October 11, 2013 · 1:15 pm

No Good Deed…

English: McDonalds' sign in Harlem.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Foodie Friday fun time, and this week it’s fast food. Oh, sorry – Quick Service Restaurants. No, this isn’t going to be a polemic on the horrors of what’s served in many of these places. Instead, I’d like to focus for a moment on what the category leader has announced and some of the responses to it.

I find it instructive and you might as well. You might be aware the McDonald’s is going to give away books as toys with their Happy Meals which are targeted to kids.  The books will replace the usual toy and I think giving away 20,000,000 books instead of a like number of toys is a good thing.  However, that’s where much of the positive energy stops.  As USA Today reported:

…this new series of four kids books is hardly comprised of Caldecott Medal winners. Rather, the four books are based on McDonald’s own animated animals, including a goat, ant, dodo bird and, yes, a dinosaur.

Now McDonald’s had given out books at least 15 times previously but this is the first time the books have been created by their ad agency.  The cynics would say that since the books try to tell the kids about healthy eating from characters associated with the McDonald’s brand, kids might think McDonald’s is healthy food.  NY Times food writer Mark Bittman asked this:

If McDonald’s wanted to be on the right side of history, it would announce something like this: ‘Starting tomorrow, we’re not offering soda with Happy Meals except by specific request. And starting Jan. 1, at every McDonald’s, we’ll be offering a small burger with a big salad for the price of a burger and fries to anyone who asks for it; we’re also adding a chopped salad McWrap. We challenge our competitors to follow us in making fast food as healthful as it is affordable, and we dare our critics to say we’re not changing.

What’s the business point?  We can’t say one thing and appear to do another.  Simple, right?  Maybe to say, but we have to examine the entirety of our activities – both marketing-based and otherwise – to make sure that our words and our actions are aligned.  There are many people who look at everything companies do with a cynical eye and they have the tools and platforms to make their feelings known.  Anything associated with making money is subject to that skeptical review and the above is a good demonstration of how our good intentions can be undercut.

Does that make sense?

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October 10, 2013 · 10:19 am

I Wonder…

When I talk about meeting new people or potential new hires, I always look for two things which are related to one another. The first is how curious that person is while the second is how they translate the results of that curiosity into cogent thinking. I suppose when I’m hiring I push this second point a little and try to get at how that thinking translated into action (and results). Both of these things come down to that person’s ability to wonder.

The Thinking Man sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s nice to respect the thinking that got a business or individual to where they are.  For some businesses, continuing to move forward on the basis of the usual patterns of thought can work.  For many, however, it won’t.  Markets change as do market conditions.  More importantly, the technological changes of the last decade and a half have ripped apart and rebuilt almost everything we thought we knew about how to interact with those markets.

The best way to approach business today is with a strong sense of curiosity.  We need to use one phrase a lot:  “I wonder…”  I wonder what would happen if we skipped a trade show and used the money to throw a golf outing.  I wonder what would happen to our sales if we took money out of TV and put it into search and I wonder if the drop in our unaided brand awareness is a big deal.  We need to maintain a mindset I try to foster in brainstorming sessions.  No idea is a”bad” idea.  Maybe some aren’t feasible as expressed but perhaps lurking inside that idea is a nugget of innovative thinking brought about by wondering about a topic.

Ask questions.  It’s a great social media strategy, by the way, since your audience is probably wondering about some of the topics that might help your business grow.  As an aside, it’s an important mindset for us to maintain as people – and citizens – as well.

If you can find a minute or two today, start wondering.  Ask questions.  Don’t dismiss the answers you get out of hand no matter how unfeasible or silly they might seem.  Start a sentence with “I wonder…” and see where it leads.  If you get a chance, tell me how you made out, because I wonder what you think!

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October 9, 2013 · 10:42 am

Faulty Instrument Readings

I’m not a pilot (although I’ve played Flight Simulator a bunch). One of the things pilots are told is to trust their instruments because sometimes our eyes or other senses deceive us while flying. Things such as graveyard spins or spirals result, and I’m very sure that anything with the word “graveyard” is bad when using in conjunction with flying.

X-Plane 10 Flight Simulator Zero panel

(Photo credit: Wanderlinse)

Business analytics today are exactly the opposite of flying.  You see, there are so many things that can go wrong  – a misplaced space, code missing or in the wrong place – that going by what the “instruments” tell us alone can be fatal.  I’ll go back to a point I’ve stated before – we need to figure out what we’re trying to investigate and why before we ever look at the numbers.  That lets us process the information we’re going to receive in context so we can make decisions.  Knowing your web traffic is up is relatively useless.  What it should prompt is a response into both “why” and “what of it?”  That requires using your eyes and your common sense.  Let me give you an example.

You launch a campaign to increase sales using Search Engine Marketing – pay-per-click ads to use a less-fancy term.  You’re smart enough to make sure you have conversion tracking installed – a method through which you can assess how many people who come to your store via your fancy new campaign actually buy something.  Your developers check the code and make sure it’s in the right place and that the beacon fires when the appropriate action is taken.  However, no one ever does what a real-world user would do – click an ad and place an order – to make sure that the “instruments” are picking up the action properly.  As a result, you think, based on the reporting, that the campaign was a tremendous waste of money since it resulted in no sales.  Your instruments just crashed the plane.

Had you used your eyes and common sense, you’d have seen that the ads generated a lot of traffic and based on your history, some percentage of that traffic that stayed on the site (non-bounced visits in tech speak) does convert to sales.  Since that didn’t happen here, maybe something is wrong.  Click an ad and place an order – did it register?

There is a tendency to trust the instruments but unlike the gauges on airplanes, the gauges we use in business are relatively new and far more prone to error.  We can’t let faulty instruments over ride the business acumen we’ve developed over the years.  That can be a fatal error.  You with me?

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