Category: Musings

The State of Guerrilla Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The following is a Q&A with yours truly on the current state of affairs in guerrilla marketing.

Q: How has guerrilla marketing evolved?

Guerrilla thinking has evolved tremendously in the last 24 months. Press seeking guerrillas have shifted away from street theater to something with online legs. Part of this is fishing where the fish are. Part of this is that if you can gain Likes or YouTube channel subscriptions, your initial contact can turn into a more lasting relationship. Part of this is the press itself—the press is more likely to wax on about a social program than a purely street program at this moment in time.

Q: What’s up with street stunts?

Frankly, I’ve never been a fan or promoter of the street stunt approach. They are typically a brief encounter with little residual value. The challenge with guerrilla has always been to provide a reasonable exchange of value between brand and consumer. In exchange for a consumer’s time, the brand must provide some value, either genuine utility or at least a good laugh. The reason the HSBC BankCab is still on the road after seven years is that the value exchange is extraordinary. First, people love to see an old Checker driving around the streets. Second, when they get in the BankCab, it is a refreshing experience complete with a truly knowledgeable cabbie. Third, HSBC customers get a free ride when engenders brand love. We recently renovated the HSBC BankCab, enabling it to run on compressed natural gas, thus making it a more “green” experience. As street programs go, this is about as good as it gets.

Q: What’s cool right now?

The most exciting area of guerrilla right now, is the social to offline movement. Skittles “Mob the Rainbow” program is one great example of this. Skittles solicits ideas from its 10 million strong Facebook fan base, which sometimes lead to hilarious offline executions. For example, fans suggested sending Valentines to a particular postal worker. Skittles did just that and produced a funny viral video which brought the program full circle. JetBlue is using its strong Twitter following in a similar fashion. Earlier this year, @JetBlue tweeted they were on a particular street corner in Manhattan giving away tickets. In a matter of minutes, 300 eager travelers showed up and of course, JetBlue got some nice ink for this as well. In this way, social media has replaced email as the ignition switch for flash mobs.

Q: How does social fit into a guerrillas plans?

Any marketer considering a physical guerrilla interaction would be crazy not to also bake in a social component. The social component should give the program legs, extending the offline interaction online. It also provides a home for videos and or photos taken of the physical interaction thus sharing these experiences with a larger audience. The social component also helps amortize the cost of the potentially expensive offline component. Finally, the social component provides an opportunity for feedback something that is not always easy to get in the physical arena.

Q: Is the physical street experience dead?

Since marketing success has often been about zigging when others zag, a few enlightened marketers will renew their emphasis on the physical experience and the true engagement opportunity it represents. Touching someone deeply often requires a physical touch. Online dating sites do the matchmaking but typically the fire doesn’t flame until the couple actually meets.

Q: What roles are left for guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla thinking has never been dependent on one particular type of interaction. It has always been about making more out of less, breaking the ice in order to build meaningful and hopefully lasting relationships. Social marketing has proven its ability to maintain and nurture relationships but the jury is still out on its ability to generate trial from new customers.

Q: How has Renegade evolved from a guerrilla standpoint?

I see social marketing as an evolution of our long-time guerrilla practice. The goals haven’t changed but the tactics  we use continue to grow and evolve. Five years ago, three out of four incoming calls would be from clients seeking guerrilla ideas. Now those same clients are requesting social marketing ideas. The impetuous for the calls is the same—help us engage customers cost-effectively.

[“Delivery.com Street Stunt in October”][]

Top Tips From One of the Fastest Growing Small Businesses in the US

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Here are some of the highlights of my interview with Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, one of fastest growing small businesses in the US.

Identify an unmet need

“I was a venture capitalist before I was doing HubSpot, and I was trying to get the portfolio companies to use modern marketing to create blogs to pull people in through the search engines, social media sites, and the blogosphere, and I had a hell of a time making that shift. I had to hire a ton of consultants and a ton of IT people and buy 6 different software packages, and it was very hard to pull off. So that was the gap I basically saw in the market and thought, ‘How do we pull all this stuff together into one simple package and then transfer as much knowledge we can from our heads to their heads and get them to shift the way they market?””

Eat your own dog food

“We are the number one user of our own product. I personally use it every day. A key part of our growth is that we are able to use the product. We feel the bugs at just the same time as our customers feel the bugs, so we fix them as quickly as we can. We know what we want in a software. We’re on the cutting edge of all this stuff. Like Dan Zarrella, for example, is one of our employees. He’s a real cutting edge kind of guy. He’s more leading edge than most, so we try to learn as much as we can from him and build it into the software so that mere mortals can use it, not just Dan Zarrella.”

Replace messaging with valuable content

“The basic idea behind inbound marketing, this marketing transformation I’m talking about, is you want to create remarkable content that becomes a magnet to pull people in. So we create tons and tons of blog articles and the blog articles I wrote 4 years ago still are like magnets, pulling people in through Google. We write eBooks. We create a weekly TV show, HubSpot TV. And we build these Graders, which are basically little tiny pieces of our product that we break off and we offer for free for people to run their site through, and they get a diagnostic on it and they get a score, and based on that score – it’s 1 to 100 – if they get a crappy score, they say, “Well who are these HubSpot guys?” and they end up in our funnel and we show them a demo, take them through a trial and they end up buying the software. So it’s very much part of our philosophy of ‘How do you free up as much knowledge and content as you possibly can and use that knowledge to pull people into your business and try to convert them into customers?’”

Build a community

“There is definitely a big community forming and we do a couple of things to foster it. We have Inbound Marketing University where you can come and there are 15 online lectures you attend – and there’s a test at the end. If you pass the test, you get a badge and you get Inbound Marketing Certified, and those have been showing up on a lot of people’s LinkedIn profiles and resonate these days– our customers are dying to hire them. The second thing is there is an Inbound Marketing LinkedIn group that is very, very active. I don’t know how many people are in there. I haven’t looked recently, but it’s quite an active group in there that’s cranking away. There is a HubSpot partner group. There are a bunch of splinter inbound marketing communities that keep popping up, and we’re just trying to do our best to keep up with them and help them and foster them, and it’s been a big part of our success.”

Inspire a compelling culture

“Culture turns out to play a huge role. When my co-founder and I started the company…in the first two years of the company we didn’t mention the word culture. It wasn’t something on top of our minds. And then about two years in, we did a survey of our employees – the Net Promoters survey. We asked them two questions. Question number 1 was “How likely are you to refer HubSpot to another friend of yours to join us?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Then the second question was “why?” When we got responses from the ‘why,’ we probably had 60 or 70 employees at this point. The two big reasons people like or loved working at HubSpot was 1 – the culture. The culture? We didn’t know we had a culture. And number 2 was that they loved their fellow employees. So at that point we were like ‘OK, it seems like we got something here.’ Why don’t we try to institutionalize the culture and make sure that that doesn’t break. So we hired one of our old professors from MIT to do a project with us to clarify the culture and clarify the mission. Then we tried to institutionalize it in the company. When we do the annual reviews of our employees, the culture is part of that review. There are 7 points in our culture and we grade them. It has become a great part of who we are. I wrote an article about our culture that has been very popular on the Internet. It is called Start up Culture Lessons from Mad Men.”

Don’t try to do it all yourself

“[If you’re starting a business, the] first thing I would find is a great co-founder. It is lonely at the top. Don’t find just any co-founder. A mistake that so many entrepreneurs make is that they find co-founders just like themselves. When you look at the special stars of the early successful teams, like Jobs and Wozniak, there are usually two people with someone who can actually build something and someone who can actually sell something. So my advice would be to find a great co-founder who would compliment you and, very early on, figure out the equity split and figure out the roles, because so many companies die because of a founder conflict.”

Be open-minded about your idea

“Another piece of advice I would give to a founder is to be very open-minded about your idea.  There is a great book called Founders at Work, written by a journalist on the west coast [Jessica Livingston]. She interviewed about 100 entrepreneurs that were successful and I would say that 90% of the entrepreneurs started out with plan A and ended up making money on plan B or C. It took them a while to meander to the idea, so don’t get too stuck on your original idea. Be very flexible and take a while to meander your way to the right idea. The third piece of advice is not to raise venture capital too early. Make sure, if you are going to do venture capital, that your incentives are in line with the VC and that you really want to swing for the fences. Once you are backed by venture capital you are committed down this path. One you become venture backed, you are committed to trying to hit a home run, and you can’t go back to being conservative.”

Pivot Day #2

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Yesterday at the Pivot Conference, the presentations flowed like rapids through a gorge, with the audience clinging to our chairs, occasionally exhilarated, rarely bored and at times simply overwhelmed.  There is no way I can cover it all here but here are a few of the highlights and observations.

Kit Yarrow, Consumer Psychologist, Author and Professor had fabulous insights but not enough time to dive deeply into any of them.  Of all the day’s presenters, her’s was the only one I wanted to hear again in slow motion or at least get a copy of her slides to review later.  Here are a few of Kit’s observations about Millennials:

  • they have more technology & more opinions than boomers did at their age
  • view of themselves as viable and important comes from a genuine place
  • sociocultural changes have dramatically impacted their development (technology, child-centricity)
  • today the average TV show is geared at teenagers vs when boomers were kids, target was 35 or so
  • there is an inter-generational gap between older / younger Millennials (older gen y shared computer, dial up, didn’t have cellphone, didn’t text, etc)
  • for younger gen y, technology is a “third hand and second brain”
  • all this tech has actually altered their cognitive functioning (they can multitask better)
  • technology impacts relationships, facilitates influence, elevates the importance of innovation
  • technology is also creating a more superficial relationships
  • as on Milliennial put it, “I found my apartment, my job and my boyfriend online so of course, I got my shoes online”
  • in sum, “I want what I want when I want it”
  • more impulsive, get bored more easily with explanations, jobs, products, in relationships
  • more visually-oriented
  • inspired by competitive challenges, games, hunts
  • responds to active engagement
  • personality under the influence of technology since they are overloaded with options and searching for trustworthy guidance
  • craving the antidote—a genuine connection and a sense of being seen and deeply understood
  • sometimes those needs are understood and fulfilled by brands (Apple, Virgin America, etc)
  • though gen y’ers always get their say, they aren’t always heard, which is especially tough for a generations that’s accustomed to getting attention
  • they come by confidence naturally (self-esteem movement in schools, etc.)
  • they want more which is a double edge sword, creating “choice anxiety” and desire not to settle,
  • they have been told all their lives, “you can do anything, you’re special”
  • interestingly, this gen are kids and staying kids longer
  • in a nutshell, their need for stimulation, yearning for belonging and connection leaves them younger than they appear

The five keys to connecting with Millennials according to Kit are:

  • Make it visual contextual intuitive
  • Technovate – keep the new products flowing
  • What you do is more important than what you say
  • Ramp up the emotional intensity
  • Humor, irony, drama, fantasy, games, keep it real

As you can tell, Kit had a lot of great info and I wish we got a lot more of her time.  The rest of the day was too rich to detail in the time I have now, but here are a few other observations.

Having seen Arianna Huffington speak twice in the last two weeks, I am truly in awe.  As one Tweeter noted, she is classy, sassy and smart.  She is obviously at ease as a speaker and manages to deliver meaningful content in a way that is informative, enjoyable and inspiring.  I was delighted to buy a copy of her book and of course, to get her to sign it.  Once again, i asked her for an interview and once again, she said “yes” so stay tuned on that front.

J.Y. Park, CEO of JYP Entertainment, spoke of creating “global stars” by training a bunch of young people to dance, sing, model and speak at least two languages.  He is obviously a very talented guy and his track record is impressive.  He offered as his latest example, the “Wonder Girls,” a girl group that performed last night. And while the girls were cheek-pinching cute, you couldn’t help but wonder which one was “Baby” and which one was “Sporty.” They were more like Menudo than Michael, manufactured bubble gum without any true artistry.  I would recommend you watch their video “Nobody” which has been watched over 41 million times to get a sense of their global appeal! And while I have no doubt this group can sell songs and bubble gum today, I’m equally confident the world won’t be talking about them a decade from now.

More to come.

PivotCon Day 1+

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Last night was the first night of the Pivot conference here in NYC.  I was slightly annoyed at having to give up a precious Sunday night off but found myself stimulated by the speakers, panel and interview with the author of The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick.  Overall, it was a good show followed by some quality networking. And the truth is I probably would have worked anyway.  Here’s a quick recap from last night.

Carol Phillips, a Notre Dame professor and President of Brand Amplitude, provided some great insights into Millennials, the focus of Sunday’s conversation. According to Phillips, Millennials are:

  • not as likely to engage with advertising
  • excellent filters
  • unless there is a coupon or something in it for them, they won’t bother following brands
  • reject ads that don’t mean anything to them (DN: what group doesn’t?)
  • will accept ads on phone if they get free stuff
  • they actually love brands and they talk about brands
  • they use brands to express their identity
  • more brand conversations that older consumers
  • brands that go their own way resonate w them
  • brands trying to be cool can be uncool
  • Lady Gaga is an exemplary Millennial brand
  • striving to be awesome
  • delaying by marriage and buying cars
  • unique personal narratives will define then

Carol noted that for Millennials, brands happen at intersection of culture. She pointed out that NASA has done an especially good job of appealing to them.  As proof, she showed NASA’s engagement on Twitter, Facebook and Slideshare presentations created by four Millennials on why NASA was relevant.  AstroMike, a NASA character, garnered over 1 million followers on Twitter.  NASA also orchestrated a geo-caching scavenger hunt partnering with location-based service Gowalla. For Millenials, engagement begins with discovery and ends with advocacy. So the challenge for marketers is to figure out how to “be found” to get Millennials to tell your story.  As Carol put it, “its not what you say, its what you do.”

More to come.

Humorous Haiku

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I went to a friend’s 50th birthday party last week and shared a modest collection of Jewish haiku that got a few laughs.  I then presented a few personal stanzas which seemed to go over even better.  So, I thought I’d write a few more to see if I could inspire 50 of my friends to make a $20 (or more) donation to Charity: Water.  My campaign ends in 7 days so if you want to skip my poetry, click here .  If you want to know why I started this campaign, you can read the article I wrote on Charity: Water founder Scott Harrison click here . If you want to know what I learned about using social media to fund raise, click here .  I you want me to thank me for any of the articles I’ve written, feel free to donate by the word.

I ask for little
when twenty buys a full year
of fresh clean water.

You drink it daily
like water from a faucet.
What if you could not?

Help the Bayaka
get a well and get well too.
Hope springs eternal.

There is nothing funny about not having fresh clean water. Without it, there is little hope. Yet, if laughter cleanses the soul, then maybe the haiku series below will inspire you to help me help the Bayaka. To see a video of the first well being drilled for the Bayaka, click here.

Thanks for reading this,

Drew

A Collection of Jewish Haiku

After the warm rain
the sweet smell of camellias.
Did you wipe your feet?

Lacking fins or tail
the gefilte fish swims with
great difficulty.

Yom Kippur — Forgive
me, Lord, for the Mercedes
and all that lobster.

The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing:
got it at Loehmann’s.

Sorry I’m not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news.

Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I’ve done?

Today, mild shvitzing.
Tomorrow, so hot you’ll plotz.
Five-day forecast: feh

Left the door open
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now the cat is gone.

Quietly murmured
at Saturday services —
Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.

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!