The Art of Einstein

Everyting I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Steve Jobs

 Ken  Segall and I had a long, chatty lunch a week or so ago.  Once upon a time Ken and I worked together at LGFE.  He’s been around tech advertising as a creative type for years - many of them spent working on Apple at Chiat Day.

            Jobs, he says, is passionate about keeping things simple - which dovetails in a way with a long ago lesson I learned from a New Yorker editor who, when I asked him what he did as an editor, replied “It’s very simple.”  “I am a surrogate for the reader.”  His job, in other words, was be sure that ideas, no matter how complicated, were easily understood.  He was a sort of customer advocate who made things simple, as Apple has been striving to make computing simple for as long as I can remember.

            Back in the era of green screens and DOS prompts, Apple borrowed the icons that had been developed at Xerox PARC and introduced them on Macintosh in 1984.  Suddenly using a personal computer became hugely simpler.  Microsoft saw the light and went to work developing Windows.

Bailing a Leaky Boat

I have been heads down on a couple of projects and haven’t been paying attention to anything else for the past 6 weeks - this blog included.

But out of the corner of my eye I did notice that the the big cheeses of adland have been wringing hands in public lately about when the business will bounce back. 

They may be worrying about the wrong thing.

Instead, if I were Maurice Levy or Martin Sorrell I’d be worryied about Jeff Bezos and his kind.  A few years ago Bezos decided his ad dollars were wasted.  (With all the media opportunities available these days it’s easy to dump $50 million into a campaign that disappears without a trace).  Bezos, in what I think is a flash of genius, decided to deep-six his ad budget and invest the money in doing good things for his customers.  If providing a better customer experience worked, he figured the news would get around.  So, the dollars that once bought TV time went into free shipping - and the rest is history.  Customers responded, Amazon’s business went through the roof, and, by the way, changed the game for other Internet retailers. 

“Free Shipping” may not be the most creative headline but it's supported by a brilliant creative idea.

And Bezos is anything but a wild duck.  Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos says  “we actually take a lot of money that we would have normally spent on paid advertising and put it back into customer experience.”

In the Internet era, the way to build a brand is to get people to your store ( a.k.a. your website ) and give them something they can’t get in the real world.  Sometimes the offering is unique - like Twitter or Facebook (I have never seen an advertisement for either).  Sometimes it’s a commodity like books or shoes.  In any case the way to build a brand in the 21^st century has less and less to do with advertising, as we once knew it.  It’s about treating people with over-the-top care and consideration so that they 1) can’t bear not to come back and 2) can’t resist spreading the word. 

Advertising and the agencies that flog it aren’t going away in my lifetime.  But the ad biz is a leaky boat, and that’s what I’d be gloomy about if I were sitting in Martin’s chair.

 

 

 

 

Warning! Brand terrorists at work!

I could not believe my eyes the first time I saw this.

Some genius over at GM gave one of his co-conspirators the go-ahead to punch a hole in the middle of the Chevy bowtie logo, stick a trunk lock in it, and slap it on the rear deck of a Chevy Cavalier.  What can these people be thinking?

The hole in the Chevy bowtie is a sign of what’s been wrong at GM and a lot of other companies for a long time. 

What's changed? How about everything!

My friend George Parker, advertising bad boy blogger, lobbed in an email the other day.  Seems he’s been tapped to chair a panel  here in NYC all about how the business has changed in the past umpteen years, what’s wrong and what can we do  to fix it.  George asked if I’d join the fun.  Alas I will be otherwise disposed on August 20^th.   But his email got the juices flowing.  What has changed?  What can we do?

So much has changed that it’s hard to figure where to begin.  We have new tools, new media, the Internet, new emphasis on measurement and accountability, no more commissions and on and on and on.  But advertisings folk are resilient and figure out how to deal with this newness eventually.

However, I were able to be on George’s panel I would make several observations.

1.     1.  The ratio of good to terrible is about the same as it used to be.  The 80/20 rule still applies though in reality I think it’s more like 95/5.   (While we may remember “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” we forget “this invisible shield protect’s me”)

2.     2.  Where ‘no idea’ used to hide behind production values it now hides behind computer graphics

3.     3.  The impulse to tune out advertising today is driven by the fact there’s so much more of it.  (TV commercial time has gone from about 6 minutes an hour in 1975 to about 20 currently)

4.  4.  Advertising has lost the talent for telling interesting, believable, compelling stories.

5.. 5.  Measurement rules.  It keeps client and agency from taking chances on new ideas. 

The biggest development by far, however, l is the change in the basic nature of persuasion.  

Not so long ago the marketplace was fairly simple.  You had a handful of products to choose from.  They were sold in a relatively few places.   All we ad weasels had to do was write some ads that ‘sell’.  That was no problem, and results at retail, coupon returns from direct mail, and coupons in magazines confirmed us often enough to support an occasional 3-martini lunch.

Wham.  Bam.  POW!!!  There’s no more peace in happy valley.  The marketplace has become chaotic.  Choice, for practical purposes, is now infinite.  The job an ad must do is help the consumer wade through a cornucopia of options - product and shopping venue.  Selling is no longer about persuasion.  It’s about resolving complexity - a much more difficult job.   

Ads must help consumers work their way through the noise, find what you're selling, and make a choice in your favor.  All this, knowing that they've been researching your category on line, reading reviews, and asking their friends for advice.  And they're tuned in to your selling game.  They smell phonies mile away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 8 Iron Laws of Customer Loyalty

Disclosure:  After many years making advertising I have been consorting for the last decade with customer experts who predict loyalty.  

I used to believe that advertising was about making great ads.  In fact, it’s about making great customers.  It is, nevertheless,  important work, because an absence of customers has a chilling effect on commerce.  If absence of customers persists, unemployment may result.  Customers may not show up on the balance sheet but there’s no doubt that they're a company’s most important asset.

Therefore, if I were into decorating my body with rules of life as some of my motorcycling friends are, I’d stop at the neighborhood tattoo parlor and have the following rules inked on my hide, lest they ever be forgotten.