Tag Archives: Strategic management

March 10, 2016 · 11:49 am

No There There

You’re probably familiar wth Gertrude Stein‘s quote about Oakland – “there’s no there there.” Putting aside the meaning of the statement (nostalgia and not a diss of Oakland), it came to mind when I read about Obsessee. This offering, as reported by WWD, will cover fashion, culture, music, beauty, food, shopping and relationships for the 14- to 22-year-old set. What’s unusual about it is that the brand will exist only on social media platforms. No website, no app of their own. In other words, no home base. No there there.

Accession Number: 1979:4010:0001 Maker: Alvin ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It will be interesting to see how this works. One thing many companies forget about social and other non-owned media platforms is that your brand is at the mercy of the landlord. When the landlord decides to change the terms of the lease or to raise the rent, you’re sort of screwed. Won’t happen? I’ll tell you what – go look in your Google Analytics for all the keywords used to come to your website via Google search. They’re all (not provided) Google decided to change their policy. It’s just as easy for any of the social platforms to do the same, and we have many instances of Facebook changing both their policies and their algorithm in ways that require any brand in the platform to rethink how and why they’re using it.

What happens when you become wildly popular and, as with some other analytics, Facebook decides to charge you if you want full data in your Insights reports?  Maybe I’m too much of a control freak, but it seems that without a home base that’s completely under a brand’s control, there is no alternative but to sign up for whatever terms and conditions the non-owned platforms decide will be how you operate.  Moreover, you never really own the customer. What are your thoughts?

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March 9, 2016 · 10:10 am

Blocking My Goodwill

One of the things I’ve done consistently throughout my life is to subscribe to the NY Times. I can remember a representative of the paper coming to my elementary school class to show us how to fold it for easy reading and to explain how newspapers are written and printed. 50 years later, I’m still a reader.

The New York Times uses an unusually large hea...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have read that the NY Times is following the lead of several other publications and shutting down access to those people who use ad blockers. Instead, readers who visit the Times site will see, as Digiday reported, the following:

“The best things in life aren’t free,” the pop-up reads.”You currently have an ad blocker installed. Advertising helps us fund our journalism,” then points readers to two options: purchasing a subscription option, which doesn’t strip the site of ads, or to whitelist the Times, which disables the ad blocker.

It’s the value exchange – we give you content, you give us attention. I’ve written about this paradigm before and I came to the conclusion that there really isn’t any one correct answer for publishers when it comes to ad blockers. Cutting off access does little for most publishers since not many publishers can claim to provide truly unique and valuable content and readers can go elsewhere. The Times, however, can make that claim. The issue is that with upwards of 40% of US readers using some sort of ad blocking, curtailing access also means fewer page views that can be sold, lower time one site, higher bounce rates, etc. Still, given their success in digital, I’ll give them a “wait and see” on this. Except for one thing: They’re cutting off access for subscribers as well.  As a spokesperson put it:

Ad blockers do not serve the long-term interest of consumers. The creation of quality news content is expensive and digital advertising is one way that The New York Times and other high-quality news providers fund news gathering operations.

Want to know what really doesn’t serve consumers’ long-term interests?  Greed. My bill for home delivery, which includes online access, is around $150 a month.  I daresay that the Times has gotten full value out of me, just as I’ve gotten great value out of their content. I access the Times site as a logged in user, so it really shouldn’t be too difficult to identify me as a subscriber and not to hassle me about ad blocking.  Hopefully, they will.

To the extent it can, any business needs to treat each customer as an individual.  There are very few rules that can apply to prospects and customers equally, and not every customer is the same (the pesky lifetime value computation we need to do!). Asking a customer to pay for access and then asking that same customer to endure a barrage of ads as a condition for continued access seems like nothing more than greed and insensitivity.  What do you think?

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March 4, 2016 · 10:06 am

Getting Real

This Foodie Friday, I’d ask for an extra minute of your time so you can watch the commercial below.  It encapsulates our business thought perfectly:

I’d say that the spot is less about “big” food than it is about authentic food.  Real food, made with the same ingredients you’d find at home or in a farmer’s market.  It is yet another manifestation of consumers being sick and tired of lies and their desire for authenticity.  In case you hadn’t noticed, consumers are buying a set of values over a simple brand logo or image these days.   I found this quote from a marketing blog which I think states it well:

The demand for authentic marketing is a reaction from consumers based on decades of deception and deceit from organizations with slick marketing campaigns and smooth interactions with the media. From cigarette manufacturers, food producers, banking and more recently, automotive, the public has become less trusting of the messages shared by corporations. What the public really craves is this: honesty.

You might think that you don’t have this issue, but it goes beyond your products themselves.  For example, how authentic is your social media?  Are you letting the consumers do the talking in their very real voices or are you heavily editing comments?  Have you ever bought followers or likes to make your content appear popular rather than allowing your content to draw consumers to your brand?

Consumers are sick of photoshopped images, “editorial” that’s nothing more than an ad, and “astroturfed” virality.  The age of making products less expensive to produce while making consumers less safe or healthy is gone.  Maybe we ought to factor in the customer’s long-term viability as we think about “cost effectiveness” since their lifetime values certainly will decline if we shorten their lifetimes.  Do you like that notion?

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