What Are Your Colors?

"The Customer Can Have Any Color He Wants So Long As It's Black" – Henry Ford

There is some dispute whether Ford actually said this. Regardless it has become a truism, whose influence persists. The message is also, if you don’t like our products, tough! Long after the decline both of Ford and his company, black is the one color in which virtually every model automobile is available.

Similarly, major appliances such as refrigerators and washers still tend to come in white and now a quite limited assortment of other colors. While consumer electronics and small appliances often come in metallic silver, white or black. This begs the question – why are developers of products from plumbing fixtures to household implements to tee shirts color blind?

Colors in product design are, subject to fashion. Remember the blizzard of beige a few years ago? Novel products used to be able to get away with superficial sameness but as product categories from mobile phones to sporting goods have become commodities similarity has become dangerous.

Those of you who stage shows and events as part of your promotional mix may have used tchotchkes such tee shirts. All too often they are white or black in size extra large. As a result, they often end up in trade show dumpsters.

The temptations, which attracted Ford, are still with us. Of course, it’s easier to have one or a small number of colors, flavors, or other features. One of our key missions as marketers is to differentiate our products favorably. We should also do this inexpensively. Here color can work, especially in the face of monochrome monotonous competition.

An interesting case is Dell. Personal computers are as much a commodity as any consumer product. Indeed computer “manufacturers” make none of the major components. Instead they assemble their products from standard parts produced by others.

Dell’s key differentiator had long been to compete on price – the typical strategy in a commodity business. Dell played that game for too long. Competitors caught up leaving Dell with neither cost leadership not profitability.

They have recently made radical changes from management to sales channels to marketing. And they’ve discovered color. Dell notebook computers now come in a choice of eight colors (7 plus black). The color option consists of replacing the top of the case with a plastic panel in one of the colors. This increases Dell’s bill of materials, but with it’s build to order products, it does not increase the number of SKUs. This feature is probably profitable.

Customers pay an extra $20 for color. As long as colored computers are unusual, this means the Dell logo is displayed on the top of an eye catching background. This not only polished the brand image, it builds a ruby, evergreen, gold, or azure box, which for now, is not a commodity.

Scientific Marketing

A recent commercial for Ocean Spray diet cranberry drink was, according to the Wall St. Journal (6/4/07 Page B8), created with the aid of “lab-coat-wearing scientists as it seeks to get deeper into the heads of consumers.” You can see the ad (along with another commercial) at here

The article goes on to describe that the agency, which created to ad, employs an individual with a Ph.D. in cognitive science. The ad superficially looks like an ordinary consumer spot, however the “scientist” is credited with changing the ad’s content to be less confusing and facilitate better information processing by the ad’s audience.

Should you add a cognitive scientist or any other scientist to your marketing team or is this a case buzz word invasion in marketing. For the commercial in question, we cannot yet say.

Physicist Richard Feynman, in his perennially interesting Feynman Lectures On Physics, characterized science as the discipline in which disputes are decided by experiment. Yet for the Ocean Spray commercial, data on outcomes, such as sales, are noticeably absent. Until they are included, I’ll go light on the diet cranberry drink.

Give Your Communications A Basque Treatment

After a recent trip to see a client in Northern Spain, we spent a few days traveling in Basque country and neighboring La Rioja. Here the road signs are in bilingual in Basque and Spanish. They also tend to be in large letters in a highly readable sans-serif type. Our Spanish is so-so and our Basque, that unique language unrelated to anything else, non-existent. We were, however, better able to navigate the roads than in US cities we don’t know.

Where it’s important, such as entrances to traffic circles and narrow unlighted mountain tunnels, the signs are vivid graphical icons. We had never seen some of these, such as those for dimming lights, but we understood immediately.

Can you say the same about your package design, web pages, and ad layout? If not, we suggest giving your communications the Basque treatment. Think about what it would take to deliver a single message to prospects, who often don’t already know who you are and why they must have your products.

Looks Like They Forgot To Add Marketing

Microsoft has been a marketing focused company for most of its history. Independent of the merits of its products, it has often excelled in both marketing strategy and tactics. It is hardly a coincidence that its current CEO, Steve Ballmer, began his career at Proctor and Gamble. Thus it seems particularly puzzling that for its latest and most ambitious product ever – Windows Vista, marketing appears an afterthought. Sales of what Microsoft expects to be a blockbuster are off to a slower start then predicted. The Vista products have received mixed reviews, but it’s the marketing that hurts.

Microsoft can commit marketing sins the rest of us cannot get away with, because over 90% of new PCs automatically come with Vista. The marketing opportunity is with the tens of millions of computers running one of the versions older than Vista. When the choice is to stay with the older product for free or pay for Vista, marketing is crucial. So what’s wrong with Vista’s marketing?

Too Many Products With Indistinct Positioning.

Vista is not a single product. It exists in five (count’em 5) versions each at different price points. The products homepage (www.windowsvista.com) is longer on animation than substance. One clicks, waits for icons to dance around the screen, clicks again and gets a paragraph, which claims but neither shows nor convinces why this is for me. These are somewhat ordered on a continuum perhaps from simple to sophisticated or home to business, or clueless to tech-savvy. The positioning is not clear and that’s a problem

Unclear Benefit Proposition.

"Easier, Safer, More Entertaining, Better Connected" says the web site.

This smacks of “new and improved” from the bad old days out of the marketing museum. Want to know more, download the product guide. This guide may need a guide. Depending on its format, it weighs in at from 24 Mb to 61 Mb. The formats are not what computer users have been taught to expect. There is no Word document or Adobe pdf collateral for Vista. Rather the guides come in new proprietary formats, which require you to first download and install viewer software.

Vague Claims and What Seems Like Mere Puffery.

Clicking further does not always yield more information or enlightenment. Consider this description of the Vista Business version. Often hyperbole substitutes for demonstration. Why spend $99.50 for Vista Home Basic when for $ 159.00 or so, you can get Vista Home Premium with an “Elegant Windows Aero desktop experience”. Experience is getting expensive, but I guess you have to be there to appreciate it. The page depicting this is neither elegant nor an experience though it tells us:

"Windows Vista Business is the first Windows operating system designed specifically to meet the needs of small businesses. You'll empower your entire business to work more efficiently …"

Curiously Vista is subordinated on Microsoft’s own home page, not only to the new version of its office software, but even a to a fix for the new onset of daylight saving time. This last, some days after the time change, when you had either manually changed your clock or decided you didn’t care what time your computer claimed was.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is well known and for a businessman fairly recognizable. The site depicts him much younger and with a beatific smile that participants in an informal poll I conducted found unsettling.

Vista may be a fine product, but until Microsoft tells and shows what’s in it for customers and there by return to its roots, sales are likely to lag.

Your Sugar Mama

There are so many bad marketing campaigns, we like to salute one when we find it.

Campaign: Sugar Mama

Sponsor: Virgin Mobile

(http://www.virginmobileusa.com/stuff/sugarmama.do)

Offer: Reward Mobil customers with extra minutes in return for

• Watching online videos
• Receiving text messages
• Filling out surveys

Details: Exactly how program works stated clearly and concisely on a answers page.

Execution: If you still have questions, there is an email address. And someone actually responds to the email with explicit answers within a day.

This is permission marketing as it ought to be. Customers can opt in and opt out at any time. Their participation is acknowledged with a simple token reward – for every minute you view our content, we give you a minute of airtime.

As a rate of pay this is way below minimum wage, but that beside the point. It is an acknowledgement and appreciation of the customer. When is the last time you got that as a consumer?

This straight forward clarity runs throughout. It’s easy to see what you get, what that costs, and what to do if you want to change your plan.

This shouldn’t be a big deal, but compared with the major communications carriers and cable system operators it is. It is the difference between earning customers and trapping them.