Experience Manifesto

Are We Overhyping this Whole Movement/Tribe Thing?

Have you seen any movies set in the future, say Blade Runner or Minority Report? What do you notice about those films as it relates to the future of advertising? Yep, that all of that time in the future and advertising is still pretty pervasive. In fact, it's even more pervasive then it is today. Think of those giant billboards from Blade Runner or the famous (or infamous, depending on your POV) scene where retinal scanners welcome Tom Cruise to the Gap. The only future world I can think of without pervasive advertising is the one from Brave New World and there, they train you in-vitro to be a consumer. That's pretty pervasive.

Now I want you to think about the brands you use every day. Not just the big brands, but all the brands you use. Your car, computer, phone, phone service, washer & dryer, your food, your socks & underwear, your deodorant. All the brands you interact with on a regular basis.

Do you have relationships with any of those brands? Are you part the tribe of those brands? Or do you mainly use them and hope and expect that they will actually deliver based on what they do?

I've written about this before, but today listening to Seth Godin and seeing how people reacted to his presentation made me think about it again. Full disclosure, I am very envious of Seth and what he's built. I am. He's done an incredible job of building the Seth Godin brand. I've read many of his books and many of his blog posts and usually find them very helpful and inspiring.

But lately I've been questioning this whole relationship thing. I use Apple products, but I'm not really involved in the Apple tribe. And I definitely have a love/hate relationship with Apple. It's certainly passionate, but that passion isn't always positive.

I drive a Subaru Outback, which I love. It's the best car I've ever driven in the snow. I would recommend it without hesitation. But, I'm not part of the Subaru tribe. I've barely registered our Outback with the online Subaru groups.

My relationship with T-Mobile is sometimes OK. Its a little strained right now thanks to the fact that they want me to pay $329 for the new G2 phone when new customers can buy it for $199 and I'm thinking about moving to AT&T and getting an iPhone. I've really been trying to stay with T-Mobile, but the G1 just isn't cutting it any more and as much as I like android and a keyboard, for a $150 savings, I'll go back to the iPhone.

I'm pretty happy with my Fruit of the Loom, but there's no relationship there. Dog food we use, same way. Got a new Dyson and while it's started off strongly, I have to wait and see if it dies in a year like my other vacuums. Two dogs will do that to vacuums. And while I've almost always owned Nikon cameras I don't think I've ever visited a Nikon users group or anything like that. Maybe with the new S8000 I have since I'm still trying to figure some things out. Sydney loves mac & cheese, but she's not brand loyal at all.

But Seth said it's all about connections and if you make a boring product it's hard to connect. Hugh MacCleod has a cartoon (and a shirt I got at the GasPedal WOM event) that says advertising is the cost of being boring. And I started think that most of the products I use are pretty boring. And if boring products have no place in the connected world and they all went out of business, well that would send us into a pretty big economic disaster, wouldn't it?

So I'm wondering, how many brands really can create movements?  I hear lots of examples of small companies that create local movements.  Certainly companies like Apple, Lululemon Athletica, Trader Joes, Anthropologie and others have done very well creating relationships with their audience, so I know it's possible.  But my socks & underwear?  Not likely.  And many other brands I deal with every day are like that too.  Good, solid companies, but a movement?  Not so sure.

I would love to hear your thoughts.  Can every brand create a movement?  And if brands can't create a movement or they don't have a tribe, does that mean they should be out of business?  Don't get me wrong, I think all brands should strive to look for ways to engage their audiences.  But I'm worried that we might be setting some pretty false expectations for brands to follow.

Are We Out of Touch? Are Companies Really Changing?.

Be Human & Listen, This is the Best Advice We Have?.

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gapingvoid gallery -- Advertising is the cost of being boring.

 

 

Seth Godin, MIXX 2010

IAB MIXX kicks-off with the IAB b-roll and that kind of jammin' music that they use. Loud, but getting the audience ready. Randell Rothenberg takes the stage pumped and ready to kick-off Advertising Week in a big way. Digital took the C suite this year as digital natives headed up. This year, IAB announces a competition to find new interactive ad formats, go to www.iab.net/risingstars for details.

Seth Godin

People always want to talk about what's next, but you need to talk about what's now. 30 - 40 years ago, you were successful by placing as many ads as you can as many places as you could. TV marketing says i have the power to interrupt people everywhere they are. We're now in the revolution, are you going to join it? Everyones trying to get their own share of consumer, everyones trying to interrupt more people. Come up with col mascot. If that doesn't work, spam people. We don't get to do Mad Men any more.

Ideas that spread, win. The market for something to believe in is infinite -- Hugh MacLeod.

Internet is about connections. It's a connection machine. Marketing is now such a huge lever, that marketing should be running the company. If you're making a product that's boring, it's hard to find reasons to connect.

He started to talk about his idea of tribes, using the language of the Third Place. Suggesting that marketing should move to tribes. Chief Marketing Officer should be Chief Movement Officer.

Everything built on Henry Ford's model of replaceable parts and replaceable people. What replaces this model? Art. You go places because there's an experience created by people. It's getting harder and harder to sell copies of things at a premium price.

Competence in no longer a scarce commodity. School teaches us to be good at school, but we don't do school. Businesses are not set up they way they should be. Companies that are collections of individuals rather then an executive team.

You're getting what you always wanted, a chance to lead people, to do what you want.

The challenge with this idea is that way too many brands don't really have a place in a "movement." My daughter really, really loves mac & cheese, but she's not going to join the mac & cheese movement. So while I think the movement idea is a good one (I wrote about it several years back), I'm not sure that it's really helpful to the vast majority of brands out there.  How do everyday brands become a movement?

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T-Mobile, the G2 Hunt and the Existing Customer Roadblock

After months of rumors, T-Mobile finally announced that the T-Mobile G2 phone would start taking pre-orders this weekend. I was psyched! I've had my G1 for a little over a year (when my Nokia 9500 Communicator that I loved finally died) and jumped online to do the pre-ordering. That's when I hit the existing customer roadblock. You see, the phone is $199 for new customers, but folks like me -- existing customers who have been with T-Mobile for several years now, the cost would be $329.

Now, I want to start by saying that the help I got when I went to a T-Mobile store was excellent. Really excellent. They did everything they could to try and help me make this work. They came up with options. I could cancel my account, pay some cancellation fee and then get a new account, porting my cell phone over. Or I could add a line for Sydney (who's only 9, so we don't really want her to have a phone), put the G2 on that line and then switch sim cards with my G1 so I wouldn't lose my phone number.

But since I'm getting a smart phone I would then need to add a $30/month internet service for a phone for Sydney, something that's not needed. Plus, that would add $720 ($30/month for 2 years) to the cost of the phone, and that seemed pretty dumb. I'm more then willing to re-up for another two years, I like my T-Mobile service. Heck, I'd re-up for 3 years to be treated like a new company.

So, here we are in the age of relationships, a time when the consumer is in control and yet T-Mobile still treats its new customer better then its existing customers. Not that this is only a T-Mobile issue, most, if not all, US carriers do the same thing.

So, maybe cell phone companies don't know that the consumers are in control today? Maybe they haven't gotten the memo's about this? Or maybe they just don't care that consumers are in control.

Or maybe we, the consumers, only think we're in control.

Cell carriers here in the US do all kinds of things that show that we're not in control. In fact, it was just announced that this new G2 won't support tethering (T-Mobile G2 Will Not Support Tethering At Launch) despite the fact that the phone supports it. Why? Because carriers would lose money on other services that they sell to let people tether their phones today.

So, I'll keep pestering T-Mobile in the hopes that I'll get the right deal on this phone and maybe they'll surprise me. But until that happens, it's pretty hard for me to believe that I'm in control.

Photo: Engadget Mobile

Groupons For Local Business: No Magic Bullet - The Retail Doctor

Bob Phibbs, writing over on The Retail Doctor, has an 11 piece post on Groupon (and similar sites) and their impact on retail.

He makes a pretty strong final argument on his post:

Stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.

Tell those customers wanting you to match price, offer a “deal” or get you to offer a Groupon or other online coupon,” We had a choice a while ago to either pursue price or quality. It’s a choice our customers have appreciated for years. Our toys don’t break quickly.” Or, ” You won’t find our garments at Wal-Mart.” Or, ” Our spa’s masseuses are second to none.”

“That’s because we’ve discovered, as I’m sure you have, that you truly get what you pay for.”

You might even put that in an upcoming email along with the message “No Groupons – Ever.” That way your best customers know no one gets a better price than your loyal customers.

If you’ll go out there on your sales floor with a new attitude, a new direction that won’t settle, I promise you – you’ll find your way without discounting or couponing to people who don’t know you, aren’t interested in your success or who are trying to make every interaction “a deal.” But you have to look in the mirror and change what may be keeping customers from returning.

Pretty bold statement in the face of a bad economy, but I think he's making some excellent points. After the heave discounting a few seasons are back, most brands are finding it difficult to get their pricing back up. But brands that didn't discount, like A&F, saw significant sales declines. So what's a brand to do?

Is Groupon a good way to introduce your brand to potential clients? Or does it introduce you them to your brand in a way that's difficult to move into a new direction? Can you convince your audience that your service is worth extra money once the Groupon coupon is over?

It'll be interesting to see where this all leads in the future and which brands are able to maintain their value in the world without competing on price alone.

Exposed: Groupon For Small Business No Deal The Final Review - The Retail Doctor.

Why We'll Always Have Newspapers

Funny video for the Newsday iPad app.

The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media

Steve Hall from Adrants (a blog I read every day) was quoted in a recent Mashable piece on the future of Ad Agencies and Social Media:

“With the ability to target people only when they are within purchasing distance, brands will be able to come that much closer to targeting nirvana. Offers can be made only to those meeting certain location (and even demographic) requirements, reducing waste and actually saving a brand a lot of money by minimizing its old school spray-and-pray mass marketing techniques. In a nutshell, mobile will, once and for all, make it possible for a marketer to target without waste.” (Emphasis mine)

And Jolie O'Dell, who wrote the article, finishes the section on location-based services with this:

Between the intelligence you can gather about your clients’ customers and your ability to find more highly qualified targets than ever before, location is indeed the holy grail for advertisers.

I know that it was a piece about advertising and the future of the agency, but in a world of "consumers being in control," we're still mostly looking at any new tools through the agency POV. Consumers don't really care about whether or not advertising can do their job without waste unless it has a direct benefit to them.

If the consumer's in control, then shouldn't any discussion about the future of the business talk about the value to the consumer first?

The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media.

Are You Just Hunting?

Originally published in 2003, before the social media craze started, these are five ideas that every company should still be exploring today. I believe that these five rules are even more important in the social media world we live in today.

The Marketing Chase Continues

It’s not just a cliché, it is a new world. The problem is, if you listen to the language of marketing, it sounds a lot like the language of a hunt. It’s about capturing the audience, capturing “eyeballs.” Capture audiences everywhere and claim that as success. I know it’s not a pretty image, but I keep seeing the pictures that were used years ago to protest seal hunts—except that now the marketing community is holding the clubs and the consumers are the seals.

During the last decade, I have read business plans and heard pitches for new media formats such as advertising on postal trucks, on ATM machines, and at gas pumps. The ideas range from the ridiculous to the outrageous. What makes this even more bewildering is that in a time of media uncertainty (increased fragmentation, declining viewership), costs are going up while frequency and reach are going down.

Here are some surefire rules to help integrate your media mix to increase efficiency and efficacy.

1. Make it compelling. Is there a narrative story that the audience understands? Is there a narrative at all? What is the story that you tell to your customers every day? Could you define it? More importantly, can your audience? Make the product experience as good as the marketing experience. After the consumer leaves your event, will the message be retained during the actual consumer experience? This is probably one of the trickiest things to accomplish for those of us in the event marketing industry. After all, when we’re producing events and tours, we sometimes have a better opportunity to control the hiring of the event staff and the script that they will follow. But what happens when the consumer leaves the marketing event and experiences the real product?
2. Deliver on your message. Here’s something that I like to do, and I challenge you to see if your brand could stand up to my test. I was on the phone with a bank, trying to resolve a problem with an account. During the course of my conversation with the customer service person, I asked her to dinner. She got a little nervous, then I explained that since the bank marketing message is, “Where the right relationship is everything,” and since I wasn’t getting the satisfaction I was looking for, we must not have the right relationship. I was only trying to create a better relationship in order to improve my banking service.
3. Don’t use slogans to deliver an empty promise. Do you say that you’re committed to total customer satisfaction and then create rules of engagement that are of benefit to you and not your customers? Do you train your customer service staff to only say yes to a request after the customer has asked a certain number of times? Are you prepared to live your slogan in everything you do, and not just the easy things?
4. Make it a movement. Jim Ward, vp-marketing at Lucas Films, said recently that the next generation of brand marketing is creating a movement. Would people camp out in front of anything for up to three weeks for your product? Many companies have created movements—just listen to any Mac user talk about PCs. Is your brand a movement or simply a product? Are people passionate about your brand, your products, and your services? Do they sincerely want to share their stories of your brand with other people? Are you telling the same story with all of your employees? Are they telling the same story to your customers?
5. Be authentic. If you need more answers, talk to consumers. Be who you are and leverage what your company stands for. I recently had the opportunity to work on a product for a Fortune 100 company, helping to position them to a specific target audience. They wanted to talk about speed, but as anyone who has worked with large companies knows, speed is not one of their authentic story lines. They had many other authentic stories to tell, but it took a while for them to understand that and work with different language. Note that stories must be organic and can’t be rushed.

Remember, it’s a good story when people want to hear it, tell it, and participate in it. You can create a story that people will want to share in—once you do, your brand won’t just be a product.

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