Longer Employment Contracts?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The speed of the Internet is pretty amazing.  In an instant a great idea like, say, Carla Emil’s “One Job For America,” can go viral and change the world (let’s hope so).  Businesses such as Groupon can launch with a real monetization plan and become a billion dollar company. Businesses without a real monetization plan can launch (Twitter) and do the same.  Much of it is because of technology and the Inter-nech. 

But commerce in this world is still driven by people, IBM’s Watson aside. And people are often a company’s biggest asset.  If you leave a company they can wipe your hard drive but not your gray matter.  Something learned at company A can be re-envisioned at company B.  There is a lot of churn today in the corporate ranks and the freelance economy is also quite viable.  But I see a change in this churn behavior when I look beyond the dashboard. The Japanese used to talk about “employees for life.”  Well, even though this behavior seems unabashedly un-American, I see us moving in this direction. I expect to see at the top and mid-top levels of American companies employment contracts of much longer durations.  Just as a baseball team wants its #1 starting pitcher around for 7 years, smart companies moving at internet speed need their key difference- makers to stick around.  Had Ray Ozzie signed a 25 year contract, would that have made a difference? How about Tim Armstrong?  

Movement from company to company can be a healthy thing for top executives, but staying and working within the system makes the system stronger.  This I see. Peace!

CBS. FOX and Yahoo!

By
Steve Poppe
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0

CBS is a content company. Most think of it as a TV channel…with a bit of an integration problem across the country.  Different call letters, different channel numbers, not where it’s supposed to be on the dial when you move from city to city.  (See? Platform integration has always been around, it’s not just an issue for the TechCrunch crowd.)  CBS has always been dinged for catering to the older market. Well, in today’s media world the older market watches TV. Lots of it. And CBS’s quarterly numbers are quite strong, especially for local sales.   CBS owns C|Net and ZDNet, which along with other web properties, is helping the company diversify and learn about new targets, markets and categories.  CBS has radio, outdoor, book publishing, and other web properties in addition to cable and broadcast, which positions it nicely as all media moves towards the middle.  At its very core, CBS is a content play.

And in a new media world where everyone’s a publisher therefore no one’s a publish, CBS continues to crank out content people want to watch, hear, and read.  This content strategy is also the strategy of AOL and Yahoo!.  Oddly, they are all competitors.  I know AOL and Time Warner didn’t make it, but that was then.  WABC (Disney) and WNBC (Comcast) have too much baggage.  Fox has the stomach for it (read MySpace), so I predict Yahoo!, or less likely AOL, will be purchased by Mr. Murdoch and FOX.  This would be the year to do it, too.   Peace!

Brand Design vs. Product Design.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Which comes first?  It’s not a trick question.  And I won’t go all “sort of” on you.  The answer is product design.  A good brand planner will take the product design, understand it and package it.  A great brand planner, while packaging the product will “inform” it — change, evolve, aspire it and help create its future.

Brand planners know when you see a friend’s baby for the first time there’s a difference between “What a beautiful baby” and “Ooh, what an amazing rosebud mouth.”  It’s the different between talking an observing. Most marketing today is talk. When you talk to a product designer and really see what they have created, you connect.  Just like when you really see someone’s baby.

In today’s commodities world (see yesterday’s post on banks and healthcare), it is imperative for planners to find the difference.  It may only be a DNA-like strand, but it’s there. And once found that difference can give form to the brand idea.  Not a tagline, not a campaign, but a brand idea: The world’s information in one click. Refreshment.  Different.  The people who tell you brand design comes first are probably art directors. Or peddlers of marko-babble.  Peace be with you and with Lara Logan and her family.

Innovation in Branding?

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Innovation is a word I hear in brand planning meetings all the time.  Executives, brand managers and marketing partners love to camp out on it claiming its importance to their brands. If you don’t count technology, two categories come to mind as the primary innovation hounds: healthcare and banks.  In healthcare, marketers and their agents scurry around the hospital looking for innovation under every bed and when found hit publish.  Right next to their awards ad.  Banks are so mired a commodity status (TD Bank’s only claim to fame is the color green) that they create innovation just so they have something to say other than rate and service.   

News flash!  Innovation is not a brand plank.  It’s lazy, fleeting and often a refundable deposit in the brand bank. Even Apple doesn’t get caught up in the innovation game. Their schtick is design. They innovate but don’t talk about it, showing design and apps.  If you did a tag cloud of every piece of copy Apple has run on TV over the last 15 years, I bet the other “i” word would turn up in only 4 point type.  Lee Clow, you on the tag cloud thing?

Innovation is the price of doing business —  it’s not a branding value. Coddle it, couch it and canoodle it into your story but don’t try to be the Innovation company.  Peace@\!

Shit My Brand Planner Says

By
Steve Poppe
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0

A good brand planner has to love his or her brands. With that love in hand the planner can spend enough time and mental capital to really get close.  Past the label. Past the brand manager’s bias.   That means seeing a brands warts. Knowing the warts and working around them are the goal.  Consumers at their very core love patterns and predictability, but they also like new and optimism.  Have you ever tasted lettuce grown in your own garden?  It tastes better, no?  That because you want it to taste better. Optimism.

In the advertising business there are a lot of people who live on snark.  Creatives don’t like clients who don’t buy their work.  Managers don’t like people who can’t make decisions or won’t follow directions. No one likes those who are focused on the broken not the fix.  Have you ever read the comments following an Adweek story?  There is so much envy and loathing it’s scary.  

But brand planners have a nice job. A Zen job. To do it well  they need to like consumers  — to watch and listen. To find the love.  But don’t advertising it.  Are you listening Blackberry and Subaru.  Peace!

Pepsi Earnings and Pepsi Refresh

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here I go again about Pepsi Refresh.  Broken record,  I know. And please don’t think me a geeze for seemingly dis’ing media socialists and their heartfelt efforts to do good’s work on behalf of brands. (Liberal I am.)  But count the likes and clicks and friends and authenticity and opacity and, and, and in the soda category this week and two numbers stick out: Coke’s North American volume is up 3% and Pepsi’s is up 1%.  2 percentage points in market research may not seem like a lot, but in a billion dollar consumer business that some serious.  Especially in the much attacked sugar water marekt. Right Michelle?

Coke’s earning, announced this week, were kicking on all cylinders. First time in a long time. And Pepsi’s were down, overall.  No wonder Pepsi chief Indra K. Nooyi took a couple on the chin in the analysts call.   To be read in a whining voice “Commodity prices, really killed us. Considering the economy we did gre- ate.”  Well watch Mad Men.  Commodity prices have always been a problem for which one must be prepared.  Playing with pop marketing tactics, not well integrated into your core value prop or linked to an ersatz brand plank, do not a great earnings report make.  Head down. Sell soda. Peace!

Fiat Chrysler Omelette.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Chicken or egg?  What comes first, consumer demand or product building intended to create demand?  Most media socialists would say the former.  I favor the latter.  Case in point: For as long as I’ve been blogging I’ve railed about the American car business, its focus on gas guzzlers and how that focus has driven Detroit into the ground. It took a national melt down and a global economic recession for De-twah to find the new smaller car path.

Chrysler has a neat new European-sized car (beep beep) called the Fiat 500 which will be in the States soon. You can see it driven by a professional driver on Owen Mack’s Cobrandit.com site. Owen is a whazoo videographer, by the way.  Fiat has been building this type of car for years. Small, economical and with a more reasonable environmental footprint.  Short of the VW Beetle and Mini Cooper few companies in the states made an effort to play in this market space.  It was a mondo opportunity zone.

Customers weren’t demanding the cars, but automobile makers should have been creating that demand. They didn’t like the margins. The oil companies bought them too many dinners. The designs were funky.  May all three.  What I do know is this — had a car company gone all egg and seen beyond the dashboard, they would have known small cars were going to be a growth market.  That’s why I like the Chrysler-Fiat combination.  Fiat will help Chrysler step up to this current market need.  A few years too late, but it will happen and off we go. Egg it up. Peace!

Only as Good as Your Next Refresh.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

In the reporting today following the AOL purchase of Huffington Post there were two points of note worth highlighting.  One suggests that since AOL purchased TechCrunch traffic to the TechCrunch site has increased 30%.  I’m not sure if that as a good or bad thing.  Was the reader gene pool slighting diminished by that add?  I suspect so.  But if TC holds to its editorial mission, that growth may find its proper level.

Secondly, Tim Armstrong was quoted as saying “We are essentially two years away from a growth business on the Internet.”  Hello? It’s the Inter-neck.  It’s a content strategy.  In the content business you are only as good as your next refresh.  I understand about building a mission and infrastructure and team and all that, but if Egypt can change a country in three weeks, I think AOL with some imaginative thinking and mad content posting can add some readers in less than 2 years.  BTW, did anyone read the AOL memo from Mr. Armstrong circulated on the web about his plan to turn the business around?   Maybe that’s why he said 2 years.  Dash that plan and start dialing up the original, thoughtful and creative content. (Oh, and Patch isn’t it.) Peace it up!

Smiles at AOL.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

AOL’s purchase of the Huffington Post 8 hours ago was very smart.  I Googled my blog  (whatstheidea+AOL) to see if I predicted said purchase but did not. Maybe I should use Bing.  (Full disclosure, client. Hee hee.)  Anyway, if AOL’s strategy is to provide the best content on the web, this is a great move.  And I loved Arianna Huffington’s quote in the paper paper — her first as head of the new media property group — that she won’t let her politics get in the way of her job.  Yeah right. That’s what makes the Huff Post great.  She can put on her transformer hat when overseeing other media properties, but don’t change a thing on the Huff Post. Ima (pronounced eye-mah) have to start reading I guess.

And, oh, by the way, this story was not on the front page of the NY Times business section, it was on the front page.  Just under the mast head.  Geezer for important.

Tim Armstrong articulated the strategy to be a content leader… and he is delivering.  Yahoo articulated the same strategy and is not. Nice move AOL. Nice move.  Even Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) is probably smiling.  Peace!

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