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...