"If someone preaches profit-maximizing as a company's highest goal, then that's simply wrong. Hell, it's criminal."
-- Dietrich Mateschitz
"If someone preaches profit-maximizing as a company's highest goal, then that's simply wrong. Hell, it's criminal."
-- Dietrich Mateschitz
10 March 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
|
Last month Scoble said "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."
I propose a stronger wording: "You should be fired if you conceive of your marketing site as being anything other than an RSS link to and from your audience."
Why go through all the bother of creating a slick online "brochure" when everyone else can create the same thing by spending cubic dollars? Flash tours, splashy graphics -- they're all so commonplace, so boring. And how many times do I visit a non-transactional marketing site? Once, maybe twice?
Instead, create a site around what's unique: you and your offering. Speak with a real voice. And listen and learn. Use RSS, and not a glossy brochure, to strike up a relationship with a potential or current customer.
Here's a great example.
06 March 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|
Most business magazines would have you believe that a big, nasty monster called "commodification" really does live under the bed. Or perhaps in the closet. This view of world believes that dwindling margins, shrinking revenues, outsourcing to China, and the great sucking sound of WalMart are all inevitable parts of doing business circa 2005. The monster is going to get you...
Hogwash. Creating cool stuff that matters is the best way to avoid the commodification trap, and cultivating the ability to create that cool stuff in a cool way makes things even sweeter. To illustrate this point, I'd like to point you to economist Virginia Postrel's recent NYT article on American Leather, a furniture manufacturer using lean manufacturing, enlightened employment practices, and a modular design philosophy to create (and claim) real value in the marketplace. In an industry rife with cost and price pressures, American Leather's sales are growing 17% per year year. And their products are pretty nifty.
Not that it's been an easy ride for the firm. Its co-founder Bob Duncan came from an engineering background, which enabled him to implement the innovative manufacturing culture that defines American Leather, but that training didn't prepare him for what it really took to get something to market. Says Duncan:
At the end of the day, you have to sell the stuff. You can have the coolest products. You can build it in 20 minutes and deliver anything you want. But if nobody buys it, it's irrelevant. As an engineer, the biggest thing I've learned in the whole process is how hard it is to sell things.
I love what American Leather has done and what they stand for. Designing your venture to create the products people want in the way they want them is the best way to beat the commodification monster.
26 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
|
Today Robert Scoble said something terribly trenchant about marketing:
"You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."
He's right.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) isn't about blogs. It isn't about geeking out and being a blogger, either. Forget blogs. RSS is about giving your customers the ability to say "Yes, I'd like to continue to hear what you've got to say." You'd have to be a total coward of a marketer not to try using a RSS feed (whether you call it a blog or not) to have a conversation with your customers. It'll take a bit of work, and you're going to have to put some writing and thoughts and feelings out into the public domain and maybe take a risk or two, but that's life.
Good marketing takes guts.
19 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|
As a design thinker, I wouldn't dream of embarking on a development project without first establishing my point of view (POV). Establishing and growing a POV is an integral part of my design process. Think of a POV as your take on why whatever you're creating merits a place in the universe. What makes it remarkable?
As it turns out, establishing a strong POV has everything to do with good storytelling. For help in illustrating this idea, I direct you to the writing of Scott Rayburn, who is growing a tasty new blog around teaching great public speaking, and to some extent, storytelling. He insists that to create a good story, you need to understand your Big Idea:
First, wade through all the fact and figures and themes of a subject and distill everything down to an idea that can be expressed in fewer than 10 words.
Next, shape your message around those 10 words... When your audience hears your presentation, what is it you want them to remember above all else?
So the concept of the Big Idea is to storytelling what POV is to design: don't leave home without it. Now, I believe that to make your designs take hold in the world, you need to be a good storyteller. So it's delightful to think that perhaps design thinkers already know the right process for designing -- and telling -- good stories.
17 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
|
For a whole host of reasons, I've become obsessed with the idea that most of process of bringing cool stuff to life is about telling great stories. Great stories are a way to communicate a complex value proposition, evoke emotions, relate a new offering back to its brand, or to shape the Reflective elements of a design that create "brand" in the first place. And storytelling is a wonderful way -- perhaps the only way -- for innovators to convince key stakeholders, partners, and collaborators of the worth of their quest.
Storytelling holds the potential to take business thinking from the cold, dry left-brain world of 4P's and 5C's and 6 sigma to a warm, rich world of ethos and pathos. It's about being human.
Example: when I was marketing QuickBooks Online, I had a helluva job on my hands: how do I convince really busy, really technology wary, really penny-wise small business people to adopt a non-sexy accounting software solution that requires the use of a scary new technology platform (the Internet) and a strange business/transaction model (software as service)? I spent months iterating my way to what, in retrospect, is an obvious solution: tell stories. And not just any stories, but stories told by users themselves, telling them in a "keep it real" kind of way. As you can see here, I created stories using raw, basic photos, and didn't do anything to edit the verbatim words of my customers. Zilch, nada, nothing. In turn, these stories are compelling to prospective customers because they ring true, plain and simple. They're good stories in a way that a traditional software industry white paper could never be.
This is why I can't wait to start reading John Winsor's book Beyond the Brand. On his blog he provides a nice excerpt which explains the key elements of compelling storytelling:
See the rest of his blog post here. I, for one, look forward to using his wisdom to enhance my ability to tell good stories.
14 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
|
Why you should really focus on creating net promoters (not net detractors):
01 February 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
|
“Brand management is fake." -- Carlos Ghosn
28 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
"We are in a long-term campaign to close our credibility gap. The reality of our hardware and the general misperception of the overall buying public still exist. The V-Series is shouting that we have performance and to take a look. We want to bring the general public up to speed on what's happening at Cadillac. Part of that is getting the right kind of drivers into our products who will spread the news by word of mouth. If we give them a piece of hardware that is satisfying to drive, we've got them in our boat and have made them all advocates."
-- Jim Taylor, General Manager, Cadillac
How do you build a brand? The people at Cadillac are rebuilding their brand piece by piece, and they're doing it right:
It's not about creating an expensive advertising campaign, holding your breath, and hoping the suckers don't notice that their purchase doesn't live up to your promises. Build it right, get the mavens to come, and then everyone else will come.
PS: If you're asking "Why so many cars on this blog?", here's my answer.
26 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (2)
|
Good marketing takes guts. Sure, analytics are important and you need to have them if you want to avoid blowing both halves of your promotional budget on negative NPV efforts. But analytics aren't sufficient. Good marketing means taking unquantifiable risks once in a while. Really, what do you have to lose?
That's why I was thrilled last week to see that Footnote No. 2 on the iPod Shuffle product page said "Do not eat iPod Shuffle". Even with the lowliest footnote, here was Apple being Apple, thinking different, not afraid to poke fun at uptight lawyers and all the CYA footnoting typical of consumer product marketing. This was about being fractal, being willing to be as hip and daring in something as trivial as a footnote as Apple is with big things like messaging, industrial design, and channel strategy. Somewhere in Cupertino sat a brilliant, grinning brand manager, and I wanted to hire them on the spot.
So imagine my dismay today when I went back to the Apple site to write a post about that brilliant brand manager and found that their cheeky disclaimer has been replaced by this piece of paralegal drivel:
Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding
Perhaps the other thing was just a joke. Or perhaps some gutsy brand manager or web developer got their wee wee hit by the hard hammer of the CMO. In the end, boring won out over brilliant.
Bummer. Good marketing takes guts.
Feb 4 update: I ate iPod Shuffle
25 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)
|
Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary:
A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no matter how close you zoom in)
Good brands are fractal. Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you'll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself. Since "brand" is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything -- large and small -- is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing.
What's the implication for creating cool stuff? I haven't fully thought this one out, but I think it all boils down to leadership. Behind every great product is someone who had a vision of the end thing in mind and was able to say "yes" and "no" to help the development team understand that vision. In a way, great products require a kind of fractal leadership able to recognize the right texture for a button, the right message for the box, the right approach to customer support and service.
24 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (3)
|
A few weeks ago I bemoaned the lack of attention paid to the temporal aspects of designed objects. The same criticism can be applied to the world of brand promotional activities.
Promotions are one way in which we can shape the reflective aspects of a design. We typically think about promotional campaigns as only impacting relatively brief spans of time -- say an hour (Super Bowl commercial), a day, a week, a month, or even a year. But what would happen if you challenged your marketing crew to come up with promotional strategies that span decades, even generations? I bet you'd be dished up some innovative campaigns -- and I'd wager many of those would yield a positive net present value (or positive ROI). By investing for the ages, you simply have to shoot to create something intrinsically valuable.
Take BMW's Art Car Collection, for example. Starting in 1975 with Alexander Calder's painting of a tasty BMW 3.0 CSL Le Mans racer, the Art Car Collection has continued more or less uninterrupted up through the present day. Some of the resulting artwork is simply stunning, some is less so, but all of it serves to underscore several key elements of the BMW brand: audaciousness, sensitivity to form, and a belief that each car is a unique and valuable work of kinetic, industrial art. Instead of dropping thousands of dollars on a few TV commercials, BMW instead chose to create something of intrinsic worth. The payoff for BMW is that it can now add spice to any public event simply by rolling out a few of the Art Cars, so weighty is their physical charisma.
A very special moment for me indeed was being able to sneak up and caress the rear fender of Calder's car as it sat, unattended, at the Monterey Historic Races a few years ago. As a young boy I saw a photo of driver Sam Posey sawing away at the wheel. Seeing it in the flesh was like touching the very soul of BMW.
Isn't that a better investment in the brand than a few TV commercials?
18 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Where do brands come from? Robert Lutz gets it -- over at FastLane he's explained what the Chevrolet brand means to him. Notice that he's not using abstract language to talk about brand; instead, he talks about actual cars and their qualities, because it's product that creates brand meaning and value, not the other way around. For Lutz, brand is also about passion:
... I do love the passion with which the Camaro faithful express their undying commitment to the object of their affections... At the end of the day, that's what our business is all about - inspiring passion among the faithful. That's what has allowed me to spend my life's work in an industry I'm passionate about. We should all be so lucky.
Creating and sustaining a brand that people really want to make a part of their lives is about connecting functionality and emotion and meaning. Your products and the services you build around them are what bring it all to life. Passionate people are the means to that end.
14 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
"Sometimes it seems like the very best stuff sells itself... Sometimes, salesmanship is overrated. What matters more is real marketing, marketing that involves making the right product, not hyping it." - Seth Godin
13 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
All of a sudden, Aston Martin is the "It" brand of the automotive world. To be sure, the Aston Martin of the 70's, 80's and 90's had a certain cachet, but it was a cigar-smoke-and-over-stuffed-leather-chairs-British-men's-club kind of cachet. No more. Now Aston Martin is sexier than Ferrari, sportier than Porsche, manlier than Lamborghini. The new DB9 is the first modern GT car design of the 21st century.
This is a true brand renaissance, brought about not by the machinations of a branding firm or an advertising agency, but via a product development team that reached back to the golden days of Roy Salvadori and James Bond, distilled the essence of Aston Martin into something actionable, and then went to work.
Easy for me to say, but what does it mean, and how did they do it? They did it by taking something as familiar as the process of starting the motor and asking "What could be uniquely Aston Martin about this experience?" Here's what Aston Martin designer Sarah Maynard says about the start button on the new DB9:
It seemed wrong to us that most car starter buttons - the first point of contact between driver and engine - is a plastic button. We wanted something better so decided on crystal-like glass. The Aston Martin logo is sand etched into it. It's lit red when the ignition is on, and afterwards changes to light blue. I think it's a really cool piece of design.
Glass. Etching. Not the usual way of doing business. More expensive than plastic. But special, and evocative of the way British cars used to be. And incredibly good for the Aston Martin brand, and perhaps even a good reason to spend so much on a car. This is great example of decisions made using not the data of a cost accountant, but with the judgment and deep experience of a trained designer who lives and feels and loves brand.
12 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
|
Fellow bloggers, members of the blog-reading community, and Web Dudes (you know who you are), I have to admit that my last few posts have been merely annotated links to third-party content rather than the stimulating, original material you've come to expect as a discerning reader of metacool. Why? I've had a helluva cold so far in 2005 and I'm not feeling too generative.
So, here's another annotated link: Fortune recently published an insightful article on the state of business blogging. It briefly mentions The Official QuickBooks Online Edition blog I started at Intuit (I wrote the majority of the content on the QuickBooks Online blog before October 2004 -- my name got overwritten when I left the company due to a bug in the TypePad software).
Blogs are fast becoming a critical part of the marketing mix, so it's worth your while to give the article a read.
06 January 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Another list. Here are my favorite reads of 2004. No claims to comprehensiveness or consistency, and not all were published in the past year; just a list of books that made me think different in 2004:
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins: an elegant book on the nature of intelligence and how the brain works. The good news for metacool readers is that "real intelligence" is the way that designers think.
The System of the World, by Neil Stephenson: third in the baroque triology, capable of stimulating latent nerdism, and a helluva of a long book, it continues Stephenson's fascinating journey through the origins of modern finance and computing. I loved every page of it. Not for everyone, which is refreshing.
The Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen: forget the hype, the content is outstanding. Clay tested the ideas in this book on my class at Harvard Business School, and yet I still find something fresh and interesting each time I go back to its pages. The chapters on need-based market segmentation strategies are excellent.
Porsche: Excellence was Expected, by Karl Ludvigsen: perhaps the best business book of 2004, unfortunately Excellence is marketed as a car book, which will keep it out of the mainstream. In a world where marketing-led "brand building" is an oxymoron, Ludvigsen shows how Porsche built a brand with deep integrity piece by piece, slowly evolving it over time. His discussion of the genesis of the Porsche Cayenne SUV also shows how quickly a brand can be diluted and maimed by managers out to make a quick buck.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie: any book recommended by both Richard Tait and Bob Sutton (both proponents of humane business practices, and really good guys themselves) has to be good, and Hairball delivers. Look, any organization will have its problems, and those problems can seem particularly nasty when seen from the inside. The real question is: do you care enough about those problems do something about them? Hairball is a guide to engaging with an organization to help solve its problems without losing your soul. It also contains some great advice about dealing with nasty behaviors in the workplace, including teasing, which has run rampant in every org I've ever worked in.
Emotional Design, by Donald Norman: if you haven't noticed, I'm quite taken by this wonderful piece of thinking. His Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of human cognition is a powerful way to understand slippery concepts like brand and meaning, making this one of the most important books on marketing (where marketing is the process of understanding human needs and creating offerings to meet those needs) to come out in years. His message about beautiful things working better is important, too. Read this one.
30 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
John Moore of Brand Autopsy came up with this nifty comparison of old school / new school marketing philosophies:
Reach | Frequency
Remarkability | Fanaticism
29 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Earlier this year I talked about the remarkable, user-driven Firefox ad campaign.
Well, I'm happy to say that today I joined over 10,000 other web browser geeks to run an ad in the New York Times with each of our names writ small -- very, very, very small:
Now, it's not an outstanding ad as far as ads go. And since it ran in a newspaper, it has next to nil staying power (we would have done better to put a Firefox sticker on the dashboard of Dale Jr.'s NASCAR Monte Carlo). But it certainly is a milestone in the history of customer evangelism.
Have you tried Firefox lately? Over 11 million people have so far, because it's a great product worth talking about.
16 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
|
Here’s the headline of an article I just read:
Shocking! It got me all worked up. My mind filled with visions of hell freezing over and Enzo Ferrari’s body spinning (at 19,000 RPM, mind you) in his grave.
I have nothing against the concept of engineers from India working on Ferrari motors. Bear in mind that the day of tragic, cigarette-smoking Italian craftsmen hammering out Ferraris from stolen Cinzano signs is long gone; today Ferrari’s general manager is French, the chief of design is American, and its head mechanic is British. No, what matters to the Ferrari brand is that the motors and cars continue to be designed and built in Italy. So, no matter where they were born, the designers at Ferrari need to feel, act, and think Italian, imbibing lambrusco, eating pork products and parma cheese, and dreaming of screaming motors whenever they look out at the foggy expanses of Emilia right outside their drawing offices.
But.
Read the article carefully and you’ll see that Ferrari isn’t outsourcing anything. They’re just buying design software created by the Indian company Tata, and some Indian engineers are going to live at the Ferrari factory (lucky bastards!) to support it. No engine design work will occur outside of Italy.
The lesson here isn’t that outsourcing is bad, it’s that the essential Ferrari brand idea that Italy is Ferrari is Italy should be guarded as if it were a life and death matter. At the very least, Ferrari’s business development people should have put a gag order on Tata.
Often times effective brand management is more about influencing what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.
14 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Though I spent a couple of years getting my MBA (which was a great, fun thing to do), I'm a bit wary of the whole MBA thing in general. The degree is getting a bit too rubber stamp-ish for my comfort level, as exemplified by this excerpt from a Slate article:
The Pennsylvania attorney general's office Monday sued an online university for allegedly selling bogus academic degrees -- including an MBA awarded to a cat.
Thing is, I bet the cat made some pretty good contributions to the class discussion. At least enough to get a "2". Takeaway? Assess the person, not the degree. Did they really learn anything?
08 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Great article in today's NYT Magazine on creating (and paying for) formal mechanisms to foster word of mouth communication around a market offering.
So long as they keep things real, agencies like BzzAgent and Tremor offer a fantastic addition to the traditional marketing mix. Of course, as with all promotional activities, formal word of mouth campaigns should only be used in addition to, rather than in lieu of, having a remarkable, human-centric offering worth talking about in the first place. Even better, that offering should be designed to foster word of mouth behavior on its own, so that most of your word of mouth can be earned, rather than bought.
05 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
There are blogs that focus on original (or somewhat original) content and thinking, and there are blogs that focus on cataloging and linking to interesting things. metacool is mostly about the former, but once in a while I find something remarkable that I want to pass along, like this:
I've built my professional life around putting humans at the center of business activities. To that end, I love this Cool News bit about a Mr. Butts of HEB, my favorite (really!) grocery store in Texas. Want to create a better offering? Create a culture of deep empathy for your users -- HEB gives employees $20 and tasks them to see what it really feels like to feed a family of four for a week on that bill.
02 December 2004 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
|
Swedish designer Sixten Sason was the man responsible for creating the aesthetics of of the Hasselblad camera in the late 1940's, a design so compelling that today it defines not just a product but an entire brand:
A remarkably prolific and flexible designer, Sason also drove the aesthetic design of Saab automobiles up through the 1960's. The unique design language he coined lived on into the early 90's before GM bought Saab and lost the trace. He started it all off with this iconic piece of work, the 1949 Saab 92001, which pretty much says all you need to know about what Saab-ness is:
Where do brands come from? What we call "brand" is the sum of all the decisions you make to shape a user's experience of your offerings. Brands are designed and built layer by layer over time. As I've written before, your brand does not define the character of your offerings. Instead, your offerings (and the layers of sales, service, support, and meaning creation surrounding them) define your brand.
Want a strong, vibrant brand? Make “brand building” the job of your product development group and your brand team. If you still need convincing, just think about the incredible amount of brand equity created by Sixten Sason over the course of his career at Hasselblad and Saab, and how quickly Saab lost it once his influence was gone.
28 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|
Forging an enduring bond with customers is at the core of what a brand is all about. What if you could add depth, vigor, and passion to that relationship by encouraging your customers to participate in the creation of the very offering they consume?
For example, Virgin Atlantic recently held an open competition to create the graphics for 20 different airsickness bags. Called Design for Chunks, the contest -- nicknamed "retch for the sky" -- attracted hundreds of submissions and resulted in some tasty (ahem) creations.
Over at Ducati, with an offering miles more complex than an air sickness bag, the potential for user involvement in the design process is lower. Simply put, you can't have laypeople mucking about with the design and engineering of a superbike. Even so, working within that constraint, Ducati tries hard to make the Ducatisti feel like they're part of the development process by encouraging them to vote on the details of future products, such as the fuel tank of the 2005 model year 999.
Examples of this kind of participative marketing are manifold, from Firefox soliciting its user base for help with product logos to Guy Kawasaki holding a design bakeoff for the cover of his new book. The point is, why not tap into the collective genius of your users? If in open source software development many brains make deep bugs shallow, then with participative marketing many brains can make shallow offerings deep.
Embrace and engage your users, get deep passion.
21 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|
"If you are a marketer who doesn't know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you're no longer a marketer. You're deadwood."
- Seth Godin
16 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
This week the New York Times talks about the intensely emotional reaction people are having to the new Mustang. While the 2005 Mustang doesn't deliver innovation at the Behavioral level of design (it still has a live rear axle -- so 1960's, eh?), it is a sublime mix of Visceral and Reflective design. Viscerally, the shape is compelling in and of itself (love those tailights); Reflectively, it says "I'm a Mustang and you can project all the good things you know and feel about Mustangs on to me." It's a great example of the product marketing itself -- meaning is embedded into every curve, rather than being forced on the design via a copywriter's slogan.
Retro design has its critics, but as evidenced by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to its new Mustang and GT designs, Ford is striking a decent balance between something new and something old. Better than Chrysler and its PT Cruiser, as good as VW and the New Beetle. Not quite as brilliant as the BMW Mini.
PS: If you're asking "Why so many cars on this blog?", here's my answer.
13 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
The marketing people at Mini do so many things so very well, it's hard to know where to start. So let's begin with the lowly Mini bumper sticker:
I created this sticker in just two minutes at the Mini website. What's happening here is quite cool: rather than printing a jillion stickers, dropping them in the mail, and then hoping that someone slaps one on a car (or even worse, selling the stickers, which is what most automakers do), Mini lets you design your own, and provides you with instructions on how to turn it into a sticker. Odds are only a few Mini whackos will take the time to create a sticker, print it out, and place it ever so carefully on the boot of their Mini. But imagine the deep and passionate conversations these Mini ambassadors can have with civilians around the world!
As a marketer, you want evangelists talking about your offering because their voice rings true and pure in a way that yours can't. So why not enable them to create true and pure marketing collateral, too?
11 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Change This is passing the 100k mark for manifesto downloads from their site, and reckons that if you add in pass alongs enabled by the "smoothness" features built in to those manifestos, the total number is more like 250k. Since August.
Wow.
This is proof that, at least in the case of fostering word of mouth on the internet, if you're smart about building in smoothness and pass along functionality, people will spread your stuff. In addition to designing the tools correctly, Change This set up the human incentives right, too -- they enlisted blogging mavens and connectors (including yrs trly) to host manifestos, and rewarded those uber bloggers with increased traffic and prestige.
04 November 2004 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|
Keen shoes have tipped. In a repeat of the Doc Martens phenomenon of the late 80's, we're going to start seeing them everywhere, on everyone. The thing about a pair of Keen shoes is that you can't help but notice them when they stroll by -- their designers took a risk and added a big old ugly toe-protecting bumper to the front of the tried-and-true Teva, and came up with something which screams "Look! I'm different and kind of cool." That toe bumper may be ugly, but it represents Keen's entire "brand", and no amount of money thrown away on awareness building could come even close to the word of mouth (message of foot?) buzz generated by this aesthetic oddity. Now, I'm a TiVo guy, so I don't watch many commercials, but to the best of my knowledge Keen doesn't spend anything on advertising. I saw my first pair at REI, then I saw another set on the toes of a friend... and... and I had to have a pair.
The lesson here is to build your marketing into your offering. Make something great, something interesting, and make sure that you design that offering such that private usage is made unavoidably public.
Keen. All the cool kids are wearing them.
26 October 2004 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
|
The folks at Firefox are helping their passionate user base take out an ad in the New York Times so that the world can hear about the Firefox experience.
It's a cool marketing idea; not quite open source, but something close. No doubt the imitators will dive in, but Firefox has filled the idea vacuum with this one. Brilliant.
26 October 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
|
Attended Stanford’s EDAY over the weekend, and had my hat knocked in the creek by the event’s final speaker, the Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Richard Tait. The theme of EDAY was “the power of play,” so who better than a gaming company Grand Poo-Bah to tie a bow around things?
Tait’s spiel focused on his own version of the 4 P’s: Passion, Productivity, Profitability, and Play. Some particularly chewy nuggets:
Passion:
Productivity:
Profitability:
Play:
Speaking of bonus items, here’s a charming PDF by Tait which nicely summarizes his thoughts on culture, meaning and innovation. I’m still looking for my hat…
13 October 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Seth Godin has a nice post about foodie, a perfect example of doing things to the hilt. Joe DeSalazar’s foodie is to a fancy dinner what Steve Moal’s Zausner Torpedo is to a standard luxury car: same fundamental offering, but implemented with a point of view obsessed with total quality and epicurean delight.
Granted, you’re not going to get to the mass market by doing stuff to the hilt, but there is an audience out there. And they’re hungry.
Why not do it to the hilt?
06 October 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Thanks for being part of metacool.
If you can spare 5 minutes, give me some feedback on my blogging by answering any of the following:
1) What do you like so far?
2) What could be better?
3) What topic areas would be cool to explore?
Mahalo.
27 September 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Tenacious D may be able to rock 24x7x365, but I can't. I found this out last week with the public launch of a weblog for the product I market. All my creative energy was consumed in a tremendous endothermic blogging reaction, hence the content drought at metacool.
The blog is getting good reviews from highly connected blogging mavens like Anil Dash and Robert Scoble, but most importantly, customers love it. And I love doing innovative marketing.
16 August 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
This week’s New York Times talks about how wet suit makers are moving beyond addressing only the Behavioral elements of their products to embrace the Visceral and Reflective aspects as well. Instead of cranking out old-style suits that make a surfer's bottom look like a tube of dried chorizo, manufacturers like O’Neill are making sexy new products out of new materials and shapes designed to flatter the body.
John Hunter, designer at O’Neill, says it best in this quote from the article:
You're inside a super-hip, state-of-the-art, rubber human-body girdle, looking cooler and stronger and slimmer and better and feeling it, too. If, as a result of that, you get some extra love, we're fine with that.
When offerings in your industry start to deliver more functionality than users need, it’s time to take a deliberate approach to differentiating your product by paying attention to its Visceral and Reflective components. You need to design the whole burrito and put some love into it.
03 August 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Porsche’s management is planning to add a four-door, front-engine sedan to their lineup. I find this rather painful, as Porsche is all about – and only about – two doors and rear engines. To be clear, it’s not about having just two seats, as the 911, and the 356 before it, proved that four-seat cars can be real sports cars.
So why roll out a four-door sedan? Well, automakers like multiples of ten, and some MBA-type at Porsche wants to be able to grow sales to the 100k mark, something not likely with only a lineup of pure sports cars. Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin recently stated in BusinessWeek that the key to creating shareholder value “… is to avoid a quarterly [earnings] orientation,” but it seems to me that by floating this four-door concept, Dr. Wendelin isn’t practicing what he preaches. Shareholder value is defined as the present value of all future cash flows; if you believe, as I do, that creating a four-door Porsche will erode the brand’s hard-won equity, then it’s bound to erode long-term cash flow as well, for in an automotive landscape where a $30,000 Subaru can run with any Porsche 911, what else is there besides brand image? No, a four-door Porsche is just a play for short-term earnings.
If they were really serious about long-term growth, Porsche the company would keep the Porsche the brand focused on making tasty sports cars, and then find another brand whose name could be used to rollout sedans without dilluting Porsche's heritage, much as Ferrari is doing with Maserati.
Next thing you know they’ll be talking about introducing a SUV.
Oh.
27 July 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
The stock is down 45%, the financial clock is ticking faster... it's time for practicing the brand management of desperation! How about a 20 oz, 740 calorie frozen blended "beverage" that packs a 114 gram carbo wallop and tastes vaguely like a stale floor scrap off our signature donut line? Sure, it'll ruin our laser focus on making great donuts and great donuts alone, and turns us into something more like a Starbucks with better pastries and worse coffee, or a Dunkin' Donuts with better donuts and just-as-mediocre coffee, but we'll keep our jobs for at least a few more months, and besides, as brandroids we're all about line extensions and "tremendous" growth opporunities and what was De Niro talking about anyway with all that "this is this" mumbo jumbo?... I think he was babbling about something like "fundamental goo", which is what this drink is all about and pretty much sums up what Krispy Kreme will be with just, oh, three more years of this kind of inane marketing behavior.
22 July 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
My latest book review is live and in living color at 800 CEO READ Blog
I reviewed Lovemarks, by Kevin Roberts. An interesting read with some stimulating ideas, but not a stellar book.
05 July 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
I recently spent a fine Saturday morning sipping Bluebottle Coffee outside San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace. As I sat there under an open sky watching traffic trickle by on the Embarcadero, it occurred to me that I’m a bit weird when it comes to cars. As in “I can tell the brand of car just from its exhaust note” weird.
Here’s a list of the notable automobiles I heard go by:
Yes, they’re all sports cars – products designed to deliver an emotional use experience. And isn’t it cool that each of these remarkable products delivers a substantial portion of the brand experience via the ears? Believe you me, this stuff doesn’t happen by accident; Mazda is famous for squadrons of engineers who methodically try out umpteen combinations of induction/exhaust components until they reach that indescribable point of aural perfection.
What’s the sound of your brand?
30 June 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
|
Google is hot because they let their products do the talking for the brand. If you think about it, the Google brand is synonymous with the Google use experience, and isn’t the result of some expensive “brand building” campaign. No, those crazy Google people spend their dollars on product. At Google, everyone – the engineers, the graphic designers, the cooks in their fabulous cafeteria – owns the brand.
You can see this in Gmail. Google took free email and said “How would the Google experience work here?” This kind of thinking led somebody at Google to place a wickedly brand-defining message in, of all places, the Trash box (see above). This is brilliant. Like 99.99% of all adult males, I skipped all the marketing messaging when I cranked up Gmail. Sure, I knew going in that it had 1 Gig of memory reserved for me, but this little surprise in my Trash really drove the value proposition home for me. Brilliant.
All experiential elements of your offering can be, should be – must be – thought through and consciously designed to define, embody, and amplify your brand’s unique song.
Good on ya, Google!
28 June 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (4)
|
Download BzzAgent_HBS_CaseStudy_Sum.pdf
John Moore (who is one of my book reviewing peers at 800-CEO-READ-BLOG) turned me on to this summary of an HBS case on BzzAgent. It’s a nice overview of how word of mouth marketing (aka customer evangelism) is affected by network types and the players within them.
The most interesting – and counterintuitive – assertion in this piece is that the most influential source of incremental word of mouth marketing comes from individuals with weak ties to your organization, meaning that they’ve only experienced your brand once before, as opposed to being repeat or long-term customers. The reasoning behind this is that more loyal individuals have already saturated their networks with talk about your offering, while less loyal folk offer virgin fields, so to speak, for you to plow.
This is a nice way of thinking about the dynamics of word of mouth for established brands. For nascent players or offerings, however, you’d have to alter your tactics, because very few individuals, if any, are loyal to you, and in order to cross the chasm you’ve got to establish some pockets of deep loyalty.
07 June 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Bluebottle Coffee Company, an artisan microroaster, is a purveyor of Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ). In the minutes leading up to a sip of Bluebottle espresso, my knees go giddy with anticipation, because they know I’m about to have the best damn coffee around, crafted with care by one James Freeman. Like Woody Allen, Freeman is a clarinetist when not laboring for his art, and that art is sublime: watching him whip up a cappuccino from beans roasted not more than 24 hours ago is a deep lesson in passionate product creation. He’s serious about brewing coffee to the hilt:
The highest achievement, I think, is just a straight shot of espresso. Coffee itself is very sexual. Espresso is nerdy. You have to have the soul of a poet and the heart of a band nerd to get everything right.
Freeman takes things beyond sane limits because it’s the only way he knows – it’s about Way Beyond Critical to Quality (WBCTQ). Ettore Bugatti and Enzo Ferrari understood WBCTQ . Yvon Chouinard, Steve Jobs, and Quentin Tarantino are instinctive WBCTQ’ers. Bluebottle Coffee is using WBCTQ to create what, one day, will be a widely-renowned brand. Doing things to the hilt is how great brands get made.
02 June 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
I believe in products that go beyond the ordinary to deliver memorable experiences. There’s so much clutter in the marketplace that merely competent functionality is, for the most part, a given. What matters more than ever are products which solve real problems in spectacular ways, creating deep meaning for users along the way. True product standouts come from people who take something and do it to the hilt.
Doing things to the hilt means going beyond what is “reasonable” or “expected” by the market. There’s a product development baseline out there which all know and recognize. This is the world of the Ford Taurus, Budweiser, and Taco Bell – all entities where advertising is used to create and push products, because the products largely can’t stand on their own. Why? Because each was developed to a specification of “market demands” laid out in a book, and the very act of writing guidelines down limits the potential for something wonderful happening. Some people call these specifications “critical to quality” metrics, or “CTQ” for short.
Screw CTQ. CTQ’s give us Velveeta, which is congealed boredom. Why not do things to the hilt instead? I want a rich, sublimating cheese that makes my nostrils flip out and my tongue go furry. How about replacing CTQ metrics with “Way Beyond Critical to Quality” (WBCTQ)? We need more people creating things born out of intense, total passion. Making things remarkable. Surprising. Blow-your-hair-back-and-part-it-down-the-middle-wow. Way Beyond Critical to Quality.
31 May 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
In today’s New York Times, Jamie Kitman tells a sorry tale of the demise of Saab. In an earlier post I asserted that “Subaru is the new Saab”, and unfortunately that’s literally true: the new Saab 9-2 is but a badge-engineered Subaru. Kitman agrees that the WRX is the car that Saab should have been building all along:
"Authenticity issues aside, the turbocharged, all-wheel-drive WRX is, at least, the sort of car that Saab might have built today if it had only received enough financing in the 1990’s. Like the rally-winning Saab 96’s of the 1960’s, the 9-2X wrings maximum advantage from being a light car with a small engine and loads of grip."
In contrast, Kitman describes the new Saab 9-7X (which is really a Chevy truck) as “… the very antithesis of the Saab ethos,” and he’s right. Just because you hang a badge on it and put the ignition in the floor doesn’t mean it’s a Saab, no more than lipstick on a bulldog makes a fashion model. In Popeye’s parlance, things are what they are, and your brand (an odious word) is the sum of the feelings your products evoke. A Chevy with a V-8 just can’t feel like a Saab.
Kitman attributes Saab’s crash to a lack of leadership. I would go beyond him to say that leadership was surely lacking, but management, particularly “brand management,” was in no short supply at GM and Saab. The old Saab was run by rally junkies who wore blue and gold underwear; it was run into the ground by a bunch of pin-striped, brand-managing fun sponges whose only gold is on their wrist.
24 May 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Remember Saab? The world-conquering rally cars? The firm whose machines were hallmarks of iconoclastic engineering that coupled functionality, rationality, with understated yet compelling design forms? The crew who brought us ignition on the floor, turbos under the hood, and huge fifth doors which opened up to a cavernous cargo hull?
Well, that Saab is dead, victim of a relentless drive up market to the fairyland of bigger margins and “aspirational” customers. Somewhere along the way, Saab stopped racing and stopped loving cars. They axed the hatchback (you can just see the PowerPoint deck and the MBA voiceover “… the hatchback segment share of market is decreasing year over year…”) and they lost their soul. Only a soulless firm would slap a Saab badge on a Chevy truck, Saab's next big move.
On every parameter of what once made up “Saab-ness”, Subaru is, well, firing on all four horizontally-opposed cylinders. World-conquering rally cars? Check. And piloted by a charismatic Nordic race driver who grew up driving Swedish cars, to boot. Iconoclastic design sensibilities? More than a heaping spoonful: expensive boxer engines justified on the basis of lower CG, rounds of raucous turbos for the entire bar, and all-wheel drive on all models. What Subaru has done is to whip up a distinctive mix of ingredients and pour it into cars that drivers love. Then, instead of blowing their marketing budget on just the usual media mix, they’re out there mixing it up – and winning – in the World Rally Championship across every continent save Antarctica, letting the car-crazies among us know that Subaru creates exceptional driving experiences. And as Malcolm has taught us, those Mavens are the key to word of mouth…
Your brand does not define the character of your products. Your products (and the layers of sales, service, and support surrounding them) define your brand. A brand is not about words and pictures, it’s about feelings. And it’s the product (or the service or both) your company delivers that generates those feelings.
Want a strong, vibrant brand? Make “branding” the job of your product development group and your marketing team. Let the product crazies have the run of the house. I’ll bet my TiVo that the Saab corporate lot is full of boring, unmodified Saabs driven by boring, by-the-number corporate zombies. And the lot at Subaru? Do I have to tell you?
14 May 2004 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (2)
|
"It passes between rooms until it has infested not only your living room, but also your 1.5 bathrooms, your cleanly appointed kitchen, and then your entire sun-drenched, open-plan loft apartment. In the most extreme cases, it will even spread to the string-light-decorated rooftop patio overlooking your recently gentrified neighborhood."
You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to learn more about this deadly epidemic.
30 April 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
Another incredible effort from the folks at Mini.
27 April 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
|
I'm not a bike fanatic (used to be one, though), but I still really dig a well-crafted bike. Rivendell Bicycle Works makes well-crafted bikes.
But they're about more than the bike -- they are a group of people unreasonably obsessed with workmanship and doing the Right Thing. When was the last time you came across any business with a mission statement like this?:
Our bikes are designed and built to withstand a lifetime of long, hard, fast riding and racing, if that's what you're up to, but we don't go out of our way to appeal to the rambunctious, speed-before-all crowd. It isn't us versus them, or retro versus techno, or old versus new. It isn't niche marketing in the tactical sense, either. It's the same gear we prefer and ride, every day. It is not a "market-driven" approach, which is one reason we're so small.
It's enough the make the skin of any cost-conscious, 6-sigma-driven, Excel-grubbin' business person pucker up like an old prune.
I love it.
07 April 2004 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
|