The D Word

By the time establishment economists acknowledged there was a recession, we had, according to their terms, been in one for 9 to 10 months. Nonetheless, not being in a “recession” may have made some people feel better and allow others to lie with a straight face.

For marketers and their customers, a “recession” has little to do with “two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth” or any specific formal definition. The economist’s recession is not the marketer’s and vice versa. It is a perception and more important a feeling.

The same could for the less commonly heard “depression.” Like recession, depression had its origins as a euphemism. Herbert Hoover did not like the term “panic,” which had been used to characterize earlier financial dislocations. That may have been inspired web-smithing and accurate in that panic can hardly be sustained for more than a decade as the Great Depression was.

Use what term you will, customers know what they’re experiencing. The latest (January 2009) employment report shows a loss of 598,000 jobs and that 3,200,000 jobs were lost in the last 12 months.

For most firms, this was not part of their planning assumptions. What marketing messages are we going to say to consumers and firms (including those, which used to employ some of those consumers)? In more general terms, what are we going to do for our markets, which are a lot sicker than we imagined?

Pricing does have to be realistic. Whenever I hear a supplier claim his business is recession proof I wonder how much is delusion and how much dissembling. There may be such businesses, but neither you nor I are in them. Price cutting alone won’t be enough, but be prepared for concessions.

An interesting wrinkle on this are pre-announced price freezes. Professional sports are an example. Demand is down, and not just for personal seat licenses. Demand for this years’ Superbowl tickets weakened such that in the week before the game, ticket brokers were selling some tickets at less than face value.

The response of teams such as the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox, was to announce there will be no price increases for the coming season. The market was clearly not going to support an increase, so they are trying to take credit for doing the obvious.

This is not a bad tactic, but it is not enough. Prediction: professional sports, like most other marketers will have to offer further incentives to maintain their market share. With customers feeling increasingly gloomy, we’ll need to continually reinforce how we are adding value. How do customers feel about your business or brand, such that you will not be the first one to be cut in tough times?

Short Elevator Rides

A common metaphor, or cliché, is the “elevator pitch.” It seems to mean a compelling story in 30 to 60 seconds, which conveys the essence of your product, service, mission, or goal.

The classic 30 second commercial or one page magazine ad ought to be an elevator pitch. They are forced to be brief, but often fail to engage or communicate. They commonly try to cover too many points, lack focus, and contain much that is inessential or irrelevant. Even worse, they will do all of this without ever getting to the point.

I was thus intrigued, when I chanced upon a short video by artist Matt Shlian. YouTube lists this video as 9 seconds, but we could edit out the static trailing space and it would be 7 or 8 seconds. There is no text, no color, and no audio. The I comes away knowing something of Shilan’s talents and wanting to see more. Fortunately he has other short videos on YouTube. Search on Matt Shilan if interested.



What can you get across in 8 seconds?

It's Back - This Time in 3-D

Superbowl XLIII is charging down upon us. We are the worst recession since this annual rite of advertising with football obbligato began. Large advertisers are writing off assets, closing facilities, firing thousands, and reporting record losses. This has caused panic - and panicking executives are even more likely to do the familiar, including the familiar, which has never been shown to work.

In particular, major advertisers have agreed to pay up to $3 million for 30 seconds of air time during the game. Of course with production, not to mention the expense of senior staff “needing” to attend the game, the total cost can be substantially higher. So we’re starting to talk about real money for a marketing expense, whose value remains to be demonstrated. Rather than worrying about the niceties of ROI, PepsiCo and DreamWorks, will try to make their Superbowl ads more memorable, by presenting them in 3-D.

Those of us old enough to remember an earlier generation of 3-D movies and comic books also remember having to wear cardboard glasses, whose right and left lenses were of different colors. The movies tended to be horror movies and westerns, in which the monster or villain, though thought dead, somehow survived to appear in a sequel.

So much for progress, the funky cardboard glasses are back. No glasses - no 3-D. Pepsi is using its considerable retail distribution to try to get 125 million pairs available to the viewing public by game day glasses. The Wall St. Journal(1/23/09, B8) reports that the glasses alone will cost about $7 million. To PepsiCo’s and DreamWorks’ credit they have gotten Intel to pay this.

What Intel gets for this another remains to be seen, but kudos to the deal makers at Pepsi. This challenge has made the commercials themselves news and DreamWorks is even advertising the commercials. Dreamworks new 3-D feature Monsters and Aliens is a major product push. Thus the game gets prime real estate on its animation site (warning - visiting this link will shift your browser to full screen).

In case you didn’t find the glasses at your local supermarket, you can get some by calling Pepsi at 1-800-646-2904.Curiously, Pepsi does not invite consumers to order online. There was no promotion of the event either during the on-hold recording (background music) or when I spoke to an attendant, who indifferently took my shipping information. The promotion is not featured on Pepsi’s or Intel’s web sites.

What does this have to do with selling SoBe Lifewater or microprocessors? Perhaps this would be clearer seen through a pair of 3-D glasses.

Where's My Cookie?

Marketing should give customers something. In retail, direct mail, print, or the venerable 30 second spot, we try to show what our product does and what’s in it for the customer. Our communication and programs associate our brand with a customer goal, sometimes called a "cookie." 1 Depending on customer needs, a cookie could be information such as a product description, prices, free samples, the ability to do or buy something here and now, etc. We don’t deliberately challenge readers or viewers to work long and hard to figure out where the good stuff is. Once we’ve understand which cookie customers want, lift notes, end aisle displays, and headlines take them there.

There are some notable exceptions. If you’ve ever stayed at a Las Vegas casino hotel, you have probably had the frustrating experience of having to navigate acres of gaming tables on route to your room.

That’s Vegas. In the real world we don’t deliberately frustrate customers. What about the virtual world? After we manage to get prospects to our web site can they find their cookie? This is a four part problem:

1. Finding the site
2. Finding the relevant page
3. Finding the relevant content on the page
4. Being able to get to the next step by clicking, calling, or going somewhere

Trying to negotiate many sites feels far too often like being trapped in a labyrinth. The bounce rates on many landing pages, show that visitors get frustrated, fed up, and leave.

Far too many web sites are more concerned with design than usability. In post mortem interviews within companies having dysfunctional sites (some of which were “award winning”) we often find no consensus on what the site was supposed to do. In some cases it seems the cookies are missing altogether. Where do you hide your cookies?

1) I am indebted to Nadia Direkova of Razorfish for this metaphor.

Forecasting Season

Along with post-holiday sales and carcasses of Christmas trees on the curb, this is the season of forecasts. Pundits, gurus and mavens emerge from their dens to favor the rest of us with insights about the next big thing or the soon no longer to be big thing. As with forecasts of stock markets and fashion trends this can be risky and tough to do. Forecasting does have advantages. Comedian Jay Leno summarized these when he assumed his long running late night show:

There’s no heavy lifting and nobody tells me to comeback and fix the jokes, which weren’t funny last night...

As marketers we are often asked to predict. How do we do it? Mostly badly. Do we have an alternative? I suggest following the advice of the late Peter Drucker and "predict the future, which is already happening" rather than speculate or paying others to speculate on your behalf.

What do we already know about 2009?

• Consumer sentiment is negative
• Real spending will decline
• Commercial and consumer credit will decrease
• More ad spending will be allocated to measurable media than broadcast
• Your competitors will launch fewer new products
• Promotional budgets will decline
• You will have fewer marketing staff

For your own market and business you can extend this list and probably provide some relative quantification. This approach will save significant management and staff time. More important, it will let you focus on telling customers why your product or service is what they need even in a down economy.