PodZinger is a site that is great search engine for investigating the pod-o-sphere (and video blogs). Unlike YouTube which searches titles or descriptions, PodZinger actually searches content and allows you to listen to the exact piece of content your search term is in.
"You get to be a superhero for a night...We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do."
This is not a quote from Fight Club . It is a quote from a Silicon Valley techie who started a fight club (as reported on CNN )
It is interesting that for these engneers, who for all intents and purposes live in the virtual world of programs, the Internet and C++, there is a need for something truly real. Smething which consumeism cannot satisfy. It is perhaps, further proof that brand experience, not product, is the driving force of the future.
I was listening to an edition of NPR's Fresh Air and heard John Power's review of the 1970's film The Passenger (whihc has been remastered and released on DVD. I was struck by the folowing piece of dialogue which Power's played during the review:
Jack Nicholson: " It’s us who remain the same, we translate every new situation, every experience with the same old code – we just condition ourselves"
Ian Hendry: "We are creatures of habit is that what you mean?"
Nicholson: "Something like that. However hard you try, it stays so difficult to get away from your own habits – even the way we talk to these people, the way we treat them – it’s a mistake"
My gut reaction was how well this quote applied to planning. It is all to easy to get into habits in the way that we think. Our analysis, our assumptions, our thought processes are conditioned and honed through experience. While (good) planners are always learning, reading and trying new things, not to many are re-examining our habits - understanding them and trying to turn them over. Understandable perhaps, since it is no small task (and few planners have the time to do it anyway).
How might we do this? Maybe a good place to start is to ask ourselves what our short cut are? What is our usual framework for analysis? What connections do we automatically make? Then we can begin to investigate what else is out there. maybe one way to change our habits is to go intern at or study a totally different kind of company to see how they approach problems (e.g. a software company). Ideally, you would do something active - go volunteer or work for an entiely different organization to see how they do things.
Grant McCracken has been posting some interesting comments that referenm\ce work by Jonathan Miller. Miller argued that actors needed to create characters that defied a genre in order to give a convincing performance on stage. The noise and contradiction built into the character would then make people pay attention, allowing the work to come to life.
In many ways this is similar to the argument I made about entropy . When a source of information is more random (i.e. you don;t know what to expect from it), the law of information says it contains more information.
The implications for brands is simple: the more you defy a genre and be unexpected, the more brand character will be created and the more people will be convinced by your performance.
Today (May 25th) has been named Towel Day to commemorate the death of Douglas Adams. Adams is the author of The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy series of books - a cult classic that seems to have spread across the world (despite it's recent butchering by Hollywood).
To find out more about why a towel is the most useful thing you can carry around with you and how to make a pan galatic gargle blaster (it's the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging) click here
The color pink has gone through many phases. It was "owned" by the gay community, associated with women and was (maybe still is) very widely worn by bankers and traders in the City (London financial district).
The latest group to take it over are dirt bike riders and teens. Dustin Smith (one of our v. talented CDs) is a keen rider and he was telling me about one fellow racer who rides in a pink polo shirt (no protection either). Moto cross riders have been donning pink gear and it's now big with college kids (brands like Hollister and Converse seem to be acocmodating this).
So what? Other than the fashion tip, it seems interesting that a brand that evokes strong stereotypes ("gay", girlie") can shift associations so quickly. No advertising, no PR, just usage.
A very neat new idea from Nike...spoilt by delivery.
PSFK featured a news of a new Nike partnership with iTunes, where Nike running shoes link to and interact with your iPod. Not only will your iPod now give you running information, your shoes can now trigger a power song to give you a psycological(and phsyical) boost. Maybe best of all, your iPod will now keep records of your runs (something I am bad at doing but should do more of).
The site is very well done with lots of content to keep you involved. But I have to say I was ticked off that Nike only planned on offering one shoe. IN this day of catering to niches, why not offer it in several models to suit different feet and running styles (you can't tell me they don;t think this is going to be a winner)
In the age of CGM, any campaign is susceptible to being made fun of. But this parody of Australia's "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign hits a little to close to home. The funny thing is that, while people in Australia might previously have felt this way, we wouldn't have known it 5 years ago? Having said all of this, I still like the Australia work - it captures the Australian spirit (or at least the part they like to be known for)
Finally a support group for people in advertising :)
This is, unfortunately, actually a serious issue. As people work longer hours and become more defined by what they do (especially in the US and UK), they have less of a life outside of the office. Their self worth and social network reveolves sround work - something made easier if they are married, since it is most often the spouse who makes the friends. The Recovering Workaholics group, based in London, organizes social activities to tempt people from the office and sessions where they can address ways to balance life and work.
All of this may sound extreme, but it is becoming a very serious issue in retirement. In some work we did recently for a client, people had a hard time transitioning into that second phase of their life, because the way they new themselves was through work.
While planner should (fortuantely) be somewhat insulated from this problem, we are not immune. For a lot of people I know (especially at smaller agencies), their entire social ife is built around work. While you may be a culture vulture, if you're not meeting normal people outside of the biz, you don't see the world as it really is.
Quite a few of blogs have been using the PersonalDNA as an interesting little experiment/personality tool. I am a benevolent creator it seems.
What is interesting but not surprising is that every planner taking it has a different personality. This is what makes this test so much better than a Myers Briggs - there are more combinations to categorize people with. One might expect that planners would share some similar characteristics: high empathy, high imagination etc. This doesn't seem the case (caveat: I have onyl found a 5 or so blogs with the survey results posted).
This doesn;t surprise me too much though, since Emily Reed and I explored this issue at a previous APG. We administered a personality test to planners, account folks and creatives across a number of agencies in the US. The differences between roles were less than differences across agencies. To me this showed the power of agency culture over the power of individual people.
There is an excellent post on Holy Cow talking about the new eork for Mars in the UK.
He makes the point that "brands are living narratives". This is a good reminder that brands should not be afraid to change and adapt to circumstances. That they need to bring an active point of view, not just speaking to changes in product or society but also in recognition that our attention spans are just a lot shorter than they used to be.
The implication to me, and somehting I am seeing mroe and more of in my own work, is that consistency needs to come from high level strategy rather purely from execution. That there can be many interpretations or avenues to pursue when you have a big brand idea, and that we shold not only pursue one of those pathways. In the example of Mars, they are making their brand more real by bringing a specific interpretation of it for the world cup.
There is an application of this even in the FMCG / packaged good world. A product may only exist in a specific category, but to grab hold of people it has to have relevance in all of their lives. So taking the meaning of the brand and placing outside of the traditional consumer context gives the brand more legs and ultimately, makes it stronger.
I am still trying to decide whether or not BMW's new advertising is smart or to big a step forward for the brand.
ON the one hand, it taps into an issue or truth that is relevant to the managers, executives and upwardly mobile people who would drive them. The need to be more flexible, creative and innovative in business is being embraced more and more. The approach also ties in nicely with Richard Florida's work on the creative economy.
Another added benefit is that it depositions Nissan, Honda and GM (not that this was hard), casting them as the big, mammoth corporations that they are.
unfortunately, the strategy does not ring true for me. To borrow from Seth Godin, marketers can not/should not be liars any more. BMW has been selling itself as the ultimate driving machine for years - that is the brand. It German-ness is a big part of that idea: the skill and precision in engineering, the Teutonic bureaucracy and dogmatism. That is why I believe it is such high quality.
Sure, BMW has a lot of engineering innovation - something I guarantee that the board of of directors would like the company to be known for. The ads act as a great message to employees (potential and current). But the approach they have taken does not ring true - you can be big and innovative, without even having to brag about it. In fact, Honda and Nissan (Infiniti) are just that.
So far, I guess, this creativity is just not creative enough.
Sometimes when we think of invention, we think of high minded, game changing ideas. But I think these scissors are just great - an unlikely combo of high tech lasers with household scissors. Maybe it's because I failed arts and crafts in kindergarten, but this is oe of the most useful things I have come across in ages.
Corebrand is planning to launch a mutual fund (unit trust to people in the UK)that will base it's investment decisions on how well company's manage their brand equity. This is great news for rbands, because it could provide a very public source of data on the correlation between stock price and brand equity management (and I think we all know which of these CEOs really care about).
A very different, but fun exercise, would be to start a brand stock exchange along the lines of Hollywood Stock Exchange. The idea would be that as news about new product development, new campaigns etc. fed into the market, we would vote with our play money about the likely success of each of these. It taps in to the Wisdom of Crowds power of collective prediction, and it would be intersting to compare how cynical marketing insiders predictions of success match with how the real stock market reacts.
Any takers?
I had an interesting conversation with a set of clients this week, which illustrated two (seemingly different) questions:
a) Is it ever useful to pursue a strategy of increased frequency (get peoplee to buy more)
b) Will/Should marketng and avdertinsing ever pay attention to marketing academia
The client's brand has stalled in terms of share growth. The client's preferred strategy is to target light users and get them to use more. In their logic, the light user has already overcome the barrier of trying the product, so now we just have to show them how to get more use out of it.
Now, I'll be the first to say that there are numerous flaws in this logic. But one major one is this: brands don't differ much in terms of loyalty and if anything, big brands get greater loyalty than small brands do. This is Andrew Ehrenberg's famous double jeopardy theory. Well let's assume that heavy users are pretty loyal to the brand. So light users and medium users are the ones that ae less loyal and there are more of them). So using Ehrenberg's findings, trying to get people to use more of a product (if they are a light user) is pointless. Getting more people to use has a herd effect on current users, encouraging them to buy more.
This is interesting but not new (especially to anyone who has read Mark Earl's book). What is frustrating is that Ehrenberg's work is old and well published (in the UK at least). Yet, we are not paying attention to it. There are still plenty of clients and agencies pursuing this type of strategy. At a time when agencies and marketers in the US are doing so little research into understanding how and why marketing works (or doesn;t) we should at least pay attention to what is out there.
Of course, marketers are not solely to blame. Marketing academics, driven by the needs of tenure, do a terrible job at marketing themselves and their research to the outside world. There seems to be space for someone to fill this serious resarch void - the question is who will fund it and figure out how to moentize it.
