Mythology - The Meaning Behind the Marketing

Microsoft Marketing Goes "Bing!"

I often observe my old company's marketing with a mix of critical eye and hopefulness, all colored by my fourteen years at the company. So I'm obviously enjoying the marketing related to the launch of Bing, Microsoft's latest effort to humble Google.

In many ways this is classic Microsoft: an emphasis on feature-rich improvements over the competition, a major publicity push, and "launch event" stunts like a campy "Bing-a-thon" hosted by Hulu.com and (of course) a Space Needle stunt.

(Some of these launch stunts can go horribly wrong. I still cringe and break into cold sweats at the memory from my days as a young Microsoft marketer in the early Nineties when someone thought that sticking MS execs in a broadway-musical style product launch musical was a smart thing to do. Yikes.)

In terms of raising awareness that there is an actual choice in search engines now, it seems to be working.

Google has always taken pride in not really marketing itself other than by coyly generating buzz about what service it may or may not be launching. In some ways that approach has created significant media and consumer craving for the next cool Google innovation.

Microsoft has rarely, if ever, taken the understated approach to marketing. It has a saturation-style approach that in many ways is "old school." The Bing campaign seems to be an interesting mix of old and new media and tactics.

At least - thank goodness - the central marketing group has taught the Microsoft product groups to consider unique, memorable names vs. "Microsoft Search Engine 3.0". You can take that to the Bing. That's a major breakthrough, although some are disagreeing.

For the good of search engine competition and more options in search marketing, let's hope Microsoft gets some traction this time.

Starbucks Fights Back

Starbucks is placing full page ads in major newspapers trying to reclaim its legacy of setting the bar for the best-tasting coffee. Starbucks of course built their wildly successful business through 1990's - 2000's based on creating brand value around bringing great coffee to America and the world, as well as creating a hip, smart vibe in their stores.

Lately, Starbucks has been under attack on both fronts. McDonald's McCafe launched a blisteringly dead-onanti-Starbucks positioning ad that made fun of the snootiness factor. Stores such as Dunkin' Donuts launched "taste test" style ads to deconstruct the myth of Starbucks' coffee superiority (can you imagine how insulted Starbucks brass must have been..."Seriously? Dunkin' Donuts?").

In the latest Starbucks print ad that I saw this morning, they attempted to take back the great coffee position. It will be interestingto see if the marketplace buys into the pitch or if their position has been too damaged by the competition. Personally, I believe it's the combination of emotional and functional factors that Starbucks lost in the past 4-5 years that has hurt them the most. Over-expansion, sometimes into very non-Starbucky places such as interstate highway rest stops, diluted the "specialness" of visiting a Starbucks store.

Back to the Future With Sponsored Content

We've noted in earlier posts how early radio and television shows came with a singular sponsor so associated with the program that it was hard to think of one without the other (see Milton Berle and Texaco Star Theater).

Over time, in order to make advertising more affordable for more companies and to maximize their ad revenue, networks invented the :60 and :30 spots. At that point, it became about selling impressions, not aligning a brand with a popular personality or show.

Now that the Western World is thoroughly saturated with far too many commercial messages, marketers are beginning to rethink the value of impressions disconnected from the benefit they could have received back in the old "brought to you by" days.

One example of course is the smash hit American Idol, where Coke, AT&T and Ford have made long-term commitments to associate with the show.

Another example has been MSN's successful special content offering which spawned the In the Motherhood web series (which carried a "conceived by", not just a "sponsored by", tag for Suave and Sprint brands), now an ABC sitcom (hey, Cavemen aren't the only ones who can start as a commercial and end up with a real show).

The latest iteration from MSN is "The Guy's Manual- Get the Tough Things in Life Done." This time, Grape Nuts is enjoying the exclusive credit for bringing a relatively humorous look at tough life scenarios men must deal with and advice on how to handle them by host Kenny Mayne from ESPN.

This approach is an interesting mix of old school/new school advertising. While many "new marketing" gurus sniff dismissively at anything that smacks of interruptive advertising, the truth is that there are still opportunities to influence. This model is an interesting mix of desired (if done well) content with a much stronger opportunity for the brand to "take credit" for delivering it free to the viewer. The brand association is much stronger.

While not as attractive from a pure reach standpoint vs. traditional television, it attracts significant eyeballs with promotion on one of the world's most-traveled web portals, yet without the "hey, here's our advertising message" baggage. The brand is more subtly, yet powerfully, woven into the content experience.

This is most likely one of the experiences that will enable true interactive television content. While it won't be Milton Berle and Texaco any longer, it may usher in a new era of strong brands associated with specific content that develops strong emotional brand connections.

What if Customers Designed Your Ads?

There have been several examples of the trend towards collaborating with actual customers to build a brand or specific marketing campaign, such as Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl."

Now there is an actual tool that can help you organize and launch a contest in which your customers can compete with their own ads about your product or service. Zooppa - "People-powered brand energy" - provides templates and tools that make it easy for customers to share their interpretation of your brand. Here's one for Brooks bio-degradable running shoes.

Zooppa also enables you to set up contests with cash prizes for the best ad, like this one for Mini Cooper.

Turning the reins over to customers isn't necessarily the best or only way to build a brand, even in our current social media-crazed world. But it is a very cool way, as part of an overall strategy, to get them intimately involved with your message. And who knows, they might create a viral hit that your agency never would have.

Is Your Brand an Icon?

Our consulting practice, Mythology, is based on the idea that marketing is in a sense "belief management." How you and  your organization interact and shape the values associated with your brand in collaboration with the marketplace - how you shape beliefs in an authentic way that lead to positive responses - is what marketing is all about.

The book How Brands Become Icons: The Principle of Cultural Branding by Douglass B. Holt reveals how brands emerge as various "authors" tell stories that involve the brand. Those authors could be customers, critics, culture industries (media), or other companies.

Brands are created when markers of the product are filled with customer experiences. The logo, packaging or design become the material markers that are filled with a history. This creates brand meaning that consumers use to associate with the specific brand. Without this history of customer experiences, the brand is empty and does not exist.

Brands that embody the the ideals that consumers admire become cultural iconic brands, brands that help the consumer to express who they are and who they want to be.

The leaders in this iconic horse race are well known in American consumer history and popular culture: Coca Cola, Budweiser, Nike, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson. Customers value these brands' stories largely for their identity value. Such iconic brands act as a vessel of self-expression and the brands are imbued with stories that consumers find valuable in constructing their identities.

The success of a brand is not built so much on advertising and traditional marketing capabilities anymore. Their power rests in large part on the brand myth that consumers can identify with. In order to satisfy the need to be a part of that myth, consumers will drink, eat and wear the brand.

Don't think that this brand mythology doesn't play into business-to-business scenarios as well. In past generations, an IT executive wanted to identify with the power of success of IBM; in more recent generations, many wanted to identify with the spunky independence and flexibility of the open source Linux movement.

With different generations come different myths that are appealing. How well a company is able to reposition and connect with more relevant myths can determine their long-term success - something IBM has actually done quite well by becoming an early supporter of open source technology.

Sweet SUCCESs: Are Your Messages 'Made to Stick'?

One of my favorite practical books of the last few years is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It takes up where the insanely popular Tipping Point left off by providing a clearer template for how to construct messages in a way that they would "stick", or have more viral pass-along potential.

The authors' formula is SUCCESs:

• Simplicity - Finding the core of the idea
• Unexpectedness - Combining surprise with interest
• Concreteness - Bringing it alive by engaging the five senses ("memory Velcro")
• Credibility - Tapping the power of authority - or anti-authority - to build belief
• Emotional - Priming people to care
• Stories - Generating involvement that leads to action 

Essentially, the more a message - including an advertisement or other commercial message - incorporates these stickiness factors, the more likely it will be remembered and even passed around to others in the Internet-connected world.

Advertisers have been fighting hard to cut through the clutter with unexpected - even shocking - imagery. A handy shortcut often involves the use of innuendo or overtly sexual images.

However, often these efforts are disconnected to the value proposition of the product. Which of us haven't seen a memorable commercial, but completely forgot what it was even advertising?

I thought it would be fun to review some recent commercials as I watch TV in my hotel room and see how many are "SUCCESsfully Stick" using the Heath brothers' formula:

• Castrol: Think With Your Dipstick - OK, a dipstick-wielding Scottishman who sneaks up on consumers about to make a bad motor oil decision and whacks them on the back of the leg got my attention. It's disturbingly humorous, I guess...And of course it has the "think with your dipstick" innuendo. But I didn't get the sense that Castrol's unique selling proposition came through and was almost overpowered by the abusive Scott. Why is Castrol EDGE better again? I'll remember the ad though, and may look behind me when I purchase motor oil again.
• Energytomorrow.com - An effort by the oil and gas industry to generate support for drilling. I think this one fails the sticky test. No stories that generated emotion or involvement. Nothing unexpected, just a nice lady telling me why it's important for America to be independent and how many jobs her employers provide. Nice info, but very forgettable. Certainly not powerful enough to take back the conversation from "green" advocates.
• Wal-Mart: Better Homes and Gardens Collection - Devoid of any stickiness. It's like Pam anti-stick spray was used on this commercial.

After actively paying attention to maybe 12-15 commercials this morning, it's quite amazing that the vast majority of commercials don't pay one whit of attention to the Heath Brother's elements of stickiness.

How about you? How does your messaging stand up to SUCCESs? It takes some practice. I'm going to go throw some honey on the mythologymarketing.com web site right now...

What IS the Future of Advertising?

I read an interesting post recently on www.widgify.com on "The Future of Viral Marketing: Service-Oriented Advertising." The author proposes:

I call this concept Service-Oriented Advertising. People will pay to have their messages delivered across services.  It’s a bit geek-shique, but the idea is that marketers will seed the delivery of their message through multiple web services, or channels, and pay for the enhanced distribution of their messages on a performance basis.  There are some primitive versions of this that exist today.  The CPI, or cost-per-install, model for widgets is a subset of this paradigm.  People pay for their message (widget) to get distributed across a subset of channels (social networks) on a performance basis (install on a page).

It's been a mantra over the last several years (with philosophical underpinnings from the Cluetrain Manifesto) that marketing must morph into a conversation, a collaboration between vendors and their constituents/customers. While many companies still react with "Huh?", others are blazing trails on what exactly this looks like.

The conversational approach has great emotional appeal, but marketers have struggled with how to measure it, how to manage it and how to profit from it.

Whether it looks like the "pay for propagate" model as Hooman suggests, I'm not sure. But as word-of-mouth influence continues to challenge television and traditional media as THE source for new product/service information, it's clear that rallying your tribe is of utmost strategic importance.

The keys seem to be:

• Is your tribe made up of the right people?
• Is your tribe truly influencing people down the purchase funnel?
• Is managing the tribe really more efficient and effective than traditional marketing?
• Can you convince your boss of all the above?

A Reminder from the Past on Relationships and Relevancy

A friend of mine, Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine, sent me this vintage reminder from McGraw Hill in 1958 of the challenges that marketing must overcome in order to drive sales:

How We Decide: Emotion-Driven Decisions

Ever wonder how a Republican and a Democrat can look at the same set of facts and come up with radically different interpretations? The new book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is the latest validation on what great marketers know: it's emotion - not a logical analysis of facts and figures - that primarily drives decision making.

Actually, it's a complex mix of emotions, bias, facts, societal validation and other factors, but emotional reactions generated through those filters seem to be the most influential factor in making decisions, including what we decide to buy.

However, the development of the right emotional connection with customers is one of the most neglected areas of the marketing discipline. Consumer packaged goods companies, particularly those targeting women (see almost any Johnson & Johnson ad targeting moms), are among the best. But many other companies, especially those in "business-to-business" categories such as IT and professional services, seem to think they are above all that emotional nonsense and stick to the facts. Surely a senior buyer in a large company sets emotion aside and makes the most logical buying decision based on the evidence, right?

They are sorely mistaken. Even the most seemingly rational category of decisions are often dominated or at least significantly influenced by emotions and their deeper manifestation, relationships. This is especially true as individuals get more hurried in their decision-making; we all tend to default to emotional comfort levels to make faster decisions.

That's why you're seeing more B2B firms developing their emotional connection, such as the longtime association Accenture has developed with Tiger Woods to tap into the aspirational emotions of executives:

Matching the right emotion with the right customer and decision-making situation is the trick. What emotional role does your product or service fulfill for the customer? And how can you deliver that connection in your marketing?

We have a neat map of how brands attach to various emotional triggers. If you're interested, drop us a line at [email protected] and we'd be happy to send it to you as a PDF file.

For now, think about your own marketing materials and messages. Does it look or sound like a list of feature/functions? Or is there an emotional hook that will attach you to the minds of priority customer segments you're seeking?

Pre-Super Bowl Thoughts: Evidence of Integrated Campaigns

As I sit here watching the 17 hour Super Bowl pre-game show, it's pretty clear that marketers still believe in traditional advertising. NBC (finally) sold out their Super Bowl ad spots and set a new record for advertising revenue at $206 million.

However, I think we'll notice that throughout the game that new media, social networks and search have permeated almost all major campaigns. Whether it be involving consumers in the creation of an ad like Doritos, integrating a Facebook experience like CareerBuilder, showing the outtakes of a commercial like E*Trade, or integrating search keywords with the media effort (70% of advertisers did this year), you probably noticed the new world of marketing in its tween years.

Now the question: is your organization leveraging best practices for integrating efforts across all marketing channels? If not, we're to help.