I started this post with a small lie, but that’s okay in marketing. Be honoust; would you have read this piece of writing had I called it ‘Jerome McCarthy, a misunderstood man’? No of course not. Mccarthy was the man that introduced the ‘four p’s of marketing’and Kotler was the one that ran of with the credits and the dollars. Which is also okay in marketing. But, I am sure you are absolutely dying to find out why I’d say that mr. Kotler (or mr. McCarthy)  is misunderstood.

Well,  a couple of days ago, our vacuum cleaner broke down. When we bought it, we were on a bit of a budget, so it was one of those cheap ones. At first, it worked okay and we figured ‘no one makes crap products nowadays, so what the heck’. But, within three years of service it broke down, in the middle of the housecleaning process and on a Sunday. Fixing the problem would not be easy. Fortunately, we ‘d always kept our old vacuum cleaner. A Philips one, handed down form one of the parents, to be used to vacuum the car or something. It had been been sitting in a cold, moist shed for five years, after it had been ‘in use’ for over fifteen years. This was one abused vacuum cleaner. We kept our fingers crossed, switched it on… not only did it work, it worked beautifully. It worked better then the crap machine had ever done. Hurrah for Philips.

This short event made me think back of one of my first clients I ever worked for when I was a marketing consultant. A grey suited, grey haired, dull (somewhere below the) middle marketing manager by the name of Peter D. The client was Philips. The assignment was to help mr. D. in getting a good perspective on their product; CD rewritables (I think many of us know how that one worked out for Philips…). Since I was new to the field, I hadn’t yetr lost my youthful enthusiasm and I told mr. D. about the Philips television I had at home. My dad worked for Philips and was a bit of a gadget freak, so we bought one of the first colour tv’s ever made. This thing was about 25 years old. And, like the vacuum cleaner, I had it in my house and it was still working. Mr. D. responded with a joke that really surprised me; “Well that certainly shows that it’s a good thing marketeers are taking over around here. Those technicians would have run this company to the ground. Har-har-har…” (well, something like that any way) What he meant was, that since consumers don’t expect a tv to work for that long, but -say- ten years or so, it would have been better for Philips if their tv’s lasted for only fifteen years (five years longer then expected, but ten years shorter that was, obviously, possible), their customers would still be thrilled and would buy another Philips tv. At that point, I couldn’t realy put my finger on it, but I do recall instinctively knowing that mr. D. was a complete douche-bag.

I think mr. D. was what you may call ‘the average marketing exec.’. At university he read his copy of  ‘marketing principles’, sort of read about the ‘four p’s’ and received moderate, but sufficient grades to pass and get a nice job at a leading multinational, where he made a couple of small climbs along the corporate ladder. However; he had never understood what marketing should truly be about. He could never understand a concept such as ‘in a great company, marketing could be obsolete, since it doesn’t add anything’. Things like ‘the experience economy’ is something consumers had -unknowingly- been into for decades but no one had named it yet. A marketing guru found out, gave it a name, and many of his followers made a big buck, selling an idea to corporations that was totally useless to them, but no one actually figured that out. consumers make their own experiences and if you’re lucky: your company is invited. Back to the product bit.

Philips did do something wrong concerning that colour tv. It wasn’t that they invested too much in technology to make sure it would still be playing after thirty years (which it does), but they never invested enough in R&D to come up with something new and revolutionary enough so that I would want to pass my old tv on to someone else, in favour of that new product. Consider the computer industry. When was the last you bought a new pc because the ol done was broken? In my case, this never happened. I discarded several pc’s in perfect working condition (I donated them to school in developing areas) because I wanted that newer, better product. So, I’m still buying stuff from the company that I feel connected with, and I don’t have to throw out all sorts of old broken tech-stuff. Seems to me, everybody wins.

So, now I’m off to buy a new vacuum cleaner. Not because the old Philips one is crap, but because there’s something better out there. Lighter, more silent and more efficient in use of electricity. First, I ‘ll check if Mr. D. is still working for Philips and if he is, if he’s been transferred to vacuum cleaners. If he’s not, I’m going to buy the Philips one.

Whenever it’s convenient, advertisers and agencies make the claim that ‘advertising does not influence your behaviour, it merely influences your preferences’. This is convenient when it comes to stuff like ‘tobacco’ and ‘alcohol’. On the other hand, no agency has any problem in telling a potential client that their campaign will drive consumers to their stores like maniacs, but that’s an entirely different discussion. It is also a well known fact that the advertising industry has a big problem with science and research. Especially the creatives claim that ‘great campaigns’ have too often been ruined by ‘bad pretesting’ or ‘unreliable reasearch’. Both claims are, of course, wrong. 1. When the clients knows what he/she is doing (granted; this is also rarely the case) if a concept does not do well in the pre- or concept-test, then the concept the creative has come up with is shoddy. 2. Finally there is some research thats hows a direct link between media confrontation and behaviour.

Watching sexual explicit tv-shows is linked with teen pregnancies
I actually believe that many advertising people believe that what they do is mereley steering on preference. After all, we’ve all learned about mass media theories and we all knwo that there is no direct link between behaviour and watching tv; Watching Child’s Play may have been named as the main reason for two teenagers to murder someone else, there are millions of teenagers that do no go out and kill people… so there can be no scientific connection. While this may be true in the case of ‘murderous behaviour’, it appears it may not be so in the case of sexual behaviour. The American RAND Corporation has conducted research that showed that teenagers that watch a lot of sexual content on television are more likely to become, or make someone, pregnant. The article that was published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics describes a longitudinal survey of teens during a three year period. Teens who were exposed to high levels of television sexual content (90th percentile) were twice as likely to experience a pregnancy in the subsequent 3 years, compared with those with lower levels of exposure (10th percentile).

watching sex = having sex or having sex = watching sex?
Sexual content in this case is not: porn, but ‘Sex and the City’ (for example). Most likely, it will not be long before a network executive, when confronted with these results will go public with the claim: ‘Well, obviously teens that become pregnant, will have ha dsex. And obviously teens that have sex are interested in sex and will be more likely to watch sexual content on tv.” The RAND head researcher, dr. Anita Chandra has said that the main problem is that sexually explicit tv shows generally only highlight the positive sides to sex and not the dangers. This also stresses the importance of talking openly about sexuality for parents with their children.  You don’t leave it up to the advertising and media industry to teach your children about driving a car, you shouldn’t leave it up to those people to teach your children about sex either.

The highlights quickly and easy to understand on the BBC website.

That’s the actual pay-off of the Lidl supermarket: ‘Lidl is cheap’. and when looking at the yellow and blue logo, all the boxes in the places where there should be shelves and the tiles on the floors, you know it’s true. This is one cheap supermarket. But in the case of Lidl, that might not be a bad thing.

It’s easy to draw a parallel between Lidl and Aldi, the other German ‘discounty’ supermarket. No major brand names, almost everything under ‘made up’ private labels. But there are big differences as well. Lidl has a choice of ‘biological’, ‘Fair trade’ and even ‘ecological’ products whereas Aldis generally have none. Where Aldi usually makes the headlines because of the high levels of poison find on there fruit’n veg, Lidl was rewarded by the Dutch watchdog program (Kassa) for having the best (in terms of biological) vegetables of all Duthc supermarkets.

In marketing terms, Lidl is going the other way around as the other supermarkets. Traditionally, a supermarket would communicate on it’s quality and once you got there, you’d find out that they might be affordable as well. Marketeers try to convince advertisers that we are in an ‘experience economy’ and that shopping at your supermarket should also be an ‘experience’. Lidl probably flipped them the finger and told them to piss off. Good choice, I’d say. Lidl is cheap. And apparently you can get quality stuff there as well, a lot of which is fair trade, which makes it hard to slag them off because of preying on developing nations or child labour. I’d say that’s quite a clear position there taking. Shopping for groceries might just b shopping for groceries. I’ll get my experiences somewhere else, thank you very much.

(ps, obviously there are some skeletons in Lidls closets, but aren’t there always?)

‘Creating a hype’ has been much more than a hype itself among the big multinational consumer brands. Almost every marketer is looking for ways to create a big hype around it’s brand. Whisper campaigns, guerrilla marketing, brand buzzing what have you not in the idiom of the A-list marketeer? In the mean time, the biggest brand name of them all, Coca Cola, does what? A bit of tv ads, sponsoring of the big sports events… that’s about it. Seems very innovative. And smart. All this ‘ trying to create a hype’ is, excuse me, complete bollocks.

The Hush Puppies effect
Every brand that has ever been successful by getting the cool kids behind it and then seeing it expand to the masses has been extremely lucky. There are not that many brands that can say they have actually succeeded in doing this. In fact, it is a shockingly small number of brands considering the vast amount of brands out there that all employ professional marketeers, trendwatchers and advertising creatives. It a matter of pure statistics that a couple of them would in fact get that lucky and be able to copy the ‘Hush Puppies effect’, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.

Chaos and blind drivers
Am I saying that marketers do not know what they are doing? Well, actually: yes. I truly believe that many marketing exec tries his/her best at it, but the continuously mistake pure random success with events from which they can derive scientific knowledge which they can then use in completely different situations, for completely different target audiences and completely different brands. The world simply doesn’t work that way’. There’s too much chaos there to be able to use simple rules and apply simple theories. Advertising creatives are blind drivers: some might get you to your destination, most will end up in a ditch leaving you shaken but unhurt and a couple of them will actually crash into something.

Randomness
Hundreds of thousands of new brands emerge very single year, a couple of dozen of those make it into more or less well known global brands and a couple of those every decade will become real A-listers. That’s not cleverness, that’s merely statistic odds. Obviously there are a couple of things you can do to get some better odds for yourself, like ‘make a good product’ or ‘don’t spend too much before you start earning’ and of course, a bit of advertising will be necessary; who will know you’re around. But don’t expect to become very successful by trying to achieve that tipping point; you won’t.

Coke for the brand
Statistics for businesses is different from that in match class, where with every time you achieve success the chance of being successful again decreases. In business, when you’re successful, the chance that you’ll be successful again actually increases. If you combine that with the ‘winner takes it all’ effect (like WalMart destroying all it’s competition, or Microsoft holding the pc market captive) you get a situation where a couple of big brands will hold all the cards and new competitors have no choice but to aim for that hype effect be become successful, most will fail, but some will get lucky and increase their chances for future success. The big brands in the mean time wisely spread their odds. So Coca Cola introduces Coke Zero, which isn’t too risky and they sponsor the Olympics. get lucky once, twice , perhaps three times, then spread the odds…

Google for the brand
An alternative route to take would be to try and do something different. Google is perhaps the biggest example for this. First they took on Yahoo, then switched to Microsoft and perhaps Apple will be next. Google entered a market where they still had good chances; search engines. They become successful because the Google brand got ‘picked up’. With their success they penetrated the online advertising market and now they’re going for the Mobile telephone market (not with a gPhone mind you, but with a Linux approach to Mobile software…) Google never went looking for the Tipping Point, but they found it anyway. They had a good product and (virtual?) street credibility and they turned that into success. No marketing professional needed. What if Google manages to turn the mobile telecommunications market upside down as well? If I were working for Coca Cola, I’d be very very afraid indeed…

I do not necessarily hate the automotive industry. Nor do I have a personal vendetta against advertising people. Hey, I even wrote something nice about the good people at Ford some time ago. But, somehow, advertising brings out the worst in everybody (like people that have had to witness the Fortis adcampaign-disaster surely have noticed…)

As I was on my way to work this morning, I caught a glimpse of a big Ford billboard. On it, a nondescript vehicle, that has apparently been manufactured by Ford’s designers is shown in the traditional advertising way; a little diagonally, very shiny and metallic…

The header on top of the billboard read: “Dare to be different“. Which left me stunned by the complete and utter lack of creativity of both copywriter (and entire agency) and client. How generic can a payoff be? How very ‘not different’ to say ‘dare to be different. I would think it would be absolutely impossible to think of a tag-line for a car manufacturer that says ‘me too’ product more than ‘dare to be different‘. If I were the CEO of that advertising agency I would fire the copywriter and give the account director an enormous raise immediately.

It’s such a strange combination. People that actually dare to be different, or the people that aspire to be someone who dares to be different would never in a million years want to be seen in that car. The header that makes sense would have to be ‘dare to be just like everyone else‘. And would that be so bad?

In the world of NGO’s the fashionable term is ‘leadership’. All NGO’s are looking for people they can turn into ‘leaders’,which means that -since everyone is leading- we’re not actually going anywhere. There are too many people that consider themselves to be leaders anyway. We need followers. People that do the actual work. We need people that dare to buy a Ford Kuga since it makes them just like their neighbour. I can only conclude that the Ford ad people have got it all completely wrong….

I am sorry,

On the cover of an advertising magazine I read an article about an art director who said he was really tired of people still talking about ‘business-to-business’ (B2B). I can only assume that with B2B he only means ‘B2B marketing’, most advertising creatives rarely think beyond marketing when talking about companies. In his opinion, B2B should be replace by P2P (people-to-people) because it’s always ‘people doing business with people’ and there’s always a lot of emotion involved when people interact. I won’t argue with that, but then again; I don’t argue with the drunk that sleeps on the street and shouts at me that I should repent becasue the world is coming to an end. I will however, respond to the idea that ‘ B2B is dead, because you just have to target people in organisations’. I will actually give three responses! (indead, no less…)

First of all, I am sorry advertising world, P2P has already been taken. It stands for peer-to-peer, not people to people. Unfortunately it is therefor highly unlikely that it will replace B2B. I know how important a good acronym or brandneame is for anythiogn to become popular with ad-execs.
Second: It is generally assumed that in B2B marketing, emotion can not play a role since ‘businesses make rational decisions’. That is nonsense and has always been nonsense. On the other hand; it’s no reason to discard a fine term as ‘B2B’ either, unless we’re playing semantics here.
Third: businesses behave in ways that are no longer controlled by people. Especially large corporations behave like ant colonies behave; no single ant has much influence on what the colony does as a whole, and the colony is actually the enitity that ‘behaves’. This means; when businesses interact with other businesses, it’s not always a ‘people’ process, even though people (like ants) are always involved. Large organisations are like autonomous entities (organisms) that have their own ‘memories’, ‘knowledge’, ‘needs’, ‘behaviour’ et cetera. Ofcourse, this behaviour and these needs take place through the enitre organisation and not just the marketing department. however; the marketingdepartment will feel the influence of the organisationorganism it is situated in.

I’d say especially marketeers who work with ‘company profiles’, ‘positioningstatements, ‘organisation ambitions’, ‘corporate profiles’ and so on, should be able to understand that an organisation is more than just a collection of people in a shared building. They work hard to get the image across the spotlights that an organisation can be seen as one large -usually friendly- entity. Yet, they seem to fail to see how much of what they are saying is actually true.

I’m guessing a lot of you, dear readers, are not very familiar with the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept. The reason for that could be, other than just a mild distaste for anything ‘eco-friendly’, that marketing and C2C (hey, it’s sounds a lot more interesting now, doesn’t it?) seem a bit contradictory. Let me explain: C2C is eco-friendly but does not approach that from a moral high ground, but from simple economical sense: producing waste will cost you money. If everything you produce has an economical value, because it ads to the biosphere you will therefor, make more money. All pollution is stuff a producer made, for which he does not get paid… so that doesn’t make sense. It’s all just a matter of design, good design will not reduce waste, it will get rid of it.

How would this work in practice? Some examples; icecream packaging that melts when it gets defrosted. A company has added tiny seed to the packaging so that every time you throw the wrapper away you are spreading plants, therefor adding to the biosphere (I guess there are a couple of foreseeable problems to this, watch the documentary ‘Darwins nightmare’ about the East-African Lake Victoria for an obvious example, but still). Another example, a car that runs on compressed oxygen; the more you drive around, the cleaner the air gets. Anyone who has ever seen a photo of the smog over LA of any major Chinese city understands how this would help. It’s possible to compress the air making use of ‘clean’ energy so there would beno waste. And Ford Company is, in the meantime, designing a car that is completely C2C as well. Traditionally, to produce a 3000 pound car, you would use 50.00

Sounds pretty amazing huh? If you want to learn more, there’s loads of stuff about it on the net and I strongly recommend the book by the C2C founding fathers, William McDonough and Micheal Braungarten.

So, now to marketing. Marketing should be defined as: tricking people into buying crap they neither want nor need, with the forever unfulfilled promise of finally satisfying the consumers’ unhappiness. I know we’re all taught at university that marketing is about listening to our customers and that the customer is in the driving seat and that this is the story we tell each other and other out in the open, but this is, actually, BS. 95% of all marketing activity is about pushing unwanted crap, so that should actually be the definition. The ones of you that are reading this are obviously responsible for the remaining 5% so I’m sure we have no need for discussing this matter any further. So, it would seem, that the outcome of any marketing activity is: waste. And that’s not very C2C. Unless…

McDonough and Braungarten already knew that it’s not possible to use 100% of everything you put in, in the end product, some stuff will get discarded. So they said: waste is food. (remember the icecream wrappers?) You may need water to cool your production, but there is no reason why this water should get polluted. It is actually quite possible to have cleaner water go out of your factory then went in. I think we can consider ‘market segmentation’ and ‘targeting’ the equivalent of ‘reducing polution’. Marketeers try to, or have to, limit their polluting activities, not because they care, but because it makes economical sense. But try to ‘think outside of the box’ for a minute (it is something that’s supposedly in your job description isn’t it?). Your job is to sell crap, why not try to add value to (make food of) that crap as well as as the selling activities as well. I am quite sure that McDonalds could think of something better to put in their Happy Meals than Disney puppets made out of plastic. I am quite sure they have research on how long it takes for their gifts to be thrown away. If you make the give-away not just biodegradable but also add something that actually adds to the biosphere, that would help enormously. Or how about; you can return it to McDonalds so they can reuse the arts for new toys to give away? While we’re at it; why don’t they sell their burgers in stuff that adds to the biosphere? And how about those coupons that are handed out on the streets? How much of that is thrown away? Imagine all the seeds, leaves and branches that birds tear of trees and drop… that’s not pollution, that’s dding to the biosphere. Everyone that buys from Mcdonalds or receives leaflets or coupons from McDonalds could be like those birds. Without having to think about it, just throw all that stuff away (just like they do now). The architect Mcdonough likes to view buildings as trees; adding to their ecosphere with all its activities. All marketing activities could do that too. Just think outside of the hamburgerbox.

I doubt wether the newschannel Euronews will ever become serious competition for CNN or, say, BBC world, but I’ve been catching glimpse of it on a regular basis lately. It sort of helped me through my days while lying on the sofa with the flu. One of the most memorable things I’ve seen on Euronews is not a news item, but a commercial. And to answer the question; how cool can aviation be: as cool as Finnair (Okay, I admit it’s an awful joke). I actually did have a couple of good flying experiences with Finnair, but right now I’ll only discuss the commercial, which is fantastic bit of 3D animation that would not embarrass the best animators at Pixar, Disney or Sony.

The plot outline: we see a young reindeer looking up at the night sky. A light flies towards the horizon. The reindeer follows it. We then see it is threatened by approaching wolves, however… the light is guiding it to it’s mother and family. The reindeer is safe. You’d imagine that the light you saw was Santa’s sled… but it turns out to be a Finnair plane that lands safely on an icy runway. The payoff: Finnair, the official airline of Santa Claus. How can anyone beat that? This is the moment where every poorly talented advertising creative that was not involved in the making of this commercial will argue that this is actually not a good commercial at all. Awful concept, great execution, because: what does it say about the Finnair brand? How does this contribute to the Finnair positioning, or secure their marketsegment against it’s competitors?

If you’re an advertising creative and you have no such emotions; you’re either talented or you don’t have as much of an ego as the average creative (or both). No one flies as much, as reliable and as on time as Santa Claus and why would that be? Combine that with no endorser evokes as much positive feelings as Santa and the beautiful hartwarming script and brilliant execution and, yes: we have a winner. However this spot will undoubtedly never win any advertising awards, because it’s not edgy, not trendy and not sexy. In Holland we have a saying: ‘Good wine has no need for a halo’ and this spot proves it. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to book a skiing holiday in Finland.

P.s. Don’t enter the competition. That would really reduce my chances of winning.

Two trendy looking guys accompanied by a Voguely dressed young woman entered the office. Blackberries were placed on the table (not switched off, obviously), vintage jackets taken off and placed over a chair subtly revealing an mp3 player of some sort. They sat down, brought their own bottled water and plugged a macBook into their portable beamer to show us their animated presentation on a wall. Indeed, webdesigners were in the house. Intimidatingly cool as they looked (especially to us, office dwellers) we could all tell there wasn’t much to their story. We wondered; have they even read the briefing? It was quite clear that these eWizards tried to dazzle us with so many moving images, cool looking design and eLingo so that we would forget that there proposal had nothing to do with our briefing whatsoever. We had invited some of the leading webdesign agencies around and they all showed this same pattern; assuming that we -the client- had (1) never heard of community sites, p2p networks or even IP adresses, (2) we would believe them that you can only communicate with teenagers through internet or mobile phones and (3) making an image move is pure sourcery to us. Hm, well.

Obviously, we signed a contract with the -seemingly- most suitable company for us. And, as is the case when you’re building a campaign, at first everything moved along smoothly. As the deadline approached we were assured that our website would be ready on time. At least; if we could deliver the needed texts they were sure they told us about. Well, we couldn’t remember, but “hey, we’re in this together“. So we wrote the texts, worked on the graphs and on friday night after a week of 14 hour working days we sent all that was required of us so the cool guys (who always work, obviously) could get our website ready on monday… the deadline. Alas. On monday morning ’something’ was on the requested url… but it wasn’t our website… Was it? Well actually it was. But it was just half of it. Accompanied by a ‘website under construction, more information will be here soon’ sort of message.

Of the half of the information that was there, about half was old, incomplete or outdated information. Addresses were wrong, links were dead, pictures didn’t load and there were typos everywhere. When we asked the fashionably speaking woman about this we were told not to worry. ‘Everything will be fixed soon’. The ‘fixing’ part took about two weeks… And for several more weeks, different kinds of errors kept popping up.
We weren’t all too pleased.

We also were in need of an online mediastrategy, so we hired the agency recommended by the cool guys. The mediastrategy was nothing spectacularly creative, but it all looked solid and they would be doing the buying and traffic as well. Banners would go from the cool guys straight to the mediaguys who would then see to it that everything was distributed and put online. We, the client, could direct our attention elsewhere. Which, unfortunately, we did. Guess what happened when the mediacampaign began? You’re right; nothing. No visitors whatsoever. The expected -based on previous experience- 3000 visitors a day were a meagre 300 a day. Banners weren’t placed, contracts we had to sign weren’t e-mailed through, plannings were changed without informing us… basically: they fucked up. Our account person as well as our replacement account person somehow disappeared from the company, colleagues could not be reached. So again, we lost several good campaigning weeks (which could also be a good thing, the site was still shit anyway) but in the end someone who claimed to working for the mediaagency got in touch and told us he would put matters right. Proposed solution: All the banners that weren’t placed during the campaign weeks, will still be placed now. He actually got annoyed with us when we told him that we thought that this wasn’t much of a solution at all.

I’ve been asking around a bit. I’ve spoken to several former collaegues that work with these webdesign agencies (or cross media marketingcommunication consultancy firms…..) and online mediastrategy companies, I’ve spoken to advertising creatives, even account people (yes really), I’ve spoken to mediaplanners that work at the traditional companies. Turns out this isn’t an unique story at all. the cool ‘webpeople’ have absolutely no understanding what an agreement or a deadline means. I you ask for a site on a set date, you will get something that resembles a site, somewhere a couple of weeks after the decided date. They will tell you that a webvisitor four weeks after the desired date is the same thing as a visitor actually during the crossmedia campaign. And these people think they can get away with it!

Since I make more use of the internet as a … erm… ‘civilian’ sounds like a good word, than as a ‘professional’, I am actually quit happy with this. Anarchy still rules the web and if you want to build a success online it is still ‘every (wo)man for her/himself. One of the words I hated most when worked in advertising was ‘accountability’ but the cool webguys and gals could do with some. It is annoying that you work very hard for something and these people get paid to fuck it all up. For our next campaign, we are definitely hiring some cool freelance creatives. We might still fuck the strategy and mediaplanning up, but at least we’ll have fucked it up ourselves.

*note: above story is based on reality, but is no accurate account. Matters were actually a lot worse.