Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

Captain Kirk & The Talking Lizard

One of my pet peeves is the elevation of corporate mascots and celebrity spokesmodels from sales promotion tactics to brand strategy.  Only now I'm thinking that in certain circumstances, they really are one in the same.

Almost.

Consider Geico and Priceline.  Both businesses offer pretty generic, unsexy products (insurer and travel agency, respectively) that compete primarily, if not solely, on price.  Good luck trying to attach emotional or other intangible attributes to such brands, right?  Best is usually synonymous with lowest cost in any commodity business.

But nevertheless, both of these businesses have both broken out of their respective packs; each has reported more converts and higher sales numbers than their competition.  And both of them have goofy marketing programs: Priceline uses William Shatner, in an entertaining, self-mocking sort of way, and the English-accented Geico lizard is, well, hard to ignore.

So is there a connection?  Have these companies built great brands?  Like I said earlier...almost.

I'd argue that low-involvement, low-cost brands are defined far more by habit than choice.  The trick is for the business to get people hooked...literally engaged in some regular use that takes care of the variables of involvement -- through subscription, browser bookmarks, automatic fulfillment and auto-pay billing -- and then keep them from having to think about things ever again. 

Marketing's role is to get attention.  It doesn't make the sale, but it gets your business on the list.  It's an added bonus if that attention includes some information that might make the listing somehow relevant to the decision-maker, but it's not vital (nor common, or set in stone). The strategy works more like a thunderclap, or a flashing police car along the side of the road.  
Celebrities and mascots break through the clutter, pure and simple.  Attaching anything else to them, like brand attributes (or anything lasting) is a reach. 

The first, and all subsequent purchase decisions, are reliant upon the actual functioning of the business.  So that's where the real branding resides. 

Geico and Priceline can't afford to lose customers.  Just like the measures for cell phone providers and the recently discarded comp store sales for retailers, the real payback for using live and CGI mascots requires that consumers establish usage habits. They've got to stick around.

So every aspect of company performance -- what's offered, when, how, and for how much -- has to be focused on making sure customers aren't just happy with the brand, but don't consciously think about it one way or another.   Strong commodity brands have customer bases that are locked-up in routine.  If asked, they'd describe the brand via those behaviors, and not the image or marketing related to the mascots that first captured their attention.

Interestingly, it's a strategy that calls for acutely conscious awareness on the front end...and utterly unconscious routine on the back end. 

Celebrity spokesmodels and corporate mascots are far less important for what they mean, but rather how effective they are at capturing our attention.  What gets done to support the consistent usage habits that follow them are what define the branding.    

So sales promotions and brand strategy can be one in the same.  Almost. 

Mexico's Branding Nightmare

Salmonella.  Drug violence.  Now swine flu.  You think Mexico's development and tourism marketers are having a few sleepless nights?

Only this nightmare is real. 

It has always been a contrivance to think we could separate, say, the branding of farm produce from the realities of where and how it's grown, or present imagery of luxury resorts and pristine beaches that didn't somehow trigger recollections of drug war casualties pictured on the Internet.  We've deluded ourselves into pretending that the miasma of life for millions of poor, ignored, and exploited Mexicans wouldn't affect us across the border, in spite of every effort to claim that the only problem was that too many of them wanted to live here.

Tourism is all about marketing fantasy, just like economic development relies on a large does of hope.  We're supposed to look at those empty beaches in resort ads and suppress the fact that we know the coastline is likely filled with fellow pale, flabby tourists.  Manufacturers need to close one eye to the way workers live, or are treated on the job, or they'd never source or buy products anywhere but Iowa.

Marketing relies on us maintaining this separation, this double-think, and uses tools like creative rationales, excuses, and symbolism to obfuscate or distract.

Only sometimes reality catches up.  So what should Mexico do about it?

The Old School Approach would be to do absolutely nothing.  This nightmare will end, and a new day will dawn, once again filled with hapless and willing tourists and businesses.  Human beings have memories a tad bit longer than gnats, and we prefer the happy comfort of our well-practiced double-think (see above).  Any proactive or additional communicating on negatives such as poisoning, murder, and disease wouldn't do much for the, er, brand; other than extend the bad news.  So cancel whatever marketing you can.  Better to hunker down, and wait for the troubles to pass.

A new approach would be to consider that this Internet thing is going to be with us for a while.  And that the nature of how people become aware and make decisions about things is not like it used to be.  Imagine if the top marketers of Mexico's leading resorts and exporters got together, and committed to figuring out what they needed in order to restore confidence in their brands? 

No, not come up with some creative nonsense, but address first the operational, substantive hurdles...the messy, inconvenient facts that keep popping up, and then finding eternal life online.  They would come up with must-do recommendations for their employers, and for their government, and then they could go public with them, so as to enlist engagement and support from the larger community.  The creative marketing-types wouldn't even be allowed in the room, but instead hired once the substantive changes needed to get communicated.

Do food producers need another layer of third-party inspection?  Should factories have webcams to witness behavior, or should worker treatment get linked more closely to the parts and finished goods that get shipped?  Could the vectors for transmission of swine flu (not to mention the factors that allowed for its genesis) require major, meaningful changes to public health laws and enforcement?

I know.  The likelihood of such a confab is next to zero, and the prospect for any such recommendations getting put into practice even less so.

But I'm not sure Mexico's marketers have a chance to wake up from their branding nightmare without it.

Swine Flu, The Movie

I just finished watching a press conference from the Centers for Disease Control, and I can't help but think that I've seen that scene before.

You know, the one wherein the lead character turns on the TV and some faux news broadcast covers an emerging crisis (from Global Cable News, or some other made-up network).  We know it's a hint that the utter destruction of civilization is coming in about 20 minutes or so, but our protagonist simply notes it, which makes sense, since portent of Armageddon haunts almost every hour of the daily news (and swirls across the Internet far more frequently, as well as virulently).

We've seen the entire movie, actually, only today I think it feels like it's really happening.

Maybe it's a symptom of my loss of faith in our public institutions.  I mean, come on now, our government couldn’t predict the fall of the Soviet Union, the miasma in Iraq, the devastation of Katrina, or the collapse of our economy.  What has it done or said that proves it knows what's going on with the swine flu outbreak? 

Every declaration is nuanced or caveated with blatant wiggle room: it's a public health emergency, only not really.  Travel is being restricted, well, on a voluntary basis.  Nobody in the U.S. has died from it, but that could change.  Families need not panic, but they should start thinking about how they'd feed themselves if stores were closed.

Feeling reassured? 

The Feds can't clearly tell us what's known, and what's unknown, even when they try.  I understand that the situation is changing minute-to-minute, but the TV news segments come across with this overwhelming sense that everyone is chasing the story, instead of getting ahead of it.  Like it's a movie plot that we viewers alone know will inevitably lead to Will Smith doing battle with mutants.

Worse, without clarity from the authorities, we turn to the Internet to find plot twists.  I bet there's a disgruntled bioengineering researcher (played by Russell Crowe) sulking out there, somewhere, with this computer printout that predicts the demise of the human race.  There's a Denzel Washington character who can explain how 4 different strands of flu DNA got woven together into a terrorist plot to kill the President.  The fact that Americans are recovering from the disease means they're slowly turning into zombies, and Milla Jovovich will have to waste 'em all.

I mean us.

The excruciatingly precise verisimilitude of the movies isn't helping things.  We've watched actors living ordinary lives, like Tom Cruise in "The War of the Worlds," or Jake Gyllenhaal and his pals in "The Day After Tomorrow, " so we know that it's rather common to bicker with your kids or chase the ingenue, and then WHAM!  Now, you're running from blood-sucking alien harvesters, or camping out in a public library buried under a mile of snow.

It all seems so very real, almost possible, because we've seen it happen so many times before.  And, whether real or just a really good yarn, the news media -- and through it, our government -- help move the story along, usually with a large dose of foreshadowing...like you want to yell at the screen don't you dolts see what’s about to happen?

Well, don't we?

Boing Boing Sells Out?

With the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") pondering adapting its archaic advertising regulations to cover blogs, I chanced upon some blatant commercial content posing as a blog post on one my favorite sites, Boing Boing.

Last Thursday, it promoted its participation in a lame branding campaign from Comcast.  Comcast is one of its sponsors, which was duly noted at the start of the first sentence.  The short post went on to shamelessly flack something that would never have gotten onto the site otherwise (the image even takes you to the Comcast promotion).  In fact, the Comcast campaign is so dumb and inert that it might have been negatively covered. 

Did Boing Boing sell out?  Naw.  This is no different from what mainstream media features reporters have been doing for years.  Ditto for editorial writers. 

Sure, reporters write about things that have some cachet or hint of relevance, but the primary criteria for picking stories has always been personal predilections, and who took the news person out to the best lunch.  Anybody who has pitched a story to a reporter knows this, and yet there's never been a requirement for disclosure of either 1) the reporter's subjective biases, and/or 2) who paid for the lunch (or whatever quid pro quo might have yielded the story). 

We've also learned to be critical readers, right?  Feature stories are, well, feature stories, not news fact, and a restaurant review or story on some new product or fad isn't the same thing as a performance or satisfaction guarantee. 

How is blogging any different?  I think the implicit argument is that we assign more credibility and authority to blogs...almost since we couldn't trust mainstream media any less, so we give more credence to the blather of anybody who has enough initiative to post. 

But the comments following Boing Boing's shill for Comcast reveal otherwise: everybody knows that the post is commercial speak (again, the site revealed it).  Most of them didn't like it.  Those that defended the post used the argument that defends most crappy behaviors in life (variations of the "it's not personal, it's just business, so it's OK" rationale).  I'm sure that Boing Boing looks at the negativity arising from the placement actually good for the blog (it will deliver more eyeballs, thus raising the ad value, just like mainstream media).

So, whether declared or not, however, I'm not sure that we need conversation on blogs regulated at all.  The primary reason is that we've never bothered to do it to mainstream media.  But there are at least three qualities of blogging that make regulation unnecessary:

1. Bloggers aren't experts at anything except opinion: I know bloggers.  I've worked with bloggers.  And bloggers aren't reporters, industry experts, or unrecognized geniuses (present company included).  The vast majority are color commentators on life, and as such are responsible for little original content save their own personal spin on things they choose to talk about.
2. Bloggers can be shills, just like everyone else: Just like nobody would have ever held actress Rula Lenska accountable if VO5 hair spray didn't hold, neither should we care about bloggers being right or wrong.  When they take sponsorship money, they're the Internet corollary of celebrity spokesmodels; when there's no quid pro quo, they're sharing truly biased, personal opinions (see point above).  Everybody knows it.
3. Bloggers are mostly concerned with promoting themselves: Blogging is a style business first, followed closely by substance; as such, it has as much in common with poetry slams as it does with reporting.  It's simply not commercial conversation, and it's not news, either.  It's blogging, and holding it to either standard misses the point. 

That point is the really interesting debate: how do we define things like "truth" or "authenticity" in the context of Internet conversation?

As mainstream news outlets wither, it seems as though they're being replaced by blogs (among other sources).  Even as we know they're not the same thing as vetted reporting of fact (whether explicitly or implicitly), we pay attention to them and, in doing so, can't help but be influenced by them.  Sometimes we choose to believe them, too, even though we can't necessarily explain why. 

Further, the social web gives us group-reviews and de facto endorsements of products and services...so is that commercial content or news, or something between the two? 

Clearly, this is a debate that's far beyond the regulatory reach of the FTC. 

Further, while I can't tell you how we should figure it out, I can tell you one thing: like the traditional definition of pornography -- "I can't explain it, but I know it when I see it" -- Boing Boing has lost any claim to authenticity or truth-telling I may have once bestowed upon it.

I Hope We Lose The Bid

Chicago is competing with Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro for the honor of hosting the (summer) Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2016.  I hope we lose the bid.

I say this as a native son, born and bred in the city, and a proud believer in Chicago exceptionalism.  Here, we live in a near-constant state of reinvention; after all, this is the place that invented skyscrapers, and then had to invent the real estate on which to build them.  Our stockyards fed the nation, our docks and train stations connected one edge of the country with the other.  Buildings are always going up and coming down, just as traffic has to endure road repairs, extensions, and plain old volume.  We're the folks who gave the world Studs Terkel, Hugh Hefner, and Kanye West. 

So I'm all for change.  But what do we need the Olympics for?

We're all familiar with the boosters' pitch: the Olympics will create jobs, command global media attention, and subsequently benefit the host city's brand thereafter.  So quick: name a city that has benefited from the Olympics.  I bet you’re getting sick of hearing about all that hubabub in Lake Placid?  Contemplating a vacation to Mexico City?  The people of Athens can't stop cashing the checks.  And can you believe that Salt Lake City's population has topped Amarillo's?

Coupled with the billions required to build the facilities that will be left without purposes or benefactors once the games leave -- and all the jobs that disappear as soon as the games end -- and you get the picture.  The city's ruling class of rich and famous people get together and, encouraged by one another's self-importance, commit themselves to making something happen in spite of every compelling reason why they shouldn't.

Hosting the Olympics isn't a business or development decision.  It's a vanity project.

Let's assume just for chuckles that hosting the Olympics were a great idea.  It's still dumb for Chicago, for at least two reasons:

First, the Olympics ain't what they used to be.  Corporations are aggressively questioning the very idea of spending such large sums on a single event.  J&J, Lenovo, Kodak and Xerox announced they'd not return the moment the last games ended.  Some sponsors may not survive to pay up (GM has promised $70 million to the Vancouver Games of 2010).

Even if every human being alive watched one competition or another, the merits of simple exposure to them are far outweighed by the lack of measurable impact or relevance to future sales.  Far fewer people are actually watching, of course.  So you'd think that GM could think of better marketing uses for its $70 million, right?  

The Olympics as a marketing event are so last century.

Which brings me to the second point, which is that Chicago could come up with a far more important, lasting project on which to spend zillions of dollars and years of effort. 

I have no idea what that would be, but I'm thinking less in the direction of a massive, one-time event, and more along the lines of something repeatable, dependable, and always useful.  Like the stockyards, or writing every home with fiber optic cable, or building a rocket launching pad (or giant blimp aerodrome).  Why not build and fund the world's leading genome study center, and then make zillions as it spins off discoveries? 

A few billion would do lots to alleviate all the pain and suffering that we take for granted in our fair city, too.  32 Chicagoans were shot, and 6 died, during just one weekend last month.  Half our kids in public school will never graduate.  I'm not suggesting we trade future development away, but shouldn't our plans have some direct connection to the needs and concerns of all our citizens?

The Olympics are a great event, and I’m happy to watch and root for the Americans.  I'll even brave the craziness and try to attend a few contests if the Games end up in Chicago.

But Chicago is bigger than the Olympics.  We could do better.  I hope we lose the bid.

Pepsi's Brilliant Branding

No, not its inane brand image campaign and logo nonsense.  I'm talking about its announced intention to spend $6 billion to take control of its bottling and distribution operations.  I think it is the smartest branding move the company has made in recent memory.

I think it's nuts that the company is wasting millions on the above-referenced brand communications campaign.  It's a tax (or sacrifice) in service of an imagined abstraction of branding, and it's proof that its marketers have only doubled-down on their habits...in spite of the changes in the world that render those efforts laughable.

Going beyond this easy slam on branding, though, there's a deeper, more substantive issue worth talking about: the traditions of distribution have changed, too.

The outdated perspective on operations is that it's purely functional.  In the soft drinks business, companies wanted to keep these businesses (assets and liabilities) "off the books," so they could focus on the real business of developing and marketing stuff.  It was also the source of lots of financial ledgermain that contributed to the bottom-line.

Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi knew the gig was up on Pepsi's old-fashioned distribution model last year when she announced that it needed to be "reconceptualized."   The company had changed...now selling lots of products that don’t quite fit the "fill and ship" model that worked for a long time (and made lots of bottlers very rich). 

I suspect Ms. Nooyi saw also that the definitions of branding and distribution are interrelated.

Marketing tells people about products, and awareness is far preferable to non-awareness.  Sales promotions work, and digital marketing campaigns can be lots of fun.  Creative ads get headlines and even win awards at Cannes.  But very little of what Pepsi's inventive brand marketers can propagate into the Universe will do anything to support long-term, repeat cola sales (or sports drinks, or water, or whatever).  It'll do even less for profits, as branding is an expense no matter how many people will swear their lives to the pretense that it's an investment. 

Tomorrow's real branding magic is going to come from conceptualizing all business activities as branding: ingredients, mixtures, containers, manufacturing, distribution, display, replenishment, and support all commingled to provide uniqueness, competitive advantage, and behavioral prompts for purchase.

So bottling isn't after or outside Pepsi’s brand, but rather is the brand.  Or at least a core part of it.  Bringing it into the company’s fold isn’t some exercise in cost-reduction, as noted by the financial press this week, but rather a brilliant, strategic branding move.

Think about it.  New packages and formulations, available at new and different locations, priced and supported in novel ways...all thanks to a holistic approach to the brand, vs. some archaic top-down application that sees it only as image and words.  It's these actions, and real investments, that will build sustainable, long-term brand growth. 

So Pepsi can run all the nonsense ads it wants, and do nothing for its business other than help its agency folks put their kids through college (I'm all for it).  But I suspect Nooyi's bottler strategy is a brilliant move toward redefining that what, and not just the how, of Pepsi's brand. 

If she's successful, I bet we'll see billboards that say something more meaningful and compelling than "Howdy."

What Do They Know?

More companies are declining to provide revenue or earnings estimates for their next three months of business.  This is a disturbing trend that reveals a scary vacuum at the core of their strategic planning processes.

Two bits of recent research illustrate the problem:

• A third of the 600 companies responding to a survey by the National Investor Relations Institute said they'd limited or eliminated their forward-looking guidance
• Almost two-thirds of companies cannot accurately forecast cash flow within 10 percent, according to a study by a management consulting firm called The Hackett Group, Inc.

So Intel declined to give any guidance a week ago on its upcoming quarter.  Manpower Inc. did, too.  BMW and SAP put up their collective financial hands and gave up on predicting the end of 2008...in November!   A host of retailers have not only retired from providing forward-looking predictions, but have stopped reporting past month sales results (such as Macy's, Home Depot, Sears, and CVS Caremark).

Why the cloudy corporate crystal balls?  The current credit crunch, fickle customer demand, and other externalities that, according to the NIRI's CEO, means "If you don't know what the future holds and you can't accurately predict it, you don’t want to be out there telling somebody something you don't have confidence in."

So what do they know?  A lot, it turns out...

The laws of physics render the future an unknowable destination, so forecasts are the paths we follow to find it.  Businesses rely on forecasts for every function, from ordering parts/ingredients for products and hiring/training staff, to borrowing cash and making investment decisions.  They do it all the time. 

Therefore, a claim that even the immediate tomorrow is somehow beyond the purview of a strategic planning model must mean:

• The company doesn't like what it sees, which means investors should be frightened, and/or
• It really doesn't know how to deliver on its plans, which should send everyone running away, screaming

If the news looks like it's going to be bad, shouldn't a company be required to share insights as to why things might look that way, and what actions it will take to impact it?  The tools exist to collect and analyze more information in an instant than most individuals can absorb in a lifetime, and we're supposed to believe that the CEO has no visibility? 

Now, if that visibility is really and truly cloudy, and the business can't specify the activities it can rely upon (i.e. the reliable core of its plans that it can all but guarantee), doesn't that say something about a vacuum at the very core of its strategy? 

Companies are responsible for understanding not just what should happen, but what they can make happen, while assigning meaning to it all.  If the future is really a blank slate, the management should be fired, or the company simply boarded up.  Jeez...even blackjack players assign percentage likelihoods to cards yet to appear face-up on the table.

It's simply unreasonable for brand names to reduce perceptions of the fundamental drivers of corporate performance -- revenue and profits -- to the equivalent of a shrug. 

I know, I know, Wall Street stock analysts are mean and unforgiving, and they punish companies if they miss their estimates by even a small fraction.  I say deal with it.

Everybody knows that you can't guarantee what the future may hold.  We already know what should work might not work out.  Businesses are in business to hatch plans, and then deliver them, and they have a responsibility to communicate to us what is a core, reliable plan, and what variables may affect it.

That is...presuming they know. 

Shakespeare Did It

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has rendered a verdict: William Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to his pen.  The likely author was Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford.

This says lots about the nature of truth in the chaos of our Information Age...or the changed definition of how we make decisions in our Age of Chaos.

If there's one thing we know is true more than (and above) any other idea, it's that nothing is as it seems.  Our capacity to digitally change visual and auditory records of history renders them as no more than creative expressions; the little places, points, and edges where we once had to look for evidence of manipulation -- such as the staging of an event, the confirmation of a signature, or the obvious cut-out of a person or object in a photo -- are now often proof of authenticity, as real things are often less perfect than manipulated ones. 

The Internet has done the same thing to text, and to the content it expresses.  No fact exists without a qualification or refutation, and the mechanism of online interaction elevates every viewpoint to a simulacra of truth.  Internet search, and the need for reporters and bloggers to present "another side" to every conceivable story or fact, means that nothing is as it seems, no matter how obvious or sacrosanct it might be.

Jesus was married.  HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and inoculations are bad for you.  The World Trade Towers were felled by dynamite blasts.  Humans cavorted with dinosaurs on a planet Earth only 6,000 years old.  The Rolling Stones' Brian Jones was murdered.  President Obama will raise your taxes.

And Shakespeare didn't write his plays.

I mean, come on now, this is kinda nuts, even if it's all good fun.  How do we know that Socrates really said what Plato attributed to him?  Where's the proof that it was FDR sitting at his fireside chats, and not an imposter?  Since nobody was in the room with Einstein, where's the confirmation that he wrote his famous equations?  Could Mozart's pen have been guided by someone else's hand?

Justice Stevens' case rests on all the circumstantial context stuff of a case before a court: the Bard didn't own enough books to explain the breadth of his knowledge; his education was wanting; he dedicated a few plays to somebody in the earl's family; the guy just wrote too many brilliant plays too quickly, and left little in the way of letters or drafts to attest to his struggles.

Welcome to the Facebookification of history.

Even in light of immediate, incontrovertible evidence, the perception of truth is still a perception.  A conscious decision.  Fact is, ultimately, belief, in that you have to trust that something is trustworthy.  Truth is a decision, rendered in the "courts" of individual minds and hearts..

Our Age of Chaos blows up that decision-making process, though, or at least diffuses it, so there's no ultimate finding.  Or it just extends the conversations endlessly.  Nothing is set.  Everything is changing, or questionable. 

And we marketers think we can associate qualities with the toothpaste and car polish brands we sell?  If the Shakespeare brand can't survive intact, I shudder at the prospects for Apple, or Bud.

My Plan For Skype

 
Now that eBay has put Skype up for sale, it's an intriguing question to ponder whether an IPO or acquisition makes the most sense.  I think a better question would be to reconsider what's going on.

Skype is a poster child for how successful -- and misleading -- technology hype can be.

It was the brainchild of the folks who gave the world KaZaA, which was a fast-follower P2P file sharing application right after Napster created and broadened the marketplace for illegally swapping media files (Napster was shut down in 2001).  Calling the demand for such services a "marketplace" is a bit wobbly, as nobody was paying for any of it, so there was no actual market.  The brillance of KaZaA was that it got gobs of people to do something for free, required no effort, and had no real-world consequences. 

Sound familiar?

The founders went on to invent Skype, which was conceived as a KaZaA-like P2P app for swapping voice.  Utilizing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), it was able to let people use their computers like phones and, better yet, do it for free.  It had 100 million registered users within its first 3 years of operation, which helped inspire eBay to pay $2.6 billion for it.

And then eBay promptly forgot about it.

I guess the rationale, if there ever was one beyong the giddy nonsense of we'll figure out how to monetize it later on, was to let eBay's customers use Skype as a tool to communicate with one another.  But I couldn't find a Skype icon anywhere on eBay this morning, and it's not even offered as a way to contact eBay customer service. 

When eBay's boss claims that "...separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth strategies..." I don't think he's being terribly honest.  eBay has spent no obvious time, nor made any significant public gestures, evidencing even the slightest focus on Skype.  Similarly, Skype has introduced some pay services (like calling out to real phones), and grew revenue to $145 million in 4Q08, but continues to operate and appear as a spunky, inconsistently reliable, free-standing start-up.

(Disclosure: I use Skype occasionally.  My name is "baskinjs")

So what's going on?  Well, I think Skype is a perfect candidate for a dim bulb plan, so here's the skinny:

• VoIP is cool.  With the advent of ubiquitous hot spots, and various technologies (like 3G) to get Internet stuff on mobile devices without having the wait for the paint to dry, means that there's a viable network on which to conduct conversations (and any other data transactions)
• VoIP is cheap.  It'll always cost less than a proprietary network.  Being generic is also a drawback, as Skype (or any VoIP provider) is trying to make money offering bathers voluntary help stepping into a free ocean
• VoIP isn't a business. Put aside all the poetic blather about networks and systems and glorious misrepresentations of reality found in slide presentations.  The only reason Skype was worth anything a few years ago was because the context around it was nuts.  Remember, eBay wrote off pretty much all the price it paid for it only a few years later.  Can anyone say "bubble hangover?"
• Skype is a community.  Forget for a moment all of the entertainment-based communities we normally celebrate, like Facebook and YouTube.  People use Skype for a specific, purposeful reason: to talk to one another.  So it has a real-world utility, by definition and, accordingly, its users have something in common other than a shared interest in Susan Boyle's singing debut.  Further, the very use of Skype creates and supports community; it enables communities every time people reach out to one another
• Skype is a service.  Well, it doesn't understand that, but it is.  The service available to users now is embarrassingly inadequate (i.e. there is none).  Skype operates as a technology, and it's supported as one, with all the requisite FAQs and outsourced responsibilities.  But with 370 million registered users, and nearly 8% of the world's total voice minutes originating with it, you'd think it would be something more (see Community above)?
• Skype needs a purpose.  Or purposes.  Big, bold, hairy ones the change the world..like being the best voice app in existence, and offering the service to support it.  Donating x% of every call to fighting global warming, so users become true eco-warriors.  Becoming the only viable alternative to business travel.  Establishing real communities of users (around geography, topic, or interest), so that each use is a dip into community, and the communities get smarter, more relevant, and bigger.

Or all of the above. 

Figuring out how to make money giving something away for free is a crappy business model, all of the happy new media prognosticating aside.  Skype has zillions of users with at least something meaningful in common. Its strategy should be based on defining purposes, not just technoology, services, or even the faux appearance of community that's so in vogue these days. 

This would raise really intriguing options for an IPO or acquisition, wouldn't it?  I'd love to help write that offering prospectus for a newly-envisioned Skype, based on the promise of tangible user interests.  You can just imagine how boring the plan for the business as currently configured would look by comparison.

Potential acquirers could be businesses that need to establish (or attach) purpose-driven communities to their brands.  So it's not just telecos in the bidding anymore.  Think oil company.  Commodity consumer product, like Coke.  Maybe a CE product manufacturer or, gulp, even Microsoft.

None of these opportunities will ever see the light of day unless the management at eBay and Skype come to terms with what's really going on.  No dim bulb is bright enough to illuminate it for them.

An Inevitable Evolution?

It's sad to watch the newspaper dinosaurs thrash in the marketplace's tar pits, but the Boston Globe's latest branding campaign is destined to become fossilized before the gunk dries.

The paper is all but extinct: its parent, the New York Times Co. (itself troubled), gave it one of those cut-off-your-legs-or-die threats when it demanded $20 million in cost concessions from the unions.  Like the topsy-turvy craziness that lends much of the Conventional Wisdom on Detroit's woes to suggest that legal obligations to former and current workers are the reason nobody wants to drive American-made cars, the dare to the Globe was all but a formal announcement of the paper's demise. 

Then, only a few days later, word leaked out that the paper will run a branding and subscription campaign.  In other words, it set its feet firmly in the tar. 

The ads will be headlined with "One Story," and will talk about the Globe's storytelling and photography in print and TV spots. Interestingly, it seems that the entire campaign will run on Times-owned or controlled media (NESN TV, the Globe itself, and a free communter tabloid).  So thank goodness it isn't actually paying for having helped along its own extinction.

But the branding, like the paper (it seems), is doomed.  It didn't have to be this way.

I know that brighter bulbs than I have been struggling with the challenges of newspaper circulation and readership for years now, and with little success to show for it.  Marketers have tried every possible invention to garner interest, short of holding a puppy hostage and threatening to kill it unless people renewed their subscriptions.  None of it has done much to stem the slide of these great, old beasts into the muck.

That's because I don't think the problem is that more people need to appreciate the beauty of the Globe's stories and photography.  Its problem isn't that folks don't feel fond thoughts for it (the Globe is an institution, after all), or that they don't realize that at least some content in the paper is available nowhere else (though that number has been shrinking significantly).  There's nothing that marketing can tell people that they don't already know, and no amount of creativity or sincerity will change that fact.

The Globe has to become relevant to its readers...no, it needs to be needed...and that would require a rethinking of the paper itself, not just its branding.

Here's a for instance: 

• Instead of simply rearranging the paper's sections to somehow appeal to the aesthetics of Internet consumers, why not do something that the Internet can't do?
• How about deliver objectivity and truth?
• The POV of the paper, from its editorials to beat reporting, would get refocused to become arbiters of fact, providing assessments of the prior day's news in a truly (and uniquely) fair way. It would shift from reporting the news to assessing it
• So, while the Internet torrent of quasi-news and gossip swirled through the alimentary canals of readers' screens and mobile devices, the Globe would be the resource that everyone wanted to check every morning...a reality check on what was said, who said it, and what it meant
• In this way, the newspaper wouldn't have to operate as a competitor to online noise, but rather recast itself as an augment and necessary pallative to it

Better yet, this purpose would be nearly impossible for other entities to copy or do better.  The Globe would be utilizing its unique qualities -- great reporters and editors, and processes for vetting truth from fiction -- instead of dismantling them in order to mimic the breezy irrelevance of online news

Coming up with the branding campaign for this evolutionary step would be a hoot!  And if this version was a dim bulb idea, I'm sure there are other ones that would have been worth pursuing.

Extinction wasn't inevitable.  But the latest branding campaign, without any real, relevant, needed changes to what the Globe hopes to accomplish, means that its hopes of survival are all but spent. 

Splish, splash.  That tar pit sound is sad.