Yearly Archives: 2011

Negative Brand Ideas.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Sometimes powerful brand ideas are not generated by consultancies, CMOs and marketing agencies – they are created by competitors.  When launching the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet yesterday in Manhattan, CEO William Lynch referred his competitor  — Amazon’s Kindle Fire —  as a “vending machine for Amazon services.” Ouch. Mr. Lynch knows what a lot of B2B sales people know, that positioning a competitor negatively with a nice, believable turn of phrase can be hurtful. And viral. If you have a good sound bite, one that comes with emotional impact, use it.  Remember US Scare, the name for USAir after a number of plane crashes?

These anti-positioning brand ideas are rarely used in advertising, but set free in the market, they can have mad negative impact. You often hear these negative branding ideas bandied about and assume they come from the creative populace, but don’t be so sure.  All’s fair in love and marketing.

In the Kindle Fire example, calling it a vending machine for Amazon services may actually be seen by some as a positive.  There are a lot of Amazon users for whom added convenience is a good thing. Even so, this was a nice negative parry by Mr. Lynch. If you are a second-to-market, me-too product sometimes going negative is all you have. Peace!

Young girl, violins, center of her own attention.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 When Eddie Vedder sings “Daughter,” which according to the movie Pearl Jam 20 started out as a song called Brother, he sings the headline of this post about a girl at a breakfast table. To Pearl Jam fans, this song makes the world spin. If a guy, the song has meaning. If a woman, even more meaning. The lyrics speak to us in many, many ways. Personally. On behalf of a friend. On behalf of a neighborhood.  This is Pearl Jam at its best.

Reading The New York Times this morning I encountered 4 “young girl” ads in the first few pages. They were silhouetted in white or surrounded by big retail type and pictured beneath headlines telling other girls and non-girls about products and services. “Experience the finest education on 3 continents.” Stuff like that.  If I had a dollar for every girl ad without a narrative, I’d e a much less busy man. When Pearl Jam plays Daughter in concert 85% of the audience knows 95% of the words. And they sing.

When marketers, tiny ad agencies, and in-house communications departments put a girl in the ad, she is no one’s daughter. There are no violins.  She isn’t alone, listless, sitting at a breakfast table in an otherwise empty room.  She’s not even selling shit.  No wonder every other new TV show is about zombies.  Can we fix this please? Hee hee. Peace!

 

Yahoo’s Going to Get its Exclamation Back!

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I would not be surprised to see Yahoo sold to Jerry Yang and the Texas Pacific Group (TPG) fairly quickly. Yahoo, with lots of schmutz on its shoes, is still one of the top 5 tech brands in the world. And what is a brand but a vessel into which we poor meaning. Organized meaning. Yahoo’s fix requires an Is-Does. What a brand Is and what a brand Does.

Is it a portal?
Is it search engine?
Is it an advertising company?
Is it a web content publisher?
Is it a technology company?

Does it provide news?
Does it provide entertainment?
Does it provide organization?
Does it provide results?

Yahoo needs to retrench and make tough decisions — and that will only happen if the property is sold. A public company with lots of shareholders, Yahoo will get its Yahoo! back with new leadership, some old leadership, tough love, and a brand plan. And when I say brand plan I don’t mean a new logo, new color palette and an replacement agency for Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.  I mean an organizing principle for marketing.  A plan that inform every decision made by the company — from hiring to firing to what new mobile services to launch.

When dimensionalized through obs and strats, a brand plan creates marketing clarity. TPG doesn’t speak like this, but they know how to make it happen. It’s about time. Peace. 

Dumbed Down Utility.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Today The New York Times had a cover story on geolocation dating services. If you’re looking for a date and have a smart phone these new apps tell you who is nearby and available. Text, text, plan, plan and you can grab a drink with little social awkwardness. The services are Grindr, Bendr, OKCupid Locals, and How About We.

I was a doofus at bars as a young ‘un and couldn’t walk up to interesting girls with a good rap. For someone in the selling business it was a skill I needed to work on. Had I an app for that, would I have learned the skill faster? 

Here’s my take, socially inept kids hide in their cell phones. Heads down, active in the ether, they appear to be busy. Some kids feign being on the phone to look popular so they can troll for interaction, they hope will come their way. Not good. Unless these are kids who might never make it out of the house to begin with. I suspect that these geolocation apps will soon come with “sorry” buttons so users don’t have to deal with ending these pseudo dates.  Rather than look someone in the eye and say “Thanks for meeting with me but…” the daters will simply hit sorry and the app will ping the date is over. (I can just hear these unique ping tones, ringing across the bars of NYC in 2012.)  The human behaviorists and sociologists are going to have a field day with this stuff.

We need to move beyond a dumbed down utility with apps and think about skill enablement and development. Peace is not an app. (Or is it?)

Credit Card Advertising.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

McCann-Erickson’s “Priceless” campaign for MasterCard is arguably one of the most respected credit card campaigns to come along in decades.  “It’s everywhere you want it to be” was a great ubiquity campaign for Visa, but that’s long gone.  The problem with advertising is that sometime the advertising becomes more important that the product.  Priceless is an example of an advertising idea that overshadows the card.  Emotional attachment to a brand is important in terms of tone — and that’s what the campaign does so well.  But it is an advertising dimension. Products that tie their horse to an emotion (Coke are you listening?) rather than product benefit or quality are using advertising to get attention.  Or remind us to pay attention.

MasterCard, has done some very cool innovative things like PayPass and smartphone apps yet is sadly still famous for its priceless advertising. No matter how much it tries to make PayPass priceless, the ads are still about a smiling kid in a baseball hat.

Today MasterCard’s tagline is “That’s MasterCard. That’s Priceless.”  The “That’s Mastercard” portion takes a register mark so it looks as if they are beginning to think about evolving away from Priceless and straddle two ideas.  But “That’s MasterCard” smells like an empty vessel. This is a tough category, but for far too long it has been managed by ad people not marketers. It’s time for that to change.  Peace.  

Is it not true that the opposite of promotion is…

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Have you ever noticed that law firm earnings rarely make the papers?  Or that gazillion dollar law firm names are unknown by the masses? We really never think about big corporate law firms. As Occupy Wall Street targets the banks and focuses on corporations that do not pay their fair share taxes, lawyers walk back and forth with nary a glance. 

A friend of mine is in operations at a law firm in NYC and very involved in build-outs and office relocations. His firm is in a semi-historic NYC building and they are renovating like a dookie. Conference rooms like museums, two-story, south-facing offices that would make a king blush.  Corporate and high-end law firms are the subject of good TV drama, but fly under the radar because they are private and in the business of stealth and secreting information. They are also in the business of reverse brand management.

Staying out of the public’s eye and keeping clients invisible is an art — and lawyers do it best.  Perhaps some large communications companies who build reputations for a living should hire and study top law partners to understand the enemy.  The enemy being the opposite of promotion. Perhaps then we can invent a few new ways to sell.  Peace.

YouTube. Health Info On-Demand.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 One of the fastest growing content areas on YouTube (data source: me) is healthcare channels. Hospitals and health systems are uploading talking head videos at an amazing rate. One large nationally recognized hospital recently uploaded 25 videos by lunchtime.  YouTube has a way to go in perfecting its channel tools but visitors can search by clinical area, date added, most viewed, and top rated.

Healthcare provider companies are not known for their marketing expertise — they are too busy saving lives — but the move into YouTube is a smart one.  Do you know anyone who doesn’t have a family member with a health problem? The quality of these videos is quite good, albeit a bit over-polished.  If you remove the occasional singing video encouraging employees to wash their hands, you’re left with a body of work where humans talk to humans in understandable English, removing the magic.

Personally, I find the videos that don’t feel too scripted the best. Two docs at Memorial Sloan Kettering were talking on camera, sans make-up, and it felt very different from the norm, very real. The hospital has a reputation for clinical coolness and this video worked to change my attitude.

The ROI problems is this — these videos cost a good deal of money to produce and some get 28 views while others get 28,000 views.  As these channels grow in search sophistication and the video producers evolve, we are going to see some serious, serious advances traffic. This is big, important business. Peace! 

Brand Promises and Stereotypes.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Stereotypes are important in marketing because they are patterns.  Many feel that if you play to the patterns, you will win.  Creative directors, on the other hand, have made a living going the other way — staying away from patterns, which is a pattern in itself.

Stereotyping Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, might suggest she was more likely to assist in the EU bailout because she’s a woman – a mom.  Stereotyping a Long Island Rail Road worker who took retirement with disability at age 50, might portray him as a golf-playing aerobicist, while the reality is he is an arthritic thanks to 30 years keeping the trains moving during winter snowstorms.

Is someone in Aspen, CO who opens a retailer door and shouts in “Which way to Little Nells?” a New Yorker?   Okay, that one might be accurate – but the reality is stereotypes are nothing more than learning for a brand planner. And as planners if we know “no one wants to be a stereotype.”  It doesn’t mean the consumer wants to be the pioneer who takes the arrows  or the Beta User whose machine gets crapped – it just means when being sold, we want to feel individualized.  The promise has to have promise…not an explicit benefit.  Let consumers’ minds work and process things in their own way. Europeans are better at this type of selling than Americans.  In the U.S. we are very explicit with our ads and social media.

Sometimes being broad with a promise works harder.  Peace.  

BlitzLocal and brand planning.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Dennis Yu CEO of BlitzLocal is a smart dude.  He did a presentation about BlitzLocal, Facebook, data, and marketing futures last night at Hofstra University and it was eye opening. (What is Hofstra’s brand idea, by the way? Something with a right pointing arrow?) Anyway, a number of cottage industries have popped up over the years to help people market on Facebook and BlitzLocal is a good one. As is Involver.

Sitting through the preso I was wondering what kind of company BlitzLocal was — never having heard of them. My take?  It’s an analytics company.  The BlitzLocal Is-Does?  A Facebook analytics company (Is) that implements and optimizes Facebook marketing programs (Does). 

Mr. Yu started the evening with some really heady talk about brand building and how promotional giveaways  are a blight, then he segued into data capture, tools, and the raw power of the Facebook platform.  As an admin on a brand account, he playfully posted an offer to see how many people wanted a free pair of jeans and in minutes had 4,000 hits.

So how does this type of real time analytics stuff rub a brand planner like me – someone in search of the big positioning ideas and planks that and drive long term value?  Well, I’m a believer and will add these tools to my arsenal.  I rail about tactics-palooza, but the insights derived from a BlitzLocal engagement are too important to cast off. This kind of data, especially at the high order level, needs to go into the boil down. One more important loci for the plan. Right brain, left brain. Yin and Tang stuff.  Can’t wait to play. Peace.

IBM’s Unclean Idea.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Ogilvy is a great advertising agency.  Always has been.  It loves big ideas, big productions and big brands.  Lately, it has made a name for itself on services companies.  Other than American Express and IBM, I’m not quite sure what accounts they have – which is my bad, but partly theirs. 

IBM’s “Solutions for a smarter planet” was a big idea. Already well entrenched with big businesses on the hardware, software and services (consulting) side, IBM decided that rather than grow by increments, it would focus on large-scale advances targeting countries and industries.  That’s some enchilada stuff, there.  “Solutions for a smarter planet” helped IBM take on the planets ills (traffic, energy, food) and showcase some future technology.  By going big, it covered small (corporate) and positioned IBM as vendor of choice for massive overhauls.

Then the economy tanked. And companies started having a difficult time making payroll. And saving the planet lost a bit of luster.  Rather than returning to an advertising idea that supported product and services sales, IBM tasked Ogilvy with keeping revenue up by evolving the idea — the planet will be back at some point (knock wood).  Enter “I’m an IBMer, I’m an IBMer.” For the purposes of continuity (agencies are big on that) the campaign is tagged with “solutions” but focuses on smart employees.  Mistake.  It milks a campaign idea that is no longer the business idea.  Like the Microsoft Bing work that straddled two ideas “information overload” and “decision engine,” IBM is pushing an unclean idea.

Come on Ogilvy, bring on the new work – the new idea. Peace!

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