The Superstitious Marketing Syndrome

If Things Aren't Working, It Could Be The Wrong Plan

By David Miranda

Insanity, as someone once described, is doing the same thing over and over hoping for different results. There is a similar insanity going on in marketing today. Even in this digital age of anytime, anywhere personal media consumption, there are those who cling to the old way of doing things hoping the results will be different despite clear evidence to the contrary. There is less viewership of network television, less readers of newspapers, more users of the Internet, more subscribers to mobile and so on and so on. So why the inertia of marketers to invest in new channels and the steady flow of marketing dollars supporting the broken status quo? One answer is superstitious marketing.

Supersititious marketing is continuing to employ the same methods regardless of whether there is a direct correlation between the executed plan and the result. A good example is the much-maligned :30 ad. Is it still as effective considering the growing popularity and penetration of the DVR or user-generated content sites like YouTube. Successful direct mail produces an industry average response rate of 1% to 3%. This is a 97% to 99% failure rate! And what about the new emerging channels, e.g. social networking sites, blogs, mobile, search, etc.? Is your brand prepared to effectively deploy these channels or will you stick with the "tried and true", the status quo? It is not about what a marketer does. It is about what a marketer does that works that counts.

Superstitious marketing is the enemy of success. Marketers must recognize this syndrome by looking in the proverbial mirror and asking some very key questions -How, when, and where is my target audience consuming media?-Does my marketing mix reflect this behavior?-What is my anticipated R.O.M.I. (return of marketing investment) versus actual? Why should a brand continue to fund a media property or channel that does not produce desired results, e.g. sales, market share? Exorcise superstitious marketing from your marketing organization.

Recognize the insanity and exorcise superstitious behavior from your marketing.

The Age Of Stratactical Marketing - Recognizing The Impact Of Convergence, Compression, Choice

How To Succeed In Today's Dynamic Business Environment

By David Miranda

My friend, Sergio Zyman, former CMO of The Coca-Cola Company, defines marketing in his book, The End Of Marketing As We Know It, as "selling more stuff to more people more often to make more money." Sounds a lot like accountability to me. Radical concept.

Marketing should "sell stuff". To "sell more stuff", however, marketers must understand the new landscape and adapt accordingly. There is little doubt that the landscape has changed and is changing at an incredible pace. This business environment requires a new approach to the marketing planning process - stratactical marketing - where strategy and tactics are developed in concert rather than in a linear approach as has been he case historically. The phenomena that demands a stratactical approach is defined by three C's - convergence, compression, and choice.

Convergence refers to the marketing vortex of media - what is described today as a multi-platform, integrated strategy of delivering content and marketing messages to consumers. Fox, for example, announced "Generation Fox", an initiative, targeted at the 12-24 year old demographic utilizing television, the Internet, and mobile - the latter deploying recently acquired MySpace. Marketing implication? A stratactical approach would be to make marketing and media plans as flexible as possible to allow "substitutions" on-the-fly as required and not have to wait until the next planning or budget cycle. Rigidity, here, is the enemy of success.

Compression refers to the compression of time in today's society creating an A.D.D. environment both on the business and personal sides of daily life. Time is today's most precious commodity and most of us today suffer from time poverty. To adapt, people have learned to multi-task with the assistance of technology which allows them to communicate and consume content at their discretion whenever they want and wherever they want. Marketing implication? A stratactical approach is understanding that competitive advantage lies in reducing the gaps between planning, executing, feedback, and tweaking "on-the-fly".

Choice refers to the hyper-options available to consumers and the resulting clutter of marketing messages to advise them of these choices. The sum total of choice and clutter is noise. Marketing implication?. Preference is perishable. A stratactical approach is understanding that the antidote for hyper-choice is brand preference based on the relentless mission of finding new reasons and ways for consumers to buy your brand.

In summary, it would be wise for marketers in this Darwinian business landscape to embrace a stratactical marketing philosophy because marketing, today, is a 24/7 contact sport.

Marketing Mediocrity - The Silent Killer Of An Enterprise

The Need To Recognize and Purge Mediocrity From The Marketing Organization

By David Miranda

Mediocrity is the silent killer of an enterprise. It is easily transmitted from one person to another - one department to another - until it becomes a pandemic. It is a threat to every organization and most pronounced in the larger bureaucracies. The source of mediocrity is a person who performs to the minimum acceptable standards, i.e. performance that is just good enough to get by. These people could be young or old, male or female, executive or staff level, new to the company or one with a long tenure. Their impact on the enterprise is disruptive in a stealth way. Others witness this mediocrity and, if they do not see it challenged, begin to doubt a company's committment to excellence. Then the "if they don't care, then I don't care" syndrome rears its ugly head.

Mediocrity is a bigger problem in the marketing arena where a company communicates with the outside world. If mediocrity pervades products and services offered, fertile ground has been created for competitors to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. Here the repercussions can be catastrophic and the historical examples are many.

The American automobile industry for years were the world leaders with the likes of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Over time, the quality of American cars eroded and new models no longer captured the excitement of the American consumer. Along comes the Japanese - where quality, new models, service, and performance are superior to their U.S. competitors. Mediocrity had infected the American car industry. Products were just okay, but no match for the Japanese. It is unlikely that the U.S. car industry will ever regain its former dominance. This year, Toyota, for the first time will be the Number One seller of cars in the United States. Mediocrity did the U.S. in. For every company that suffers from mediocrity, there is a competitor plotting its demise. There is no gentle way to deal with this problem. Mediocre people and their performance must be purged from the organization. Darwin's tenet still applies. Survival of the fittest. The title of Tom Peters' best selling book was not "In Search of Mediocrity".

What is the formula?

1. Hire and encourage people who strive for excellence and will not settle for anything less.
2. Set high standards of performance - make no compromises
3. Encourage those that push the envelope, that think outside the box, that take personal initiative
4. Don't compliment average work. No one ever inspired with "Keep up the fair work".
5. Reward on merit, not on tenure. Promoting a mediocre performer exascerbates the problem.
6. Encourage people to get out of their comfort zone which is a breeding ground for mediocrity.
7. Celebrate the best

In summary, rid the marketing organization of the silent killer while there is still time.

It's About "Biz" Not "Buzz"!

Don't Confuse Brand Awareness With Brand Preference

By David Miranda

What do these "brands" have in common? - The Gap, GM, Ford, John Kerry, Dell, and Gateway. They rank high in brand awareness, but low in brand preference. Brand preference puts revenue in the register and votes in the ballot box.

One would argue that in order for a person to buy (or vote for) something or someone, one would first have to be aware of it. True, but that is only half the story. Awareness must be converted to preference or no sale, no vote.

In marketing today, creating "buzz" seems all the rage. Various and sundry marketing tactics are employed to do just that, e.g. social networking sites, blogs, guerrilla marketing. Typical response to buzz is "okay, now that you've got my attention, why should I buy what you're selling?" More often than not, there is no compelling reason. Ask The Gap, GM, Ford, or Mr. Kerry.

Better yet, ask The Cartoon Network. They recently employed a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote a new show by deploying electronic signs throughout some major markets. The campaign in Boston was a disaster as police and homeland security shut down major traffic arteries in the city because they thought these devices were dangerous. The result - bad publicity; apologies from Turner Broadcasting; a $2 million reimbursement to the city and the resignation of the CEO of the Cartoon Network.

Brand awareness? Yep. Brand preference? Nope.

It is high time that marketers put "buzz" into perspective. Will it create "biz"? Do we have a compelling reason for people to buy once they have been "buzzed"?

It's time to "get bizzy".

Going Horizontal - Marketing's New Solution For The Vertically Challenged

Embracing A Panoramic View Of The New Marketing Landscape

By David Miranda

Tom Friedman, in his best-selling book, "The World Is Flat", describes "flat" as being "connected", i.e. the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet.

For marketers, however, the world has become "horizontal" which also means "connected", but connected in a different perspective. Over time, marketing has become a host of vertical specialties - television, radio, print, direct mail, outdoor, point-of-sale, promotion, sponsorship and, most recently, online and mobile. This expansion of the marketing mix has led to the well-accepted practice of integrated marketing, referring to the need to coordinate these marketing "ingredients" into a compelling "formula" to acquire and retain customers. Integrating verticals, however, is not the answer.

As a matter of fact, it has created a vertically challenged corporate structure. The answer is going horizontal, i.e. marketers having panoramic perspective of the business landscape. Why? Because this is how media is consumed by audiences today. Consumers don't look at their personal media consumption as integrated. They watch, read, listen, and interact across a spectrum of media during any given day based on their own personal consumption whims. It is time, therefore, for marketers to think, plan, and execute in the same fashion - panoramically, or better said, horizontally.

To do this, determine how consumers wish to interact with your brand. They dictate the when, where, what, how, and why of the relationship. Take banking, for example. Consumers may wish to speak with a real person over the phone; or access a web site; or visit a branch location; or send an email, snail mail, or fax; or access via a mobile device (mobile internet, text message) etc. The consumer expects to be able to choose the medium of interaction based on his or her convenience. The bank, therefore, must think "horizontally" or risk losing business to a less "horizontally-challenged" competitor.

The horizontal approach enables historically vertical marketing organizations to be flatter putting fewer layers between the consumer and the brand - improving performance.

Smart Marketing = The "Some" And Its Parts

To Get To The Many, Influence Some

By David Miranda

For years marketing has embraced the power of mass marketing - one to many - the shotgun approach. It is indeed powerful, cost-efficient, but difficult to measure at the cash register. Mass marketing media vehicles like the major networks, terrestial radio, major newspapers, and national magazines have seen audiences erode over the years as the media landscape has exploded with many and varied media choices. The Internet, cable, mobile, satellite radio, DVR's, iPod's, and video games have enabled consumers to personalize their own media consumption - what they want, when they want, where they want. Mass marketing also assumes some level of audience homogenity in the marketplace.

Marketers also added one-to-one marketing to the mix, e.g. direct mail or search marketing using sophisticated mining techniques to identify desired consumers and communicate with them via direct mail or the internet. The reasoning is less waste, customized solicitations, and more measurable results albeit more expensive and like mass marketing, considerable waste.

But neither mass marketing nor 1 to 1 really addresses the changes we are seeing in the American marketplace. The old demographics don't work anymore, and, therefore, marketing targeted at consumers needs to adjust accordingly.

Here are some recently reported stats:

• For the first time ever, there was a higher percentage of unmarried couples than married leading our nation's 111.1 million households [50.3 vs. 49.7]


• In 2005, the nation's minority population totaled 98 million, or 33 percent, of the country's total population


• There are over 150 million women online and they are now outpacing men in terms of internet, email and computer usage.

Just looking at individuals (1 to 1) or the mass market would miss what these stats are revealing. Households are dominated by unmarried couples. A third of the population are minorities and women outpace their male counterparts as internet, email, and computer users. Knowing this would a marketer approve an advertising campaign that portrayed the average American family as a Causcasian male and female with the husband hunched over the computer? Diversity can only be successfully marketed to if marketers understand the consumer mosaic that now exists in the marketplace.

Marketing now is understanding the need to embrace O2S2M or One 2 Some 2 Many. In other words, it is the Some that influences the Many in the marketplace. It's the "Mikey likes it" phenomenon except on steriods. The Some are the Influentials, those individuals who in their own business and social networking groups deem something good, bad, or indifferently. They represent the key drivers of word-of-mouth - the holy grail of marketing. In this age of networked communication via the Internet (email, blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites) and, most recently, the mobile channel, they wield even greater power in their speed and ability to virally influence their peers.

It is imperative for marketers to seek out, identify and court these opinion leaders. They have the ability to make or break any marketing initiative.

You don't have to go big to get big in this new marketplace. You have to woo "Some".

The Next Generation Of Search - Find

It's Time To Concentrate On The Real End Game

By David Miranda

Search has become one of most pervasively discussed subjects in marketing today. Seemingly overnight, an entire industry vertical has emerged with its own unique vernacular. Search engines, keyword search, advanced search, metatags, search algorithms, search engine optimization, behavioral search, paid search, etc. etc. etc. Specialized firms have been established on providing ways and means to "beat the system", the "system" typically being a mathematical "sudoku" created by search engines for participants to solve.

It's high time to concentrate on the real end game - find.

For both businesses and consumers, the real objective is finding, not searching. Take travel, for example. Travelers are only interested in travel as a means to an end - their destination. People don't hop on planes, trains, and automobiles to enjoy the ride. They are going to or from somewhere. It's the somewhere that drives the travel. If people have no where to go, they don't travel. Such is the case with search.

Consumer want to find the information, goods, or services they require. Business want to find consumers that will buy their information, goods, or services. If a consumer has a toothache, they want to find a dentist, not search for one. If a consumer is hungry, they want to find a place to eat, not search for one.

It is time for the word find be substituted for the word search. Google should be a find engine. Search optimization should be find optimation and paid search should be paid find, or better said, finder's fees, a more accurate description of providing finds to the advertiser.

Both consumers and advertisers should hold the search industry more accountable.

The new mandate should be: "Find me what I am looking for".