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.

Oh How I Wish Again That I Was in Michigan - but especially Ann Arbor

Even though I'm a copywriter I’ve always been fussy about type, layout, readability, the sound-track, the voice-over and the message they send.  Because, the non-verbal components of a message really are the body language of a brand.

Some people do a superb job of getting it right.  IBM has a long history of obsessing about design, initiated by Thomas Watson Jr. who hired Paul Rand, Charles and Rae Eames, and other first rank designers to make sure everything about IBM looked better than the competition.    At Apple,  Steve Jobs, to his credit, has been a maniac about design and monitored the details for 30 years.  In both cases, attention to esthetics has paid off at the box office. 

However web designers, with few exceptions, seem to be lousy at body language.  I have loved the simplicity of Google’s landing page from day one.  Malcolm Gladwell’s site is also a treat.  Much of the rest looks like a dog’s breakfast. 

Which brings me to this week’s good news/bad news body language story. 

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

Random Acts of Blindness

Why do I get the feeling that the marketers I deal with wear blindfolds, like kids playing pin the tail on the donkey?  

The letter I got from my Volvo dealer last week says it all.  His database wanted to be sure everything was going swimmingly with the wagon I bought a few years ago.  But his database (who I’ve never met) had no way of knowing that I haven’t owned that Volvo in years. 

The same week someone from BMW sent a letter wishing me happy birthday.  The BMW is long gone, too.

I wonder why these geniuses don’t ask some of the sales people, who sit around waiting to ignore the next person who walks through the showroom door, to man the phones.  Call customers.  Have a conversation.  Build a relationship.    

Last week’s mail also brought a ‘personalized’ letter from an audiologist.  Someone had sold him a list of generation H (hearing aid) types.  The letter promised benefits that would “greatly effect (sic) my life”.   (When I typed the previous sentence even my grammar checker caught the mistake),

These letters don’t build relationships.  What’s more they really piss me off.

They make the senders look stupid, too.  And the underlying premise, that they can save money giving a human being’s job to a computer, is highly questionable. 

Computers have zero street smarts.  They’re great at crunching numbers but not much good at building relationships.   After 50 years of intensive work, the artificial intelligence community will tell you there’s still no computer that can recognize you when you walk into the room – much less judge your mood by your expression, tone of voice, etc. – signs that human beings decode very well.

People are expensive, I suppose.  But so are :30 TV spots, NASCAR sponsorships, Catalog mailings, Customer Relationship Management applications and other methods designed to win friends and influence people.

I am not a Luddite.  I’ve been using PC’s  for 30 years and I am lost without my Mac.  But I find people delegating tasks to computers that defy common sense.

Isn’t it curious that the best internet marketers are also the ones who best understand how to involve people in the process of dealing with customers.   More about them in my upcoming series “Heroes of the Internet”