Strategy vs. Tactics During a Recession

By
Steve Poppe
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Marketing is hard work. You have to get off your ass and talk to customers. Watch customers. Listen to customers. Get out of the building. Ask customers to spank you a little (I call this brand spanking.)

 

A number of smart marketers and ad types were quoted in Ad Age this week in a recession advice column telling us to “be strong,”  “market aggressively,” “do more with less.”  Not bad advice, but it might be construed as giving marketers a pass to change strategy. Don’t do it. And don’t go overly tactical. Now is a great time to see if your brand strategy is right. If your strategy delivers when the market is soft, it’s a good one. If it only works while the money is flowing freely, it’s not.  Now is the time to get closer to your customers, not farther away. Listen to them using social media, in quantitative studies, qualitative gatherings. Listen, learn and put tactics on the back burner for while. Playing the tactical shell game will only cloud the waters.   

 

 

Inline Advertising

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

There is a crack between the online and offline ad agencies and million of dollars are slipping through. Though the crack is getting smaller every day as mid-size shops create competencies in both areas and the holding companies try to align silo shops, bringing them into the same room, the rift exists.

 

While with a marketing boutique not long ago I tried to get the partners to embrace the view of one approach to online and offline marketing. I called it “inline,” where all communications: PR, promotion, advertising, direct and web are the result of one brief, one brand plan, one idea. I hadn’t heard it before, it sounded differentiated and unique. 

 

One comment I heard at out little shop was that “inline” sounded archaic. Inline, I was told, suggested newspaper column inch imagery. Dooh. In Ad Age this week, Philip H. Geier Jr. ex- chairman of IPG, wrote this about marketing in a recession “Integrate your campaigns to connect with consumers on TV, online, in print and OOH. Build campaigns around one, big, central idea – and push the same message through all marketing “pipes.” Inline it is.

 

    

Product Placement Finesse.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

I’ll soon be sending my son off to college and he has no real reading skills. Were college conducted as a videogame he’d be golden.  Some college kids in journalism class, by a show of hands, have never read a newspaper. Magazines for teens, tweens and millennials…well you get my drift.

 

TV, computer and mobile phones are the media of choice for kids.  Product placement on those screens is a viable investment for marketers. But product placement is a funny thing; it can be amazingly persuasive or it can fall flat. When well integrated into a story it’s a beautiful, ferociously effective selling tactic. Yet when slapped into a story without finesse, it just lies there like a stanky flip-flop. If a cast member of Gossip Girl drinks a bottle of Honest Tea, it’s “passive” and smart. When the Celebrity Apprentice builds a project around, say, a Maybelline cosmetic, it’s “active” and weak. 

 

Forced product placement sticks out and everyone recognizes it. It just doesn’t feel right. As marketers we need to minimize that smelly flip-lop or we’ll alienate consumers young and not so.

 

 

Mo, mo, mo

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

Marketing is about selling more, to more, for more. That’s it. How you do it is the sausage making. You can call it customer relationship management (CRM), word of mouth marketing, promotion, PR, account planning, advertising whatever. Mo, mo, mo is what it’s all about.

 

Thanks to the Ad Age Digital Conference held in NYC this week I came across a very cool company, Kogi BBQ, and marketer, Mike Prasad, who use all the tools correctly, perhaps presciently, but what they really understand is the consumer need.

 

These guys and girls make great food (Korean barbecue cooked by serious chefs), sell it at a great prices ($2 for a taco, $5 per burrito), they follow the hungry crowd (using trucks), and they wrap it in a cool promotional scheme (tight targeting and appointment marketing via twitter).

 

I would like to nominate Mike Prasad as one of the Ad Age Top 50 Marketers and do so before they even have their 3rd truck. This idea scales beyond belief. Now available only in LA, fast forward a year or two and these Kogi BBQ trucks will be trolling the streets of NY, SF and beyond. Crazy good idea! Mo, mo, mo. Peace!

Brand Briefs Have Children Too.

By
Steve Poppe
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I had a chat with Dave Knox the other day – Dave is a digital brand manager at P&G who was partially responsible for the fascinating “Tide Loads of Hope” training event turned marketing flash mob last month – and he told me something that floored me. He said there are different briefs for different marketing tactics.  A TV brief is different than a promotional brief, for instance. I was initially taken aback. Then realized he was right. I do it all the time.

 

There is the brand brief and there are tactical briefs. In my world the brand brief contains the brand strategy (the idea) and 3 support planks. That brief drives the product, service, messaging and ideally is the dashboard for measuring success. The tactical briefs, on the other hand, are documents operating under the brand brief, each with unique, measureable missions.  Tactical briefs must support the brand brief and stay on message but they are allowed to have a lives of their own. So long as the branding brief is understood throughout the marketing company and agencies, and someone available to make sure it’s followed, tactical briefs are good to go.

 

Campaigns, you see, come and go, but a powerful branding idea is indelible. Peace!

Check out Dave’s blog on Tide Loads of Love.

 

 

 

Social Media and Warts.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

“Authentic” is the latest marko-babble term being tossed around by today’s social mediaists – people who practice social media as if a religion. Since it’s on the tip of every digital marketing tongue today, I’ve been trying to learn what it means — and I’ve asked some pretty smart people. The answer I often get is another marko-babble term “transparent.”  It seems authentic and transparent connote the honest and forthright response to the consumer baring of a product’s warts. When online consumers suggested “Comcast service sucks” an authentic response from the corporation was to fix the problem and socialize that fix online. Well that’s just good business.

 

Here’s my problem with authenticity and transparency: It’s not always managed properly.  When consumers are driving the conversation, the weighting of messages may not be most conducive to sales. Let’s say iPhones sales are optimized when the media mix is 75% apps and 25% price — something that can be managed by Apple. But what happens when consumers are allowed to move the dial in favor of apps and that changes the optimized mix?

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love social media and I love consumers who are passionate enough about a product to post, but I also believe ceding control of the conversation can have a downside…and it needs to be managed. Peace!  

 

Topshop Opens in NYC.

By
Steve Poppe
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I know nothing about fashion beyond 501 jeans and a tee-shirt. (Once, during the punk years, I put egg whites in my hair to spike it up, thinking asking someone how to spike your hair would have been very un-punk. That meringue-ey night was my last foray into fashion.) But I do know a bit about selling stuff…and the new fashion store that opened in SOHO last week, Topshop, is going to kill.  Topshop is a fashion emporium currently tearing it up in the U.K. – even during the downturn.

 

Here’s their formula for success: cool clothes that are reasonably priced, a great address, a line by Kate Moss (fashion gold), DJ booth, 32 changing rooms and a V.I.P. suite.   NY has more Kate Moss’s than gum on the subway platform, but where do you think they are all going to do their shopping now? Hmm?  When not working, NYers are always on the prowl for the next “cool.” This is it!  Peace!

 

The “Is-Does” in Branding.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, advertising, positioning and marketing are all about finding a strategy, getting management to support it, then turning it into a powerful branding idea. With a branding idea in place you’ll find it pretty easy to create a campaign (not an overrated approach today) and tactics which will allow consumers to hum your brand tune. Metaphorically speaking. 

 

A branding idea is nothing more than an organizing principle that focuses selling messages to the masses. Often companies do a better job organizing their outbound messages – branding – than their inbound messages. This is most evident in early stage start-ups, where when you ask ten employees what the product is you get 7 answers.   Branding must acculturate consumers and employees.

 

In its simplest form a branding idea is a claim (a consumer promise) backed by a product quality.  For Coke, “refreshment” is both a claim and a quality.  I sometimes refer to this as the “Is-Does.” Once you have a claim, it only takes hold if accompanied by believable supports or reasons to believe.  Supports should be organized too.  Brand plans, I preach, should contain 3 support planks.  Sounds easy no?

 

Vitaminwater10 Ad Campaign. Hmm.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

Glaceau Vitaminwater, owned by Coca-Cola, is a smart marketing company, no doubt. Its low-calorie product Vitaminwater10 should be a success but I read about the new campaign today and am a little worried. The idea “Vitaminwater10 has one-upped mother nature,” sounds fertile enough, yet mother nature has been turned in to a dysfunctional corporation a la The Office and the ads poke fun at it. These days when everyone is pretty much rooting for mother nature, it is going to take some funny tongue-in cheek work to deliver the premise. BBH is the agency so I’m thinking they’ll handle it.

 

That said, the quotes I read by Emma Cookson (BHH-N.Y., CEO) and Vitaminwater CMO Rohan Oza don’t give me huge confidence. Mr. Oza talks purely about the comedic effect of the advertising and Ms. Cookson about the packaging dry facts. A branding idea can package facts, so I will wait to pass judgment.

 

As for the OOH which may not be a big part of the budget, it’s not “on idea” at all.  It’s all borrowed interest stuff mocking poor transit advertising.  The simple fact is, when you need a low calorie version of water, something is wrong.  Capisce?

 

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