Will The Cat Drool?

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, A currently popular marketing book, makes much of the differences between cats and dogs. Not the obvious differences. Dogs are a metaphor for customers of yore. Cats are the new non-compliant customer. The authors go on to make a specious case that Pavlov, the Russian physiologist of salivation dog fame, is no longer relevant.

Essentially Pavlov showed that merely the (almost) simultaneous pairing of two stimuli results in the learning that these are associated. The classic case is pairing of a sound with food, such that hearing the sound produces salivation. The effect is powerful and ubiquitous and applies to you and me as well as dogs and cats.

So what? You might well ask. Pavlov’s model was and is the prevailing one for marketing communications. A product may have a complex, systematic and rational value proposition, yet most attempts to enlist customers are Pavlovian.

Marketers try to induce interest or favorable perception by pairing the product or brand with something else the prospect perceives favorably or associate its absence with something unfavorable. Favorable stimuli include sex, safety, children, money, admiration, food, affiliation, and domination.

This attempted association or “conditioning” to use Pavlov’s term, is easy to spot in broadcast advertising, but is common in print, direct mail, email and web sites as well as tactics derived from these such as viral marketing campaigns.

Consider this next time you watch the Super Bowl, read a direct mail piece from Dell computer or brows banner ads for on-line gaming.

AOL Is Dead - (Not So) Long Live AOL

AOL was not the first online service though it did predate the commercial Internet. It grew and grew and prospered whereas Compuserv, Prodigy, and numerous others are forgotten.

It was not a technology leader. That was not its value and its market was not technophiles. It was a service, which provided content, connectivity, and community before the Internet and during itsgrowth spurt. Even after the Internet was common, AOL offered a comprehensive service, which attracted and retained tens of millions of users. For millions AOL was the Internet.

What set AOL apart and made it preeminent was marketing. Not hyperbolic like Apple nor solid like IBM, nor memorable in creative or execution. As was said of Coca Cola in its glory days, AOL strategy was to be within an arm’s length of desire.

AOL diskettes and later CDs were in the mail, in magazines, at libraries, convenience stores, and post offices. They included a “free” trial and a competitive price. It was easy to join and not so easy to quit. If you had access to a telephone and $20/month you were in. So were 25 million others, at its zenith, circa 2000.

In the days before standard email addresses, AOL was easily the largest community of online users. An AOL screen name was, like a well known address, something people were reluctant to change. Rather like mobile phone numbers before mandated portability.

What happened? How did so dominant market player loose its market?

AOL was king of dialup and its market allowed it to prevail over competitors with lower prices and different offerings. Dial up is dying and the fortunes of the king declined with his domain.

This leaves AOL with millions of customers and increasingly less to offer them or make them stay. Its portal, content, free email, and other services delivered on an advertising pays the bills model looks, feels and smell sort of like Yahoo, MSN, or a number of others. If it controls costs, witness its recent layoff of 5000, it can survive for quite a while as one of many web media properties. As a key player, it’s gone.

RIP

Phonak Phonak

Quick, what’s a Phonak? Readers of sports news might recall that the winner of this year’s Tour de France, Floyd Landis, rode for the team sponsored by Phonak. The team is multinational, the company is Swiss, and Landis happens to be American.

Landis’ win propels Team Phonak to fourth place in 2006 ProTour ranks. Estimated cost of this sponsorship – at least 11 million Euros or slightly more than 14 million dollars.

Not insigficant for a $700 million (867 million CHF) company. And that doesn’t include Phonak’s sponsorship of America’s cup yacht racing.

What do you get for 14 big ones? Apparently not that much even with a winner. Phonak has already decided to abandon its marquee position. Next season, the team will be named for iShares. So much for a consistent branding message.

As of this writing, there’s a significant chance that will be the first Tour de France champion to be disqualified. Landis’ picture has been quietly removed from Phonak Cycling’s home page. If Phonak didn’t benefit from the win would they still be tarnished by the disqualification?

Getting back to our lead question, Phonak is a manufacturer of hearing aids and instruments. It markets its products under a variety of brands (micorSavia, Eleva, and eXtra), but does not appear to have products bearing the Phonak brand.

Accouding to its collateral,

“Phonak Hearing Systems is Main Sponsor of the Phonak Cycling Team and counts on the Cycling Team to carry the message of better hearing into the world.”

“Phonak supports the Phonak Cycling Team in 2006 for the seventh consecutive year. Phonak is convinced that hearing fosters communication among people around the globe and counts on its Cycling Team to draw attention to the topic of better hearing.”

“We race for better hearing”

One could imagine a campaign promoting athletes in need of hearing aids or one showing how these devices help people be more active, or many other posibilities at lower costs with positive ROI. As for this one. We’re listening but we’re not hearing this it!

Measurement Meanderings

Who sponsors:

MLB?

The NFL?

The World Cup

The US Open golf tournament

The recent Winter Olympics

The last NBA game you watched? (now that the season is mercifully over)

What is the official car, boat, deodorant or cereal of (supply the name of your favorite team)

What does Tiger Woods endorse?

What doesn’t he?

What events do Pepsi Cola, Verizon, and Coors respectively underwrite?

As marketers and students of advertising, we might know some of this if we like to play trivia games. My research strongly suggests that consumers in general (as well as most marketers and sports fans) do not. Nor have the sponsors or their agencies shown that endorsements and sponsorships increase sales.

Undaunted by such details Relay, sports-marketing unit owned by major ad agency Publicis Groupe has announced a “service” to evaluate the value of sports marketing programs. Relay’s primary business is sponsorship and event marketing, so one might question their independence as evaluators of such programs. Here’s what they Claim.

Mind you Relay doesn’t measure sales or even consumer perception but what they assert is a better measure of exposure. The real problem with relay’s evaluation, like much traditionally done by agencies, is that it measures output by input. That is, it adds up screen exposure using a proprietary methodology and presents the total as value regardless of whether the audience sees, remembers, or most importantly acts on what is displayed.

For example, their analysis concludes that Honda received the highest value of any of the sponsors of the latest Indy 500 race. Since auto racing has nothing to do with Honda’s brand image or its principal products. Where is the value.

Honda’s executives and large dealers may have been able to park their Civics and Fits and tool around the track wearing spandex suites in fulfillment of latent fantasies, but let’s not call this marketing.

Can Superman Handle the Pepsi Challenge?

Recently Pepsico has been running banner ads on Yahoo promoting a contest connected with the soon to be released summer movie – Superman Returns.

The promotion is an ambitious integrated marketing program combining point of purchase, special packaging, event marketing such as the Pepsi 400 stock car race, merchandising of toys from Mattel, and a video game from Electronic Arts. The promotion is further complicated by inclusion of Pepsi’s brand portfolio including Mountain Dew and Lay’s potato chips. Not content with empty calories, the man of steel’s return will also be promoted by Pepsi’s Quaker and Tropicana products such as (and I am not making this up) Superman Crunch: Cap'n Crunch cereal with Superman shield shapes that turn milk blue and four cheese pasta Superman limited edition Pasta Roni.

Executing such a program may indeed require super powers, but will its effects founder on the kryptonite of confusion?

Of course, if the movie is a hit it would help clear the end aisle displays coming to a WalMart near you. Superman in formats ranging from comic books to multimedia has proven to be a durable franchise. The promotion could thus be viable independent of the success of the movie. It’s less plausible that the product promotion will help the movie.

What in the long run (let’s say the fourth quarter) does this do for the brands involved? How durable is the effect of being Superman’s official high fructose or diet or low trans-fat or high soluble fiber snack? Can Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Sierra Mist and Mountain Dew all be super quenchers? What about Gatoraid?

We suspect the campaign may have a positive ROI but not a positive EROSI (enduring return on sweat invested). Once the sweep stakes are over and the action figures are gathering dust, the market and mind shares of Pepsi’s brands will not have grown.