading the stuff I want to read.  Why would an agency graphics person choose to make my brief sojourn across an ad page even messier? 

And a newspaper page is actually quite a lot of real estate, if you think about it,.  A page could probably can hold two or three pretty substantive, detailed news stories.  I can't name an ad from any company, at any time, that requires (or would benefit from) that amount of space.  If it gave the detail to fill up the page, I certainly wouldn't read it.  The firm that paid for the space chose to give us four pages of somethingoranother.

A comment about the lazy reading habits revealed above: I'm not alone.  The days of people hunkering down and reading newspaper articles verbatim are long gone, if they ever existed.  Folks read the stuff that really and truly interests them, and they scan the rest.  Barely.  The headline business is cut-throat and unforgiving, whether in news or advertising.  What did the investment firm headline tell me?  Er, I can't remember. 

Finally, the context of newspaper reading has changed.  There was a time -- again, perhaps a bit idealized -- when commuters sat or stood on their trains and read the morning paper.  Maybe they did do while eating breakfast with their perfect spouses and 2.5 kids sitting adoringly around the table.

Not so much anymore. 

I'd suggest that the very physics of opening a newspaper and turning its pages means that unless you read it on a giant, flat surface, you never see the inside half of any page.  I know that's how I experience most magazine ads.  So half the headline has to get me interested in opening up the publication, which makes things twice as hard for headline writers who already didn't have it too easy.

This is all to say that the 4 pages of the retail broker's ad didn't say anything meaningful to me whatsoever.

I'm sure the ad looked really bold an insightful when beamed on the wall when it was presented to the client.  The financial markets are going haywire, and the idea that one of the great advocates of investing by the Little People would take out some substantive statement of information that needed to be substantively stated was, well, probably not a bad idea. 

But whatever Schwab, TD Ameritrade, or E*Trade said got totally obliterated by four orange pages.

Make Local TV News Local

Jeff Zucker had very encouraging words for the future of broadcast television at the Ad Age Digital Marketing Conference this week, and his perspective centered on the event and community qualities of the medium.

While he was talking specifically about major scripted series (like NBC's Heroes) and the Olympics, it prompted a crazy thought for me: make TV news local.

I mean really local.  Make 'em the basis for real, interactive communities.  Local broadcast television as social media.

Broadcast network local affiliates were conceived and operated primarily as distribution nodes and ad sales offices.  Local news has always been a cookie-cutter affair, utilizing identical formats (and swapping identical anchors).  Even today, a good portion of the programming relies on car wrecks and numbingly similar crime reports, accented by repurposing generic video of car wrecks and crime reports from other numbingly similar broadcasts.

Why?

Technology, culture, and the economy have left the old local affiliate model in the cathode-ray dust.  The most lusted-after consumer demographic groups get their breaking news from the Internet, along with great car wreck footage (and much more).  If they watch news at all, it’s often comedy programming, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or The O'Reilly Factor.

So local stations should do the same thing:

• Consign conception and production of the late local news slots to a comedy troup.  I'm not kidding. Develop a fun, cynical, engaging take on local goings-on
• Let viewers participate via voting (call-in, SMS, whatever) on various points or issues.  Be unabashedly willing to turn each program into American Idol, sort of
• If anything, swap really funny segments between the programs instead of sharing footage of bad weather.  Think of all the creativity and content this approach could produce, which could be repurposed any number of ways (online, mobile)

What's the downside?  Bad ratings?  Well, been there, done that in most markets.  Offend viewers?  Sure, but boring them...and losing them..is a greater crime, isn't it?  Cable and the Internet have shown a new way for broadcast media that is much like the original, old way: you can’t be relevant or funny unless you risk being irrelevant or and stupid.

Depending on how successful the news programming got, you could use the approach to localize more programming.  I'm sure there are reasons why there aren't any locally-produced game shows anymore.  Why not more feature programming on local sports, or on issues? 

I know that many of these ideas might seems stale, but what's stale-er than, well, chatting aimlessly about nothing?  This behavior drives some of the most technically-advanced social media in existence, so it's not an issue of a new idea as much as making an old, established, and enjoyable old behavior somehow better or easier.  Adding new qualities of event and community might be just the ticket.

Local broadcast television could be the new social media.

Twitter This

Moderator Jim Nail kicked off a panel discussion on social media here at the AdAge Digital Marketing Conference with an off-hand remark: explaining what was working was "a really, really big question" that he was happy he didn't have to answer alone.

Then panelist David Armano inadvertently answered it with an anecdote about 10 minutes later, and obviated the need for much of the conversation that followed.

He'd recently flown Southwest Airlines, and found the airport check-in a two-button breeze.  So he'd Twittered his pleasure to the ether of fellow, er, twits, and received a "thank you" from the airline a few hours later.

His experience demonstrated what are perhaps the two fundamental truisms of social media:

1. Conversations based on inputs from reality (i.e. things a company does, or doesn’t do) are far more powerful, shareable, and meaningful than chatters repeating or abusing marketing content
2. The greatest impact social media can have on business is as places where people influence one another, not as channels through which marketers try to influence consumers directly

The other panelists never really got their heads around these points, perhaps because they were otherwise occupied being very relaxed and comfortable relying on the inevitability of the medium, instead of truly exploring it. 

The experts talked a lot about content and interactions and experience, but there was little debate about the nature of those terms.  Is interacting with a funny video the same thing as interacting with a sourcing policy that makes your stomach turn?  Is forwarding a marketing message (the Holy Grail of viral transmission) the same as truly conversing with someone else about something that matters to you both?

When it came to polling the audience on where within the organization the management of social media should reside, a third said "marketing" and almost as many voted for "a department that has yet to be created."  All of 10 seconds of attention followed, and it was mostly smug yucking about how silly it was to hope to put such an uber-important function into a tiny little box on an organizational chart. 

The implicit presumption seemed to be that social media are adjuncts to marketing campaigns, and that giving people things they need meant branding (creative stuff of one form or another).  Oh, and remember that it's really important that you staff your marketing group with people who mirror the folks in your social media groups. 

The panel revealed that most marketers are now experimenting with social media instead of just wondering what the hell it is, but there was little discussion of the purposes or results of doing so.  A poll said that folks use it to gather information from vocal proponents and critics, but nobody pointed out that it amounts to little more than extending a news clipping service to chat rooms.  And discussions of the capacity to target consumers because they've self-identified their lifestyles and interests in various communities came without mention of the wisdom of chasing them down.

Near the end, the marketing exec from Phillips mentioned that there were a significant number of user groups out there into which the company hadn't plugged into.  Nobody picked up on it, but he had reaffirmed the anecdote the flying exec had made earlier, only with an important addition:

Social media don't need marketers.

All prior forms of media, including the rest of the Internet, would be dead without the support of advertising money.  It's almost as if there's a reverse ratio for social tools, in that the more the particular medium depends on marketing support (or hosting, or other involvement), the less credible or useful it is to its users. 

We can build very busy social media sites around product launches, and watch them dissolve soon thereafter.  There are, however, qualities of lasting social communities, online or off, that challenge the very basic presumptions of what and how branding is conceived and delivered, like:

• Substance
• Meaning
• Relevance
• Utility
• Durability

These attributes aren't normally prompted (or supported) by the content that originates in the creative imaginations of marketing departments.  And the resulting experiences that matter don't come from marketing either, but rather emerge from the interactions between participants in any given medium.

Anyway, perhaps the most important conclusion from today's gig was to stay tuned.  It took all of a wait for the next session to get lots more on the topic: like a breath of fresh air, the CEO of Zappos explained that his company spends its entire "marketing" budget on customer service.  "Brand and culture are two sides of the same coin," he explained.  And satisfied customers are so powerful as evangelists and advocates via social media that their propensity to do so went "off the charts" (according to the moderator from Nielsen).

We should see this strategy as an engine for social media content and referral.  Probably gets Twittered more than occasionally.

Oh, and remember to fly Southwest.  I hear the check-in is a two-button breeze.

Definitions in the Digital Age

I’m attending the AdAge Digital Marketing Conference in New York, whereat a number of panels chocked full of learned speakers are grappling with the challenge of defining brands, let alone exploring digital marketing.

The marketing part is reasonably obvious; it's driven by technology, and the challenges are accordingly technical, such as:

• How do you monetize content creation, and who should own it?
• When do you want to repurpose content via a variety of delivery platforms?
• What constitutes a good deal re talent remuneration?
• Where are the best bets being placed for future players in the digital space?

It turns out that these sort of questions aren't all that new, really.  Change the media and the hairstyles of the panelists, and this could be a meeting taking place in the 1960s.  For that matter, people of insight and good intent have been debating how best to deliver marketing ever since the word first came into use in 1561.

We have over 400 years of working with a definition of marketing that is all but universally agreed upon and understood.  It's the "process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service."  So the conference is digging into a lot of interesting stuff on this front.

The 800 lb. gorilla here, however, is a combination of assumption, hope, and revealed truth: there's no such common language definition for brands:

• It's sometimes a list of qualities or attributes associated with a product or service
• Or a description of an experience that may or may not include said product or service
• It can describe the business that is responsible for actually selling things other than qualities or experiences of products and services
• Or reference the influence of business attributes in non-commercial material (i.e. branded content)
• Most often, any given panel uses some combination (or all) of said definitions

It doesn't help that the word "brand" (relevant to marketing) only dates back to 1949.  There's never been an agreed-upon, objective definition, irrespective of any recent confusion provided by technological innovation. 

Yet brands are the source from which basic assumptions about digital marketing arise, most centrally the conceit that exposing people to entertaining stuff has a rub-off, related, and somehow enduring benefit to businesses which create, deliver, or simply sponsor the stuff.

This means that there are two conclusions after almost 20 experts have taken the stage:

1. Somebody should figure out how to measure whether this assumption about brands has any validity
2. Whether such proof is forthcoming or doomed to be forever the plot of a sci-fi movie, companies need to dive fast and furious (and expensively) into digital marketing

I'm in 100% agreement with the former, and find the latter quite hilarious.

AdAge deserves kudos for putting together very thoughtful panels, and the production of the event has been flawless.  And what better entity but the preeminent ad rag (and electron-spewer, or whatever the slang is for an Internet site) to host conversations about the impact that digital distribution (tactic) is having on marketing and business decisions (strategy).

But if I were a client with a big budget, I'd have trouble getting up in front of any audience -- even one populated with the smugly converted -- and talk about my commitment to digital branding without any objective measure for why that money wouldn't have been better spent on, say, a cash payback to consumers.  Or an investment in T-bonds.

We're grappling with finding a definition for branding as we engage in all of this experimentation with digitally-delivered media.  We're either building a structure for business going forward, or a house of cards.  Nobody quite knows.

But I do know that none of us can talk about digital marketing without implicitly addressing our beliefs and expectations for brands.  On this front, there's more work ahead for everyone.  I suspect AdAge will help drive this conversation, just as it has so far.

Proof that PR Works

Congrats to the PR person who pitched the story I read in today's paper, entitled “Rebranding Can Refresh Tired Corporate Image.”

The litany of ill-defined, esoteric, and incomplete terms served-up in the first two paragraphs was enough to make my head spin:

• "When Xerox lost its message in the marketplace," the story began, as if that were a even a complete thought, let alone a fact.  What exactly did the company lose, and where (or what) is the marketplace in which that event occurred?
• "...the company rebranded itself in an effort to let people know if was more than copiers."  Well, actually, the company has successfully extended its business into various services, and did so with its old brand.  The "refreshed" brand that supposedly communicates that it's more than copiers is, well, a different treatment of the "x" in a red ball.  The facts must be hidden within it.  Perhaps it's all subliminal.
• "There are times in a company's life when rebranding is necessary to refresh the company image," the story continues, failing to explain what, when, or how a company’s "life" is defined or measured.  Ditto for "image."
• "...and better position itself in consumers' minds.”  Yup.  Position.  Minds.  We could be talking about religion here.  Maybe we are.

Fortunately, a brand guru gets quoted next, just to clear things up: "The single biggest reason for rebranding is to stay current with how the market perceives you," he says. 

Ok, maybe not so clear.  I'm not sure what current means, or whether there's some sensate thing called the market and that can perceive companies. 

I thought the single biggest reason for doing anything in business was to make more profits. 

Ohwhataduckiam.

The rest of the story overviews the usual nonsense about branding:

• Survey your friends, or stakeholders, and ask them to contemplate their navels
• Decide what makes your business different, by no particular criteria other than what your friends discover in their navels (though maybe you should form a committee of navel-gazers)
• Then, ask your people to sort through all the lint they find and decide what they think it looks like
• Kick-off a campaign to ultimately rename, re-logo, re-color, and otherwise regurgitate all of the look-and-feel nonsense your company swallowed the last time it rebranded itself

Oh, yes: make sure to hire a branding agency to help you through this difficult, complicated, and all-important task.  Pay them lots of money.

Nevermind that there are no respectable metrics to prove whether you get anything out of it.  After all, it's all about image, market, perception, and other attributes of your business that are absolutely so important that there's absolutely no way to measure them, other than via special divining tools invented to do it. 

Forget that consumers (or customers) don't really consume brand: they buy products and services.  You can ask them how they feel about your branding until you're blue in the face -- or have enough support for funding your branding campaign, more like it -- but it doesn't change the fact that most of what matters to them isn't contained in a survey about their perceptions; rather, it's in how, what, where, when, and why the rest of the operations in the business perform. 

And, speaking of those operations, you need to stand up to all of the critical push-back you're likely to get from everyone else in the organization regarding your latest, utterly beautiful and important ball of lint.

When the executives of your company raise eyebrows and question one aspect or another of your glorious task, remember that it’s because they just don't understand and need to be educated.  Be patient.  Share this newspaper story with them.

I know that I'm a dim bulb, but the article could have at least mentioned that rebranding isn't necessarily as real, or as useful as, say, changing the tires on your car, or actually improving customer service at your company.   

Avoiding all of those reasonable observations and questions was quite a branding coup.  Congrats to the PR person behind it. 

The Mistake Economy

When a credit card company assesses a fee on late payments, and then raises four-fold or more the interest rates it charges, it's not just realizing one of the primary sources of income for the entire industry.

It's a pillar of the Mistake Economy.

Have you checked lately what rate you're charged for minutes beyond the limits of your mobile phone calling plan?  Ditto for driving beyond your allocated rental car miles.  How about paying a shipping and handling or restocking fee for returning something you've bought?  Some municipality budgets rely on writing enough traffic tickets.  Even car and health insurance plans are priced differently once mistakes from driving or illness intervene.

Many businesses don't start making really good money until consumers screw up.  Some don't succeed at all unless their purchasers fail at something first.

The Mistake Economy subtly affects how products are marketed, too.  Introductory offers work because of an implicit expectation that consumers won't do the math on what something will cost after the special deal expires.  Companies that outsource and then charge for customer service do so with the presumption that customers are at fault for their own problems.  Even the very conception that people will perceive (let alone believe) some of the more fantastic expectations of branding rely on consumers making the mistake of credulity.

It's not terribly customer-centric, unless you envision your customers as targets.  Or victims.

I suspect that consumers are wise to the dishonesty inherent in the Mistake Economy: I know that I am, and you probably are, too, as you're careful not to break the rules that product or service providers now wrap around their sales.  Maybe a larger audience is just dimly aware of it, and that's why corporate reputations are consistently low.  Maybe it's why it's so hard to engender and maintain customer loyalty. 

When we think as brand strategists instead of consumers, we can convince ourselves otherwise...or maybe close one eye and squint with the other, and thereby hold out hope that points or discounts will keep people happy.  But as we avoid addressing the fundamental disconnect between branding's rosy promises, and the thorny reality of experience, I suspect even the most carefree consumers don't miss entirely.

Maybe the Mistake Economy just makes people more wary.  From wariness a lot of other emotions arise, such as distrust, cynicism, and sometimes outright disdain.

So if your business participates in the Mistake Economy, maybe you want to take some of the money you're spending on all that glorious branding nonsense, and find a way to stop waiting for your customers to slip up?

Playboy Energy, Baby...

Playboy has tested its own branded energy drink on college students in Boston, and it's now rolling out the products in other major markets nationwide.

Yeah, baby.  Playboy energy.  You know what that’s for.

Only you're wrong.  "...No one has done a drink in a way that is really high-end and luxury," explained the guru behind the product introduction.  "The drink takes from the DNA of Playboy which, as a brand, embodies Hugh Hefner’s luxury lifestyle..."

So the bunny logo on a can of metallic-tasting swill connotes luxury, and will 1) attract consumers over the other two-dozen similar products on-shelf, and 2) command a price premium because of its associated values of brand.

Yeah, baby. 

All of the branding buzz-word nonsense of the guru's quotes aside, this strikes me as a woefully misplaced licensing deal.  And a missed opportunity.

The textbook definition of "a playboy" is someone who is well-off, and spends his time entertaining himself with dissolute activities.  The Playboy brand capitalized this definition, and provided the creative content and dark nightclub rooms to experience it during a stretch of years mid last-Century.

Today, it does neither.  Though having successfully extended its content business to cable and Internet porn, the slimmed-down ad pages in issues of its magazine attest to a definition, and experience, that are far less meaningful to the fantasies of today's hedonist consumers.  Realizing the bunny icon as rapper bling does not relevance make.

I'd argue that the Playboy was never a static idea or image, but rather a label for behaviors...a lifestyle, even, however infrequently or incompletely realized by its middle class consumers.  Self-styled playboys did Playboy things, like oogle at ersatz bimbos, contemplate expensive tech toys and, occasionally, swagger.

It has about as much to do with luxury as Donald Trump.  Playboy is a synonym for doer of slightly dangerous things with no risk of punishment.

Why doesn't the business busy itself with providing ways to make that definition a reality again for its brand?  The implications for its content, as well as licensing into products and services, could be immense.

On the energy drink front, I'd have gone to town with marketing that was very retro funny, and that played off of the Playboy history.  The line could have been "fuel for your next Playboy moment" over imagery of a smiling Every Guy standing outside a hotel room with a buxom lady.  For that matter, it could be outright sold as an over-the-country remedy for erectile dysfunction.

Give me Playboy energy, baby.

Starter Cigarettes

Most experts would agree that kids should avoid addictive substances, but addictive behaviors -- especially those involving digital technology -- are not only tolerated, but encouraged among an ever-younger group of targeted consumers.  I mean kids.

Nobody would have to think twice about the wisdom of serving a kid a beer, or suggesting that a teenager should start smoking cigarettes.  There's lots of attention being paid to issue of childhood obesity.  We've also created over the generations some agreed-upon thresholds for doing things like driving a car, voting, and getting married. 

When it comes to stuff that humanity has had time struggling and dealing with, we have pretty clear rules in mind (and in law) to limit consumption.  Certain things are not just controlled, but evoke a duh, yeah reaction if we were ever challenged to consider otherwise.      

It's the exact opposite when it comes to the categories of newer entertainment content and new technology.

The implications of a sliding scale of thresholds on entertainment content isn't conclusive to any two people, even as the degradation of said standards is conclusively useful to producers, and angering to parents.  It's a tough one, since there's no biological, causal link between content and health akin to calories and fat.  So it's harder to establish and hold to thresholds. 

Sure, we have a movie ratings system, but it's squishy, and at times very capricious.  Sex is more dangerous than violence, and inappropriate scenes in a violent movie are somehow made more appropriate when embedded in comedies.  The general trend is to risk exposing ever-younger kids to ever-more adult (violent and sexual) themes, even as we see a commensurate surge in the number of lone gun toting kids spraying bullets in classrooms and malls. 

Two-hour mega-violent movies and endless hours of gore-splattering, murderous video game playing have no connection to the ways people act, interestingly enough, just as experts in branding and marketing celebrate the awareness and influence merits of 30-second TV commercials and sentence-long posts in social media chat rooms. 

But that's another story.

On the technology front, it's even harder, even though we know already that certain technologies are addictive: chat, email, Internet surfing.  They're not necessarily bad addictions, but can certainly be put to nefarious uses (i.e. be dangerous for kids).  And over-use in general is a bad habit we're happy to note and decry in adults.  "Crackberry" is not a nice term. 

So what's the threshold for using a mobile phone?  According to Telefonica’s Imaginarium, it's about 6 years old.  Its MO1 phone is designed so that "...your child can use whenever you want."  Nevermind the broken English translation on the web site; the presumption here is that it's a good thing -- or at least a neutral gesture -- to give your 6 year old a cell phone.

There are other providers targeting these youngest consumers: Firefly and Kajeet are two examples.  I am not slighting them for their efforts.  In fact, both of these providers seem to go out of their way to offer limitations, protections, and customization of their products so risks are minimized for even their youngest consumers.

But so many precautions make me think of what it would take to make starter cigarettes seem acceptable?  Maybe thicker filters, or wider rolls so they're more easily held by younger hands.  Starter guns could use a larger gauge bullet and a smaller trigger for easier loading and shooting.  Just like starter sex education can come from adult themes buried in raunchy comedy movies.

Marketing consumption as safe for young people is not the same as it being safe. 

Where are the objective, third-party regulators that should be looking at this stuff?  Do we want teenagers texting endlessly (the phone companies are happy to provide no way to limit the activity, and every way to pay for "unlimited" services)?  Is it a good idea that the only way to limit access to certain web sites is at the user’s discretion, and not stopping it the source (the way it's managed now would be like letting ads for X-rated content run in, say, People, or even Highlights, and just telling readers to look away). 

I wonder if, and then when, consumers will want this sort of oversight.  It may never happen, and maybe that's a good thing, considering the abuses that such controls have been put in the political past (can anybody say "Soviet Union?"). 

Even discussing it makes me think of censorship and thought-control.  We've all been taught to avoid going there because limits are inherently wrong, the Free Market is the best determinant of value, and we, as parents, have the ultimate authority to decide what our kids will and won’t see and buy.  The movie industry will "voluntarily" regulate itself.

Yeah, right.

Technology isn't neutral, despite the hyperbole from the tech lobby that consistently declares otherwise.  Unfettered, endless uses for devices, and quasi-categorized consumption of content, aren't objectively good things or bad things.  The devil is in the details.

If we can have a government that approves what ingredients and drugs belong in the bodies of one age group versus another, why can't it do something other than shrug when it comes to what we put into our minds, or what devices we surround ourselves with?

Caucuses are Digital, Primaries are Analog

There's an emerging debate in the U.S. over the nature of state caucuses versus primary elections used by our political parties to choose their Presidential candidates.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has begun making the case that caucuses are somehow less democratic than primaries.  The argument is that since a caucus is an actual, real-life meeting -- the word derives from the gatherings used by the Algonquin Indians to make decisions -- it excludes people who can't attend a meeting, whether due to infirmity or work obligations.

Thus, delegates chosen by caucus vote are less representative of the people's will, and worth less than those allocated by primary votes.  Mrs. Clinton cares about the distinction because she ranks far closer to Barak Obama in delegates chosen by primaries than those selected by caucuses, even if the Democratic party has never had cause to make such distinctions. 

Hats off to her strategists for even introducing the idea, which I'm blithely parroting here.

But caucuses are conversations.  Debates.  Arguments.  Something close to physical fights sometimes, I'm sure.  Voters who don't actively participate in the noise at least have to witness and endure it, and then quite literally declare their selection (usually) by a show of hands.  Arguably, meetings are very democratic, both literally and figuratively.

Caucuses are real-life social media.

Conversely, votes by ballot, which is how general elections are conducted, are very one-way. 

Candidates can claim positions and, short of the media providing context or interpretation, voters can skip all conversation, and simply tick a box on a paper or electronic form.  This is why candidates save lots of their propaganda claims and spending money until a few days prior to election day; quite literally telling people how they should vote is scarily effective. 

With no reason to debate, any truth or falsehood is held sacrosanct, buried in a citizen's consciousness, destined to see the light of day anonymously, and after the fact, once a vote is cast.  This is why one-way media works best in primaries and general elections.

"Old style" campaigning -- replete with its attacks, sound-bites, and shrugs -- is an artifact of ballot voting.  It's the negative aspect of a very positive development: namely, not only giving each citizen the right to think what she or he wants, but the freedom to cast votes based on conscience, and do so without fear of any harm or reprisal.  Ballots are the product of an analog world wherein the right to hold an opinion needed to be affirmed.  Massively convoluted propaganda machines have evolved to change them.

But conversations change opinions, too, and they effectively vet those that are unchangeable.  And caucuses, like social media, are enabling technologies.

Old style campaigning falls apart in a room in which every declaration can be analyzed and debated.  I know it's a horribly flawed experience for many (watching supporters of one candidate or another chanting as they shake placards at one another doesn't bring to mind refrains from the national anthem), but an imperfect conversation is still better than none at all, isn't it?

It seems to me that conclusions reached via caucuses are more democratic, not to mention heartfelt and realistic, than those delivered by secret ballots. 

Think for a moment about what's going on in the business world. 

• Unlike the rare strata of politically-aware activist who visits blogs to rant or rave about issues, a lot of rank-and-file consumers use social media to make decisions as mundane as selecting a toothpaste brand, finding a vacation hotel, or comparing offerings of car insurance
• When it comes to consumer products and services, the days of mass media command-and-control branding are long over.  Brands don't declare values as much as demonstrate them, or get held accountable for them by their consumers
• "Old style" marketing died many years ago, even if some marketers haven't fully come to terms with it yet.  New marketing is digital, just as the strategies that utilize it are involving and social
• Likewise, I think caucuses are digital, and primaries are analog

So, while the case could easily be made that general elections should forever stay grounded in the inviolate sanctity of a secret ballot, it seems silly to suggest that party conversations about candidates are somehow less democratic than letting individuals get manipulated by one-way propaganda. 

If people need to talk about what facial tissue to buy, I think it's worth talking about which candidate should run for President. 

Web Surfing Turned Into a Game

A really intriguing new experience called PMOG -- for "passively multiplayer online game" -- has nearly 5,000 people playing as they surf the web.

It sits on top of their Internet browsers, and lets players leave messages, traps, games, rewards, and links for one another.  Points are accrued and spent on more tools or better protection. 

What does playing in addition to surfing look like?  A visit to one site prompts a pop-up from another player who has left a "mission" for you to explore (a puzzle that could take you to another web site, for instance).  Another site has a "bomb" that goes off when you arrive, costing you points.  An evolving give-and-take between players has them forming castes, strategies, and social connections.

The goal?  Playing.  There's no conclusion.  It is a game paradigm spread over and within a non-gaming experience.

Anybody involved in branding or marketing should pay close attention to what's going on here.

We're already seeing greater use in marketing of ARGs, or "alternate reality games."  An ARG has a story line replete with its own context, which is then presented via a variety of media (web sites, emails, phone calls, even real-world events) so people can participate in it. 

An ARG called World Without Oil let consumers experience an an energy meltdown as if it were really happening -- blog posts and videos made it seem real -- and it just won the activism award at SXSW's Web Awards. 

Clues in movie promotions, posters, TV show web sites  posters and on CD packages have engaged people who are interested in tracking down faux web sites, plots, and other experiences that feel like a game even if there’s no obvious conclusion. 

Playing is interacting.  It's engagement, only with passion.

PMOG applies these qualities to an existing activity, and I think it's a simple leap to consider other activities -- contexts, relationships -- that have never seemed to be anything more than channels and targets for branding and marketing.

So imagine if, say, a similarly interactive experience were spread over interaction with your insurance provider, or across blogs and chats for one technology product or another.  How about allowing mobile phone subscribers to play such a game with one another?  Could your employee communications program become something that’s equally involving and rewarding to play, not just in which to participate in some inert way?

You could see branded filters that laid such a level of interactivity over what we today consider brand behaviors, so I could access a heightened experience having designated myself as a member of one consumer group or another.  Accrue points for customer service wait time, then use them to blast users who post unhelpful answers in chat rooms.  See feedback from my fellow group members when I do things.  Turn the most unpleasant tasks (like filling out required forms) into entertaining diversions, allowing me to ding others (or they me) while I do the work.

The PMOG Beta is wonderfully strange, too, as the overall look-and-feel is very Steampunk (why? I have no idea).  It seems that you can join groups (Associations) with avowed purposes (one group tries to mess things up, while another wants to simplify them).  There's a solid dose of alternate-reality history on the site, and the imagery is very neo-Victorian, which I just love. 

But beyond its look-and-feel, it's the latest indication that playing is the next step after interacting.  It's commenting with consequences.  Participation with a memory.  Give-and-take with true give-and take.  Web 2.x, or maybe even 3.0, or whatever.    

It could be branding with behaviors.