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    Marketing

    Trust, Authenticity and Transparency.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Trust, Authenticity and Transparency are the three "pop marketing" words of the day. ROI was last year. Trust, Authenticity and Transparency can be found on every marketing blog and in every social media webinar worth their free price of admission.

     

    Sound like I have a bug up my arse? You bet.

     

    Here’s the problem with brands today: They don’t mean anything. Most brands are not imbued with an idea, but with many ideas. They are defined by campaigns, not a brand strategy. We, as consumer, are therefore so confused we default to the “is” of the Is/Does.  Levy’s is jeans. Coke is cola. And with so many people managing these brand across so many silos we don’t know what the brands “do.” We can’t land on a brand value, because it is ever-changing.  

     

    That’s why everyone is talking about Trust, Authenticity and Transparency.  Everyone is  confused.  And with social media added to the brand management fray, there’s even more confusion. Return On Strategy (ROS) is the most important brand metric there is. Not the ROI which measures tactics. Too much ROI leads to the need for? That’s right. Trust, Authenticity and Transparency. Peace!

     

    Conspicuous Frugality.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Yana Paskova for The New York Times

     


    Okay, it’s not me. Value is the new cool — the new black. I tweeted last week “Am I alone in my desire to put together an amazing meal that costs under $5.00?” wondering if a special feeling results from making something out of nothing?

     

    Well today I read a story about dumpsters being converted into pools on urban rooftops confirming the view. People are enjoying being ingeniously frugal and flaunting it. Conspicuous consumption used to be “what’s up.” Now it is conspicuous privation. Being green is very cool but turning nothing into something is huge. DIYers are the new velvet rope crowd. Home made beer tastes better than Heineken. Backyard greens taste better than Jean-Georges greens. And frankly, the conversations surrounding these frugalities are much more deep and exciting.

     

    These are the times in which we live. Embrace them. Take the time. Teach yourself, your family, your friends how to enjoy being ingenious. Fly your “conspicuous frugality” flag. Peace! 

    Search Ads — Least Trusted?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Steve Rubel is alike a big fish swimming in the ocean siphoning millions of gallons of water each day for nutrients. For a human, he really has a great deal of processing power. If you only read one blogger (oops, lifestreamner) a day as a marketer, Steve is not a bad place to start.

     

    Today he posted a gem ranking trusted sources of advertising. The study, a top two-box (trusted “completely” or “somewhat”) ranker from Nielsen, suggests that the least believed forms of advertising are: text ads on mobile phones (24%), online banner ads (33%), online video ads (37%) and search engine results (41%).  

    Recommendations from people known (90%), consumer opinions posted online (70%) and branded websites (70%) top the chart. Traditional forms of advertising: TV, print, OOH and radio, lie midway in the high 50s and low 60 percentiles.

     

    It makes sense that ads that are the least expensive to produce are the also the least trusted. When more people can afford to create ads they may not be held to professional and legal claim standards. Also, those ads often done in-house or by DIYers lack professionalism. 

    The low score for search engine result ads, though, surprised me. I know they are paid for, but the “algorithm” is supposed to correct for relevance. Could it be that the algorithm isn’t working hard enough? I’ve run a couple of AdWords programs and have been somewhat pissed at the high “bid numbers” on certain terms. If Google is watching the bottom line, not the search relevance line, it may want to do a rethink. Peace!

     

     

    Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Wal-Mart’s sustainability index, reported today in The New York Times, is an important step in the right direction. Labels indicating a product’s eco-friendliness will help consumers with decision-making at the point-of-sale (POS). The index reflects things like carbon emitted, water used, recyclability, air pollution, etc. 

     

    In NYC’s commuter railroad hub, Penn Station, all fast food is now labeled with caloric intake. This mandate is another smart move already having an impact on POS product selection.  The latter idea has been legislated, the Wal-Mart idea is their own. (Bravo NYC and Wal-Mart.) 

     

    Change doesn’t always come easy. There are still people out there who don’t care about nasty, fatty calories. There are still people out there who won’t mind bringing poorly indexing products to the counter at Wal-Mart. (BTW, I’m thinking the index should be color-coded: green, yellow, red).  In fact, there are still doofuses who throw their trash out the window of their cars. But as derision grows and our culture finds these behaviors less acceptable, change will occur. 

    (And can we lose the word “sustainability” and call it “green” for goodness sake?) Peace!

     

    Hellman’s “Eat Local” Campaign.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    ContagiousMagazine.com has a neat story today on a Hellman’s Mayonnaise campaign to publicize the growing consumer trend to eat local. The campaign is up and running is Canada. Eating local food – food not trucked or flown in from hundreds or thousand of miles away – may not always make economic sense, but it makes environmental sense. Locally grown food is fresher, tastes better, provides local jobs and keeps transportation emissions and energy consumption down.

     

    Have you ever tasted a pepper or lettuce from your own garden or a bass from local waters? The improved taste is not psychological, it’s real. So will Hellman’s mayonnaise taste better on a locally grown tomato?  You bethca. Not only is Hellman’s doing the right thing with this new “Eat Right. Eat Local” campaign, they are doing the tastes better thing.  I mean would you really want to put Miracle Whip on a tomato that’s two hours off the vine?

     

    Good job Hellman’s. It’s a fine cause and an important cause. (One minor quibble, money raised from the campaign shouldn’t go toward improving the quality of life in Canadian cities. Put it into farms.) Peace!

    Microsoft Bing’s Two Branding Campaigns

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Microsoft’s Bing ads are chasing down two ideas. Both are pretty strong but since they are executed together they both lose power and become watered down.

     

    The first idea is the “cure for search overload syndrome.” It is fun, relevant, creates a problem (where one may not exist), and has the potential to be talked about and mimicked. I can see high school kids free-styling stuff like this. The second idea, “the decision engine,” hasn’t been fully carried out in the TV ads but it augers to the core of what searchers want: find, compare and decide. It’s a stand alone idea, not just a campaign tagline.  

     

    Were I the brand manager at Microsoft, I’d pick one of these two ideas and stick to it. A tight branding idea is easy to execute. Open the door a bit to another idea and you confuse the consumer. It’s not that hard people. Peace!

     

    Newsday Strategy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    We know where you live is a strategy I wrote for Newsday over ten years ago. The saying “Campaigns come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible” is the basis of my consulting practice.  We know where you live is a powerful branding idea.

     

    A little background: Newsday serves Long Island, home to about 3 million people  — 7 million if you include Brooklyn and Queens – and it’s the island’s only “local paper.” The New York Daily News, New York Post and New York Times are also options but they more city and nationally focused. What sets Newsday apart is its ability to report the local news. People care about where they live so if you prove to them you can deliver you should command an unfair share of readers’ daily newspaper dollars. No brainer.

     

    The branding idea “We know where you live” is a clear, clean mission. As employees leave the building each night if asked the question “Did you bring readers a closer to understanding their home and hometown today?” they should be able to answer. It is a business-building, strategic mission. Different than “Did you sell more papers today?”

     

    Newsday.com is the newspaper’s online property and like most online brand extensions it is still trying to figure itself out. The executives re-creating it have newspaper hats on and, likely, will not get it right for a while.  Why? Because they don’t have a branding idea to guide them – to free them up as they think through the property. As news, content, commerce, community and widgets are being developed to drive site relevance and traffic, the developers need to be grounded in a strategic mission. The site and paper need to prove that Newsday.com knows where we Long Islanders live. Peace!

     

    The Cheese Economy.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    There’s a new trend in marketing — it’s called you get what you pay for. Not you get what you bet on. Or you get what you hedge. Or you get what may appreciate.

     

    Too much of the economy has been about investing in the promise of returns. That’s what venture capital funds are saying as they get ready to cut way back. It’s what drove the financial industry meltdown. And the Internet start-up boom. 

     

    Today, people are spending their hard earned on real stuff. They are shopping and comparing – even enjoying the pursuit of value.  American’s are tired of wasting money. Sure they will buy a new BMW, but only after making sure it’s a good value. No more cheese. No more futures. People want brick and mortar stability. Not products built to last 9 months.

     

    The companies that will do well in this recovering economy are those who market smart. Build products with predictable returns. Good products. With efficient pricing. And proper promotion. Bet on packaged goods. Housewares.  Durables. Peace!

     

    Marketing’s Tripartite System.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0


    The business of marketing is and will continue to be a tripartite business: marketers, marketing agents and media. The lines may blur every now and again and some companies will try to bypass one of the players to save a buck, but the system will endure. 

     

    Microsoft purchased aQuantive and Razorfish to see if it could get into the marketing agent business and now has decided it can’t and is selling Razorfish. Smart move. Marketing agent Anomaly is trying to become a marketer and will enjoy some modest success, but they are more likely to make their bones giving independent counsel to makers of products and services than change the system.

     

    At Cannes Eric Schmidt and Maurice Levy agreed to play better in the sandbox…but there needs to be a little friction between media (Google) and agent (Publicis) for everyone to make money. Friction and conflict keep everyone on their toes.

     

    Media will change. Ad agent tools will change. Products and services will change. The tripartite system will march on. Peace!

     

    Open letter to Penny Baldwin.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0


    Penny Baldwin is Yahoo!’s new brand savior.  Reporting to CMO Elisa Steele, Ms. Baldwin is tasked with creating the way forward for the Yahoo brand. Newsflash: If you are plotting the course for the brand, you are plotting the course for the product (hopefully).

     

    For years Yahoo has been a multi-headed dragon: part search, part start page, part portal and Web tool kit.  Ms. Baldwin knows this and will likely use a variety of means to look into Yahoo’s past and determine where Yahoo’s brightest embers lie. Where its greatest loyalties reside and the treasure trove of revenue amassed. Researchers will look at competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Anthropologists will delve in to time-of-day usage and where other media intersects. All this info and data will go into the hopper and be extruded into a hardened strategic mass that be delivered to 72 and Sunny or some such shop(s) and $65 million and six months later we’ll be humming a new song or reciting a new line, but Yahoo will still be foundering.

     

    Here’s what needs to happen: Yahoo needs to get rid of 65% of its technologists, replacing them with really good free-agent and draft pick content creators: bloggers, video bloggers, podcasters and journalists. People make appointments with internet properties to be informed, entertained, enlightened, and educated. Yahoo isn’t "my home on the web.” People don’t need the weather and horoscopes and puzzles and shizz, they want curated pages leading them to the coolest original content. Invest in content Ms. Baldwin. Peace!

     

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