100 Great Green Goods

Amazing that I have reached 100 posts with all that has/is going on in my life - the most commitment I have made since marriage.

So now i somehow have to make the leap from commitment to the environment - I suppose as a species we have shown no commitment to the environment unless it is made easy for us. Larger groups off people are finally becoming more "sustainability" conscious, but this is not because of some sudden revelation. Petrol prices prod them and things like Prius means that it is easy to be sustainable - you don;t have to give anything up.

The more we make find easy, low trade off situations for people to be environmentally firendly the better. Great Green Goods is doing just that for people - showing them how they can great furniture etc., that is made of recycled material. Their sister site Great Green Travel does the same for the travel industry. Good on 'em !

Thanks to Cool Hunting for listing the link.

Ford's Boldest Move

Ford has created a great website to both create a discussion with consumers and drive action from it's employees.

I have to say that I was not a big fan of the "Bold Moves" campaign when it first came out. In fact, I put it in the "crumbelievable" Kraft ad type category because Ford has no right trying to own being Bold with it's current marketing and vehicle line up. Ford Bold Moves is the antidote to that marketing.

It is a direct, honest, documentary type approach to their current issues. The news headlines on the site sidebar are not just positive, but are also about Ford's debt being downgraded. The site has invited a documentary film maker into the company to record and show the process of the company undergoing transformation, warts and all.

This is possibly the most honest conversation I have seen from a US automaker. By confronting an issue head on it is likely to win points from consumers, but more importantly, show it's huge internal audience the urgency of the company's situation. Effectively what Ford is creating is public (and therefore effective) warning sign to it's employees that it could: "Change the way we do things or we will all be out of a job." The honesty of the conversation gives Ford permission to address the issue of American car quality directly - creating an honest debate about it.

Of course, it does not help that I could not get the video on the site to work, begging me to ask the question of how much Ford has really changed!

Kudos to John Hearn at Dogmatic for the pointer.

origami research

What do you do when you need to do research on a new venture and seed a product that's not yet ready, all at the same time. Well if you're Microsoft you start this website . The site "starts" after the company's announcement of new software for the ultra mobile PC space(see launch promo here ) and it's intention to develop more. But it what intrigued me about it was more than it's announcement quality.

The whole notion of the site is positioning Microsoft as a company that wants to collaborate with, not impose on, it's customers and developer groups. The company is honest with it's audience, admitting that it is late to the game. It is genuinely asking for feedback as it posts pictures of software, new developments (and even colours for hardware cases).

This kind of consultative, longitudinal and public approach to research seems to be worth doing more of (time permitting). It treats the audience as intelligent and gives them something back in return - a more marketing 2.0 way to approach the process.

The Power of Aussie

Blogging has intersected my life in a new way.

I went out with one of Aussie copywriter, Andrew and his mates to watch the Australia v Croatia match. The resulting side splitting experience was captured by a CNN blogger right here . Funnily enough, John Minty works for TBWA SF.

The whole game and atmosphere was a great ad for Australia and the Australian temperament. Maybe the Aussie tourist board should scrap their campaign and just pay Australians to go to bars and social events. I'm sure they would find some volunteers.

21st Amendment

This San Francsico beer caught my eye with this great bottle design and brand name. 21 st Amendment is a microbrewery with a bar and restaurant down near Giants Stadium. This doesn't sound to out of the ordinary until you look at their packaging and attitude. They have their brew master doing a regular radio "column" on beer, speeches about craft brewing and other appearances. Thye give out t shirts for their regulars to wear. Great brand building for not a lot of money, and something that creates a great deal of consumer interaction.

deconstructing marketing departments

As we evolve our thinking about how complex brand ideas need to be and the need to encourage variety of execution (as opposed to consistency), it is probably worth thinking through the implications for marketing departments.

Last week on a book browsing trip I couldn't help noticing how many business books there were about execution and getting things done. In the world of Wall Street driven shareholder value, this is hardly surprising. But implicit in this focus is the need for predictability: if you know how to execute you get predictable results which keeps the finance people happy. Hence the desire for brand consistency.

Corporate marketing is designed around predicability - control from the center. Moving took a more complex system means helping companies be predictably unpredictable (and innovative). To me, at least, the best way to do that is to devolve marketing out of the marketing department and into every other part of the company. If brand today need to give up more control to the consumer, why shouldn't marketing departments?

Ultimately, everything the company does affects the brand. In that case, let every department or group be responsible for marketing it and putting it forward. There would probably still be a communications group to deal with that area of expertise, and possibly a system of co-ordination. But by devolving the job of building the brand and selling product, you are more likely to make unpredictable things happen.

There are certain organizational elements that need to be true for this to work. Most important of these would be a shared culture around the brand (perhaps articulated in a set of principals, though unspoken is fine to). Also, a system of assessment where every person is measured on how well they help market the company, how they've taken responsibility for the brand.

By driving the same philosophy and expectations, you probably will get more participation than a set of brand standards and predictable variety in your marketing ideas.

some big ideas

Russell Davies and Leland over at Whistle Through Your Comb have posted some great articles abut branding, big ideas and the the need for complexity in brands. Go read them. Now!

to the mountains

A short trip to the Rockies means no blogging for a day or so. Normal service will be resumed when I've had my 2 days worth of truly fresh air.

rational expectations

A few weeks ago I posted about how the concept of entropy (in a physical and information theory sense) might apply to brands. While I plan to post again on that subject soon, there is another theory that draws somewhat similar conclusions.

Rational expectations is an influential economic theory mainly associated with monetarists. In essence it says that people use all of the information available to them to make predictions about the future, and those predictions are pretty accurate (hence the name "rational"). A simplistic example of the theory's outcome (for an economist anyway), is that attempts by the government to pump money into the economy before every election should come to nothing, because people adapt their expectations of spending and price levels (i.e. inflation) and deaden the effect that this spending can have on GDP.

What would the equivalent conclusion be for brands and marketers? My thought would be that if the moves of an entity like a brand, are predictable, then people adjust for those moves in their behavior, or (worse still) learn that they need not pay attention to that company. For example, we know that Lexus is going to have "December to Remember" sales event every Christmas, or that Gap is going to put things on sale regularly, so we adjust our behavior and our opinion of the brand accordingly. You know what a brand will say and you see that there is no need to adjust what you do.

Therefore, consistency or predictability has a downside. This fits with the conclusion of the entropy discussion: random or unpredictable things contain more information, and deserves more attention.

Interestingly, one of the biggest solutions governments have used (successfully) is to make the central bank independent, taking the decision power away from government's and to people. Is the equivalent publicly letting go our brands and putting the consumer feeling in the driver's seat?

The argument against rational expectations has always been that people do not make rational expectations or use all of the information available to make decisions. However, one of the hallmarks of the Internet age is that classical economic theory (which makes these types of assumptions about perfect information), are more likely to be true. It is very easy for us to gain information about what is going on and use that in our decisions. This is possibly why people are more actively seeking "the new" and become more easily bored with what is consistent or expected.

(more) world cup design

The Design Conspiracy in London are having a World Cup t-shirt design competition. Some great designs in there (my favorite posted here). But after today's game against Trinidad and Tobago, where's the one that alludes to the stress of being an England fan (Americans now know why so many of us loose our hair).

happily creative

Psychologist Alice Isen has found that when you are happy, your thought processes are broader and you are better able to think creatively or generate ideas. In her research she found that it only took a small gift or a bit of comedy to effect the change.

There are a lot of implications/confirmations of this but here are a few of the things that first came to my mind:

a) I'm going to push Isen's results and suggest that people are more accepting of new ideas when they are happy. Not only does this suggest why humour is effective in advertising, but it suggests that there are certain types of programming that make more effective media choices than others.

b) Design moments of happinness into your brand experience to open people up to new ideas.

c) Diffuse pressure when you need to create big ideas (both on yourself and for the creative teams). Make the situation fun (briefings especially), lower stakes and focus on the potential reward.

d) If all else fails, hand out lots of chocolate

more bad commentary

Thanks to Russell Davies for posting this great example of what I talked about yesterdayin regards to bad American football commentary. Glad to see that every UK expat blogger (e.g. PSFK ) is pissed off to.

The principles of victory

Great post here courtesy of Marktd . It really shows the driving ethos of Nike as a pirate company, something it can be easy to forget when you look at the giant it has now become.

Their first principle (and probably my favorite) is: "Our business is change." This is a great ethos for any company. But it is damn hard to keep up. You have to drive and reinforce your internal culture very deliberately and consistently - keeping teams small and resetting goals so that they become challenges (as Jack Welsh did at GE by making every unit redefine their market so they were a #3 or #4 player instead of #1 or #2).

In that sense, maybe you have to footnote that principal with the thought that: "Success is an illusion."

Interestingly, I tracked the original post back to John Grant's blog . It seems that he and Russell Davies were having an interesting conversation here about their principles for a successful company.

viva football

Every four years, we all know that many men (and increasingly more women), turn into square-eyed TV addicts, getting up at all hours of the night and morning for one thing and one thing only: World Cup football. Having lived in the US for 11 years, I am no stranger to getting up at 6 AM to watch England play, (although nothing tops the 3 AM game against Brazil in the 02 semi final). As Bill Shankly said about football's place in people's hearts: "Some people say football is as important as religion or politics. Nonsense! It's much more important".

So of course, I had to post one or two observations on the cup so far

The Uniforms



This tournament's shirt designs are probably some of the best in a while (without going back to the 70's designs which are still fueling retro-cool). The almost Nehru like collar and the font used for the player's names are probably my favorite features (see pictures below - unfortunately none with the font).

Also very clear from the uniforms is the battle between Nike and Puma for shirts and mindspace. Both brands are getting great visibility (leaving Adidas and Umbro somewhat in the dust) and deserve design kudos. Nike's move into football has been pretty aggressive and successful, although I am not sure the equipment (especially boots) has the credibility that Adidas has yet.



The Coverage

Let's start with a positive: every game of the World Cup is being shown live on US cable television (some matches are even on ABC). Unfortunately, watching that coverage means having to put up with the American commentators who seem to think that they know something about football (they don't) and feel a need to fill every moment of the game with useless stats and chatter, rather than focus on the game. This is a good reminder of America's obsession with stats (as illustrated by Jon Steele's comparisons of baseball and cricket coverage). More importantly, it shows how ABC/Disney's commitment is skin deep. Why not invest in some good commentators? All they will succeed in doing with this is drive people into the hands of Fox Sports World.

Polo buyback

An article in the paper the other day reported that Polo Ralph Lauren has finally bought back it's brand from the companh it licensed it to. My question is why?

By their own admision, Ralph Lauren allowed it's brand to be "over-distributed" - something I am not sure Polo can recover from for quite some time. They and Tommy Hilfiger are in the same position, and probably need to focus on very high quality, low distribution goods for a long time to build their reputation bacl up (and maybe keep the emblem size a little smaller on the clothing). The only problem with that is that these are huge businesses and the market will not let them take that hit. So again, are the other parts of your brand (like Purple label) so affected by what has ahppened to Polo that it is worth spending $300 M to buy the rights back? We shall see.

the new creative mind

Jaffe Juice points us to a diagram created by David Armano of the new creative mind. What strikes me is this could just as easily have been the brain of the ideal planner (although maybe the proportions would be slightly different). In fact, maybe a better title for the slide should have been the new advertising mind (since it seems so far removed from the way to many agency people think).

farecast

Boing Boing points us to a new service in private beta called Farecast. The service will help tell you when the best time is to buy a particular plane ticket (all based on historic data). The post also rightly points out that Expedia and Travelocity are no longer actually helping competing with airlines, but are merely acting as a new distribution chanel for them practice price discrimniation.

how to....

Hot off yesterday's post on fathers, I spotted this book in Barnes & Noble. It'got that cool 1950's kitch but actually had some pretty useful tips. It's interestng that I've seen more and msore of these "how to be a man and know manly things" articles or books in places like Maxim, GQ and other magazines. Just like women "need" Martha Stwerat and her ilk to pass along lost skills around the home, men need tips on how to do stuff properly. Seems the e1980's divorce boom, latch key kids and distant parents (literally) are equal opporutnity problems in the US.

dads

With Father's day almost upon us in the US (thanks to Hallmark), it's maybe not suprising that I was struck by a post in Russell Davies' blog about the power of getting up early.

Now, as it happens, I absolutely buy into the idea that successful people get up early (probably because I am personally a lot more efficient at that time of day vs. late in the evening). In fact successful people just work damn hard. The problem is that being a (good) dad and getting up early to work (or just wokring more) are somewhat mutually exclusive. What's more this problem is getting worse.

Dad's tend to get squeezed at both ends - they work during the day, then more and more of them work either end of the day helping look after the kids. In the UK (according to the Equal Opportunities Commission men account for a third of child care time - which is high if you consider the number of women working in that country. And with 40% of UK men working 48 hours a week or longer, how are you supposed to find time to do either one well, let alone put in more hours? For me, getting up early to do work is not really an option, since Aidan is up everyday at 6.15 (and there are limits to how early I will get up). This has always been one of the challenges of working in planning and being a parent - it's a great job but with long hours and a lot of extra-curricular stuff that you want/have to do.

This is a similar problem to one faced by career women. A lot has also been written about the undocumented/unrecorded value of work in the home - whihc based on my observation that taking care of 2.3 kids is a like having 2.3 jobs,, is pretty high. However, the market has provided wmen with more of an answer than men in the form of more childcare options.

For fathers, the probem is that the world tends to be a little less sympathetic to them on this issue. According to EOC studies, fathers often feel discouraged by workplace norms and culture from taking time off work for family, or expressing a wish for flexible work. Father's expectations about whether they would have access to work life balance policies are lower than for mothers.

This together with new backlashes on men's rights to their kids during/post divorce, is the interesting accompanying trend to women's increasing desire to not go back to work after having children. Men, liberated from a stereotypical work role by women, now do not want to slip back into that same stereotype. A Careerbuilder.com survey in 2003 showed that 40% of men would be very happyto relinquish the breadwinner role. Hard work may make you more successful, just not happier. To quote a paper form the Rowntree foundation "a high level of domestic responsibility combined with long working hours did appear - as with mothers - to be a source of stress"

the new advertising conversation

Capion: Advertise! Advertise! That's always been your answer for everything.

product vs. branding

John Moore at Brand Autopsy has posted a nice quote from Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Get Back in the Box" .

”Businesses today are counting on the power of ‘community’ to keep their products in perpetual circulation. A clever new marketing campaign or a snazzy new package, it is hoped, will stir word of mouth about the same old product. But the only lasting way to raise the value of a product as social currency is to raise the value of the product itself. While creative marketing is always a plus, it is no substitute for creative development.”

This really speaks to the need for planners to move upstream in the creative process - from focusing on creative development to having a role in product development. And while many agencies do get involved in this, their work is somewhat limited to downstream marketing vs. design and development. Overall thi si not just a planning problem, but an agency one. To often we have lost the right to play in this world and consultants have taken over. The key question is how to win the right back.

The one place I would start is talent (outside of planning in most cases). I know this subject has been over-talked, but the industry's inability (as a whole) to attract talent away form consulting or industry and into account management, for example, seems to be hurting us the most.