PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I was reading an interview this week with the incoming president of RISD, a 41-year-old named John Maeda who has never run an institution of higher learning. When he was asked why he decided to leave MIT Media Lab, he said:

“I’d been at MIT for quite a while, but I was a bit tired of technology. I think all of us are. We have so much of it, more of it every day, and we’re not sure why we’re buying so much of it. It’s kind of like a summer movie – except it lasts too long.”

The day after I read this I lost my cell phone (”Lucky you,” quipped a colleague) and decided I wanted to downgrade from a smart phone to something a little less brilliant: a Motorola Razr is what I was hankering after. I expected this swap to be a simple process since I have cell phone insurance, and even to be complimented, at least in a backhanded way, for choosing simplicity.

The mobile phone insurance rep was having none of it. “I’m sorry, sir. You’re not allowed to downgrade. We can only replace the phone that you lost.” He was immediately on to his next activity screen with me, but the whole thing set me to wondering: At what point are we using too much technology in our lives? Will we even know when we’ve passed the overload point?

The Economist had a wonderful special report recently on the rise of technology nomads (if you’re reading this, it’s a fair bet you are one) and how cell phone technology has strengthened our ’strong bonds’ with immediate family but further deteriorated our ‘weak bonds’, the ones we have with strangers, acquaintances, contractors, neighbors and so on. If we’re always attached to a piece of technology, are we really reachable? Are we really living in the moment?

What’s the link to PJA? On a weekly basis we see plenty of marketing programs that use a scattershot approach to technology. One prospect recently showed us a series of YouTube videos he’d posted about his company. Vaguely interesting, but they weren’t attached or tied into anything, and therefore had few hits and almost no impact.

On the other end of the spectrum, I continue to see many case studies on the continuing power of opt-in email marketing. Fast Company recently highlighted the enormous boost Barneys New York has realized with Sheldon Gilbert’s startup Proclivity. The big secret: use predictive algorithms to tune an email program, and realize 10-fold response rate increases.

I wonder if my wireless carrier and their insurance company could have seen the sales opportunity within my service request: give me a simple piece of technology that suits my needs, and I’m likely to use it more.

Maybe next contract.

Burt Helm has an interesting piece in the new BusinessWeek about how many advertisers are now offering free services to lure people into looking at, interacting with, or forwarding on their brand information. Anyone who has used Free411 rather than spending $1.50 to get a simple number is a consumer of these new ‘useful’ ads. A few cool examples:

* Being able to text live to a sports event screen, a la wiffiti

* Being able to send ‘goodbye’ photos from behind security to a digital billboard in an airport’s departures area (the idea of distance is demolished a little more every day, it seems)

* Being able to contact an avatar on your mobile device to get you a cab or a designated driver because you’ve had a few too many.

The more you contribute as part of your sign-up, the more information the company takes away. The longer you look at the screen, the longer your brand impression. Etc.

In the BtoB world, we’ve clearly got deep roots in providing valuable content in exchange for a prospect’s attention. In one case, years ago, we convinced HP to postpone another glossy brochure and go with a buyer’s guide for the technology category that was lightly sponsored by the brand. It was more work-intensive to put together an editorial board of doctors and nurses, but the result was so popular it was reprinted twice and placed on a national regulatory recommended reading list for healthcare information systems.

The same rules apply online, of course: give someone content they couldn’t find elsewhere or that makes them more competitive and they will be more loyal to your brand. Amending that list for the Web 2.0 world is in order, too. You can also connect with:

* content that allows people to connect with their peers and exchange that information

* content that allows people to test their skills in real time

* content that allows for co-creation or near real-time collaboration with a brand

The list could probably go on forever. The point we like to make is, don’t just interrupt someone. Inform them. Educate them. Inspire them. That’s got to be a part of the brand territory now.

I had some interesting conversations today about marketing and the future evolution of brands, a few hours’ worth with one of my favorite clients, the rest with my favorite colleague and someone I was meeting for the first time. It has always been interesting to me how spending time with truly creative thinkers ups my game as a thinker. As the old Yiddish saying goes, “When you make a friend, take a step up.”

What I was pondering today was this: most Web sites in BtoB are silent films. There’s a sort of backdrop quality to them, a lifelessness, and almost no meaningful sound or vision. They are like the 2D sets in silent movies and just about as authentic in feeling. They don’t really talk to or interact with you, so until the next little injection of content, the intertitle card with the language on it, you really have to guess what the characters are saying, what the narrative arc is, and what the key dialogue is. The expressions are somewhat exaggerated or off (bad stock photography is the wooden silent actor of the 21st century). You’re held at a remove from it all because it’s…silent.

Where Web sites want to move is into the Talkie era: the era of full stereo sound synchronized to movement, the era of storytelling that really reaches out and involves the user, the state of a medium starting to realize its full potential. In film that era began in 1927 or so, with The Jazz Singer. There’s only about two minutes of synchronized talking and acting in the film, but movies could never go back afterward.

It might make sense to look at your Web site the same way. Is it really engaging your audiences, or is it mute? Does it deliver a story, or just a series of title cards? Is it experiential, or just a 2D storefront with a few frills attached?

One of our major goals for 2008 is to bring BtoB companies into the era of the talkie Web presence. Once you’ve seen the engagement measures and longer visits to your little marketing theater, you really can’t go back again. And that’s a very good thing.

In recessionary times (see under GE, Earnings Statement, 4.11.08), companies nearly always become more conservative about the value of marketing. That’s no surprise, though I’m still taken aback, working through my third economic downturn in this industry, at how quickly the winds shift. Just yesterday I heard about a client whose $10 million marketing budget had, in the course of five months, been whittled down to just north of $900,000 at the lower edge of the range.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

Now that we are ‘officially’ in a recession, the realization of which typically means that we are in the middle of or on our way out of one, we’re seeing a curious trend here at the agency. Companies that we’ve never talked to, companies we haven’t heard from in years, and companies we’ve never heard of, period – are asking us to help them choose a position. It might be a new position or it might be an updated position to suit these less-forgiving times.

In some cases these companies have their business strategy set but no story with aspiration or vision that sits above the strategy and unites every business unit. As a result they can’t get the right valuation from analysts or they’re stuck in the wrong competitive set. In other cases the company has chosen a position and is interested in a gut-check, hiring us on a consultative basis first. (These ‘trial-size’ contracts are a classic sign of an economic downturn.)

In other situations the company’s markets are consolidating by the minute, driven by the entrance of a behemoth competitor (on Mondays and Wednesdays insert “Google,” on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays insert “Microsoft”) and they need an irrefutable statement of why choosing best-of-breed still matters over giving in to the inevitable one-stop shop.

In still others, the company is growing too quickly to come up with a new position that works for the next stage of growth, realizing that if they don’t, they’ll put the brakes on that growth because they just don’t pass the smell test of the CXO customer versus the regional VP they’ve sold to successfully in the past. (more…)