Rebel against complacency. Make big ideas real.
Last May I wrote about an outrageous incident I experienced watching pharmaceutical marketing executives lying to their own employees.
Today, Advertising Age reports that Merck and Schering-Plough spent $100 million advertising the cholesterol drug Vytorin for a year, despite having findings that showed the drug didn’t deliver the results promised in the ad. That’s right one whole year of lying to consumers.
Maybe it’s time to end the direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.
Here’s an example of how good brands taint their reputations by not thinking through the customer buying experience.
For a post-Christmas gift I treated myself to a new Miele vacuum cleaner, which I LOVE — and this from someone who hates housework. But the process of buying this beautiful piece of German engineering was a truly frustrating experience.
After reading many reviews I went onto the Miele site and placed my order. The site was slow in loading, but I tried to overlook that. Real frustration set in after I filled out all the shipping, billing and credit card info and the Miele site kept giving me an error message. So I kept going back to the payment part of the process to try again. I then called the Miele customer service number but after waiting 45 minutes, hung up. Then I got an email message confirming my order and panicked, thinking maybe it had processed four or five orders. I called customer service again. No response. Now I’m hating Miele despite the glowing product reviews and decide to call it a day and try to resolve the issue the next morning.
The next morning before 10 a.m. UPS delivers my new vacuum cleaner. I was stunned (and thrilled) that the delivery came in less than 24 hours. And that I only received one vacuum.
Would I recommend a Miele? Yes and no. The product is amazing, but buying it was a challenge.
James Carville coined a mantra for Bill Clinton’s during his fist presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” For marketers, let’s remember, “It’s the customer experience.”
Nothing gets people talking (and thinking) like a contrarian or counterintuitive point of view. A good example can be seen in a post today over at the Running a Hospital blog by Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. There’s a local hospital in financial trouble that none of the Boston-area hospital groups have the money to acquire and fix. Levy suggests an alternative — that the Service Employees International Union take over the hospital as they have a strong interest in hospital management and lots of cash.
“So why not approach SEIU with a proposal to have the union purchase, own and operate Carney Hospital? Let the union show how it can handle the full panoply of issues of running a hospital and demonstrate how it can profitably operate a neighborhood facility without the kind of state aid that has been pouring into Carney for all these years. Let the union negotiate contracts with the insurance companies, encourage access for low-income patients, maintain high regulatory standards for patient care, and do all the other things required of hospital management, while, of course, providing excellent working conditions for staff members and physicians.”
An innovative idea or a friendly smack at the unions who so often complain about how hospitals are managed? Hard to say, but Paul’s post will certainly be the topic of conversations in the Boston healthcare community this weekend. And there’s nothing healthier for any industry than frank, open conversations about contrarian ideas. That’s where change so often begins.
Thanks to Howard Kain, managing principal of the healthcare group at PNC for turning me on to Running a Hospital, a great example of CEO blogging — and in a highly-regulated, conservative industry like hospital management no less!
Cerberus announced today that former GE and Home Depot executive Bob Nardelli is taking over as CEO of Chrysler. And today the executive known for his arrogance and lack of effective leadership communications skills made his first misstep as CEO.
There’s a two-page Chrysler advertising spread in today’s Wall St. Journal proclaiming “The New Chrysler: GET READY FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.” Gee, Bob, most new CEOs have a 100-day plan, but a 100-year plan? You’ve already been able to consult and collaborate with Chrylser employees, union officials, and partners and figure out the next 100 years? Puh-leeze. This is a stupid way to start and doesn’t help you overcome the credibility and arrogance problems that clouded your departure from Home Depot. Pull the ads before you have mud on your face.
What’s almost as dumb is what the ad says.
“A NEW ERA BEGINS WITH THE NEW CHRYSLER. Now, that sounds like the kind of news that would only pique the interest of the people on Wall Street, but we believe it’s going to be more important to the folks on Main Street. In short, it means that the New Chrysler is something of a rarity in today’s automotive world: a company that’s capable of quickly responding to the needs of customers. The fact is, we’ve always strived to be the most customer-focused car company on the planet.”
Maybe Bob, with his $200 million Home Depot severance package, has never bought a Toyota and Honda and experienced great customer service.
But I digress. The point is that when a CEO has credibility issues his communications advisers should help him or her not step back into them. Before there can be a new Chrysler there needs to be a new Nardelli who can earn the respect and trust of his new team.
Why oh why do organizations obsess over logos and tag lines? If execs looked at the the return on investment they’d be shocked. And, by the way, people hardly ever “get” what the brand experts say the logo and tag are supposed to mean.
Two recent cases in point.
What does the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, pictured above, say to you? It says nothing to me, except that I think the Olympic Games paid too much for not much at all. Yet the Olympic Games went a step further and paid to produce a video to explain the logo. Promote a logo? Good grief, what a waste of money. But to top off the ridiculousness, the video showing an the animated logo has been found to cause epileptic seizures. (And not just among the people who authorized the branding firm .)
Then in tag line la la land we have all the car companies using just about the same tag lines, and also making a big deal about announcing a new tag line.
Mercedes-Benz use to have the tag line, “Engineered Like No Other Car in the World.” which as tag lines go is pretty descriptive and clear. But it dropped that lined for the bland “Unlike Any Other” because the car company said the brand was about more than engineering.
In the past month Audi has introduced a new tag line, “Truth in Engineering,” as has Chrysler with its “Engineered Beautifully.”
Mmmm…seems like all the auto brands are starting to sound the same. Will these tag lines, which probably cost of hundreds of thousands once you add up the market research, copy writing and testing fees, make a dent on the brands revenues?
While a strong, distinctive visual identity is important, it seems that too much money and executive time is spent on logos and tag lines in relation to their value.
[Olympic logo] [taglines] [branding] [Audi tagline] [Chrysler tagline]
There’s a good reason people don’t trust companies, and I recently witnessed an incident that left me dumbfounded. I was asked to speak at a global company’s annual marketing planning meeting about my views on how marketing is changing, based on my new book. (Which is all about trust, transparency, meaning making and conversational marketing.)
One of the company’s marketing execs told me that some customers would be speaking before me to give the marketing team a sense of what the real customer is all about. Wow, I thought, what a great way to open the conference. Hear the real views of real customers in their own words. Fantastic.
But unknown to most of the marketing staff — these “customers” were actually actors hired by the advertising agency. As I was sitting in the green room with them, the actors let it slip to me what was really going on. (I remarked to one of the actors that she looked familiar, and turns out she’s a recent graduate of the Trinity Rep Theater- Brown University MFA program – and I’m a board member of the organization. So then the cat was out of the bag….)
It was bad enough knowing that actors had been hired to pose as customers, winning the gig based on their performances at a big casting call the ad agency organized. But then two people from the ad agency came in to the green room to “rehearse” the actors, reminding them who they were suppose to be, and what messages they needed to hit on in their little speeches to the marketing group. I especially winced when the ad agency people reminded the actors, “Remember to say you still get a lot of your information from traditional advertising.”
Following the “customer talks,” there was a Q&A, where the marketing people thought they were asking real customers about their views about the product category. I cringed not knowing if the answers were real or rehearsed.
I’m crushed, angry and incredulous.
I can’t tell you who the company is because I always keep my promise not to reveal confidential information from client engagements. And I promised told the actors I wouldn’t tell. I may have gone too far even writing this cloaked post. But if this gets just one company to think and reverse course before trying to pull a fast one on employees or customers, it will have been worth the risk.
And what a pity that the real voices of real customers are being filtered. Imagine what companies could learn if they actually had meaningful conversations with customers – and not actors.
Is United Airlines trying to run its business into the ground by delivering the worst service possible? If they really don’t give a hoot about customers, why not just pack it up and sell the assets? I’ve been out promoting my book and emphasizing that ultimately the only marketing strategy that really matters is delivering a great service or product experience. To get from place to place I’ve been flying United, for no good reason other than I always do especially going coast to coast. Plus I have Premier status. (Or use to.)
But Monday was an all time low between me and United.
I got on Flight 161 from Boston to Los Angeles at 8 a.m. only to find left over Heineken cans, used tissue paper and sticky, smelly cups stuffed into my seat pocket. The seat was loaded with crumbs. There were no pillows or blankets This was the first flight out for the day — couldn’t United find anyone to clean the plane over night?
The attendant played the safety video. But the video didn’t run correctly so we had to wait for it to play again before moving out of the gate.
But, alas, it looked like one of the monitors was broken and couldn’t be fixed. “Please pay attention to the other monitors.”
When I used the lavatory the seat fell off. I looked above the seat area and there was masking tape holding the unit together. Really. Sure it was the wide, industrial steel-colored tape, but tape nonetheless. It looked like someone fell off their meds or had too many nips and violently trashed the place.
Leaving the lavatory I noticed paper towels strewn in the aisle. I went to the aft cabin to tell the flight attendants about the toilet seat and masking tape, but had to wait awhile before they acknowledged me. They were talking about their weekend social plans. (And the doctor’s appointment for skin cancer screening, and…)
They shrugged their shoulders when I told them about the lavatory. They knew about it, but dismissed it. Walking back I wondered if the attendants had noticed the trash on the floor. Surely, if they did one of them would pick it up?
The second thing United did to make me hate them was to downgrade my longstanding Premier flight status because I used miles to upgrade on a flight back from California. This meant that in addition to sitting in a filthy plane I now also had to sit in the back with the seats that have no legroom. I understand rules — miles drop below a certain level you lose the membership. But this math is madness. I fly so much for business that I am a customer United shouldn’t want to lose. Their marketing analytics should look at the bigger picture about my travel behavior, yes?
In a recent United press release Dennis Cary, United’s senior vice president- Marketing, is quoted as saying, “United is committed to being the best choice for customers who crave comfort while traveling for business or pleasure.” Oh puhlease Dennis. If you were committed to comfort you’d at least make sure the planes are clean.
Well it’s over for me and United. If you see any United advertising or marketing, know that the money is a waste. They’d be better just tossing bags of money off a plane. If the service experience stinks (in this case quite literally), no advertising will do a lick of good.
United Airlines travel marketing brand experience air travel
Here’s another really crazy marketing decision. The brand managers at Always maxi pads decided to send a little message to women when they tear off the adhesive backing of the pad: “Have a Happy Period.”
A happy period? Do you know any woman who has ever had a happy period? Don’t you test out these ideas with consumers?
Wendi Aarons posted a hilarious, frank open letter to James Thatcher, the Always brand manager. She starts out complimenting Thatcher for some of the great features in Always over the years and then gets down to business:
“As brand manager in the feminine-hygiene division, you’ve no doubt seen quite a bit of research on what exactly happens during your customers’ monthly visits from Aunt Flo. Therefore, you must know about the bloating, puffiness, and cramping we endure, and about our intense mood swings, crying jags, and out-of-control behavior.
“Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: “Have a Happy Period.”
“Are you f******g kidding me? What I mean is, does any part of your tiny middle-manager brain really think happiness—actual smiling, laughing happiness—is possible during a menstrual period? Did anything mentioned above sound the least bit pleasurable?
“For the love of God, pull your head out, man. If you just have to slap a moronic message on a maxi pad, wouldn’t it make more sense to say something that’s actually pertinent, like “Put Down the Hammer” or “Vehicular Manslaughter Is Wrong”? Or are you just picking on us?”
If you go to Technorati there are 918 raving blog posts about “Have a Happy Period.” I still haven’t been able to find any response from P&G. Bad decisions happen. The best strategy for companies is quickly acknowledging mistakes and telling people how they’re going to fix them. Always.
A front page article in today’s New York Times, “Aging, Frail and Fighting Insurers to Pay Up,” talks about how some long-term care insurance companies have abused elderly customers trying to file claims. The insurance companies sent the wrong forms. Refused to provide information. Didn’t answer questions. Sent snail mail instead of picking up the phone and answering questions. Refused to allow their employees to talk to one another, which would have helped provide better customer service. Unbelievable, especially insurers Conesco and Penn Treaty America.
My four takeaways:
Should the United States Post Office be in the business of promoting direct mail?
Yesterday I received a copy of “Deliver,” the USPS’ expensively produced, 32 page magazine. USPS sends the free bi-monthly magazine to 350,000 marketers.
The business world is moving to a paper-less, digital world, but the Postal
Service is trying to promote the value of direct mail and other “innovative marketing tools.”
“Finding innovative marketing tools is a must for any company that needs to promote its brand and products to the consumer,” according to USPS press release announcing the magazine last winter. “Today the U.S. Postal Service is Deliver-ing a magazine for marketers about strategies and trends thatare shaping the world of marketing and advertising.”
My view is that the USPS has no business trying to be in the marketing advice business, especially as their advice is grounded in the old print world, which is hardly innovative. That’s just a bad use of our tax dollars. Not as bad as the USPS’ huge sports sponsorship spends a fewyears ago, but still rather irresponsible.
USPS should take the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on the magazine and
address its real issue: how to create a new USPS business model for a world with less and less mail.
Now, back to getting my tax returns completed…
Yesterday the U.S. Army hired a new ad agency, McCann Erickson, according to Ad Age. The budget: $1.35 billion to be spent on ads to recruit for active duty and the Reserve. That’s right, more than a BILLION dollars.
This
decision comes at a time when the marketing industry recognizes that
conventional advertising is not effective, particularly if the value
prop is weak. (Or if you’re being recruited to go to Iraq, maybe a
non-existent value prop.)
Is there a better way to spend $1.35 billion of our money?
Use
a slice of the money to figure out how to get out of Iraq sooner; then
we wouldn’t have to recruit so many people. Despite its advertising and
aggressive recruiting, the Army missed its recruitment target this year by 7,000, according to a report in today’s N.Y. Times. Maybe no amount of advertising is going to work. Like Vietnam, people
don’t believe much in the military’s cause. And if they don’t believe,
they’re not going to join.
Create an online community where active duty Army professionals
can talk to those with a possible interest? Let the people who know the
value of being in the Army – and have the most credibility – tell the
story vs. ads?The goal of the Army is to recruit 80,000 new soldiers a year. Divide 80,000 into $1.35 billion and you get $1,687.50. If the army upped the signing incentives by another $1,687.50 would that be as effective as advertising?
Reinstate
the draft. Give full college scholarships to everyone who serves. Make
the military reflective of a democratic society. The added benefit: the
middle and upper class would be mad as hell and would get more involved
in government’s decisions. (As the mother of a young son, I hate to
think of a draft…)
Maybe some of these things
are already happening. I’d sure feel better knowing that the Army has
looked at alternatives before committing $1.35 BILLION on trying to
market something no one wants to buy.
Computer Associates, now to be
called CA, today featured multi-page spreads in newspapers like “The
New York Times” announcing the company’s new growth strategy.
But darned if I can figure out what they’re talking about, which is too bad because CEO John Swainson seems
so passionate about cleaning up CA and making the company matter again
to its corporate customers. I’m rooting for him to succeed, but there
are a few things in marketing that he’s going to have to change to win
me over – and his customers. (Newsday
interviewed some of CA’s customers following John’s speech in Las
Vegas, and they too are a little befuddled.)Here’s what CA needs to do
differently:
The ad headlines are “Remember when technology had the power to inspire
you? Believe again.” Technology has been extremely inspiring in so many
ways to so many of us. We never lost the belief. CA may have lost its
inspiration along the way, which accounts for so little company
innovation and growth. We don’t need to be told in ads to “believe
again” in technology. What we do need, however, is to be told why we
should believe again in CA and its technology and services.
Which brings me to point two. What the heck is your big new vision,
Enterprise IT Management (EITM)? Your communications talk about how it
“unifies and simplifies complex IT environments across the enterprise.”
The press release headline says, “Unified Management of End-to-End
Infrastructure Enables IT Organizationsto Overcome Complexity and
Ensure Performance Of Business Services.” But hello, what exactly is
it? I really know technology, yet I can’t figure out what the big aha
is here. More context, examples, maybe some helpful metaphors, and just
plain speak would really help.
I’ve heard John talk and he’s engaging and direct. So why is your
letter, advertising and Web site so full of empty corporate speak,
which, by the by, uses phrases that date back to what other tech
companies used in the 90s? Phrases like “transforming business,”
“unifying and simplifying complex IT environments,” “reach a higher
order of IT,” “simplify the complex,” “deliver fully against your
business goals,” “align IT to reach business goals,” are empty, boring,
and tired.
CA must have some points-of-view on enterprise technology that are
contrarian, counter-intuitive, unusual, insightful, or surprising. How
else can you innovate, as you say you have, if you weren’t turned on by
some big insights? What customer insight triggered the passion of your
developers? What do you know that you can do better than any of your
competitors? Talk about those ideas. In the real words of real people.
In today’s business world, a new logo and name change don’t matter all
that much. People want a reason to believe in you. They want fresh
ideas. And they want to connect with the company and its people — not
with a new acronym.
I love the technology industry and hope that
there is great thinking and innovation going on at CA. Maybe the
marketing approach just needs to revamped.
When many of us see
this old style marketing, with to much hoo-ha around logos and category
acronyms and not enough clear explanations of what is new and valuable,
we often think that there is no new strategy. Just a great shade of new
lipstick that is likely to quickly fade.
People are talking this week about “PR problems” at the Boston Red
Sox and Wal-Mart’s new War Room media strategy when the real problems
are leadership problems.
At a press conference yesterday Theo
Epstein talked to the media for 30 minutes about his resignation as
General Manager of the Boston Red Sox. He never explained the real
reason for resigning, and the rumors about a the nature of the falling
out between Epstein and Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino went supersonic.
Especially since Lucchino didn’t attend the press conference. (All the
other Sox execs were there, including owners John Henry and Tom Werner.)
Sportswriter Bill Reynolds wrote in this morning’s Providence Journal:
You would think he (Lucchino) would have been there for no other reason than he’s
the public face of this franchise, its CEO. You think he would have
been there to send out the message he wishes things could have been
resolved, that he wishes Theo well, blah, blah, blah, the new spin. You
would think he would have begun the first day of damage control, both
to his image and the perception that the Red Sox are going to be fine,
that the organization is strong enough to withstand the loss of anyone,
Epstein included.
Lucchino’s absence and the way the Epstein contract negotiations were handled tell you there are bigger leadership problems.
A front page story in Tuesday’s New York Times, “A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room/Retailer Tries Political Tactics to Help Image,” talked about how the retailer is taking a page from the political playbook to try to sell a better image to the public.
No
PR tactic – or even the best political strategists – can help a company
with weak leadership. And Wal-Mart is flip flopping all over the place.
Last week The New York Times
also reported on a leaked Wal-Mart memo discussing the company’s
strategy for selling its new employee healthcare plans to the public.
The memo said the company is testing the plan’s proposed changes “to
determine whether these investments would effectively ‘move the needle’
on Wal-Mart’s public reputation.”
Here’s what Wal-Mart should do to move the needle:
Poor management begets poor reputation. PR has nothing to do with it.
I shop at Target because I understand its point-of-view – cool stuff at
good prices. While I don’t choose to shop at Wal-Mart, I understand
what the retailer is all about. Wal-Mart is successful because it, too,
has a point-of-view that people understand: almost everything you need
at really low prices.
But Kmart and Sears? Neither company has a
point-of-view. The merger announced last week is like the bland (Sears)
following the blind (Kmart). What do these retailers stand for? What’s
the shorthand reason to shop there? Beats me. I’ve seen many
new Kmart television ads this fall but they confused me more than
helped me understand Kmart. Why exactly would I shop there? The ads
seemed disconnected from any bigger positioning. And Sears? Aside from
buying Craftsman tools, I’m not sure why I’d shop there.A
point-of-view helps we consumers understand what a brand is all about.
It’s the promise that helps us understand why to buy. Done right, it
drives brand communications so it all adds up to set the brand apart.
(And it makes it easier for marketing managers to plan, prioritize and
really integrate different marekting communications techniques.)
Staples
gets this. Its promise is to “make buying office products easy.” And
they do. Last week I bought cartridges for my home office printers and
received a rebate. Rather than having to fill out forms and mail them,
which I never get around to doing, Staples let me go to a Web site,
fill in a couple of numbers, and presto, the rebate process was
complete. That was easy.But merging two dying brands rarely
succeeds. It would have been far smarter to resuscitate K-Mart or Sears
with some real marketing. I tend to agree with retail consultant Howard
Davidowitz who says that the Kmart and Sears merger will produce one
thing: a cadaver.
Who knew that Travelocity is
much better than competitors like Expedia and Hotels.com? Not me. All
the big online travel sites’ marketing sound alike to me.
A couple of weeks ago I sat in on an excellent presentation by Jeffrey Gulleck,
CMO of Travelocity, at the Sales and Marketing Leaders Summit in Desert
Springs, CA. Gulleck explained that most of the online travel sites
confirm our hotel reservations with, hold on now, faxes back and forth
to the hotels. Travelocity’s technology is far more advanced, which
helps the service provide better deals, better service, more
reliability. “The complexity of the travel industry is our friend,”
explained Gulleck. “It provides a barrier to small companies entering
the category, and helps us compete against the other major players.”
Most
interesting was the strategic work Gulleck has done to create a new
positioning: “Travelocity is the advocate for travelers,” a position
that Travelocity can deliver on better than any of their competitors.
Most disappointing, however, was seeing Travelocity’s new gnome ads,
which don’t pay off the positioning.Why,
we wonder, don’t companies use their positioning points-of-view to
drive all of their brand communications, from advertising and public
relations to sales presentations and Web marketing? If Travelocity
really wants to be an advocate for travelers, it might think about
trading in the gnomes for a Gert Boyle-like campaign. (I’d trust
Columbia Sportswear’s “Mother Boyle” ads before the gnome.) Or allocate
more to a content-driven advertorial campaign. Or get more from PR.
With my work schedule, I really want a travel advocate. Travelocity needs to prove that it is one.
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