September 27, 2006

What Would DeTocqueville Say?

When Alexis DeTocqueville came to America and wrote his classic Democracy in America in 1830, he lauded our nation's "associations," our ability to get together in groups to discuss and address a wide variety of issues. It was those associations that DeTocqueville thought truly distinguished our country.

Robert Putnam's important book, Bowling Alone, agrees with DeTocqueville's premise. Putnam coined the term "social capital," defined as the prevalence of these associations. And he argued that there has been a serious decline in social capital as people tend to live their lives much less connected to their fellow man. Hence, "bowling alone." Putnam says the decline has been very damaging to our nation's institutions such as education and healthcare. He makes a very compelling case.

Bowling Alone was written before the Internet explosion, and I wonder how Putnam would view the landscape today. He's still correct that according to his measurements of social capital there has been a decline. But what about all of the associations catalyzed by the Internet?

I'm thinking specifically of the affinity groups identified on MeetUp.com. Tonight I checked them out. There are 132 groups just here in the Charleston area. They range from expat Germans to vampire enthusiasts, from ghost trackers to Yorkshire terrier owners, from people interested in bunko to those interested in belly dancing.

I wonder what the consequence of all these associations are. And how are these associations different from the ones identified by DeTocqueville and Putnam?

I think it matters to marketers because we need to understand where consumers feel they belong. What do they feel a part of? How do they perceive their identity? How have their influencers changed? Is it different if you're connected to people in virtual space, rather than "real" space? Is there a different language, and are we marketers attuned to those differences?

Where is DeTocqueville when we need him?

September 24, 2006

The Lessons of Lonelygirl

More than 2 million people watched Lonelygirl on YouTube.com. Many imagined that she was not what she represented she was, but they hung in there anyway...suspending disbelief, at least for the moment.

The enormous audience for Lonelygirl substantiates the theory that we live in not so much in a time of mega-hits, but rather in a time of many, many mini-hits. A fragmented marketplace that welcomes niche players and enables them to succeed very, very well.

The thought occured to me that what if half of Lonelygirl's audience paid $50 each for a full season of Lonelygirl episodes. Not such a far fetched idea. The revenue generated ($50 million) would be plenty to produce quite a series and quite a profit...with no advertisers. The series could be downloaded onto computers, iPods, whatever.

And couldn't this be the way we get much of our entertainment (and information) in the future? And where does that leave traditional advertising venues?

Naysayers will point out that this is the way movies are made...someone produces them (with no advertising) and people pay to see them. No, this isn't what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that the people pay upfront, saying that they want such-and-such a show and are willing to subcribe to it a priori. They get what they want, not what some Hollywood producer hopes they'll want.

There's more to Lonelygirl too. The "lie" of it. And that makes me wonder where we really do stand these days on matters of what's true and what's not. Does it matter to anyone? The lines are so blurred, what with reality shows that aren't reality and news that's not news. I read that the most trusted news person is Jon Stewart. He hosts a show that is fake news! A few years ago, Vice President Cheney chose to appear on a TV show hosted by Armstrong Williams to complain about bias in the press. Armstrong Williams, as we all know now, was a fake journalist on the government payroll!

Our business is communicating the truth about the products, services, companies and institutions we represent. How can we make our messages credible in this blurry environment?

I don't believe that regulation or any other top-down fiats will help. The weight-reduction ads show powerful testimonials from now-thin people, while the screen flashes "Results not typical." Does anyone think the disclaimer discourages purchase? And what about the disclaimers following pharmaceutical ads? Useless, in my opinion.

No, somehow it's got to come from the marketplace. I'm not sure how that will happen. I sure hope it does, and that we're all listening when it does.

September 20, 2006

How Memory Affects Marketing and Communications

We all know how powerful our remembered experiences are and how deeply they inform our reactions to products and services. For example, hear the word "Coke," and each of us remembers childhood memories of that cool, refreshing, bubbly goodness. Successful marketing taps into positive memories and associations. After all, that's a lot of what branding is all about.

The same dynamic occurs with respect to people and events. We saw an extraordinary new play in London called Frost/Nixon. It's about the 1977 interviews that David Frost conducted with former President Nixon. Both men were at low points in their careers. Frost hoped to restore his career by getting Nixon to appear in four hour-long interviews, and he paid Nixon a very high fee in order to get him. Nixon figured that by agreeing to appear with Frost (whom he considered not to be a journalistic heavyweight) he could vindicate himself on a wide variety of issues and become once again a positive national leader.

Both Frost and Nixon were portrayed sympathetically, and I realized that had the play appeared much closer to the 1977 date, I would have brought too many strong feelings to it (especially about Nixon)...so that I would not have had adequate distance to appreciate each individual's perspective...the actual people and event would have been too close, with opinions and prejudices too sharp and raw.

Too close proximity to the actual event may have had a negative effect on two recent movies, Flight 93 and World Trade Center. They may have been released too soon after the actual event.

Daniel Mendelsohn makes this point in a fascinating article in The New York Review of Books.

He tells the story of a play called The Capture of Miletus, by a Greek playwright called Phrynichus. The play appeared only two years after Miletus was brutally occupied by the Persian emperor Darius. The audience wept uncontrollably. Mendelsohn reports that "it quickly became evident that it was still too soon to turn history into drama." As a result, Phrynichus was fined, and further performances of the play were banned forever.

The issue of when we have adequate distance from events to consider them in some reasonable perspective and appreciate their nuances as well as their impacts is intriguing. It's all tied to the issue of what collective emotional baggage we carry with us.

As marketers and communicators, we do not speak to blank slates. We speak to individuals with deep reservoirs of experience and emotion. And being respectful of that, understanding that, and tapping into it constructively is a wonderfully exciting challenge.

September 19, 2007

Amaze Your Friends!

Ask your friends these questions:

"Netflix offers about 35,000 film titles. What percent of those titles do you think get rented at least once a quarter?"

"Of the top 100,000 books sold on Amazon, what percent do you think they sell at least once a quarter?"

If your friends are into "conventional wisdom," they might answer 20%. After all, conventional wisdom says that 20% of any universe of products generates 80% of the sales.

But the true answer is 95% for Netflix and 98% for Amazon. That's right: 95% of the 35,000 different film titles at Netflix get rented at least once per quarter.

And that's because - thanks to online distribution and retail - we have moved from the world of scarcity into the world of abundance. We have moved from a small handful of hits dominating the market place to a modicum of hits followed by an extraordinary abundance of successful also-rans. Chris Anderson details the phenomenon in his interesting book, The Long Tail.

The title refers to the graph of sales in companies like Netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody, iTunes, and so many other companies that sell online. There's a big bump at the beginning of the graph representing "best sellers." But then there's a very long tail of smaller quantity sales of many, many, many more items.

Consider books: In 2004, more than 1.2 million different book titles were sold. Only 32 sold more than 500,000 copies, while 948,005 of them sold fewer than 100 copies. That's a very long tail!

Thanks to new technologies and online selling, it is now possible to cost-effectively print books and CD's on demand, thereby diminishing inventory costs. This means it's so much easier to bring new products to the market place and, therefore, products and product choices have become so much more abundant.

Is it overwhelming? Well, it can be. Anderson sums up what he calls "the secret to creating a thriving Long Tail business" with two imperatives: 1. Make everything available. 2. Help me find it.

It's that second imperative that is our challenge as marketers. Among other things...

I think we need to make site navigation as logical and easy-to-follow as possible. By now, that should be easy. But I am stunned every day as I get caught up in the frustration of navigating through some site that is more about the designers than the users.

We need to be creative in creating aggregators and filters that profile a customer's preferences so we can expeditiously direct them to the products and services that will interest them the most.

We need to find ways to get product choices into the market place through influencers, bloggers, sampling situations, etc.

September 18, 2006

Theming

Perhaps catalyzed by the onslaught of customization, there seems to be a whole lot more theming going on.

For example, weddings used to be - well - weddings. Simple ceremonies followed by lovely parties celebrating the bride and groom. Now they are frequently themed with so many bells and whistles that the honored couple ends up playing only a bit part. The theme becomes the star.

Turner Classic Movies just announced a new theming initiative: a joint promotion with Architectural Digest magazine. In October, this wonderful cable movie channel will promote a collection of 19 movies relating to architecture. The series will be called Architecture in Film and feature pictures like The Fountainhead and Towering Inferno.

In London, I noticed that the Tate Gallery (the original Tate, not the new Tate Modern) has what looks like about 20 different brochures in a rack promoting a series of themed, self-guided tours through the museum. The titles are great fun: "The First Date Tour," "The Animal Lovers Tour," "The 'I'm Feeling Depressed' Tour," etc. You get the idea.

It was not only a clever way to customize visits to an attraction, but it could also work just as well in other contexts like hotels and resorts. Instead of offering only a handful of packages, a hotel or resort could use its website to offer many, many customized experiences that would require only modest tweaks in what is already easily available. And the wide range of experiences would help promote more repeat visitation. Suppose you stayed at a beach resort one year and enjoyed the "bird lovers" package...came back next time for the "photographers" package...etc.

The web provides a venue to offer so many more choices to our customers. Organized properly, a site can enable someone to explore a wide range of options and drill down into those of greatest interest. For us marketers, I see this as an opportunity to provide so much more...to be more creative in packaging, and to offer many more packages...not worrying if only a few will want one package or another, because the incremental selling cost is negligible.

Theming gives us a chance to offer more choice, more varied experiences, and more fun.

September 17, 2006

Hiatus

Alas, there has been a two-month hiatus in my blog. No real excuse, except that summer felt like a good time to give it a rest and do more contemplating than communicating.

My sense is that there were no cataclysmic changes in our industry. The trends toward new and alternative media, audience fragmentation, and customized messages and media certainly continued. A new study by McKinsey reported that by 2010 traditional TV advertising will be only one-third as effective as it was in 1990: a 37% drop in message impact, 23% fewer ads being seen, a 15% decline in buying power, due to cost-per-thousand rate hikes, and a 9% drop in ad focus because more viewers are multi-tasking.

These are not new challenges, but they will certainly separate the smart and creative thinkers from everyone else.

The summer also brought the London terrorist raid, which provided a particular challenge to airport shops that profit greatly from selling cosmetics, perfumes, and liquor...all products presently banned as carry-on in airplanes.

Now many of the stores are scrambling to figure out ways to ship your purchases. And some clever marketers are taking wise advantage of the situation. For example, Proctor and Gamble donated "smile packs" of toothpaste, mouthwash and floss of Avis to leave on the front seats of its rental cars. Every challenge provides an opportunity!

Wal-Mart stayed in the news all summer, too. Disappointing sales results, store redesign plans, the decision to adjust store product offerings to reflect the variances from one market to another, wage wars, etc. kept the drums beating.

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about D-Day in which someone pointed out the fact that American troops were trained to take more individual initiative than their counterparts. Confronted with an unplanned set of circumstances, they were more likely to be creative and pro-active, while others who had been more rigidly trained would wait to receive new orders from on high.

And that reminded me of the story of the train wreck near a Costco store, and how the Costco employees rushed out and played such a vital role in saving the passengers. They took great initiative, as that was part of their training at a company whose culture seems to be the antithesis of Wal-Mart. You get as good as you give. That's always been the case...and it always will be.