John Drake

On Ten Marketing Truths

Richard at Adliterate posts smart stuff. Here's 10 marketing truths we shouldn't forget.

1. Seeking greater penetration is almost always the winning strategy rather than attempting to shift average weight of purchase.

2. Light buyers are your most valuable customers not loyalists. Virtually every brand needs more light buyers.

3. Buying is the desired outcome from marketing not engagement, participation or conversation. We are obsessed by the wrong metrics.

4. People never care enough about brands to want to be followers, friends or fans. Not at a scale that is commercially useful.

5. Brands need to ensure their mental availability but its fanciful and hideously expensive to remain ‘always on’ and few people want them to be.

6. Targeting is not the holy grail of marketing. It’s helpful to a point but rests on assumptions about human behaviour that are unpredictable and misleading.

7. Wastage is under-rated. One way or another wastage is a conversation with tomorrow’s customers.

8. There is no earned media. With a few highly notable exceptions, for most brands, all media is paid for media.

9. There is no one way advertising works. Any campaign can work in many different ways and often in ways that were not explicitly intended. And a great campaign will improve all your metrics.

10. Advertising works best with the consent of people. Consent that is best built when advertising is helpful, enjoyable and interesting. The digital inventory of today is destroying this consent day by day.

On How Your Brand Isn't The Center Of The Universe

Red Bull reportedly spends nearly 30% of their revenue on marketing. It's an incredibly high amount. Most of that goes to events.

Their brand is very strong, but as they do all of these events, drawing huge crowds, they keep in mind that it isn't about them at all:

At no point were people coming to these big Red Bull events because they like the drink and wondered what else we might be up to. They didn’t dislike the drink, but they came because they knew that the event was going to blow their mind — was really a critical part of it. The mistakes that the brands make in this area is assuming that they are the center of the universe and that they can do no wrong. At the end of the day, you’re a f***ing brand. You’ve got to be clear that there’s a lot of human emotion that as a brand, you’re lucky to be part of. But you’re certainly not the star of the party.

On Email Marketing

 

This is one of the best summaries on good email marketing I've read in ages. Two year's worth of research broken down into four actionable areas.

Deal: Percent off often performs better than dollars off.

Subject: Six to Ten words and punctuation, like question marks, help.

Timing: Open and conversion rate peaks differ by month; summer is good.

Body: Multiple calls-to-action and multiple products--that can lay out cleanly.

All good points to consider.

On A Turnaround At Arby's

Two years ago, 35 percent of Arby's customers were under the age of 35. Today, 50 percent are under the age of 35. That's significant when your brand is a QSR. "We're driving transactions, which in our industry is hard to come by, and I think we're just getting started," said their CMO.

Focus, is how you get to purpose. Which is a beautiful thing. That what we see with "We have the meats."

True in food advertising, and, really all brands.

Because it's also what helped Taylor Swift keep 1989 free of country. "Let's capitalize on both country and pop markets," the record execs said as they wanted to add some twang to some songs. "No, let’s not. Let’s choose a lane” Taylor said. And 1989 was a smash hit.

More Than Ads

Lincoln started 2015 with sales up 16 percent, which is double the pace of the luxury industry. The ads have received mixed reviews. But they're only part of a story. There's an underlying ambition going on here. And it was evident at the Seattle Auto Show this weekend.

Among batches of cars from Porsche, Ferrari, Lexus and more, guess who had the most stand-out 'booth'? I thought Lincoln did. They had created this sort of posh living room with one of their models spinning in the middle. The music was something you might hear in the lobby of a cool midtown hotel.

Grand ambition requires a brand to win everywhere.

Marketing Crack

As only he can do, Martin has put together another great one.

Marketing crack from Martin Weigel

The Tech We Bring In

When Genevieve Bell was studying the car industry, one of the things she reportedly discovered what that the technology in the car wasn't as important as the technology that people brought into the car.

Our music, podcasts, address books and recent destinations are with us everywhere, so why try to duplicate that in the car? Just create the ability to hook up the phone.

Which makes sense. Our cars are full of personal items we brought in.

It's a very smart piece of ethno research. And it might be the philosophy that helps retail, too.

What if instead of a retailer investing huge amounts of money into physical things, location by location, they focus their attention on reacting to a phone once it arrives? I think this goes beyond apps and beacons. Target and Starbucks and more could tie together on one platform, not separate ones that they each have to build, market and grow an audience for. Like our playlists of hundreds of bands that share a channel. 

Maybe the answer is something like MyShop Companion?

The Brand Brief For 'Just Do It'

1998:

“Nike is about to become a significant network television advertiser. We will spend nearly three times what we spent on the ‘Revolution’ campaign in the fall of 1988. (Despite the high visibility of ‘Revolution,’ Nike had spent less than $5 million on TV that year.) This is a turning point for a company that not long ago spoke to its customers at track meets from the tailgate of a station wagon. This just cannot be a narrow look back at where we have been. We should be proud of our heritage, but we must also realize that the appeal of ‘Hayward Field’ (an Ad set at the University of Oregon’s Track & Field Stadium) is narrow and potentially alienating to those who are not great athletes. We need to grow this brand beyond its purest core…we have to stop talking just to ourselves. It’s time to widen the access point. We need to capture a more complete spectrum of the rewards of sports and fitness. We achieved this with ‘Revolution.’ Now we need to take the next step.”

Much has been written around the story behind creating the line 'Just Do It.' So it's nice to read about the business problem the brand was facing from the Director of Marketing Insights and Planning at the time.

Which led to work, like this, that carried the line we all know.

And there's an insightful thought around the three circles of influence that help create a good brand purpose;

- the social tension,

- the core brand truth,

- an unmet consumer need.

Why Research?

The reason design projects that neglect research fail isn’t because of a lack of knowledge. It’s because of a lack of shared knowledge. Creating something of any complexity generally requires several different people with different backgrounds and different priorities to collaborate on a goal. If you don’t go through an initial research process with your team, if you just get down to designing without examining your assumptions, you may think your individual views line up much more than they do. Poorly distributed knowledge is barely more useful than no knowledge at all.

From the Secret Cost of Research, via the always thought-provoking Dark Matter.

Real Time Outdoor

Here's an artificially intelligent billboard with an algorithm attached. The board evolves over time to show the most effective ads that it can based on people's reactions. Copy, layout, font and image can all be mixed and matched, automatically, in real time. The point is that it gets smarter, choosing less and less solutions until it finds the best mix...

"We are not suggesting a diminished role for creative but we know technology will be playing a greater part in what we do." 

 

There's an important nuance to monitor with this particular approach for creativity. It's one thing to have various executions and then optimize to the highest performing one; that's wonderful. And there's a beauty in taking design elements that prove to work in one area and trying to spread them across others.

 

But this AI creative design approach starts to get close to literal group design without guidance. Incorporating everyone together and then spitting out one idea is a risk. Like what GM did with their initiative to "give the people what they want" and use extensive focus groups to arrive at the design of the quickly-pulled Aztek.

 

Said one company exec back then: "By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, 'How could you put that on the road?'"