Marketing Matters

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Did you catch me on Fox & Friends yesterday?  It was an interesting segment broadcast nationally on the role of unemployed fathers. Fox posted half of the panel’s conversation on its site, but the more interesting part was only available to those who tuned in (or who are reading this).

In the second half, we talked about how an entrepreneurial spirit is the only way to combat the economic environment we’re currently enduring. For established companies everywhere, that means that the surest way to weather this storm is to invest in your brand to draw out what makes your offering unique. Now is the time to get out your message in creative and engaging ways.

Many companies are waiting right now for things to improve. But change doesn’t happen on its own. Change needs an advocate – and right now it needs an impatient one. Now is the time to invest in your brand, to strengthen its voice and value. Now is the time to make your message cut through the white noise of anxiety in the marketplace. Create a bold statement of your value. Your customers are listening. An articulate voice can be of immense value to them, especially when your competitors are just muddling through. That articulate voice, that clear message are the products of your brand at work. It’s times like these that make having a brand worthwhile.

So yes, hunker down, be careful, be prudent – do all the smart, common sense things you know you should. But don’t wait – leave that to the competition. Now is the time to create!

An e-mail for eTail 2009 landed in my box the other day with the following announcement: “Pundits agree that hard times also present opportunities for innovation.”

Maybe I’m foolish for thinking that major organizations that enjoy good reputations and talk to marketers all the time wouldn’t throw such fluff in our faces. I mean, surely marketers are responsible for plenty of fluff in the sales dialogue – and if we’re not, Scott Adams may be out of a job. But to try to out-fluff the source of fluff is just asking to be taken to task.

So, what’s so fluffy about this, you ask?

For starters, three out of the ten words are meaningless buzzwords in this context: pundit, opportunity and innovation. Taken alone, any one of them can actually mean something. Together, they suck the meaning out of the sentence.

Sometimes, though, if we’re not careful, we do end up sounding fluffy when we try to be sincere. So let’s give our friends at eTail the benefit of the doubt and consider what it is they’re trying to communicate: Marketers need the external validation of “pundits” to be motivated to come up with new ideas.

This is the fluff that irritates me as a marketer. Coming up with new ideas is what any good marketer should be doing every day. To be blunt, all our audiences have heard it all before. They wouldn’t listen to the same old message if you strapped them to a chair while you repeated it over and over. If you’re not trying to find a new way to present your ideas, you’re not being listened to. You don’t need a pundit to tell you that, you just need common sense.

There’s no excuse for bad messaging just like there’s no substitute for common sense when it comes to marketing. Circumstances don’t call for innovation. Your audience does – every day.

With everyone trying to be a thought leader these days, I have to wonder, who exactly is supposed to be thought-following?

Most marketers and CEOs will tell you that you can best differentiate your company by being the smart guy in the room, the one everyone listens to. The logic is something like this: “People are inundated by messages these days, so if you show people you’re smart, you’ll cut through the chatter, they’ll listen and you’ll make money.”

There are a bunch of problems with that. Here are just a few of them:

If everyone’s doing that (and everyone is trying to), there’s no rising above the chatter because the chatter is now just different chatter than it was before it was important to be a thought leader.

Not everyone is smart enough to be worth listening to. Sorry to be blunt, but not everyone can really have pioneering thoughts on a subject. And nothing is worse than someone who’s not that good demanding they be listened to.

Unless you’re very careful, by positioning yourself as a thought leader, you’re effectively telling your clients and customers that they’re not as smart as you. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a bad way to win people over.

But even if you are able to overcome all of those pitfalls, you still may not find thought leadership beneficial to your business. Why not? Because most decision makers (whether they’re making those decisions about which doughnuts to buy or how to allocate their $500 million budget) want to feel in control and lead themselves (which is exactly how thought leadership became the popular idea it is today).

In other words, it doesn’t matter what decision someone is making, they want to make it themselves. What they want is someone who can help them make the best decision they can by being a sounding board for them and brainstorming with them.

The key, then, if you want to sell your expertise, is to be a thought partner. Be the one decision makers turn to in order to have some help along the way. Being a thought partner means you’re sharing the load, it means you’re reliable, present, thoughtful and, most importantly, listening. It means you’re a catalyst that helps great ideas come to life.

Thought partnership is like great jazz improvisation. Someone starts a riff and you and a group of people jam on that and create some incredibly complex and beautiful music. Your being the room makes that music soar, but you don’t create it alone. Of course, not every meeting will sound like Coltrane, but it will be a lot better than if you insist on playing solo while everyone else in the room waits for you to sit down and be quiet so they can play a note, too.

So be a real thought-provoker. Be a thought partner.

Just to keep harping on Microsoft for a moment, what’s really a shame with their last three major campaigns (Jerry Seinfeld, I’m a PC, and the Mojave Experiment) is that in trying to make their products and platforms interesting and engaging, they failed to engage their audience’s emotions. It’s all demonstration without audience empathy, they’re saying “this is funny, thou shalt enjoy” without eliciting the emotions naturally.  The stories aren’t well constructed.

And while they’ve been trying to confront Apple more and more directly, they’re not attacking them where they’re vulnerable. Apple will always get high marks for being interesting, but it will also always get equally poor marks for being an environmental hazard . One of Apple’s greatest strengths has always been its strong visual element, especially vivid colors. But Apple doesn’t seem to care for green very much. Sealed batteries in popular devices wear out in a few years causing a fully functional device to be tossed into the garbage heap. How much waste is Apple responsible for? And then let’s talk about battery chemicals seeping into the ground.

Meanwhile, the PC (and competitors’ phones, computers, portable music players, etc) have batteries and other parts that can be replaced easily and disassembling a PC to recycle its various parts is both a cinch and lucrative.

The only real reason that Microsoft wouldn’t steer its advertising in that direction would be that, as a company, it’s not exceptionally green itself. Correcting that, though, is a lot less expensive than high-profile ad campaigns that don’t accomplish anything. And it’s already a world better than Apple, according to environmental watchdogs such as ClimateCounts.

The “I’m a PC” ad used a world of faces. Make those faces do something good for the world they represent and people will care more.

It’s so hard not to talk about Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” campaign, I’m not going to try to resist. It’s pretty obvious that the strategy is to put the “personal” back in personal computer, but they leave unanswered the question of what, if any, emotional tie those people have to their PC or that we viewers could have to them. That’s supposed to be the whole point of making a brand personal, right? Make people care about the brand and the product. They didn’t.

One could argue that it’s not necessary for us to feel anything about our PCs at this point. PCs are ubiquitous and utilitarian. They’re almost like water faucets or electrical outlets – I turn it on and it goes. And frankly, most PCs run Microsoft products most of the time. PCs running Microsoft products have become a basic household utility. When was the last time you felt one way or the other about your basic utilities (assuming they’re working)?

And that’s the reason we users get so upset about things like Vista when it crashes or has crappy functionality (a search function that can’t find anything???) or the like. That’s not how a utility is supposed to be. If my PC stops working when everything seems fine, I feel like I’m experiencing a rolling blackout in a third world country. My computer and the third world should not be comparable.

Which brings me to Orville Redenbacher. Mr. Redenbacher (or at least his agency) realized that popcorn was being widely consumed without much thought to the manufacturer or the respective quality. To make people think, briefly, about their choice, he got up in front of the camera and, like some quirky old uncle we all seem to have, talked to us about popping corn. He turned his product into a brand we cared about.

When I was growing up, it seemed like every third commercial was either Mr. Redenbacher talking about popcorn or Frank Purdue talking about chicken. So if Microsoft wants us to care about PCs and Microsoft products, why not use Bill Gates? How about if Bill Gates talked to the world about their PCs? If I saw twenty-five seconds of Vista-tweaking advice from Bill Gates and a five second tag, I’m not only going to watch that commercial, I’m going to care about it, go to the site to download the suite of them that will inevitably be released, talk about it and sing their praises for being smart. I bet a lot of other people would, too.