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    Brand Debt.

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    Retro Geek

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    A Cadillac Grows in SOHO.

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    Marketing

    What’s Next in POS?

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    Steve Poppe
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    POS stand for point of sale. It used to mean in-store displays. Today it covers a lot more. It covers ecommerce and some online advertising — certainly online ads that put a customer one click from purchase.

    Not too long ago the vast majority of advertising reached customers while nowhere near shopping. TV and radio hit consumers with ads that molded opinion and attitude for a future purchase.  Then 800 numbers on TV ads allowed custies to dial-up a sale from the couch, as so did shopping networks like QVC. But the real breakthrough in POS was the web, where people actually go to shop. 

    POS advertising online and POS advertising in-store are too similar for my taste. The online version should be richer. In-store you can experience the product through touch and feel — through sampling. Online all you have is video. I’m thinking virtual reality will alter this in the next couple of years and I can’t wait.  Buckle the seatbelts of your self-driving cars.

    Thoughts? Peace.

     

     

     

    Domino’s Takes on Papa John’s

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    Steve Poppe
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    Dominos Pizza has invested in a big turnaround and you can see a snapshot here at this link.  Management, after listening to customers past and present and realizing it had a product and image problem, decided to reformulate its pizza recipe.  Dominos attacked “cardboard crust” and “sauce like catsup” and now has a tasty product story to tell. (You’ve seen the hokey but effective focus group ads, I’m sure.)  Ingredients, however, is an important brand component of Papa John’s Pizza, whose tagline is “Better ingredients. Better pizza,” so Dominos is playing catch up.

    Recently, Dominos launched some advertising telling us that 3 of its new pizzas win taste tests over Papa Johns. Because of Papa John’s lead in ingredients — a brand idea it has been pushing for a while — I would normally say Papa John’s doesn’t have much to worry about. Taste tests are tactics not strategies.  But Papa John’s has been playing lip service to the ingredients strategy for a while now, focusing on sports promotions and price promotions.  Plus it has given a lot more brand time to Papa John Schnatter the CEO, which is a distraction.  Ingredients equal taste and Papa John’s has lost its momentum. 

     Dominos is the underdog now and you know how America loves an underdog.  This is an interesting fight to watch and one which may have just turned in Dominos favor.  Peace!

    Video. Amazing and Not.

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    Steve Poppe
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    So I’m at the Jet game yesterday – my first time at the new Meadowlands stadium.  Were I dreaming I’d have though myself at the old Meadowlands stadium with a skim coat of concrete and a few more pork sandwich stations.  The Jets looked the same as I remember from back in the day, but there was one really cool new thing about the stadium: the video monitors.  I’m like a quarter mile away form the screen and the hi-def was amazing. Hair follicle amazing. It was pretty hard to take your eyes of the screen and watch the game on the field. (They never replayed the Santonio drop though and, so, still have some editing policy to deal with — but that’s a story for another day.) 

    I had to leave the game early in the 4th quarter because my ride needed to pick up his son at baseball practice – feakin’ kids – and on the train from the stadium we sat near some dudes with HTC EVOs (or some such) phones…on the Sprint network.  They were streaming the end of the game.  A little freezy, a little jumpy, but live. “The Jet’s are on the 20!”  My eyes aren’t the best but let me tell you shrinking a football game to the size of a postage stamp is not optimal.  You can’t read the graphics, the yard markers or even the helmets, but whoever was providing the game on this hacked channel was showing us the future. 

    So in one day I saw both ends of the video spectrum.  The world’s best and the world’s worst.  Perfecting the world’s worst will be the battle.  Smart phones the battle field.  Peace!

    Logic Premium. Huh?

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    Steve Poppe
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    e cigarettes

    Here’s a category that could use a little brand work: e-cigarettes. While listing to news radio this morning (a shaving thing) I heard a commercial for NY’s largest selling brand of e-cigarettes: Logic Premium. Triple take. Logic Premium e-cigarettes? Come se kidding me?

    So I Googled top selling e-cigarette brands to see if there was any good branding (starting with the name, of course) and there was none. Here are some of the leading brands nationally:

    Vaporfi, Green Smoke, Apollo, Halo, South Beach Smoke, Ever Smoke, Social Lites, White Cloud, V2, Smoke Tip. And of course, Logic Premium.

    Here’s a chance for a strong brand to own the category – to be the category– and they all opted to save some benjamins and poop out amateur names. A pot head two blunts in could have come up with 10 better names. In a half an hour. Aren’t these things colloquially called “vapes?” Street names are often way better.

    Think about the famous names of old time cigarette brands. Marlboro, Lucky Strike, Camel…those were brands. Tobacco advertising was the haps back in the 60s. It’s where careers were made. The e-cig category is pathetic. I suspect it has bottomed out. Peace.

     

    Why is beer advertising so bad?

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    Steve Poppe
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    Have we as a society gotten so besotted with ad messages that we can’t even make a good beer commercial? ( don’t include Corona in this assessment, whose simple work I still find to be splendid.)  Now I admit to getting a chuckle every so often hearing the “real men of genius” radio, but it certainly doesn’t make me want to quaff down a Bud Light. But could the Coor’s Light frozen silver bullet train be any more inane? 
     
    Coors Light advertising, according to a senior marketing executive, gets back to the brands roots of “refreshing and cold.” Refreshing and fun are Coke’s core attributes; so is it any wonder when I see a Coors Light commercial I get thirsty for a Coke?
     
    I’m a beer guy. There are a lot of things that might induce me to drink a frosty one, but a frozen train darting between a bunch of smiling blonde women isn’t one of them. Hmmmm, or is it? Sigmund?      
     

    Disappointment.

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    Steve Poppe
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    For the last week or so I’ve been interviewing dieticians. They are a fascinating lot.  One of the questions I just decided to add is “Are there any disappointments in your practice area you can share?”  If I hear silence, um or no, I’ll prod “How about, have you a wish list for your business or your patients?”  

    These conceptual questions draw out emotional responses, personal responses.

    So, I decided to ask myself the same question and the answer might be instructive to tyro planners. My disappointments relate to not selling my brand strategies hard enough. Or well enough.  There are been a number of brand strategies (one claim, three support planks) I’ve sold I know to be powerful, business-winning organizing principles. Powerful enough to redistribute market wealth significantly — but I’ve either let marketing clients, agency creative or C-levels get in the way.  When someone is trying to get a website created or a campaign out the door, they don’t want to spend too much time on its underpinnings. That’s the mistake. That’s my mistake. If you have a solution that will change the brand for the better, don’t let go. Don’t be deterred.

    Henning Mankell’s character Kurt Wallander has a father who paints.  He only paints one picture – a landscape. He does it in two flavors: with and without a grouse. That’s focus. That’s a plan. Is he crazy?  Does he see a different painting every time he puts oil to canvas?

    A brand plan is not a limiting document, it’s a rich strategy consumers can remember… and consumers can foretell. Peace!

    Give and Take in Content Marketing.

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    Steve Poppe
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    There are two fundamental behavior types on the social web: giving and taking. Givers are those trying to help others, either via original thought or curation.  All those posts on Twitter that start out “7 ways to increase your…”,  those are from givers.  Takers are people looking for information. “Where is Lone Survivor playing? Who is the actress in Vampire Diaries?”  Takers are also looking to get answers to questions. Platforms like Ask, Jelly and Quora come to mind.

    If, as a brand, you look at the web from this Giver-Taker point of view it will help you with your customers. SEO people get this. The reality is, though, not a lot of people are in the market looking for brighter brights in clothes washing.  One of the guard rails in my Slideshare presentation on social media dos and don’ts is “Care about what your customers care about.”  If you understand your customers “taker” behaviors and have a brand plan (1 claim, 3 support planks), you can align your social giver content in more targeted, higher-value ways. 

    So the keys are: Know what your custies care about. And have a brand plan that gives form, relevance and meaning to your sharing. Otherwise you are just pizzling in the ether. Peace.

    Barack’s informerical.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Two days ago, I suggested Barack Obama’s infomercial was a mistake. Well, the people have spoken and I was wrong. Over 33 million viewers tuned in to CBS, NBC, Fox and cable to watch. The media cost to air the informercial was about 3 million dollars, which I find hard to believe since a 30-second Super Bowl spot goes for $2 million+ and delivers less than twice the viewers.

     

    Here’s the big question: Were the 33 million+ viewers Obama voters, John McCain voters, or undecideds? In marketing, new incremental volume is always an important measure.  Loyal customers need care and feeding but new customers are a key growth metric.  If Barack’s investment reached only his loyal followers then it probably wasn’t a great idea. But if the audience was a cross section of the population, as I suspect it was, then it was. (Can’t you just see some pro-McCain people quickly changing the channel as their spouses walked in the room?) Mea culpa. Peace!

     

    Southwest Airlines has an Idea.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I rant like a broken CD about the importance of a powerful branding idea to drive business. Nowhere are the positive effects of an “idea” more evident than at Southwest Airlines. Southwest’s suit strategy is “be the lowest cost provider of airline travel in the U.S.” (The “world” should be in their future.) If every fiber of its corporate being is put into reducing costs, today and in the future, the company has a mission…an idea. 
     
    But as Carmine Gallo (www.carminegallo.com) would ask: What’s in it for the consumer? The answer is “savings,” but that’s not very message-sexy. So the creative solution to low-cost carrier is “freedom.” You are now free to move about the country. Brilliant idea. Brilliant translation of the idea into creative. Brilliant mnemonic. You can’t say those words without hearing the voiceover.
     
    Why is Southwest the only airline to announce a quarterly profit? Its fuel hedge program. Management thought ahead. (Ford, GM, you listening?) Southwest has an idea. When you have an idea, you have focus. When you have focus you can fend off the opposite. Peace!
     

    Heart and Humor.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I sadly see a future, probably way before the sea levels rise, when advertising becomes almost completely programmatic.  Not just ad buying but creative. Why is this? Because we can. Sports stories are written by computers. Machine learning is to the point where self-driving cars can avoid accidents (in labs) without human control.  And marketing metrics are plotting success at rapidly growing rates. 

    Advertising agencies are expensive. Employing humans to write and produce mediocre ads has been a billion dollar industry for ages. The shops that do good work probably amount to 7% of all shops…and even their outputs aren’t always perfect.  So marketers will ask, “Why not let the algo write my consumer pitches? “Why not put the money saved toward the bottom line or into more media?”  “Why pay a premium for people, when machines can do mediocre?”

    This is going to happen. Trust me. But the reason if won’t work well is the algo can’t nail heart and humor.  Or surprise and artistry.

    In this future there will be machine advertising and a little bit of old school bespoke advertising. Priced accordingly.

    I can wait.                                                 

    Peace.

     

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