Monthly Archives: January 2010

Detroit and Green Tech

By
Steve Poppe
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0

toyota ft-ch

 

I have been pissing vinegar for years about Detroit’s mishandling of the America car business.  Having recently been on a behemoth cruise ship I can say they aren’t that hard to turn around. (They go pretty fast.)  Back in 2006-2007, I remember reading about the billion dollars losses in De-twah and thinking someone has got to make the tough call and design an energy saving, green tech automobile.  It’s called vision.

Two bankruptcies later, the Detroit Auto Show has finally begun to inch forward. Hybrid penetration is 2% in the states but finally the talk at the show is that the  stand-alone internal-combustion engine’s reign is over. 

I met a tech space angel investor last night and asked if he was looking into any deals in green tech.  He said it wasn’t his sweetspot so “not really.”  Well, green tech can’t be too many people’s sweet spot today, but it needs to be.   If this recession has taught us anything, it is that we need to start producing “stuff.”  And green tech stuff is what can lead America out of its current production malaise. I’m no Barack, but as the kids say “like, like, like, like, like duh.”

Detroit will be the initial driver of our green tech revolution, but sadly 5 years too late. Peace!

A Touching New Book. Marketing With Meaning.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

marketing with meaning

“The idea to have an idea is often more important than the idea itself” is favorite piece of advice I received as a kid in the business.

The book I just finished, Bob Gilbreath’s Marketing with Meaning, reminds me of this quote.  Mr. Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, dispenses lots of good advice and some spectacular case studies in the book’s pages, but the “idea to have the idea” in Marketing with Meaning is the call to arms that we need to stop broadcasting one-way messaging at consumers. The idea here is that we all must do the hard, thoughtful work upfront soasto uncover rich consumer insights that will drive meaningful customer response. Everyone talks about customer touch points today.  Mr. Gilbreath talks about TOUCHING customers.

Let’s face it, everyone want ads, websites, direct response and promotions with meaning, but in reality we often don’t deliver. Creating marketing with meaning is hard work.  This book is the trailmap.  I was especially smitten by Mr. Gilbreath’s suggestion that organizations team up on marketing problems, using people from different disciplines and backgrounds. Serendipity is very freeing. (And don’t include people who report to one another, he suggests.)   

Measurement

Mr. Gilbreath also suggests new ways to measure marketing success.  They 3 legs of the stool are engagement (Did the consumer do something?), meaning (Did the communication provide positive value?) and marketing (Did a sale or predisposition to sale result?).  Many marketers care only about sales, but the two additional measures show a refreshing sensitivity toward the consumer.

The other thing I liked about this book is that it elevates the idea and recognizes its roll in delivering sales.  Many agencies have tried to charge for their ideas rather than their time hoping to increase revenue upside. I suspect Mr. Gilbreath’s process and art + science approach gets us one step closer.  And, as he says in his closing pages, all practitioners of marketing, selling and advertising long for the day when we move up the respectability ladder and put some distance between ourselves and lawyers and politicians. That, too, is an idea. Peace!

Worldwide Pricing.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Last week I posted about a concept called worldwide inventory which suggested, king of search, Google will catalog, index and make searchable most things for sale.  When people or companies have things for sale and other people or companies are shopping for those things only time and distance keep them apart.  If Google removes these obstacles search takes on a new dimension – a breakthrough business dimension.  The technology hiccup lies in the inability of inventory data to be captured, a problem I suggested might be solved by barcodes.  Is this a business opportunity for Motorola (Symbol Technologies) or PayPal?

Taking a closer look at worldwide inventory one realizes that worldwide pricing is the real key. As mentioned last week, an US$11,000 hip replacement in Mexico city (including airfare) for someone without insurance is compelling because of the price – so, this next generation of commercial search needs a database component that allows search by price.  Once the world’s products are inventoried and priced, the web will find serious monetization.   And, oh, there will be an app for that. Peace!

Listening Starts at Home

By
Steve Poppe
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0

listening

So (today everyone starts their pontifications with the word “so”) the talk on the marketing street these days is all about “starting the conversation” and “being a good listener.” These are axiomatic teachings of the social media movement.  I appreciate this view and love listening to consumers, but I’d like to throw a trump card on the pile: Listening to employees. What is often forgotten in the social media world today is the role and input of employees.  Employees touch customers.  Lots of them. Employees know the product inside and out (if the company is well led). Employees have a stake in the performance of the product. Companies need to mine their own people for product and selling insights, because employees are the aggregators of smart marketing intelligence.

New Product Ideas

If you look back through time, I’d bet that 75% of all new product improvements, line extensions and new product ideas have come from within the company. Add to that all the new ideas and suggestions made off-the-cuff by employees that never saw the light of day and you begin to see a bigger opportunity.

Smart social media software companies, building enterprise 2.0 applications through which employees share, commune and contribute business building ideas, are what’s up in 2010. Listening to employees through social media will be a marketing breakthrough to Tweet about. Peace!

Sharing the Brand Plan.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

sharing

When I worked on the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System business with Welch Nehlen Groome, system CEO Michael Dowling would meet every Monday morning with new employees and welcome them. The system employed about 30,000 people so Mr. Dowling had an opportunity to go really viral with his mission.

At face value the mission, embodied in the tagline “Setting New Standards in Healthcare,” didn’t sound like much.  Operationalized, it was a brand game-changer.

The brand planks supporting the strategy were unassailable and uniquely North Shore – creating tremendous wealth for the brand. Yet what was missing from the equation and where I didn’t do a good job as brand planner was getting senior management to acculturate the brand plan through the employee world. Had every Monday morning Mr. Dowling shared the brand strategy with his impressionable new employees, imagine how much stronger his brand would be today.

People think health systems are about saving money. Done correctly, they are about redistributing healthcare wealth (clinical and economic).  North Shore had a system for doing this.  It was, and is, its secret sauce.

All companies, big or small, need to share their unique brand strategies with employees. Otherwise, every employee at every company is driven by the same strategy: earn a paycheck.

Worldwide Inventory

By
Steve Poppe
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0

barcode

Google built a business, quite well I might add, on perfecting search and search usability. They funded the business with advertising.  The brand play was not to be the world’s greatest advertising platform (something Yahoo and AOL didn’t understand), it was all about search. 

Back in the day (last week, hee hee) Google search was all about the Web.  Finding things digital.  This week, it’s about seeing and searching for digital things in the physical world.  So mobile apps and navigation are the rage. Google hasn’t led the way here, Apple has, but Google wasn’t first in search either.

What’s next?

What’s next is search for physical things in the physical world. Call it worldwide inventory. What is worldwide inventory and how will it work?  Not sure, but this cantaloupe sized brain of mine says it may have to do with barcodes.  Now you can’t put a bar code on an $11,000 hip replacement in Mexico (You can’t?) but you can put one on a $12.00 case of Honest Tea with torn labels. The ability for mankind to find real things, in proximity, with their smart phones is what Google will be doing over the next decade. And that hip replacement or $6,000 valve bypass in China will be something worth searching  for. Stay with search Google — it will soon be atop Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

Worldwide Inventory may sound like a Pearl Jam song but it’s an Eric Schmidt song.  Peace!

A Monster Idea.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I read a lot of books about branding and marketing. One thing about which they all agree is “read lots of books.”  But these books tend to cite similar case studies — especially the new ones trying to make a buck off of social media.  One case study you’ll read a good deal about is Monster.com 

Leaders lead and Monster is a brand that has done a pretty good job of leading.  I’ve spent some time on Monster but honestly, have never used any of the features bloggers and book authors discuss as builders of loyalty and value. Resume writing, dressing for success, etc. have not bound me to Monster one bit.  It has always been about the search and user interface. Plus they were first.

Then I took my son to college orientation earlier this year and one the big group presentations was a data party put on by Monster.  Smart. The speaker was from Monster, as was the literature and much of the advice. The point of the event was “Here’s what you need to do at school to succeed and get a good job.” They made great points: grades matter, it’s not hard to allocate 2 hours a day to studying, go to class, it will be competitive when you get out.  This is a wonderful marketing strategy; beyond wonderful.  It was forward-looking, targeted, important, agenda-neutral and believable.

I don’t know where Monster will be in 4 years but I do know where my son will be.  And if Monster keeps up with this type of marketing, he will definitely be touched by their brand. When cause marketing is personal it’s a winner. Peace!

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