Generally Mediocre

Yesterday GM announced massive layoffs - with 30 000 people and at least 7 production facilities put out to pasture. Among them was the Spring Hill facility - once home to Saturn. Saturn was a symbol of GM trying (what I think is) the right solution to their problem - and this closure is the exclamation point that shows why GM won't get better for some time.

One of the big problems I notice with GM is it's myopic internal culture. The fact is that the company is located in a town - Detroit - that is a car town. People grow up eating, sleeping and drinking cars. Their parents and grandparents worked in the business and the chances are they will to.

As planners we learn to question assumptions, to take a step back and put a situation in context. With GM employees their frame of reference is so centered on the car world that everything they do is filtered though a Detroit car lens. Even some of the best research in the world would have a time changing how they act, because their personal cultural context is limited. These leads them to produce ads and enact policies that have less relevance to the rest of America.

Saturn was an attempt to get away from this. It was a GM unit not located in or managed by Detroit. And while admittedly, the whole point of setting it up was to do things differently, I think they succeeded in doing that because they were not in Detroit. Do you think a no haggle policy would have got enacted if Detroit had been involved? The proof is that, when certain people at GM got jealous of Saturn's success and returned control to the center, the whole thing fell apart. Now, Spring Hill is closed.

Other companies have tried to move key units to different parts of the country - Jaguar is now in LA, as was Lincoln-Mercury for a while. But in both cases Ford did not cut the cord and allow them to operate outside of"the Ford way". Now Lincoln is back in Detroit and is still crap.

GM will be generally mediocre until it takes a "scrap it all and start fresh attitude". And the best way to do that, IMHO, would be to leave Detroit and hire more people from outside the car industry.


PS Now that I will not be working on GM business any more, I have a certain freedom to comment on them, their ads etc. that I didn't before. And there its so easy to talk about...:)

iptv and the new agency

I went to an interesting talk today by Jon Kamen of @radicalmedia . He was talking about how the Internet companies were about to start using the web to provide more and more entertainment content - all of it on demand, and probably with advertising optional. Software and broadband have progressed to the point where we now have the option of IPTV: full web entertainment.

It will be interesting to see if he is right, though I am a bit cynical. I still remember the promises of the integrated TV, computer and coffeemakeer whihc people like Olivetti and Philips promised i Europe many moons ago. They failed because people didn't want to watch TV on their computer. Maybe things have changed - especially among tweens, colege and post-college "kids". Somehow, they, I thinnk the boob tube is a hard abit to break.

What did strike me as interesting was the work @radical is doing. Creatign programming for ESPN, MTV and Nike (who can then sell it to TV channels). Starting an entertainment company for Grey Goose (and making the film Iconoclasts that was on Sundance tonight for them. They claim that they want to work/need to with the agency because they are the brand experts.

But what is to stop them hiring a few planners and just becoming a new kind of creative/strategic hotshop - one producing cool content which is truly relevant. Another production company, Dogmatic has already hired someone super smart to help do just that. Agencies and TV execxs should be worried, though if the TV execs put anything good on TV they wouldn't have to be worried. Same goes for the ad guys I suppose :)

flatten real estate

If the world is flat (as some people claim), why are real estate agents still in business? As I am now selling my house in Detroit this is a pretty relevant question.

I have serious issues with paying 5-6% of my houses's ever diminishing value to a broker who isn't really going to do a lot of work. With the power of the Internet -especially sites like forsalebyowner.com - their prices should be lower. Right?

Apparently I forgot one of Malcolm Gladwell's lessons - these people are mavens. They know schools, areas, houses, construction, prices and anything else you need to know when selecting an area or house to live in. What's more they are perceived as independant or house neutral. So people come to them to buy, which obviously draws sellers.

Interestingly, even if you offer a buyers commission, and list on the MLS/ realtor.com with a flat fee service (and only pay 2.5% commission), it won't work. Little birds tell me that brokers will know how you have listed and will steer people away from your house because of it - all in the name of protecting the 6% racket.

Where's the FTC when you need it...

On a side note - advertising seems a total non-starter in this market. On the weeks that we've put an ad in the paper nothign has happened. Ads with pictures and beautiful (?) copy - same deal. Stick up a few signs in the road and invite people in - we got 8 to 10 people the first few weeks. So much for the power of mass communication.

the age of influence

Vicki Cooke has published an excellent article talking about the need to switch from an awareness model to one of influence. To quote her: " much of what we do is still based on by now out-moded, awareness based, mass market thinking." She rightly points out that given the trends towards customization, the markets we deal are less mass than ever before. How long will it take before the industry changes/

Inverting the funnel

Its been a while since the last post, but lots has been going on - in my head and on the ground. But head first....

My current client loves to look at the classic marketing funnel. Awareness, familiarity etc. etc. I think most planners reading this probably know that this doesn't fit with how the world really works (this is a reflection on the client). For example, we know attitude forms after action. So maybe most people think that we have moved...


from   awareness - familiarity - attitude - action


to   Intrigue - Investigation - Action

While on the surface this may look similar, I would define investigation as an active step (seeking out information) and familiarity as a passive one. I would also argue that awareness is not enough - witha mutlitude of consumer choices you need awareness + relevance immediately .

However, I'm not sure the above is enough of a change. The funnel is still a narrowing funnel (I would try and draw this efefct on the above funnels but I'm a planner not a programmer). We need a funnel that starts small and gets big, if only to reflect the new media landscape and advances in our thinking.

Ideas about consumers as herd animals, consumers cynicism towards mass media and the empowerment caused by the web - all of these things suggest that we need a different model for marketing. This model might look as follows;

intrigue (among a small group) - co-option - investigation - consideration/opinion - publicity

The implication here is that we start with a small target audience, creating intrigue among them and allowing them to co-opt and have input on the product. News about the product then spreads organically through the evagelists encouraging people to investigate. Mass ads come last, after the brand has built a base.

This is not the only model - please send your thoughts. If I had to pick a brand that had used this model it would be Starbucks,who didn't do any advertising until recently. The stores and the cups were their ads instead.