Return on Intention

As more companies become familiar with the existence of social media and the success stories given at just about every conference held, it has become very common to hear “I would use Facebook / Twitter / Whatever, but I just never know what to say.” This problem was the cause for so many people posting “I like pickles” or “I had eggs for breakfast” on Twitter in the early days as they tried to figure out what to say. Often this lack of knowing what to post is a symptom of something bigger than understanding a new medium. Often its based on the organization not really understanding their uniqueness or their brand promise and how it fits into its customers lives. To put it another way, they don’t really understand where they fit into their market. If you make English Muffins, a product that hasn’t really changed in decades, what could you possibly have to post on Facebook? Plenty.

First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

Once upon a time in a kingdom far away, there was a mighty river. This river was the sole water source for the kingdom, and had been flowing for generations. One day the water stopped flowing, and the king summoned the bravest knight in the kingdom to the castle, Sir Steve the Noble. The King dispatched Sir Steve to go up the dry river bed to find out what had happened. Sir Steve traveled for days and nights until finally finding that a dam had been built, stopping the water. Sir Steve destroyed the dam, and the kingdom lived happily ever after.

As stories go, that wasn’t very exciting. There is something missing. Lets try that story again and see if we can make it better.

Once upon a time in a kingdom far away, there was a mighty river. This river was the sole water source for the kingdom, and had been flowing for generations. One day the water stopped flowing, and the king summoned the bravest knight in the kingdom to the castle, Sir Steve the Noble. The King dispatched Sir Steve to go up the dry river bed to find out what had happened. Sir Steve traveled for days and nights until finally finding that a dam had been built by non other than the Duke of Darkness. The dam was guarded by hoards of the Dukes minions. Sir Steve, knowing that his chances for victory we’re slim, charged ahead into battle without hesitation. Sir Steve knew that without water, the kindly village people of the kingdom would suffer. With the faces of the village children pictured in his mind, Sir Steve battled through the minions until there was no one left standing except for himself, and the Duke. There, in the middle of the dam, an epic battle raged between the Noble knight and the evil Duke. Back an forth the swords flew, only to be stopped still with a clang as it landed on armor and shield. For hours the battle between the two men raged, until with the last of his strength, Sir Steve struck the fatal blow to the Duke of Darkness. With the villain gone, and the safety of the kingdom in hand, Sir Steve destroyed the dam and the kingdom lived happily ever after.

Ok, so I’m not much of epic story writer, but I think its clear the second attempt was much better than the first. Both stories have the same set up an the same conclusion, but the second allow the reader to become more emotionally invested in the outcome for two reasons. 1.) There was a villain; and 2.) Details about what the protagonist is thinking and feeling. The addition of the villain gives the audience something to focus its attention, and disdain on. A good protagonist is one that the audience can either identify with, or at least root for. The audience needs to get on the side of the stories lead, and in order to do that, you need to know why the protagonist is doing what he’s doing.

So much of marketing today is about story telling. The story could be  about the founding of an organization, or the triumph of a product. To get the idea across to the audience, its going to take more than the  just the facts. Look at the story your telling. Who is the protagonist, and what is the conflict? What is at stake, and who is the conflict with? Why should the user care, and how do you get them on the side of your protagonist? How much story is in your story?

If the goal of an organization is to provide value, then it must be considered, what is value? There is no single answer, as value is something internalized in each of us. For some, comprehensive coverage of an event is valued above all, so waiting for a “professional” source to gather all the facts is acceptable, and this valuable. For others, timeliness of an even is most important, so expediency of delivering whatever data is available is what constitutes value.

The traditional view of value was utilitarian, or to put it another way, what I can do with a thing. This is what leads to bullet points of features on the sides of packaging, and cramming a clock onto every electronic appliance because “it can be done”. There are at least 5 clocks in my kitchen.   There are types of value to consider, like emotional and psychological. With current car designs, we can only get so many horse power out of the motor before the car itself cannot handle it. This creates a ceiling on what we do to further the power a car can provide, but the feeling you get driving your dream car provides value that has little to do with the limitation of our engineering.

Providing value is relative, so learning what type of value you provide has more  to do with your success  than your manufacturing capabilities. What need do you fulfill and/or what are the needs that your target market has? The value you provide is what matches you with your customers, not the industry you are in. This is why listening is such an important yet underrated part of business. Social media is a good tool for this, but often we find people trying to hard to talk (old sales and marketing stuff). Apple is notorious for not being involved directly in social media, but you can bet they listen, and its working for them.

What do you think?

There has been a lot of debate lately about whether advertising agencies, PR firms, Digital shops or Social Media boutiques should be the first point of client contact to get marketing work done, and some even debate if any or all of the verticals should even exist. I think it stated with an Ad Age article saying the most qualified group to be the “Lead agency” was the digital guys, because they have the data, and the channels where the most people are. This article really got people up in arms as the traditional guys defended their historical turf and the digital guys staking a claim in the new environment.

A similar debate (again started by an advertising magazine article, only this time it was from AdWeek) reared its ugly head on the cross-posted podcast for Jaffe Juice / Six Pixels of Separation. It’s a very good listen, so I encourage you to check it out, but at the end of the show, much like the comment stream on the afore mentioned Ad Age article, there was no real resolution. From my perspective on both debates, what seems to really be the linch pin here is the lack of a standard vocabulary or lexicon to accurately describe this space. If you polled 100 people on what marketing was or meant you would undoubtedly find so many different responses you would wonder where everyone was the day they taught us that in school. Or did they? More on this in a further post, but for now lets get back to idea at hand.

One of the biggest computers of any industry is the ignorance of the market. When the market, or at least portion of it doesn’t know the definitions of all these words then it only makes sense that there will be confusion. Even if the industry gets it, so many people don’t that it all gets confused. Choosing an agency should not be done by what they are called but what they can do for you. Of course every business has different needs, but good agencies that assist in creating a solid strategy and excellent execution have a better chance to get a company where it wants to go than what it says on their business card. So if you don’t know what to call it, how do you find the right agency? Look for results. Ask the agencies on your short list about their past successes and how they reach their decisions. If you don’t have a short list, and don’t know where to start, find work that has achieved good results, call the business owner and ask them who they use. Forget the names and labels and go for results.

Being noticed is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses. Startups and established businesses both suffer from the problem of being remembered. Increasing numbers of competitors, along with the general ignorance of the market leaves many local businesses struggling to get their perspective customers to know or remember they exist; however it’s not usually the competition that keeps companies from standing out. Most often, it’s the company itself.

There is a prevailing myth that being “professional” means to be “boring”. Businesses suffer from this idea that doing something risky is risky. It’s been said before that the only risky thing to do is to play it safe, and the safe thing to do is be risky. To be noticed, do something worth noticing. To be remembered, do something memorable. Doing the same thing as your competition but “better” is usually not memorable. The “better” that many businesses are defining themselves by are usually things that doesn’t effect the customer or are completely missed by the customer  because they are not  knowledgeable enough in the industry to know whats better and what isn’t. If the customer can’t see it, or doesn’t understand it, they won’t remeber it.

Do something different. Give your brand some character. You are different than your competition, so look, act and be different. Don’t try to bury the personality of your brand in “professionalism”. Jingles are silly and corny, all the things a professional isn’t supposed to be. They also work. A rubber duck doesn’t have much to do with real estate, but customers remember it. Just ask Rick Miner from Duckin.com.  Have some fun. Be different. Be memorable.

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

Usually the topic of integration in a marketing and business development context is based on the idea of integrating a cohesive message or marketing campaign through multiple channels or disciplines. The concept is to come up with the “Big Idea” that meets the strategic goals of the organization, and then deliver that big idea through all the relevant media channels like TV, radio, print and the web. This idea is for the most part sound, but its greatest problem does not lie in theory, but the ability to achieve this integration in a successful way.

The skills that it takes to make a good TV campaign and a good digital (web) campaign are very different. With TV you have writers, directors, production crews and a whole slew of technical knowledge on how to operate a camera, capture good audio and the best way to frame a shot that can take many years to learn and become effective at. In digital you have the same scenario with specialized knowledge about user experience, human computer interaction, markup and programming that isn’t found in other mediums. Because of these vast difference in technical knowledge its easy to see why there aren’t many professional service firms that can offer world class solutions in every medium. Even if you could find one, the overhead of that business would be huge just from employing such a vast labor pool that their fee structure would be out of reach for most business owners.

In years past, the concept of who should be the “lead” agency has seen a fair share of heated debate. Some say it should be the advertising guys because of their knowledge of consumers and generating the “Big Idea”. Some say it should be the PR folks because they understand how to communicate best. There has even been speculation from some of the largest advertising trade magazines that it should be the digital agencies because they have the audience and ability to track behavior better than any other discipline. At the end of the day its still not clear who the winner of this debate should be, or that there ever should or could be a clear winner. This argument does illustrate that, if nothing else, there is no agreed upon right answer.

Somewhere in the combination of the widely varying difference in skill sets from one media to another and the murky uncertainty as to who is best suited to try and work it all out, this makes creating a successful fully integrated campaign a problem of organization just as much as it is strategy. The responsibility of creating a successful endeavor falls upon the client. Over the next few years expect to see more movement as the disrupted industries of marketing and communication learn to deal with  the new digital world. It seems that on top of everything else that a client side marketing manager or CMO has on their plate a whole new level of technical complexity will now be required. This will result in either larger in house marketing staff on the client side, new planning positions on the client side to offset the need for a lead agency or a change in the agency world to take into account the new required disciplines.

I’m not sure how this will all work out, but perhaps a good idea is for both clients and agencies to ponder “what isn’t digital anymore.” Perhaps the digital agencies will go away as it becomes less of an ancillary discipline and is absorbed into business as usual, or perhaps the digital agencies will win out as they acquire the relevant knowledge traditional housed at the Advertising and PR firms. Can you hear it? Its the winds of change.