Marketing, Much Like Democracy, Is Good for You (Yes, Really)

Think About It: Politicians Should Treat Citizens the Way Marketers Do

By John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz

Published: February 11, 2008

Marketing is much maligned. Consumer advocates say it's deceptive and intrusive. Sociologists contend it encourages self-centered materialism. Cultural critics argue that it saps civic spirit and political involvement.

Marketers, preoccupied with individual campaigns, have done a poor job of rebutting these critiques.

Equally beneficial The six benefits that marketing and democracy deliver to society are very similar.

What do you say to the cynics who claim that marketing is bad for society? Is it enough to try to distinguish good marketing from bad? Or to point out that you have to search hard to find individuals who think they consume too much or would prefer fewer choices?

These are weak, defensive responses. To answer the question with positive arguments, we investigated the broad impact of marketing in modern, industrialized societies. In a new book, we compare the consumer marketplace with our political marketplace. Turns out the benefits that marketing and democracy deliver to society are remarkably similar.

Improving quality of life
Marketers give consumers information. They offer consumers choice. They want to engage consumers, to earn their interest and loyalty. Most marketers seek to be inclusive, to bring quality and innovation to the masses. A marketer's success depends on an exchange with a customer and subsequent consumption of goods and services that satisfy needs and improve quality of life.

These six benefits are equally relevant in democracies. Democracies depend on informed citizens participating in the political process and making choices among political alternatives. Democracies promote the welfare of all citizens and enable them to be included in political decision making. Indeed, it can be argued that the practice we get as consumers each day in the commercial marketplace makes us better, smarter citizens.

The marketing mix encompasses all of these benefits. Marketing communications accelerate information sharing and new-product adoption. Information makes consumers aware of the choices that suit their needs and thereby stimulates consumption.

Pricing is a key determinant of exchange value. Marketers ensure that products and services are priced at levels that provide value to target consumers as well as profit to producers.

Wal-Mart democracy
Efficient distribution and logistics systems enable exchange. Products reach broad audiences of customers faster and more cheaply than ever. Wal-Mart may be disparaged, but its mission of bringing low prices to everyone is democratic and inclusive.

Product diversity provides freedom of choice and allows consumers to express individuality.

Marketing inherently engages consumers. The creativity in marketing communications, good product design and enjoyable retail experiences all bring fun to our lives. A world without marketing would be a world of sameness, commoditization and inertia.

Bad marketing engages customers as well, with resulting negative word-of-mouth. That's one of the democratic niceties of marketing. Everyone can have an opinion about the latest product or this year's Super Bowl ads. Marketers welcome the risks inherent in being part of the conversation. After all, nothing worries marketers more than when no one is interested in discussing what they have to offer.

Of course, marketing can be abused. But sensible marketers, the vast majority, know that respecting the customer is key to a profitable long-term relationship.

Responding to desires
The scope and impact of aggregate marketing activity cannot be underestimated. It contributes enormously to economic development. In the United States alone, 17 million people hold marketing, sales and customer-service jobs. Marketing's customer focus directs economic activity such as product development toward value-adding innovations that respond to individual desires and improve our quality of life.

Marketing supports the pillars of democratic society. Advertising funds our diverse media, including the internet. These advertising-supported media give citizens access to information about political figures, policies and programs. Marketing know-how helps public policy-makers change citizen behaviors by, for example, encouraging seat-belt usage or good nutrition.

Moreover, the billions of mutually satisfying exchanges that occur daily in the commercial marketplace are part of the glue that builds the trust and respect that hold society together. The top national brands and global brands offer a consistent level of functional product quality and innovation combined with emotional appeal. They adapt where needed to local preferences, but they attract the loyalty of millions of consumers because they deliver the same good customer experience to all.

Starbucks more rewarding
It may even be argued that the commercial marketplace is more attentive to diversity and more democratic than the political marketplace. For the 80% of American adults who are not political junkies, relationships with brands such as Starbucks (the "third place") and BMW (the "ultimate driving machine") are more rewarding than associations with political parties.

Instead of treating citizens merely as taxpayers, donors and voters, politicians ought to treat citizens as well as marketers treat their customers by focusing on how they can better deliver the six benefits common to both marketing and democracy.

Check it out: 'Greater Good'

Excerpts from "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy," by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz, Harvard Business Press, 2008.

"We believe that marketing itself is marketed poorly and that the social value created by the 17 million Americans who are employed in marketing deserves more credit. The fault is largely with marketers themselves. They should be more conscious of the social importance of their work and of the moral principles that underpin their daily decisions. Marketers are most comfortable judging marketing as a business practice, where the issue is how well a particular marketing tool, technique, or process helps a business meet its objectives. But marketers also need to consider the impact of marketing on individual consumers, the marketplace and society."

"Politicians constantly sell themselves to raise money to fund campaigns, and their marketing efforts diminish rather than enhance marketing's reputation. This is especially true of politicians who harness marketing tactics such as negative advertising to achieve short-term results at the polls. In contrast, commercial marketers must earn the consumer's vote at the cash register every day. With decades of experience, they therefore view marketing as a long-term investment to boost their brands' reputations. They rarely indulge in negative comparison advertising with their direct competitors, knowing that consumers respect brands that offer positive reasons to buy them. What is needed in the political marketplace is not less marketing but better marketing. Politicians need to understand that marketing, practiced properly, is grounded in the concept of a fair exchange that builds trust."

Expand Your Brand Community Online

Join the Dialogue: Social Media Provides a New Opportunity for Sparking Excitement About Products and Services

By Patrick Hanlon and Josh Hawkins

Published: January 07, 2008

These days, consumers self-select into a media environment of trusted, on-demand sources. Traditional 30-second TV spots, viral stunts and PR campaigns are subject to rerouting through a milieu of online communities that repackage, edit and mash up intended messages for distribution through social networks, search engines, e-mails and word-of-mouth. It's within that mix that today's real marketing opportunities lie.

Rather than spending resources on 30-second spots consumers avoid, savvy marketers develop new strategies and investments to engage consumers in active conversations that invite participation in their brands. Traditional media offer monologues. New social media prompt dialogue. Successfully engaging in this dialogue across the great internet divide becomes the new challenge.

When you build a community of passionate advocates who share your beliefs, the dialogue becomes a natural evolution of your customer-relationship practices, inspiring trust, relevance and renewed energy around your brand.

Bridge building
The opportunity to build an online community is reinforced by making sure you have created the belief system to support it. Then your online community becomes talk among people who believe in the same things, speak your language, and enthusiastically bridge the gap between manufacturer and consumer.

"Stop preaching and start conversing" is the message to marketers. Social media is exactly that: social. A dialogue, which may seem daunting at first, is actually a more positive way to persuade people to become advocates for your products or services. You don't have to be Aristotle to figure out that dialogue offers the opportunity to persuade, something traditional advertising increasingly fails to accomplish.

There are plenty of examples of how marketers have chosen to influence, engage and excite the online communities that surround their brands.

Social-media outlets provide a powerful new opportunity for companies to revisit their origins, their reasons for being, to expand brand communities. One such company is DuPont. It launched a social-media campaign to communicate its heritage of scientific discovery, innovation and progress to a younger, online audience. DuPont enlisted Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom to create a series of videos called "Science Stories." Each video highlighted a compelling product innovation (such as Kevlar bulletproof vests or Nomex fire-resistant clothing).

DuPont made the videos available online at stories.dupont.com and distributed video clips through blogs, science-related sites and video portals. The result: fresh brand buzz and spontaneous in-market awareness for DuPont.

Loosening reins
Successful social-media campaigns often require brand managers to give up some control. Be not afraid. The DuPont video clips, for example, were embedded in blogs and wrapped with commentary posted by blog owners and readers, creating an authentic dialogue and communal understanding of DuPont, prompting future interactions with its growing online community.

Increasing numbers of people in the 13-to-30 age group (a consumer demographic for which marketers grapple) can be found on the internet. These self-made media producers ritually scroll through articles on their RSS readers; chat with friends on instant-messaging services; send and receive SMS messages; download tracks from iTunes; update blogs, MySpace pages and social-network profiles; monitor responses to updates; post notes on friends' Facebook profiles and "walls"; and grab video clips from TV programs.

Blogs and forums are addicting. The opportunity to put your words and ideas online for others to praise and challenge is social media's drug of choice. The instant exchange and reshaping of ideas from random and omniscient onliners can be a powerful intoxicant.

The blog ring of fashion sites is so large it's almost a movement. Head for StyleMob, Iamfashion, FabSugar, Stylehive, Go Fug Yourself or the focused Purse Blog and you'll find primarily women gathering to list their favorite jeans, talk about an upcoming sale, or rant about a new designer.

Peer pressure
Peer opinion is the most powerful recommender for the wired generation. A recent Nielsen survey shows that 78% of consumers trust the opinions of peers over all other information sources and advertising. The hair straightener that receives the best reviews is the next one the consumer buys.

Checking prices and styles online has become a ritual for many savvy shoppers. Some buy online, some pre-shop before heading to stores. But that white space between the idea of buying an item and the purchase itself is fertile territory for marketers -- if they can join the conversation or locate those who drive it.

The site where the conversation happens between consumer and marketer is the iconic hunting ground and presents the most opportunities for marketers in this consumer-generated space. Social-media outlets enable you to steer the dialogue toward your reason for being and offer the opportunity to weave new consumer benefits, new promotions, line extensions and other marketing efforts into your story.

Front and center
Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. recently launched a consumer media campaign with a new slogan, "Stop & Shop works for me." The campaign centered on videos with stories from real customers. Stop & Shop also used an internet TV microsite to solicit additional customer video submissions that will be programmed into the marketing mix.

As a result, the retail chain was able to place core consumers front and center -- real-world stories told by real people about how and why the brand is relevant in their lives.

Judi Palmer, senior director of marketing and communications for the company, was recently quoted in the Waltham, Mass., Daily News Tribune as saying, "For the first time, we're actually letting real customers talk about us rather than us constructing a message."

A common frustration for marketing executives is that it's nearly impossible to control what people write about a brand online. Innovators see social media as a new avenue of communication. After all, the benefit of having a brand community is that you can talk with one another. It's daunting, but what better way to engage people in your message and the language surrounding your brand than to engage them in a dialogue about it?

Public follow through
The Consumerist is a corporate-watchdog site with more than 620,000 visitors per month that solicits stories from consumers -- with preference given to negative experiences. And that's OK. The opportunity for companies on sites such as the Consumerist is to directly address issues of customer dissatisfaction. The Consumerist tends to post follow-up stories, so what begins as a warning against a certain company can reveal the care and concern by that same company reaching out to invest itself in customer concerns.

Opportunities to reach out even to those who don't like your brand can have powerful positive consequences. Reaching out conveys confidence, accessibility, respect and authenticity to people both inside and outside of the brand community. Steve Jobs' prescient rebate to iPhone owners earlier this year gained huge credibility and empathy in response to one of the simplest of merchandising techniques: a price cut.

The news of the price cut set the blogosphere on fire with commentary. Regardless of where consumers landed on the issue, the result was a general perception that Apple was responsive and engaged with their community.

Even if you can't always control the conversation, you can join it. That lets you project an image of authenticity and transparency.

Pick a flavor
The annual Häagen-Dazs ice-cream-flavor search, Scoop, has taken a decidedly social turn in an attempt to grow the brand's community. Häagen-Dazs recruited video submissions from ice-cream enthusiasts demonstrating recipes for new flavors. An online video channel encouraged word-of-mouth promotion by online foodies through e-mail features, link sharing and RSS feeds for consumer videos.

From thousands of submissions, the online community voted to select finalists. The winning flavor, caramelized pear and toasted pecan, just hit grocery stores.

Leaders and senior management can relate with their brand communities by writing about their companies' culture, plans and concerns -- and field comments from the customer side.

Corporate blogs often have direct C-level involvement with high-level industry perspectives, PR announcements and thought leadership. Sometimes these sites have PR or legal oversight. Other times, blog mavericks such as GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, who writes on GM's FastLane blog, have a slightly more direct flow of communication. (Social personal finance site Wesabe lets customers call their CEO four hours a day, seven days a week in their "Talk To Jason" program.) A corporate blog can provide a useful platform to quickly address issues and respond to consumer concerns.

Lasting conversations
Social media, whether it is executed in the form of blogs or the mobile web, treats marketers with a new opportunity to engage and excite the communities that surround their brands with people who care. In today's commoditized world, where apathy and skepticism run wild, social media are one more opportunity to become a part of the conversation and keep consumer loyalists talking about you through product iterations and company life cycles and link them with others who feel just as passionate about you.

The brands that leapfrog into the future will be those enabled with a community that feverishly praises them and pummels their competition. Embrace this brave new dialogue, and your brand zealots (sometimes even your detractors) will reward you for it.

Don't Overemphasize ROI as Single Measure of Success

Variety Counts: It Takes More Than One Benchmark to Assess Overall Effectiveness

By Tim Calkins and Derek D. Rucker

Published: February 04, 2008

Everyone loves to talk about ROI. The benchmark has firmly planted itself in the soil of marketing doctrine, widely accepted as a measure that makes it simple to evaluate marketing programs and gauge spending levels. Return on investment enables financial types to evaluate marketing initiatives with the same approach they use to evaluate capital expenditures and acquisitions. For senior management, ROI makes marketing less subjective. For marketers, ROI makes decisions fairly simple; it removes the appearance of subjectivity from the debate. Perhaps more important, a good return makes it easier to defend marketing initiatives and to justify existing and future spending.

But to us, there is a fundamental problem with overemphasizing ROI as the single measure of marketing success: It is often impossible to accurately quantify the impact. Although the world of marketing has come a long way in terms of analytic capabilities, applying financial numbers to the marketing equation is not always possible or preferable. That's why using ROI to evaluate the overall effectiveness can be a problem.

Take branding, for example. For many companies, brands are their most valuable assets. Determining the precise value of a brand at any given moment, however, is near impossible. Many companies do attempt to value brands. Interbrand and BusinessWeek, for example, produce a ranking of global brands each year based on brand value. Yet these brand valuation calculations generally rely on an assumption, built on an assumption, built on another assumption, built on, yes, another assumption. That means that trying to determine the impact of a TV spot on a brand's value or equity might produce numbers that are directionally right but certainly not precise.

Assuming brand impact
If the value of a brand cannot be precisely calculated, and thus known, then it would appear impossible to use solely ROI to evaluate the decisions that impact the brand. Either the impact on the brand has to be ignored, which seems incorrect, or it has to be put in as an assumption, which makes the analysis suspect.

That creates the potential for suboptimal decision making. Consider, for example, a company evaluating a cost-reduction idea. The capital cost is known, and the savings are known. The exact impact on the brand, however, cannot be determined quantitatively. Will anyone notice the change? Will it affect how they feel about the brand? How will sales and profit be affected? When will all this occur? All these questions can be hard to answer.

So on one side of the debate are certain, quantifiable savings. On the other side of the debate are qualitative concerns that the brand might suffer. A sharp finance executive could simply ask, "Well, what is the impact on the brand? Let's just factor that into the ROI calculation." The problem is that factoring this in with any precision is difficult, making the results of any analysis incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Branding isn't the only area where returns are hard to evaluate. Customer satisfaction, loyalty, employee morale and differentiation are all important but generally impossible to put into hard financial numbers that can be used on a day-to-day basis when calculating ROI.

Super Bowl impact
Given these observations, it would seem that attempting to calculate the precise ROI on a Super Bowl spot, for example, would be a futile task. Certainly the cost is known, and it is rather substantial. But the returns are impossible to fully quantify. Consider Budweiser's recurring and considerable commitment to the Super Bowl. What is the net impact of Budweiser's appearance on consumers' affinity for the brand, the morale of employees, the motivation of distributors and the differentiation of the brand? While all of these elements are important to building a brand, they are generally impossible to put into hard figures that can be used to calculate an accurate amount.

Some marketing initiatives are easier to quantitatively measure than others. For example, a short-term price promotion generally has a substantial and immediate impact on sales. That makes calculating the return a fairly straightforward process. Similarly, online-advertising initiatives and coupons are often easier to evaluate with ROI. New-product initiatives may also be easier to evaluate using ROI, though as Clay Christensen, Stephen Kaufman and Willy Shih warn in their recent Harvard Business Review article, the calculation is often misused.

But here's the danger: A company that uses ROI to guide marketing decisions might focus only on initiatives that come with strong, quantifiable returns. The company might then reduce spending on programs that build the brand, increase customer loyalty and strengthen differentiation. That can be dangerous in that it increases the focus on short-term initiatives at the potential expense of more-valuable long-term gains.

'McStarbucks'
There's no clearer example of this than Starbucks. Over the past several years, the ubiquitous coffee chain has rolled out a series of initiatives to boost short-term profits at the risk of potentially damaging the brand. The ROI on each decision was probably very positive. But as CEO Howard Schultz admitted, the initiatives have hurt the brand and weakened the company overall. The new breakfast sandwiches, for example, might generate incremental revenue, but leave the stores smelling like cheese factories and make the baristas feel like they are working at McDonald's. As one rather frustrated barista noted on a recent visit, "Welcome to McStarbucks."

This is not to suggest that marketing should be a black box, where money is spent in a haphazard manner on programs that may or may not make any sense at all. Marketing decisions do need to be made strategically, and a marketing executive should manage and be evaluated on the overall financial performance of a business. But rather than focus on ROI, executives need to use a variety of measures to evaluate marketing programs' success. Those measures should be grounded in the objectives for a particular initiative. For example, if the goal is to strengthen customer loyalty, then loyalty should be measured and tracked. Anyone advertising in the Super Bowl needs to have clear objectives and a clear strategy, along with some way to evaluate success with respect to these strategies.

So what should managers do when asked to produce the ROI for a marketing initiative? Take a more open-minded approach to measurement, first focusing on a company's objectives and strategies and then identifying measures that can best work for them. Focusing solely on ROI is dangerous and naïve.

It's Time to Understand Consumers

Ticking Away: Get a Handle on Your Target's Internal Stopwatch and Your Window of Opportunity for Selling Big

By John Rosen and AnnaMaria Turano

Published: February 04, 2008

All CMOs engage in a time-driven bargain: exchanging their time -- the time they've invested in market research, marketing plans, strategy development and advertising -- in return for a few minutes, hours or days of their consumers' time. But how can you know whether consumers are willing to trade their time for yours? To take the time to listen to your pitch, to be "sold"? More important, how much time will they give you to make your pitch? Leveraging the answers to those "how much time" questions to increase volume and profit is a key challenge.

Imagine that all potential consumers have internal stopwatches ticking away until their buying decision is finalized. It is, therefore, the key objective of the marketing effort to either slow down that ticking long enough to get the message across or to stop the ticking and close the sale right then and there. The fascinating part of all this is that each consumer's clock is unique -- some decisions take months or years, some days, minutes or even seconds -- and is ticking at a different speed. Adding to the complexity is that for any given consumer and any given buying decision, the size and speed of the stopwatch will change depending on the specific occasion: buying a bottle of wine for a hot date (a risky endeavor) might be a very different process than buying a bottle for a brother-in-law you don't like very much (not very risky; just get it over with).

In fact, the riskiness of the purchase, from the consumer's standpoint, often helps define the consumer's stopwatch. Consider a risky consumer decision -- one you'll have to live with for a long time and that's fraught with many negative consequences, such as the purchase of a very-big-screen HDTV. If you screw this up, you're stuck with it for several years. In this situation, you have a big and slowly ticking stopwatch, because you are spending much time and energy consulting magazines and relatives, checking prices, and comparing brands and stores. This risk aversion tends to drive the way marketers address these consumers: High risk leads to slowly ticking stopwatches, allowing for multiple marketing touch points.

This interplay of risk vs. time -- the shopper's stopwatch -- defines four different shopping behaviors: impatient, recreational, reluctant and painstaking.

1. Impatient shopping
For almost everyone, buying replacement tires is the very definition of an impatient purchase: No one seeks them in advance, but the purchase can't be put off once the need appears. When a mechanic tells a consumer her tires are worn out, he doesn't say, "Drive them for a few weeks while you think about it."

There are few touch points in this impatient process where a manufacturer such as Goodyear can influence a decision; then the consumer's stopwatch starts ticking quickly. And Goodyear has to be certain no consumer is swayed by a salesperson's claim, such as: "I've got something just as good for $15 less from Toyo."

Besides such dealer recommendations, consumers respond most readily to visual cues, such as sidewall images and tread design.

The key moment in the success of the Goodyear Assurance with TripleTred -- Goodyear's most successful product launch -- occurred when buyers were able to see the tire itself: what the company called its "long, sculpted, sensual shapes that draw the customer's attention ... [an] aggressive appearance that helps the dealer explain the tire's benefits and technology to customers." The icon on the tire's sidewall -- a sun, three raindrops and a snowflake -- crisply communicated the tire's appeal.

And it worked. As Andy Traicoff, Goodyear's director-consumer development recalls, "We knew we had a winner the first time a consumer told us, 'It looks like it does what you say it does.'" And the dealers put it more simply: "Assurance sells itself."

2. Recreational shopping
Consumers refer to the typical supermarket shopping experience with troubling words such as "time-consuming," "dread," stupid, "disgust," and even "hate." Many consumers come away from a retail experience feeling defeated and deflated and can't wait to get out of most supermarkets.

Whole Foods Market, however, doesn't try to speed up the consumer's passage through its stores. The brilliance of Whole Foods' strategy is its recognition that some consumers would rather spend one hour roaming the aisles of a delightful supermarket -- one with beautifully displayed produce, samples in every aisle, gourmet food and chocolate-enrobing stations -- than 10 minutes pushing a cart through one that isn't. This amounts to the transformation of a supermarket into theater -- a stupendous slowing of consumers' stopwatches.

How stupendous? Most midsize cities have only one or two Whole Foods but hundreds of traditional supermarkets. So a significant number of Whole Foods shoppers are, quite literally, driving past 50 supermarkets for a once-a-month, uplifting experience at which they happily spend hours.

3. Reluctant shopping
Reluctant shoppers, like the impatient ones, simply can't wait for shopping to end. Reluctant shoppers, however, may not actually start shopping for years after they recognize a need. Shopping for tires may be distasteful, but it is seldom delayed. Bank accounts, however, are seldom acquired under conditions of urgency.

The opportunities to take advantage of reluctant shopping behavior are richest wherever consumers have a continuing relationship with a business, not because they enjoy shopping there but because, having embraced a bank, the costs of leaving it are just too high.

Commerce Bank has been much benchmarked for perfecting a strategy that combines consumer friendliness (grand openings, friendly and welcoming staff, staying open late and on weekends, and traditional advertising) with a fearfully consistent, pleasant and inviting in-branch experience, backed up by the feedback of 200 mystery shoppers per branch per year. Such perfection at the retail level simply makes consumers reluctant to take their accounts elsewhere.

4. Painstaking shopping
Painstaking shoppers differ from reluctant shoppers in the way they measure the downside of a particular consumer choice. Reluctant shopping is characterized by fear of making any decision; painstaking shopping is characterized by fear of making the wrong decision.

Consider cars. For decades, research has shown that buyers frequently leave the dealership feeling they have, indeed, made the wrong decision and that someone else got a better deal. Lexus overcomes this by showing dealers a better way to deliver the highest profitability in the industry. Lexus' dealer qualification, training and recognition process is legendary and assures that painstaking consumers actually get to participate in the selling process. This dominance of the last ticks of the stopwatch enables Lexus to spend half as much per car as most other manufacturers on the earliest ticks in the consumer's stopwatch: brand building. Lexus's commitment to dealer performance outweighs its competitors' reliance on dealer incentives. And Lexus consumers rarely leave feeling they've made the wrong decision.

Marketers have largely solved their problems targeting the right demographic segments. Now they need to focus on consumers' time imperatives -- the continuous altering of their shopping stopwatches. Properly executed market research will identify those stopwatches. And effective marketers will build strategies to leverage the unique characteristics of each target consumer's stopwatch: What works for consumers on impatient days will not work on days they spend two hours browsing at Whole Foods. But if you understand that stopwatch, consumers will be happy to give you their time -- and money.

	John Rosen is co-author of 'Stopwatch Marketing: Take Charge of the Time When Your Customer Decides to Buy.' He is an executive director at Marketing Consulting Services. Previously he worked at Coors and Mattel.
	AnnaMaria Turano is co-author of 'Stopwatch Marketing' and an executive director at Marketing Consulting Associates. She is also an adjunct professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business.

락스 브랜드가 피부 미용 제품을 출시한다는 결정이 쉽진 않았을 텐데
브랜드 갭에서 걱정했던 방만한 라인확장이 일단 벌어지고 말았다.
도브의 리얼 뷰티 캠페인 이후 인공적인 느낌보다 진솔한 아름다움을 강조하는 것이
업계의 추세인 듯 싶은데 중요한건 바세린의 아성을 비즈왁스가 무너뜨릴 수 있을까라는
석유 미용 제품과 천연 미연 제품의  대결 구도 정도?

Burt's Puts Bee in Bonnet of Skin-Care Marketers

First National Effort by Clorox Brand Bashes Ingredients in Beauty Products

By Jack Neff

Published: January 31, 2008

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- In its first major national ad campaign under new owner Clorox, countercultural brand Burt's Bees criticizes industrial-strength ingredients long found in conventional beauty brands.




Among the first of six ads from agency Pool, New York, to appear in issues of magazines such as People, Oprah, Allure, Real Simple and Natural Health starting Feb. 5, is one that in classic package-goods mode compares the beeswax in Burt's to the petrolatum found in other products.

Beeswax is a "naturally replenishing moisturizer made by bees," while petrolatum, Burt's says, is a "non-renewable hydrocarbon made from crude oil" that leaves a "greasy film that could contain contaminants."

Mike Indursky, the chief marketing and strategic officer at Burt's Bees, knows his beeswax, but he's no stranger to petrolatum. He's a veteran of Unilever skin care (think Vaseline petroleum jelly) and L'Oreal (with petrolatum currently in HIP eye shadow).

Not attack ads
"You see brands attack other brands," Mr. Indursky said. "We'd never want to do that. What we want to do is show one ingredient vs. another ingredient."

The other half of the strategy, he said, is to build a reputation for efficacy by showing natural ingredients that do the same jobs as chemical additives and define the squishy notion of "natural" in the process. The campaign, he said, "really helps show the difference between natural and not natural in a very provocative way."

The conventional personal-care industry is among those likely to be provoked, but representatives of Unilever, L'Oreal and the Personal Care Products Council, which represents the industry on safety issues, either didn't return calls or couldn't reach executives for comment by deadline. The PCPC website notes that petrolatum is approved by the Food and Drug Administration as safe to use not only in cosmetics, but even as a food additive.

At least some people doubt Burt's has much room to bash others about ingredients now that it's owned by a bleach marketer. "If they make a face cream we may all come out looking like Michael Jackson," chided a poster on Consumerist.com.

But Mr. Indursky believes the critics are few. Both he and CEO John Replogle, another Unilever alum, have been responding to as many critics as they can. "Our standards are only going to rise," he said. "Our product is only going to get better."

Unconventional beauty message
By putting an unconventional beauty message in a familiar beauty context, he believes the ads will make the brand stronger, too. "Once you understand [the rules of beauty ads]," he said, "you can ignore some, follow others."

Burt's marketing had focused mainly on events, public relations and store displays. A much smaller and short-lived magazine campaign in late 2005 also focused on ingredients but had less of a beauty angle. For example, one for Lemon Butter Cuticle Cream showed no women, but did show the package, two lemons and two bees with the copy: "What do you do when life gives you lemons? You rub them into your cuticles. Duh." It also listed other natural ingredients, which it said give "instant results."

"We don't believe we were sending the right brand message," Mr. Indursky said. The new effort, he said, also links better with the company's effort to establish a standard definition for natural products -- and differentiate them from products labeled "natural" but which have synthetic chemical ingredients.

Like 'Real Beauty'
In the new ads, the models never show their faces and, though they're naked, not much of their bodies are seen, either. In the tradition of Dove's "Real Beauty," they're not typical models, but still attractive. "That juxtaposition of hard-core message and real, beautiful image is very different," he said.

"They're very dramatic, exciting ads," said beauty consultant Suzanne Grayson, who believes they'll get women to think about cosmetic ingredients. But she believes a standard headline across all ads would work better, particularly her favorite so far: "How do you get the soft without the suspicious?"

Shelly Lazarus: Brands Are More Than Checkbooks for Content

Ogilvy CEO on Branded Entertainment That Worked

By Andrew Hampp

Published: January 30, 2008

LAS VEGAS (AdAge.com) -- Fund-seeking content producers and programmers got a big wake-up call on branded entertainment from Shelly Lazarus this morning at the National Association of Television Program Executives Conference here.

"Brands are more than checkbooks to develop content," Ms. Lazarus, the CEO of Ogilvy & Mather, said in a question-and-answer session with Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom. "We develop shows to get [them] to an endpoint. Brands are cultural artifacts that have inherent story values. We see ourselves as being both in the entertainment business and the product business."

'Not breaking new ground'
To accommodate the resurgence of branded entertainment and product placement -- which Ms. Lazarus likened to the old days of the early Procter & Gamble-sponsored soap operas ("We're not breaking ground here") -- Ms. Lazarus set up a branded entertainment and content group helmed by executive director Doug Scott two years ago.

The group's earliest and biggest success was for Unilever brand Dove. The "Evolution" campaign took a $50,000 viral commercial and launched it into a national initiative for the changing perception of beauty that went on to garner a Cannes Grand Prix Lion. Then Ogilvy and Unilever teamed again for a more traditional product placement for Pond's facial cream on USA's "The Starter Wife" miniseries last year, and the conversation changed between the creatives, the brand and the media planners at Ogilvy sibling MindShare.

MindShare bought the show during TV's annual upfront sales period, when USA was still working on the storyline. Ogilvy's content team was able to sit at the writing table to talk about using Pond's not just as a product, but as an arc in the show's "40 and fabulous" storyline. "It was a subtle yet very significant moment and brought the brand's message to life," she said. After the show's high-rated run on USA last summer, Pond's was able to reverse its 24-month decline in sales, and saw "double-digit increases in sales," Ms. Lazarus added.

The model of the future
This is the model successful branded-entertainment initiatives will have to take in the future. Ms. Lazarus said she had just gotten a call the previous morning from a network programmer asking if she had any clients who might fit with his list of pilots. "The agencies have to get involved earlier in the conversation. ... If you have an idea for content in any form and you can see where a particular brand would be an exquisite fit, we have people who can have a conversation with you about what would work better."

Not that Ogilvy is looking to replace the content programmers any time soon. "I need all of you desperately," Ms. Lazarus said. "We can come up with a brand idea, but we can't do programming. We wouldn't start to even try."

Another case study she pointed to was the "Real Food" series Ogilvy created for Hellman's mayonnaise to combat the myth that mayonnaise was a "poisonous" food. Although the program would have been a perfect fit for cable TV, the group ultimately partnered with Yahoo's online food channel to build brand extensions. "We saw 10 other ways to have consumers engage with the brand through recipe exchanges and food communities."

Having seen the positive effects of new media in Ogilvy's recent brand efforts, Ms. Lazarus didn't seem to think much of media plans of yore. "If you don't ask the right questions [about new-media channels], you're going to get a media plan with print and radio on it," she said.

Measurement issues
Measurement remains an issue for branded entertainment, particularly since determining scale for a targeted, multiplatform campaign can be difficult. At the end of the day, however, "the ultimate measure has to be sales," Ms. Lazarus said. "As much as we applaud engagement and spending five minutes with something online, if you can only get thousands of people to do it, it's not interesting to mass marketers. That is what mass media means."

Yet media budgets have yet to make any major adjustments to accommodate the still-nascent market. Ms. Lazarus said 90% of her clients' budgets are still spent on traditional media, while the last 10% is used to "fool around with." There will be a significant move toward digital media in the near future, "but I don't think there's to be a year where TV goes from 69% to 40% [of media budgets]," she said.

없이사는 흑인 형제들이 종이봉투에 싸서 빨대꼽아 마시는 그들만의 낭만 맥주-Colt 45
종이 봉투를 마케팅 툴로 사용할 것이라곤 상상조차 하지 못했었는데!
역시 발상의 전환!!!
Works every time!

Challenge: Make Malt Liquor Look Good on Paper

Pabst Uses Icon From Controversial Brand's Past to Reposition It as Edgy to New Generation of Drinkers

By Jeremy Mullman

Published: January 28, 2008

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Talk about a marketing conundrum: Revive Colt 45 malt liquor -- once seen as an exploitative product that preyed on the urban poor -- as an edgy choice for young hipsters.

But Pabst Brewing Co. is trying to do just that, with a campaign from Seattle boutique Cole & Weber. The push uses outdoor, digital and print ads to spread what it calls "The Tales of Colt 45," graphic-novel-type strips that show young drinkers enjoying alcohol-fueled adventures. And in what might well elicit a wince from those familiar with the brand's history, all the creative appears to be drawn on brown paper bags.

"The brown bag was really the canvas these adventures write themselves on," said Todd Grant, Cole & Weber's executive creative director. "We've all had those cult adventures, and it's fun to tell the tales."

Legal pushback
Of course, the image of malt liquor being carted around in brown bags isn't universally viewed as benign and fun. Activists and a congressman in Philadelphia successfully pushed for Colt 45 wraps to be taken off a pair of city buses last year, saying the marketing of malt liquor was irresponsible given the rising crime rate there.

"Given our rising epidemic of violence, your promotion of especially dangerous malt liquor is extraordinarily counterproductive," Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.) said at the time. "Through these ads, [the transportation authority] is effectively condoning malt-liquor sales."

In its late-1980s heyday, when sales topped 2 million barrels annually, Colt 45 was hardly bashful about marketing in poor neighborhoods, where the image of actor Billy Dee Williams and the slogan "Works every time" were often ubiquitous on billboards. Colt 45 contains 6.1% alcohol, making it boozier than most beers (Budweiser, for example, is 5%).

"We really wanted it to be a brand-new thing," Mr. Grant said. "Whatever baggage they did have ... doesn't exist anymore."

Neither, it seems, do a lot of the brand's consumers. Sales have fallen by more than half since the late 1980s, and most of the remaining drinkers are aging.

Graphic libations
To appeal to younger drinkers, Cole & Weber tapped graphic novelist Jim Mahfood (author of the volume "Classic 40 Ounce: Tales From the Brown Bag" and a regular contributor to alternative newsweeklies) to create a series of scenes and stories of young adults enjoying themselves with Colt 45. Most of the creative shows 20-somethings flaunting their oversize cans in social settings such as rooftop parties and dance clubs.

The brand's ad budget is centered on the New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Los Angeles markets, although it also made national print buys in magazines such as Vice, Fader and Juxtapose.

Mr. Williams is nowhere to be found (Mr. Grant said unsuccessful overtures were made to have him make a cameo in one of the strips), but his signature "Works every time" slogan does appear in most of the work, which some experts said could be problematic. "Anytime you call attention to the [alcoholic] strength of a brand, you're taking a risk," said Benj Steinman, editor and publisher of the newsletter Beer Marketer's Insights. Federal regulations prohibit the use of strength as a selling point for alcoholic beverages.

Go Beyond: In Every Single
Way, Marketers Must Do More to Lock in Customer Loyalty

By Don Frischmann

Published: January 21, 2008

As if being a successful CEO wasn't tough enough, now you may have to learn a new skill: the art of apologizing. The number of public C-level apologies is growing daily as Mattel's Robert Eckert, Ameritrade's Joe Moglia, Apple's Steve Jobs and JetBlue's David Neeleman join a very long list.

What's happening? Have business leaders suddenly abdicated control? Are financial expectations overtaking common sense and good business judgment? Or have corporations lost touch with their customers?

"All of the above" could be one answer. But a more accurate explanation is that our world of instantaneous and ubiquitous communication has given customers more power to hold CEOs and companies accountable than ever before.

Branding 101 taught us all that a brand is more than a product name or a company logo and that loyalty can't be bought with an ad. Brand loyalty is a gift from customers to companies that consistently earn their trust and demonstrate credibility over time. It can also be taken away at any time.

Cost of failure
When a company or brand delivers what is expected time after time, customers begin to trust the brand. When a company acts in accordance with the image it projects, then credibility develops. But as credibility and trust grow, brand failures become more costly.

Dell lost customers' trust when service slipped. Mattel lost both trust and credibility over lead-tainted toys. OK, so much for product-related problems; what about the corporate brand image? Herbal-tea maker Celestial Seasonings incurred customers' wrath by ignoring its advertised corporate image of environmental stewardship when it poisoned prairie dogs on its property. Who would have guessed that prairie dogs were important to tea drinkers? That question is the point of this discussion.

There is an unwritten contract today between customers and the brands they buy. First, they expect companies to consistently deliver what they advertise. Second, they expect the companies they do business with to treat them with respect and to be honorable and forthright. (Note: For a definition of the terms "respect," "honorable" and "forthright," ask your customers, because only they can define the terms.)

Unfortunately, brand research all too often stops with product or service quality. What is not well-understood is that everything a company does affects the brand in the eyes of the customer. Google's decision to use solar energy for its server farms reinforces what Google stands for and strengthens the Google brand. A company's decision to outsource manufacturing or IT isn't just a financial decision; it impacts employees, community political leaders and, most of all, customers.

Each employee matters
In the everything-is-brand world, each person in the company, from contract employees to managers to executives to directors, must be responsible for maintaining and increasing brand value. Key brand decisions are not just product- or marketing-related; they can be decisions involving outsourcing, environmental policies, corporate-contribution recipients, high-profile lawsuits, layoffs, plant or office closings, treatment of employees, animal testing, low-cost suppliers, product-quality control, service-response times, information-leak control and even the control of pests on corporate land.

How can you possibly know which issues will touch a customer nerve and negatively affect brand loyalty? It's simple: Ask them.

Companies need to spend time to understand what makes customers so loyal. They need to go beyond research on products and services and understand what the customer believes are:

• The best and worst experiences they have had with your company.
• The company's values.
• The company's social and ethical responsibilities.
• The major differences between the company and its competitors.

Once you have the answers, weave them into your company value statements, CEO messages and especially employee training. The most well-crafted brand message, PR or advertising campaign can unravel the moment a customer talks to an employee on the phone. The way your employees treat customers, handle complaints and answer questions about shipping or billing is the true test of your company values. A five-minute call will prove to your customer whether your values are real or a mere marketing slogan.

At one time, probably when you joined the company, you received the employee handbook. Everything you ever wanted to know was laid out in carefully crafted statements covering the history of the company and its founders, the mission, current executives, and maybe even a code of business conduct. On the inside back cover, probably expressed in bullets, was a list of the company values. The message to you: That's it! Employee education accomplished! Now get to work.

Embracing values
It just doesn't work that way, folks. Employees need to understand how their roles fit into the brand promise and how they are expected to embody the company values. They have to know that they will be held accountable. And this is not accomplished in a training session. It happens when the entire management team, down to the first-line manager, embraces the company values in the way they act, speak and communicate to the outside world as well as to employees. It happens when employees are honored for handling difficult customer situations. It happens when the company has a misstep and management fixes it immediately and, if needed, apologizes for it.

When you start to think most employees understand the company values, it's time to test it. Probe for the little things that can easily be overlooked. In one company, the corporate operators were trained to never let a customer call go through to the CEO but to divert it elsewhere. Unfortunately, an unhappy CEO of a very large account called and demanded to talk to the company CEO and was told, "I'm sorry, sir, the CEO doesn't talk to customers." The operator knew the rules but didn't understand the values of the company.

When you believe employees understand their role in delivering on the brand promise, broaden the communication to partners, channels and suppliers. If you start this process before employees are engaged, the first interaction with a partner, channel or supplier will inevitably create a massive credibility gap that will take months, at least, to close, if it ever does at all. Partners, channels and suppliers also have to be held accountable for delivering on the brand promise, but as we've all been taught, we are only as good as the company we keep.

Now it's time to start communicating your message and brand promise to customers. Tell them what you stand for and what they can expect when they do business with your company. Open customer communication channels on product and nonproduct issues and take their input seriously. Consider a customer advisory council and possibly a CEO blog to communicate key decisions that customers really care about, not decisions that make the executive team look good or are aimed at influencing the financial community.

One last thought: Make sure every executive, manager and employee in the company understands what is important to customers and that every meeting ends with one question: "Will this decision help or hurt our brand?" And don't let anyone forget the prairie dogs.

~ ~ ~
Don Frischmann is principal at Rubicon Consulting. He is a former senior VP-brand management and communications at Symantec. Prior to Symantec, he was with IBM, where he led organizations in marketing and advertising programs.

26일부터 시작했던 프로젝트 끝났다.
광고 쪽과 달리 끝이라는 단어가 주는 편안함보다
혹 모를 추가 수정에 대한 불안함이 먼저 엄습해온다.
추상적인 결과물이다보니 라인을 거쳐 변하게 되는 건 숙명일지도 모른다...

이번 프로젝트가 쉽게 끝나지 않고 지리하게 이어진 이유는

첫째, 의뢰인이 듣고 싶어하는 Story를 말하지 못했다.
언제나 기억해야할 것은 내 이야기가 아니라 그가 듣고 싶어하는 이야기!

둘째, 의뢰인이 듣고 싶어하는 Story를 파악하지 못했다.
그들은 절대로 미팅에 많은 시간을 할애하지 않는다.
정해진 시간에 자리에 착석해주는 것만으로도 그들의 해야할 도리는 다 한 것이다.
끊임없이 듣고 물으며 확인하고 점검하고 파악해야 하는 것이 내 사명이거늘
바보같이 옮겨적기만 바뻤고
옮겨적은 그 노트에 오늘의 방향이 큰소리로 또박또박 적혀있다...

셋째, 의뢰인이 듣고 싶어하는 story를 완성하지 못했다.
그들의 속내는 밤을 패면 파악할 수 있지만
그들은 이야기를 듣고 싶은 것이지 자기가 내준 숙제 점검을 원하는 것이 아니다.
이야기는 다시 원점으로 그들이 듣고 싶어하는 이야기는 사실의 나열이 아니라
조합해서 만들어낸 그들의 마음 속에 있지만 (능력이 안되서) 말하지 못한 새로운 이야기...


조합하면
첫번째 미팅에서 그들의 속내에 대한 확신이 있었는데
재차 확인하며 의중을 완전히 파악하지 못했고
이는 잘못된 방향설정으로 이어졌으며
두번째 미팅에서 시간 낭비로 판명, 사기저하
방향에 대한 지시 전달로 숙제 검사까지 받아야하는 쪽팔림과
내부 분열의 조짐까지...
세번째 미팅에서 질보다 양으로 승부하는 비열한 수법으로
숙제검사에서 참잘했어요 도장을 받은 후에야 무엇을 원하고 듣고싶어했는지 정확히 파악.
네번째 미팅에서 30%의 완성도를 끌어내고 다섯번째 미팅에서야 승락...

짬밥이 높았으면 좀더 적극적으로 나서지 않았을까하는 궁색한 변명 이전에
맥을 짚어 윗분께 정확히 보고하고 방향을 제시하는 능력을 기르는 것이 급선무.

마지막으로
동화 구연 연습 필수....

Strategies are not something you hope for; strategies are somthing you work for


 

남자는 세번째 여자와 결혼을 한다며
늘 두번째 여자로 머물고 마는 자신의 인생을 씁쓸해하는
어느 여인의 소설을? 에세이를? 블로그를? 본 기억이 난다...

세번째 여자라...
세번째 여자에 대한 압박이 들어오는 이즈음에
그녀들을 찬찬히 생각해보곤 피식 웃고 말았다....

어렴풋이 떠오르는 아련한 기억, 첫번째 여자가 미술이라면

이루지 못한 간절한 미련, 두번째 여자는 광고...

내일을 위한 현실의 대안, 세번째 여자는 마케팅이겠지...

내일 광고로 돌아가기 위해
오늘 마케팅을 하며
그림 그리는 인생을 동경하는 것이
내 인생이겠거니....