Marketing Magic

Standing Out

Marketing is all about being noticed, isn't it?

Well, no, it's more than that. It's about positioning your company in a positive way. It's about being noticed, making a good impression and being remembered in a world that has an awful lot of marketing noise.

I'm betting, that after reading this blog post from the excellent Cheryl Smith, you will be able to think of one more thing that you can do to help yourself or your company stand out.

Handwritten Notes, Connections, and Lost Luggage.

It's a good story as well as smart advice. Enjoy!

Good Enough is NOT...

Too often in marketing, we stop short. We do enough to get the basic job done, but before we have created something remarkable. The goal of this blog post is to make you take a look at every thing you do - at ALL of your creative output - and ask yourself two questions:

1. Is it "wallable"?
2. Does it have a wienie?

If you're not satisfied that the answer to those two questions is YES - get back to the anvil and keep pounding. There is already too much mediocrity out there; we don't need any more.

Aim to amaze. Shoot to thrill. 

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New Rules of Viral Marketing

David Meerman Scott has written an excellent E-book entitled "The New Rules of Viral Marketing."

It's available in PDF format. Download it, read it and live it. Pass it on to your friends and clients who may be interested.

Unleash the virus! It's too good to keep to yourself.

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Viral - Permission - Marketing

Take a look at this video that suddenly has vaulted to the top of YouTube's "most viewed", snagging 1.4 million viewers last week - all of whom...

Clicked on the "play" button themselves- and forwarded it to friends.

This was a spot that was put together for Levis by Cutwater, the cool San Francisco advertising company that created the famous Ray-Bans video with the guy catching sunglasses on his face.

This is what Seth Godin is talking about in "Permission Marketing" - a paradigm in which we are no longer forced to sit captive while old media waste our time with ads that are neither interesting nor relevant. Instead, we willfully, even cheerfully watch ads that are provocative, fun and stimulating.

What are you doing with your marketing? Are you mired in the same old "interruption-based" media, doing the same old ads that most of the viewers ignore? Because if you are not actively dreaming up ways that you can get the permission of your customers and prospects to market to them, you just might be facing your own fight for relevance sooner rather than later.

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36 Ways Marketing is Like Sex - And Vice Versa

Why Marketing is Like Sex - and Vice Versa

Sex. And marketing. Two areas in which everyone pretty much believes they are expert.

Think about it. Both areas have fairly low barriers to entry. Both areas have a plethora of articles and books available to teach us the "secrets" of success. You could walk up to your uncle right now, and he could talk for hours on either subject.

When is the last time you ever heard someone say, "I really don't know that much about marketing/sex"? Never. People who know, know. Those who don't, think they know

But come to think of it, sex and marketing have similar rules and lessons of interaction. Both can teach us about the other.

What can sex teach us about marketing - and what can marketing teach us about sex?

Rather than running from the question, let's run WITH it! Following are 36 observations or recommendations that could apply equally well to both subjects.

1. The keys to synergy and a long term relationship are trust, passion and respect:

2. Passion is everything - seek ways to live it and create it. Passion begets passion - it’s better if both parties are passionate about each other. And you know passion when you see it. Or feel it.

3. Trust is a necessary foundation for any relationship. Without it, the relationship will erode. Trust takes time to create, and mere seconds to destroy.

4. Respect your market before, during and after the transaction.

5. Communication is vital. Two way.

6. Ask your market what they like - then try to give that to them better than they have ever gotten it before.

7. After the transaction, don’t assume you were awesome. Ask your market how much they liked it and what could have been better. Seek continuous improvement. Oh yeah, you better pay attention to body language; it speaks WAY louder than words.

8. Investigate success as well as failure. If you develop a strategy that appears to have worked really well, find out why. Ask the right questions.

9. The same thing, day after day, night after night, is boring. People will start looking elsewhere for excitement.

10. Serial and varied interactions may seem exciting, but the best long-term results are developed by a deep understanding of your market and what makes them tick. It’s the development of repeat business, and profound mutual loyalty and partnership.

11. Never lose sight of the fact that if the relationship is not mutually beneficial, it will be short term.

12. You don’t position your product - your market positions your product.

13. The right positioning strategy can only be developed once you have a thorough understanding of your market and what it needs/wants, and how you might best address those.

14. You better keep an eye on the competition: what your market is looking at and finding attractive.

15. First impressions are vital. It had better be a good one. And real.

16. If you come across as being in it for you, your market won’t be back.

17. Once the sale is closed, the marketing starts all over again. Don’t fall asleep.

18. There had better be consistency in the brand message and the users’ experience.

19. Perception is reality - you better be listening to what people think.

20. Being louder will not make up for a poor strategy.

21. Making it fun and entertaining will always win more points and create more interest than foolish consistency.

22. It’s a courtship that begins, but never ends.

23. You can’t spin your way out of trouble you behave your way into.

24. Knowing your market is vital. And not all markets are the same. Each has a different set of needs and wants, and will respond differently to marketing messages.

25. Complacency will get you ditched for someone more interesting and/or responsive.

26. Long term commitment is preferred to a series of short term, temporary interactions.

27. There will be misfires - ask about it, learn from it and move on. But don’t be afraid to try something new.

28. The best results will be achieved by listening first - and by listening more than talking.

29. Be real. Don’t try to be something you are not. You’ll have to give up some of your market, but the ones you attract will be there because they want YOU.

30. There will always be people who love reading about it more than they love doing it.

31. Reading every book on the subject will not make one an expert. You must practice and experiment. And fail.

32. Failure, and learning from failure is crucial to long term success.

33. If you haven’t ever failed then you haven’t tried enough new things.

34. Two people engaged in the same transaction can have entirely different experiences. Communication afterward is key.

35. Enthusiasm can attract business sometimes when there is a glaring lack of experience.

36. Winning the head is less important than winning the heart.

OK - I know there are also many ways in which marketing and sex do NOT have similarities - such as say having a goal of winning as many customers as possible. But that's the subject of another blog!

So what other lessons can be applied to both subject areas? I hope readers will feel inspired to weigh in with their own ideas on the subject. After all, everyone is an expert, right? :-)

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Plight of the CMO

Ah, the plight of the CMO. We have all heard heard the statistics. They’re lasting in their jobs now about as long as Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s singing career. Following are the latest statistics from the Executive Search firm, Spencer Stuart.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FrankBlogsAboutResearchAndMarketing2006 - average job tenure 23.2 months
2007 - average job tenure 26.8 months

It may be getting a little better, but there were twice as many CMO vacancies in 2007 as a year earlier.

CFO’s and CIO’s on the other hand keep their jobs right around 3 years. (This still seems short but it’s still 50% longer than CMO’s)

Articles on the subject have suggested job security tactics for the CMO’s - strategies they hope will lead to more secure positions and longer tenures. They won’t help because the focus of those articles is all wrong.

It is unadulterated horse manure that CMO’s need to “do a better job of communicating what marketing can and can’t do”, or need to do a better job of “establishing realistic expectations”. All this will do is make the rest of the C-suite think the CMO is hedging her bets or soft pedaling her effort - which is not going to inspire confidence that she can be entrusted with the advancement of the brand.

Marketing is about dreaming big and tenaciously pursuing those dreams. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes wrong. The smart marketers take stock, learn and move on fast, eyes forward on the goals.

Instead of making suggestions to the CMO that would put a band-aid over the issue at best, the writers ought to be addressing the REAL source of the problem:

The CEO.

Think about it! When is the last time you ever heard of a CEO dropping by the CIO’s office and wanting to discuss the organization of the wireframes for the web site? Or engaged in a debate on risk theory with the CFO?

Everyone has an opinion on marketing. Board members. Employees. Customers. Elevator operators and custodial staff. Everyone thinks they know either what does or what will work. Usually, the CEO is the worst of all, because he’s the one with the budget clout and final word. But just because he is at the top of the corporate food chain does not mean his ideas or judgments are best for marketing the organization.

In fact, if he is a good CEO, he is not likely to have the time to be a good marketer. The CEO is, or should be, too busy leading the organization to do justice to the quotidian minutiae of running marketing. Show me an organization where the CEO (or the CEO’s offspring) is running marketing, and I’ll show you one that is WAY underperforming. Yet most CEO’s love marketing, and want to have an active hand in its creation.

Who can blame them, really? What would YOU rather do, go to an Audit Meeting or meet with the Agency and watch old Robin Williams out-takes from Mork and Mindy?

CEO's are like that too - they would rather listen to the agency pitches; brainstorm taglines, cogitate the implications of the brand promise. Many have a very hard time leaving all this merriment (and publicity) to someone else. But the best marketing is never going to be done by a CEO - at least by a CEO who is doing a competent job of leading his organization.

Instead of jealously holding onto the marketing reins, here’s what the CEO SHOULD be doing:

1. hire a professional CMO
2. allow her to take an active roll in the planning process: the vision development and strategy formulation
3. give her the budget to get the job done
4. Hold the CMO accountable for the vision, but stand aside and give the freedom to execute without arbitrary second-guessing, or making them justify every expenditure.
5. be absolutely clear about expectations: agree in advance on the metrics to quantify success
6. provide the expected time time frame to show results.

It would be really cool too if the CEO understood that in marketing as in finance sometimes the short term is sacrificed for the long term good.

It would also be terrific if the CEO understood that marketing cannot make a shitty company a good one. All good marketing will do is increase awareness of how shitty the company is.

OK, but what happen if the cow doesn’t jump over that moon?

Are you thinking about joining an organization as a CMO? Here are some of the warning signs that it would be a safer bet for you to take an 8 second ride on a bull named Bone Grinder:

Warning Signs

• The organization does not give the CMO a seat on the Executive Committee, or give her access to the Board. Again, is this because they think marketing is not important enough? Or because the CEO speaks on behalf of marketing? Or because deep down they believe marekting is fluff?

• CMO’s aren’t allowed to take part in planning processes, or provided with the vision and 5 year plan. This ensures that all of the marketing decisions are only as forward-thinking as tomorrow. How can the CMO make cogent marketing decisions if they are not provided with a semblance of direction regarding where the ship is supposed to go from the CEO?

• Marketing has no budget or control over its budget. It’s recommendations, decisions and actions are therefore always subject to budget cutbacks and second-guessing. The CEO then has the final word.


• The CMO is expected to provide consulting “input”, but has no decision making authority. He loses face and credibility with the rest of the staff, who rightly surmise they are wasting time with him since he has no real power. This undermines both the leader and the team.

• The marketing is still done in 2008 the same way it has been done for the past several years. Same ads in same publications. The CEO, or the CEO’s kin has been handling the marketing function.

• The marketing department is all about execution of top-down directives rather than strategy development. Marketing used used more to put out fires and take care of promotional emergencies than it is to support the strategy or move the organization closer to the vision.

• The CEO must approve all ad copy prior to its publication. He has marketing books in his office, but the most recent ones are written by Ted Levitt and David Ogilvy.

• There have been several CMO’s over the past few years, and you are told they a) weren’t a good fit with the corporate culture, or b) just didn’t work out.

• The corporate web site is treated like an online brochure, and features models with 80’s hair styles. No one in the organization understands SEM or SEO.

• Blogging is one-way and is treated as an attempt to toot the marketing horn even more. Comments of course, are NOT allowed.

• Little marketing research is done, or it’s done for the wrong reasons. When you ask to talk with the Chief Insight Officer or to see the latest customer satisfaction results, you are met with far-off stares.

Under these conditions, marketing will fail - absolutely fail - to meet expectations. Never mind that the expectations are unrealistic, somebody has to belly up to the chopping block. And who do you think it’s going to be, you or the CEO?

What can CMO’s do?

Suppose you are already the CMO of an organization, and you are frustrated with your organization’s reluctance to accept your brilliance. Following are some recommendations for bolstering your credibility and making yourself indispensable to the management team.

• Know where you are, where you are going (vision) and the strategy for getting there. Let this knowledge drive your decisions, questions, tests

• Become the voice of the customer. Consume all of the current marketing research that you have on hand, and argue for doing more. Do focus groups, asking questions about satisfaction drivers, reasons for buying, and advertising tactics. Quote liberally from the groups in your memos and meetings, and send streams to the C suite to bolster your points.

• Realize that a huge part of your job is providing insight. Do it. Spend one day a week in the stores, or talking with customers. Look in shopping carts, ask direct questions about the customer experience. Go beyond the basic purchase to explore the needs your organization satisfies. Try to experience your business, at least once a week, from your customers’ point of view.

• Talk to your front line employees and ask them about the customer experience. Front line employees are nearly always an underutilized resource for marketing and market intelligence. They interact with customers every day, which gives them a solid basis for recommendations regarding changes or programs that will make the organization stand out way ahead of the competition.

• Take charge of your organization’s marketing partner ecosystem, and realize that YOU are the guardian of the brand. It’s up to you to ensure the imagery and content is consistent, and consistent with the vision.

• Never, ever mislead or lie to your market. Hold your organization accountable to the truth. (Duh!)

• Be the gadfly - the person with the questions, not with the answers. When the CEO or any other marketing expert in the organization tells you what you should be doing, question their assumptions and conclusions. This doesn’t mean you won’t be a team player, it just means you will make sure many different options are considered before a decision is made.

• Be the Change Agent - embrace and advocate change, especially that which is driven by and for the customers and prospects. Keep your colleagues on their toes, by pushing them to embrace change as well.

• Embrace innovation - Business model innovation. Business design innovation. Infrastructure innovation - all of these are going to draw heavily upon your experience talking with customers and prospects.

• Look for ways to reinvent marketing - embrace Web 2.0 and all of its amazing opportunities. Collaborate in wikis, build Google docs, bring in some experts in SEO and SEM. Put a video on You Tube. Blog and invite customer ideas and commentary. Do NOT censor the criticism. Learn from it and respond to it. Web 2.0 means two-way; learn to love it!

• Become highly skilled in analytics, using new technologies and metrics to demonstrate the full value marketing represents to the company. Be able to fully integrate with sales and other functions of the organization.

• Agitate for a seat at the planning table. The customers deserve to be heard during this process, and you are the one with their voice. You want to be a part of the assessment of where things currently are, the development of the vision, and the creation of strategies designed to take your organization to the vision.

Stay focused and on goal

If you want a career in marketing, you are going to have to become comfortable with the fact that the best marketers will make other people in the organization nervous (especially the pseudo “marketing experts”) who will waste no opportunity to criticize or advise. But they’ll shut up eventually when they realize you know a lot more than they do about the customers and what motivates them to buy.

Or maybe they won’t! It’s always a good idea to keep the resume polished! But never fear - the one thing about marketing jobs is that we know new ones are always available!

And if you can bring experience and expertise in the above areas along with a passion for innovation and the customer, you’ll always be able to find a terrific marketing job.

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Starbucks and 2.0

What will Web 2.0 do for Starbucks?

Starbucks has been in a bit of a rough spot recently. Sure, the company is doing OK financially. As of March of 2008, it has nearly 16,000 stores in 44 countries, and is opening stores at a pace of about 6 a day. Income is still positive, and the company is not overloaded with debt.

But there are storm clouds: operating margin is down to a paltry 12%, and growth of same store sales has shrunk to a flat 1% as of the first quarter of 2008. Incredibly, this reflects a 2% value increase and a 1% transaction decline.

And it’s not going to get easier. The dust cloud on the horizon? That’s McDonald’s, and it is coming after the lucrative coffee market. McDonald's has brand, and it has convenience. And it’s selling a new “Premium Brew” that Consumer Reports taste-tested and pronounced “better than Starbucks”. Huh? McDonald's? GTFOH!

And, oh yeah, McDonald's has hot breakfast items. All Starbucks has is carbohydrate-intensive fare that make us tremble even to think about the impending bathing suit season. Muffins that conjure images of muffin-tops. Love handles.

Eeyow. Not only that, the buzz in the blogosphere is negative verging on nasty - disappointed people are asking WTF is going on at Starbucks? People are sharing tales of belligerent baristas, stale, crumbly food, filthy bathrooms, and worst of all, bad coffee.

Bad coffee? At Starbucks?

But wait a minute. Starbucks has always been about much more than just the coffee. It re-defined the whole idea of the coffee shop. Starbucks features a shared coffee experience, and a community of intelligent, connected coffee drinkers who are passionate about their brew and about their lives and about their world. They like the way Starbucks and its coffee makes them feel. Not only that, the joe is damn good. Or was.

Earnings flat. Margins squeezed. Quality of questionable consistency. Recession looming. Food fattening. Competitors circling.

What’s a brand to do?

Here’s what: Starbucks is going to unleash the power of Web 2.0. OK...a very small part of 2.0. But it's a start.

On March 21, 2008, Starbucks announced the creation of an online Starbucks community at MyStarbucksIdea.com. The big idea is to extend the community from the coffee shop to the world. To leverage the power and goodwill of the brand to induce passionate Starbucks customers to conceive ideas for the improvement of the product, the experience and the community (world). The ideas will be shared within the community, voted on by members, and presumably acted upon by Starbucks.

If Starbucks can pull this off, it will be a huge victory for the organization and for 2.0. All of a sudden, Web 2.0 will move from the abstract to the concrete for a great many organizations whose only nod to 2.0 is to have a MySpace page. Needless to point out, this could have ramifications throughout the global economy for people who make a living on the web. This is a pretty major attempt, by a company that has a stellar brand, to use Web 2.0 an interactive tool to understand and improve the entire customer experience. We should all watch, listen and learn.

Let’s take a look at what Starbucks is doing right and wrong so far.

Starbucks is doing several things right:

• First, Starbucks recognized it had a problem. Then it acted. Some companies never even do the first part. Maybe Starbucks should have been soliciting and listening to customer feedback all along, but at least they are doing it now.

• Starbucks appears to be listening. Really. Listening for more than just the words, listening for real meaning - trying to intuit something about the needs of its customers so the stores can connect with them in a more profound way. Moderators (noted by the sbx tag) are responding to suggestions and comments with questions designed to obtain clarification - to get real understanding. And this understanding is always going to be the best foundation for profitable marketing decisions.

• There is immediate gratification. Site members vote on ideas, and watch the overall score increase with their vote. They see how all ideas rank relative to all of the other ones. Ideas are “sorted” into the categories of Products, Experience and Involvement. Each of the categories has hot linked sub-categories that take the reader to all of the ideas concerning that topic. It’s logical and easy to follow. 

• It's highly interactive. Members are allowed to “comment” upon the ideas of others, which can be a very instructive way to observe how the market of customers may react to the idea were it to be implemented. Too many of the comments are of the “dude...w00t” variety, which takes up a lot of space without contributing to the discussion, but that’s still better than censoring any of the comments. The site also provides readers with a sense for the popularity and/or controversy of the suggestion, since it gives the number of comments.

• They are NOT censoring ideas or responses. They’re putting all criticism up there for the world to see, which is painful but confers credibility. One writer excoriated Starbucks for putting the same number of “shots” in the Grande and Venti Espresso drinks - apparently the .55 price difference is for milk, not for one more shot like a lot of people surmised!  This sort of thing terrifies the denizens of the C-suite, who want to maintain “control” over the conversation, just as they have tried to control advertising and PR messages over the years. Giving it up is hard, and I’m betting somebody at Starbucks has gambled his job that this is going to work out well for the company.

• They are practicing UPR (Unconditional Positive Regard) and suspending judgment on ideas at first. This prevents shallow, defensive thinking and brings even more ideas, even the “outlandish” ideas that sometimes are the the breakthrough ones. Sometimes, leaving up the cheesy ideas leads commenters to come up with stellar ones.

• It’s taking real action - telling customers which ideas are going to be implemented, and the time-frame for implementation. For instance, they have decided to offer “free AT&T wi-fi in the stores for 2 hours following a purchase that has been made with a Starbucks card. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. They note which ideas will be implemented and which are actively under consideration. For one suggestion - that of a separate line for Drip-coffee drinkers as opposed to Espresso based drinks, they offered the results of a test they had done on that very issue, and gave the reasons its implementation would be  a challenge in their stores.

This is in essence, an online creative brainstorming session with thousands of participants. It will be unwieldy, difficult to follow but probably very fruitful. The challenge will be keeping the enthusiasm level high, and keeping the output organized in a way that does not suggest manipulation. So far so good.

What they’re doing wrong, or could be doing but aren’t.

That said, there are some opportunities Starbucks is missing - it is not addressing some of the areas that have come under fire recently, areas that people desperately want to see addressed.

• Face the ugly truth - quality is in question. It’s costing Starbucks customers. Tell us what Starbucks is going to DO about it. Now. Whenever I ask the question on Twitter, “What Should Starbucks be doing?”, the quickest answer is “make better coffee”. There is very little mention of the quality issue on the website. Why? This issue has not been addressed and should be. If the company is buying cheaper coffee in a move to save money and improve earnings, tell us about it and tell us what you’re going to DO about it.

• The number two suggestion so far, with 29,220 points (or 2922 votes) has been “free wi-fi”. Not free wi-fi for AT&T customers. Not free wi-fi for those who pay with a Starbucks card. From the ideas in action page, they have announced that customers who make a purchase with their Starbucks card will have free wi-fi for two hours (reasonable), but they have to have an AT&T wi-fi account and be subject to “limited marketing” by AT&T. Huh? Free wi-fi is NOT a difficult concept to grasp. Panera does it, as do Mom and Pop shops across the country. Don’t tell us Starbucks is going to implement an idea, and then fetter it with regulations and exceptions. People will go away.

• It's showing the "best" ideas, but should also have a way to showcase the newest ideas, so that people returning to the site will be able to respond to new suggestions without having to scroll over several pages.

• It has tearoff "post-it" pages in the shops, but is doing nothing there to drive store traffic to the idea site. Why not? Put the address on the cups or on the recyclable pad or maybe even the bulletin board.

• To fully harness the power of 2.0, Starbucks needs to make the site even more interactive. Why not have one of the sbx “partners” recruit original idea posters and creative commenters to an online discussion board, and moderate an online discussion designed to flesh out and understand the original intent of an idea and the needs it would be addressing.

• Why not have a weekly online focus group (that can be observed by other members) to focus on an “idea of the week”. Essentially, this would move the discussion into the realm of “real-time”, which will give it more weight.

• If they aren’t, Starbucks also should be doing research and study offline. Starbucks will end up with the names and email addresses of thousands of passionate coffee drinkers. They should be doing online focus groups and online surveys with this group, testing and ranking ideas as they emerge, then putting fleshed-out ideas back up for more feedback. Listening, probing and listening some more.

Even though Starbucks is about more than just coffee, Starbucks needs to remember that coffee is the linchpin of their value proposition - and they have been losing taste-tests to McDonald's. That's like losing an ambiance contest to Wal-Mart. Free wi-fi will not make any difference if the coffee sucks - we can get both at Panera. I wouldn’t be worried about this except for the fact that I have noted a couple times recently when the coffee was a little over-extracted and bitter and tasted like the bottom of my home coffee pot - not my usual experience. If Starbucks coffee does not improve, it won’t matter what else they are doing right, they will lose their customers. And they will deserve to!

Starbucks has put itself out on a limb with the launch of www.mystarbucksidea.com, and it is going to be very interesting to see what happens from here. If they build a large following for the site, generate a lot of enthusiasm and ideas, and then do very little, or spend a lot of time rationalizing the corporate position or blogging about why they can’t implement this or that idea, they will fall like Icarus before the blazing sun of public disdain. And that will be a loss for the 2.0 community, as well.

But if they get it right, it could be a great victory for 2.0, one that points the way for many other organizations to do more than simply put up a MySpace page and posts blogs about their commitment to  total quality improvement and maximizing the stakeholder return. They will begin to suspect that the best business application of 2.0 is in discourse - not monologues. In listening to your customers and giving them what they want.

Finally!

 

 

Truth in Packaging

So maybe commercials are a bit of a stretch, but are you disposed to believe what you see on a product package? In your experience, are the pictures of of the product on the package a fair representation of what is inside?

A German company did a study comparing pictures on packages to the contents of the package. I've attached a link to the webpage.

The results are illuminating - and very damaging to the credibility of the companies that are selling the product.

They may make a sale when a hungry prospect sees the packaging, but are they really creating long term customers? Or are they creating a culture of distrust that will harm their brand in the long term?

As marketers, we fight the battle for credibility every day. We make claims regarding product quality, service excellence, and responsiveness to customers. Whether people believe us or not is driven by their perceptions of our believability. By their experiences with our brand.

Be honest in your marketing, in your packaging, and in your communication with your customers. The credibility of your brand depends on it.

Anything else shows contempt.