PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). Read the rest of this entry »

Our friends at Cymfony, now TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony (proving a theory of mine that all CGM companies will ultimately be acquired) have just released a new survey of 60 marketers at companies in North America, France, and the U.K.. The report concludes that when it comes to social media, marketing agencies are “ill equipped,” to quote AdWeek and “don’t get it,” to quote the survey report.

The report brings back the words of an AT&T executive who is a “friend of the agency,” as the saying goes. In essence, she said that “agencies talk a good game about integrating print and online, but I’ve been hearing it for years and I just don’t see it.” Well, she used more PG-13 language than that, but you hear the same kind of frustration as we’re now hearing about social media.

Although BtoB has traditionally lagged consumer markets in marketing innovation, we find that social media provides a great opportunity to step out and “punch above your weight,” since larger companies tend to arrive at the party later. Of course, there are a few ground rules to be laid down after, to quote Jim Nail from Cymfony, we “put up a good presentation about what social media is.” In no particular order, these are: Read the rest of this entry »