Mythology - The Meaning Behind the Marketing

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.

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.

Jones Soda Puts its Customers on the Map

We've often used Jones Soda, the spunky upstart soda and juice company in Seattle, as a great example of a company who has collaborated in the development of their brand (and product) with actual customers.

Now Jones Soda is putting their customers on the map, literally. Using a Frappr Guest Map by Platial, Jones Soda fans can upload themselves and find each other. Just another way Jones stays connected to customers by helping them stay connected to each other.

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.

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?

Plucking the Right Decision-Making Chords in Your Industry

The human mind is an interesting thing. Sometimes rational, often irrational, it's been said it's the most complex thing on earth.

Marketers have classically been trained with an assumption that consumers are rational. Most business undergrads and MBA students are well prepared to draw diagrams on feature/functionality-based value propositions and how one brand compares to another. Our "SWOT" analyses (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) are analyzed to the nth degree on logical points.

Yet so many products and companies fail.

One of the reasons, I believe, is that most marketers fail to understand the full scope of decision-making criteria in their industry and regional scenarios. Just what drivers exactly do customers use in their busy, noisy lives to make decisions in a given time, place and set of circumstances?

Best-selling books such as Blue Ocean Strategy use a "Strategy Canvas" to help marketers assess where open space ("blue ocean") exists in the competitive landscape based on a deep understanding of customer decision-drivers. For example, in the airline industry, you could choose an airline based on a number of factors: price, loyalty program, travel amenities (meals, seating space, etc.), convenience of the departure time, etc.

A company like Southwest Airlines emphasizes some of these criteria over others, such as price and frequent departures, while a United traditionally emphasizes a different set of decision-factors.

However, the weakness of even this well-known model are that the selection of decision-criteria tend to be primarily functional and logical. Few, if any, models emphasize what is becoming to be the key driver in buying decisions - emotions.

Researchers such as Dr. Robert Passikoff, who runs the marketing research firm and consultancy called BrandKeys, provides an example of how of the four main decision-making criteria for fragrances, three of them are emotional. A competitor who enters the fragrance industry primarily on functional benefits is headed for disaster.

While this might seem obvious in a consumer category like fragrances, it's surprisingly true for business-to-business categories. If your firm does not fully understand the foundational decision-making criteria for your market space, including the emotional drivers, you could be in for a difficult challenge to grow market share and become a dominant player.

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.

Whopper Sacrifice: Monetizing Facebook and Other Social Networks

Facebook is one of the most powerful marketing tools developed to date on the Internet. The willingness of people to post their personal and career-related interests and activities and share them with both their network of friends and the Facebook advertising engine is quite amazing.

The ability to target not just on demographics but on psychographics is impressive. However, like many new marketing tools that arise quickly on the scene, the platform is ripe for misuse and disappointment.

Although plastering a well-targeted banner ad next to a targeted user's profile is certainly better than plastering one on an untargeted page, it's still not exactly enough to generate significant ROI. For example, whereas a pay-per-click link on Google's search engine is "double qualified" because the person is actively searching for your keyword, Facebook's targeting does not capture those "in market" users who are actively looking for your type of product or services.

Facebook users are there to socialize. What is more annoying than trying to be sold something while you're socializing?

That's why the most effective Facebook marketers know that in order to effectively market on Facebook and other social media sites, you must understand and commit to the concept of "community." What is community? While scientists and Wikipedia posters debate the exact definition, one thing is for sure about online communities: it's a group that has voluntarily come together around a common interest or affinity.

Sometimes that interest is buying stuff, but rarely. More commonly, a marketer must understand what common interests are worthing tapping into, and then decide how to add value to that community vs. distracting it with a pitch. You can add value through information, enabling people with common interests to find each other (a major benefit of any community) or humor, among others.

Unless you are a brand with inherent community-building appeal, or have established a cult-like following already, you may not want to start with a "fan page". Instead, think of a cause or topic related to your brand that you could build a community around. For example, if you're a hybrid car manufacturer, sponsor a "green motoring" group. You'll attract far more people while gaining credit in the community for building on this topic.

Another way to generate interest, buzz and action is to address the social network in terms that are relevant and contextual to the situation. Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice campaign is a good example in which they challenged users to delete ten of their friends in order to get a free Whopper. It was humorous as well as effective. In fact, perhaps it was too effective from Facebook's point of view, but Burger King is craftily keeping the buzz going by offering to help you send an angry-gram if you were de-friended over a hamburger.

Here is my steam-release angry gram to "Brandie."

Name Brands Beginning to Knock Off Store Brands?

I've noticed lately that some major national consumer brands such as Sierra Mist and Tropicana have switched their packaging lately. However, instead of setting them apart as premium "name" brands, they seem to be mimicking the store brands that have eaten up so much of their market share.

What do you think?

• Old Sierra Mist
• New Sierra Mist

• Old Tropicana
• New Tropicana

Several others seem to have noticed this direction. We'll see how the wisdom of this strategy plays out.

It's common knowledge that store brands have eaten up market share at rapid rates, putting name brands in a tough position. We blogged earlier about how name brands have to make a commitment to differentiation in order to compete and maintain their premium price levels.

However, are these major "brands" testing how a "ceding strategy" might stem their losses, or just simply trying to simplify their design?

Begin With PowerPoint in Mind

PowerPoint presentations have taken a lot of flack lately, but mostly because there are so many people who don't present well and abuse the concept of the presentation slide.

By the way, in case you haven't seen this hilarious and spot on video of how NOT to use PowerPoint:

But that doesn't take away the fact that a compelling presentation (yes even one that uses PowerPoint effectively) is a great indicator of whether you have a very strong value proposition and brand-building story.

I was thinking of the connection between great presentations and great brand-building this morning during a client presentation. Before we pitched our "stuff", we spent an appropriate amount of time really building up the need for our services. We talked about how the world of marketing has changed, how the consumer has changed. We talked about the shift from a megaphone-based approach to a conversation-based, community-building approach. And then we outlined how we could help the client get there.

It worked.

Then I got to thinking about how much our own web site needs to improve, and the rest of our marketing. And the reality is that the foundation of marketing our services is in the presentation that we gave today.

Here are some of the best presentations ever given. Think about how they could be foundations for building a brand around these ideas. And dust off your presentation slides to see if you're articulating a powerful value proposition.