(The following is the first in a two-part blog-exchange on brand decision-making.  It is written by Joel Rubinson, the President and Founder of Rubinson Partners, Inc., a marketing and research consultancy, and former Chief Research Officer at The ARF.  Having met Joel years ago, I find he always inspires and challenges me with his insights and provocative thinking — this post is no exception.  My perspective on facts vs. guts will appear on his blog next week — stay tuned.)

What color is your brand decision-making?

Edward de Bono is a leader in creative thinking processes who authored a book on the Six Thinking Hats.  Two of the hats are:
• Information: (White) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
• Emotions (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling

I find that organizations tend to be made up of people who are either white hat or red hat and they often do not work well with each other. Consumer insights and sensory researchers are generally white hat while the brand and customer marketing teams and designers are red hat (“my instincts got me here”). Media researchers are often analytics-driven white hat folks while creatives and agency planners are usually red hat. Brand and innovation teams often prefer to create an innovation initiative based on their instincts or consultants they work with who are rooted in careful ethnographic study of 12 people delaying the dreaded moment of the researcher conducting the concept or ad copy test.  Not a good dynamic.

Well, I’d like to propose a different model.

Consider that 80% of new products fail, 50% of ad campaigns never show sales lift, yet researchers test things at the 90% confidence level.  I mean, huh??  Obviously marketing is game of hunches but if we can ground those hunches in facts, we’re onto something.

We need to use the past but not be shackled by it.  The media world which managers rely on to bring their brand communications to consumers is evolving way too fast.  If you wait for hard evidence on something like leveraging advertising possibilities in smart mobility you will be last in.  You need some creative leaps.

So the model I propose is that we think in terms of belief repositories that are fueled by hard evidence but that these beliefs can lead marketing teams to make investments where no experiment or marketing mix model has yet been run.  Very Bayesian and actually, I believe this is how marketing teams need to think anyway.  If the insights team is going to have an impact they need to embrace this model.  Prove a new belief or disprove an old one but let marketers still act on their instincts based on these beliefs.

Here’s an example of how this works.  Many believe that Facebook is a place where a marketer can build engagement for their brand because what can be more enduring than getting someone to friend your brand on Facebook?  BFF, right?  Well actually, I have gotten some ahas by showing marketers that digital engagement marketing is really about getting people to spend time with your brand and then showing that this does NOT occur in Facebook.  For brands I looked at, mostly, less that 1% of fans revisit the brand page in a given month, meaning that mostly, brand friending gives the marketer a broadcast channel for updates.  On the other hand, people spend lots of time when they visit your website (usually in the 3-10 minute range per visit).  A case I looked at is Starbucks.  From the data I’ve seen, Starbucks has more than 10 times the fans on Facebook as it has visitors to its website, yet those website visits generate 10 times the number of minutes that people spend with the brand.  A new belief about building brand engagement is born in this way, rooted in evidence.

Marketing decision making is about taking actions whose consequences live in the unknowable future. The belief repository system calls for hard evidence (e.g. study the data on time with brand) that changes the beliefs (e.g. owned media is where I build customer engagement) and then you make marketing decisions from there.

The sessions at eTail, the conference for multi-channel and online retailers, were chock full of new perspectives and new technologies.

The title for this year’s event, held last month in Palm Springs, was:  “The Future Is Now: Managing ‘What’s Next’ While Remaining Focused on Today’s Brand Experience.”

I learned a lot from my time at eTail — since my work focuses primarily on the strategy and operations of brand experience, while the content of this conference was much more about the tactics and techniques.  I took particular note of 5 ideas about the business and marketing of retail which emerged from all of the presentations I sat in on:

1. “Facebook ‘likes’ are the new email addresses”

This point, made by Mark Pierce, CEO, Marketlive, was reinforced by several speakers who expressed concerned about how companies’ eagerness to accumulate “likes” on Facebook is reminiscent of the pursuit for email addresses a few years back. Back then, CRM was the shiny new object which companies clamored for and many rushed to amass a large database of email addresses.  But they soon found that the value of a CRM database lies less in its size and more in its usage.

Today the phenomenon is repeating, as many companies are focusing on getting a lot of people to “like” them on Facebook. Most aren’t doing or offering anything to prompt a “like” other than asking for it — and they have no plan for following up on the “likes” they get.

It all seems rather pointless unless you use “likes” as part of an engagement strategy.  And it would be so much more impactful for companies to instead focus on doing something that people like so much they decide all by themselves to tell their friends.

2. the impact of mobile extends beyond commerce

With only a very small percentage of retail transactions happening through mobile devices, it might be tempting to write mobile off as a passing fad or perhaps a nascent behavior with little consequence today.  But mobile has broad and influential impact on retail.

Pedro Santos, Chief Strategist, eCommerce, at Akamai painted a clear picture of this impact with some stats:  87% of mobile owners use their devices to locate stores, 75% use them to compare prices, and 38% use them to access product reviews.  We may never see the incidence of mobile commerce top 10%, but mobile is already radically transforming the retail experience.

3. joining existing communities and conversations may be better than starting new ones

In a talk about content marketing, Deanna Brown, Federated Media’s President and COO, encouraged attendees to leverage the power of conversation to engage customers in meaningful relationships.  But she clarified that we shouldn’t simply default to initiating the conversations.  Joining existing ones – through forums, Twitter hashtags, and related parties’ blogs — may be easier and more valuable to customers.

Forrester analyst Diane Clarkson furthered the sentiment, pointing out that building a community is resource intensive — so participating (vs. hosting) a conversation may make sense despite the trade-off of more limited opportunities.

4. mobile has upped the competition for people’s attention

Limelight Networks Chairman and CEO Jeff Lunsford reminded marketers that their biggest competition may be Angry Birds, the mobile game with broad appeal and addictive qualities.  To capture the attention of today’s “hyper connected customer,” we must offer engaging, seamless experiences and use rich media and personalization.

When customers use their mobile devices, they behave very differently. On the plus side, they’re available and on-the-go and so the laws of inertia work in retailers’ favor:  a body in motion tends to stay in motion, so a visit is more likely if you reach someone who is “in the neighborhood.”  But at the same time mobile users are often distracted and have short attention spans, so the call to action needs to be persuasive and urgent.

Ultimately, Akamai’s Santos explained, “E-marketers need to shift their website optimization from simply shortening page load times to creating branded experiences.”

5. new technologies should be used for more than marketing

The marketing applications of new technologies like mobile search and social sharing are obvious – but marketing leverages only a fraction of their value.  Customer service can be greatly enhanced by the new sites, tools, and capabilities.

Tracy Benson, Sr. Director, Best Buy Marketing, explained how her company has placed a priority on using technology to redefine customer service.  She highlighted Twelpforce, Best Buy’s Twitter-fueled program through which employees respond to customer inquiries and issues directly.  She also talked about facilitating knowledge sharing among customers and introduced the idea that, between reviews, forums, and social Q&A, “Friends are now problem solving tools.”

Forrester’s Clarkson gave an entire talk on “Customer Service Is the New Social Marketing.”  She outlined how social media can meet customer service objectives by:
- facilitating – helping people help others
- resolving – using direct and immediate communication tools to solve people’s problems
- redirecting – directing people to other channels where they can be better helped

I’ll be posting an interview with Diane soon, so check back to hear more about how, in her own words, “Social media and customer service are no longer flirting.”

related posts:

• future of marketing
• five leading business ideas for 2011

This post concludes the series on brands that have wasted their potential.  In the past few weeks, we covered:

• GNC — “It’s such a shame because the company has the history, focus, and distribution to be a great brand.“
• Facebook — “There are no obvious or meaningful brand attributes that differentiate it.“
  
• Dairy Queen — “Recent rebranding efforts have squeezed out much of the endearing old-school essence of the brand.”
  
• Vonage — “It’s the classic “boy meets brand, brand over-promises, brand under-delivers, boy tells everyone he knows to avoid brand” cautionary tale.“, and
• Saturn — “In 1994 people bought Saturn for what it stood for. Today it is just another make to be judged on quality and price alone.”

Thanks to my guest contributors who provided provocative insights about how brands that could have been really good ended up failing to live up to their potential.  Their analyses contain great lessons for all brands who may be squandering strong equity or missing opportunities.

And hope for these brands, and others, is not lost — in fact, the following concluding remarks describe how all brands can maximize their potential.  These comments are from Scott Goodson — founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog (the agency behind iconic campaigns such as Coke, Old Navy, Heineken, and the current effort for True North).  The success of his agency speaks to what a talented guy Scott is (and I’m not just saying that because he has been so great to me for so long.)

Scott says, “I would say that any brands that are simply broadcasting to the consumer are not taking advantage of their full potential.  The new battleground is the profusion of media and how to tame and control it, and use it to your advantage to ensure your amazing content actually gets seen by the consumer.  Cultural Movement + Tools = Full Potential.

“I know this is new thinking in the new marketing world that has totally transformed everything, difficult to believe even, but the way things have worked in the past is not way how they can or will work in the future.  The 60 years of advertising that have gone before are not the systems of the future, marketing is today transformed.

“Brands that are taking advantage of their full potential are brands that spark cultural movements, not brands caught in the past.  Today brands can identify an idea on the rise in culture, they can crystallize, lead, curate and sponsor a movement.  Once you have a movement you can do anything in a fragmenting media world.“

Thanks for the inspiration, Scott.  I hope this has been an interesting series for everyone and you have learned as much as I have.

This is one in a series of posts about brands have failed to live up to their potential — from Jonathan Salem Baskin, author of Branding Only Works on Cattle, the “dim bulb” blog, and Ad Age/CMO Strategy column.  Jonathan has taught me a lot through his insightful analyses of brands and businesses — and he’s entertained me with his dry wit and occasional rant.  What I appreciate most is that, along with his critique Jonathan provides thought-starters for how to do things better — his post below is no exception.

I’ve asked Jonathan to share his thoughts on a brand disappointment  — he chose Facebook.

From Jonathan:

I know, I know.  You’re already thinking that the Facebook brand is a poster child for the social media movement.  Everybody and their brother (or third-cousin, or that dork from high school who needed to be avoided like the plague) has a page, and probably checks it at least somewhat regularly.  Also, founder Mark Zuckerberg is a famous brand, right?  Like a post-bust market proto-Steve Jobs, or something.

Only I say not really, and so what?

Functionally, Facebook is a glorified address book combined with a chatroom, allowing for incessant updates that create an experience of intrusion that is glowingly labeled ambient awareness.  It’s great, for sure: I post my daily Dim Bulb essays, created a page for my new book, and I occasionally comment on news from a friend (or get a funny little comment on mine).  I was particularly involved right after I first opened my account, trolling my address book and failing memory to reconnect with all of those names from my past that had otherwise slipped from my daily life.  Done.

Now, I’m sort of running out of things to do.

There seems to be a usage curve based on social media functionality, and I’d suggest that it’s the inverse of 1) total participation numbers, and 2) number of functions or add-ons.  It was fun the first or second time I was gifted or poked, but now I just ignore that stuff (and usually de-friend whatever numbnut bothered me).  I’m ambiently aware of the things people I barely know are doing, but for the life of me, I can’t see any reason why I should care.  Awareness is certainly not the same thing as recognition, let alone relevance.

I’m reminded of the fun I once had receiving and then forwarding jokes and funny video links via email.  It was a blast…and then it got old.  For that matter, I remember the thrill of downloading every song I could even think of via Napster.  Finally, I owned that Bay City Rollers song I’d remembered from high school, although I’d lived a productive and fulfilling life without ever hearing it again thereafter.  So I proceeded to continue ignoring it on my hard drive.

I worry the trend with such functionally-based technology tools is to skew heavily to the ambient part, and not so much on the awareness end.  The functional attributes of the Facebook brand could become a part of the background of my day, just ahead of the buzzing I hear from my fridge when I choose to hear it.  What makes the brand unique?  From an functional perspective, not much.

Conceptually, the Facebook brand is even more dicey.

It’s original brand proposition was that it was only open to college students, so it provided some protection from the vast wash of numbnuts who might otherwise want to look at your pictures, or chat with you.  But now it’s available to anyone, or to anything, as corporations can issue pages, run promotions, etc.  Lurkers are still somewhat stimied, but commerce isn’t.  Facebook’s owners are madly trying to figure out how to exploit…er, monetize…its members, just as some members are already working hard to exploit one another.

So is the Facebook brand about being safe, or transparent, or useful, or responsible, or what?  I’d suggest that there are no obvious or meaningful brand attributes that differentiate it, or that preclude it from slipping into the miasmic muddle of purposelessness that embraces MySpace, Second Life, and most other mainstream social networks.  It’s WOW without trolls, or Eve Online without spaceships.

It doesn’t have to be this way, however.

Facebook could adopt and promote specific behaviors that define its brand, and establish a framework for its user participation and future growth.  It’s not a marketing or branding challenge, per se, but rather a business strategy question: how to create, via real commitments and actions, a brand purpose that defied the general trend toward becoming generic (and losing out to the next tool embarking on the same path)?

Here are four starter ideas to illustrate what I mean:

Become a truly user-controlled referral community: Instead of selling commercial conversation to businesses, why not let users own it, a la eBay?  People could recommend things to one another, and receive credibility rankings (or some other accrued value).  Members could opt in or out of such activities.

Provide platforms for multimedia: Go one step past YouTube and merge membership with art, thereby creating user-controlled channels for original music, video, and audio works.  Make Facebook the brand that excludes professional art; make it the tool for everyone else to use.

Give up management authority to the collective: Transform Facebook into one gigantic town hall, and give members the responsibility (not just the opportunity) to vote on activities, allowable tools, functional additions, etc.

Monetize membership, not eyeballs: Figure out ways to make members want to pay (or subscribe) to Facebook, instead of trying to exploit their visits.  Think public television…what would the brand have to deliver/stand for in order for it to be valuable to people?

Fundamentally, though, the business would have to function differently in order to claim and substantiate its branding.  There’s little evidence that such actions are likely.  It’s just too easy to quip about members and time spent on the site, and relegate the issue of finding a sustainable, long-term business proposition to some future inevitability.

But that future is not a guaranteed outcome; in fact, the evidence is that, without real brand behaviors, the Facebook brand proposition has already reached its peak (and perhaps passed it?).

Now is the time for it to put a stake in the virtual firmament, and make the brand stand for something(s) real, different, and meaningful.

Good stuff, Jonathan — thanks for your post.  I’m particularly intrigued by the membership monetization idea – I’ve often thought that the problem with sites like Facebook is that they’re free, thus falling squarely in the category of you get what you pay for.

Jonathan and I would love to hear your feedback — and next Monday:  John Moore offers his thoughts on another brand that has failed to live up to its potential — can’t wait!

Yesterday’s New York Times article entitled, “Do You Want to ‘Friend’ a Detergent?” provides a vivid description of what’s wrong with marketing these days.  It discusses the attempts by brands like Tide and Crest to employ “social advertising” and points out the limitations of such efforts.

The article reports on Procter & Gamble’s 11-month old campaign for “2X Ultra Tide” featuring a page on Facebook that invites members to post “their favorite places to enjoy stain-making moments” (not sure what those are — Italian restaurants??).  Apparently the page has received only 18 submissions including two from the Company, two from someone at The Onion, and several one-word posts like “Tide-alicious.”

It seems the marketers behind this failed campaign are misguided — they are putting the desire to engage their target audience in a culturally relevant manner ahead of applying simple logic to their marketing approach.  I say this because they are engaging a program that seems disconnected from the marketing objective.

FaceBook may be a great way to spark a cultural phenomenon for your brand (I’ll let others debate that point) but I suspect the objective of the 2X Ultra Tide campaign and many others like it is simply to prompt product trial.  So, why not engage marketing tactics that actually facilitate trial?  Sharing stories about stain-making moments seems pretty far removed from activating trial.

Back when I worked as an account planner for the advertising agencies for brands like Burger King and Land Rover among others, my primary role was identifying, describing, and framing the advertising task — “why are we advertising?” Grounded by this insight, creative directors and media planners would then identify the appropriate tactics.  I fear this discipline lost out to the desire to jump on the social media bandwagon.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for marketing innovation — it must be grounded in specific marketing objectives.  After all, marketing is not an end unto itself, right?

In the article Ted McConnell, the interactive marketing manager at P&G, explains, “All brands want consumers to be their ‘friends,’” but he himself reluctantly admits this really doesn’t make sense — “It’s just stuff.”  I find his comment quite revealing.

My critique of Lucky Jeans‘ “Lucky Few” campaign was published in this week’s Brandweek.  For those of you who didn’t see it, here goes:

For decades, fashion advertising seems to have followed a formula that goes something like this: Gorgeous models + famous photographer = stunning print campaign. Perhaps models were switched out for celebrities or a gimmick was thrown in the mix but, overall, there really hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in apparel brands’ marketing. For the most part, the people wearing those clothes have been stunning, and chances are they don’t look anything like you do.

That’s why the recently launched “Lucky Few” campaign from Lucky Brand seemed to have so much potential. As the press release explained, the fashion label had selected a group of “artisans”—ranging from musicians to an aspiring actress—to model its fall 2008 collection. The idea of choosing real-life creative types as models was intended to underscore the brand’s “message of individualism and the belief that being original and creative should be celebrated.”

Sounds great, huh? I imagined an inclusive, celebratory campaign featuring actual people whose compelling-but-flawed selves would inspire us to carve our own creative paths through life. I think that’s the kind of fresh approach that apparel brands need. But it looks like we’re not going to luck out with the undifferentiated and unfocused campaign that Lucky’s delivered. Real as these folks may be, they still look like stars—just ones you haven’t heard of. They come off as contrived, unapproachable and, in some cases, irrelevant to the theme. Just how “ordinary” is an aspiring musician who’s already been to Juilliard? Sure, some of the winners of the national selection process came from humble beginnings and got, well, lucky. Maybe that’s the problem: “Lucky Few” smacks of elitism; these are not Average Joes like you and me.

They certainly don’t look like you and me, either. Remember the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign from 2004? That campaign featured everyday women, warts and all—and it worked. Granted, Lucky is selling fashion, not soap, and its core demo is cool and young. But instead of taking a creative risk, Lucky defaulted to the “beautiful people” shoot, courtesy of photographer/director Michael Bernard.

What’s so bad about that? Well, the stated goal is authenticity, and that’s been undermined by highly stylized images like these. Along the way, differentiation has been another casualty; these shots make Lucky look like all the other high-concept apparel brands littering the glossy mags.

Lucky also could have escaped the sea of sameness by communicating a distinctive POV, but the messaging is scrambled. The brand’s homepage claims the “Lucky Few” is an “amazing group of individuals who used their talent to make luck happen,” while its Facebook page says they’re “people that live for creative expression.” Is the campaign about luck? Creativity? Individuality? Dreams?

The campaign signage only muddles things further. The headline on one piece asks, “Who’s Your Joan?” in a somewhat esoteric reference to the inspiration one of the artists received after seeing a painting depicting Joan of Arc. Yet the same piece features the slogan, “Make Luck Happen.” I don’t know whether Lucky is trying to inspire me or cajole me. Either way, I’m confused.

Postings by the brand’s Facebook friends suggest that I’m not the only one, either. In answer to the invitation to submit their own “lucky stories,” people have posted everything from a recounting of how they met their girlfriend at a party to a promotion for their budding musical career. It’s an attempt to harness social media, but the lasso has clearly slipped. Lucky’s Facebook page is primarily comprised of images of the Lucky Few, and it looks as though the print campaign has just been peeled off and stuck there. It’s no wonder that three weeks after its launch, the page has garnered only 1,000 fans and wall posts by 30 people—many of whom are Lucky employees (Zara, which launched its page a month earlier, now has more than 160,000 fans and 500-plus wall posts).

At a time when brands have to take greater creative strides to get noticed, I wish that Lucky had done more than follow in the well-worn footprints. I guess that goes to show there’s a difference between wishing for something and making your own luck.

Here’s another download from last week’s Digital Symposium which I spoke at and attended (see express vs. operationalize for a synopsis of my talk) — this is from Mike Moran‘s presentation.

Mike is the author of Do It Wrong Quickly:  How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.  He’s also a former IBM engineer turned Internet marketing guru, which means he has a great perspective on all the stuff trips up marketers — like how to talk about new Internet technologies in a way that your CEO, CFO, head of R&D, etc. are going to understand.

One of the things he covered in his presentation was a categorization framework for social media — buckets that help organize and clarify different social media technologies.  Here are the 4 categories he discussed along with explanations and commentary from him (and me):

1.  content-based — e.g., blogs, webcasts, YouTube, etc. — any social media in which the point is the content (creating and sharing it) — for companies, doing content-based social media is essentially PR on the web and the most basic approach

2.  personality-based — e.g., FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc. — commonly referred to as social networking sites, this kind of social media is for connecting with others — companies might engage with personality-based sites by developing profiles for their brand characters or their brands themselves, targeting market segments (particularly useful for B2B), and/or creating groups or sub-networks to connect brand stakeholders

3.  interest-based — e.g., Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, etc. — these are communities, message boards, and forums formed around specific topics — like personality-based sites, this type of social media may be used for targeting a specific market segment — it also seems like a great research source

4.  fantasy-based — e.g., Webkinz World, Second Life, etc.  — fantasy-based social media are virtual worlds in which people adopt personas and interact with each other — more and more brands are setting up their own custom Second Lifes in order to facilitate deeper customer engagement with the brand

Perhaps the next time you try to explain a new marketing program to your corporate execs you can use this framework to help them understand the growing and ever-changing landscape of social media.  Thanks, Mike!