Category: Marketing

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Between Faith and Rationality Business Marketing

Between Faith and Rationality

There’s a spot in New York City, on 5th Avenue between 51st and 50th Streets. If you go there late at night, or early on New Year’s Day, you can actually stand in the deserted center of one of the busiest avenues in the city.  The spot itself isn’t remarkable — it’s what’s around you. To your left is St. Patrick’s Cathedral and to your right is the statue of Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center.

In other words, you are literally standing between one of the world’s greatest expressions of faith and one of mankind’s most enduring symbols of science, technology and rationality.

Whenever I’ve stood in this spot, the juxtaposition of life’s two great themes has added valuable clarity into the confusion of my choices and challenges.

As we begin a new year with its delineation, both artificial and realistic, between what came before and what comes next, I think it is important to keep these two themes in their proper place.

The challenges of business, marketing and our personal lives and finances which this new year will bring will seem unexpected and insurmountable to some, expected and easily addressed by others.

When you look at life as a continual set of challenges and opportunities, when you have a method for addressing problems rationally and intelligently, applying the right tools or the right processes and then testing the outcome before moving ahead, this year’s challenges are no more daunting than last year’s.

When you have faith in your own abilities and in your own ethical core, you have the strength to face any new challenges and opportunities because you have the sure knowledge that you are up to the task, and that even if you fail at times, you will not give up and eventually will find the answer or solution.

It is only when we confuse faith and rationality, and attempt to use faith as a tool to reach our goal, that we are doomed to failure. Faith is a feeling, not a tool.

I had a client who attended a Small Business luncheon and was told by an expert consultant that she needed a blog and that it would help her business. She believed the speaker, and came to my agency and said, “I need a blog.”

We discussed why she wanted a blog. We rationally explored who would be interested in reading it, and came to the conclusion that the way in which her customers find her business and what they want out of it would not be enhanced by a blog. We discussed the amount of time and effort it takes to maintain a blog, and compared it to other expenditures of effort which could have a direct impact on new customer acquisition and repeat business.

When we were done, her belief that she needed a blog and her faith in the speaker/consultant was replaced with a rational assessment of blogs and their ability to deliver ROI for her business at this time.

The conversation reminded me of the now classic, cliche conversation from the mid-90’s:

“I need a website.”
“Why?”
“Everybody else has one.”
“What do you want the site to do for your business?”
“I don’t know. I just know that I need one.”

We all know how well that turned out.

Now is the time to have faith in our ability to use our rationality to navigate the challenges ahead and come out of them stronger, smarter, and more able to succeed at the hard tasks at hand for our nation, our businesses and our selves.

It is not the time to reignite the war between faith and rationality that has divided and handicapped us for centuries.

So can someone please explain to me why something that’s so easy to see on 5th Avenue is so much harder to see in our own lives?

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Business Directed Advertising Integrated Marketing Marketing

The Most Sexy, Surprising and Shocking Marketing Numbers of 2008

It’s the end of the year, and that means it’s time for bloggers everywhere to do one of two things:  an annual recap, or predictions for next year. I’d like to examine some marketing numbers that are in turn sexy, surprising and shocking.

SEXY

Let’s start with my favorite number of the whole year, and it’s about as sexy as a marketing number gets:  52% of  women 39-44 would rather give up sex for 2 weeks than internet access for the same period of time. It’s part of a new survey by Harris Interactive sponsored by Intel that finds that most Americans feel Internet access is essential to their lives. The survey also says that 82% say having internet enabled devices help them stay current on the economy and 87% say it’s helped them save money by:  price comparison research before buying (84%), simply shopping online (66%), or by finding coupons, discounts, or special internet-only promotions (65%).

With numbers like that, combined with the retail meltdown, rising costs of commercial space and inventory, and the uncertain cost of energy, can we as marketers continue to look at internet retailing as an ugly stepchild, with a mere fraction of advertising and marketing spending?

SURPRISING

Now my second favorite numbers: 23% and 36%. They’re the number of adults over 65 who play games, and the percentage of those who play every day. Why are they surprising? The 36% is higher than any other age group except teens.  That’s right — according to the Pew Internet Project’s Annual Gadget Survey, people over 65 play games more frequently than any other adults. A few other interesting numbers from this survey:   53% and 21%.  It’s the number of adults (18+) who play video games and the number who play every day! And of course, no surprise here:  97% of teens and 81.9% of 18-29-year olds play games.

With numbers like that, can most of us continue to ignore gaming platforms as marketing mediums any longer, or avoid figuring out an effective and hopefully respectful way to communicate with consumers using this medium?

SHOCKING

My third and final number is 16%. It’s the number of high school and college students who actually pay attention to marketing emails, according to an eROI survey reported on Marketing Charts.  And it’s shocking given that these are email super users. On average, they’ve been sending emails since they were 13, had email addresses for 8 years and have 2.4 email addresses each. They love email:  26% say it’s their favorite form of communication. (Of course, 37% choose texting.) 55% of them check their email more than 3 times a day.

And yet only 16% read marketing emails and 66% of them say that even if they read an email, they never take action afterward. (I know what you’re thinking:  a 16% open rate and a 34% conversion rate would be great, if it was your email. But that’s not an open rate, it’s an avoidance rate and it’s a nightmare for student marketers.)

With numbers like these, can we continue sending messages that are innocuous at best and spam at worst, rather than looking to use new technologies to make more engaging connections with the lucrative teenage consumer?

So, what are my predictions for next year? Sorry, my crystal ball is cracked and my prognostic abilities are more willful than prescient. For instance, some look at Twitter’s 600% growth in 2008 and the $1 Million in revenue Dell attributes to Twitter and see the next big marketing tool. I’m not sure what I see, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets overwhelmed with poorly conceived and executed marketing messages and become less use-worthy than it is now. (See, willful — I really don’t want to have to learn how to use Twitter.)

With sexy, surprising and shocking numbers like these concerning critical demographic groups like women, seniors and students, what I will do is leave you with one question to ponder as we enter 2009:

Can someone please explain to me how any marketers can even think of doing any business as usual in 2009?

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Marketing

Shredding History to Make a Buck

A couple of weeks ago I was reading an article about Michael Eisner’s life after Disney in the Sunday NY Times and I came across a marketing gimmick that surprised me.

As you may or many not know, Eisner is the owner of Topps, the trading card company. The article mentioned an upcoming series of event-worn Topps Baseball cards, which are made by attaching pieces of a baseball uniform to trading cards.  These event-worn cards are very popular and highly collectible, precisely because only a few cards out of the whole set are actually event-worn cards. (The practice is far from new — in 1993 Press Pass started the category of event-used cards by offering redemption cards for NASCAR race-used lug nuts. Upper Deck issued the first cards with pieces of game used jerseys attached, Press Pass countered with race-worn fire suits and pieces of burnt rubber attached to the cards, and the arms race was on.)

What bothered me about this was that the uniforms Topps was cutting into tiny little pieces this time belonged to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

And it didn’t just bother me.  Apparently, it bothers Mr. Eisner as well.

The article says that “Eisner, a serious art collector, is openly uneasy about the endeavor, but Scott Silverstein, the chief executive of Topps, explains that this gimmick is a big moneymaker.”

I don’t care what you do with a piece of a used rubber tire, Jeff Gordon’s racing suits, Kobe Bryant’s jersey, or even Andy Roddick’s jock strap. There are plenty of them, and you can always make more.

Some may say, “One man’s history is another man’s product line,” and in this case, unfortunately, they’d be right. Misguided, but right.

Some may argue that it’s extending the franchise, so to speak, democratizing the ownership of the collectible. Many more people can own a piece of the Babe and revel in his history, this way, than just the single collector owning the uniform. (Of course, frequently those collectors loan those items to museums, so many can benefit.)

Following that same line of thought, though, why don’t we grind up the original Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, sprinkle them into a giant milkshake, and let everyone in America drink some, thereby allowing all of us to share more deeply in our nation’s most important memorabilia.

But c’mon, Scott! Surely you could think of a couple of other ways to use these rare and historic uniforms to drive sales besides just shredding them.

Here’s just one from a friend of mine: How about putting 10 “golden” tickets into packs of baseball cards? The winners get flown to the new Yankee Stadium for the drawing, where two of them get to win the unshredded uniforms, which are then placed on temporary display at the stadium or in Cooperstown or the Smithsonian or someplace where the public can enjoy them. It’s a prize that can easily drive sales. The winners get a historic plaque, a trip onto the field at Yankee Stadium, and two of them get a valuable investment they can pass on to future generations. Plenty of sizzle and sales, with history intact.

Besides, in today’s collectible card industry, what’s so unique about one more set of cards with a sliver of fabric in them? And why stop with Ruth and Gehrig’s uniforms? Why not buy the Shroud of Turin and cut it up? I bet that would sell some cards.

Finally, have you even considered the potential for backlash? What if baseball fans and card collectors are so appalled at the lack of respect for history and tradition (which is, after all, an important part of being a baseball fan and a baseball card collector), that rather than flock to stores to buy the cards, they boycott them instead?

Mr. Eisner, I’m betting that you’ve done pretty well in your career, trusting your gut. Why are you surrendering your integrity to your CEO and his promise that if you just trust him and do what he says, everything will work out great in the end? After all, John McCain pretty much did the same thing with his integrity and it didn’t work out so well for him.

Look, I’m a marketing guy, and I’ve been party to my share of promotional innovation, especially during my years at Marvel. But there’s a line between leveraging content to engage fan interest and exploiting it in an attempt to sell product. And in my opinion, this crosses that line.

But maybe I’m wrong, and I just don’t get it. So if that’s the case, can someone please explain to me why it’s become acceptable to destroy history in the name of making a buck?