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.”

We’re having an interesting summer (clearly, we’ve been a bit busy based on the evidence of this blog). One of our projects has been to help a B2B company transform itself into a consumer brand. A fool’s errand, you say? A marketing whitewash? In this case, perhaps not. Check out a terrific article from Biotech 360, whose title says it all: “What can the biotech industry learn from a consumer products giant? More than you might suspect.”

The article outlines how P&G, under the leadership of CEO A.G. Lafley, has brought the company from strength to strength in observing, recording, co-developing, testing, and following its customers everywhere, including into their minds. In short, consumer-driven innovation. In one of the best anecdotes, P&G Pharmaceuticals staff wore pagers to interrupt their daily lives 6 to 12 times a day to simulate the effects of having acute ulcerative colitis. If they were driving and got the page, for example, they had to find the nearest public bathroom. What a great way to create empathy with a target audience. The insights gained led P&G to improve its support programs and guided clinical research.

What’s so interesting about this approach is that one of our B2B clients is similarly cultish about their customers. They observe them in their work spaces. They have 165 technical specialists whose job is to do nothing but solve problems and report back insights in real time. They hire industrial design firms to add useful innovation to commodity product spaces. And yet surveys show they are often thought of on the same level as industrial distributors, coopetition in short. Clearly, the message about how they approach their customers looking for innovation opportunities is not getting through.

Which is where their agency comes in. How do you convey a customer-driven company without hanging out internal laundry? Why should the customer care? Are a customer focus and unending determination the stuff of great marketing? At the moment, we’re moving from insights to creative treatments. Should be an interesting next couple of months…

Greetings from Shinjuku, and the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Yes, it’s the Lost in Translation hotel, with the view of Mount Fuji from the gym on the 47th floor. Mike and I arrived last night, after nearly 24 hours of travel: 1 hour to airport, 2 hours waiting for flight, 6 hours to San Francisco, 2 hours of layover, 11 hours to Narita Airport (40 miles from downtown), 2 hours to Shinjuku, the district where the Park Hyatt is located.

(more…)

I am feverishly preparing for next week’s presentation to 50+ B2B marketers in Japan. Prep includes a little Pimsleur (I’m aiming for competency at least around “good morning” and “excuse me, do you speak Japanese.” Its funny, but it seems like half the lessons involve apologizing for lack of skills. I figure my lack of skill in the Japanese language will speak for itself), and a lot of sharpening an argument around integrated marketing. Planning integrated programs is what I spend most of my time doing for clients, but there is nothing like a presentation like this to force some fresh research and thinking.

Here is the point I’m coming to. A lot of the research points to a mismatch between the information sources B2B decision-makers value when making purchase decisions and the channels companies invest in to get their message across. The most glaring example is in online…something like 40% of B2B decision-makers rate online channels (search, and vendor Web sites rate particularly high) as their first or most influential information source. Only 8-10% of media budgets are being spent online. Hence the marketing arbitrage. If you can do a better job than the market at large at synchronizing your message with the media your audience values, you can exploit a marketing arbitrage opportunity. The most obvious arbitrage opportunity: rebalance your media mix before your competitors do. Less obvious is investing more in what I’ll call consideration media: trade or industry Web sites–or increasingly blogs–that your audiences already trust. More on this later.

After These Messages lets the community review and give feedback to advertisements. Decidedly focused on the cultural impact of advertising, it’s mostly relevant to B-to-C advertising. The intention of shared concern, dialog, and the exchange of ideas is, however, very relevant to the B-to-B space. After These Messages was created by Green Team and is a great example of how a company can seize an opportunity to be a thought leader or champion of innovative thinking. I like the way they’ve positioned the site:

ATM focuses on more than just creativity, we look at the effect our communications have on society and our culture. As facilitators, not judges, the creators of ATM have provided members with a few fundamental tools (view the video above) to help us do just that. The use of these tools earns users points, which are in turn redeemable for rewards.

People in advertising tend to be passionate about their profession and will have something to say about all the work featured on ATM. I’m eager to see how this site does and who gets involved with the conversation.