Marketonomy

Why Businesses Really Fear Blogging

Have you ever noticed how it sometimes takes an epiphany to reveal the reality of an obvious truth? Like, I don’t know, sitting in traffic in a $60k SUV burning $3.50 a gallon and, even though you’ve sat in the same gridlock every day for years, on this day you happen to notice the endless lines of single-occupant vehicles, the single half-empty carpool lane, and for the first time it dawns on you with sparkling clarity the breathtaking stupidity of modern life? Yeah, that feeling. I had a moment like that yesterday. Not during my commute, but during a panel discussion about blogging and digital media technology.

I was part of a panel for the Backstage Pass series of industry discussions at Pillsbury Winthrop in Palo Alto, moderated by Tamara Ireland Stone of Rainmaker Communications. Though the discussion was highly practical, focusing on the challenges and pitfalls of new information channels like blogging, I fell into my usual routine of veering off into the social and philosophical context of the debate. While it’s important from a business perspective to understand the immediate impact of disruptive technologies, I’m always interested in seeing the flow of the bigger picture—in this case, how the control of information is becoming distributed, how consumers are learning new skills to filter and process data, how businesses are having to learn how to shift from polished monologue to broader dialog with their audience.

The old paradigm of corporate communications that businesses understand—the one-way broadcasting of a tightly designed and controlled message—is giving way at an accelerating pace to a chaotic and uncontrolled market discussion. Bulletin boards, chat rooms, blogs and list groups allow consumers to share information and influence public perceptions about companies and products, and businesses are quickly being relegated to just another participant in the conversation. Some companies are actively engaged in the discussion, some are trying out various schemes for influencing the dialog, but most are just standing on the sidelines scratching their heads.

So while we panel experts were doling out our sage advice about how businesses can better understand and engage the blogosphere it suddenly occurred to me why this is such an immense challenge for so many businesses. I always just assumed it was about control. Businesses want to minimize risk; control is a powerful tool in minimizing risk; and the new channels of communication take much of the control away from business. Panic ensues. But my epiphany was about something much more obvious and fundamental.  

The advice that has become standard among blogging experts is that any business engaging in a dialog with their market must be authentic, open and responsive. You can’t just hire a PR agency or a freelancer to write your blog—you’ll be defrauded or disregarded, or both, in an Internet minute. Companies must put executives on the frontline who can engage intelligently, responsibly and passionately about what the company does. This is an obvious challenge for companies that have a contentious relationship with their market, a hyper-secretive culture, an impatience for dealing with questions, or a style of business that might not stand up well under public scrutiny. But it’s also a serious challenge for companies beleaguered by a far more common vice: uncertainty.

And this, finally, was my penetrating revelation into the obvious. Why do so many businesses fear the give-and-take dialog that is the currency of our new communications technology? Not primarily because of the lack of control—that only scares those who were good at controlling their image in the first place, an elite few who are now engaged in tactics to control their image in the new paradigm. What far more businesses fear is the lack of a consistent, cohesive and compelling story--much less business operation--they can be confident in sharing and defending clearly to win the hearts and minds of their market. After all, it’s easy to package, polish and publish a perfect message for mass consumption. But to embody that message as a business, to understand its meaning and its implications throughout every commercial function, to champion that message and to believe it, that takes something that most businesses just haven’t spent a whole lot of timing working out.

When No News Is Good News

In Public Relations there are some situations where any news, even bad news, is good news, as long as your company gains visibility. Good PR firms always have a  contingency plan to deal with bad news in order to make the best of a crisis.

But every once in a while, you come across a situation where good news is bad, and if the planets align just right, it can even be a disaster. I watched one of these train wrecks unfold today in a news piece on NPR about Segway.

I was one of those gullible idiots that slavered over any news of "Ginger", when the geniuses behind the Segway's introduction--including the homerun king of marketing, Steve Jobs--leaked tantalizing clues of a revolutionary transportation product that would change the way cities are designed. The public was so rabid with anticipation that, according to the Segway entry at Wikipedia, Segways were auctioned for $100k on Amazon before they were released, and a factory was built to produce 40,000 units per month in order to meet anticipated demand. And then it belly flopped. No one wanted to pay $5000 for a geek scooter, and cities weren't redesigned to accommodate the expected legions of 12mph dorks.

I pretty much forgot about Segway, except for the occasional sighting of a gaggle of Segway-mounted tourists. But today, NPR did a small story on an industry tradeshow called GovSec--the Government Security Expo--which is proudly billed as America's Premier Homeland Security Event. I'm not sure what I'd expect to find at a Homeland Security Event--do they pass out Predator Drone key chains?--but I certainly wouldn't expect to find Segway as an exhibitor. Yet there was the Segway PR representative, one of a string of asides interviewed by a vaguely disinterested reporter breezing through the exhibit hall. To her credit, the Segway rep put on her A-game and trotted out the kind of sound bytes that are practiced in front of a mirror. And that's where it all started to unravel.

I kind of perked up my ears when I heard "Segway" amid all the white noise on my commute. There I was stuck in traffic in the middle of my daily grind home, in a car that sucks down $3.50/gallon gas like it's cheap beer. I heard "Segway" and thought, wow, a quiet ride on an electric scooter, how appropriate for today's emerging gas crisis. In fact, how brilliant. Is Segway about to strike a masterful  marketing blow and regain the visionary momentum it had when it launched?

Uh, no. As the perky PR rep tootled along, it became obvious that the grand vision was much more modest. She wasn't skillfully positioning Segway as the saviour of a frustrated commuting society. She was at a Security tradeshow, skillfully positioning Segway as an alternative transportation device for safety officers in 3rd-world airports. Yes, that's right. The Segway is a perfect solution for airport security guards, because, as they found in their market research in the British Virgin Islands, passengers feel much less threatened by police when they see them on Segways than they do when they see them running.

Oooookay.... Because, um, in the middle of a crisis, you see, it's a good idea to use disarmingly cute little transporters to allay the fears of all those innocent bystanders.

That, my friends, is called a value proposition. And in the one moment Segway found on the national airwaves to deliver a message to the masses, they managed to position the most revolutionary transportation product in ages as a benign alternative for scary security guards in far off places that you've never been to, and probably won't be able to afford to visit any time soon because of outrageous fuel prices.

Now let me just say that the PR rep did an excellent job. She did what she was paid to do, and I'm sure she was excited to succeed in landing a national story for Segway. But sometimes--and it's just the way the planets align--no news is the best news of all.

The Downside of Marketing ROI

File this under: Oops.

Google's stock has flown high on revenue from paid search and advertising. One of the most compelling motivations for allocating a bigger chunk of your marketing budget to paid search and online ads is the measurability of the click-stream. When you run an ad in, let's say, a newspaper, you have to do a lot of engineering to create a campaign where impressions can be tracked to top-line revenue. Special discounts, special URLs or phone numbers, staggered drop dates--all just to be able to pinpoint how many people read the ad and then bought what was advertised.

On the Web, you can follow the clicks from an advertisement or listing directly through to the order page. You can adjust your campaigns to improve performance rapidly by testing different types of ads,  messages and placements until you identify the package that performs the best. Good marketing.

So Google, raking in the ad dollars hand over fist from the frenzy of marketers who want campaigns they can track, decided it would be a good idea to enhance their Advertising offering with Web analytics. If customers are coming to you because they can better track their marketing ROI, why not up the ante and provide them more powerful tools to track it? Brilliant.

Google went out and bought Urchin, a Web analytics company that's been around for years offering  simplified reporting tools for tracking page views and visitors and other statistics about Web site performance. The plan was to provide Google's advertisers with a way to track the click-throughs and conversions on their campaigns. They called it Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, Google went from raking in the cash to stepping on the rake and getting nailed by the handle. Forget about the debacle they had during their launch, the real story is that some users are beginning to find the analytics so useful they can slash their budget for paid search and online ads. The CEO of a well-known hosted application company told me that the analytics opened his eyes to the poor ROI of his online spend with Google, and now he's looking for other channels to replace it.

I don't know, is that like upselling the emperor on a big mirror so he can see the nice new clothes he just bought?

Don't get me wrong--I think Adwords is a great product for certain types of marketing campaigns. But so many marketers have become double-fisted drinkers of the Adwords Kool-aid, I think the whole thing's a little Bubble-icious. I just never thought it would be Google supplying the pin to pop it.

Engineering Upselling Opportunities

I have a theory about Starbucks. For being the world's most successful coffee shop, they sell the worst coffee in the world. How is that possible? Have you ever tasted Starbuck's coffee? I'm not talking about all the flavor-laced Dope-accino drinks, but the coffee. That burned and bitter sludge you have to drown with milk and sugar just to choke down. It's awful. But through the brilliance of Starbucks' marketing, it's also guaranteed to be the closest caffeine fix to anywhere you happen to be in the world at any given moment.

For years I've stayed loyal to the neighborhood roasters with good coffee, and limited my Starbucks visits to those times when I was away from home. And it would annoy the hell out of me every time. You can't order a "medium" coffee. It has to be "Grande". And it's not just some pre-career Goth taking your change, it's a Barrista. I'd stand there in line listening to all those abbreviated insider codes "double-quad-nowhip-mocha, extrahot", convinced I was on the fringes of some cult. The dependency. The special language. The willingness to donate handfuls of cash with a vacant happy stare. I finally realized the bad coffee was a way to separate the skeptics from the true believers.

When a Starbucks opened right next to my office, I found myself buying more of their crappy coffee, and then upgrading more frequently to a Latte just to avoid the torture. When I finally graduated completely from coffee to the poodle drinks, it struck me: Crappy coffee is an upselling opportunity. It's what everyone initially comes for, it's the cheapest thing on the menu, and it sucks. But for just a few dollars more, you get flavor. Any flavor you want. Any combination. And once you make the initial leap, a banquet of delights appears before you. Add a little chocolate, a little orange, a little cinnamon and whipped cream. It's just money. And once you buy a Starbucks' loyalty card, you won't even tally up the transactions any more. Just dump some cash on the card every payday and you're good to go.

I thought it was an amusing little theory--Starbucks makes its coffee undrinkable to migrate customers to a better tasting, more expensive beverage--a little marketing conspiracy theory to kill time in line with a client. But then I heard one of my friends talking about a recent experience with Salesforce.com, and I started to wonder.

If you haven't heard, Salesforce had a few hiccups in its service over the past few weeks. One of my friends runs a company that relies heavily on Salesforce.com, routing its lead generation streams through the application. It turns out the outage wasn't so much a blackout as it was a brownout. The system was continuously going up and down over the course of a week. Every time it went down, my friend's IT team had to divert their prospecting feed away from Salesforce, and then restore the connection when it went back online. A little annoying to say the least. Finally they called the Salesforce support team and said, hey, why can't you send us an alert when the system goes down and when it comes back up, so we can stay on top of this problem?

Are you ready for the response? Sure, Salesforce said, we can send you an alert, but that's a service included in our Platinum Support Package. Would you like to upgrade?

When I heard the story, I had visions of a Salesforce executive standing behind a row of servers with a plug dangling from his hand watching the Platinum Support Upgrade Dashboard. Drinking a double caramel macchiato.

To Save A Town, Why Did They Destroy It?

Santa Maria used to be a city of small stores and Main Street lives. Now, all that is gone -- and so is its soul (Originally published in BusinessWeek Online, August 31, 2004)

I took a short vacation with my family to visit the town where my wife grew up. It was the town where we met some 15 years ago, the place where my parents retired, and where I landed after wandering overseas between college majors. Back then, Santa Maria was an agricultural backwater on California's central coast, a pit stop on the way from San Francisco to L.A. It was a town with a vibrant history, but little use for it -- an impossible place to love if you didn't have roots there. For me, it became the town where I met my wife, where my father died, and where I got my first tastes of both business and journalism.

Today, Santa Maria is a burgeoning Wal-Mart suburb. Everything and nothing has changed. Where once there were neat rows of strawberries and broccoli that went on for miles, now there are endless fields of single-family homes. In a town that once couldn't attract a national grocery chain, you now find the same brand-name strip malls that dot almost every town in America. Starbucks-Blockbuster-Subway-Kinkos -- prefab economic zones you can buy off the shelf to drop into your half-acre plot along Main Street, some assembly required.

On a national scale, this is the face of progress. These manufactured main streets feature a star-studded array of brands that are leading markers on the stock exchange, where they build our retirement accounts and our children's education funds. But on a local scale, especially in a place like Santa Maria, the history that is being paved over holds some interesting clues about the future -- clues that are convenient to forget in the face of short-term profits.

Like most California cities, Santa Maria has an old town -- the intersection of Broadway and Main -- where solid buildings from the early 1900s line the streets. Well, Santa Maria used to have an old town. Where many California cities now have a revitalized core, with old brick buildings turned into stylish restaurants and side streets turned into open air markets, Santa Maria has a massive monument to one of the most influential fads ever to sweep city planning -- the Town Center Mall.

In the mid-1970s, Santa Maria bulldozed their entire city center in order to build a huge shopping mall and parking lot. The new mall generated a lot of wealth -- for about a decade. As soon as outlet stores started cropping up along the freeway, and then Big Box discount stores, even a Barney Carousel couldn't salvage the Town Center's consumer appeal.

Now the mall is half empty, and the anchor-tenant department stores are struggling. During our vacation, my wife took advantage of the 15-hour Super Double Discount Sale at one of the major retailers. When my wife balked at paying the "slashed" sale price of $29 for a Finding Nemo throw pillow my son was clutching, the check-out clerk whispered the name of a nearby discount store where she could get the same pillow for half the retailer's sale price.

You don't need an MBA to do the math on the future of that retailer, or the future of the mall. In fact, the city is already trying to figure how to do what they weren't willing to do with the old downtown -- revitalize a retail ghetto of empty storefronts. One of the leading ideas is to turn the entire mall into an assisted-living facility. That's right, renew the city center with a very large nursing home. I suppose there's a certain logic to it -- all the unused parking space could easily convert to a cemetery.

What no one seems to be asking, either in Santa Maria or many of the other towns that now look exactly the same, is what time frame should drive investment decisions. Just as business-development and investment decisions on Wall Street are driven by quarterly results, our city-planning decisions are increasingly governed by short-term payoffs. But instead of losing our shirts to scandals like Enron and Worldcom, we lose something far more profound behind the new facades of one-size-fits all city streets. What we lose are the stories that make our lives meaningful.

Okay, call me a romantic. Tell me I just don't understand the capitalist economy. Tell me all about the cycles of change that have gone on before, and how we always move forward. I'm not buying it.

Taking Santa Maria as an example, the payoff on the mall that wiped out much of the city's history lasted little more than a decade -- and that's not counting the hefty residual, which hangs like a mall-sized albatross around the city's neck. The economic cycles of outlet centers and big box stores are running even faster. As soon as one town builds The New Thing, the town at the next freeway exit has to get one too in order to recapture escaping sales tax revenues. In a couple of years, demand is diluted too much for any one city's investment to pay off.

In the short run, of course, developers do well, cities collect some nice fees and sales taxes, and retailers expand volume. And there's always the potential for another big project to bail us out when the current scheme runs out of steam.

But how much value do we place on a sense of place, or a sense of history? History only tells us where we've been, but it's those stories that help us understand who we are and where we're going. What stories do we tell about our communities when our history is relegated to some old black and white photos in the barber shop or a doddering historical society?

The sad truth seems to be that we are reduced to telling stories only through our possessions. We are what we own. We are what we drive. We are individual "brandscapes," buying and assembling our identities through the metaphors of clothing, furniture, and food.

There's some beauty in this. Everything is invested with meaning, since everything we own has the potential to say something about who we are. And the whole grand economic exercise, from corporate marketing to supply-chain management has a masterful efficiency -- our purchasing power as consumers, the lifeblood of our economy, is now directly coupled with, and driven by, our psychology of being.

 But at the end of the day, we are giving up a society in favor of an economy. When every decision -- even decisions that cut to the core of our community -- are dictated by the most immediate profit opportunity, it makes sense to tear down a city in order to build a mall. It makes sense a few years later to build big discount centers to undercut the mall. Cross every bridge when you come to it, and let every decision be driven by the shortest break-even point on the balance sheet.

Maybe it doesn't matter, but Santa Maria no longer feel like the town where I met my wife, where my dad died, and where I got my first taste of business and journalism. It just feels like every other town on the way from San Francisco to L.A. That relentless consistency is what made McDonald's  a household name in 150 countries around the world. But I don't want to live there.

Customer Experience, or, Travelocity Sucks

I've wondered for some time how much difference there is between online travel brokers ever since it's become a commodity business. Now I know. I've had accounts at both Expedia and Travelocity since way back when the Nasdaq was at, what was it, 5000? I've also used Orbitz and some other latecomers, like FlyBankruptCarriersForReallyReallyCheap.com. But somehow I just got into the groove at Expedia and stopped shopping around.

For some stupid reason, I decided to retry Travelocity when scheduling a Christmas vacation with my family. Maybe it was that gay lawn gnome thing they've got going on. I don't know. So I reactivated my dead account, browsed around and booked my tickets, confirming that indeed, there is no Difference. What an idiot.

A few weeks later, I get a friendly email from the folks at Travelocity. Sorry, the totally reasonable flight you fell for on our site has now been switched with an insane flight. Instead of leaving at the leisurely hour of 11am the day after Christmas, I would now be dragging my wife and 4-year-old son to the airport for a midnight flight, arriving in Dallas at 5am for a 4-hour layover. Maybe it's just coincidence, but in 6 years at Expedia, I had never had one of many dozens of flights switched. But that's really just the setup.

When I called Travelocity, I got one of those friendly new HAL9000 customer service reps--you know, the ones that make you drone your reference number into the phone just so they can serve you generic information, and then say about 6000 times in a syruppy voice: "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. You said you'd like to pull out your eyeballs?" After I screamed "operator" a dozen times, the system finally put me in the long queue for an open phone line to India. Amazingly, they can transfer my call 12,000 miles away to another continent where an operator can tap directly into my account, but they just couldn't manage to send along the 87-digit alphanumeric reference number I've already recited into their system.

The operator--Mike, from Bangalore--is neither helpful nor friendly. Did I get an email about the switch? Yes. Did I wish to cancel the flight? No, I'd like to explore some other options. Like what? Oh, I don't know, like maybe a longer layover so I can really appreciate those abbreviated airport museum displays of cattle farming history and modern macrame. Geez. What other flights are available that day? I don't know, I'll have to call the airline. You mean, you can't look it up on the computer? No, I have to call, please hold.

I then got 8 minutes and 37 seconds of Adagio for Idiots on Hold, punctuated every so often with an ominous click and a long silence that had me convinced they were doing an experiment to see when I would finally hang up. Mike eventually came back and delivered the crushing blow. Yes, there is a flight that leaves just an hour after your arrival in Dallas, but it's oversold...would you like to stew over that on your terminal layover in the departure ward, or would you like me to just cancel your whole vacation?

Travelocity sucks.

And I can say that with some authority, because only 3 weeks ago, I had to call Expedia customer service. I had purchased pre-paid parking for a recent business trip, and couldn't find the parking lot--they had, whoops, neglected to put the address and phone number on the handy dandy printout map. When I called the parking garage to get a rain check for a future trip, they refused. So I called Expedia to complain, and without a moment's hesitation, they did one better than a rain check, they refunded my card. That is customer experience. The flight scheduling may be a commodity, but the service is different. Expedia has it, Travelocity doesn't.

So, one more time for the benefit of Search Engine Optimization:

Travelocity Sucks. Yes. They really really do. Travelocity Sucks. Sing it with me now. Travelocity Sucks.

I feel better now.

Alan Scott Interview

In my first foray into podcasting, I've interviewed Alan Scott, CMO of Factiva. Alan is one of the most candid--and often provocative--marketers around, so it was the perfect opportunity to step into audio and capture some of his thoughts on tape. I interviewed Alan over the phone, and we talked about everything from why marketers are losing control of "the message" to why salespeople make better marketers.

The podcast is about 22 minutes long, and the file is 8MB--and you'll have to endure my first attempts at "slick" audio production. Click here to listen. (right click to download).

Googlemyopia

I had a funny conversation with a sales rep from Google who called to sell me on reselling AdWords and AdSense. She was smart, well informed on Google's offering, and pretty well briefed on the company I work for. But when I told her Paid Search and SEO weren't on the roster of services I would be offering in 2006, she went, like, totally blonde on me. "You're a PR and Marketing firm, right?" Yes, I confirmed, and we don't do search marketing. She barely concealed her incredulity, circling back to the beginner's pitch to introduce me to AdWords. Yes, yes, I know. Great stuff, really. No, not interested, thanks. But if you want to send me some material I'll keep it on file. She couldn't resist confirming one final time, "You are a PR firm...right?"

Yes. I know Google is a really big phenomenon, and I know AdWords is critical for generating topline revenue at many companies--especially if they happen to be selling something like refrigerator magnets or life insurance. I've advised businesses spending 10s of thousands of dollars a month on paid search, and others spending over $100k on SEO. When something like 80% of all Internet traffic begins at a search engine, it's a good idea to understand how the game works. But--gasp--I don't think it's the end-all, be-all marketing strategy for most businesses. This seemed to come as a genuine shock to the Google Ad Rep. As if, what else is there?

Well, I think the biggest What Else is what seems to be a rapidly resurging relevance for Social Marketing--a marketing approach that focuses on meticulously cultivating relationships with a selected audience rather than trying to push a critical mass of anonymous and abstract targets through a response filter. As effective as AdWords is today, it still represents a paint-by-numbers approach to mass marketing that won't stand on its own in a world where users have on-demand access--through Google, no less--to hundreds of data points on your product from media sources, expert reviews and countless peers. Businesses are rapidly losing control of their own message, and channel efficiency isn't going to solve the problem.

I'll post more on this after the CMO Summit in Monterey this week. For now, I'm not sure whether I'm captivated more by the Google Ad Rep's inability to conceive of any marketing tactic beyond Search--are they really that self-inflated?--or by the thought that she was so incredulous because she doesn't come across any other companies that question Search's omnipotence. That can't be true. Can it?

What's Happening to PR?

Here's a challenge to the traditional Public Relations process at most companies. Despite all of the fragmentation and multplication of information resources, most businesses are still pursuing the age-old PR methodology of spitting out press releases as the primary method of media relations. Well, we've jut completed an interesting audit of one of our clients. In 2004, this company put out nearly 400 press releases--more than one a day. After analyzing media coverage, we discovered that although they distributed more press releases than any of their top competitors that year, they actually had a lower share of coverage than any of their top competitors.

It's going to be hard to change the attitude of CEOs who only judge the effectiveness of their PR by whether or not they find the latest release on Yahoo!, but clearly more strategic media relations methodologies are mission critical. That's always been true, but now we have the metrics to prove it.

99-Cent Salvation

Is it just me, or is this not one of the most nauseating examples of street-pimp marketing ever vomited up by a barrel-scraping network? NBC is launching dear God no not another Reality-TV-Show-But-With-A-Twist this fall, and they're trawling for media coverage and viewers by dragging dollar bills through America's trailer parks as a moving testament to Christian faith.

Here's the story: Lagging behind the other networks in the popularity of its Slit Your Wrists programming, NBC has concocted a reality show designed to appeal to God-fearing WalMart shoppers from America's heartland. In NBC's Three Wishes, an "unscripted show" premiering this fall "singer Amy Grant travels to a different town each week in an effort to fulfill the heart's desire of needy families and community groups." It sounds sweet. Really.

So NBC, looking to stir up some coverage for this faith-based initiative hires a publicity firm to cook up some media impressions. The big idea? Stalk "needy shoppers" in the checkout lines of discount retail chains and trot in on a big white horse to pick up the tab with a conspicuous stack of 1-dollar bills. Why waste time and money on creative marketing when you can just buy viewers, and through the magic of stunt media, multiply your audience?

Now I know the professional marketing purists will protest that Hey, they did their job and got national coverage, who cares if it's singularly unimaginative? My response is that the skirmish won for publicity is a battle lost for NBC's soul--ahem, I mean brand. The entire stunt paints NBC as a cynical manipulator of America's poor and needy, eschewing substantive acts of service in favor of Good Samaritan skits prepackaged for the camera. The fact they've enlisted Amy Grant, the spokesmodel of shrinkwrapped Christian consumerism, only amplifies the effect.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no voice crying out in the wilderness here. But this is a gravely disheartening view of America to me. The greasy aftertaste of this campaign is that faith and compassion in America can only be signified by randomly showering money and brand name appliances on unsuspecting poor people who look good on screen being effusively grateful. Perhaps it's a testament to the marketing company's professionalism that they so effectively segmented their subject and target audience. Notice they're distributing fistfuls of cash to people not so needy that they don't have a credit card and an eye for brands.

I guess good faith comes with a minimum requirement of purchasing power. 

Coming In From The Cold

There's a good article in CMO Magazine about the rise of marketing among technology companies. The article outlines the evolving landscape of marketing at high-tech companies, and the drivers behind the marketing department's growing ascendance. The gist of the article is that a maturing landscape of technology buyers is more discerning than ever, requiring tech companies to think more deeply about their offering, and behave more collaboratively in identifying and responding to market demands. This has provided the opportunity for marketing to play a more strategic role in the company's operations.

There are couple of other components I would add to the mix.

1. Technology marketers have long been one of the most isolated and under-valued representatives of the marketing profession. While marketers in other industry sectors, particularly retail, have long had strong peer associations, generous budgets, and a mandate for more strategic marketing programs like focus groups, surveys, and market testing programs, technology marketers have been relegated primarily to sales support. When the dramatic shift to accountability-based performance marketing caught many marketing sectors flat-footed, it was already old news for most senior technology marketers.

2. Technology marketers, by virtue of their chosen industry, are comfortable and familiar swimming in a sea of technology. They have to constantly adapt to disruptive innovations and rapidly learn new technology paradigms. In a world in which enterprise marketing requires emerging enterprise applications to leverage data and connect more responsively to customers, technology marketers have a tremendous edge over marketers who prefer to retreat to the world of demographic trends and marketing creative--and there are a lot of marketers still in that camp. 

The Need for a Bigger View

There’s a story my wife sometimes tells of an old woman back in the Azores islands where her family is from. The old woman had lived in a small village on the island of Pico all her life, and never ventured beyond it. By the time she reached her eighties, roads had been improved between the villages, and a young relative took the family on a drive to the other side of the island, about 10 miles away. When the old woman looked for the first time from the opposite shore and saw another island in the distance she gasped, “My God, the world is big.”

That’s what I feel like at my new job with the CMO Council. I’ve only been on the job a few months and already I’m getting an education that makes my career so far seem provincial. When I was running my own marketing agency, I had plenty of excitement serving a wide variety of companies large and small. It seemed like I was at the hub of enterprise marketing. But in retrospect, it’s evident I was always solving the same kinds of problems—developing competitive positioning strategies, establishing brands, building marketing programs, producing lots of collateral, messaging and Web sites. It was challenging work that is core to the marketing function. But now it seems like just a village on the side of a small island.

My work with the CMO Council, and with its parent GlobalFluency, has exposed me to a whole new set of operational marketing challenges that I haven't had to deal with much in the past. They range from big company issues--like how to manage a global brand when it's localized through thousands of agency partners--to issues that affect small and large companies alike, like how negotiate with the CEO over which key indicators matter in the measurement of marketing performance.

Many of these new issues were anticipated, and part of the motivation for my move. But other realizations have come as a surprise, the most startling being the state of the marketing solutions market. I've been on the front line for years reporting on the many ways in which marketing has been hammered by changes in the business environment--including the fragmentation of marketing channels, the explosion of new technologies, the demands for accelerated efficiency and effectiveness, the imperative to integrate with other key business functions, and the pressure to be more engaged with the customer.

What I failed to see was how rapidly a rabid market of proposed solutions to each of these problems circled the marketing profession. I’m not talking about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Sales Force Automation (SFA) platforms, which have been around long enough to have matured into reasonably viable tools in the marketing arsenal. I’m not even talking about the Business Intelligence (BI) or Business Performance Management (BPM) platforms, which have a strong lineage in other enterprise application arenas. I’m talking about one-off solutions for every tactical ill that ails marketers, from lead generation tracking to customer referral manage.

When I was managing a marketing agency, I would run across companies from time to time that would seek a partnership to reach my clients. When I joined the CMO Council, those infrequent calls became a tidal wave of requests to reach our membership. I did a recent informal survey only of companies offering solutions that affect the customer relationship lifecycle—the marketing pipeline—and came across 900 companies with some kind of offering. If you’re a marketer, 300 of them are probably calling you or emailing you every day.

I don’t know what percentage of these companies actually has a compelling solution for a critical problem facing marketers—I’ve seen some credible vendors with solid offerings, and I’ve seen some pitchmen hawking elixir. The problem is that they all look exactly the same. Rapid software development tools and the growing acceptance of Web-based applications have lowered the bar so precipitously that there’s almost no barrier to entry. Hundreds of overnight vendors can pop out of the woodwork when the opportunity arises, and the plight of marketing has proven to be an opportunity of epic proportion.

What has made this situation even more confusing is that every one of the vendors, from the mighty billion-dollar incumbents to the masses of new startups, is selling their product the same way. Whether it’s an email marketing platform or a marketing analytics package, just about every product in the marketing bazaar is being wrapped in the same package. After years of hearing that marketers are pressed for accountability, performance and efficiency, every product is being positioned as an ROI-based lead-generating powerhouse that offers a real-time dashboard on key performance indicators. It’s become parody.

But if there’s one thing I’ve realized in this larger world of marketing, it’s how important vendors are to the balance of the ecosystem. The demands on all business functions are growing along with the demands on marketing, and the challenges can’t be solved without a strong set of partners. The biggest challenge today is the void between marketers and vendors. Marketers need solutions, but they can't make sense of the sea of solutions, they have few benchmarks to compare options, and they don't trust vendors enough to take them at their word. Hmmm. I wonder why.

The only way the gap between vendors and marketers will be crossed is by moving away from the mindset of marketing as a predatory sport. Vendors need cultivate relationships with customers in a way that treats the market more as a channel than a field of prey. Rather than the typical approach of staking a positional claim, trumpeting a message as loudly as possible to the market, and then tackling prospects at the knees, vendors need to actively partner with customers to listen and define problems so that solutions can be positioned for a tailored fit.

Ironic, isn’t it? Matching problems with solutions is the very definition of marketing, and yet it’s precisely the missing mindset that prevents marketers from gaining the powerful vendor tools that can unleash marketing's full potential. I guess in some way, we're all stuck in an isolated village on one small island in a vast ocean. We need a bigger view.

Marketing Mindshare

I'm at an event in Boston this week for senior marketers--a week long summit of targeted sessions on everything from Competitive Intelligence to CRM optimization. It's an interesting crowd--maybe 200 or so marketing executives and 30 vendors. The event is hosted by Frost & Sullivan, and I'm actually here to support the marketing and sales team of one of my clients, Leverage Software.

The event is pretty well produced as far as conferences go--the venue is right on the harbor, the networking is well facillitated, the crowd is highly qualified and strategic--nicely done. My only complaint is at a much higher level. When you get a few hundred marketers in the room together and start threading the crowd to network, you get a really good sense of the current position of marketing evolution. There's certainly a lot of activity out there--busyness--but the signal-to-noise ratio isn't what I would have hoped by this point.

Here's the problem: While the activity of marketing is changing, the mentality is too much the same. The activity of marketing today is focused on accountability, metrics, ROI. It's all about efficiency. If marketing can line 100 ducks up on the fence, sales can shoot 1.5 of them. And the big objective of today's marketer is to improve that ratio to 1.7.

What few marketers seem to appreciate is that you can be remarkably efficient at serving your market poorly. The mentality needs to change from shooting a fraction of your ducks and calling that success, to gathering those 100 ducks off the fence and cultivating them into a channel that can consistently offer up 1.5 new customers, without making the other 98.5 gun shy. You do that by engaging with your market, cultivating peer connections, collaboration and dialog--not by spouting positioning messages and applying your cookie cutter qualifiers. That, by the way, is why we're here with Leverage, because they provide software that enables such an approach.

As a blog entry this is oversimplified to the point of being parody. But I just want you to know that I'm milling around this show with a highly concentrated crowd of high-level marketers--and as events go, it's a decent one--but it feels like there's not enough octance in the fuel.

The "New" CMO

There's an article posted in the current issue of CMO Magazine describing "The Future CMO". You should read it, because it's a perfect guide to how marketers can continue to crash and burn. On the surface, the article is right on target. It resonates perfectly with the marketer who has his back to the wall, offering a clear antithesis to all of the complaints about marketing coming from the boardroom, but providing no real clue to the underlying dry rot of the marketing practice. "Here I come," it seems to say, "responding to the pressure for accountability with snappy financial lingo, crisp analytics, and a  network of engineers who respect me." It sounds like the vision of marketing by a clueless Marketing Executive staring lovingly in the mirror.

The current obsession with financial issues simply reflects that it's through the window of performance metrics that we're able to see that marketing is broken. Learning financial concepts is important because it makes your understanding of the indicators more acute--but it doesn't solve the problem. The CMO Magazine article articulates many of the shortcomings of the marketing function--inability to link programs to the bottom line, failure to integrate with other functions, myopic focus on soft campaign measures--but seems to suggest that the solution lies in restating attacks as declarative statements of what marketing will be, some misty day in the future. What? You say we don't have metrics? Well, in the future we WILL have metrics.

What really annoys me about this depiction of the future CMO, is that it paints the picture of some slick executive deftly navigating the c-level suite, as if simply rowing to the pounding drumbeat of the current trend will open all the right doors. What the future CMO really needs to do is roll up his or her sleeves, get down in the trenches and serve sales, engage with customers, listen to engineers, and start playing an active, service-oriented role in the organization at the bottom first. If the future CMO can't solve real problems on the front lines, their lofty dream of "reaching across" the whole organization to pull together all of the corporate elements and set strategic direction is nothing more than a sales brochure for an expensive marketing MBA.

The most amazing section of this article is this statement:

To their surprise, the group's findings suggest that the biggest challenge may not be getting CEOs and CMOs to see eye to eye. One may speak the language of revenue while the other may prefer talking about customer satisfaction and brand awareness, but the research indicates that these groups are on the same page when it comes to identifying a company's most pressing marketing concerns.

"We did not find any major difference between the CEOs and CMOs on any major topic," says McNally.

CEOs and CMOs with no difference on the most pressing marketing concerns? This says everything about the actual survey, which I'd love to see. Where are CMOs and CEOs perfectly aligned? Tactical management of the marketing function. Where are CMOs and CEOs standing on opposite sides of a tremendous gulf? On defining the strategic contribution of marketing to the organization. Apparently the survey didn't dig into the debate over the ultimate role of marketing in the organization, or it polled only those executives who accept the notion that marketing is little more than managing lead generation. If you want to talk about efficiency, CEOs and CMOs are aligned, because it's all about tactical improvements. If you want to talk about effectiveness, CEOs and CMOs are in different worlds, because it requires a view of marketing that includes corporate strategy.

Most CEOs in America are weaned on the Porter, TQM, Balanced Scorecard, Core Competency, Lean Production, Six Sigma, Resource-based mindset of corporate strategy, which essentially relegates marketing to a line function to be managed as efficiently as possible. Strategy is a pre-packaged mandate and the title of "CMO" is given out to soothe the egos of glorified marketing program managers. That's not true at all companies of course, but it's the mass of the bell curve. How do CMOs change the tide? Not by dipping their oars into the surface currents while the deeper water sweeps them out to sea.

Personally, I'm looking for a Future CMO who has an open invitation to the strategy discussion because they have retooled their marketing organizations from the ground up by actively serving their internal teams as well as they serve customers; they have engineered processes as efficient as they are effective; and they have relevant contributions to make to the strategy debate based on real world experience in market development, customer intimacy, competitive positioning, and brand management. Not because they've learned to keep "ROI on the tip of their tongue".

Brand Design

I've got a new column up at BusinessWeek, focusing on the process of creating a brand. It's causing me no small amount of grief trying to serve up functional value in 900 words. Opinions are easy in that amount of space, but functional substance is difficult, unless you spread it over many installations. It's humbling that in my 3rd year of writing that column, I'm still learning how to work the medium effectively.

My biggest fear is that the column was more interesting to write than it is to read. I've had the tremendous privilege of working for the past seven years with two of the best strategic designers in the brand game--Russ Baker and Kenichi Nishiwaki--and learning firsthand just how strategic design can be in crystallizing the value a company provides to its customers, not to mention galvanizing the corporate culture. For so many of the clients we've served, the aesthetic process of determining their corporate or product brand was a seminal experience--a rare opportunity for the company to look in the mirror and make critical discoveries about who they are, as well as choices about who they want to be. There's very little patience for that kind of process these days.

Let me know if the column stands on its own. If not, I'll push on some the ideas a little more, and maybe even rope Russ and Kenichi into offering some of their own thoughts.

And the Brand Played On (and on)2

I guess the debate isn't over. Jennifer Rice at BrandShift is taking up the dialog on the meaning of brand. The crux of Jennifer's argument is that the definition of "brand" as a tangible symbol that distinguishes one company's products and services from the competition is too narrow--and too "company-centric". She argues that we should understand "brand as an idea".

Let's take a fictional character called Joe Shmo. Joe works hard to cultivate a reputation as a smart, well-connected and savvy business professional. He believes that these qualities represent his personal brand. Unfortunately, those who know Joe say he's overly opinionated, boorish and irritating. They believe that's Joe's brand. Who's right? Joe, or those who know Joe?

The answer is, both are right. Christopher would say that others' opinions represent 'brand reputation,' not the actual brand. I say that a brand is worthless without understanding how the brand is perceived in the marketplace. A brand is the ultimate co-created corporate asset.

I'd prefer if we started instead with an analogy that is actually a business. One of the posters on this blog, Sage, offered an analog to Jennifer's example with Enron.

Perceptions change. Brands do not. Want proof? Enron circa 1999 and Enron today. Same brand. Totally different perceptions of the brand.

A tangible definition of brand is the cornerstone that allows us to make distinctions about what adds value to the brand and what does not. I'm not arguing with Jennifer's ideas about the importance of the customer relationship in developing brand equity, but if the meaning of "brand" is to be understood to encompass everything that influences or increases its value, than the word has no identifiable boundary. Yes, a brand is worthless without understanding how it is perceived in the marketplace (or at least worth less), just like a car is worthless if there's no gas. But we don't say gas is the car. It is a distinct, critical component of the system that makes the car useful. Just like brand image--that idea in the mind of the customer--is a critical component of the system that makes a brand valuable.

I think a lot of people reading my posts have come to the conclusion that I'm denying the importance of the customer relationship in building a strong and valuable brand. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am *only* arguing that we have come to a point in the evolution of marketing where our imagination has run headfirst into the brickwall of rational necessity. Marketing exists as a corporate function--if the company stops investing in the marketing budget, the customer is not going to come in and pick up the tab. Companies are increasingly confused by marketing concepts--not because they are wrong or misguided, but because they are poorly communicated, inconsistent and detached from a demonstration of measurable value.

The idea that a brand is an image in the mind of the consumer, that it is co-created with the customer, is a great strategic concept that can help businesses get beyond a product-centric focus that leaves their customers uninspired. We need more of that. But at the same time, we need to understand that just as companies live or die by the satisfaction of their customers, they also live and die by the satisfaction of their investors. Companies are being pressed to wall to demonstrate *how* value is created, and when 10-50% of revenue is going into marketing, they are not going to countenance marketers continuing to say that brand is some ethereal idea that can't really be pinned down but we think it's in the mind of the customer.

Company centric? Yes. That's who pays the bills. The marketers who make real advances in building a customer-centric landscape will be those who understand that fact and are able to keep it in balance. The first step down that path, in my mind, is the kind of professional discipline that insists on semantic clarity so that we can all communicate knowledge and ideas consistently without having to spend most of our energy recalibrating meanings.

If you want to insist that "brand" means more than it has been both traditionally and professionally  defined to mean (AMA)--ie: a symbol--than you need to demonstrate 1) how that meaning is insufficient, and 2) how the existence of related, but distinct concepts, fails to address that insufficiency.

 

And the Brand Played On (and on)

Alright. I can finally start putting the semantic argument over the meaning of brand to bed. My column finally posted on Business Week, after a week's editorial delay left me twiddling my thumbs. I'm certain there will still be some semantic discussions in the weeks ahead, but I think the foundation is layed and it's time to move on.

One interesting note on this whole exercise. After digging so relentlessly into the confusion over the meaning of brand, and then stepping back from it, the whole process of how we got to such confusion seems suddenly so clear. Brands as important commercial symbols have been around since ancient history. But an appreciation for the critical value of brand to commercial success really exploded during the rise of mass markets after World War II. At that point, we started developing all kinds of approaches to building value in the brand--from enhancing the relationship between the company and the customer to developing aggressive competitive strategies. So far, so good.

The confusion arises when we start to believe that activities that *add value to the brand* are in fact *creating brand*. At that point, we can start to make the argument--as so many marketers do today--that *any* activity that adds value to a brand is really producing the brand. And since so many activities that add value to the brand produce so many disparate things, each of those things suddenly becomes invested with the title of brand, and we no longer have any clarity. It only gets worse when you realize that many of those activities are owned by competing camps within marketing (advertising, direct mail, interactive, design, etc.), and each has a vested interest in staking their claim to the role of Brand Creator.

Well, I've made my argument. In many ways, it's less about the meaning of brand than it is about the future of marketing. Do we have the capability to sort through the confusion we've created and clarify the concepts that define our profession so that businesses understand the value we provide? Do we have the ability to even recognize there's a problem at all? Or will we wind up pushing a shopping cart down the halls of corporate America babbling on to ourselves about how important we are while everyone looks at us with a mixture of sadness and disgust? Really, it's an unkind metaphor, but that's what's at stake.

Papa's Got a Bland New Brand 2

I just got off the phone with John Winsor. We had a great conversation about brands and marketing, and we're essentially on the same page. He posts his own response to my comments here. I have to say what I appreciate about the whole experience is finding a thread online that leads to an open and engaging discussion, less about "what's wrong" with marketing per se than about how marketing can be done more effectively.

John's focus is on the development of *real* interaction between marketers and their customers, rather than the relationship-by-proxy that happens through agencies, focus-groups, surveys, etc. He talks about going Beyond the Brand (ie: the hype of branding) by changing the one-way flow of marketing communication--the broadcasting of a pre-fab message--to a two-way dialog with customers. I can't argue with that--in fact, I'm looking forward to more of a dialog with John in the future.

Papa's Got a Bland New Brand

This is unreal. Over at Corante's BrandShift blog, John Winsor is arguing that the word brand has become too stale to be useful, and that we need to come up with some *new* special word that infuses new life into what it is that marketing does.

The word brand has started to loose it's magic through overuse. Is there another word that captures the same concepts? If so, what is it?

Is this really the face of marketing today? Is this the best we can do? Apparently, the way to solve marketing's shortcomings is not to dig deep in order to understand how we are failing to provide real value and how we can improve; the solution is to just toss away the old paradigm and create something new and shiny. A new word will solve all our problems and make it all magical again. 

*This* is exactly what I've been ranting about for the past few weeks. I am extending an invitation to John Winsor--and anyone at Corante--to dialog on this topic and explain their point of view. I'll keep you posted on whether or not we can get something going to get to the bottom of this.

--Update--
I should have mentioned in the post that Winsor was picking up the call for a new word for Brand from a William Safire column  that makes the same case: "brand" is bland, let's have something new. That doesn't change my position--I could add to it by saying marketers probably shouldn't be taking professional cues from William Safire--but the original column is relevant to the discussion.

From Brand to Branding

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. I posted my final Business Week column on the meaning of brand--I'll post a link here when it goes live--wrapping up my argument for a concrete definition, while unavoidably opening another can of worms. If a Brand is a tangible symbol that distinguishes one company's products from all competitors, what is Branding?

A couple of years back, when The Industry Standard was still a 150-page print magazine (remember that?), I had an animated discussion with one of the editors about "branding". They had done a special section on the topic, and every single one of the articles was on advertising. At the time, my company was heavily engaged in interactive development, and I was making the argument that the creation of an online experience was every bit as important a branding activity as advertising--in fact, for some companies, it's the most important activity. Yahoo, eBay and Google all became household names because of the experience they delivered, not their snappy ads--which didn't even begin until after they had made their mark.

I'll still make the same argument today--although I no longer try to claim that the experience you create *is* your brand. Your brand is still the symbol, but the experience enhances the value of the symbol, both for you and your customer. In fact, all of the activities that a company engages in to maximize the value of the company/customer relationship, in my mind, fall in some way under the category of branding. Take Customer Service as an example. To some degree, Customer Service is just Customer Service--it's providing accountability for a product according to the service contract. But to the extent the company realizes Customer Service is a critical touchpoint with valued customers, and invests in going beyond basic accountability to try and influence the customer's perception of the company--by having intelligent operators answer the phone, by offering a replacement product, whatever--any returns on that investment accrue to the brand.

So, what is the definition of "branding"? No help from the AMA here, they don't have it in their dictionary. If you use Google's helpful "define:" command, you come up with a reasonable grabbag of definitions --many of which simply revert to "brand". But building on the original cowboy definition of brand as the symbol, and branding as the act of applying the symbol, we could follow the same approach in business:

Branding is the set of activities that serve to create or build the brand.

As most companies know today, the relationship with the customer permeates far more of the company's operations than just marketing, sales and service. For some companies, the way you answer the phone is key, for others, it's the way you drive your trucks. For some companies it's your Web site experience that influences customers most, for others it's the fact that you invest some of your profits in charity. While some activities are pure acts of branding--like advertising--others may be more subtle but equally important. Whatever the activity is, to the extent you go beyond the function of the activity itself to try and improve your relationship with customers and prospects, it is, I would propose, branding--the activity is designed to add value to your brand.

I can already hear the mail coming. If you know of a solid and authoritative definition of branding, please let me know and I'll post it. If you have a good argument for why branding should be more limited, or more expansive, likewise. There's a lot of ground to cover...

Tripping (over) the Light Brandtastic

I'm working on my next column on brand concepts, sifting through a lot of the complaints that have been leveled at my reductionism (that every instance of brand is, by definition, tangible).

Most of the people passionate enough to send me hate mail complain that I'm oversimplifying the complexity of marketing. Apparently, because I'm arguing that the definition of the word *brand* should be understood in its simplist form, these people make the knee-jerk assumption that I'm cynically tossing out all of the other concepts associated with brand building--like the CFO with horns and a pitch-fork that must be haunting their dreams. Is it possible that the universe can contain one core concept for brand that is concrete, and also accommodate derivative concepts that are *distinct* but arrayed around the core? Heavens no. Everything must be lumped into the vague domain of a single word. It's like brand has become the magic bag of Felix the Cat--it can be anything you want it to be.

Others, like the letter sent to my editor at BW (the one from Gaurav Bahirvani), go a step further by mounting a defense for the soft subtlety of marketing that defies quantitative analysis:

I disagree with Kenton regarding marketers not being adept at demonstrating return on investment. Marketing or branding is a qualitative aspect. It is not a 2+2 sum which will give you a definite answer. In marketing, you're playing with emotions and human psyche, not numbers.

Okay, let's parse that for just a moment. He disagrees with the notion that marketers aren't adept at proving ROI. My assumption would be that he would follow that statement by showing how, in fact, marketers are good at proving ROI. But no, he mounts the defense that marketing is about emotions and human psyche, not numbers. Which, I guess, is a proposition that marketers should be immune from having to prove ROI. Why? Because it's too hard to give a definite answer.

As a businessman, if you're on my payroll you need to show me why putting a dollar in your budget is a better bet than putting that dollar in the stock market--or in the lottery, for that matter. As long as marketers argue that they are entitled to immunity from quantitative performance review, simply because they're dealing with something that is hard to measure--and that everyone else should just "get it"--they're lemmings: they're apparently ignorant of the tidal wave of marketing metrics and accountability measures that are sweeping through the business world. Sarbanes-Oxley anyone?

Finally, there are those who will accommodate me, grudgingly, as some curious fundamentalist. They're not quite sure why I'm insisting on this line of argument, but they'll grant that I'm not entirely wrong even if I'm not entirely right. The most gracious of these is over at hypocritical, which goes into some interesting detail about the mindset of marketers who are arguing against me.

Here's the thing. He's not wrong. He just has a different semantic argument for his definition of the word "brand." It happens to be completely at odds with my definition. And that, to quote Stuart Smalley, is okay.

My whole point has been that it's not okay. And this is the heart of the problem. Please understand this. I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO AGREE WITH ~~MY~~ DEFINITION OF BRAND. And I, personally, will not countenance your creation of a NEW definition of brand. Why? I'll be the *first* to champion a living language in which words can be created, modified, exploded--we didn't get to 100,000+ plus words in the English language by insisting on stasis. But when you get to the point of MASS CONFUSION, you must stabilize the language you use to communicate and transfer knowledge, or you embrace intellectual oblivion.

The simple fact is that the standard definition of brand, the one that defines a brand as a symbol that sets one company's products apart from competitors, is entirely serviceable today in 2005, and the attempts to push derivative concepts into the meaning are self-serving, egotistical and misguided--not to mention professionally suicidal.

The heart of the problem, to me, is this: Marketers have creative minds that are able to see many shades of gray. There's a lot of value in seeing the nuances in life--it allows you to apprehend patterns, to anticipate trends before you see the numbers, to see more than those who can only see black and white. But there comes a time when so much gray becomes impossible to navigate. We talk past each other like a bunch of babbling idiots, each asserting our own spin on the grayness, our own self-congratulatory definitions. At that point it becomes necessary to step pack, to prune the vast overgrown tree and pare it down to the strongest branches.

My entire argument is that that time is now.

Brand Semantics 102

I'm still getting a lot of contact on this topic, ranging from encouragement to head scratching--with a few good flames to keep things entertaining. I'll be moving up a level in brand exploration with a new Business Week column next Tuesday, but in the meantime, Jason Kerr picks up the semantic thread over at Brandlessness, scrutinizing the reduction of "brand" to the foundation of tangible assets.

I intuitively agree with you that a brand is what it is. A taxonomic anchor. But which one? You said it's "your name, your logo, your trade dress.." Well which is it? If a brand is "a concrete thing," then it's a concrete thing.  BUT if you define it as a set of different concrete things that share a common idea, well then...  it's an abstraction.

That's an interesting distinction that could take us deep into semiotics, at which point we might as well just shoot the audience. Let me try framing it like this: all dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs You can certainly say that "mammal" is an abstraction--a title for a group of things that hold a common quality--but you know that every single mammal, whether it's a dog or a cat or a blue whale, will be tangible. Same thing with brand. A logo is always a brand, but a brand isn't always a logo. It can also be your name, your trade dress, or one of a number of  touchpoints. But if it's not a tangible symbol that distinguishes your products and services from all others it's not an example of brand.

So yes, technically, the word brand signifies concrete things without being concrete itself, and yet, it's used interchangeably with the concrete things it signifies. If I walked my dog, you wouldn't correct me if I claimed to be walking a mammal--although in that example, you'd probably think I was a little whacked.

Beyond Brand Semantics

I took the rant on marketing semantics to my Business Week column today. I never imagined such a seemingly simple issue would have such legs, but the resistance I've gotten from some quarters--dismissiveness, anger, derision--is unusual. There are a lot of marketers out there who don't want the boat rocked.

But the struggle over the meaning of Brand is only scratching the surface. There are many concepts in marketing that are equally vague or confused, or conveniently reinterpreted to fit each marketer's understanding or expertise. Depending on who you're talking to, Segmentation can mean either market segmentation or segmented pricing. Positioning can refer to a competitive market strategy, a marcom messaging strategy, or even brand image.

In a conversation, the multiple meanings of a word are usually stabiliized by context. If I say "grab the wheel", and we're sitting in a car, you'll know I mean the steering wheel. If we're outside the car changing a flat, you'll know I mean the tire. Using context, experience and inflection to determine what meaning of the word was intended doesn't change the meaning of a concrete thing. A tire is still a tire, and a steering wheel is still a steering wheel. But what happens when the word is referring to something that is no more solid than an *idea*? What happens to the idea of segmentation, or positioning, or brand, when, through my own channels of experience--through context, inflection, etc--I interpret the meaning in a way that is different? What happens when I downright confuse one meaning with another, and then transmit that confused meaning to someone else?

In an age of Information, when we make our living as Knowledge Workers, what happens is that we fill our universe with static. Knowledge is shared through the use of language, and if the language isn't sufficiently clear, it's like we're talking to each other over a bad connection. In the short run, it's merely annoying--your clients or colleagues don't fully understand what you're saying. But in the long run it's destructive. People who are not marketers, but who depend on interacting effectively with marketers, begin to lose confidence in the value of marketing because every conversation is slightly vague, slightly confusing--and more troubling still, the meanings of important concepts seem to change from person to person. That lack of clarity and credibility has become the brand image of marketing, and until we get clear in our communication, we stand little chance of improving it.

If you're coming in from BusinessWeek, welcome. I'd really like to get more of a dialog going than a rant, so please drop a comment, if you would. Thanks for reading.

More Brand Definitions

My business partner pointed out "Exhibit B" in the ongoing fight over defining the meaning of "Brand". Over at Corante's blog on branding there's a discussion going on about the difference between "we companies" vs. "they companies". I'm not going to pick up that thread right now, because there's something far more important to draw out of this discussion.

One of the blog authors, Jennifer Rice, who apparently has a deep resume in brand consulting for some big companies, and who makes some interesting observations about brand strategy, nevertheless says in an offhanded way what I've been arguing is a stake in the heart of the marketing profession. Here it is:

My definition of a brand is an idea in the minds of your customers... and that idea is formed by what you say and what you do.

Before we get to the dreaded ~semantic~ argument that so many marketers want to avoid like the plague, let's just parse the framing of this definition. It is "My definition". Not "the definition". "My definition". What, exactly is the purpose of a "definition" if its meaning can be determined individually? How do you transfer knowledge about a thing, if the meaning of the thing can be arbitrarily open to interpretation?

To be fair and honest, I can't throw any rocks at Jennifer Rice's glass house, because I'm in one myself. I'm fairly certain if you go digging through my writing, you'll find someplace where I've said "my definition of x is..." This isn't about Jennifer Rice, it's about marketers as a profession. We MUST stop treating such bedrock professional concepts as a blank page for waxing philosophical about meaning. I'm arguing that this is one of the major reasons why marketing is continuing to lose credibility--because it cannot consistently communicate an idea that is solid and immutable. And this is a profound irony. What is one of the most commonly cited attributes of a strong brand? Consistency across time and medium. Apparently we marketers don't know how build equity for our brand.

Without rehashing all of the arguments about why Rice's definition is derivitive (you can find one of the posts on this topic here) I'll summarize the argument, stolen from Heidi Schultz, this way: There is a legal definition, and legal status for the concept of a brand. You own it. You can buy it and sell it. There are laws to protect it. Not one of these commercial facts applies to the concept of "an idea in the mind of your customer". Your brand is your logo, your name, your trade dress. Everything going on in the mind of your customer is derivitive and distinct. Call it brand image. Call it brand reputation. It is not your brand.

As an oversimplified analogy, someone might say "that Ferrari is my pride and joy". Is the Ferarri *really* an emotion? Of course not. You understand that without having to parse it. A Ferrari is a tangible object. It may influence your emotions. It may make you happy and proud to drive it. But your emotions are distinct entities that are influenced by other things too.

Same with a brand. You create a brand. You cultivate brand image and reputation. There are many things that effect brand image and reputation but that do not flow directly from your brand. There are social currents, historical events, cultural attitudes, economic trends--I'm sure someone, somewhere has drawn up an exhaustive list--that also have an impact on your brand image and reputation independent of any action you take. That's why it's useful and meaningful to consider them distinctly. If you require one single word, "brand", to carry the weight of a thousand ideas, it quickly loses its ability to convey anything of value. And if marketers today are in need of anything, it's an ability to convey clear ideas with real value.

What A Brand Won't Do

You can have a big marketing budget, a big name spokesperson, a big event with huge publicity and emotional appeal, but if you've got a junky product, it won't improve your sales. Witness today's report of the Pontiac G6 debacle. Oprah Winfrey gave away 276 of these cars on a tear-jerking show that set the marketing world on fire. But, sales have dropped through the floor.

Art Spinella, an industry observer and marketer, summed it pretty succinctly:

Spinella said neither GM's marketing department nor Winfrey can be blamed for the market performance of the G6.

"It's one thing to have that kind of a major marketing coup, but you need to back it up," said Spinella, who said he believes that the vehicle is an underwhelming package in a competitive marketplace.

Branding Claptrap

Here is Exhibit A of the problem I'm addressing with the confused meaning of "Brand". A "marketing innovator" who posts a blog but doesn't identify himself, takes issue with my support of a tangible definition for the meaning of brand.

Christopher Kenton of Marketonomy wants to reclaim the term "brand" for the advertising realm.

I'd be curious to know on what basis that judgement is made, since nothing could be further from the truth. I want to reclaim the term "brand" for the rational realm, and distinguish it from the other derivative brand concepts that are important but *different*.

He's argument is well-thought-out but wrong. It is meaningful to distinguish between 'brand image' and 'brand experience' but in the end, a company has to live more in the derivative world of brand consequences than in the artistic world of brand impressions. Speaking as someone who's worked for many companies where the advertising was at devastating odds with the real experience of customers in the company, I think we stand to gain more as marketers by insisting that 'brand' = the total customer experience based on encounters with the company.

It's funny, because I used to argue the same thing. In fact, if you look at my theory on Touchpoint Mapping, the whole premise was that the only way to try and bring the entire breadth of the brand experience into the realm of the tangible was to understand the practical meaning of brand to be the entire array of Touchpoints a company uses to create a relationship between the company and the customer. Brand Experience is *critically* imortant to the success of any company. BUT IT IS NOT BRAND. You own your brand. You do not own your customer's experience. One is something you create. The other is something you cultivate.

It blows my mind that so many marketers refuse to accept such a basic semantic necessity as clarifying words and meanings so that we don't confuse each other by talking in circles about what a Brand is. It's a relationship. No. It's a bond. No. It's an experience. No It's an image. No. It's a promise.

What marketers stand to gain from most is Clarity.

Brand Dialog

I've had my feet held to the fire today over my column on the meaning of brand--which is as it should be. Don't ever take the word of a marketer at face value. Some of my critics took issue with the fact that I was flogging a ~semantic~ argument. Semantic apparently meaning "unworthy of consideration", rather than "a useful exploration of meanings".

But some of the criticisms were useful. One of the more interesting discussions took place via email with Justin Mink, a brand marketer from USATODAY.com. With his permission, I'm posting the dialog here. 

Why Marketonomy?

Main Entry: -nomy
Etymology: Middle English -nomie, from Old French, from Latin -nomia, from Greek, from nomos
: system of laws governing or sum of knowledge regarding a (specified) field <agronomy>

We live in the age of information. We call ourselves knowledge workers no less. And yet we are surprisingly ignorant. Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. We've been swept away in such a flood of information that we no longer have any grounding in principles. Intelligence now means "new information", or "insider information", but it rarely means "good information". What, after all, is "good information"? How can you tell?

The answer today is that you bob on the surface of the flood: when enough of a current is moving in one direction, you go in that direction t