April 7, 2014 · 9:59 am

Don’t Be An Idiot

Over the weekend, CBS and Turner tried an interesting experiment around the Final Four broadcast. They set up “homer” channels which have nothing to do with The Simpsons and everything to do with a particular team. Called TeamCasts, the channel would have announcers who openly rooted for a particular team and called them “us.” There was also a traditional, play it right down the middle broadcast available.
Apparently, not everyone got the message (or managed to decipher what the on-screen graphic meant that said it was a TeamCast) and Twitter filled up with complaints. Leave it to Charles Barkley to explain the problem:


Maybe a little harsh, but Chuck makes an excellent point, one we should remember.  People ARE idiots.  OK, not you and not me.  But there are idiots in the world.  Ever notice when you buy a cup of coffee that it says “this cup is filled with very hot liquid”?  That’s thanks to an idiot.  Ever see a piece of wrapped food that instructs the purchaser to “remove wrapper before consuming”?  Another idiot.

I don’t raise this to degrade my fellow humans.  I’m pointing it out because many of us assume the consumers are a lot smarter than they often demonstrate.  I am very aware of David Ogilvy‘s famous quote – “the consumer is not an idiot; she is your wife” and I agree with his point.  You can’t treat people like idiots.  You also cannot, however, assume that they’re a lot smarter than they are. They may not realize they have a problem that your product solves.  They may believe a competitor’s silly claim  that has no basis in fact because most people are too lazy to seek out the facts (just turn on one of the many news channels and you’ll be able to see hours of undocumented “facts”).

Don’t be an idiot.  As a marketer, strike the balance between respecting consumers and treating them as if they’re not really very bright.  As a consumer yourself, pay attention to facts and don’t go jumping on social media to proclaim your outrage when in fact you’re demonstrating ignorance.    Simple enough, right?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, sports business

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 4, 2014 · 8:32 am

Cooking In A Closet

For those of you who live outside of New York City today’s Foodie Friday topic may be a little esoteric.

Tiny kitchen

(Photo credit: doraemon)

Then again, since I’ve never lived in an apartment in any other city, perhaps many of you can identify with it.  I know the subject was one I lived with in our NYC apartment and even when we moved to the suburbs the issue persisted:

The challenges of a small kitchen.

Our apartment’s kitchen was literally a closet.  A large walk-in had been changed into a kitchen.  There was a small stove with a tiny oven, a narrow refrigerator, some shelves and about two square feet of counter space.  A small  cutting board and a bowl would cover it completely.  My culinary ambitions generally overwhelmed my kitchen’s ability to produce what I was visualizing.  You’d cook sequentially instead of concurrently, making one course and removing it to another room while you started the next.  Two pots were tight on the stove even though it had four burners, and good luck if you need to sear something over high heat in a pan while simmering a pot somewhere else on the stove.

What cooking in a small kitchen taught me were a series of skills that I still use.  First, I had to think through the entire meal – what to cook when and how to have everything hit the table at the same time.  Second, I learned to be organized.  There wasn’t room to have clutter nor the luxury of extraneous kitchen equipment or ingredients. In short, I learned to focus on the essence of what I was doing and to do so in an incredibly efficient manner.  Which is, of course, the business point.

It’s not just start-up businesses that have resource challenges.  When I work with my clients who are early and mid stage companies, I think about cooking in a closet and how those skills are critical.  That said, every business can stand to think that way.  Sure, your ambitions are way bigger than your business, but what’s the essence of what you’re doing?  What’s really necessary in terms of tools?  How do I organize everything to maximize efficiency?  Since the business can’t do everything it wants to all at once, what’s needed to be done in what sequence to get us where we want to go?

I don’t cook in a small kitchen any more and I have way more silly tools than I know I need.  But while you can take the cook out of the small kitchen, the small kitchen stays in the cook.  I think it’s the same with small business people.  You agree?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 3, 2014 · 11:51 am

You’re Already Behind

The IBM folks have been surveying Chief Marketing Officers for quite some time and the latest results of that survey have come out.

Image representing IBM as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

You can read the study yourself by clicking through but I’d like to point out one data point that really got my attention.  It was this:

It’s questionable whether CMOs are moving fast enough to keep up with the speed at which the commercial landscape is evolving, or whether they need something akin to a turbo boost…The situation is, if anything, worse than it was when we completed our last Global CMO Study.  In 2011, 71 percent of the CMOs we interviewed told us they felt underprepared to deal with the data explosion. Today, a full 82 percent feel that way. Two-thirds of all CMOs also report that they’re not ready to cope with social media, which is only marginally less than was the case three years ago.

This is scary.  It used to be that marketers would pay for tons of research better to understand their customers.  The dream was a 360 degree view of the customer’s purchasing and media habits.  Today, that dream is very viable – it’s within a marketers grasp – but only if the marketers have structured their organizations and daily routines to include analytics.  I’m not just talking about web analytics but also point of sale information, real-time data from social media, and any other font of information which can be integrated to round out that view.  That seems to me to be common sense and yet less than a fifth of CMO’s feel ready to deal with all of this.  Put that in the context of over two-thirds of them acknowledging that digital channels will play a bigger role in their interactions with customers in the next three to five years and one concludes that the vast majority of companies are far behind where they need to be.

I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe it’s an investment issue – it’s hard to find dollars to invest on new things in almost every organization.  It might be a priority issue but the folks in charge seem to acknowledge the need.  Maybe it’s the life-cycle of the CMO, which has always been one of the shortest tenured positions in the “C” suite.  No matter what it is, it’s a tremendous opportunity for anyone who can get their company’s stuff together and leap ahead of their competitors.  Will that be you?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , , , , , ,