Archive for March, 2007
value improv (dynamic pricing)
Posted by: | CommentsPricing used to be a fluid, informal thing. Prices in the market would fluctuate with the time of day, the clothing of the buyer, the stock of the seller or all three. It was kind of value improv.
In the longer term, I guess the train will have a digital display in each car. It will show the price of each car in the train, and historical average for that car. Otherwise, a trip home to Connecticut turns into a game of "musical chairs."
Gaga over Geico
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Voice-over:
Denise Bazik is a real Geico customer, not a paid celebrity, so to help tell her story we hired a celebrity.
Denise:
It was Thanksgiving night, when I accidentally hit a deer.
Little Richard:
Whoa! Look out! Look out!
Denise:
I called Geico expecting to get a recording but someone was there to help me.
Little Richard:
Help me! Somebody help me!
Denise:
Geico got my claim in the works right away, and I was actually able to enjoy my Thanksgiving.
Little Richard:
Mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce! WOOOOOooo!
Voice-over:
Geico. Real service. Real savings.
I love these ads, and I’ve been trying to think why they work so well. I mean, what would an anthropologist say?
If we think of Little Richard as a Greek chorus (I know, I know), he’s a second voice expressing what the first voice cannot say. Right? Um, no, that’s not it at all.
If we think of Little Richard as a Greek muse, he offers creative inspiration. Right? Um, no, again.
If we think of Little Richard’s voice is a "gloss," he serves one of three functions:
1) translation, turning speech we can’t understand into speech we can,
2) explication, suppling underlying facts or assumption,
3) exposition, drawing meaning out.
No, no, and no. Little Richard mystifies content and destabilizes meaning. This is advertising at its most nimble and mischievous. It evokes a convention, and then breaks it.
The effect is funny. Accustomed to one thing, we get another. Discontinuity creates a current of surprise and a small shock of amusement. If only the world were more like that! Thank God, the world is not more like that! Or, as Little Richard would put it, woooooo!
According to Adweek, the Testimonial campaign idea came from Warren Buffett, the sage of Omaha and the head of Berkshire Hathaway. Now there may be people more elementarily American than Warren Buffett, but I can only think of one and his name is Brett Favre. The fact that Mr. Buffett helped inspire this mind-bending technique is, well, just plain interesting. I would have bet what’s left of my scholarly reputation that such a thing could never happen, but then that’s what’s interesting about doing the anthropology of contemporary culture. Strictly speaking, it’s one surprise after another.
Clearly, the hat tip goes to The Martin Agency which turned Buffett’s interest in consumer testimonials into something remarkable.
[If this were a Geico testimonial ad, you would now see, sitting beside me, Randy Jackson from American Idol and Randy would say: "They blew it out the box, dawg!" complete with exuberantly cliched hand gestures.]
Effectively, we are running two tracks of meaning in the ad and letting them play off against one another. It makes me think of Henry Jenkins’ notion of transmedia, but in this case we are running the two media events in the same space.
[Cut to Horatio Caine (David Caruso in CSI: Miami), saying, with his signature menace, "two media streams in...the...same...(put on sunglasses, stand sideways) AAAd."]
As if to encourage the two-stream effect, the Geico customer barely acknowledges the celebrity in her kitchen…a clear departure from standard operating procedure in our celebrity addled culture. These ads might as well have been split screen. These screen are conjoined but kept separate, the better, perhaps, to spark off one another.
There is something interesting about the choice of celebrities. In addition to Little Richard, the campaign features Peter Graves of Mission Impossible, Burt Bacharach of movie sound track fame, and Charo…who knows why Charo is famous. She just is, ok?
[Christopher Walken with his eerie emphasis: Who knows why Charo is famous but she just is, ok?"]
These celebrities established themselves before the slopes of Mount Olympus grew so slippery. They became fixtures in our culture. And then apparently, they choose, for their own reasons, to retire from view. Bringing them back feels like an act of generosity on the part of the brand. These are old friends, as familiar as they are famous. We are pleased to see them again.
The ad puts these celebs to work. After all, this is not the usual kind of endorsement exercise with the celebrity air brushed into an adworld, Uma Thurman for a watch company, say. No, these celebs are asked to play against type. Bacharach is all louche and loungey, fallen but happy. Peter Graves is apparently wandering in some sexual Second Life. The steely Graves is gone. So is the parodic one. Charo is the least interesting, and darn close to stereotypical as a chatty Latina who turns every English word into 40 Spanish ones. And Little Richard. He seems eager to get the translation exactly right (see image above), even as he then makes off with it, transporting it across state lines into a world of his own delirious invention.
These celebrities do seem to occupy their own alternative realities. And it may be the same alternative reality. Certainly, they are all have an air of contented eccentricity. But only The Martin Agency can say for sure.
We can say is this: These ads bring together (without in any way implicating or integrating them), straightforward, hard working, middle Americans who turned to Geico in their hour of need, and celebrities who are all but AWOL, missing both from our screens and their own well known, PR scripted lives.
The effect is spectacular. Not just funny but resonant. And perhaps this is because we have three streams running. The Geico customer, the celebrity qua celebrity, and the celebrity against type. It’s a lovely, interesting, noisy, cloudy, streaming event, as if The Martin Agency managed to stuff the cable this once with things that almost never go together.
Acknowledgments
creative director: Steve Bassett
copywrighting: Bob Meagher
art direction: Adam Stockton
Reference
High, Kamau. 2007. Geico’s campy success. Adweek. February 5, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant 2006. Who is the celebrity endorser. Culture and Consumption II. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Little Richard for Geico on YouTube, here.
Charo for Geico on YouTube, here.
Burt Bacharach for Geico on YouTube, here.
Peter Graves for Geico on YouTube, here.
For more on muses, see the Wikipedia entry here.
For more on the Greek chorus, see the Wikipedia entry here.
The RED campaign, is this what happened?
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The early results are in. On a "massive" investment, the RED campaign recently returned a mere $11 million.
You could argue that these are early days, that it’s too soon to judge the Red campaign. On the other hand, you could say that this much firepower, publicity and currency should have produced a bigger effect.
It would be a lovely case study. There are lots of bits and pieces here for scrutinizing. Does the fault lay with any or all of the following factors:
1. Bono fatigue
2. the association with big brands
3. the association these big brands (the Gap, American Express, Motorola, iPod)
4. using a color as the thread
5. using this particular color
6. something about the marketing execution
I think none of these is the culprit. I think the RED campaign was killed by the skeptics, the ones who insisted that RED was too little, a distraction from real problems and real solutions, and/or a way of disguising or obscuring personal and corporate responsibility. These arguments established a shadow of doubt and this did the rest.
After the skeptics, the RED project carried a secret message, one that suggested that the bearer of a Motorola was perhaps a poor, clueness dope who didn’t get a) how serious are the problems of this world, b) how little corporations care, c) now little this particular campaign could hope to do. Now the consumer has to worry that the RED campaign positions him or her as someone who "just doesn’t get it." And let’s face it, in certain circles, on these issues particularly, no one wants to look like someone who just doesn’t get it. In a flash, all one’s credibility as a social actor disappears.
Now, when someone wears a Gap t-shirt in hostile circumstances (a particularly hip coffee house, say), there is always the outside chance that he is doing so ironically, that it was a gift from a girlfriend, or that he got it as a give-away. When the product is a simple t-shirt, the consumer is not obliged to "own" the brand. And even if he IS obliged to own the brand ("but we have pictures of you buying it!)", it’s finally just a t-shirt , no real harm, no real foul.
But if the consumer is seen packing an American Express credit card, after the skeptics have spoken, he really has to own the card, and its new shadow, the imputation that the bearer really has no idea of the larger, most pressing issues of the day. Not so good.
Now, I am betting that most of the skeptics lodged their skepticism reflexively. On the grounds that you just can’t let the corporations get away with this act of white wash, green wash, red wash. I mean you have to say something, if only because you don’t get a chance to state the position often enough. We know the drill here.
But if the effect is the killing of the RED initiative and if funding is denied AIDS prevention in Africa, yikes, the skeptics have a lot to answer for. There is suffering in the world that can be put at their doorstep.
The larger marketing issue is also clear. People build personal identities out of the meanings accessed from the branded world. In this case, the intended meanings of the RED brand were subverted so that now RED adoption must necessarily diminish the consumer’s claim to intelligence, sensitivity, worldliness. People will pay any number prices to aid in the amelioration of social problems. Participating in the ritual destruction of the social self is probably not one of them. And we would be naive to expect otherwise.
The take-away for RED, take it down and start again. This campaign is truly cooked.
References
Join the Red campaign here.
Fawkes, Piers. 2007. After Huge Marketing Effort, RED only Delivers $11.3 M.
PSFK. February 19, 2007. here.
Noise
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I spent the day at the PSFK conference in New York City. I fell into conversation with Noah Brier and Mark Lewis about how important it is to have noise in the signal, noise in the brand, noise in the corporation.
If once the meaning managers of the corporation hoped for perfect clarity, now they know that clarity is a problem, a barrier, and a failure. Clarity leaves no room for consumer cocreation, the complexities of a Cate Blanchett (see post below), and the nuance on which great branding now depends.
So what a pleasure later in the day to hear Laurie Rosenwald talk about her design work. Rosenwald is a devotee of noise. She regaled us with the importance of accident. One of her headings: "how to make mistakes on purpose." She collects stray materials and waits for them to insinuate themselves into a cover design or editorial art. Rosenwald harvests noise.
There are cultural origins here. The Fluxus movement was deeply interested in accident. The beat poets told Allan Ginsberg that his poetry was too well formed. The Talking Heads advised us to Stop Making Sense.
But things got, I thought, even more interesting when Rosenwald talked about her life as a commercial artist. (In fact, Rosenwald calls herself the world’s "most commercial artist.") Being a commercial artist, she says, is like living an argument. Commercial and cultural impulses are now longer defined at cross purposes, but they still ride up against one another. This makes some people cut and run. But the rest stay to experience and harvest the noise within.
I found myself thinking that some of the most interesting people these days are hybrids. In fact, it’s relatively easy to be one thing. In fact, we got pretty good at being one thing. These days, the trick is to be several things. This is more difficult, but I think Rosenwald is right to say that it gives us access to new creative powers. Selves used to be declaried unfit for habitation when filled with diversity, accident, and noise. But these are now the signatures of someone well defined. Hybrid selves are good to live. Good and noisy.
References
More information on Laurie Rosenwald here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Piers Fawkes for a wonderful conference.
Unsolicited advice
If you have a chance to hear Kevin Slavin of area/code talk about his work in the area of game design, run, don’t walk, to listen to him. Wonderful. More on area/code here.
The Sacrificial CMO
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Friday, I was wondering whether Mary Minnick of The Coca-Cola Company is a "sacrificial change agent," a woman who was destined to break the rules, antagonize her colleagues, and push the corporation too far.
Adam Richardson wrote to say that we should perhaps also see Carly Fiorina of HP in this way. Interesting.
When I got thinking about it, I realized I missed two other candidates.
Kerri Martin spent 20 months at Volkswagen as the director of brand innovation. Martin has piloted Mini’s reentry into the US and Marketing Vox says she was "known as a risk taker." She dumped Arnold Boston, the firm responsible for the spectacularly successful "Drivers Wanted" campaign in favor of Crispin Porter & Bogusky. Crispin raised a ruckus with TV spots like the "V-Dub in da haus" (pictured).
Whether Martin can be called a sacrificial change agent is complicated by her relationship with Crispin, the agency she brought to VW without the usual review. (As we have noted before, CMOs have such brief tenures [~20 months] that they are sometimes obliged to bring agencies with them from their prior lives.) It’s hard to tell. Who was the change agent: Martin or Crispin?
It was Crispin for instance who suggested the change of name from Golf to Rabbit. Solman of BrandWeek continues,
Crispen has created many controversial campaigns for Volkswagen in its first year on the business; ads featuring frenetic drivers embracing their "Fast"; imploring GTI riders to "un-pimp" their rides; relaunching the Rabbit with over-reproductive innuendo; offering guitar giveaways for turning cars into mobile amplifiers; and producing shock spots for rubberneckers with on-screener Jetta accident ("Safe Happens").
The other candidate for "sacrificial change agent" status is Julie Roehm, the woman who joined Walmart to serve as its advertising/communications chief. Roehm lasted just 10 months.
In retrospect, this was not a match made in heaven. BusinessWeek calls WalMart "one of America’s most colorless companies." And this is what Roehm says about herself,
I think part of my persona is that I am an envelope pusher. The idea of change in general can be uncomfortable for many people, and my persona as an agent of change can prompt that feeling.
Roehm says Walmart "would rather have had a painkiller [than take] the vitamin of change." (from Berner, as below.)
Riley says Walmart should have known better.
Give me a break. You didn’t know that Julie Roehm is a lightning rod? A change agent? You didn’t know that she had a track record for pushing the envelope in advertising, especially leveraging sex and sexual innuendo?
By this reading, it looks like Walmart was merely naive. The likeliest scenario is perhaps that when Roehm saw how deeply Walmart was going to resist change, and decided to go out with a bang. Her status as a sacrificial player was, in other words, thrust upon her. "Go big or go home" turned into "go big and go home."
Here too the relationship with an agency, in this case Draft FCB, complicates things. Who was the change agent: Roehm or Howard Draft? Was Roehm being run by the agency? Was she being pushed by the agency? Was Walmart firing Roehm to get to Draft FCB?
This much is clear. If someone IS a change agent in a deeply conservation organization, they will need external support. And agency, with the deep creative and strategic pockets, are designed to supply this support. The solitary change agent badly needs a partner in change, and as Tom Peters once said, innovation requires a "freak on the inside and a freak on the outside." The agency serves as the freak on the outside.
Summing up
There are 5 points (or possibilities) to note here:
1. The notion that some CMOs serve as sacrificial agents is perhaps encouraged by the fact that we have several more candidates to treat as evidence. Whether Mary Minnick, Carly Fiorina, Kerri Martin and Julie Roehm all so qualify may be disputed, but the evidence is suggestive, no?
2. All of these candidates are female, a fact to reckon with in all kinds of ways.
3. One of these is to ask whether female CMOs are more eager to serve as a sacrificial change agent. And if this is the case, what is it about the makeup, the training, or the generational character of these executives that they are more willing to "take the hit"?
4. Another is to ask whether they being set up? Do these women enter the corporation in good faith only to discover that the corporation has no intention of committing to change? Given the choice of being true to their mandate or the corporation, they choose, (more willingly than men?), to be true to the mandate and suffer the consequences. A systematic study of the sacrificial change agent would look at who profits from an outgoing change agent. If it’s always a man, we might have grounds for suspicion. Men are then the beneficiaries of female self sacrifice.
5. The last take-away here has to do with the agency. If there is a new pattern here it a realignment of the agency-corporation relationship. In the old days, the agency would serve as a brain trust, a conceptual innovator, of an organization that could otherwise indulge itself in a "rules and regs" approach to business. In a perfect world, we might have expected this relationship to intensify. Now that the corporation looks increasingly like an Indonesia resort with a tsunami of change at its doorstep, we might have expected it to hope for a deeper relationship to the agency, to rely on it ever more completely.
But that’s not what has happened. The agency world has been displaced and diminished by the new media, new consumers, new marketing. Plus, its future watching abilities are not much changed from what they were 15 years ago. It’s clear many agencies have not stepped up to the innovation challenge. But even if this were not the case, the agency would still be estranged by the new realities of the life of the CMO. To get anything done in their 20 months at the corporation they have to "agency up" (as in "lawyer up"), and this has the effect of putting the agency-corporation relationship at risk.
Ah, the planets of corporation are realigning. What to do with marketing, that inconvenient interface with the world out there, remains a pressing question. And the question is especially pressing for the CMO.
References
Anonmymous. 2007. VW Marketing Exec Kerri Martin Calls It Quits. Marketing Vox. January 12, 2007. here.
Barbaro, Michael and Stuart Elliott. 2006. Wal-Mart Fires Marketing Star and Agency. New York Times. December 8, 2006. here.
Berner, Robert. 2007. My Year At Wal-Mart: how marketing whiz Julie Roegm suffered a spectacular fall in 10 short months. BusinessWeek. February 12, 2007. here.
(source for the Walmart as "colorless")
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Soul of the Corporation, Scourge of the Corporation. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 2, 2007. here.
Postrel, Virginia. 1997. The Peters Principles. Reason. October. here. [This interview between Postrel and Tom Peters is the only source I could find for the Peters' "freak" quote. My wife heard him use the phrase at at Design Management Institute Meeting in (or around) 2ooo. It's a great interview. ]
Riley, David. 2006. An open letter to Walmart, Julie Roehm and Draft/FCB. Brand New Day: Thoughts on marketing and advertising. BusinessWeek. December 14, 2006. here.
Solman, Gregory. 2007. Kerri Martin’s Abrupt Exit Raises Shops’ Hopes. Adweek. January 15, 2007, p. 7.
Soul of the corporation, scourge of the corporation
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I was at IDEO a couple of months ago. They were kind enough to ask me to come speak at one of their Friday "Know Hows." A guy called Scott Underwood gave me a quick tour, and about 10 minutes in, I thought to myself, "this guy is really good at this." Later, several IDEOers made a point to ask if I’d "met Scott," and half way through dinner, when Scott was talking about something, Tom Kelley leaned over and said, with real affection, "this is classic Scott."
I remember meeting someone like this at the Harvard Business School. There was a junior member of faculty who everyone loved. He was good at some of the things you are supposed to be good at HBS, and he was smart as can be. But none of this seemed to explain why he, like Scott, was a minor celebrity in the organization.
Neither of these guys was remarkable for their power, accomplishments, or any specialized body of knowledge. Both were likable, but neither of them was charismatic. No, if these guys had celebrity, I think it was because they were both seen to be exemplars of the spirit of the corporation. In fact, the phrase that started to role around in my head was, perhaps too melodramatically, "soul of the corporation."
Compare these two guys to another species of corporate life, the sacrificial change agent. I haven’t met anyone like this in the flesh, so I am now pretty working from the business press. A.G. Lafley is the CEO of P&G and if there is a success story in marketing right now this guy is definitively it. Lafley is nothing short of a sensation. But it’s hard not to wonder about the significance of his predecessor, Durk I. Jager.
To judge from the journalistic treatments, Jager chose to drag P&G kicking and dreaming into the future. He upset a great many people, but in the process he did A.G. Lafley an immense favor. Whatever AG did to reform the corporation,and these reforms have been radical and continuous, he was going to look like a paragon of consideration by comparison. It is even possible that Jager saw his role as deliberately sacrificial. He knew he was going to pay for this reforms, and he did them anyway.
Mary Minnick is the outgoing CMO at the Coca-Cola Company. To judge from the press reports, it sounds as if she might belong to this particular category of change agent. Here’s what she had to say this week in the Financial Times.
Change is uncomfortable, just as a human characteristic and for organisations as a whole. It’s challenging, it’s complicated, and it doesn’t always make people comfortable.
Minnick pursued change anyhow. As she told shareholders. "I tend to be quite discontented in general. It will never be fast enough or soon enough or good enough."
And we may judge how far she was prepared to transform the Coke paradigm, when she says,
All the work we did suggested that consumers are using beverages in dramatically different ways, ranging from disease prevention, to hydration, to weight reduction, to relaxation, to relieving stress and to fortification of nutrition.
Change agents of this kind don’t stay for very long. Ms. Minnick lasted 20 months. But then that is perhaps the very nature of their contribution to the corporation. They so upset the apple cart, they can’t stay for very long.
What’s weird is that the new corporation is going to need both of these kinds of people. As things speed up, as the corporation grows cloudier, both continuity and discontinuity are called for in equal measure. As things speed up, as change grows more intense, it is really hard sometimes to remember what the corporation stands for. How useful to have a "soul of the corporation" person around to remind us. But then there will be moments when the corporation finds itself so far behind the curve that something revolutionary is called for. Bring in the revolutionary. (And make sure the pay package is rich, because they won’t be here for long.)
Now do these two creatures coexist? Well, you’ve got me. But then almost everything in the coming corporation is a bit of a mystery at the moment.
References
Anonymous. 2006. Queen of Pop. BusinessWeek. August 7, 2006. here.
Markels, Alex. 2006. Turning the Tide at P&G. U.S. News. October 22, 2006. here.
Willman, John. 2007. Soft drink survivor with no bitter aftertaste. Financial Times. February 26, 2007. p. 10.
MBA meet MI5
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Something remarkable is happening in the world of marketing. According to Brandweek,
The tenure for chief marketing officers at the 100 top consumer branded companies has continued to decline…. Over the past three years CMOs at these companies have seen their time on the job drop from 23.6 months to 23.2 months, said Greg Welch [Spencer Stuart, Chicago]
So what does this mean? Many things. But one of them is that every CMO must now arrive at the corporation with a team in place. Specifically, the CMO wants to arrive with a "pre-existing" connection with an agency. There's no time to play "getting to know you" paddy cake. No time to audition the agency world. You want to come with an agency in place. (For the source of this image, Alan Turnbull's website, please go here.)
And what does this mean? Many things. But one of them is that the agency needs to start early. It won't do to get to know the CMO as a CMO. It won't even do to know the CMO as a brand director or brand manager. No, it would be nice to spot CMO talent the moment he or she clears the MBA.
And this means, among other things, that the agency wants to reach out to b-school profs the way MI5 did. MI5 (Thames House headquarters, as pictured above on Alan Turnbull's www.secret-bases.co.uk) is the security service responsible for protecting the UK against threats to national security. In the old days, the British secret service relied upon a network of professors who kept an eye out for espionage talent. It was all very discrete. In the course of a conversation over lunch at the club, names would come up and references would ever so casually change hands. Approaches would be made. Connections would be fashioned The British secret service didn't need executive search. It had a deeply intelligent, observant, thoughtful corps looking out for recruits who were in their turn deeply intelligent, observant and thoughtful.
It could work in the world of marketing. If the tenure of a CMO is less than 2 years, perhaps it's going to have to.
Go.
References
Babej, Marc E. and Tim Pollack. 2005. Who Needs a CMO Anyway? Forbes.com. October 5, 2006. here.
von Hoffman, Constantine. 2006. Length of CMO Tenure Continues Decline. Brandweek. August 22, 2006. here.
the website for MI5 here.
