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Filed under: brands, community, online media, politics | Tags: Anatoly Drozdov, banks, Belarus, border control, Charles Schumer, Guy Kawasaki, IndyMac, International Monetary Fund, knock knock joke, machine, nobodies, panic, Reuters, Senate, Soviet, Tipping Point, totalitarian, Twitter, USA
The Belarus “powers that be” has recently released an ill-thought out directive. Reuters reports:
Belarus’s central bank said on Wednesday it had advised commercial banks to inform the police about anyone who approaches branch customers expressing doubts about the business in a way that could cause panic.
Belarus, where much of the economy remains in state hands, says it has suffered few effects of the world financial crisis, but the ex-Soviet state has requested a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund as a “security cushion.”
“We are asking the banks’ security service to monitor the behavior of customers inside their branches,” central bank spokesman Anatoly Drozdov told Reuters.
“If they see someone is speaking loudly to other customers about whether the bank is in a critical position or advising against making deposits, they can ask the police for help. That person may then be detained for an identity check.”
If the customer was found to have had no intention of undermining confidence in the bank, he would be released.
There is an old knock-knock joke that I like:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Soviet border control
Soviet border control w…
DON’T ASK QUESTIONS!
The world is getting tougher for these regimes. Never could they completely suppress the freedom of the mind and soul, no matter how they punished speech and actions. But now, every time they try to crackdown, eventually, they are exposed as the domineering institutions of which they are. As I have written before, our modern world has no place for these groups. There is simply too much power in the common man’s voice. Guy Kawasaki straightforwardly remarked, when discussing Twitter,
But mark my words: [...] Nobodies are the new somebodies
That is, we are. All of us. We are the somebodies. And no matter which totalitarian machine tries to stop that, whether it be governmental, political, educational, cultural, or corporate, we will fight back with the weapons of discourse and dissent, founded in the freedom-seeking characteristics inherent in every man and woman.
Maybe one day, Belarus can be like America, where it’s okay for even a Senator to undermine a bank.
Filed under: brands, marketing | Tags: Brand Tags, evil, humanizing, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods
My wife came mentioned to me the other day that food purchased at Whole Foods feels like “a treat”;—shopping their is a truly enjoyable experience; the other patrons feel like friends (well, your “granola” friends), the store is inviting, and the staff is pleasant.
She set this against here Wal*Mart (notice the asterisk—I am brand compliant), which has the unfortunate position of being considered “evil” (image links to Brand Tags, the web page which I pulled this information). To her, it is a chore—a place that she wants to leave as soon as possible.
Even in times of stress, I wonder how long we will be willing to trade a more humanizing experience simply because of low prices. It’s only so long before the store becomes a trial to be endured until some better can be afforded.
Filed under: brands, community, leadership, marketing, online media | Tags: BusinessWeek, CEOs, Forbes, Johnson & Johnson, Logic + Emotion, moms, Motrin, social media, TwitScoop, Twitter
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twitscoop The motrin story is1more proof brands need to monitor social
networks – the graph + reading first tweets tells it all: http://bit.ly/eR8x
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twitscoop Motrin ad makes moms mad on twitter, follow it here:
http://tinyurl.com/6khfzv #motrinmoms
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I received these Tweets yesterday. At the same time, motrin.com went down. Today, motrin.com continues to be down. It’s actually inaccessible. These same Twitter moms knocked it down (I guess they don’t like being condescended).
For more information, see Logic + Emotion—they give a nice running commentary of the “headache”.
In other news, BusinessWeek has noted that a large number of CEOs do not support social media, reasons ranging from lack of knowledge to lack of relevance. Consider this:
While 62% see social media as having an impact on a company’s reputation, only 48% say it can change sales.
Time will likely tell that Johnson & Johnson (Motrin) may disagree that perception.
Filed under: brands, community, marketing | Tags: Brains on Fire, brands, communities, marketing, Spike
As I pointed out in Manifesto 02, the secret to great brand building is to “understand [a] consumer community.” Not to be the leader necessarily, but to be “an integral part of the tribe.”
Too often it seems that brands are trying to be built on a delusional platform that the brand will be the center of their consumers lives. And many marketing thought-leaders (whether real or imagined) espouse this notion that all brands can be such. It was, therefore, nice to read Brain on Fire Spike’s comments yesterday on this subject:
What’s been forgotten is the basic principle that we all learned from the beginning: We cannot be the center of anybody’s universe. They will not rotate around it. Fixate on it. Or make their lives all about your product or service. But what we CAN hope to achieve is to become included in their universe. To be a part of it. To fit within their lives. It’s a common thing to hear around here that “it’s not how that customer fits into brand X. It’s about how brand X fits into that customer’s life.”
That’s how the really effective (and often less-than-glamorous—except to stakeholders) offerings succeed. It is not being the figurehead; it is being the irreplaceable backbone.
Filed under: brands, community, marketing | Tags: communities, iPhone, Laura Ries, manifesto, marketing, Triiibes
I wrote this posting initially for Seth Godin’s new Triiibes. Still am not sure about the triple-i, but I would imagine it has to do with the need for the focus on I (sounds a bit like Anthem I suppose—if you don’t get it it, read the book; it’s one of my favorites). And my photo is now updated, thanks to help from Mackenzie at Ning.
There is a lot of idea-sharing and befriending activity at Triiibes. This is likely to be reduced after Triiibes is open to the general population, but right now everyone feels like they are in an exclusive club and perhaps are collectively justifying its initial exclusivity.
One of the things that has impacted me is that while there, I noticed the perpetuation of some of the isms of yesteryear that work together to cheapen and marginalize marketing. As a result of these parochial viewpoints, I have put together this protestation.
An argument needs to be made for marketing. First of all, not to defined as what is marketing, but rather, what isn’t. Marketing is not
Many of these are used in marketing, and it is important to know how they are used; some should not be. But that is not marketing. A marketer should not be a promoter or blogger or designer only. A marketer should be a social scientist. A marketer should be a creator (not just a creative).
Marketing is not the steps you take to sell a product, it is not how to always try to extract a premium from customers by having the best brand, it is not positioning a product to hold a new place in a customer’s mind.
Marketing is about creation. Marketing is about people.
Tribes, or brand communities, or evangelists are closer to what marketing is to be about, but these are simply descriptions of a something far deeper. A contrarian Laura Ries was convinced last year that she was predicting the demise of the iPhone. After being woefully mistaken, her risk-taking ended as she covered herself this year by saying because of the added functionality of GPS and 3G access, the phone would actually be a success. Her stumbling statements are indicative of the narrow-minded and not cross-applicable viewpoints that she inherited from her “marketing” heritage.* These and like theories pervade the marketing field. If this happens, do this; it worked for Starbucks. Until we realize that the world doesn’t work for us like it works for Starbucks. How about Apple…
Whether by luck or thought, the really great brands are successful because of something more primitive, more tribal. It has to do with communities. Star Trek fan boy organizations get it more than Starbucks (obviously with their recent mistakes and flailing strategies). The iPhone’s success had much less to do with whether the phone was a convergence or divergence product and more to do with the cult-like allegiance to the brand. And the allegiance has little to do with coolness as much as it has to do with connectivity and exclusivity. It has to do with how a community is formed. They have their figurehead and their artifacts. In fact, the worst thing that can happen to Apple is not necessarily bad customer service (which can disconnect the community and cause them to reform elsewhere); it is if more Zunemeister-types start trying to encroach on their space. I am mostly serious; look at the comments about him on the referenced posting. It is one of the reasons Triiibes is so popular: exclusivity, connectivity, and membership.
It’s not about demographics or psychographics; it’s about studying how people work with people to communicate, move objects, and start movements. It’s more anthropology than financial analysis or sales pitches. If you want to learn how to talk to a group, you will learn more by watching them in their personal and social environments than you will through surveys and focus groups.
If we want marketing to be where art and science meet, we need to stop acting like hucksters and charlatans.
*I have spoken of these fallibly short-sighted theories before.
Filed under: brands, marketing | Tags: 1-800 Contacts, ATK, brands, Corporate Games, eBay, risk, Salt Lake, service marketing, Seth Godin, Struck Creative, trust, U-Haul, Ultimate Frisbee, Zappos
My body and my brain got into a bit of an argument this morning. My brain told my body that it wanted me to get an early start today, so my body did a Jedi mind trick on my brain and put it back to sleep. And then my subconscious took over and told a lovely story about a English lady with a Spanish accent that gave me, by accident, an incorrectly minted 1907 penny that was worth five-million dollars.
My body had insisted that I get some extra sleep as a result of my overexertions on Saturday. The day had started with a couple of Ultimate Frisbee matches (I know it is called “Ultimate” because of the trademark, but I have always thought that sound like a stupid nickname for the sport) in a local Corporate Games competition (we handily beat 1-800 Contacts and lost in a heart breaker to ATK; hopefully we will perform better against eBay tomorrow). After all that running around, I spent the next significant portion of the day helping move a neighbor (with, I think, about half of the employees of Struck Creative). The effect of this work was the overuse of many muscles I don’t use as often as I should.
While moving load after load after load, I read the sides of the boxes with my typical interest (my wife has problems with my grocery shopping style, which includes reviewing the design of the most trivial products’ packaging). A few things were obvious from this observation. First, they enjoy books. A lot. Second, Zappos is an important company to this family (this was confirmed with emotion when I asked about it). Third, U-Haul understands dregs (this needs more explanation).
This thought came from the my thinking about Seth Godin’s recent posting about “dregs” and how that concept applies to business. He wrote that dregs
lets the community know that you’ll backstop them, you’ll worry about what’s left, and you’re happy to be generous. It’s an expression of great humility, sort of the opposite of what people expect from a business.
And then I saw the U-Haul boxes that they had purchased with their rental.
If you can’t read the bottom, it explains that they buy back any unused boxes.
One of the most important aspects of brands is the fact that higher brand trust removes risk. There is a bit of a dynamic equation in that thought. Particularly in services, risk is inherent in any purchase decision. As a result, companies with less brand trust have to charge less for their offering because included in that discount is the increased risk that customers absorb. And the reverse is also true. The premium that good brands can receive is fundamentally a quality of customers paying more because there is less risk in the purchase decision (so there you go; now you know how my mind works—let me know if it is confusing).
So, U-Haul removes the risk by paying for the dregs. It works on the community-consciousness level that Seth discusses; it also helps in understanding the strategic and monetized approach that should be a part of brand building.
Filed under: brands, community, marketing | Tags: Bloomingdales, trains, Who Am I, Zappos
If you look to the right on my profile, you will see how I describe myself:
- Father.
- Brother.
- Son.
- Husband.
- Friend.
- Viking.
- Oxonian.
- American.
- Idahoan.
- Outdoorsman.
- Farm Boy.
- Reader.
- Boyish.
- Generational Link.
- Marketer.
- Interested.
- Concerned.
- Restless.
I have a lot of evidence to back up these claims. I can tell people about them time and again so they will view me as one of the above terms. Of course, none of that really matters.
In my building, one of the families we are friends with came over a month or so ago and I played trains with their young son. He refers to me now with one term:
- Choo-Choo (like the sound a train makes)
This has since evolved to “Russell choo-choo”, but the point is, to him, I am not what I say I am, I am as defined by what I do that matters most.
With our audiences, this perception is not only held by a single person, but as a simple way to explain what a product or service or brand is from one person to another. Zappos is most definitely “shoes”, and to one they are cheap and another they are fun. Bloomingdales is another place that holds a significant place in the “shoes” category. If Zappos tried to additionally capture Bloomingdales’ chic and classy image while they try to hold on to their strong position in the fun and inexpensive category, their actions would betray them to their existing community, resulting in the loss of their current market position.
To use and muddle a well known concept—realizing that brands are as therefore we think, brand managers ought to be careful to not create dissonance between the hoped for brand image and the perceived marketing and other business activities.
Cliff Ennico is a self-described “Affordable Wall Street Lawyer.” He tries his best to charge flat fees for his services; services that are focused around the needs of small businesses and start-ups. These fees (and his hourly rate, if it is needed) are transparently available on his website. He has understood what people like and, more importantly, don’t like about getting legal assistance. His approach is less painful, more helpful, and more upfront than most other practices.
Though he has obviously created a nice middle position to reach out to so many, one area that is most impressive is inclusion of what he doesn’t do, including any litigation or criminal work. Though there is, obviously, a place for that type of work in our society, he had decently chosen to ignore areas that are likely the most lucrative to address the needs of the common man.
In his approach, he has understood his brand and core offering, firstly by easily helping people understand what he does, but more specifically by delineating what he doesn’t do.
Have you done this?
Filed under: brands | Tags: Brand Autopsy, branding, honesty, Obsessive Branding Disorder
Brand Autopsy reports on the book Obsessive Branding Disorder, bringing out a well thought out snippet:
Branding is corrupting our culture by heralding emotion over reason, surface over core substance, and packaging over experience.
Though I am, by profession, more at brander and marketer than anything else, I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. Too often the focus of marketing is on the peripheral emotive rather than the concrete factual. Though branding, as was mentioned in the piece, is the medium of communication, the core kernel offering needs to be genuinely helpful and worthwhile or the sale pitch is essentially dishonest.
Filed under: brands, community | Tags: Bleed Cubbie Blue, branding, communities, Cubs, Fenway Park, Marlins, nations, Red Sox, White Sox, Wrigley Field, Yankees
Cubbie and Red Sox Nation. For years, these two communities have had a treaty of understanding that had grown between them after years of failures and curses have fallen upon their beloved baseball clubs. Though the Red Sox have finally stepped into the light, the Cubbies have yet to even near the promise land. The last time they won the World Series was 1908. The last time they were even in the Fall Classic was 1945. Compare that to the Evil Empire. The Yankees have won the World Series more times than I can count on all my fingers and toes. Even in recent history, they have won in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. They have been in the Series as recently as 2003 losing to the Florida Marlins.
The Marlins are another story. This is a team that has never lost in the playoffs. In their short history, they have won the Major League Baseball Championship twice: 1997 and 2003, both as a wild card. Not only that, they represent the Miami, Florida area, which means they have 5.5 million fans to support them—more than Boston (4.8 million) and Chicago (4.6 million per Chicago team). New York has more (a staggering 10.2 million per New York team), but the Fish ought to be in a great situation for community support.
Why is it then that the Marlins average just fewer than 43%* in attendance since 2001 in their 36,000+ stadium? Boston pulls a sellout crowd of 37,000 to every game over that same period, and the Lovable Losers are just behind them at above 96% (Wrigley Field holds just past 41,000). It is obviously not for winning teams; compare it to the New York Yankees. They average under 86%, and in the midst of their last winning legacy (2001 – 2003), they were below 78%. It wasn’t until they started struggling that the fans came out. And sure, Yankee Stadium is much larger (holds almost 57,000)—but, the fan base dwarfs any other team. If you want to break it down per person, the New York area has nearly 179 people for every baseball seat (Mets and Yankees), Miami has 151 people for every seat, Boston has about 129 people for each seat, and Chicago a paltry 111. Take it another way; each member of the Yankee’s immediate fan base (say, half of NY Metro because of the Mets) attends games .48% of the time, Red Sox fans: .78% of the time, Chicago Cubs immediate area (as shared with the White Sox) fans attend .87% of the time, and Marlins fans: each fan base member attends just .28% of the time.
Maybe it is older teams that really draw, or perhaps it is an issue in Chicago: Chicagoans like losing teams. There has been some examinations into this phenomenon, but, luckily for us, we can compare it to another losing Chicago baseball team. The White Sox had nearly 90% attendance in 2007—but that was after they won a World Series for the first time in decades upon decades. During 2001 – 2008, their attendance is right at 65%. This is one of those old, storied teams! Teams that play in hallowed locations: Yankee Stadium (well, for a little bit longer), Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, U.S. Cellular . . . wait, what? No wonder the Cubbies are fighting to keep Wrigley, Wrigley. Maybe U.S. Cellular is to blame; or maybe it was a residual effect born from the Black Sox (I don’t think so).
It is likely much more to do with the way a community has been built. A community built through trials and struggles. The Red Sox have a bit of an advantage in this. The Cardinals are a fine foe, but there is no team that is easier to hate than the Yankees. The have bound together, as a baseball fan base and as a city to support Boston against the behemoth to the south. More than anything, everything about the Cubs and Red Sox are genuine. They play in old stadiums (with old names) in old neighborhoods. They aren’t too polished (Green Monster, Murphy’s Bleachers, The Idiots). They are fiercely local (paradoxically, they are loved all over). They have stories, curses, traditions, villains, songs—more so than every other club (though I love the Yankees Bleacher Creatures). In short, they act so much like a community because they are one.
Wouldn’t you like to have a brand like that?
*Averages are in median. I don’t pretend to be a researcher, so my process may have some holes—but it is close enough to give us an idea of the true situation.
Update: I posted this in part on Bleed Cubbie Blue. The regulars had much to say concerning this fan base cohesiveness (there is a strong since of self-ownership and involvement; extremely pertinent to a community’s identity).
