Mythology - The Meaning Behind the Marketing

Marketing with The COP

    Systematic planning is the means to a successful end for your advertising/marketing team.  “What Sticks” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart outlines two simple approaches: COP and the 4 M’s of advertising. 

 

    The COP (Communication Optimization Process) methodology is a framework for laying the foundation for your campaign and creating the benchmarks for you resulting actions.  COP emphasizes the communication of what the campaign will do, in measurable terms, and institutes accountability into the process.  COP prescribes a series of three meetings with your campaign team to make sure the campaign has a strong base.

    

    In the first meeting, you and your team will define success, that is, outline the campaign outcomes in a quantifiable and measurable way that you would deem a success.

 

    In the next meeting, you need to evaluate the possible scenarios that will arise in the development of your campaign and what alternatives are available. According to surveys, marketers spend 70% percent of their work time doing rework, i.e. making adjustments and revisions.  Being able to plan for problems that will undoubted arise will increase reaction time when they do occur. 

 

   In the third meeting, you and your team will tie your goals together with how the campaign will be developed and create an action plan that delivers on your strategy.  Remember, ROI research, goal planning, and campaign development are all worthless unless it is applied to the implementation.

 

    This all sounds like a logical planning algorithm for a successful campaign, but if it is so easy, why do many marketers and companies completely miss the mark or underperform when the potential for success is so high?  Here is where the fundamentals of advertising and marketing come in: The 4 M’s, Motivation, Messaging, Media Mix, and Maximization.  Constantly referring back to the 4 M’s through each stage of the COP process and periodic assessments during the campaign guarantee that you are doing the things necessary to minimize wasted costs and maximize success.

 

Next post:  The COP's sidekick, The 4 M's

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.

Mythology Joins Empowered Marketing Initiative

Since its inception in late 2007, Mythology has sought to help organizations build belief in their business. We believe marketing is at its core a "belief management" discipline. What your own team members believe about yourself, and what customers and prospects believe about you, determine your true brand.

One thing we've noticed is that there is a lot of anxiety out there about how to generate better results in marketing. CEO's are finally demanding more insight into what they're getting out of their marketing budgets. Marketers are anxious about all the new social media tools and how to move forward.

That's why we have partnered with our web services and digital marketing partner WELD to launch Empowered Marketing. This approach to marketing gets back to basics with the Ten Pillars of Empowered Marketing, a set of assessment and planning milestones that calm the nerves and open the possibilities for marketers.

Check out the Empowered Marketing site and watch the videos explaining this unique, yet powerful, approach to marketing planning and execution. With Mythology's strategic research, planning and management services, and WELD's advanced web presence, digital content and search engine expertise, we are well-positioned to empower you to reach the next level of performance with your marketing.

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.

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?

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.

What are the Marketing Implications for Microsoft's Tag Mini-App?

Good to see my old company Microsoft generating some buzz with their second iPhone app called Tag. It's also good to see my old company building code for competitive platforms.

Tag "transforms traditional offline media into live links to online information and entertainment" by rendering an image that can trigger an action, such as launching a web site, when it's read by the iPhone app. Check out a little video here for the concept.

The integration of offline with online has been the holy grail of advertising and marketing circles since the Internet took hold in the Nineties. Tag brings together mobile, the web and print in a unique way.

For a quick example of how it can be used, download the Tag app for your phone and snap our first Mythology tag:

 

At Mythology we're planning on piloting some viral marketing efforts using this technology. Give us a shout at [email protected] if you're interested in brainstorming some ideas for your organization.

Ignore the Purpose, Abuse the Medium

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, but Forrester (registration required) recently reported that only 1 in 6 people trust corporate blogs. But aren't blogs supposed to be how companies put on their human face and show the "real" brand?

Hearken back to the rise of email and database-driven marketing in the Nineties. Remember the big push for customers to sign up for company "newsletters"? It was supposed to be about producing "news" that built a long-term relationship. Instead, most newsletters turned out to be glorified spam with companies training their consumers to ignore a barage of special offers. No news, no real value. Email open rates and click-through rates plummeted over time as consumers learned this medium wasn't that new after all in terms of the value companies sent them.

It's happening again with blogs, at least among the over-managed, stylized corporate blogs that are little more than a thin veneer of "authenticity." By the time the corporate PR and legal team approve the CEO's post, it says next to nothing that a promotional email wouldn't have said.

Why does this happen?

For one reason, marketers focus on the medium as opposed to the purpose and nature of the communication. During the email marketing frenzy, hundreds of database analysis firms were there to help you determine how many emails you need to send in order to achieve a certain return. But who was focused on actually putting value in the email itself so that consumers were trained to look forward to the content?

Why do marketers focus more on spinning up a cool new medium, such as a blog, as opposed to focusing on what matters, which is what consumers need and want in order to build a long-term value-driven relationship with a company? Because it's easier.

Let's be honest. Everyone is busy. Few marketers truly understand their customers or their market as deeply as they should. Few spend enough time listening to customers' needs or desires enough to know what would be considered valuable. Therefore, it's easier to crank out a vanilla blog than it is to produce a meaningful, value-building conversation.

Leaping Ahead of Competitors in Tough Economic Times

Knowledge@Wharton re-affirms the notion that taking a bold, aggressive approach during an economic downturn could pay off big time for companies who continue aggressively marketing while their competitors cut their advertising budgets:

Research shows that companies that consistently advertise even during recessions perform better in the long run. A McGraw-Hill Research study looking at 600 companies from 1980 to 1985 found that those businesses which chose to maintain or raise their level of advertising expenditures during the 1981 and 1982 recession had significantly higher sales after the economy recovered. Specifically, companies that advertised aggressively during the recession had sales 256% higher than those that did not continue to advertise.

Everyone from Gold's Gym to financial services marketers have had to revise their message a bit. It is more difficult to appeal to vanity or ego during times such as these. Instead, messages centered on value and practicality seem to ring true and connect with consumers.

However, for premium or luxury brands, there is still an opportunity to market the emotional benefit of escapism. After all, who doesn't need a respite from the constant stream of bad news?

Here at Mythology, we continue to tinker with our own messaging about "building belief in your business." One of our key value propositions is to get more out of your marketing and to focus on marketing ROI. This has certainly helped us connect with new clients as senior executives question what they've been getting from their marketing efforts.

As with all difficult circumstances, it's an opportunity for brands to sharpen themselves and get to the core of their value proposition. It's also an opportunity to devise more clever, low-cost, high-yield customer engagement strategies that will pay off as the economy starts growing again.