Back Seat Marketers

I watched Disney’s latest tween movie made for TV (with the kids): Camp Rock. OK, standard fair as far as made for TV movies go, but I have to say that Disney seems to be figuring out an updated model for successful media management.

Beyond Scarcity Marketing with events such as Hannah Montana, Disney is showing that it can also step up to the freshness and frequency needed to stave off the problems of Tivo and its time shifting short attention spans. High School Musical may well run into a 4th, 5th and 6th edition and the expansion of other creative properties on its network are creating many more reasons to watch early and regularly to keep up with the story lines.

Who else is figuring this model out? Trent Reznor of NIN. Didn’t think I could fit together Disney and NIN in one post, eh? Well, Trent has pushed no less than three albums in this year with free content, some pay for content and tons of interactivity with his audience.

Creative frequency is the new grand slam pop chart topper, and interactive is the new means to monetize by leveraging scarcity from a limited venue of both time and place.

At a time when some shows are tempted to lower costs by doing less weeks per year and less minutes per show, the new successful model in media is likely to be more content, more frequently and more interactive. As Umair would say, it is either in the networks’ DNA or it isn’t. I’m long on Revision3 for just that reason.

Even the top tier brands are beginning to feel the US consumer pinch.

To appreciate our situation, consumer sentiment is reaching long time lows (source: St. Louis Fed):

Value marketing isn’t about going for cheap, it is about getting more for less = benefits / price. Wal-Mart forged value merchandising into almost every consumer category they served in the last 15 years to the point where we can find a value proposition easily. In fact, Ikea’s entire marketing strategy is built on value propositions as opposed to cheap or luxury.

What happens when value consumers start to face headwind? A NYT article today on the Recession Diet provides MasterCard spending data on how people are narrowing ‘nice to have’ purchases back to smarter everyday purchases.

When looking at the drops in consumer sentiment, people’s lost confidence takes a couple years to recover. During times like these, people change behavior as a result of economics. These large macro shifts in behavior become prime times for new ideas and brands to take hold, especially in categories that have been over-innovated, or have been incrementally improved beyond consumer need (e.g. Honda in the 70’s v. the Big 3 auto makers).

With continued growth in consumer electronics, has the tech arena been over-innovating, or striving to meet mass consumer needs?

An old adage about how you create perceptions. When you’re a market leader, you typically don’t want to detract your message by mentioning other players. Conversely, followers play on how they meet needs as compared to others.

Ohhh, Mr. Stewart, on Obama and Clinton: well displayed…

At work, we talk about determining user problems, finding innovative solutions that hit top concerns, and finally creating delight in the experience. Enter: Zappos.com, an online retailer for clothes, shoes and other gear.

Today, I got this note from the customer service team after buying some shoes:

Dear Cory,

Good news!

Although you originally ordered Standard (4 to 5 business days) shipping and handling, we have given your order special priority processing in our warehouse and are upgrading the shipping and delivery time frame for your order. Your order will ship out Monday, April xx, 2008 and be given a special priority shipping status so that you can receive your order even faster than we originally promised!

Please note that this is being done at no additional cost to you. It is simply our way of saying thank you for being our customer…

If you’ve enjoyed your experience with us, please tell your friends and family about Zappos.com!

Thank you!

——————————–
Zappos.com Customer Loyalty Team

Actually, I bought a couple things today, and Zappos.com was the one that went above and beyond. I know where I’ll go next time I need to buy something, that’s for sure.

Zappos.com turns a nice idea into great execution and as a result I’m blogging it up.

Update: The Zappos folks have a twitter page? This is quite a statement about ‘people representing the company’ and customers interacting with a retailer. Two words: forward thinking.

FYI, Google is not in the internet business, it is primarily in the advertising and media delivery business.

Google’s PPC traffic report from comScore today reflects the nature of the emerging recession that is gripping most of Corporate America. While technology VCs would like to think that PPC will be the last element of marketing to be touched, because it is ROI oriented, they may be missing an important temporary facet on this point in the short term.

First, companies cut variable costs quickly when facing a down turn. As a result, PPC advertising may actually be one of the only current costs being used, and as a more variable, more responsive cost in the system may get cut because it can get turned on and off so easily. Interestingly, if people slow down buying, and then ROI gets worse making the PPC returns less compelling, we may be seeing a real-time consumer slow down occur via Google’s click traffic.

Second, most major corporate marketing departments aren’t using PPC as the major element of lead generation or sales. As such, the decision to cut “everything else” in the face of having to get rid of programs means that PPC is still fairly high on the list of things to remove when budgets get cut v. the big media splash campaign that supports a new product in store.

One last thought…
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see Google’s new account spend v. existing account comparables?

Can’t help but think that the possible combination of Best Buy and Circuit City is an old school move to get quick hit, bolt-on growth instead of a way to create value for consumers. Honestly, how does a DVD rental chain integrate with an electronics retailer other than products from one are played by products bought by another. Sure, Best Buy sells CD’s and DVD’s which can be used as the strategic difference between the firms, but…

Jim Keyes, Blockbuster CEO, dreams that this acquisition will make them a consumer-solution focused company:

He provided Apple Inc.’s stores as an example of “a user-friendly one-stop shop with solutions for the consumers” that he sees as a sort of model for a combination of Blockbuster and Circuit City.

Here’s but a few strategic concerns:

1. Best Buy’s competitive response could be to buy Netflix or get into the rental game. Neither are profit enhancing for Circuit City or Blockbuster.

2. Blockbuster and Circuit City integration (primarily real estate consolidation, product line meshing and branding) could take years, if not a decade, to fully realize synergies on. In that time, what will the consumer electronics and digital media landscape look like? In short, very different than today.

3. This will not create a new Apple. I shop at Apple, I own Apple products and there is no way that the combination of these two firms will create an Apple consumer solutions vision without completely changing what these two firms do. [on that note, see Sears + K Mart a few years later to get a sense of the enormity of the task]

This smells like a bet the company move: Wheels off.

Google’s growth in PPC ads is still gaining share v. the competition. Yahoo! appears to be testing the idea of partially throwing in the towel, but wants to keep options open.

More surprising, the growth rate of PPC ad is expected to be 23% in 2008. I’ve bought into the idea that online ad share v. traditional media is not proportionally correct and should shift dramatically, like double from where it is at. With less than 10% share of the overall ad market, online advertising isn’t growing as fast as it seems like it could.

Advertisers don’t seem to be easily going away from the tried and true version of traditional media campaigns to less chartered waters. In the internet world, are there [non-tech] brands that have grown on mostly interactive media? Without concrete poster children, proving to the majors that the media mix should go in a new direction, it won’t.

In all of this talk of interactive v. traditional, let’s step back. 1:1 marketing is value creating in ways that traditional media isn’t. Creating virtuous cycles by fostering conversations with consumers is how brands will win in a people as marketing message world.

How does Yahoo! create *unique* value for those that aren’t more aggressively integrating online ads? They could:

• Prove that the US population is using the internet (seriously, many still doubt it)
• Partner, buy or merge with a major advertising agency and become a force on Madison Ave.
• Approach advertisers with PPC media buys in a way that feels like traditional media
• Integrate more seamlessly with traditional media campaigns in terms of timing and branding
• Get a case study on how branding and sales are grown - prove that it works beyond just getting people signed up
• Create and leverage centers of content excellence that advertisers will want to associate with

Frankly, AOL and Microsoft don’t improve Yahoo’s chances in being more unique when compared to Google, do they?

Umair is “communitied out”, no small task for a guy that lives and breathes this stuff.

I’ve been stewing for a bit on recent deficiencies in the current web information fire hose which just slams down so much information so fast that my trip to a meeting today meant I missed out on “the dialog”. Not real sure I really needed to be tapped into it for any reason other than my inherent need for information (heard that on a TWIT podcast this morning).

As a marketer, I’m feeling that consumer voice screaming in my head with problems that aren’t being solved. There’s Twitter, blogs, RSS and the social network of choice, but it isn’t mine, on my terms, with my voice and on my server with me sending permissions to other people to share and interact with my media on some grander edgeconomy.

I can’t get at a Twitter stream on a good UI (or Facebook for that matter), can’t keep up with the few hundred blogs I want to track and I’d actually like to add more. All these content creators, good thoughtful folks, don’t all use Facebook, they aren’t all close “friends” deserving of being that close to me anyway, but maybe they will be someday. I’m not interested in narrowing my focus on just the A listers as there are so many more thought leaders putting it out there. I also have to slam together my business life with my personal one while maintaining my “voice”.

To top it off, it is 9 PM on Monday evening and Twitter is down.

This is where the next web product development should begin.

Update: Google’s App Engine is interesting, but not when it comes to the rest of us.

In the past week, a couple folks have brought topics together that feel like critical ingredients of the next wave of the web, and with it marketing communications.

As backdrop, Christopher Locke saw this trend coming back in 2001 in Gonzo Marketing when he noted that Ford was being very progressive in 2000 by trying to get all employees to push forward their passions into online forums. As an example, if people who work for Ford also like to garden, then foster online communities amongst employees offer the possibility to open up to the outside world to interact about all sorts of things that could even include new ideas for Ford’s trucks, but also a lot of other good ideas and meaningful involvement.

This week, Gary V. nails it on his “120″ video covering how all these new social web tools are forcing folks to align all elements of their lives onto the same page. No more secret lives, fake or ambiguous ID’s since Facebook is playing the hand of people to fess up to the networks they belong to for access. Along with that forcing hand comes transparency.

Next up, Loic Le Meur offers solid thoughts on his frustrations of the decentralizations of the social map. Partly, web communications are just becoming more advanced to meet users’ needs, but also he’s noting a problem with the early stages of web’s social tools.

Facebook is a walled garden which offers people a safe and user-controlled environment. While Flickr and MySpace broke a lot of social norms about a person’s online persona, Facebook’s attraction as a safer version of digital media sharing allows for a transitional platform for those still afraid to fully go online. For these ‘early majority’, the idea that digital media may get online with little to no control personal control is still scary. An explosion in video and digital camera technology combined to most cell phones (plus much easier uploading functions) should all but end that fear in the coming years (for many in the early and late majority of tech adoption, not for laggards).

How does this thread together for branding? The two emerging concepts of transparency (=people being who they are at work and at home) plus disintermediation (=tools that foster connectivity without being a platform) create a person as marketer/representative/communicator. [note: yes, I’m pulling a term, disintermediation, that isn’t really used for the web, but I think it fits]

Marketing strategy and communication is becoming more like silly putty. While these branding concepts are not novel in for web developers and marketers, it is very challenging for firms outside of the interconnected web that are used to highly structured interactions. Silly putty can even make a copy of the news/comics that can be stretched.

InvestorInsight’s John Mauldin points to the solution to the credit market. You guessed it…

“Maybe we see the formation of funds that step in to do lending the old-fashioned way. They actually look at the quality of the credit. They put some skin in the game (their risk capital) in order to securitize the debt. And the rules of lending become very transparent. It is not clear what the actual form will take, but something like that is going to be what we see in a few years. More transparency and actual risk on the part of the agency/fund/group that makes the loan will be the order of the new day.

Agreed. (emphasis mine)

The BuzzBin talks about how more of a marketing department is becoming a 2 way street. My guess is that all the areas will get there eventually if we’re all doing our jobs.