Author: Drew Neisser

A Good Sign

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The fun part of tracking examples of Marketing as Service is that you never know when and where you might find one.  A recent exploration of various websites for imported alcohol brands yielded an interesting example from the Dominican Republic courtesy of Brugal Rum.  Creating road signposts where none stood before, Brugal provided a meaningful service that proved so popular it became a national phenomenon.  Here’s the story as reported on Brugal’s website:

Some time ago road signs in the Dominican Republic were scarce. In the beginning of the 1970s, Brugal voluntarily offered to improve the situation and, in accordance with the local government, began to post signs in the form of the company’s crest that would identify the cities, towns, beaches and points of interest in the entire country.

It made us proud that this initiative ended up being very popular, and soon those same towns and cities began requesting these signs from Brugal. Today the tradition continues and the demand is so high that Brugal created a special workshop specializing in the production and maintenance of these signs.

The signs are like the traffic ones, nearly 3m high. And since this action by Brugal was not motivated by any publicity goals but rather a desire to help the people of our country, we don’t know the exact number of signs we have but surely it’s more than 4000.

Like many of the best examples of Marketing as Service, this one started with the brand’s desire to provide a service that would be of benefit to its target.  Of course, they also ended up with thousands of very inexpensive reminders of the brand and made the brand an even more integral part of  Dominican life.  Whether you see this as crafty marketing, “enlightened self-interest,” or just plain CSR, it’s a good sign from any angle.

5 Savvy Guerrilla Marketing Ideas for 0h 10

Posted on by Drew Neisser

ADWEEK published its special report on Guerrilla Marketing a couple of weeks ago including a few quotes from your truly on how marketers are capitalizing on empty retail spaces. These quotes were part of a larger conversation I had with ADWEEK on overall guerrilla trends and the kinds of things you might see in 2010. I’ve collected those thoughts into this piece that looks remarkably similar to an article of mine that appeared in MediaPost this week!

More DO, Less SAY
Guerrilla used to be about “hit and run” stunts that in the best case yielded on-message PR. Like other forms of marketing, guerrilla is evolving into more complex experiences that DO something for the consumer rather than simply saying something to them. The HSBC BankCab (yup, its still driving brand love after seven years!), the Samsung Charging stations and Charmin’s Times Square bathrooms are three examples of the DO versus SAY approach.

Expect a lot more of this in 2010 with new twists that integrate technology and/or social media. For example, Charmin added a search for Tweeters to supports its 2009 “pottie platoon” and HSBC added tweets to the BankCab program.

Meet Up meets Flash Mob
At the heart of the most effective guerrilla campaigns is a physical interaction. Social mobile technologies enable new interactions that guerrilla marketers will undoubtedly exploit. A well-connected marketer will be able to take the notion of a flash mob to new heights, gathering people of extraordinary commonalities at a moments notice. Think Meet Up meets Flash Mob. It is easy to imagine a kitchen appliance company gathering left handed vegan cooks for an “equal rights” march through Bloomingdales that turns into a party to celebrate a new “leftist” friendly product line.

Foursquare, Loopt and Google Latitude all represent interesting opportunities for marketers to connect with likeminded consumers in fresh ways. These tools all create the opportunity for customized micro-events that could make prospects feel a part of something special. For example, liquor brands should have a field day partnering with Foursquare and/or Loopt to create an entire nights worth of experiences.

Pop-up not Pooped Out
With commercial real estate still in the tank, expect guerrilla opportunists to exploit empty spaces in all sorts of new ways. Suddenly these windows could become touch screen displays that are customized ecommerce enabled eco-systems. Smart video technology would assess the people walking by (i.e. male, female, young, old, short, tall) and serve up a customized visual experience.

For example, the video window could display an avatar of the individual walking by and then transport it to sunny beach in the Bahamas for a travel company. The consumer could select their own destination and place their image into it. This image could be emailed to the consumer along with a discount for a cruise to that destination. Less tech heavy uses of storefronts will include live mannequins, video projections and printed posters that change on a daily basis for a reason (weather reports, news items, drinks of the day, etc.)

Taking Tech over the Top
Look for augmented reality to creep into guerrilla programs. For example, a girl could virtually try on a dress she’s just seen via a guerrilla encounter, share that “trial” with a friend, get instant feedback, figure out who makes that dress and then order it on Zappos. Smart phone apps could include components found via a real life scavenger hunt. The consumer would have to find the “clue” and take a picture of it which would help them reach a higher level in the app. The variations on this are endless but all involve integrating mobile technology with a physical experience.

Little Luxuries
Guerrilla marketers have long pursued random acts of kindness as a means of gaining attention for their brand. Look for these random acts to become less random and more upscale, providing little moments of luxury in 2010. Concierge service in unexpected places, free transport in unique vehicles and exotic food samples for passersby are but three examples you can expect to see this year.

Little luxuries are always welcome and can be delivered on an increasingly personal basis thanks to advancing technology. For example, GPS mash-ups can enable everything from customized messaging to personalized walking tours. This messaging could be educational—like how do you get the best shot of a landmark (that you happened to be at) to what’s the best thing to order at the restaurant across the street. This level of customization will endear brands to their prospects thus transforming them into card-carrying brand evangelists.

Manufacturing Love: The New CRM?

Posted on by Drew Neisser

These days, it’s simply not enough to manufacture a good product. Those are the table stakes. If you make an inferior product, no amount of marketing can save you from the painful truth that will spread faster than you can say, “tweet tweet.” That said, in categories with several high-quality options the winners like Lexus, American Express and Apple are succeeding by manufacturing love, gaining share of heart not just share of mind.It’s probably not news to anyone that Lexus makes a high quality product. In fact, Consumer Reports consistently rates Lexus best of breed in just about every segment. What you may not know is how far it will go to satisfy its customers, even its used — excuse me — “pre-owned” vehicle customers. Ready to retire my trusty Civic at the end of last year, I found out first hand why Lexus has topped a University of Michigan study on customer satisfaction four years in a row.

Meet Keith. Keith mans the pre-owned section at Lexus of Manhattan and is my new best friend. Keith offered my wife and me beverages, comfy chairs and a complete explanation of our options when we first met. After identifying OUR car, we haggled over the price ever so pleasantly and then did a final inspection at which point we discovered deal-breaking scratches on the passenger door. Expecting a “take it or leave it” response, Keith surprised us with a “of course, we’ll take care of this” and scheduled the repair work. Evidently, this is par for the course at Lexus.

When I picked up the car a week later, Keith surprised me again by explaining how everything in the car worked and noting the additional repainting they’d done “just because.” Keep in mind, we’re talking about a used car lease here so I’m thinking that’s the end of the road. Wrong again. A couple of days later I received a “how’s the car running?” check-in call from Keith. Several weeks after that he phoned to say that we needed to schedule an inspection and when I couldn’t find the time, he offered to retrieve the car, take care of the inspection and return it in short order. He did all that, threw in a car wash and, in the process, became the poster boy for love-generating customer service!

Lexus is not the only brand out there manufacturing brand love. American Express has been after the hearts and wallets of small businesses for many years. Recently, its OPEN program has kicked into high gear, delivering invaluable content and networking opportunities via the OPEN Forum. Sure, lots of brands offer content online but as someone who pumps out a fair amount myself, I can assure you this is best of breed, including articles, videos and discussions.

I also witnessed the OPEN Forum in action as CES, at which live speakers attracted flocks of small businesses eager to fly higher. Even the sales people were helpful, explaining the benefits of OPEN and assisting in the registration process. The positive vibe in the American Express booth was palpable and every touch-point made me and my fellow small business peeps feel loved by this corporate giant.

Apple has been a beloved brand pretty much since its founding by making truly innovative products that were easier to use and prettier to look at than its main competitors. The iPod and the iPhone created entire economic ecosystems, reinventing their respective categories, transforming mere devices into holistic lifestyles. And most companies would stop there, thrilled to have unique goods on the shelf.

Apple did not. It created the Apple Store to control the entire brand experience and, about a year ago, added in-store concierges to further the romance. These orange-shirted wizards can do everything from fixing a broken key to directing a product search to ringing up your order and emailing the receipt all in a nanosecond. And these are just the tasks they did for me on my last visit, all of which assured my enduring love for all things Apple.

Lexus, American Express and Apple are all premium brands that deliver high-quality products AND exemplary service. In doing so, they set themselves apart not just within their respective categories but also in the marketing world as a whole. They make it their business to exceed expectations and, in doing so, have created legions of brand advocates ready to do their bidding. These brands are redefining the rules of CRM, manufacturing love at every touch point, gaining share of heart, mind and wallet in the process.

Long Term Impact of Ad Spending Cuts

Posted on by Drew Neisser

For years, agency types like me having been referring to an old study about the deleterious long term effects of short term spending cuts. Until yesterday, I’d never seen a stock analyst frame his/her recommendations based on increases/decreases in A&P (advertising and promotion) budgets. It took me a day to realize how significant this really was and why I needed to share the whole story which ran in Wine & Spirits Daily yesterday:

Spirits Make Biggest Cuts in A&P Spending

A new report from Deutsche Bank’s Jamie Isenwater says that the spirits sector has taken a short-term approach by cutting their marketing budgets during the downturn, which almost guarantees it will be expensive to rebuild once the environment improves. In the last 6 months, Pernod Ricard (Sell), Diageo (Hold), AB Inbev (Hold) and Campari (Hold) cut A&P the furthest out of 30 European and US consumer staples companies, while Beiersdorf (Buy), Unilever (Buy), Henkel (Buy) and L’Oreal (upgraded to Buy) invested the most aggressively.

Jamie says that Pernod and Diageo cut their organic marketing spend by -24% and -18% respectively in the first half of calendar 2009. “We remain underweight Beverages with a particular caution on Spirits given the aggressive cutting of A&P spend seen on the back of the downturn,” said Jamie. “We see little earnings rebound for the Spirits sector as a result and struggle to see where earnings upgrades are likely to come from. Pernod Ricard remains a key Sell recommendation and we see little upside to Diageo at current levels.”

LOWER A&P EQUALS LOWER MARGINS. “When we analyze our entire consumer staples dataset we find a similar result – companies that cut A&P see their operating margins fall over time,” said Jamie.

The note points to a McGraw-Hill study of the early 1980s recession that says “companies that maintained or increased their advertising spend in 1980-81 grew over 50% faster in 1982 than those who cut spend and grew over three times faster by 1985. Whilst it may not be entirely surprising that increasing A&P, increases sales growth…a study of the PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) database shows that those companies who increased marketing spend also increased profits and returns post-recession.”

Deutsche Bank realizes that “in a difficult environment it can be very tempting for companies to cut marketing spend to protect profitability,” but that “the benefits of the cost savings are short-lived with profits dipping in the following year and again the year after as marketing spend needs to be rebuilt.”

Why is A&P spending so important? Deutsche believes it’s because “consumers are prepared to pay higher prices for brands they like and trust.”

Bottom line–spending cuts may help not help bottom line after all!

Six Questions to Start the New Year

Posted on by Drew Neisser

1. Does your target Digg your ads?

If zapping tv spots wasn’t bad enough, now Digg is allowing their readers to essentially vote ads “off the island” while promoting the ones they like to star status. For the undug, Digg is the highly popular tech-focused news site where the stories are chosen by the users—the more Diggs a story gets, the higher it ranks on the site. And now that ads can be Digged or Buried, marketers will get real time feedback on the relative appeal of their ads to this highly influential target. If you’re targeting techies, this could be the cheapest copy test you ever tried, as well as the most eye opening.

2. Is your marketing worth retweeting?

While the joys of tweeting may still escape you personally, the phenomenal reach of Twitter is undeniable. In addition to the 20 million or so global users, tweets now appear as status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and other social networks, extending Twitter’s influence to just about everyone marketers might want to reach. This isn’t kid stuff either. Professionals between 35–49 are the biggest tweeters of them all. So, if you create marketing worth tweeting about, the world will find out about it faster than you can say, “Wow that’s tweet.”

3. Do interns handle your social media?

This is not a trick question. We’ve been asked this a lot in the last month and it is a reflection of a naive belief that it is okay to put a brand’s social media campaign in the hands of novices. One senior marketer even told us that his company uses interns for all of their social media and then shrugs off the lost intellectual capital when the interns move on. As social media advances from the experimental phase to the front lines of customer relationship management, building and maintaining expertise is essential to optimizing results and avoiding PR nightmares. After all, would you ever put an intern on the phone with the press or your top customers?

4. How many customer “love letters” do you get a week?

It is a simple fact—beloved brands do better. Becoming beloved requires achieving customer satisfaction on the basics (product quality) and somehow exceeding expectations via service. Zappos calls this delivering “wow” and does this wherever they can. The Apple Store does this with its amazingly knowledgeable squad of orange-shirted concierges. Others use Marketing as Service to foster brand love, as HSBC does with the BankCab, whose riders send at least one love letter every week. So ask yourself, what could your marketing be doing (versus saying) to generate this kind of passion?

5. Do you have an app yet?

2009 was the year of the app rush for marketers. Everyone from Blockbuster to ZipCar, Betty Crocker to Starbucks, and Fandango to The Food Network cooked up mobile apps for their prospects and customers. In fact, well over a hundred brands joined the fun, some with pragmatic extensions of their service offering (like FedEx mobile) and others with engaging entertainment to enhance their brand perceptions (like Scion’s AV Radio). Given the low development costs of mobile apps and the millions of smart phone users, there is still time to get app happy. And while you’re at it, check out the newly launched CALL THE SHOTS iPhone app that Renegade developed for HARLEM, the new ice cold shot drink imported from Holland. It’s fun, it’s free and it’ll answer the question—how lucky are you really?

6. Did you know Renegade moved?

Back in September we said goodbye to Chelsea Market, our home for 10 years and moved to our new digs in the heart of Greenwich Village, just south of Bowlmor Lanes and north of Patsy’s Pizza. It seems that a few of you might not have our new address so here it is: 41 E 11th Street, 3F, NY, NY 10003-4602. Our phone numbers haven’t changed and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Happy New Year!

Accenture Fails to Be a Tiger

Posted on by Drew Neisser

After six years of riding on the coattails of the world’s greatest golfer and two weeks of controversy, Accenture summarily dumps the man who put them on the map. At this moment, all their competitors are sighing with relief as none of them had an answer to Accenture’s extraordinarily successful partnership with Tiger. Do I think their decision was premature? You bet. Do I think it was wrong? Time will tell.

This much I know–the Tiger Woods-Accenture partnership was as good as it gets for brand campaigns. Launching in 2003 with the umbrella tagline “High Performance. Delivered.”, Tiger symbolized high performance delivered like no other man alive. In 2006, Accenture took their focus on performance one step further by offering up the wisdom they gained by studying 500 high performing companies. The results of this study were made available to clients and prospects elevating the campaign beyond mere branding to something of genuine value.

At this point they also evolved their theme line to the fateful “We know what it takes to be a Tiger.” I guarantee you that up until two weeks ago every Accenture employee around the world loved being associated with the greatest golfer on the planet. His standard of excellence, his clutch performance tournament after tournament undoubtedly inspired Accenture employees to deliver day after day. Accenture stands alone in its category thanks to Tiger. Now that they have dropped Tiger, they are unlikely to find a campaign that will score (pun intended) on so many levels.

For the most part, I’m not a fan of brand campaigns because they offer very little genuine value to the consumer. Most people tune them out because they talk at the consumer and don’t encourage a dialog. That said, a few cut through because of the massive media weight they receive and or the magnetic presence of a celebrity like Tiger. Of those types of brand campaigns, believe it or not, my favorite was Accenture’s use of Tiger Woods.

Undoubtedly the Tiger campaign hastened the demise of BearingPoint who’s sponsorship of Phil Mickelson paled in comparison. Tiger out drove Phil on and off the course. It wasn’t even competitive. Accenture is on the map. BearingPoint is out of business. And both were started within a year of each other. When BearingPoint started to go downhill, its consultants simply walked out with their clients because neither had allegiance to the brand. The Accenture brand, on the other hand, is bigger than any single consultant, thanks in large part to its association with Tiger.

Admittedly the Tiger brand is now tarnished. Can Tiger redeem himself? Of course. America loves come back stories. Look at Robert Downey, Jr. Look at Hugh Grant. Look at A-Rod. He just needs to take a page out of the Scarlet Letter, the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic in which the heroine is forced to wear an A for Adulterer on her sweater but through her good deeds transforms it into A for Able and ultimately A for Angel. I fully expect Tiger to regain the good graces of his golfing fans sometime soon. While I can’t predict how long this will take, I can say with certainty that the A on his chest will no longer stand for Accenture.