The Art of Einstein

Naming Your Baby

Things have come to a nasty pass in the agency biz.

Being hired by a procurement officer is surely a sign of vendorship, not partnership. And apple carts   continue to be upset at every turn.

Marketing once was a piece of the advertising pie. Now advertising has become a sub-set of marketing, and the Rodney Dangerfield in the marketing mix.  Ad types who were once counted on for wise counsel are now vendors who don’t get no respect.  

And new generations of digital agencies has contributed to this reversal of fortune. Here’s what I mean.  A list of advertising agencies popped up on my screen the other day.  The list included : Juniper Park, Rockfish, Big Spaceship, Unknownlab, Victors & Spoils, Ground Zero, and Toy.  No Weiden.  No Kennedy  No Fallon. No Bogusky.  So who’s in charge?  Who’s responsible?   Who’s minding the store?  In a service business, where relationships matter,  does it really make sense to hide behind a name that make you sound like a rock group? 

Naming your new company after the partners may sound quaint in this digital era, but there’s much to recommend it.

• It establishes a unique identity for your firm - making your URL safe.
• It clearly differentiates you and your crew from everyone else.
• It lets everyone know who’s in charge, where the buck stops, etc.
• It tells the client, who may very well not be working directly with the names on the letterhead, who to call when the relationship hits a rough patch. 
•  It identifies responsibility and by doing so builds trust and authenticity.

Every rule has exceptions and so does this one.  But in the end I believe that personality wins.  And most business people with an ad budget burning a hole in their pocket will feel more comfortable and confident entrusting it to stand up people who aren't afraid their name on the door.  

 

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.

Betty Crocker's Recipe For A Perfect Website

You may think Betty Crocker is a little "old school."  Think twice.  Betty was created 88 years ago “to respond to customer inquiries  in a more personal manner”  She was, by the way, invented by a small company to talk about a commodity product, baking flour. 

Betty and her mission came to mind the other day as I looked at a friend’s website.  I shall call my friend Tim and fudge some of his business details to protect what has always been a cordial relationsip.  

Tim is smart, honest, and focused.  He sells quality things.  Shake his hand and you know he’s a person you want to do business with.  Like most companies, what’s unique about Tim’s isn’t what’s on the shelves.  It’s his values, policies, and people that set Tim’s company apart.   Unfortunately his website does not convey this competitive advantage.  The site lacks what I call humanility - that combination of humanity and personality that elevates communication beyond features and benefits and into the realm of the intangibles that differentiate one business from another. 

There’s no recipe that applies unconditionally to every business - but Tim’s website could be a lot better if he followed what I think of as Betty’s recipe.

"Bring Me a Big Animal Book!"

I went to a memorial service on Saturday for good friend and former client Charles G Francis.  Chuck was the Grand Sachem of IBM communications and advertising for a long stretch and was in charge when our agency, LGFE, was hired.  

It was a momentous time to be hired by anyone in the computer industry but especially by IBM.  The personal computer explosion was brewing.  And while IBM was unsurpassed as a sales organization, feet on the street was their modus operandi.  Salesmen sold computers.  Advertising was for buffing the corporate image.  At the time we were hired I’m pretty sure IBM spent more on recognition events for sales people than on product advertising.  Of course everything was about to change - including my life in advertising.

Chuck didn’t actually hire LGFE, his colleagues did.  He had added us to a list of 25 agencies IBM was reviewing for a small corporate ad assignment.  If ever any agency defined the term “unlikely contender” it was us.   But against all odds we made the cut.  And when the choice came down to LGFE vs. an agency that was literally 100 times our size, Chuck recused himself from the decision process because he’d once lived next door to Dick Lord our president.   Integrity was Chuck’s middle name.

Why Advertisers Lie

 It’s no longer the outraged consumer who’s accusing advertisers of playing fast and loose with the truth.  It’s advertisers themselves!  A front-page article in the NY Times lays out a story of big brand mud-wrestling - hilarious if it was’t so sad.

AT&T is suing Verizon.  Fedex is after UPS.  Pantene is after Dove.  Campbell’s Soup is calling out Progresso.  So far this year, brands you know and presumably trust, have filed 87 complaints so far this year with the Better Business Bureau  about the truthfulness of one another’s advertising. 

Quibbling isn’t good for business.  In some countries even a mention of your competitor in ads is verboten.  Ironically,  in Campbell’s vs. Progress both parties have lost the argument.  Sales of both company’s non-condensed soups have hit the skids - a decline one analyst says is due “largely to the advertising battle.”  

So, what’s so bloody hard about telling the truth? 

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. 

I Don't Know Much About Branding, But... Part II

It’s pretty clear, if you’ve followed this blog, that branding discussions tire me out - too many gurus with too many theories, and no road maps.   Sure, you can run some ads and spruce up the logo, but is that really the answer?   I think not.

My view is colored by time spent inside the first Internet bubble. Everyone worked at warp speed to gain ‘first mover advantage’.  Nobody had time to invest in brand building.    You worked all night create a website for the idea.   If people tried it, liked it, and continued to use it you had the beginnings of a business.    No ‘branding’.  Pure pragmatism.

Looking back, I believe it was an ‘aha’ marketing moment.  It became clear that the fastest, most efficient way to build a brand was to persuade people to experience the product or service.   If they liked it they might continue to use it.  They might even tell others – and pretty soon you’d be an Amazon, or Quicken, or Netscape.

The number of products and services, and websites that support, them has approached infinity.  They classic way of building brands is dead.   

Do you need a tag line?

Survey Monkey showed up in the in-box the other day with a questionnaire from a friend who is advising on the re-launch of an on-line service.   The survey asked my opinion of four possible tag lines and, more provocatively, whether I thought a tag line was needed at all. 

The tag lines were fairly lame.  They didn’t position or differentiate the company.  Nor did they add any value, which is what a tag line or slogan ought to do.  (Here's a list of some breathlessly irrelevant  tag lines ).

So, is a tag line needed?   Not necessarily.  A bad one generally doesn’t do much harm.  But a good one can add a great deal of value.  “Intel inside” comes to mind as a tag line that embodied the marketing thrust of a company.  At a time in the personal computer business when IBM wanted you to believe the hardware was the reason to buy a PC, and Microsoft wanted you to believe the operating system made the difference, Intel came along and asserted that you needed to know what kind of microprocessor was in there.   The chutzpah is astonishing.  It’s like claiming that you should decide what brand of car to buy based on the piston rings in the engine.  But it worked. 

I don't know much about branding. But I know one when I see one!

At some point in the last 20 years‘advertising lost its mojo and the buzzword du jour became ‘branding’.   

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what  exactly a person means when they talk about ‘branding’. 

We all know about burning a cattleman’s imprint on a dogie’s rump.  That aside, the trouble with branding is that what it is seems to depend on who you ask.  The only sure thing is that branding has become a reason to spend millions of dollars on marketing activities that have no direct responsibility for producing sales.  I'm no carney barker but this is nuts.

Advertising types will tell you branding really is another word for advertising and doing lots more of it is a good idea. Designers will talk about graphics, typography, packaging, and bringing the logo into the 21^st century. Brand consultants, the true poets of branding, will advise you to get in touch with your brand personality, brand DNA, and brand values before you make a move.  

It's confusing.  I googled ‘branding’ a minute ago and got more than 44 million hits! Even a search of Amazon brings up 51, 471 branding references.   Who’s a person to believe? 

Back in the 20^th century when advertising was marketing's steamroller, you could still build a brand using print and broadcast media.  Ivory soap did it when your great grandparents were kids. Maxwell House did it on radio in the 40’s.  Volkswagen did it in print during the 60’s.   Frank Perdue took his tender chickens to television and did it in the 70’s.  But time marches on.  In the past 25 years, it’s hard to think of a brand that has risen to greatness on the back of an advertising campaign. I’m not sure anyone is to blame.  Media has become so fractionated that advertising simply doesn’t have the impact it once did.

Today, anyone with an idea and a personal computer can get 15 minutes of mind space (and fame) on the Internet.   The cost of communication (and distribution via a website) is trivial, so everyone seems to be taking a crack at it.  But gaining awareness is only part of the battle.   Building a brand in the yeasty media environment that surrounds us can only be accomplished by getting a product into the hands of consumers – and creating an experience that so thoroughly excites-and-delights that the delightees will share the good news with their friends.  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others make sharing the good news easy.  

However, there’s a very practical approach to getting a brand built and nourished in 2009 and beyond.  And I'd get into it right now.  But this is a blog not a novel so I will lay out the formula in the next post.  Stay tuned.

The Uses of The Past

I spent a day this week with my pal Bruce and his merry men at The History Factory in our nation’s capital.

Bruce and I have been friends since the day, about 20 years ago, when he first let me in on what he was up to.  He had been working at the Smithsonian where his job was saying “no” to companies who’d asked the museum to pull together historic material to help them celebrate an opening, an anniversary, a retirement, or milestone of some kind.  The Smithsonian, big and wonderful as it is, doesn’t do that kind of work.  But Bruce saw an opportunity.  The History Factory is now a global business.

 In our first conversation, Bruce knocked me flat when he said “The past is the springboard to company’s future” at which point a light bulb went on and  I said “A-men brother”.  So while The History Factory organizes and manages the archives of large corporations,  I’m convinced it’s really in the branding business.

Brand stories, after all,  are rooted in a company’s past – but for some reason the past embarrasses some corporations.   My first job out of school was at J Walter Thompson, then the world’s largest advertising agency.   I started there, as a copywriter, and soon  found myself working on Ford  advertising.  As a car enthusiast, I knew the history of the company and its cars fairly well.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that 70 years of Ford history, that included cars  hobbyists idolized, was out of bounds.  To my amazement I found that Ford was so rattled by it’s ‘tin-lizzie’ past that the famous Ford blue oval logo hobbiests revered, didn’t appear on their cars and was forbidden in their advertising.