Tag Archives: marketing

May 27, 2014 · 8:45 am

Long Promised Road

This TunesDay, I thought I’d continue to celebrate yesterday’s very American holiday with one of our most “American” bands, The Beach Boys.  The song below is from their “Surf’s Up” album of 1971 and it’s one of my favorite songs when I need a little inspiration.  While Carl Wilson plays all the instruments and sings the vocal parts it has the distinctive Beach Boys sound.  Give it a listen:

They’re one of the few bands that I believe is instantly recognizable as soon as you hear a vocal part.  Maybe it’s that 4 of the 5 were family – the 3 Wilson brothers and their cousin Mike Love.  Their unique five-part harmony influenced almost anyone making music at the time and since.  Which is, of course, today’s business thought.

Every business needs to have its own “sound.”  In a perfect world, that brand identity is unique and wordless.  As the American Marketing Association says:

Your brand identity is the representation of your company’s reputation through the conveyance of attributes, values, purpose, strengths, and passions. Great brands are easy to recognize, their mission is clear, and it fosters that coveted customer loyalty all businesses crave.

It’s not good enough to look to another brand or business and say “me too.”  You need to have something intangible that people will recognize when they encounter the brand.  It’s really the essence of the brand – that central set of emotions that are brought front and center, just as one conjures up California, the surf, and good times when hearing the Beach Boys.

Marketing 101?  Maybe, but if you’re not creating as recognizable a sound as these guys, maybe back to basics is just what you need.  Or as the song says:

But I hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me, yeah
Knock down all the roadblocks a-stumbling me
Throw off all the shackles that are binding me down

Success is waiting!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Music

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 , , , , , ,

March 24, 2014 · 9:55 am

What Oreo Has Wrought

Let’s begin the week with another entry in the book of social media marketing stupidity.

English: Two regular Oreo cookies. Please chec...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One trend of which you might be aware is real-time content marketing – brands responding to events as they happen. It’s rapid response content creation and the best-known example is Oreo tweeting out a clever marketing message in response to the blackout at last year’s Super Bowl.  This wasn’t the result of a smart intern winging it.  There were ad agency and brand people at Oreo’s social media command center during the game.

The success Oreo had inspired many copy cats.  In fact, a study done around that time found that over half the brand folks surveyed thought they’d be making greater use of real-time data in their marketing.  Fair enough.  Now let’s see what Oreo has wrought.

Yesterday during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, CBS showed a shot of a young Kansas fan who was crying as his team lost.  Some marketing genius at KFC thought it would be clever to tweet out a screengrab of the teary child along with a marketing message to the 500,000 people following their Twitter account.  After all, what better way to sell fried chicken then on the back of an upset kid! It was such a good idea that KFC pulled the tweet down shortly thereafter as someone woke up and realized that finding a sales message in a crying kid’s unhappiness is way over the offensive line.  Credit them for moving fast to pull it down (although it would have been nice if they’d have issued an apology as well).

Contrast this with something I saw this morning in an online golf publication I read.  The former head of the USGA passed away yesterday – the announcement came late in the day.  Less than 12 hours later, the USGA has a tasteful ad in the publication saluting the man.  Real-time?  Not exactly but certainly quickly after the event.  Different from social media?  Yes, although they certainly could have used this in all of their social channels and they did, in fact, do other things in those channels.

Real time doesn’t mean “speak before you think.”  It means coming across as authentic and relevant (and really funny never hurts either).  That’s not as easy as giving a kid the keys to your social account and a TV to watch what’s going on.  It may not take a lot of planning to be good in real-time – that would kind of negate the purpose.  It does take managing, however, which is clearly what someone did after the KFC tweet went out.  Do you see the difference?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,