PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Yesterday was bounded by numbers: not just the usual budgets and estimates and the quick check into one’s 401(k) performance thus far this year (best not to look), but two interesting ones. The first, 150, is the number of books a client’s son is reading between now and September to prepare for his PhD orals.

I’ve run a monthly reading group at the Boston Athenaeum for the past 13 years or so, and it’s now at the point where if I read 15 books in a year I’m not doing badly. So 150 seems, at all these years of remove from graduate school, like a mountain of data.

Ah, but that’s the academic world. Later in the day yesterday, we were asking a prospect how complex the legal cases his company managed could become. He said, “Well, there’s one pharma client in the middle of a large case, and they have 500,000,000 pages of documents.”

Now that’s a pure BtoB number. Astounding amounts of data, written in multiple languages, and framed in specialty language. Five million pounds of paper, if a single sheet of 8.5 x 11″ weighs .16 ounce. About 62 average harvest-ready pine trees worth of paper. And all of it needs to be organized, potentially in hours in the run-up to a legal event, to find specific  information that will save someone’s tail.

At the other end of the scale, of course, our life science clients are now talking on the atomic and nanoparticle scale, the scale where the actual work of the cell gets done, but for some reason these 500,000,000 pages are sticking with me. As the refrain often goes in our world, “Thank God there’s software for that.”

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.

If you’ve wondered why that old pyramid hierarchy slide continues to appear long after it’s been supplanted in many companies’ operations, CNET Business has just released some great research on word of mouth marketing and how everyone plays some influential role in spreading a word. As conversations with a number of CXOs over the last months have shown me, word of mouth remains the headiest elixir in marketing: it can’t be bought, it can’t be forced, but it moves people to act like nothing else. Everyone wants it, especially as social media channels proliferate, but it’s getting harder and harder to pin down.

As CNET Business notes in its new white paper, Understanding Influence, and Making It Work For You, several myths about word of mouth deserve to be called out:

“Myth #1: The Few Inform the Many
While the size of personal networks varies widely, with some individuals having 10 or fewer connections and some having more than 100, each person wields some influence. Viewing the model as a pyramid discounts the much larger number of moderately connected individuals who can help spread the work about your product or service.

Myth #2: They Share Because They Know More
Influencers aren’t driven to share information for the sake of appearing knowledgeable or to demonstrate their expertise. They’re primarily motivated by a basic desire to help others. They develop a stronger sense of self-confidence when it’s well-received, further motivating them to help and advise others.

Myth #3: A Single-Minded Focus
Influencers aren’t necessarily single-subject experts. Our research shows that influencers have diverse interests crossing a wide range of topics. On average, they are interested in 10 to 12 topics and they actively seek information on these topics. This is true whether they have large or small networks. There are two critical attributes for information to be valued by the influencer, no matter what topic they’re investigating: it must be both unique and trusted.

How to take advantage of word of mouth? Make your word of mouth fodder forwardable, place it in unique and trusted environments, and share your message with moderately connected users, not just the top of the pyramid (make that diamond) types.

This is probably a prescient question for the last post of 2007, since the online world will dominate marketing next year in ways it just hasn’t before.

In what ways? PJA is asking some of our top clients and prospects precisely that question (well, 20 questions is more like it) at a series of informal lunches and dinners. As you might imagine, the first question back to us is typically: “What are my competitors doing?” That being said, here are some of the over-arching questions we’re setting out to answer:

• How are you thinking about interactive and marketing?
• If you feel that your rate of online adoption is slower than the norm, why is that?
• What should your agency’s role be as interactive guide and mentor?

From here, we generally move into 20 questions that more specific to the customer: (more…)

No getting around the fact that the Chief Marketing Officer has been on the endangered species list almost since its creation. Recent data from Spencer Stuart points out that the average CMO now lasts only 26 months in their position before deciding to spend more time with family. That’s compared to 44 months for the average CEO and 39 months for the average CFO.

A recent piece from BusinessWeek captures the new challenges any CMO faces. In fact, the best part of the article lays out what one CMO, from Geico, faced in just 72 hours: (more…)