The Future Place Blog

BrandZ update

Nigel Hollis's blog as a good piece looking at Millward Brown's BrandZ study (an annual global study about brands) and discussing whether it is sufficiently marketed.

I think we can probably expand issue about marketing to most of the MR industry. I am often surprised that we can spend so much time look at marketing, measuring the return from marketing, testing new marketing, yet remain so unaffected by it. I suspect that most clients would have difficulty explaining the key brand attributes of their suppliers.

Should marketing report to the CFO

Market researchers often complain that they do not get a seat at the board, and the same appears to be true of marketing. Evidently, according to a post by Paul Barsch, CEO (Chief Executive Officers) often do not believe that marketing can deliver the goods, and have increasingly turned to operations and finance to cut costs, rather than marketing to increase sales.

The post draws on work by others which suggests that marketers should do more to gain the area of CFOs (Chief Finance Officers). Amongst the suggestions are learning about the things the CFO is interested in, learning the language of finance, tracking the right metrics, and being a valued player in strategy discussions.

All of that advice, IMHO, applies equally to market researchers. I have found some CFOs to be amongst the best recipients and users of market research, when it has been scoped, conducted, and reported with their concerns and agenda in mind.

City Beach don't understand BOGOF!

Today, we were out buying board shorts in City Beach in Brisbane (a funky store with surfer brands). Whilst buying the boardies we spotted a sign on a nice range of t-shirts (Billabong, RipCurl etc) saying 'buy a t-shirt get another free' (a promotion that in the UK is known as BOGOF - Buy One Get One Free). The price at AUD$49 was a bit high, but hey this was a holiday purchase, and two for one seemed great. So, we selected two t-shirts and took them, with the boardies to pay.

BUT! The scheme was not what it appeared, if you bought one nice t-shirt you could choose one from another rack, where the t-shirts with brand names you have never heard of were collecting dust. In disgust, the t-shirts were rejected, the board shorts were still purchased, and we left the store grumpy - feeling City Beach has tried to scam us.

If we assume the reason for the promotion was to a) sell more, and b) improve customer satisfaction, the scheme has to be judged a failure. There is no point having hidden catches in a store which aims to build it clientele. A buy one t-shirt here and get one from the B rack free, is fine, if it is clear - although it is hard to imagine who in branded store would find it a great offer. But sneaky cop-outs just devalue the shopping experience.

The death of marketing

Here is an interesting post dicussing whether the death of the term marketing has started. The post picks up on the fact that that Piers Fawkes has dropped the use of the word marketing when describing PSFK conference to be held in LA in September. A similar debate is happening on FaceBook about the term consumers (see Stop Calling Me a Consumer group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2376249831).

I am not sure where all this discussion and angst will lead us, but I strongly believe that the process of selling people things will change massively over the next few years, as will many other things.

via Adam Crowe on FaceBook (http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=10080&id=639725495)

Tryvertising in Japan

Sample Lab has opened a Tryvertising salon in Tokyo, according to a report on Springwise. For a small fee, about £1.22, people entered the salon to try a range of products, from cosmetics, to exercise equipment, to BBQ sauces. At the end of trying products people can take up to five items home.

Marketing Music Gen X and Gen Y

This video explains one company’s view of who Gen X and Gen Y are and the role music plays in their life. One of the interesting points is the comment that Gen X and Gen Y are the first cases where generations are judged in 10 year rather than 20 year bands.

Kodak Get It!

This video from Kodak was evidently made for internal consumption. It is really funny, and it certainly caught my interest, I’ll be keeping an eye open to see what comes from Kodak. IMHO this is the sort of brand building that works great on YouTube, and will probably even help in job recruitment.

The text on the YouTube site says “This is a commercial that was produced for internal use. But it has become so popular, especially with employees, that Kodak has released it for external viewing. It demonstrates that Kodak not only understands it's changing business but also has a sense of humor. (more)”.

Via Elizabeth Lane Lawley

How to make a million

Seth Godin has a useful post on how to make a million, or perhaps how not to. Godin points out that one popular strategy is to try and make $1 from each of a million people, or even £0.10 from 10 million people. However, he points out, this usually fails. Where people go wrong is not in their evaluation of whether their product is good enough to generate a margin of $1 or even $0.10. The problem tends to be in reaching that many customers.

In market research the problem is worse. Where we are using human skill and intelligence there is no long tail, most of the money comes from the few large clients, as does most of the risk!

Which Western brands are hot in China?

CNet has and interesting article about the brands that are seen as hot (to own or work for) in China, based on the views of their China staff. Many of the views emphasise how the flat the world has become. The list of big brands and the views about them could come from anywhere: Sony (nice but expensive), Apple (love the iPod), Microsoft (hate the company, use the MSN), Dell (used to be good, but now service poor and what about those batteries), IBM (boring).

In fact, it was the few differences that were reported that made the article more interesting. YouTube, not a great success, it is not in Chinese, and there are plenty of video sites. Yahoo is marginal and Google has a much smaller share – one of the reasons is the strength of Baidu (Wikipedia link here). Baidu is a China based search engine, which is particularly strong at searching MP3 files. I checked on Alexa and Baidu is ranked 7th globally, the highest non-US site, one behine MySpace and two ahead of Wikipedia.

Jack of all trades, master of none

Seth Godin's blog highlights the excerpt below. One of the key things for anybody is to learn how to prioritise.