Back in 1992, our CEO wrote a letter to all Aquent employees outlining the four principles that guide us in the work we do. The first principle, and the one that has consistently spoken to me, is, "People make the difference."
OK. We're not the only company that espouses this value. In fact, we're not the only company for which it is true -- this slogan can be applied to many organizations, especially those which provide specialized services, such as doctors, lawyers, architects, tattoo artists, and so on.
But I'm on board with it as one of our guiding principles for several reasons. First of all, it's true in a literal way for us. We don't have a secret formula or patented product that makes us different or better. Aquent IS the people who work here and the people we represent.
Second of all, this is how our clients tend to see things. As I mentioned in my post on customer loyalty, the two things that matter most to clients of staffing companies, particularly niche-players like us, are (1) the people or talent represented by the firm, and (2) the relationship with that firm's representatives. (The latter also confirms the findings of Michael Lowenstein and others.) In other words, it's good to have a principle that actually reflects the interests of our clients.
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Ever since I spoke to Erik Hauser last year I've been looking for an opportunity to speak with him again. He's optimistic, he's infectiously enthusiastic, and he has a lot to say on a lot of different topics almost any hour of the day or night (as anyone who follows the Experiential Marketing Forum knows).
Long story short, I asked him if I could interview him for this here podcast, and he amicably agreed. Rather than asking him to define "experiential marketing" for the umpteenth time, I thought instead it would be more illuminating to talk about emotionally connecting with brands, using experiential marketing techniques when searching for a job, and, of course, Gene Simmons. So that's what we did.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. You can do so by clicking on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. Finally, this and other Talent Blog Podcasts are always available on iTunes. Heck, you can even subscribe to our podcast there!
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A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:59 - Gene Simmons: The Genius
05:19 - You need a 3rd Party to serve as "Keeper of the Brand"
10:04 - You want to raise demand? Decrease the supply! (From Hydrox to Polaroid)
12:01 - The "outside perspective"
14:45 - The EMF: How moderating discussions increases their value
16:08 - Keys to nurturing a vital online community
20:05 - "Experiential" is a methodology, not a tactic
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What Is a Website?
Mar 25, 2008 @ 10:03 AM · Matthew Grant
This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.
I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.
Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.
I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.
At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.
This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?
I know this much, the content doesn't!
In Part 1 of our podcast interview with James Intriligator, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wales in Bangor, we talked about branding, loyalty, and consumer psychology.
In Part 2, we discuss personae and customer motivation, different neuormarketing approaches, and how understanding the brain can help us make more effective commercials (among other things, of course).
Listen in on our conversation by clicking on the Flash device below. You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link. You can also check out this and other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes. Heck, you can even subscribe to our podcast there!
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A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
01:50 - How to Get the Most out of Focus Groups
03:52 - Aunt Sally and the Straw Man
05:03 - Customer Motivation: Dreams and Aspirations (not just Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts)
09:59 - Marketing and Branding from a Strategic, Artistic Perspective
11:55 - "There are a lot of good things you can do with marketing"
13:39 - Defining "Neuromarketing"
15:16 - Pros and Cons of Different Neuromarketing Approaches
17:15 - "If someone wants to pursue marketing from a neuromarketing perspective..."
20:44 - The Classic Mistake that Most Ads Make
21:58 - Another Classic Mistake
24:16 - Segment the Emotional and Attentional Aspects of Your Campaigns
Image Courtesy of Looking Glass.
The other day an SEM specialist told me, "Marketing is a hard science."
She said it, at least in part, ironically. "Marketing? A science? Come on! What's next? Fishing?"
Marketing may not yet be a hard, or even soft, science. Nevertheless, scientists are indeed taking a hard look at marketing and beginning to paint a very interesting picture of how and why marketing actually works IN THE BRAIN.
James Intriligator is one such scientist. Having received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard for work on "attention," James did a stint as a consultant to the automotive industry, among others, before assuming a post in the Center for Neuroscience and Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
I've known James for many years and decided to call him up when I wanted to get a handle this "neuromarketing" thing. He was kind enough to walk me through this emerging field as well as his own findings regarding brand loyalty (Hint: It kind of makes you act like a crazy person!), segmentation, and literally getting inside the customer's brain.
I invite you to listen in on our conversation. I think you'll find the discussion illuminating and, at times, even entertaining. (Where else will you hear people talk about "brand build-up," "brand flossing," and "brandectomies"?) I had a lot of questions for James and he had a lot of answers. For this reason, I've split the interview into two parts.
You can check out Part 1 right here by clicking on the Flash device below:
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You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
02:35 - How Brands Build Up in Brains
04:06 - Ways to Quantify Brand Loyalty
05:06 - Brand Loyalty, Brand Familiarity, and the Attentional Blink
06:45 - Dealing with Excess Brand Build-Up
08:13 - How to Forge a Robust Representation of the Brand (in the Brain)
10:27 - What Counts as an "Experience" in "Experiential Marketing"?
11:40 - Problems with Product Placement
13:23 - Brand Loyalty and Brain Damage
17:43 - A Brand Is the Net Sum of All Experiences You've Had with a Product/Company
19:22 - The Web as a Branding Medium
23:09 - Segmenting the Brand
26:09 - The One Rule that Fits All Branding and Marketing Activity
Image Courtesy of debaird.
Ron Leland of Real Life Brand Architecture is an architect by training, a surfer by vocation, and happens to be the president of the Orange County Chapter of the AIGA. He's an enthusiastic, reflective, and interesting guy who has worked with a broad range of clients including mutual fund companies, wineries, and jazz prodigies like Matt Savage.
I had the chance to record an interview with Ron towards the end of last year but fate conspired against my posting the interview until now. It was worth the wait. Please listen in on our conversation as Ron talks about the power of architectural metaphors when communicating with design clients, his sometimes serpentine career path, and getting inspired to go to the next level.
You can check out the interview right here by clicking on the Flash device below:
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You are also welcome to download an mp3 of this interview by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) on this link, or check out this and all other Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
A few highlights of the interview can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:46 - Defining the word "brand"
02:36 - The power of architectural metaphors
03:50 - Brand architecture in practice: A case study from the film industry
07:07 - The need for a flexible brand development process
09:00 - Branding challenges when a company reaches the age of 130
11:33 - Measuring brand success: "Clear $30 million in 45 days"
15:47 - Branding a jazz prodigy
19:20 - High-end designer homes, surf club newsletters, and "real estate propaganda"
21:42 - What's interesting about design conferences
22:26 - Getting the most out of the AIGA (Hint: It involves giving!)
26:00 - The outsider's perspective and the dangers of "techno-speak"
30:19 - "Oh my gosh, I've got stuff to learn"
Image Courtesy of d'n'c.
The writing is on the FunWall: Marketing is undergoing an unprecedented and overwhelming proliferation of channels. This isn't new news, naturally. It's been going on for a while, what with computers in taxicabs and digital bulletin in elevators and all. But it does seem like every day the web is adding another site, another portal, or another technology that will allow people to connect with each other and, by extension, allow marketers to connect with consumers.
So, in addition to your direct mail campaigns, your advertising (on and off-line), and your promotions, you, Mr and/or Ms. Marketer, need to figure out whether or not you should be blogging, vlogging, Twittering, or podcasting. How can you use Facebook and MySpace? How can you leverage LinkedIn and Plaxo? Where is your sim in Second Life? Your Halo tie-in? Your product placement in Grand Theft Auto? An what about that other cool thing you read or heard about but aren't even sure what it's for?
Everyone feels like they should be doing all or some of the above, but there are so many possibilities, and so much on your plate already, that it's hard to know where to start. To help clear the air and provide some sort of guide to the perplexed, I hunted down a couple of new media-savvy marketers and asked them quite simply: How can marketers best figure out what they should get into and what they can profitably avoid?
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In one of my last posts, I addressed the issue of "voice" and the difference between the "corporate voice," which I tend to use for this blog, and my own voice, which peeks through here and there but is more or less repressed. That post was sparked by the realization both that I was using the corporate voice without anyone explicitly telling me to do so and that I knew implicitly how the corporate voice should "sound," again, without anyone ever instructing me on its proper use.
Although I was focused on a curious sociological fact - i.e., that people learn how to act "professionally" by osmosis - with a little bit of navel gazing thrown in for good measure, the comments I received got me out of my own personal quandary ("How can I write for Aquent and still be me?") and have set me on a new blogging path. Specifically, the words of Kris Rzepkowski resonated strongly with me. As he put it, "The corporate voice of Aquent is the sum of the talent they've chosen to retain." In other words, the real issue isn't whether I'm using a stilted or sterile corporate voice instead of my own scintillating and incisive voice. The issue is that the voices of Aquent's many talent are not being heard here.
Of course, I have profiled and written about Aquent Talent , and I thought I had made it clear that I welcome guest bloggers, but nevertheless this blog has remained "mine" in many ways. Accordingly, I resolve in the 2008 to get more voices of Talent on this here blog. I also hereby resolve to write more as "Talent" myself. I first came to Aquent as a temp back in the MacTemps days and, in many ways, still think of myself that way. I also think that there are some valuable career lessons to be learned from the meandering course of my own.
Finally, and this will be a big and shocking break, I want to make this blog more about Aquent (which, frankly, was the suggestion of Lewis Green). I've consciously avoided adopting a "Rah Rah Aquent!" tone on this blog and, even when writing about Talent that we work with, I've taken pains to highlight their skills, experience, and insight, and not dwell so much on the role that Aquent has played in their careers, even though their connection to Aquent is the main reason that I'm writing about them.
A year ago our COO said, "I'm still not sure if the perspective of the blog should be 'I bleed orange,' or not." Now, I may stop short of bleeding orange, but I will write more openly and enthusiastically about this company. I've worked here for over 10 years and think that the people I've met, both Talent and staff, are cool, interesting, and deserving of praise and, frankly, hype.
So, Happy New Year, everybody. I'm looking forward to 2008 and I promise, with your help, to make this blog ever more smashingly fabulous. Cheers!
Image Courtesy of Pear Biter.
Obsessed as I am with the reach of this blog, I wanted to find out if my last post about absinthe had gotten me any Google-love. Turns out the interweb contains a boatload of absinthe-related content, so Ye Olde Talente Blogge wasn't showing up in the first several pages. I switched tactics and did a search for "Marketing & Hallucination." My post shows up first! I sent myself flowers immediately.
Although the likelihood of anyone doing a search for those two terms may be small, it did return 266,000 results. One concerned an anti-fungal drug that had the side effect of causing people to see Wookies. As strange and intriguing as that was, I was more impressed by a site called Logo.Hallucination. (That link goes to the Logo.Hallucination "concept" page, if for no other reason than that the homepage contains some, er, "adult" imagery.)
The brainchild of one Christophe Bruno, Logo.Hallucination relies on neural network image recognition technology to scan images on the web, detect whether or not an image contains a facsimile of a copyrighted logo, and then sends a letter to the owner of the image encouraging them to contact the company concerned. The most amusing part of the "prank" is that the letter suggests that the company should pay the image owner for advertising and promoting the company's brand.
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Many years ago, I met a group of people who, having encountered absinthe in Spain and despairing of it's unavailability here in the United States, decided to take matters into their own hands and distill it themselves. The concoction they produced was beguilingly exotic, shockingly potent, and of questionable legality, having been banned here in the United States since 1912.
Well, time changes everything. The European Union has got rid of the various bans against absinthe's production and there are now two brands available in the United States (and many more in the EU itself). Not only that, there seems to be a full-on PR blitz letting everyone know that Van Gogh-esque feelings are just a milky green glass away.
The first story I remember seeing appeared in The New Yorker last year. That article focused on artisans like Ted Breaux who were trying, fairly successfully, to recreate pre-ban absinthe.
More recently, the stream of articles about absinthe has grown steadier. In early November, the New York Times published this giddy column on the "mystique and misery of absinthe." Then, at the end of the month, Time published this article entitled simply, "Absinthe Is Back," and posing the question, "Do you want to party like it's 1899?" Suddenly, you could find locally produced articles on absinthe whether you lived in Raleigh-Durham or in Salem, OR.
Although I'm sure that the PR and marketing folk working for Lucid and Kübler have had something to do with this, it can't hurt the folks like Picasso, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hemingway, and, uh, Marilyn Manson, have been extolling the virtues of this divinely devilish substance for the last hundred years or so (collectively speaking). I mean, with friends like that, who needs marketers?
Which makes me wonder if there aren't other contraband substances from bygone eras that we could bring back to the market by leveraging their cultural cache. I mean, who couldn't go for a frosty mug of laudanum right now? I mean, if it was good enough for Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how could it not be good enough for us?
Image courtesy of spacepleb.
(Note: I had to repost this entry without the Odeo player due to a technical glitch. If I can fix it I will. - Matt)
William Lunderman is VP of Global Strategic Brand Design at Colgate-Palmolive. He's thus far led quite an illustrious career as a designer and design leader for well-known brands like Revlon and iconic brands like Campbell's Soup. I invite you to listen to our conversation. I went into it assuming, somewhat naively, I admit, that globalization was all about localization and tailoring your products and messages to the world's varied environs. While that is certainly part of multi-national marketing execution, this sort of endless variation is not the essence of global brand strategy.
From a strategic standpoint, as I learned, the key is, on the contrary, honing in on the universal need addressed by your brand's promise. The trick then becomes effectively translating that promise into a culturally relevant consumer language. At least that's how I understood the sage words of Mr. William Lunderman when we spoke.
If you would like to hear what I heard, you can download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here (of course, if you just click on that link, it will play the file for you), or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:50 - What is "Global Strategic Brand Design?"
04:32 - The Emotional Aspect of the Brand
07:41 - Thinking about Consumers on a Universal Level
09:55 - "Children like to play in their food"
10:41 - AXE - as a Brand
12:16 - Kellogg's and "Owning the Morning"
15:13 - Package as "Delivery Mechanism" of Brand Design
17:08 - The Current Consumer Language
19:55 - The Consumer's Perception of "The Best"
24:23 - Brands at Home and Home Brands
28:09 - Why We Move to New Brands
30:22 - Design Careers: When You Move to the Next Level
32:59 - "Obsolete yourself" - On Evolving and Avoiding Extinction
Image courtesy of 00dann.
The Advertising Research Foundation, which publishes The Journal of Advertising Research, released a white paper last month entitled, "On the Road to a New Effectiveness Model," (you can purchase it from the ARF here), which got written up in Brandweek, and elsewhere, such as in this MediaPost column by Max Kalehoff.
The upshot of the ARF et al. study was that advertisements which tell a convincing or engaging story more effectively make a positive impression on viewers than those that focus on positioning a product in terms of its benefits. Max Kalehoff insists that the real lesson here is not about advertising effectiveness but about brand effectiveness. Specifically, he says, brands need compelling foundational narratives that connect with people by distilling and embodying that brand's essence.
I believe that is just what I've been trying to do with this blog but, just in case that has not been entirely and intuitively obvious, please allow me to explain.
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An Aquent Talent Spotlight
Article by Anne Stuart
Figuratively speaking, our planet is smaller than it used to be, thanks to jet travel, the Internet and other inventions that reduce the historical limitations of distance and time. But when it comes to global product launches and marketing campaigns, it's a big world after all--and going global involves serious challenges as well as significant opportunities.
Cindy Dyer understands that reality all too well. Dyer, who is currently in an Aquent placement as senior manager of consumer strategy and insight at Frito-Lay Inc. in Dallas, started out as a food scientist, but moved into marketing while at Pizza Hut Inc. She's also worked for global giants like General Mills Inc., Campbell's Soup Co. and Mead Johnson & Co., the infant-child nutrition division of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Throughout her career, she's been involved in international branding and marketing campaigns.
Following are a few of Dyer's tips for successfully taking your products and messages beyond your own borders:
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On November 29th, Aquent will be sponsoring an American Marketing Association webcast entitled, "Global vs. Local: Seven Key Insights for Global Marketing and Brand Management." The featured speaker will be Donald A. DePalma, who is a business globalization analyst with Common Sense Advisory, and author of Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.
Mr. DePalma has written extensively about the challenges associated with taking a brand or a business global, including this article on global toe dippers and toe stubbers, and characterizes the web-based, global marketplace as an "eighth continent," with all the peril and promise that that image implies.
If your company has already gone global, and your toes hurt, or if you're thinking of wading into the global waters and want to know how cold they are, you should tune in on November 29th.
Image courtesy of Charles Haynes.
When I was at PodCamp in Boston a couple weeks ago I finally met David Meerman Scott, whom I'd wanted to interview at the time that we were doing the webcast with Paul Gillin.
David has literally written the book on the "new rules of marketing and PR." I spoke with him about thought leadership strategies, building user personas, and using press releases as a marketing tool. If you have the time, please check out our conversation and let me know what you think.
You can hear the interview by clicking on the device below:
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You can download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out this and other Talent Blog podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
2:14 - Defining "thought leadership"
5:40 - Main challenges to crafting a thought leadership strategy
9:00 - Methods for creating "user personas"
10:53 - The Engineer and the "100 Mothers"
11:30 - "Why don't people do things the right way?"
16:19 - Reading blogs written by your buyer personas
18:00 - The "News Release Strategy"
25:30 - "The media will notice"
Image courtesy of belgianchocolate.
I was checking out the buzz log over at Yahoo! and came across this ominously titled post, "The Webkinz Will Rise," about the collectible and cuddly phenomenon known as Webkinz. Apparently, "Webkinz" ranks in the top 100 searches on Yahoo! and buzz about the Webkinz.com site has increased tenfold over the last 12 months.
For those of you who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals, kind of like Beanie Babies, only bigger, and each one comes with a special code that you can use to visit your new "pet" on-line, buy stuff for it, dress it up, etc.
I refer to Webkinz and their world as "advertainment" because, well, that's what it is! The Webkinz animal gives you access to the Webkinz world, which is a multi-faceted, immersive commercial for Webkinz. In this way, it resembles the Pokemon revolution of 1995, when Nintendo created a video game that became a card game, a comic, a cartoon, a vast collectible menagerie, and a huge merchandising franchise. In a Leibnizian twist, every part of the Pokemon universe became an advertisement for every other part of it.
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In this third and final installment of our podcast mini-series, we speak with Carol Burke, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at AMN Healthcare. Carol discusses how she makes sure that her team is using the marketing channels most preferred by AMN's constituents and what she does to create marketing content with a life beyond marketing.
You may listen to Episode 3 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 3 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of pingnews.
In conjunction with the webcast we're presenting today, I interviewed a few folks we work with and asked them how they coordinate their marketing messages and programs across a variety of media from print to web and beyond. I then created a three episode podcast mini-series of these interviews.
In this episode Dave Harrell, the Director of Advertising at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, talks about some of the grassroots, infotainment marketing efforts that his group has undertaken recently. In doing so, he also discusses the processes they follow to keep messages and branding consistent from channel to channel and audience to audience.
You can listen to Episode 1 here:
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You can download this podcast by "right clicking" ("control clicking" on the Mac) this link, Episode 1 MP3, or check out The Talent Blog Podcast feed.
Image courtesy of jimbowen0306.
I've become a little obsessed with the "Tasing" of Andrew Meyer. Thanks to the ubiquity and power of modern technology, I've been able to review the incident from multiple angles just like on a DVD. If you haven't had the chance to do the same, I invite you to try these variations on for size: the tape made with Meyer's own camera; a tape from the opposite angle apparently made by a reporter; a tape that seems to have been made with a cellphone; and a tape that follows him out of the auditorium.
The incident and the videos are undeniably disturbing. Although the campus police assured reporters that the Taser used was on "dry stun mode" and that there was "no external prong use, or anything," Meyer's screams are horrifying; Kerry adding insult to injury by quipping that he'll answer the question posed by Meyer although, "Unfortunately he's not available to come up here and swear me in as president," is bizarre and lame; the way people clap when Meyer is first confronted is puzzling and the seeming passivity of the assembled students is troubling, although a few freak out and some can be heard muttering, "Police brutality. Rodney King."
So what's the marketing angle? Well, aside from the fact that several people are already selling t-shirts featuring Meyer's now infamous plea, I was struck by the apotheosis of the TASER brand. Just like "Xerox" came to mean "photocopy," "Kleenex" refers to any "facial tissue," and "Band-Aid" is, well, any "band aid," "TASER" now means unmistakably, "using a TASER on someone." I know that's not exactly the same thing, but it's close! I mean, what else do you call, "subduing someone with an electro-shock weapon"?
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One of the things that I have done on at off during my tenure at Aquent is write songs about the company and it's various initiatives. I have not recorded many of them, but recently started doing so.
Most of these songs have been for internal consumption, but I thought that I should start sharing them with the world. To that end, I created a MySpace page devoted to the songs and other cultural artifacts (like poems) that I have created for Aquent. Right now there are only two songs there - one about our "Talent Bridge" approach to getting a permanent job, and a very rough, soon-to-be remade demo of a song about the importance of "U" to Aquent.
Enjoy or ridicule as you wish.
My friend, Alex, is a product manager represented by Aquent's Boston office. He was a product manager in the biotech world for the last 9 years and when I spoke with him about the evolution of his career the other day, I learned a thing or three about managing products on the cutting edge. Here they are:
1. "Customer Support " knows more about the product than you do.
Alex is a scientist by training and was doing "bench work" at a company that made thermocyclers when it became clear that they needed someone to take over their customer support team. By dealing with customers and their challenges day-in and day-out, Alex got to know the the company's main product top to bottom and found himself serving as the main liaison between the end-users and the engineers crafting the next iteration of the product. In fact, it was via his time in customer support that Alex became a product manager. Who says you need an MBA?
2. Cutting-edge products need a lot of support.
When you are bringing products to market that are "first generation," you quite often haven't worked out all of the kinks (particularly if you are following the "ship and fix" model of product release). You need to have a strong support team in place to handle the inevitable calls from your customers who can't get the machines to do what they need for a variety of reasons - ignorance, manufacturing defect, design flaw, etc. As mentioned above, the efforts of the support team can play a pivotal role in the product development cycle.
3. The "Cutting-Edge" is a moving target and sometimes you fall off.
Sometimes you're developing a product based on current best practices and standards, and then a competitor introduces a new process (which may or may not count as a "disruptive technology," though some contend that such technologies are mythical) that effectively makes your product obsolete. Depending on how much money you've sunk into the product, the sales effort, the support infrastructure, etc., you may still bring it out and hope for the best. Still, the fact of the matter is that a "trailing edge" product is living on borrowed time.
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Of course, if you have a successful product, then chances are you will get acquired at some point and, as Alex learned, managing one or two products for a small-ish company is different from managing a lot of them for a large-ish one. There are also complications that arise from working with a sales force in a company where there are competing product lines or categories. Etc., etc.
In other words, I learned a bunch of other stuff from Alex but, since this is "just a blog," I'm going to stop sharing at this point. If you want to know more, contact me and I'd be happy to put you in touch with him!
Image courtesy of lizjones112.
Our creative director has a coffee maker at his desk and when I walked by it yesterday I thought it smelled really good. "You know," I said, "Americans associate coffee with 'home.' That's why realtor's put on a pot of coffee when they're having an open house. When people walk in, they feel like they're home." He asked me to leave his cubicle.
I learned about the association between "coffee" and "home" from a New York Times article I read seven years ago entitled, "Does the Smell of Coffee Brewing Remind You of Your Mother?." The article discusses the work of Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist who uses Jungian-style "archetype research" to uncover the unconscious associations that people have with various products and cultural phenomena (he has written several books about it, including The Cultural Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do).
There are at least two lessons for marketers and designers to learn here. One has to do with smell and, in fact, the folks at Adverlab just yesterday wrote about Motorola's patent for a Smell-o-phone. That post has a list of other smell-related advertising news that is definitely worth checking out. The folks at a related site, Futurelab, also recently published a post on ads that target customer noses, which says that one chain of gas stations in California is spreading "the aroma of coffee near the pumps to encourage consumers to fill up their travel mug in addition to their gas tank." (Thanks to Erik Hauser of the Experiential Marketing Forum for that last tip.)
The other lesson is that the associations people have with products and brands are not necessarily conscious and that traditional surveys and focus groups may not be the most effective way to figure out exactly what those associations are. Who knew, as Dr. Rapaille discovered, that the key association that Americans have with the presidency is not "fatherhood" or "leadership" or even "nationalism," but, "cheap entertainment."
Maintaining a blog can be hard work. You have to stay current; you have to be original; you have to "participate in the conversation." Still, you're in control. You know who your audience is (or is supposed to be), you know what you've written, and you know what's worked and what hasn't.
Even though guest blogging might seem somewhat easier, I think it's actually harder, especially when you are writing for a blog that has a lot of other contributors. In a way, such a blog is like a microcosm of the blogosphere. While, in the grand scheme of all things "blog," you might be writing the exact same thing as some other blogger, chances are, no one will notice. More importantly, YOU won't even notice, because you can't possibly be reading all blogs all the time.
Not so when guest blogging with a bunch of others. Case in point: As I've mentioned, I'm a "guest" on the "Notes on Design" blog over at sessions.edu. Well, the other day I wrote a post strongly stating that designers should create blogs as an alternative to creating a portfolio. Then I read through some previous posts from my co-guests and discovered that Ilise Benun had written a similar post just the day before. To make matters worse, her post was more reasonable and, frankly, better than my own!
I decide I'm going to go in a different direction and talk about the state of branding today. As an example, I'm going to write about my experience shopping for a guitar and trying to shake the spell cast on me by the Gibson brand when I was a teenage Jimmy Page worshipper.
Before I start, like a good guest, I head over to sessions.edu to find out what others are writing about. Sure enough, the first post I read, by John Kuraoka, is about branding! I then write a post about my total lack of original thought-content but it is, quite appropriately, rejected by the editor. "Woe," as they say, "is me."
If there is any lesson to be learned here it is this: Whatever you want to blog about has already been blogged about somewhere else.
If there is another lesson it is this: Never read any blog but your own. You'll always be the first to post on something there!
A few weeks back, I wrote about brands which have switched genders.
Of course, "switching" implies that brands are gendered in the first place, which pretty much everyone would agree is true. Turns out, according to the New York Times, that they have sexual orientations as well.
Then I find out that brands have political leanings. You heard right: "red" and "blue" brands.
This really got me thinking. In an era of personal branding, is their any difference between brands and, well, us?
It all started when I got a Friend Request through my MySpace account from a woman who said she had known me in graduate school. I didn't recognize her from her picture for one simple reason: when I knew her, she was a man.
Then, my friend Pagan Kennedy published a biography entitled, The First Man-Made Man, about the person who underwent the first female-to-male sex change operation.
Lastly and most recently, a guy I know who publishes a magazine called LEMON, asked if I wanted to write a fairly short piece about the classical composer and electronic music pioneer, Wendy Carlos, who began this life as Walter Carlos.
In the latter case, Wendy had had an established brand as "Walter" - she had produced the first ever platinum classical record, Switched-ON Bach, and composed the music for A Clockwork Orange under that name - and then went through a re-branding exercise that involved a very public disclosure (in Playboy, of all places) of a very private and personal matter.
All's well that ends well, of course. Wendy Carlos is simply Wendy Carlos nowadays, even on her earlier recordings, and what may have seemed scandalous or shocking even in the seventies, is today, well, while still surprising, at least not completely out of the ordinary.
This got me thinking. What brands have gone through "gender-reassignment"? That is, are there well-known brands that started out as "male" or "female" and have now switched? There are certainly brands like Jockey, which was traditionally male (when you think of "Jockey shorts," who do you picture in them?) and now go both ways, but is there a brand that went one way and now goes the other?
