Tom Asacker

Semantics matter, names not so much

Someone forwarded me a link to a post titled, A dumb branding strategy.  In it the author writes:

Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.

It's a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable. "Here honey, I bought you these cheap earrings at Diamond World!" Not only are they bland, but you can't even remember one over the other. This is the absolute last refuge of a marketer who has absolutely nothing to say and can't even find the guts to stand for what they do. It's just generic.

First of all, naming is not a "branding strategy."  It may be a component of a brand strategy, especially if the name is supposed to help create an expectation, e.g. Jiffy Lube and DieHard.  Otherwise, the name is simply a label, a placeholder.  The meaning is co-created by the company and its audience over time.

Secondly, words like Central, Mart, World, and Depot may be meaningless, but Comedy Central, Wal-Mart, Disney World, and Home Depot each convey a lot of meaning.  So do bland acronyms like BMW, SAP, IBM, and BBC.  And TIAA-CREF, AFLAC, GEICO and GE.  Likewise common terms like Tide, Target, and Apple.  And so do some people's names, like McDonald's, Honda, Gillette, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Harley-Davidson.  Even silly labels like Google, Twitter, and Wii, and names that are somewhat misleading like Southwest Airlines and Christmas Tree Shops, have come to mean a lot to a lot of people.

Can you choose a truly bad brand name, not counting legal considerations?  Of course you can. Reebok's brand name "Incubus" for women's sneakers comes to mind (Incubus was the name of a medieval demon that sexually assaulted women in their sleep).  So definitely do your homework. That being said, do names matter all that much? Is there some sort of causal relationship between a good brand name and more rapid and profitable growth?  History tells me no.  But I may be wrong.  Has anyone ever seen a prospective study that proves the hypothesis?  If so, please send it my way.

Do you advertise online?

If so, you may be interested in this HBS Working Knowledge piece; "Reducing Risk with Online Advertising."

P.S. At first glance, I thought the article was about the efficacy of online advertising.  It's not.  It's about detecting and preventing online advertising fraud. Perhaps it should have be titled, "Reducing Online Advertising Risk."

How Apple Makes You “Think Different”

A study by Gavan Fitzsimmons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University and published in  the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found participants who were primed with an Apple logo  - shown the logo for 30 milliseconds so that it was not consciously "seen" - were much more likely to be creative than those primed with an IBM logo. The research purports to prove that brands can subliminally inspire or create certain kinds of feelings in people.

Do we still need research to prove that brands create subconscious feelings, and that feelings motivate behavior?  Hmm, perhaps Tiger Woods should be paying Nike.

The Flash of Brand Insight

Who am I?  What is my brand?
Me.
What is my promise, personality, and positioning?
Me. Me.
What do I want to say?  How should I say it?
Me. Me. Me.
If only I can get the details right.  If only I can discover my essence.
Me. Me. Me. Me.
.
BAM!
.
I wonder who they are.
Them.
I wonder what they’re doing.
Them. Them.
I wonder how they’re feeling.
Them. Them. Them.
I wonder how I can make life better for them and make them feel better about themselves.
Them. Them. Them. Them.

WhoTube?

Here's some surprising news from the WARC:

Addressing The Economist's seventh annual Marketing Directors' European Summit in London last week, McDonald's corporate vp of global marketing, Johan Jervoe, stunned Web 2.0 Holy-Grailers as he warned of the dangers of marketing brands via YouTube and similar social networking media. To do so, he said, forces marketers to relinquish control of how their brands are perceived by consumers and poses significant risks in moving from a 'push' to a 'pull' advertising model.

"Achieving brand advocacy is the biggest challenge facing marketers," Jervoe opined. "The ultimate goal is getting consumers to trust your brand and talk about it without you asking them to." He then astonished audience and co-panelists alike by confessing to the ultimate marketing heresy: That most of his colleagues in the McDonald's marketing department "don't even know that YouTube exists"!

How to give a speech

There's no need for commentary.  Take a look:
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Authenticity: Is It Real or Is It Marketing?

That's the title of a fictional online Harvard Business Review "case study" written by Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger. HBR have opened it up to readers for discussion, so if you're interested in a thought-provoking mental exercise, head on over: click here.

P.S. You probably know by now how I feel about pairing the words authenticity and business.  If not, you can find out here, here, and here.

The economics of attention

You've probably seen the issue of New York magazine with the spread of Lindsay Lohan channeling Marilyn Monroe. But have you seen the economics?!

Here are a few things to think about, courtesy of Forbes.com: 

The Feb. 25 edition of the weekly magazine, with Lohan on the front cover, hit newsstands on Monday. That same morning, the magazine posted the photo portfolio on its NYmag.com Web site. For a site that's averaged around a million page views a day lately, the results were stunning. NYmag.com recorded a total of more than 40 million page views Monday and Tuesday, more than 34 million of which came from the Lohan portfolio.

According to New York's online rate card, the "super banner ad" of the type that appears on the Lohan photo slideshow has a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of $15. Multiply that by the number of views and the Lohan slideshow ads were valued at more than $500,000 over two days. Based on its rate card, New York generated about as much revenue per day from its online slideshow as it would from four $64,500 full-page color ads in its print edition. And unlike print, the Lohan score can continue indefinitely online.

The photographer who snapped the photos of Lohan was Bert Stern, the same lensman who was behind the camera for Monroe's famed 1962 shoot at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles. And while some magazines reportedly spend millions to get their hands on exclusive photos of celebrities or their babies, New York paid Stern its standard fee for such assignments--and paid Lohan nothing for her participation, according to magazine spokeswoman Lauren Starke.

So now you know.  Keep your eyes wide open and you'll see people trading attention, recognition, and reputation all over the place; especially online.

Amazon offers free downloads of all of its book titles

That's right.  For three days, Amazon will allow customers to download the digital version of as many books as they want absolutely free!  No, this isn't happening now.  But it should.

Random House just followed the marketing experiment started by HarperCollins and, for three days last week, gave away the digital version of Charles Bock's 432 page debut novel, Beautiful Children.  Why are they doing this? Aren't they in the business of selling books?  Two simple reasons:

First, by doing something radically different (by industry standards), they get big mentions in the mainstream media.  Random House made the front page of the Life section of USA Today.  And even long tail exponents like Chris Anderson are smart enough to know that a cover article in Wired will sell more books than giving away a digital version of ones book on ones blog.

The second reason is just as simple.  Not many people are going to download and read books on their computer screens.  Nor are they going to print them out and read them.  The paper and ink would cost more than the books, including shipping.   But what they will do is download them and skim them.  Just like they flip through books at Barnes & Noble. Then if a book peaks their interest, they'll buy it.

So if Amazon could pull this off for all of their books, it would create a huge spike in book sales.  Customers would browse all of the titles that interest them, download as many as possible during the three day time limit, and then peruse them when they get a chance.  And this perusing - without the potential of reading a negative review, mind you - will lead to book purchases. 

But here's the one caveat: When the day comes that the majority of books are read on digital readers, like Amazon's Kindle, the free experiment will be over.  Unless, of course, they offer the books in proprietary formats which will be unreadable by digital readers. Hmm . . . sounds familiar, doesn't it? :)

Live by the Internet, Die by the Internet

A YouTube video is just like television, except that it's not.  Any one and everyone can create a commercial, and it will show up right next to the one you created and posted.  To wit, the following ad created and posted by Jack Nicholson, apparently on his own dime, in support of Hillary Clinton:

And this one (of many) created and posted by someone named CartwrightDale: