Hope for the future of branding

Marketers have a lot to answer for. At least that is what the Skinny Professor told me the other night.  He’s right, at least about how marketing was executed  in the past.  Find ways to sell people more stuff that they didn’t need, that would need to be replaced because it was of low quality, to improve sales, market share and profit.

As a recovering marketer, I hate it that he’s right.  So earlier this week when a new acquaintance told me that he has mixed feelings about branding, because he wasn’t a materialistic person, I understood exactly what he was getting at. Historically marketing has appealed to our self-interest and self-aggrandisement.

This morning I read an article in Strategy+Business about “The Power of the Post-Recession Consumer” (Spring 2011, Issue 62).  The post-recession consumer is shifting from mindless consumption to mindful consumption.  Although I disagree with the idea that this shift is driven by sudden consumer absorption with ethics, I do believe that this shift is happening.

Consumer interest in brand attributes such as exclusivity, arrogance, sensuousness and daringness were all down, while interest in kindness, empathy, friendliness and quality were all up. Personal savings levels in the US are up, as is an interest in quality, quality of life and simplicity.  Thrift is the new byword.

So perhaps marketing could be practiced differently to support a different, anti-materialistic world. Marketing could lead the effort to develop products with longer lives, less obsolescence, better quality, durability.  Marketing could lead the effort to help consumers choose products that better fit their needs, which reduces the churn of dissatisfaction. A marketer’s objective might be to sell less to fewer people, but to sell right.  If a firm becomes positioned on quality and targets the right customer for its’ products, perhaps it can justify higher margins to offset lower quantity. Maybe we can help people see that they don’t need their stuff to express their creativity and individuality.  Perhaps good marketing is about the opposite of materialism?

Or, maybe I’m wrong, and the future of marketing is doomed to be morally and ethically bankrupt.

Innovation, Strategy and Organizational Structure

Last week I posted about the essential marketing skill sets that employers are looking for.  The second most important skill set was innovation.  Yet, the CMO survey also showed that marketing was responsible for new products in only 51% of participating firms, and for innovation in only a third of participating firms.

Finding creative ideas, that is, ideas which are both novel and useful, is a challenge at the best of times. Innovation, by its very nature, fails more than it succeeds.

Here’s what I do know about innovation. First, if the purpose of innovation is to commercialize some product or service, then some group of people must represent the needs of the consumer or customer. The marketing function is most suited to this purpose, as they are closest to the customer. This is not to say that other functions shouldn’t be engaged in the process, but merely to say that understanding what is important to the consumer is a critical piece of knowledge in the innovation process. Many a firm has left innovation and new product development to the engineers. Often the result is a spectacular product in which consumers are completely disinterested.

Effective innovation strategies rely on structures that allow an organization to effectively exploit an idea.  Many organizations see marketing as purely a tactical function which provides all the advertising and PR, rather than a function that drives product strategy. 

To quote Regis McKenna, “marketing is everything”.  Whether or not the marketing department is driving innovation isn’t really important.  What is important is that the department responsible for innovation and new products has a marketing mind-set.  That is, they understand the consumer or customer deeply.  Most often, that consumer understanding resides in the marketing department.

How well do you understand your customer? Their decision-making process? What they care about? How they do things? If you don’t know the answer to this, you probably need someonelse leading your product development initiatives.

Relevance: A new marketing paradigm

When I was learning how to be a good marketer a millenia ago, we never really talked about relevance, at least in terms of media placement.  Did we care about relevance?  Of course.  The problem was that we didn’t have the capability to place media so that it only reached audiences for which it was relevant. When you bought women age 18 – 34 that’s exactly what you got.  And consumers didn’t really expect to only see relevant advertising, because they knew that it wasn’t possible.

Of course, with the digital revolution, things have changed.  Or so I thought. Last week I was online on a Canadian website (you know, the ones with the .ca instead of the .com in the address).  This should be a strong indicator to advertisers that the audience for this website is Canadian.

Part of the price I pay for using a free website, is occasionally being exposed to advertising.  Usually I ignore it. But that particular day I saw an ad for Swiffer, brought to me by the kindly people of P&G. The ad offered some high value coupons, so I clicked on it.

After several clicks, I finally found the coupons in question.  Sure enough, the coupons were clearly labelled, valid only in the USA.

So now I’m annoyed.  I’ve been promised something, and I can’t get it. Because of the digital age, I now expect marketers to provide me with relevant advertising, because they can. And when they waste my time with irrelevant stuff…. well you see my point.

Today, we expect relevance.  We get bored when we believe something isn’t relevant.  (Believe me, I see it in my classroom everyday).  Being able to deliver the right message, to the right audience in the right way always was a marketing core competency.  And technology has just upped the ante.

What have you done recently to improve your marketing core competencies?

Social Media: How do we unlearn our marketing norms

Social media is not about campaigns, it is about relationships.  I just read a great post about PR, Influence and social media by Jeremy Pepper.  In it, he talks about the value of Klout, the online tool that shows an individuals “social media influence”.  (Full disclosure: my Klout score hovers around 50 ish, which according to Pepper is close to a “celebrity”, although I’m profoundly sceptical about that). 

Pepper describes a number of recent campaigns that used Klout to ensure that people became aware of a new product offering or service, and how after the campaign (whether for a new TV show, or a new airline route), the activity and communication from the brand all but ceased.

So why do marketers do this?  Spend all that money on a Klout campaign and then stop communicating?  My guess is that traditional marketers have been trained to think of communication as a series of unidirectional campaigns that have a specific start and finish, unlike a relationship which needs to be constantly tended, or it dies.  Studies suggest that anywhere between 40% and 60% of complaints about a brand, lodged on social media (for example, a Facebook Fan page) do not receive any response from the company that owns the brand.   Traditional marketers do not have the resources or skills to manage and maintain that many relationships online, so they turn tools like Twitter into another form of broadcast media.

If we are to embrace the true potential of social media, marketers are going to have to drop some of their old assumptions.  Forget about “campaigns”, start to engage with customers in a meaningful way, develop relationships instead of selling, forget the idea that the company controls the brand message. These are going to be painful and costly lessons that will need to be learned on the road to becoming effective social marketers.