by mark March 18th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Yesterday I posited that extraordinary advertising might serve as a telling sign of extraordinary management (or the lack thereof). Three days ago, I was up the nose of Lexus for some “panic button” advertisng that I felt fell way short of the mark. So today when I read in The Wall Street Journal that Lexus is going through some rough times, I couldn’t help but think, “Am I actually on to something?”
As the saying goes: “Even a broken clock is right two times a day.” But this struck me as amazingly coincidental. Lexus used to do a lot of extraordinary, albeit derivative of BMW, advertising. Lexus becomes the #1 selling, imported luxury car. Lexus starts doing less of same…
Continue reading ‘Amazing Carma’
by mark March 17th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Nothing fascinates me more than trying to quantify the financial return of extraordinary advertising. Not just in how it can influence sales and margins because that is, at best, an imperfect equation. So many variables can influence revenue and profit growth it’s almost impossible to ever fully credit or blame the advertising. But I believe there are other areas where the contribution extraordinary advertising makes can be easily measured and are of no small consequence.
For example, in the book I make the claim–and I stand by it–that there might not be a company called Apple still in existence were it not for that brand’s uninterrupted record of extraordinary communications. Sure, its innovative products have played an enormous role. But you have to remember, the intervals between those innovations have sometimes stretched to years and what has kept Apple going is the incredible, steadfast loyalty of its user base. A loyalty founded on the deep and personal relationship Apple has managed to forge through its communications with its customers. Seriously, how many companies out there have a share as small as Apple’s in its primary line of business, yet trade at the multiple Apple does?
But there’s another company I talk a lot about in the book that has also been the beneficiary of extraordinary advertising and today was truly an extraordinary one for this firm.
Continue reading ‘Extraordinary Investment’
by mark March 16th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
A while back I got myself all worked up about some Vonage ads that employed the old “anyone who isn’t using our product is stupid” strategy. As I said then, I find it hard to believe people find this approach appealing, even if it’s completely true.
So now I see there’s a three-page extravaganza out there in which Microsoft takes this “our customers are dopes” market segmentation scheme to a new low.
On the first page, there’s a bunch of general purpose business blather about “evolution and change”, “teams out of sync”, “the new realities of work” and so forth–stuff any editor at The Harvard Business Review would have quickly run a pencil through. But it’s only when you turn the page that this effort really goes off the rails.
Continue reading ‘Fred And Wilma’
by mark March 15th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Remember when Lexus first burst on the automotive scene about 15 years ago? They had some fairly extraordinary advertising. Granted, they didn’t just borrow a page from the BMW book, they basically took the entire volume. And that “relentless pursuit of perfection” bit was a little over the top. But still, the ads had interesting headlines, enough body copy to tell you something and the brand took off quite nicely.
Alas, an ad I just saw doesn’t presage more of the same. Not with devices like the dusty, old button trick art directors often resort to when all the writers appear to have decamped for the race track.
Continue reading ‘Panic Button’
by mark March 14th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Leave it to Amazon to come up with this one. First, they scan the entire contents of many of the books they sell in order to offer their ever-so-helpful “Search Inside” function. Now those characters have unleashed a bunch of bots on this scanned material in search of SIPs, which I just learned is Amazon-ese for “phrases that occur a large number of times relative to all Search Inside books.”
So what do you suppose the leading SIP in my book is? According to them, it’s “extraordinary advertising.” Which is really scary if you ask me. Because that means that out of all the books they’ve scanned–and believe me, if they’ve scanned mine, they’ve scanned millions–the term “extraordinary advertising” appears quite infrequently. In the hundreds of books on advertising that are out there, the thousands on marketing, the tens of thousands on business in general, the bots found very few mentions of “extraordinary” advertising.
Now one possibility is that instead of extraordinary advertising, they found “great” advertising, “terrific” advertising or “outstanding” advertising. But the other possibility is they didn’t, just as I didn’t this weekend.
Continue reading ‘“Statistically Improbable Phrases”’
by mark March 11th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Assuming you may have had enough of my “dating” analogy to hold you for a while, I thought I’d try a new one on you. It came to me while I was watching my son wrestle the other day, a sport he just took up a few months ago. What I noticed was that while he was strong enough to get both of his opponents down on the mat, he couldn’t pin either one of them to save his life. Why? Because he doesn’t have the “moves” yet. And it struck me that there’s an interesting parallel between my son’t quandary and the advertising business today. Bear with me and I think you’ll see what I mean.
For many, many years, advertisers had consumers more or less at their mercy. With so few choices of TV channels to watch, radio stations to listen to, magazines to read and pre-Lady Bird highways festooned with outdoor boards, consumers could hardly avoid the messages of any advertiser with enough clout. Of course, that’s all changed now.
Continue reading ‘How To Pin The Consumer’
by mark March 10th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
It takes years to build a truly powerful brand. Years of consistently delivering a uniquely different product or service experience. Years of harnessing all the communications elements available to make this experience well known. And probably hardest of all, years of patiently fending off all the attempts by others to tweak the brand, goose it, massage it or otherwise get their dirty fingerprints all over it.
But even after all those years, you’re still not out of the woods. Inevitably, someone is going to suggest you expand the brand, which may or may not be a good idea. And surely, if you have a powerful brand, sooner or later someone is going to ask to license it. And boy, do you have to be careful with that.
I just saw an utterly ordinary ad for a type of liquor in a copy of Real Simple I was flipping through. Not too surprising since the vast majority of liquor advertising is pretty darn ordinary. But the name slapped on this one certainly isn’t.
Continue reading ‘License To Kill’
by mark March 9th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
A friend of mine was telling me about this very difficult client she now works for and she said something that really struck me. What she said was: “They (this client’s marketing team) can’t do their own jobs, so they do ours instead.” Meaning they spend more time mucking around with the advertising than they do wrestling with genuine marketing issues.
Now this is hardly an uncommon lament. But what it got me to thinking is: Real marketing is heavy, intellectual lifting. Unless the product or service you’re blessed with is truly new and unique, there are many, many things to ponder. Audiences in need of segmenting, data just crying to be mined, regression analyses to pour over, competitive intelligence to review–and that’s just before this morning’s budget meeting–after which there are insights to glean (and as we all know, insight is hardly a skill that’s evenly distributed throughout the population).
Continue reading ‘Wallpaper’
by mark March 8th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
The path to brilliant business management and sensational marketing must at times look to executives the way Russia looked to Churchill when he described it as “…a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside and enigma…”
On the one hand, you have Seth Godin in his book “Purple Cow” exhorting businesses to be remarkable in everything they do. Great advice; but terribly difficult to implement. I mean if the cars Jaguar is pumping out of Coventry this year aren’t especially remarkable, it’s not like the U.S. marketing team can simply refuse to take delivery. They have to somehow figure out a way to flog the rascals.
And on the other hand, you have Ries, pere et fille, making a very different argument in their book “The End Of Advertising And The Rise Of PR.”
Continue reading ‘Practical Punditry’
by mark March 7th, 2005
in Daily Thoughts.
Driving my kids to all sorts of travel soccer and baseball games around the northwest suburbs of Chicago gives me many occasions to observe what’s left of the prairie. A landscape that I realize was at one time host to an enormous number of buffalo. And in one of the stranger segues I’ve yet to come up with, this reminds me of the The New York Times Sunday magazine I went through yesterday.
When I was first getting started in this business, I used to collect examples of extraordinary advertising and the Sunday magazine was a favorite hunting ground. First of all, it has that unusual, 9-1/2″ x 11-1/2″ format. Plus I could always count on finding several–at a minimum a BMW ad and a Chivas ad–but sadly, that’s no longer the case.
Continue reading ‘Where The Buffalo Roamed’
