April 19, 2012 · 10:14 am

Trust Me

For you trivia buffs in the audience, there once was a TV game show called “Who Do You Trust?” The host of the show was a struggling comic named Johnny Carson and a year into the run he picked up a guy named Ed McMahon as his announcer sidekick. The rest is television history.

That bit of history has very little to do with today’s topic other than it asks the question the study I want to highlight answers. Who do you trust? For consumers, the answer appears to be one another.  Nielsen released its Global Trust in Advertising Survey and it shows that

92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising, an increase of 18% since 2007. Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted form of advertising with 70% of global consumers surveyed online indicating they trust this platform, an increase of 15% in four years.

That’s the good news.  The bad?

…While 47% of consumers around the world say they trust paid television, magazine, and newspaper ads, confidence declined by 24%, 20% and 25% respectively since 2009.

You can read more about this here but the data reinforces the fact that we’re in the midst of a huge transition in marketing.  While most brands are still making the bulk of their marketing investment in paid media, the messages those media disseminate are declining in effectiveness as consumers find other sources of credible information to help with purchase decisions.  Visibility and relevance are not the same thing.

More brands are making efforts in what’s popularly called “earned media.”  They hire an intern to monitor message broads and social media while at the same time they spend millions paying creative types and media buys to work on their TV and print.  While I’m not for a minute suggesting the abandonment of traditional media, perhaps it’s time to look at reallocating resources better to reflect modern realities?  The money spent on the last two titles on your media plan could be working a lot more effectively elsewhere in media more trusted by your consumers.

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April 18, 2012 · 8:04 am

Your Customers vs. Your Partners

Here is an interesting story from the folks at MediaBiz that just cuts to the core of almost every business issue.  It points out the Sophie’s Choice created by some older business models in a time when technology is forcing them to change.  First the facts:

DirecTV

DirecTV (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A handful of DIRECTV subs stopped receiving HBO after the company started blocking the signal on older TV sets that don’t have the encryption standard High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). DIRECTV… recently added HDCP protection to all HBO-owned channels and “will continue rolling out to other premium services in the coming weeks.” The company said affected customers should replace their HDMI connection with a component video cable and a separate audio cable (emphasis added).

Most folks who do so for a living will tell you that HDMI is a better signal (and therefore picture) than component video.  DirecTV also markets itself accurately as providing a better picture to consumers.  Without content, however, there is no service – it’s a big, empty pipe.  It’s the content providers who are insisting on the use of HDCP.  They’re the ones whose business model is most impacted by what they presume is widespread piracy and are insisting on this protection layer.  DirecTV is placed in the untenable position of either losing the content by catering to their partners or telling customers to degrade their pictures and potentially losing customers who can get better video elsewhere using more current technology.

Ultimately, customers pay the bills.  I believe we win when we serve them and while that may, as in this case, cause problems with partners, suppliers, and others, that downside risk vs. that of angry and vocal consumers is minimal.  In this case, the customers who would most notice the downgrade to component video are probably the ones who would know how to cut the cord and get the content they seek elsewhere, hopefully through legitimate means rather than piracy.  As businesspeople, we encourage that illegal behavior by choosing any segment over our customers – witness what the music business did for a very long time.

That’s where I come out.  How do you see it?

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April 17, 2012 · 9:53 am

Showing Up The Pitcher

An item in this morning’s USA Today sports section caught my eye.  It tells the story of Yoenis Cespedes’ first home run and how he stood at the plate and admired it, only to get drilled (hit by a pitch for you non-sports fans) for showing up the pitcher in his next at bat.  Why?

As if absorbing a new language weren’t hard enough, the Cuban defector also has to learn baseball’s unwritten rules at the major league level.

And that’s today’s business point.  Most of us learn, over time, to speak the language of our customers.  As with the Cuban ball players learning English, it’s only part of the battle.  Of course, the marketing world is littered with companies not even advancing that far.  There are marketing tales that he symbols in Chinese that sound like “Coca Cola” mean “bite the wax tadpole” and we’ve all heard the story of the Chevy Nova being marketed under that name when in Spanish, “No Va” means “doesn’t go.”  Exaggerations or not, these examples make the point.

Assuming you have competent linguists someplace on the staff, learning the culture is a challenge.  While it’s most apparent when marketing internationally (and one might ask what in digital isn’t marketing internationally), a brand can trip over itself even at home.  Language is in part generational – very few under 30 have ever experienced a “broken record” so how do they know if they’re going on like one?   Somehow calling my 86-year-old father “dude” doesn’t quite work.  The cultural gap is deeper than just that word.  Frankly, I’m offended by ads showing people emailing or texting during meetings – a cultural thing, I know.  You consider that a product feature – I consider it rude.

We all get our turns at the plate and once in a while we hit one out of the park.  Cespedes’ experience is a good reminder that for every happy batter there is a miserable pitcher and we need to be sensitive to the unwritten rules of business to avoid a bad experience the next time around.

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