momorantings

In the past year, I've not posted that often. My reasoning was that after four years of blogging, I didn't think I had that much new to write. Marketing isn't rocket-science and genuinely new things don't come along all that often, so I was convinced that everybody must have heard it all before. Of course, if that were true, the conference business would be in a parlous state indeed but the real point is that too many marketers are seduced by the new rather than the useful. I'm not saying ignore the new. Far from it. It's your obligation to be aware of it, to understand it and to evaluate it. But, don't obsess about it to the expense of taking your eye of the ball. Some few elements of the new may have a medium to long term impact on your business, but they will do so in the medium to long term and that's not this year. So, in 2011, dont think about new, think about better. Better may perhaps be something new, but it's more likely to be doing the old

"Paint what you see, not what you know."

I have been a lifelong customer of American Airlines . A frequent flyer, credit card holder, miles gifter--you name it. I started flying AA because they had direct flights into St. Louis, where most of my family lives. From there, I started to accrue miles, and soon enough, I booked all of my travel on AA. It became a habit. I knew their routes, the layout of their planes, and how to navigate Dallas Forth Worth airport like a local. In performing arts terms, I was a long time subscriber. That is until now. My flight from St. Louis to Washington, DC was canceled the day after Christmas due to weather (even though DC didn't receive any snow, and my plane was at the airport ready to take off). I was informed by a robo call, which also told me that I was rebooked for a flight 26 hours later. The message ended by instructing me to call AA reservations if I had any questions or concerns. Knowing that I had to be at work the next day for two interviews with major media outlets, I tried ca

Yahoo are pilloried for closing down a number of their acquisitions after failing to develop them. Nokia have been called the place where great ideas go to die for similar reason and Google, News International and many others have received similar appraisals. Outside the digital world, we know that the vast majority of product launches fail and I've often repeated the dirty secret of investment banking that most mergers denude shareholder value. It's all symptomatic of a failure to understand markets; the consequent pursuit of quantity of customers over quality of customers; and the failure to recall that realisation that having high quality (i.e. long-term) customers is dependent on exhibiting requires high quality customer-centric behaviour at all times.

BMW's cinema ad above is getting a lot of online attention, but to me it's all flash and no substance. The portentous nonsense at the start of the clip is the worst type of quasi justification that says everything about creative cleverness and nothing about creative relevance. It's an attention-grabbing gimmick that draws attention to the gimmick. Until you can link the clever idea to a genuine marketing goal, the clever idea should stay in the drawer.

A new documentary focuses on Bruce Springsteen's recording of Darkness on The Edge of town back in 1977. In an aside he recalled his musical ambitions back then. I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous. I just wanted to be great. Not a bad marketing philosophy when you think about it.

A woman and a friend sit in a coffee shop at a railway station. They're engrossed in their iPhones and serving staff later report that they also kept a close eye on their computers. So much so that they didn't notice that the other package beneath their table had gone missing. All very 21st century. A busy environment, attention in one tech-related direction, thieves in the other. Nothing to write home about, except that the package contained a bow worth £62,000. What does that tell us about our concept of value today? The social value of the phone connection and the related value of the computer seem to take precedence over the greater financial value of the package. The social tools were more important than the tools of her trade - for yes she was a violinist. I don't know if that's a new phenomenon, but it's a timely reminder that value is constantly shifting depending on context and mood. And yes the violin went missing too. It's apparently worth £1.2 mill

If there is one thing that can kill your earned revenue quicker than anything else, it is a misguided complimentary ticket policy. Someone asked me the other day why I hate comp tickets so much, so I decided to list my top reasons: 1. Comp tickets devalue what it is we do. For my entire career, I have watched artists struggle to make the argument that the arts mean business, and that an artistic career is just as viable an option as any other. However, these same artists then give away the fruits of their labor to anyone with the most feeble of reasons. In the past few days, a viral video entitled " Explaining the Arts Non-Profit ," has been passed among my colleagues illustrating this point. It starts out with one bear saying how much he enjoys a choral group, and then asking for a comp ticket. The other bear responds by saying that putting on a concert is expensive, and would prefer it if the first bear would purchase a ticket. The first bear is befuddled by the response be

Everyone’s writing self-serving pieces about the future of advertising, yet few of them seem to realise that the true subject is the future of marketing. Central to that is the future of the marketing director, an important role that has, all too often, relegated itself to some kind of administrator of outsourcing. The reversal of that trend starts with knowing what marketing really is: acknowledging that it’s not just promotion, that it involves every touch-point with customers (how ever tangential) and knowing therefore that it includes the work of a lot of departments outside one’s own. This means that the classic role of evangelist must be for much more than simply the product/service, it must also evangelise on behalf of marketing itself as well as its specific aims within the company. The future of the marketing director will therefore involve: The marketing of marketing. Firstly, the Board and senior management have to be convinced of the value of marketing as an integral part o

When it comes to customer satisfaction evaluation, I've written often of my distrust of prompted recall and my preference for the net promoter score . But I'd never expected to encounter them simultaneously. Earlier this week I had a ten minute conversation with John Maeda as Part of his Fortune Cookie performance. Before I left the gallery, I was asked if I had heard of the net promoter score and, when I answered yes, was asked to rate my experience You'll be surprised to read that I tend to grade low, so while I had thoroughly enjoyed the conversation I was going to rate it as an 8. But,under net promoter rules, I know that rating would be discarded as middling and so I found myself rating it a 9. In other words, the prompt had changed my behaviour and my perceived appraisal. Now this was an art event and the prompt may well have been an innocent conversation-starter or, indeed, part of the event but the bottom line is, if you want a true reflection of your customers'

One of the great false assumptions that marketers make is that once you have someone's attention, then you've got them for good. Well I hope most marketers don't think that way, but I can't think of another explanation for this billboard ad I saw at a station today. Just look at all those words. It starts with a few superfluous humanising sentences about how they used to be bad at explaining things but they're trying much harder now and then goes on to explain how. Thereafter they probably telling me some more of their greatness, but even I (with a blogpost in mind) couldn't be bothered to read further. In fact, I was bored after the first sentence - it was all about them and nothing about what they could do for me. It's the sort of worthiness that would be ignored in a magazine or newspaper where the next page is crying out for your attention; around a billboard the number of distractions are even greater and yet they want to preach to me - if not in tone,

I was joking with my Managing Director a couple of days ago that managing success is just as time consuming as managing a flop. On the other end of a conference call, Adrian Bryan-Brown, whose press firm Boneau/Bryan-Brown represents Arena Stage, replied “yeah, but it’s a lot more fun.” Truer words have never been spoken. At Arena Stage, we are fortunate enough to be in a situation where we have two record-breaking productions playing concurrently: Molly Smith’s production of Oklahoma! and Marcus Gardley’s world premiere of every tongue confess directed by Kenny Leon starring Phylicia Rashad. In the past two months, I have learned a lot about what it means to manage success. Below are a couple of things to keep in mind when a mega hit hits: 1. To ensure success in the future, you need to think about retention today. Having a smash hit is exciting—orders are flooding your box office, reviews are kind and generous, and you don’t have to stress about making your sales goals. But there

Tonight, amongst other nonsense, I heard a creative director declare that twitter could be a great customer service tool. No it can't. It can be a great customer mood monitor, it can be a great way to field customer complaints, but that's not what we should understand as customer service. Customer service is what happens throughout your contact with the customer. If you do it right, you shouldn't need to have a Twitter presence because your customers will be happy.

In a presentation today, Microsoft's president of online search Dr Qi Lu emphasised the need for their focus to be on user experience rather than driven by data. But what troubled me was that he kept using the dreaded words consumer and targetting and implied that effective targetting of consumers was the marketer's holy grail. Indeed, he spoke ominously of the creation of "computational behavioural models to predict human intent". Targetting just oozes all the wrong connotations: the passive customer, the picking off of individuals as they stray into your corporate cross-hairs, not to mention the assumption that you know how all customers behave. It's too confrontational, too aggressive and too interruptive - even if I search for your product online, it doesn't mean I want you to market to me right now. You don't and cannot know my motivation. Far better then to use all these technological capabilities of which Dr Lu spoke to be constantly available/acces

My friend who carried this bag had no idea what it meant - she just liked the bag. To me it was simply a further outbreak of the 360 plague that infects our world to very little marketing effect. Whenever I see it, I am struck that while I know it's meant to indicate something like constant interaction, it primarily reminds me that 365 is a much better known number - and thus 360 seems like taking 5 or 6 days off. It seems to be a diminished claim. It's all very well for marketers to think they understand what 360 means in their world, but that's not enough to justify pasting it everywhere regardless of the sub-context, under the assumption that your customers understand it and in the misguided belief that it will aid differentiation. That way leads to things like Vodafone360 People. Vodafone 360 People "brings all your friends together backed up in one place" which I'm not sure has much at all to do with the generally agreed 360 ideal. It strikes me that it&#

My mobile phone provider frequently fills my time with irrelevant offers designed to bring them more revenue. My mobile phone provider also knows I make a lot of international calls. But when they implemented a new international call plan six months ago, they failed to tell me about it. As someone admitted, "they don't shout about it". Presumably, they don't expect their customers to shout about it, but I did. Firstly on the phone where I had to endure a whole bunch of security questions despite making it clear at the outset that I was just seeking to clarify when the plan was implemented. That just served to remind me of the insurance company with which I once worked. They discovered that they asked a woman more than twenty scripted questions when she rang their emergency claim line before they got to the important question are you ok? At the time she was less than ok - her house was burning down in front of her along with the policy details they were demanding. The

Marketers have realised that women are the key purchase decision-makers. Marketers have belatedly begun to realise that demography is skewed to the elderly (even though economics classes were pointing that out twenty years ago. Marketers will eventually have to acknowledge that technology is a tool and not the the reason for the behaviour. But in the interim, we'll have to endure a lot of nonsense like digital paper. How ever fine or specially treated it may be; what ever digital machine you might insert it in; regular paper is and always will be analogue not digital. To suggest otherwise is just another example of marketing's obsession with newness. An obsession that's arguably even worse than its fixations on youth and authenticity. A product-focussed logic not a customer-centred one. People don't necessarily want new. They want better. If your new is better then that's great, but make sure it is. All too often, new is complicated, functionally-bloated and impen

Over the span of the last several months, there have been numerous emotional debates over pricing in the blogosphere, particularly among a small handful of very respected colleagues in the theater industry. I have remained, for the most part, on the sidelines as much as possible, because parts of the debate centered around practices that I have publicly endorsed at major conferences. As such, I didn't want to interfere in what was an open and honest dialog. However at this point, I feel the need to address some of the misinformation that has been posted on a few reputable blogs , and shed some light on what to me seems to be a misunderstanding of dynamic pricing by Isaac Butler (founder of Parabasis ) and Adam Thurman (author of Mission Paradox ). Some things to think about: 1. Dynamic pricing in itself doesn't determine accessibility. Dynamic pricing is simply a tool, or maybe it is better described as a philosophy. Like most things in life, the devil is in the details. How

It's a bank, not a roller-coaster and self-delusion like this is the marketer's worst enemy. Enthusiasm may seem great in meetings, but it's the customers who decide and it's obvious that excitement isn't at the top of their banking needs. Moreover, I guarantee your branch will not be exciting and if you over-promise, you're bound to under-deliver.

We live in a youth-obsessed but ageing world, a world where the elderly are often ignored. Well we do in the first world. Elsewhere, the vast majority of populations are heavily skewed to the under 30s, yet respect for elders is pronounced. Why that is and whether it will change seem to me to be important questions for marketers to ponder.

Spurred in part by an excellent article written by Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune , in the past month, there has been a lot of talk about cultural organizations using Groupon (an online, mass discount website). Just like any mass discounting method, using Groupon should be a well thought out strategy. Used correctly, and it can work very well. Used incorrectly, and it can be very costly. Things to remember about Groupon : It is out there for the world to see and it was designed to be used by social media, so that it is picked up and passed along at a very rapid pace. From some of my previous posts on this blog, you probably know that I am a fan of what I call "ninja discounting." Very rarely do I use mass communication to advertise and promote discounts, preferring instead to use one-to-one direct marketing techniques aimed at very strategic recipients. If I need to discount, then I want to make sure that I can control who gets the discount so that it flies under the

On an obscure train journey one afternoon this week, I sat near a microcosm of marketing myopia - three executives working in the promotion of horse racing in this country. In the space of ten minutes (and in their own words) they revealed a number of common marketing/business traits. 1) Assuming homogenous demand. One of the three was bewildered by the fact that while Chester racecourse had booming attendance in recent years this was not reflected in the static television viewing figures of their racing. The answer is that Chester, an idiosyncratic historic venue with a tight oval track, is a great place to visit. But, because of this, the racing is also idiosyncratic,harder to follow on screen and less appealing to those who bet. She was wrongly assuming that viewers wanted the same thing on their screen as they did when attending in person. When you put yourself in the customer's shoes, you have to remember they have different shoes for different occasions. 2) Diversifying the

Where I questioned Coke's lack of local distinction last time, today I'm bemused by what I perceive to be Old Spice's defensive localisation. The ad above is one of a series that has appeared recently. This one refers to jet fighters and punching as designators of the manliest man in town, another cites monster trucks and tool boxes. To me, the tone of voice is completely at odds with the intelligent wit of "the man your man could be" that is also airing here. It's much more aligned with the status quo of the marketplace and seems to be designed to appeal to (or more precisely not alienate) the traditional Lynx/Axe customer. But, unless you're the market leader, your marketing must surely be designed to change your world in some way. A status quo in which you're floundering is exactly what you're fleeing and any hint of trying to sell your product in the same way the competition does should be avoided.

You've probably seen the video above. It was posted in January and has over two million views on YouTube. A UK version was apparently launched today in the hope of repeating the viral trick (though it appears to have been online since early July and as of this morning had not managed that feat, having only been viewed 3,000 times). I don't get it. There are no media regions in the digital world and thus think global, act local must mean more than repeating the same stunt in different countries and posting it to the web. If it's interesting the first time, then it will have spread and "we" will all have seen and have no interest in seeing it again. Or am I missing something?

I think I have always been attracted to arts marketing because it allows me to use both creative as well as scientific talents. To this day, I might be the only person to graduate from Missouri State University with a major in speech and theatre education and a minor in mathematics. So it should come as no surprise that I take a very scientific approach to marketing. In every campaign I lead, I constantly manipulate variables and note outcomes in an attempt to continually improve upon previous results. The easiest variables that marketers turn to are design and pricing. How many times have you tested a carrier package? an offer? pricing strategy? Probably quite a few times. Now think about how many times you have tested different timing schemes for putting products on sale. This was the first year in my tenure at Arena Stage where we experimented with using timing as a variable. For almost as long as we have had mini-subscriptions, we have put them on sale at the exact same time as our

Overheard on a train: We'll give the marketing agency the message and image we want to convey and we'll just get them to make it look nice.

Many people think that the art of the headline is to attract attention. Well, the one above ticked that box for me but when I delved deeper, I discovered that the noise was emanating, irony of ironies, from a "marketing" company upstairs (read phone sales training company) and that the closure was voluntary, not enforced. The art of the headline is not just to attract attention. It must also impart information and lead to something that doesn't disappoint. Addendum: If you utilise multiple meanings in your heading, then you must deliver on all of them. This is advanced practice and should only be attempted by experts.

Before enjoying an epic of epic-ish epicness last night, I was assailed in my cinema seat by a horrible advertisement featuring inane vox-pop proclamations extolling the wonders of cinema. That's right, my enjoyment of the cinema experience was diminished by an advertisement preaching the joy of the cinema experience to people who were already sitting in a cinema! The screen real-estate was there, the audience was there and the had an ad, so the marketing geniuses decided to throw them all together. No doubt because there was no incremental financial cost and it would gain eyeball attention. It took me back to the bad old days when magazines would call up an old colleague to tell him that he'd paid for space in their next edition and what did he want them to run in it. His answer was usually the same tired old ad he'd run in the previous edition. Advertising opportunities may be abundant, but to undervalue them like this is to reveal a failure to comprehend that the scarce

Just when I'm sure I have nothing new to say, I see that other people are saying nothing new and getting talked about. The particular insight that caught my attention came from a Lufthansa social media executive who declared that businesses should "Make your product your ads and your customers your ad agency." Product has always been the first P of marketing and always will be and word of mouth is the best advertising money can't buy. But to talk about outsourcing your marketing is a dereliction of duty, even if you say it at a social media conference. Outsourcing marketing is what got us into a mess in the first place.

A local supermarket has a checkout aisle designated for customers who are using a basket rather than a trolley. It's a common feature designed to speed shoppers through rather than have them abandon their purchases when stuck behind a line of full trolleys in another aisle. The problem is that its speedy processing of customers means that its queue is often the shortest in the store. Cue the tired, distracted shopper with a full trolley who quite naturally joins the shortest line, usually unnoticed by the harassed till operator until they've unloaded their trolley. Cue the frustration of shoppers with baskets whose exit is now delayed. Why does this happen? It happens because the signage indicating the status of each aisle resides high above the shoppers' heads. It's visible from a distance but the designers, the user experience gurus and the store management (I've asked) have neglected to consider when their customers make their checkout choice. Occasionally a shop

Further evidence of marketing's identity crisis. Though the parallel with marking one's territory has some validity.

I think Umair means to highlight the importance of corporate purpose in the mind of the consumer though he tweets a little ambiguously. If that's a correct interpretation, then he's positing a prevalent thesis. One that's certainly useful to think about, albeit one that equally can lead us astray if we focus on purpose at the expense of the basics. Look around at what people do and look at your own behaviour. A "moral" element might be the deciding factor in a choice between equals. While I'd like it to be different, I'd currently contend that most of the people, most of the time don't care - for a variety of reasons that include but are not limited to personal finances, convenience and ignorance. That said, never, never forget that some of the people some of the time still constitutes a very big market.

A couple of months ago, a good dialogue about dynamic pricing began when Trisha Mead (PR and Publications Manager, Portland Center Stage) wrote a blog post on the benefits of dynamic pricing on the 2am theatre blog , and then Adam Thurman (Director of Marketing, Court Theatre) wrote a response entitled " the perils of dynamic pricing ." It reminded me how often marketers disagree with each other when it comes to so called best practices. If your organization is considering dynamic pricing, a couple of things to think about from someone who has some experience with it: 1. Tailor all marketing strategies to your organization. How can one pricing strategy be perfect for one organization, and completely wrong for another? The simple answer is every organization is unique, with a unique set of circumstances to consider. For example, if an organization's funding mix is 70% earned and 30% contributed, chances are, they might be much more likely to consider a dynamic pricing mo

Memory of the future is the provocative phrase that I came across recently that refers to the brain's ability to use memory to picture and plan future events. I term it provocative because of its combination of memory a word that evokes looking back and future that evokes looking forward. Being ignorant of its neuroscientific origin, I immediately conjured up the idea of memories of what we were told the future would bring - the ones that usually involved personalised-jetpacks and dehydrated food. Inevitably memories of the future are usually unfulfilled, but the whole concept is so redolent of ambition, aspiration and lost opportunities that it seems to me to be a rich seam for marketing to mine. While it's uniquely individual inasmuch as it combines memory of what we expected the future to look like and what we hoped our own personal futures would become, it taps in perfectly to the whole idea of consumption being about creating that future. I'm not sure yet where this le

The Jet Blue flight attendant who quit his job via the emergency shute and the fake Dryerase resignation video were the big things online yesterday. Both earned admiration from many quarters, but how many of you thought of the lesson for your business? What was being admired was people who had supposedly fired their customers. Steven Slater had had enough of rude customers while "Jenny" was sick of her customer i.e. her boss. If you choose someone to be your customer then they are nearly always right and your behaviour should reflect that, but you don't have to accept everybody who wants to be your customer. So, if you admired Steven Slater and/or Jenny then you should surely run your business the same way. You'd feel better about it and you'd have a better business because you'd care more.

AdWeek reports that, “According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent." If it's up 11% in 12 months, it could probably only be up 107% in a month if the sales had been negative in the interim so I think my original suspicions seem credible.

Briitsh Gas have an iPhone app. They told me so in a press ad. It will show how my consumption has changed year on year, quarter by quarter. That's interesting information, but I don't need an app for it. I can see it on my provider's bill already - at a time when I'm more likely to be thinking about the issue and where they already have my attention. Just because you can have an app, it doesn't mean you need one or that your customers' experience will be enhanced by having one.

Modern life is replete with customer satisfaction surveys impinging on seemingly every digital, telephonic or physical interaction and CEOs citing how x% of their customers were "either satisfied or very satisfied" with the service they received. It's also replete with dissatisfied customers. So before you undertake one of these exercises, perhaps you should ask what its purpose is. Are you seeking to elicit genuine information or are you box-ticking? Do you want to learn or to obfuscate? What does satisfaction actually mean? We all have different satisfaction spectra determined by our previous experience, so it's pretty meaningless to survey it. Even if we were consistent in our appraisal, there's the timing issue. Our satisfaction is dependent upon our happiness relative to when we're surveyed because memories fade. Crucially - the dissatisfied customer, the target you're really trying to find will either have forgotten it happened or more likely will no

Long ago, I read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People , a book that I think should be required reading for all managers and marketers. The one lesson from the book that remained with me for all of these years, was a reminder that although we like to think of ourselves as rational decision-makers, we are first and foremost emotional beings. In finishing my reading of Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide , which will be a new required book for my graduate students, I was reminded of a couple of important ways in which emotions override logic in decision-making: Loss Aversion. The fear of loss is more powerful than the appeal of a gain, so powerful that often times it makes us make irrational decisions. To prove this principle, Lehrer discusses several studies and experiments involving investments. It has been proven over the past seven decades that stocks outperform bonds almost 12 to 1, leading one to question why bonds are so popular. In the early 1950s, an econom

If, in the coming months, you see advertising campaigns featuring sleeping babies in various settings or pictures made out of food, you will know where they got their creative inspiration. From Mila's Daydreams above and Little Food Junction below. They'll be "cute" and "human" but they'll only work if they're also truthful. It's that final attribute that will make them as authentic as their inspiration.

This is not another post about The Old Spice campaign. But it is inspired by the seemingly ubiquitous innumeracy that has spun out of it. Specifically, there is a Nielsen figure being quoted that sales have risen by 107% in the last month. Think about that. Sales have doubled in a month. That would be extraordinary. If it were true. But while I haven't fully confirmed it, I don't think it is true. What is much more likely to be true is that sales for the past month are 107% higher than for the equivalent month last year. That's also impressive though maybe less so if, as I pointed out in my Cadbury post, it's an increase from a deflated level. Saliently, the fact is that nobody involved with the company or the campaign has even made that claim. They know that they're playing a long game. The blogosphere, however, is less restrained and the virality of online information means that the seemingly false interpretation has spread like wildfire. Regardless of the previou

When you took interruption marketing into the street? When you outsourced customer service to reduce costs? When you treated new customers better than loyal ones? When you tried to up-sell rather than attend to waiting customers? Were you thinking about improving the customer experience or were you thinking about improving your evaluation?