momorantings

And so we end the year as we started it, amazed that stuff like this gets made. Huge amounts of money spent on two of my pet hates - name changes and celebrity endorsement - tactics that pander to the egos of executives and agencies alike while doing little for genuine differentiation. Worse still, this is happening in insurance, that most commodified of industries that has focussed on price competition, that suffers from many complaints and that could still be something very different. It's a service that makes a huge impact at a time of high emotion and peril. What more could a business want in the way of attentive users and what better chance to make them passionate about you by acknowledging that insurance is, at heart, in the emergency service business? None of that will follow from unified group names or irrelevant celebrities and, as the You Tube comments show, people don't like the huge amount of money they're throwing at it in a time of economic downturn. It's

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people nostalgically bemoaned the passing of an institution and recalled making personally important purchases there decades ago (usually records or pick n mix). When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people realised that they hadn't been there for years and recalled that they didn't really know what they sold. When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, quite a lot of people who did shop there recalled how they sold the best value children's clothing on the high street. But who knew that? Could Woolworths' salvation have lain in becoming the best children's clothes store in town? We'll never know. Because Woolworths used to stand for something in people's minds, but increasingly tried to stand for everything by selling a wide variety of unremarkable products and, inevitably, customers drifted away. Ultimately, it didn't stand for anything and ultimately it no longer exists. Here endeth the lesson.

..one of the main reasons for this is that advertisers and publishers are not always using the right measures to analyze advertising effectiveness. With average click rates on display ads falling under 0.1%, the correct metric to use is clearly NOT the click. The click may well not be the correct metric to use. But the fact that click rates have fallen so low is not the justification for such a statement. The online advertising business really has to get its act together.

In 1817, David Ricardo wrote about comparative advantage and the mathematical proof that, regardless of your productive capacity, you could improve your community wealth by specialising and trading. In basic terms, it tells even the most advanced producer to focus on that which they are best at producing and to exchange any surplus production for whatever else they need. The corollary of this is that even the worst, most inept producers can exploit a comparative advantage by specialising in producing that which they are least bad at producing. They will improve their wealth (at least, marginally) by trading but, being inept, they are not going to get rich. It was therefore surprising last night to hear Lord Mandelson (Britain's Minister for Business) give a speech outlining his ideas for a new policy of industrial activism in which he constantly referred to the need to identify those areas in which this country has a comparative advantage. Not once did he refer to sustainable c

Last week I heard Lord Rogers exude cultural and moral leadership in discussing his philosophy of architecture and urban design. His description of cities as "frameworks for people" seemed to me to be a good way to think about any product or service.

for most arts organizations. More news from around the nation on the impact the economic crisis has had on arts organizations: Shakespeare Santa Cruz Has 1 Week To Save Its Own Life Ailing California Orchestra Cancels Season KC Symphony Hit By Economy And Competition More Trouble For Ballet BC As Bank Freezes Funds A First Glimpse Of Houston Ballet's New HQ (Or Not) NPR Cuts Two Programs And 7 Percent Of Staff Tough Times Get Tougher In Charleston Miami City Ballet Resorts To Taped Music Baltimore Opera Company Filing For Bankruptcy Protection Filling The House: Met To Offer Subsidized $25 Tickets Broadway Musicals Dropping Like Flies Las Vegas Philharmonic Musicians Lose Confidence In Management Art Basel Miami Slowdown A Formerly Secure Arts Venue Takes A Dive Las Vegas May Lose Children's Concerts Virginia Symphony Cuts Concerts, Salaries Las Vegas Art Museum Chief Steps Aside; Cuts Ahead There was one piece of good news: Minnesota Orchestra Defies Recession, Posts Surplus

When designing the Arena Stage "New Deal" One Day Only Sale, I knew that we were applying a temporary band-aid to a relatively large problem, and we would have to take a more systemic approach to dealing with the issues ahead of us. To keep the analogy going, I didn't expect the one day only sale to be the knock out punch in the first round, so here we are in round two (actually probably round 3). In our response to the economic crisis, we have done the following: Round 1: Arena Stage "New Deal" One Day Only Sale (November 14, 2008) Round 2: Adjusted income projections and decreased expense budgets. Senior staff and members of the board formed three committees--the earned revenue committee, contributed revenue committee and an expense reduction committee. Each committee met several times over the course of a month to develop a recommendation for action for the full board. Both the earned revenue and contributed revenue committees readjusted their projections f

The mantra says under-promise and over-deliver. But over-delivery lies in the eye of the customer and not in yours. For example, if you say your estimated delivery day is Thursday, delivering on Wednesday is not great service if your customer comes home to find a failed delivery note. You may well have gone the extra mile in respect of your normal performance. However, if it's not something that the customer appreciated then you weren't just wasting your time, you were potentially wasting theirs and that's unforgiveable.

It’s simple and yet seemingly oh so difficult. Give people something that makes their life richer, that does this simply and intuitively and, most importantly of all, does it in a way that doesn’t frustrate. Avoid feature creep, avoid taking up too much of their time (that scarcest of resources) and avoid causing irritation. Do that and you find that people are hard-wired to talk about this thing that gives them pleasure.

In a recent Seth Godin post , he draws the distinction between making and taking statements. The latter are approaches aimed at stealing market share, the former are designed to create new markets and as he rightly points out are distinguished by a company taking a stance and standing for something. I'd go further than that. I think it emphasises my often-stated belief of the synonymity of marketing and corporate strategy. You can't stand for something if you only consider it at the promotional stage - that way lies greenwash etc. By any proper definition, marketing includes product development. But ideally that follows from strategy. Marketing is not a department. A true marketing perspective has to permeate every element of the boardroom. It doesn't and that's where so many problems start.

I've never bothered to fill out a social networking profile beyond the bare minimum but if I had, then Warren Zevon, Carl Hiaasen and David Letterman would all have featured. So I knew already that the three were intertwined in real life - even though I came to each of them individually and by unconnected routes. But reading Zevon's biography, I was surprised to see how many other people I like were also part of his life at some time. In similar vein, I'm frequently discovering that people who've become friends turn out to have a read the same obscure business book as I did years before we met. I don't know what this means or how it happens, but it's not coincidence.

There are a lot of advertising-funded business models around. If we can just build a community, then advertisers will want to reach them. Will they? If we undercut more expensive advertising media, we'll have a competitive advantage. Will you? If we don't charge for this, our audience will accept that they have to watch some ads in lieu of payment. Even if they did, would an advertiser really be interested in reaching a bunch of freeloaders? It's amazing how many people who talk of disrupted markets, new paradigms and constant change are so wedded to old-world solutions. Change does not discriminate. If your marketplace has changed, then all bets are off. Not just the ones you don't have to make.

Customer loyalty is much prized and much misunderstood. The obsession with it is such that companies often confuse habit for loyalty. They see their healthy sales figures and believe they have loyal followers rather than habitual customers. They believe this right up until the point when a competitor disrupts their market and their "loyalists" suddenly jump ship. Last week, at an airline innovation forum, I also saw that this leads to customers misinterpreting loyalty. They were heavy users, they were anointed by loyalty schemes and they were not satisfied. They had a sense of entitlement derived from the belief that their perceived loyalty should be rewarded. But are they really loyal or are they merely conditioned by habit and the switching costs implicit in reward schemes? Haven't they essentially made their purchase decisions of their own volition? Haven't they decided that this was the best value available to them? Shouldn't that be enough? They've assign

I have always believed that marketing success starts with the product. If the quality of the artistic product isn't there, there is nothing a marketing director can do to put more butts in seats. Audiences will leave no matter how thought out or brilliant the marketing strategy. That being said, if the product is strong, a primary function of a marketing director is eliminating the barriers to purchasing. Several weeks ago, I began to feel that even with a strong product, in today's economy, we must give people a reason to buy. No longer would a strong artistic product marketed well be enough. I tested this hypothesis by developing the NEW DEAL program at Arena Stage, which resulted in sales significantly beyond our expectations. The reduction in ticket price, even if for a day, gave potential patrons the reason they needed to make the purchase, especially on something that was dependant upon very limited discretionary spending. So I wasn't surprised by an article in the Wa

I had the pleasure of hearing Karen Hopkins speak at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Houston. During her speech, she said several things that caught my attention. Because the conference centered around how marketing and development departments could work together to maximize revenue, she outlined the revenue breakdown between earned vs. contributed sources for the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Brooklyn Academy of Music Expenses $38 million Box office income: $11.9 million (31% of expenses) Other earned revenue: 4.6 million (12% of expenses) Contributed revenue: $22 million (private and public) (57% of expenses) Programs: · The Next Wave Festival · Spring season of theater, opera, dance · Education—serving 25,000 students at 219 schools I have always admired the artistic work of BAM , and some of the nation's most creative work from the past several decades have been created and/or featured at BAM , including Peter Brooks' epic Mahabharata and Philip Glass's

As the economy gets worse, the impact is starting to become apparent, even at some of the largest institutions in the nation: Tennessee Company Calls Off All Opera For Next Season Vancouver's Ballet BC Lays Off Everybody Fundraising For Orlando's New PAC Falls Short Detroit Symphony In The Red, And It Could Get Worse Public Postpones 2009 Production of Guare's Free Man of Color Young Frankenstein Folds, & Schadenfreude Strikes B'way As Baltimore Orgs Face Cuts, Opera Co. Is On The Brink Minn. Museum of American Art To Close, Reopen Eventually Canadian Arts Groups Hurting As Stock Investments Plummet Struggling Broadway Sees Two More Shows Close MOCA Considers Selling Itself To LACMA Madison PAC Cutting Staff

In a New York bar last month, a (non-media) university friend of his asked the rest of the table to explain what Faris actually did - apart from use very long words that she didn't understand? We laughed, he pled guilty and we continued drinking. This month, he's written an excellent post derived from his own thinking and his attendance of MIT's Future Of Entertainment conference. It gives us the simple language with which to clarify what viral marketing really is. What we mean when something goes 'viral' is that LOTS OF PEOPLE CHOOSE TO PROPAGATE IT. It requires people to do something. Voluntarily. For their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they pull In other words, it's not interruptive advertising. As Henry Jenkins said at the conference, it's much more about gifting and you don't put a catalog in a gift! That's gauche advertising. And viral advertising is b

Actually, no. A brand should exist solely to meet a customer need and, if it does, then its needs and those of the customer will be congruent. A construct doesn't have independent needs. On the other hand, a company does have independent needs and this suggestion is more a reflection of the interconnectedness of marketing and corporate strategy than anything else. Successful corporate strategy connects the needs of customers to the need of a company to achieve a return on investment. Not vice versa.

Rightly or wrongly, I stopped looking at my blog stats well over a year ago. That way neurosis lies. But, via my RSS reader, I am informed of how many of you kindly subscribe using that tool. Overnight, not having blogged in two days, I lost three subscribers and that got me thinking. Had I (or Loren Feldman) offended readers with my Motrin post, had I bored them into submission, had they just lost the blog-reading habit or had readers switched to another RSS system? I have no way of knowing. And it's important to know why people don't want what you're offering. Not because you should shape it to every person's whim, but because it's as informative to understand people's aversion to your product/service as it is to understand their loyalty. Motrin's biggest failing was not being ready to deal with that aversion and thus not engaging with it. Keeping your current customers happy is a crucial business skill, but your new customers (and thus growth) are people

That is the problem with all neuroscience. We don't really know what we are seeing when we watch the brain work. Is it the thing itself - the thought, the flash of insight - or just an aspect of it, the bark rather than the dog. Professor Lawrence Parsons - Sheffield University.

Round 1: Economy vs. Arena Stage Tactic: Arena Stage's New Deal--25,000 tickets at $25 each for 24 hours Good for the first week of any remaining production in 2008-09 Results: 6,661 tickets sold for almost $200,000 in revenue in a 24 hour period Notes: The previous highest grossing day at Arena Stage was $90,000 in 2002, which we more than doubled. We created 229 entirely new patron accounts. Several preview performances sold out, and the remaining shows have very healthy houses which should go a long way in boosting word of mouth early. We sold 1,400 tickets in two hours from 12am-2am on Friday morning. We had a line at the box office at 12am, including a woman in her sleeping bag. ROUND 1 GOES TO ARENA STAGE

The economic crisis is starting to trickle down to arts organizations all over the nation. Recent casualties of the crisis include Opera Pacific , Milwaukee Shakespeare Festival , and several Broadway shows . To adjust for the weakening economy, planned productions have been abandoned at Seattle Repertory Theatre , Washington National Opera , the New York City Opera and even at the seemingly untouchable Metropolitan Opera . Not to mention the St. Louis Museum of Art postponing its $125 million expansion or the Shakespeare Theatre missing its gala goal by $300,000 . The impact of the crisis will be felt in communities all around the country. Quite simply, the casualties listed above won’t be the last. Arts organizations will fail and close as contributed income dries up, and earned revenue weans. Although tragic for the artists connected to these organizations, the unpopular question that continues to emerge with my colleagues from around the nation is: are the closings of these organ

There has been a little kerfuffle in interweb land this past weekend. Most people won't have noticed it. But some people got quite excited because Motrin were very slow in reacting to the "noise" and didn't apologise and/or explain that they had been joking as quickly as they should. The whole sorry saga is detailed here and includes what I had intended to be my only comment on the furore. But I was forced to blog about it because of the intervention of the honeymooning Loren Feldman who gives an alternative perspective.

Tara pointed me to this story about a Dutch coffee-shop chain that By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree...is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn't That's smart as far as it goes. But it's indiscriminately interruptive of all wi-fi users and, more importantly, guilt is not the primary emotion you want to engender in your potential customers. Far better to focus on the wittier messages rather than the hard sell. Far better to seek to make the miscreants (not to mention all those freer-spending wi-fi users) feel part of the community and invested in the fate of the business. Far better in the long run and far more likely to cause them to return. Addendum: In line with this downtime interaction spotted by Iain , they could also use their in

So, I found myself in a crypt full of geeks. Theoretically, I was there to learn some more about cloud computing, but instead I got a lesson in bad marketing. If you're allocated five minutes to present your thinking and insights, you can do one of two things. You can try to cram your regular half hour into the reduced time which involves subjecting your audience to a blur of slides and/or an avalanche of speed-reading. Or you can acknowledge that five minutes is not thirty and tailor your presentation accordingly. Embrace the limitations that are set rather than see them as an inconvenience. You may not impart as much information, but at least it will be heard.

So, let me get this right. I could buy a coffee for £3, but rather than do that I should buy one of your £3 coach tickets and travel to an unspecified location where I can then spend some more money to buy a coffee I could have bought some hours ago? Isn't the point of travel to enable you to do something you couldn't do where you were? Isn't the point of this example that marketers should always ensure that they and their media contractors know what it is that they're selling?

Ed Keller, Word of Mouth Marketing Guru Unleashing the Power of Word of Mouth Plenary Speech Monday, November 10, 2008 Recent example of great WOM marketing: The Obama Campaign decided to announce his running mate via text messaging. That was the carrot to encourage people to sign up and provide their cell phone numbers to the campaign, which they used later to send out text messages to “get out an vote.” Those cell phone numbers were incredibly valuable to the campaign to set up their word of mouth campaigns. 3.5 billion brand impressions via word of mouth each day in the United States. Think about how expensive a brand impression is that you purchase via paid advertising. Word of Mouth is the most influential touchpoint (from research done by AdvertisingAge ). Word of mouth has more impact than any other touchpoint available. What is word of mouth? -people giving advice, insight and information to others in their own voice and in a natural, honest and genuine way. Word of mouth ma

Marketers are increasingly trying and failing to inject social interaction into their activities. The key is to realise that something which seems social may not be social at all. In this article about Sleeveface , one line stuck out. "We know this one woman who got into it, and she used to do flash-mobbing. But she says you'd just turn up, do something funny and leave, so she didn't get to meet anybody. Sleevefacing is more social" Too many markerters/advertisers think it's enough to turn up, do something funny and leave. It isn't.

Today was my first day at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Houston. I opted to come in a day early to participate in the pricing institute, and although they presented some interesting information, I feel like they condensed their overall presentation down so far to fit into one day that it lost some of its value. I did have one insight and a good reminder today. The insight: at the pricing institute, we discussed values based pricing. What value do you bring to your customer, and the importance of comprehending, creating and communicating your value. However, Tim Baker (one of the presenters) said something that really resonated with me about organizations that do a lot of new work. He said "if the customer doesn't know the play they are going to see, it is extremely difficult for them to evaluate value, so the value equation must rest on the reputation of the institution." I took that sentence to read that if you want to do a substantial amount of new w

I just touched down at George Bush International Airport in Houston, and I couldn't help but think that I am pretty sure the celebratory atmosphere that I left in DC following the election of Barack Obama probably wouldn't be the same here. I am in town for my fourth National Arts Marketing Project Conference , where I will be presenting two sessions, leading a round-table discussion and hosting a dine-around. A packed schedule, but I like it that way. I have met so many interesting people at this conference over the years. A highlight of this year's conference is a convening of marketing experts from major regional theaters that I have been invited to on Monday, November 10. Jim Royce, Director of Marketing, Communications and Sales at Center Theatre Group and Rodi Franco, Director of Communications at the Alley Theatre are hosting the dinner. The group includes Alan Brown ( WolfBrown ), Mary Trudel (Wallace Foundation), Tim Baker (Baker Richards Consulting), Bil Schroede

As the anemic economy lingers, I have gotten more and more questions, from press, board members and colleagues, about what I believe the impact will be of the worsening economic crisis. As I wrote in an earlier post, the honest answer is -- I don't know. Truth be told, the first several shows of Arena's season have performed on par with previous seasons, and Wishful Drinking was one of our best performing productions in the past decade. That being said, I am not so optimistic about the future. Money is getting tight, and some of the most talented forecasters in the retail industry are calling for an incredibly rough holiday season. As a preemptive strike, Arena Stage announced its New Deal program today. At its core is a huge one day only sale. For one day, Friday, November 14 from 12:00am until 11:59pm, Arena Stage will place 25,000 tickets on sale for $25 each, which represents 60% off regular ticket prices. I believe we owe it to our community to make ticket prices more re

At the heart of the VRM philosophy is the intention to impel businesses to move away from a customer-focused approach and towards a customer-driven outlook. Some recent developments at Tesco.com (the online service of the UK's largest supermarket chain) provide an opportunity to clarify the distinction. Customer-Focused Tesco were the first UK supermarket to launch an online shopping site, but its initial iteration seemed to have simply cut and pasted their warehouse stock-lists into a template. Whereas a supermarket shopper would select the shelf for the category, identify their favoured brand and then select the size of product they wanted, hereyou had categories listed by size of product. You found yourself looking at a list of the various 250 ml aerosol deodorants and then the various 100 ml deodorants. An experience at complete variance with what you understood shopping to be. I recall writing to the CEO and being told that things would get better and of course they did. But

to prepare your organization for the economic downturn? More from my experience and Arena Stage later this week, but check out the following headlines: St. Louis Arts Museum delays $125 million expansion: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/stories.nsf/entertainment/visualarts/story/4efc5e0a4a78af6a862574f90069fed1?OpenDocument Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs into Money Crunch: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081102/COLUMN0801/811020304/1083/COLUMN NY City Ballet Cuts Season: http://www.saratogian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20186738&BRD=1169&PAG=461&dept_id=602469&rfi=6 A Rough Road Ahead for Broadway: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/theater/05bway.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin Opera Pacific Closes Down: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/opera-company-jones-2217667-pacific-county Milwaukee Shakespeare Dies: http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/arts/33613864.html CTG announces Entertainment Stimulus Package: http://www.

While participating in a panel at Mondays's VRM conference , I made a comment about the need for all businesses to recognise that the iPod generation were accustomed to having an entirely personalised music experience and that this technologically-driven expectation would spread into every area of their life. I was bemused by some of the audience's accusations about my use of a generational generalisation and their insistence that they were more technologically-aware than their kids. No doubt they are. For me, it was not the make up of the generation, but the behaviour that was the issue. The reaction, however, was based on traditional segmentation thinking which defines all "generations" as age-ranges. The iPod generation is the first "generation/group" who've experienced iPods. They are purchase-defined, they are behaviourally-defined, but they are not age-defined. Indeed, I've always doubted that any segments really were. It may be correct to infe

Imagine how people will be feeling tomorrow if things don't go as they've been led to believe. Anger, disenchantment and distrust will prevail. When your marketing efforts overhype what you can deliver or you fail to fulfill your promises, the same feelings pervade your potential customers. It may not be as palpable, but the emotions will be there. Just as deep and just as damaging.

One of the many great things about this movie is the way the characters emerge over the course of the narrative. Unlike many movies, no-one is introduced, you're not told who they are nor what you should think about them. The mystery draws you in, the discovery hooks you and the reward is all the greater because of it. The marketing analogy is obvious.

"Murky is why being embraced by extreme athletes and clubgoers and gym rats and middle-class office workers and computer gamers and break-dance fans is just fine - at worst, each group simply thinks Red Bull is something for them, partly because they have never been told otherwise." "Timberland discovered success in the diverse, even contradictory, ways that consumers found personal narrative relevance." Do you really think you can know your prospects so well that you can craft the singular message that a specific individual wants to receieve?

First off, an apology for not writing much lately. However, since I am a practitioner and not an academic, my days have been filled with trying to address the worsening economic reality, rather than writing about it. These are the days that make me wish sometimes I was in academia, because studying this phenomenon would be really interesting . If you are like me, and like many of my colleagues, you have been hearing one question a lot lately, probably from board members and executive staff: how is the economy going to affect our sales for the rest of the season, and how do we adjust to anticipate for the impact? I am proud of the Arena Stage board and senior staff for taking significant steps to prepare for the impact of the market crash, but if you are in a position where you are ultimately responsible for providing accurate sales projections and models like I am, it is one hell of a task. When asked earlier this week by several members of the executive committee of our board how bad

In what I think they said was Phil Spector's first television interview for forty years, the "genius that other geniuses come to" described The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations as an "edit song". Since he contrasted this with his own composition "Be My Baby" (which Brian Wilson calls the greatest song ever written), I took him to mean that an "edit song" was one that couldn't be faithfully reproduced live and was therefore inferior at some emotional and perhaps musical level. It's an interesting thought. Perhaps that is what the repulsion of the uncanny valley is about - if something is refined or edited too much, the authenticity is lost and we sense the manufacture involved. This doesn't mean we have to get it right first time, but I wonder if it means we have to know when to stop refining and move to a whole new model/service. Incremental improvements are fine, but eventually they get tiresome. It's easier to be remarkable

Tom Watson has written a really interesting book (albeit with an appalling publisher-imposed title) in which he expands on themes espoused by Clay Shirky with specific reference to social activism, charity and philanthropy. It is required reading. Not just because of the importance of the subject matter, not just because increasingly your business demonstrably has to stand for something, but also because it is filled with lessons in low cost marketing and you just know you're going to be expected to market smarter in the coming years.

When the going gets tough, businesses tend to play safe. When the going gets tough, it paradoxically becomes easier to stand out if you are brave enough to make yourself different. When the going gets tough and the competition is playing safe because of financial worries and reduced budgets, you can be frugal and still stand out. The photo above is taken from a pdf of all the interns who worked with Seth Godin this summer. He featured it on his blog and thereby gave them a great platform to sell themselves. The one page that stood out (and not just to me) was the one that didn't list their qualities and skills, but just took the opportunity to say thanks. Being different got her noticed. In similar vein, I know that Iain Tait is worth listening to, be it over a beer or at a conference or, ideally, both simultaneously . But so will anyone who reads this bio . I'm pretty sure it was written specifically for this conference, but it's so different from the other dreary ego-puf

I couldn't resist a lecture with that title, now could I? It wasn't even the hoax I half expected it to be, but rather a discourse by Cornell's Head of Psychology, Thomas Gilovich on the causes of questionable and erroneous beliefs. He focused on three. 1) People have great pattern recognition machinery in their mind. Unfortunately that means people often see patterns where there is, in fact, only randomness. A perfectly fair coin could land on heads ten times in succession and the odds of it happening an eleventh time would still be 50% but most people would think differently. 2) People test propositions by looking for evidence that supports them. Positive reinforcement is much easier to find when you're actively looking for it. To test a proposition correctly you have to find both positive proof and a lack of negative disproof. 3) People are literally always of two minds about things. We have a rational and an intuitive mind that battle against each other all the ti

Not really a marketing post, just a recommendation if you're in New York before the end of the month. Though it does serve to remind you that someone, somewhere will always point out your business malpractices and that today that word will spread like wildfire.

Thanks to Lauren's art direction, I recently found myself amazed by the scale of the gallery that is Dia Beacon and being able to have huge rooms all to myself. I didn't understand a lot of it, but the comment of one of the artists Michael Heizer seemed to apply to the whole experience and many forms of business communication and interaction as well. "It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe....if people feel commitment, they feel something has been transcended." Transcendence is a great marketing goal. Hard for your competition to achieve and utterly memorable.

Much as I love New York, it seems to me that the signage has deteriorated greatly - nowhere more so than on the subway. The most prominent part of this poster delivers a message that is incorrect for the majority of the day on which it appeared. It would have been much clearer to announce that there were "No late-night Brooklyn bound trains" at this station, but that didn't happen because someone has decided that the conformity of communications format is sacrosanct. Consequently, timings appear in a small, unobtrusive header because the internal communication rules dictate that, even if doing so renders the message opaque. Something to think about when you next hear the argument that you can't do that because "it's not on brand".

If your company believes in something, then don't just co-opt the sentiment as a tagline. Walking the walk is what counts, both in real life and in terms of customer approval.

Just saw this tweet from my CTO friend Matthias. "I hate when Dell asks "what segment are you? small business? large business? home?" without explanation. Just show me computers, ok?" He's right. Yet businesses still insist on trying to categorise customers by their criteria rather than ours. Why should they presume to know us better than we know ourselves? Make it easy for customers to tell you, if it's really necessary, and then just focus on giving them what they want.

Last night, I had the privilege of being one of a group of people invited to watch and comment upon a run-through of Seth Godin's newest talk. In it he adds some of the ideas from his latest book Tribes to the mix while synthesising a lot of thinking that is bubbling around social media and marketing. It was terrific. Coincidentally, one of the points he made was what I had intended to blog about today. That point is that among all this talk of social objects , friending on Facebook or herd behaviour, the underlying test is what would happen if you were suddenly not one of the group. Would you be missed? If your product/service is not so remarkable, so well able to meet your users' need and (in some more ephemeral sense) adds to their lives by virtue of standing for something, then they will not miss it if they don't buy it. You want your product/service to be one of those that people pine for when they're travelling overseas or suddenly discover they've used up.

If you're not excited about your product, why should a customer be?

The previously featured Ferrari emporium in Regent Street is seeking staff. But the marketing department - who previously used it to announce the arrival of the emotion of Ferrari - seems to have fogotten that its temporary storefront is still the billboard for their brand. By allowing such a badly written piece of copy (for that's ultimately what it is), they've the location all the aura and emotion of the corner-shop window replete with DIY ads for gardeners and second-hand prams.