In a factory-based organization, little ideas are the key to success. Small improvements in efficiency or design can improve productivity and make a product just a bit more appealing. New Marketing, which exists in the noisy marketplace, demands something bigger. It demands ideas that force people to sit up and take notice.
At the same time that we see how game-changing ideas (like the iPhone) can trump little improvements, we’re also noting the end of the “big idea” in advertising.
There’s a difference between a big idea that comes from a product or service and a big idea that comes from the world of advertising.
The secret of big-time advertising during the 1960s and ’70s was the “big idea.” In A Big Life in Advertising, ad legend Mary Wells Lawrence writes, “… our goal was to have big, breakthrough ideas, not just to do good advertising. I wanted to create miracles.” A big idea could build a brand, a career, or an entire agency.
Charlie the Tuna was a big idea. So was “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”
Big ideas in advertising worked great when advertising was in charge. With a limited amount of spectrum and a lot of hungry consumers, the stage was set to put on a show. And the better the show, the bigger the punchline, the more profit could be made.
Today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is pushed deeper into the organization. Let the brilliant ad guys hang out with your R&D team and watch what happens.
Yes, there are big ideas. They’re just not advertising-based.
The whole series is here.
December 3, 2007
Most customer service organizations are architected around a simple idea: interacting with customers is expensive, driving costs down is a good thing, thus getting people to go away is beneficial.
Think about it: most inbound customer service people are rewarded for on-phone efficiency. Calls per hour. Lack of escalations. Limited complaints. What’s the best way to do that? Get people to go away.
If you’re on this system and a long-time customer calls in with a complicated problem, one that’s going to require supervisor intervention and follow up, what’s your best plan? Is it to spend an hour with this person over three days, or is the system designed to have you politely get them to just give up?
I’d focus on building a system that measures [sales rate before call] vs. [sales rate after call]. If the sales rate goes up, give the call center person a raise. It’s that simple.
Paypal seized the money in my account on Friday. After seven years as a user, they decided my new DVD project was suspiciously successful and it triggered all sorts of alarms. The first step was a call from them… a cheerful person asked me a few questions and all seemed fine. Then, with no warning, they escalated the process. The system they put me in treated me like a criminal and at every step they made it difficult for me to keep going. Phone calls were made, and I spoke with two incredibly friendly people who were clearly unable to do anything other than be friendly. Both people were happy to talk to me for as long as I wanted, but neither person was able to do anything at all. The system is clearly designed this way… to insulate the people who make decisions from the actual customers. The desired outcome (I go away) doesn’t seem like it’s aligned with the corporate goals (I stick around).
The question I’d be asking is, "Do people who go through process and manage to prove that they are not criminals end up doing more business with us as a result of the way we treated them?" If the answer is no, you’re probably doing it wrong.
The last straw was this: After I put together all the documents they wanted (including a copy of my passport) and created a PDF, I tried to upload it. They don’t take PDFs, the alert box said, just JPGs. So I sent the images and get this notice:
I followed up with the email address on the screen and got an email back, informing me that the email I had mailed to at PayPal wasn’t monitored.
Sigh.
[PS in the ninety minutes after I posted this, I heard from a slew of people. Guess what? Every single one had a Paypal horror story to share. Once you teach an entire organization to mistreat customers, it’s hard to fix.]
[PPS the problem is fixed now. Thanks for your concern…]
Lawrence sent me a note asking about subscribing to this blog. It’s free, and you can get it by email or in an RSS reader.
Here’s the link.
If you’re not currently reading your blogs through a reader, I highly recommend it. It’s possible to go through a hundred blog posts in four or five minutes once you get good at it. When you click on the Subscribe link (in the left column on this blog) you will see a list of available readers. Google Reader and Bloglines are quite popular. I use the Newsfire reader on my Mac, though it’s not exactly clear why.
December 1, 2007
Ben has a post about a beer made by an order of monks in Belgium. These monks, who have taken vows of silence, only sell the beer by appointment, don’t label the bottles, and severely limit the supply they create. As you can imagine for a beer that some call the best in the world, it has quite a cult following.
There are two ingredients to this remarkability. The first, as Ben points out, is the idea of ritual. By changing the way the product is created and distributed, they add a religious and spiritual element to the process (even if they weren’t monks). Second, they’re not trying to sell the most. That’s critical.
When you try to maximize anything, you work to be efficient, to fit in, to appeal to the average person, since that’s where the numbers are. Every time Budweiser makes a decision, it seems to make sense, since they’re trying to sell the most beer. Most embraces systems and policies that make sense. But most rarely succeeds.
November 30, 2007
So, as a percentage of the time you spend at work, what percent would you say qualifies as "marketing"? I’m going to count educating yourself, networking, creating products, creating media, spending money, building networks of sneezers, inventing great stuff, executing great stuff, motivating front-line people and telling stories.
The other two choices are:
selling your ideas internally/waiting for approval
and
dealing with the chaff of responding to inbound junk and wasted time in meetings…
I know some well-paid people who used to be world-class marketers who are now down in the single digits (less than 10%).
Ouch.
November 29, 2007
I walked past a private dinner being given at a restaurant in New York last night. Perhaps forty people, listening to an after-dinner speaker.
The room was dead. People were sprawled over the chairs. One guy had his head down. Others were facing away from the speaker or checking their iPhones.
They didn’t think of themselves as marketers in that moment, but of course, they were. They were marketing themselves to the speaker as uninterested, tired and hard to reach. They probably got very little back in the way of increased energy or enthusiasm from the person they ostensibly came to hear.
Every time you walk into a meeting, agree to sit in on a sales call, do a job interview or have a conversation with a consultant, you’re marketing. You’re either selling the story of your enthusiasm and attention, or you’re not. And more often than not, you get what you put in.
November 28, 2007
A few unrelated ideas:
Brett at Google dropped me a line to let me know that CyberMonday (the Black Monday of online selling) is actually NOT the biggest shopping day of the online year. That comes in 10 days or so. What fascinates me is that online-only retailers do better closer to Xmas, but the online outposts of brick and mortar stores (like JC Penney) do better earlier. Translation: the Penney’s and Target customers don’t ‘get’ the whole fast-shipping thing, because when they think of traditional stores, they think slow. The Amazon customer has been spoiled, and in addition to one-click, is now trained to wait until the last minute.
The funny thing is that this is precisely backward what it was just five or ten years ago. Mail order was slow, last minute was for local.
Chris has put together a page about gifts for marketers. He invites you to add your suggestions. And for those in a hurry, focused on stuff in a box and looking for something likely to delight, I put together this one-click quick list.
Even better:
Fred has become one of more than 7000 people that have taken the handmade pledge.
And you can buy a school. Room to Read works with local villages to change lives forever. Or you can build lives in the rainforest. Check out Dos Margaritas.
Cory has a post that points out research demonstrating that police have better luck finding suspects using caricatures than boring sketches.
A caricature falsely highlights various anomalies while diminishing the boring parts. So Jay Leno gets a ridiculous chin, or Jimmy Durante gets an even bigger nose (okay, he had a pretty big nose).
The same is true for your brand, but even more so. The best brands are caricatures of their true selves. Yes, they must have exceptional ‘features’ (a step that’s easy to skip, but without which leads to failure) but then, over time, those features become a caricature. During the formative days of Fedex, the caricature was that their drivers would even rent a helicopter to get just one package delivered on time. It’s easy to turn Starbucks’ variety and focus on your needs into a caricature as well, "half-caf, extra hot, short macchiato, extra foam, with soy, in a ceramic mug…."
As Nixon discovered, when the caricature becomes negative, it’s almost impossible to escape (glad I’m not Bob Nardelli or a shareholder at Topps hamburgers). Worse than avoiding the negative, though, is the tendency for most organizations to resist creating a brand that can be caricatured. It doesn’t feel safe or responsible or prudent. Coloring inside the lines and pleasing most of your customers most of the time almost guarantees you’ll be bland.
It’s a lot cheaper and faster and more effective to have a big nose.
November 27, 2007
Just finished buying some checks online. Got to the page with the ridiculous charges for shipping and handling. They were:
Slow…$14 (Expected delivery, December 15th)
Fast…$18 (Expected delivery, December 10th)
Expedited…$18 (Expected delivery, December 5th)
"Wow!" I said to myself, "I’ll show them… I’ll get the expedited shipping without paying a penny more than fast."
Perhaps I’m the only customer who had the insight, intelligence and flair to both realize it and take advantage of it. Perhaps some employee is quaking in his boots, fearful for his job because of the millions in losses his employers are going to take because he mispriced expedited shipping.
Or perhaps, perhaps, everybody chooses Expedited.
Nine times out of ten, especially online, people focus on comparisons, not absolutes.
Black Monday was ‘invented’ by my former colleague Jerry Shereshewsky in 1997. His idea was that since people did so much shopping at work, the real shopping day for Christmas was today.
The important takeaway for most marketers is this: an ever-increasing share of consumer spending is being done during the day, at work. In a place and at a time where you don’t have a lot of reach or impact.
Bosses are already rabid about how much web-wasting goes on at work. Loud pop-ups and display ads aren’t particularly efficient or effective as a strategy. On the other hand, promotions like this one at Amazon seem custom made for Black Monday.
PS not to disappoint, here’s an interview about Meatball Sundae.
November 26, 2007
