Consider two stories of very successful campaigns, one recent and the other very recent.  The Old Spice campaign is by now old news.  The “Smells Like a Man” campaign with Isaiah Mustafa has been a huge viral marketing success. According to data from Nielsen, over the past three months sales have jumped 55 percent, and in the past month they rose 107 percent. Recent sales figures from SymphonyIRI also show a lift for Old Spice Body Wash products.   This campaign reached legendary status and will be talked about for years.  It is a branding and marketing home run.

Another big story, this one from this past Friday, is the phenomenal success of the Groupon Gap offer.   Groupon is an online service that offers special localized “deals of the day” to its list of subscribers.  Until Friday the deals were all from local businesses offering localized deals.  Groupon offered its first national deal on Friday offering subscribers $25 off a $50 Gap purchase.  The deal spread like wildfire with people using email, Facebook and other social media tools to get the discount message to their friends.  In fact, many Groupon members on the west coast had already heard about the promotion from east coast friends before they received their daily Groupon email.  The volume Friday crashed the Groupon servers and, as of Friday evening, they had sold over 400,000 Gap coupons.  Not a bad deal for Goupon which typically takes a 50% cut of the offer.  For Gap it will drive customers into their stores but at a steep cost in margin. That the offer was delivered online by Groupon, however, made a difference.   Do you really think the message would have gone viral if they had run a TV spot saying $25 off a purchase of $50 or more off for one day only?

On the surface, these two examples look nothing alike. One was purely branding, while the other was purely promotional. Old Spice was delivered through video on YouTube. Groupon was delivered through email. But dig deeper and we see that while neither was initiated through Facebook or Twitter, these channels played a critical role in both cases.  In both cases, the message went viral, faster in the Gap case, but more effectively in the Old Spice case.  Why more effectively?  Because Old Spice drove sales without giving away margin while the Gap had to give away the store to go viral and get traffic.

So what is the take away here?  Smart branding and creativity can create an emotional link to your intended audience but it takes effort, creativity, and to go viral, some degree of luck.  It can place your product above the competition.  It can also allow you to enjoy higher margins on the sale.  Giving away the store will resonate with the audience and your message might go viral but all it takes is a red pen and a tolerance for red ink.  I am not suggesting that companies avoid value marketing.  In fact, if the Gap drives new customers into the store and they enjoy the experience and like the store offerings, it might be worth it.  But be sure you have a strategy that leverages the value message to form a more lasting brand bond with your customers.  It’s okay to give away the store to drive traffic if the in-store experience will bring them back for more.  And all the viral marketing in the world will not help Old Spice in the long term if the stuff just doesn’t smell that good.

This announcement comes weeks after reports that Amazon sold more digital books than physical product during the month of June. It seems that digital sales of books not only outstrip physical sales, but also threaten to upend a huge and almost iconic book chain. Barnes & Nobel has come late to the digital party with their Nook. A head start in market share and digital share by Amazon has made for a tough race for the book retailer.

A good book is no longer a page-turner, it’s now a screen-clicker.

I remember years ago living in New York, the birthplace of Barnes and Nobel, the slogan used in their TV ads was “Of course, of course!” This slogan meant of course you could find what you were looking for at a Barnes & Nobel store. It was a very successful campaign that started them on the road to national expansion. Now, of course, you don’t need the store, you can find it on line at Amazon.com and have it instantly without leaving home.

This got me thinking, is everything going digital? Our music certainly has, our movies are headed there, newspapers… well, that’s a sad story, and now books.   Our information and entertainment is quickly migrating to the digital realm and it is easy to see why. Digital delivery of these products is relatively easy and, with increased bandwidth and wireless capability, becoming widespread. But what about other products? Surely digital is not affecting them? If a company sells products that are only available physically, need they be concerned about digital? The answer to this question is Barnes & Nobel’s 1970s era slogan: “Of Course, of course”.

Will digital share help your market share?

Earlier in the day, before reading the news about Barnes & Nobel, I was sitting in our conference room looking at a company’s digital “share of voice” compared to their sales share of market. Digital share of voice refers to the amount of online mentions and discussion about a company compared to their competitors. In this case the product category was auto parts; obviously not a downloadable product. The correlation between digital share of voice and market share was interesting. While some companies’ share of voice far exceeded their market share, for others the opposite was true. Invariably, the company with larger share of voice on line had a more advanced digital marketing strategy.

We already know that digital outreach is much cheaper than traditional marketing strategies on a cost per lead basis. So, what exactly does that mean for the companies with larger share of voice online than market share? What does it mean for companies where the opposite is true? My educated guess is that the companies with a larger share of digital voice will eventually steal market share from competitors who put less emphasis on a digital strategy. And, they will do so spending less money than their competitors spend trying to maintain their share.

What about your business? Do you want to be Barnes and Nobel chasing the digital leader? Or do you want your digital share of voice to be strong enough to positively affect your market share and have your competitors running to try to catch you?

So the answer to the question: is everything going digital? Of course not. But does a viable digital strategy matter to futures success? Of course, of course!

This week we were working on a proposal to a client that offers private label products.  Most of the products this retailer sells as private label are the equivalent to the national brand goods and in some cases, identical.  The question arose, do we just put it on the shelf or should we devote some of the ad spend dollars to brand it to potential customers?

Before you can answer this question for your own retail business, it is helpful to look which retailers do this well, and which not so well.  The place to start is with a store’s brand image.  A good brand image greatly increases the likelihood of the consumer trying a store’s brand. In fact, the likelihood that they will experiment with private-label offerings in a new category doubles after they’ve had a positive store brand experience.  Clearly, the store’s brand image has a great effect on the success of private label offerings.

Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods

Consider two retailers, Wal-Mart and Whole Foods.  The Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value brand is an acknowledged success.  As sales dipped at the natural foods chain when the recession took hold, they aggressively promoted this brand.  Their “organic value” promotion was a success and helped the chain regain sales momentum.    Wal-Mart’s experience with its “Great Value” brand, by contrast, has been less then stellar.   The brand has not taken off and, in fact, the chain was forced to bring back national brands they had removed from their shelves in favor of Great Value.

What accounts for the different private label experience of the two retailers?

The most obvious reason is the store brand image.  Whole Foods has an image tied to healthy eating and lifestyles.  The devotion of Whole Foods fans (and they really are fans, not just customers) is based on lifestyle connections, giving the store brand credibility with its core audience.  Wal-Mart, in contrast, is all about low prices, with almost no lifestyle component to their brand image.  So the brand credibility consumers assign to the two companies’ private label brands are quite different: for Whole Foods, quality and healthy at a value price point; for Wal-Mart, cheaper than their already low prices.   When it comes to feeding the family, quality, healthy and value are appetizing but cheaper may be harder to swallow.

Package Perfect

Packaging is also an issue.  Whole Foods 365 logo and package designs have a quality look and feel while Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” design looks … well … cheap.  It would have made better sense for a retailer whose image is low price and not much else to come up with a package design for its private label brand that says “quality”.

In the last blog we talked about the importance of good logo design, and the processes used in logo creation.  It is very important to have a logo and package design that communicates your core message to the viewer.

In Wal-Mart’s case, that message is almost entirely low price.   The stark white background and simple block letters remind me of the early “white box,” cheap non-branded items that were on some grocery retailers’ shelves 20 years ago.  You saved money but sacrificed taste, often to a great degree.  Today’s private label products are far superior to those early offerings and are often as good as national brands, so why would Wal-Mart, with their already “low price” image, choose a package design that harkens back to a low-quality private label past?

Regarding whether a store needs to promote its private label brand, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  Retailers who have intelligently promoted their store brand have yielded impressive gains in market share and margin.  Whole Foods certainly did it with the 365 brand.  Another excellent example is Home Depot’s Behr paint brand.  Home Depot is so committed to branding this private label that they gave it its own web site, http://www.behr.com.

So our advice to our client was, by all means promote your private brand.  A credible branding campaign will pay dividends every time a consumer chooses your brand over the national brand.

The humble simplicity of a great logo often belies a tremendous amount of work that churned through the meat grinder before evolving into that “clever little logo”.  Logos are certainly not to be compared with the great edifices of our time, but great logos are definitely among the building blocks of the greatest businesses in the world.
My methods are most likely very common among designers.  Creative individuals as we strive to be, we almost all use the same or similar tactics in the creative process.
Step One: Hunt & Gather
This is where my inner caveman comes in most useful.  After gathering useful information about the company, its product or services, its market demographic, etc.  I set out to hunt for anything useful that may help me make that kill-er logo.  Sometimes I start with word association trees, epigrams or homonyms and see where those take me.  After I have collected a pile of ideas, images and words, I throw them all together and set them on fire.  After giving this time to simmer, I pull out some coals and begin on…

Step Two: Play with Crayons
Okay, well maybe a mechanical pencil.  I have now evolved into my “Little-boy-who-likes-to-draw-with-his-tongue-sticking-out” phase.  As an illustrator, I almost always do my free-association concepting with pencil and paper first, before hitting the computer (that’s as in using, not striking).  I have always found the pathway from brain to hand more immediate and expressive than brain to mouse.  It is more natural, so the ideas tend to be more organic, less forced.  Many are bad, some downright stupid, but some show promise.  I then work those up a little tighter and then move on to…

Step Three: Explore
This is another fun phase for me. It can be somewhat tiring and sometimes frustrating, especially if what I think is a great concept in my head is for whatever reason not translating well on the computer no matter how many approaches to it I take.  But more often than not, if I have at least 3 or 4 solid ideas to work with, I can use Adobe Illustrator’s tools to create endless variations and permutations.  The pathfinder palette is an especially close friend of mine.  It’s in this phase that I often happen upon something totally unexpected which may take me off on yet another tangent to explore.  Once I have peppered my pasteboard with a variety of seeds, some in greater stages of development than others, I move on to…

Step 4: Wash, Rinse & Repeat
This is admittedly NOT my favorite stage, but a necessary one to be sure.  It is in this stage that I wash out all the lame or half-baked ideas and cull the better ones into a presentable assortment to be put through the shredder –I mean go through the first proof.  Different perspectives are critical, both from a trained creative as well as an “outsider” – if possible.  It is very easy to get mired in a narrow focus, so taking a step back to assess the work with various opinions is often useful.  This stage of development can be both arduous and rewarding at the same time.  While refining the concept and tweaking letterforms the finish line comes into focus; the “fat” has been trimmed away to reveal a cleaner, leaner logo.  At this point there may be a handful of “finalists” which then get dressed up to…

Step 5: Meet the Parents
Here is where I feel a bit like the new dad that has just sent junior off to school for the first time. There is really very little (in fact nothing) I can do in this step except wait for feedback from the client.  Usually it comes back with some minor changes or suggestions, but if we have done our job well we are 90% there and the client is happy.  Should changes be required, the process begins again, and I work on it until I get it right.

Logo design is a fun and challenging area of graphic design.  To do it well requires discipline, skill, experience and often times a degree of luck.  Sometimes the “Eureka Moment” strikes early on and you can bang out a great concept in a matter of 2 or 3 hours.  Other times a more deliberate, methodical approach is required to distill all the ideas into the best possible solution.  Whichever the case may be a good logo should do its job, which is first, to get noticed.  Second, pique a viewer’s curiosity and convey a message and third, hopefully, be remembered.

“Women want advice from other shoppers, but they also want to share their experiences and look for validation before making a purchase,” says Jodi Kahn, executive vice president at iVillage. Moms seek out social engagements and, by doing so online, they look for portals and resources where they can find the information they seek from an authentic, trusted source.

The Boston Consulting Croup published a book recently regarding the “female economy,” stating that Moms will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending growth. The book talks about the need to engage moms authentically if brands are to succeed in marketing to moms. This is true for both online and offline marketing efforts. You must be viewed as truthful and both your products and your messages must add value to their busy lives.

Marketers are historically good at talking at people but poor at conversations. It is for this very reason we employed the services of our blogging moms. We are not telling them what to write except for the caveat that it must be Disney related and the first blogs need be about the new “Alice in Wonderland”, which comes out on DVD and Blu-ray™ in a couple weeks. These women are Disney fans and their reviews and discussions about the entertainment value and age appropriateness of the movies will offer value to moms who visit the site.

You can read the reviews of these moms and join the conversation here: www.ForYourDisney.com.

The company in question is a national brand that sought to increase its brand awareness and customer loyalty with a social media campaign.  They hired a very expensive ad agency which employed highly educated and expensive “social media experts” who crafted a costly online program.  They secured a custom URL and built a very expensive website loaded with very expensive content, both video and static.  They opened Facebook and Twitter accounts to engage consumers in their well conceived and very expensive social media campaign.  The trouble is no one seemed to care.  After a year’s effort the web site traffic is next to nothing, the Facebook page has less then 500 fans and they are tweeting to themselves.   So where did these highly paid, well educated online experts go wrong?

Six months ago the agency responsible for this campaign gave a presentation at a conference; this campaign was the subject of their presentation.  They were very proud of the campaign they had crafted for this client and explained in great detail why it would be a success and create an army of life-long brand advocates for this company.  The web site was filled with compelling content (indeed it is) and the content taps into the passions of the natural fans of this product (it does).  The Facebook page and Twitter account administrators are true fans of the product and the product benefits (they are).  This was going to be a home run.  The agency seemed to say “we built it so they will come!”  While at the conference presentation I challenged some of this agency’s assumptions.  I asked why they did not distribute the content on the site as separate videos, articles and press releases on the web.  I asked about SEO and SEM efforts that appeared to be lacking.  How, I asked, were consumers supposed to be driven to this content laden web site?   Were Facebook and Twitter really supposed to carry the load?  Their answer was yes, thus was the power of social media.

For this campaign there was no budget allocated to on line advertising and no budget allocated to conventional advertising.  The Facebook and Twitter efforts would carry this campaign to the Promised Land filled with milk, honey and loyal advocates.  In the end, there was little milk, a dollop of honey, only a few fans and an unfulfilled promise.

Web content is like love; it is better when shared.  All the content this agency created for that very expensive web site should have been distributed.   There are tools available to get good content, videos, articles, slide shows etc., in front of potentially interested audiences.  This content distribution, sometimes referred to as content marketing, is not easy and requires knowledge, research and effort to implement a strategy correctly.  Just as good creative development is a skill, so is good web content distribution.   It is, however, a skill that every good agency, claiming to be a web marketing resource, should possess.

The agency for this company also should have also considered innovative online and off line advertising to drive potential fans to the site.  There is little more powerful than integrated marketing.  This is not to say that you should forget Facebook or be a Twitter quitter, it is just that the use of these two properties merely scratches the surface when it comes to true social media marketing and true web marketing.  Building a great website, setting up a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account is the equivalent of opening a great store with amazing deals on a remote dirt road in the country, with no sign.  If you don’t tell people about the store, if you don’t market it, no one will find you and no one will come shopping.

Companies fail at social media campaigns by misunderstanding the potential of the new medium. The GM “create your own ad” for SUVs campaign is an example. GM asked consumers to submit ads about their SUVs and expected a lot of homemade ads that would go viral. The problem is that environmentalists created a lot of negative ads and they DID go viral. As I explain to my clients when we embark on a content marketing and social media campaign, the things we will post for them remain on the web virtually forever. The negative GM SUV ads will haunt the company for many years. It is one thing to respond to negative consumer postings, but quite another to invite them by asking for content about a product as controversial as a big SUV.

The real reason many companies don’t realize the value of social media was illustrated in data released last week showing that 59% of companies that use social media for marketing do not integrate it into their larger marketing strategy. They have created a separate silo for social media. This is social media disintegration. It is as much a mistake as not integrating your TV ads into your total marketing strategy; it is just plain foolish. The brand message you deliver must be consistent across every touch point where your brand interacts with the consumer, online or off. I would bet that those companies who have not integrated social media marketing into their overarching marketing plans are the ones who are doubting its effectiveness. There may be several reasons why this occurs. One may be a lack of social media knowledge at many agencies. This sends companies to boutique shops that may specialize in social media but may not have the overall marketing skills to integrate this new media into the larger plan. Worse yet, some social media practitioners may actually be disdainful of traditional media. This point of view is foolish beyond serious consideration, yet I have seen it expressed many times. Or companies may treat social media as a function that requires little marketing knowledge or skill. The Facebook fanpage and twitter accounts are set up without developing a strategy or considering how consistent the social media engagement is with their other corporate messages. So instead of reinforcing the brand message, the social media efforts might confuse it. I find it strange that companies that would never allow their ads, print or broadcast, to be written by anyone but a pro with a thorough understanding of company marketing objectives, would give social media duties to someone with less professionalism.

Social media is another marketing tool. Like all the others in the marketer’s toolbox it is not right for every job. Also, like the workman’s tools, it a very rare occasion when one tool only can get the job done. Building a brand is like building a house. Having a social media effort that is not integrated with your overall marketing strategy is like hiring the electrician and not supplying him with the blueprints.

As many of you know we have worked for clients in retail music distribution channels for many years.  As such we have become familiar with that industry.  Interestingly, the Grateful Dead pursued exactly the opposite marketing strategy than the industry as a whole.  The Dead knew that, much as many bands tried, they could not control consumers recording their concerts especially with the smaller and high quality recording devices available.  The “customer is in control” is a social media buzz term but the Grateful Dead understood it years decades before SM platforms existed.  Some concert-goers would record the concerts and duplicate and share the tapes.  Instead of trying to stop the practice the Dead encouraged it.  “Bootleg” Grateful Dead tapes became much shared and sought after for avid “deadheads” as their fans came to be known.

Contrast this with the way the music labels reacted to music downloads when they first became popular.  They used every legal means to stop them and prosecuted anyone they caught file sharing.  I always thought this was a dumb strategy.  Calling your customers thieves is not the way to build brand loyalty.  Just like the Dead could not stop the concert recordings, so, the music industry cannot stop file sharing. This is not to say that they should have thrown up their hands and given away all of their product.  It means they should have approached the problem creatively and encouraged free downloads to build a fan base for performers that could have been monetized in new ways.   The end result of a flawed strategy is the continued downward spiral of an entire industry.

Over the years I have seen many businesses fail because they were overly focused on the nuts and bolts of running their business: Their expenses were controlled, payroll was under budget, their leases and distribution costs were rock bottom. Yet they failed at the most important part of their business, engaging their customers. They went out of business for all the right reasons.

Most businesses will never be blessed with fans as passionate as those of the Grateful Dead.  Most businesses can learn from the high level of fan engagement they enjoyed however.  Be open and honest with your customers, listen to their concerns and find a way to address them, and do not let them pass you by when it comes to technological innovations.  Also, be willing to share:  ideas, product data, solutions, industry information and maybe a little music.  That, of course, is one of the purposes of this blog.

Here are Dead performing “Truckin”

Two articles crossed my desk this week that again confirm this point of view. The first was an article that outlined the results of the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. This is a report that quantifies the factors that drive consumers to trust a business or government entity. Trust, of course, is a major component in brand loyalty and brand acceptance. The report pointed out that consumers need to hear a company’s message from several different sources before they believe it. In other words they needed to be exposed to the message on multiple channels. The report also poked holes in the common myth that social media sources and online word of mouth is a more powerful driver of consumer action and trust then more traditional sources. Only 25% of consumers thought recommendations from other consumers or peers were credible. That is about the same percent that believe ads they see or hear in traditional media. So what happened? Isn’t digital “word of mouth” the mantra of social media experts?

The fact is that the very explosive growth of social media platforms is contributing to this lack of trust. With people adding casual acquaintances or friends twice removed as Facebook friends, the power to persuade from these sources naturally drops. Add to that all the companies adding Facebook pages and fishing for fans and you can see the result. This was to be expected. Just as these social media platforms grew at an exponential rate, so did their status grow very quickly into “another media option.”

This is not to say social media has no value. Of course it does. Just as TV, radio, print and other forms of interactive marketing have value. The key is how to effectively use the various media assets available to craft the most effective multi-channel campaign. Just this week there was an article about Constant Contact, the email marketing service, and its explosive growth. Company executives credited its success, to a great degree, to a radio campaign (yes, an interactive company using radio to brand its product) which they married to their digital efforts.

Another interesting fact gleaned from the Edelman study was the relatively high level of trust that consumers bestow on articles written by experts. This brings us to another service we have been introducing to clients: content marketing – creating articles, press releases, videos, etc. and distributing them over the internet. This content often conveys expert status on the author and is a non-conventional way to engage your target audience. It is also a powerful SEO tool.

The other article I read involves the consumer brand Hormel. The 100+ year old meat company is launching the first corporate umbrella campaign in its history. The campaign is meant to brand Hormel as a trusted name for convenient, quality prepared meats and meals. One of its’ goals is to stem the growing private label trend and position itself above the PL competitors in the consumers’ minds. And yes, it is multi-channel using TV, print, digital, PR and in-store assets to deliver its message. They are spending many millions to launch their campaign. You do not need millions for a successful multi-channel campaign, however. With the new tools available today, with media rates still low, and the cost of social media and content marketing campaigns being very affordable there is no reason for any company to stick to a single channel marketing effort.

This news item held some interest to me because our agency has bought a lot of network radio over the years and we sponsored a good deal of talk programming. We have had several popular talk show personalities voice spots for our clients and it has been a successful strategy. The failure of Air America, however, could have been predicted and has lessons for companies trying to market and grow their own business.

Back in 2004 when Air America first launched, one of our clients asked what I thought of it. We had used talk radio with much success for several of his products and he thought Air America might be a good fit. I told them that I thought Air America would have trouble getting a foothold on the national airwaves for one important reason: many of their natural advocates, their most likely listeners were already NPR listeners. Their listening habits were well established, they were very loyal to NPR and NPR is “commercial free”. This was a problem right leaning talk personalities did not have. I told my client that if he wanted to reach that audience we would be better advised to underwrite NPR programming and get the “halo effect” there.

Air America had other problems as well. They were a progressive Democratic radio network with a definite agenda. Talks show personalities on the other side of the political spectrum, however, are part of networks whose only agenda is profit. The business of running a radio network is best if it is politically neutral. I distinctly remember the Air America rep suggesting that I buy his programming for my clients because it is “the right thing to do.” Aside from the fact that he had no idea what my politics were (for the record, when it comes to business, my only political creed is to do the best thing for my clients) it was insulting that he would consider that I would allow personal political beliefs to color a business decision I might make for my client. Ideology and good business can co-exist, promoting green products and corporate policies, for example. For Air America, however, it was a losing combination.

One lesson for marketers from the Air America failure is to know your competition. I wonder if the executives at Air America ever considered that to a great degree their success involved stealing listeners from NPR? They thought of the conservative talk show hosts as their competition. I would bet they were loath to consider NPR competition, but they were, indeed, competing for the same listeners.

Another lesson is to understand the size of your niche and develop a business model that allows you to profit from it. Ten years ago Polaris rolled out a new motorcycle brand, Vision, aimed squarely at Harley. They marketed themselves as “the other American motorcycle company”. Harley riders, like NPR listeners, are very loyal. Polaris had no illusions that it could convert legions of Harley riders to its brand. What it did do was to build a good product, introduce design innovations and develop a business plan that allowed it to be profitable while taking only a fraction of Harley’s market share.

Developing a new motorcycle brand, like developing a new radio network is a capital intense undertaking. If you are going to be successful in either it is wise to have an objective view of your competition, a smart marketing plan to gain market share from them, a realistic understanding of the market gains you can hope for, and a business model that allows you to make money once those gains are achieved.