Tom Asacker

Olivier Blanchard on the realities of modern marketing

"The burger joint isn't an amusement park. Most people's morning commute isn't the great arctic tundra."

"Once the commercials are off the air and your customers realize that your burger wasn't really all that great, that the service sucked, that your car seat is kind of uncomfortable and that the windshield wipers are too noisy, what kind of relationship do you expect to have with them?"

Read the rest of Olivier's inspired post: click here.

Mortimer J. Adler on pyschological distinction

"The most basic psychological distinction is in the sphere of our mental acts and in our overt behavior, and is made by the line that divides the cognitive from the appetitive. Our desires and emotions or passions belong on the appetitive side of that line; our acts of knowing, understanding, and thinking on the cognitive side."

Booz Allen and the ANA have created a Marketing Profiler to help you determine which profile your organization has and what migration path, if any, is recommended for your organization. Sure. Like this cognitive approach will influence executive behavior. Whatever. However, I did appreciate their six distinctions:

1. Growth Champion. This organization is highly valued within the company for its ability to drive revenue. It is considered as important as other major departments, such as finance and sales. It drives the company’s priorities and leads product innovation and new business development.
2. Senior Counselor. Functioning as a high-level advisor on marketing strategy to the chief executive officer and the individual businesses, the Senior Counselor leads major advertising, promotion, and public relations campaigns. Unlike the Growth Champion, however, it does not typically drive company-wide strategy.
3. Brand Foreman. Above all, the Brand Foreman is an efficient provider of marketing services, ranging from communications strategy to creative output and campaign execution, in support of the company’s key brands. It serves as the central manager of agency relationships, and is considered among the company’s most important support organizations.
   
4. Growth Facilitator. The Growth Facilitator has the authority and skills to develop and lead large, company-wide marketing efforts and helps set the business’s overall priorities. This marketing organization coordinates with other major functions, such as sales and product development.
5. Best Practices Advisor. The Best Practices Advisor works with the individual businesses to identify internal and external best practices and incorporate them into all marketing activities. This organization’s goal is helping the businesses achieve maximum effectiveness and efficiency, and it has expertise across all elements of the marketing toolkit.
6. Service Provider. This organization supplies marketing services such as advertising, promotion, and public relations at the request of the company’s brand and product teams. The Service Provider is effective at executing specific tasks and is responsive to time-sensitive requests.

My humble opinion? Focus on #1 and #4 and outsource the rest. And do it now!

Bill Bernbach on human nature

"Human nature hasn't changed for a million years. It won't even vary for the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It's fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man - what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being."

Do you appreciate the power of the universal to touch people's hearts and souls? Simply watch this short video made by two Chinese students in their dorm room and uploaded to Google video. I promise you'll get it. It brought tears of joy to my eyes.

Steven Wright on crossing the border into Canada

"When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, 'Well, what do you need?'"

I'll be crossing the border in a few weeks to speak in the wonderful city of Montreal. If you're in the area, please stop by. Check out the details: click here.

Wall Street saying on knowing

"To know and not to do is not to know."

Do marketers get it, or are they simply lazy? I just received an email blast and a voice mail message from the conference machine known as IIR to drum up attendance for their 2006 Conference on Marketing. During the past six weeks, I've also received no less than six direct mail pieces for that same event. This really should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with their direct marketing business model. But here's the rub: I made it on their list, because I've been a speaker at many of their conferences. I recently emceed an event for the same conference producer. These folks have no idea who they're talking to, and they couldn't care less. And they're running a conference on marketing? And guess who's keynoting? The father of permission marketing. A guy who publicly condemns the very mass market tactics they're using to drive attendance and make a buck. It makes one wonder.

Earnest Hemingway on movement

"Do not confuse movement with action."

Here are the top three marketing priorities (a.k.a. action) for 2005 from IDC's CMO Tech Marketing Barometer:

1. Increase focus
2. Identify strategic growth areas
3. Increase focus on the customer

Sounds like one and the same to me. Focus on the customer to find strategic growth areas, which will then focus the organization. Now here's the funny thing. I read a recent report that indicated that marketers are so busy measuring everything to death they don't have time for strategic thinking, and thus, action. Catch-22.

Robert Frost on nonsense

"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."

Here we go again. In his most recent issue of The Copernicus MZine, Kevin Clancy writes:

In a recent piece for Ad Age, marketing guru Al Ries made the statement: "Fundamentally there are two ways to increase sales: (1) Expand the brand [i.e., a brand-centric approach to marketing], or (2) expand the brand's market share [i.e., a customer-centric approach to marketing]." "While it's more difficult to expand a brand's market share, this is the better way to go. The larger the market share," Ries writes, "the more powerful a brand becomes. Unfortunately, he laments, "Overwhelmingly, marketing managers believe in the expand-the-brand philosophy."

We share venerable Al's frustration: when it comes to taking actions to grow the bottom-line in the short- and long-term, the discussion becomes not what are we going to do to grow our customer relationships, but what are we going to do with the brand. In their breakthrough Harvard Business Review article, "Customer-Centered Brand Management," Roland Rust, Valarie Zeithaml, and Katherine Lemon agree that, for all the talk about the importance of the company, "Brand management still trumps customer management in most large companies."

Expand the brand vs. expand the  brand's marketshare? Will this nonsense ever end? How can you grow a brand without growing the connection between the brand and the customer?

A brand is nothing more than an expectation that customers have of something. So if you're continuously elevating the customer's expectation and delivering on that expectation with an experience such that customers are predisposed to choose your brand at a price which allows you to make a profit, you are growing your brand. How can this be done without growing the "relationship" between the customer and that something? Please folks. Stop the double-talk.

Unnamed Law

"If it happens, it must be possible."

Did you hear the news? The The Dalai Lama is at the center of a scientific controversy. The kind of controversy that REALLY gets my goat.

From the NY Times, October 19, 2005

"He has been an enthusiastic collaborator in research on whether the intense meditation practiced by Buddhist monks can train the brain to generate compassion and positive thoughts. Next month in Washington, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to speak about the research at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

But 544 brain researchers have signed a petition urging the society to cancel the lecture, because, according to the petition, 'it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity.'"

I spent 5 years in the mid 90's running an innovative medical device company, and I encountered the same kind of thinking on numerous occasions. Actually, I shouldn't really call it thinking, because it doesn't originate from a healthy sense of curiosity. It's driven by the ego's need to protect itself; it's standing and status. Nothing more. Nothing less. And I abhor it.

On a more positive note, I'm once again a judge for the Innovation Challenge where 300 teams from over 100 of the top MBA programs in over 20 countries compete for the right to travel to Thunderbird in sunny Arizona for the face-to-face final round of competition. And I just did an interview with competition creator Anil Rathi on how to cut through today's marketplace clutter. You can listen to the podcast at this link.

Johanna Keller on magazine covers

"They're absolutely a societal barometer of what we find acceptable to look at."

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the top magazine cover of the last 40 years on Monday during the American Magazine Conference. The iconic image to the left, of a naked John Lennon curled around and kissing a clothed Yoko Ono published a month after his December 1980 death, won top honors.

Keller, professor of magazine journalism at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, also said "The ones that work best touch us in the same way that great art touches us . . . stirring our very deepest human emotions."

Ditto for marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, most is watered down, safe and uninspiring.  Kind of like what George Lois, the man who created the iconic and much-lauded Esquire magazine covers of the ‘60s Golden Age of Journalism, said about the state of today's magazine establishment during his lunchtime speech at the conference:

“For the last 40 years, the magazine community has never understood the overwhelming message of my covers: that the editorial content and imagery of a great magazine belongs to the passionate writer, the iconoclastic graphic designer and heroic editor -- and not to the outraged advertisers or the quivering sales departments or the celebrity flavor of the month whose butt you’re kissing, or to your readers, and certainly not to cranky letter writers.”

Oh . . . and here's what the corporate guy, John Fox Sullivan, president of Atlantic Media, had to say about Mr. Lois’ address (how typical):

“It was provocative, it made people think.”

Asked if it would make an impact or could inspire real change, however, he said:

"It would be really hard for any magazine to emulate the old Esquire. Magazine publishing is a corporate world now, there are commercial reasons it couldn't happen, but I also wonder if you have a public that would even respond to it. It’s not the ‘60s.”

Peter Drucker on innovation

"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."

Since the beginning of business creation, successful brands have gone through three phases of evolution: mystery, model, and method. Mystery is the “I wonder . . .?” phase: “I wonder if people will purchase an automobile if I can get the price down to ‘x’?” The next phase is the model phase . . . a messy, imperfect process: “Let me try to produce an automobile for ‘x.’”

Once the model phase has proven out the mystery--“Wow! They WILL buy it.”---successful brands quickly move into the methods phase: “How can I produce enough automobiles at the target price to fulfill demand, and make a profit while doing so?” Some are driven by insights regarding a market opportunity like Henry Ford, while others, like Michael Dell, are simply trying to stay ahead of the competition and remain profitable. Either way, a brand is born.

The problems arise when successful brands . . .

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