Rediscovering trust

While the officials, scientists and insurers in Christchurch start the interminable discussions over what, when, where, why, how much and who, perhaps the toughest task of all for the authorities doesn’t lie in rebuilding the structures, but rather in bringing back the very human aspect of trust.

With time, patience and enough goodwill and funding, government, insurers, investors and the private sector can restore order, power, water, services, homes, the CBD, everything that has been physically lost and damaged. But what the hell is it going to take for faith to return?

Out-thinking the recession

When everyone’s in sale, no-one is. It simply means the market has reset the prices that consumers expect to pay. So I was interested in this interview with retail specialist Jim Lucas of Draft FCB about how businesses should approach recessive times. Here are my key out-takes from his interview:

The lack of decline in small luxuries such as skincare and animal treats is a clear sign that shoppers will hold on to a handful of indulgences in their everyday lives just to feel normal. The secret is to scan for those opportunities in their changing behaviours.

Rather than focus on the big ticket buys, look for little pleasures. Lucas says marketing is about trying to change behaviour, and a recession is a strong backdrop for that. “’You need to think of creating behaviours or new forms of regimen or rituals or routines that are going to fit into this new era.” That means, for example, calling for smaller actions: paint a wall, rather than repaint the house.

Continued discounting will simply make some categories unprofitable, and not just that, it will cement in those price expectations. Goes to my point earlier.

Finally, Lucas says, the rise of private labels is a sure sign of brands failing to communicate their points of difference. If that’s happening in your sector, it’s a sign that consumers either don’t value quality or regard it as ubiquitous. Changing that requires shifting what they value rather than just the value itself.

Incidentally – one of my rules from when I worked in direct marketing was that it was always better to give than to lose. I always used to try and keep prices up by giving consumers more product(s) for the same amount rather than the same product for less cost. Oh, and make that “extra something” a little treat if you can – for the reasons Lucas outlined above.

Four hard yards

Sitting in the lounge waiting to board yet another plane, it’s fascinating how many people are busy. Laptops open everywhere, conversations on smartphones everywhere (at various levels of discretion). No-one wants to miss a minute. And yet today Borders tanked, and local book chain Whitcoulls announced it’s in schtum …

I wonder how many of their senior people are at work right now still believing that hard work alone will get them through …

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting things to change. Somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to be lulled into the false security of doing. Things will just be fine if we work hard, advertise hard, sell hard. But while all this is happening – while everyone is working hard out – it’s easy to forget the real things that actually put distance between you and circumstances.

1. Look hard – at what’s really happening and ask the hard questions about what that might mean

2. Brand hard – so that you continue to mean something exciting rather than just selling things

3. Finance hard – so that you have debt structures that are at least viable

4. React hard – read what’s happening and make the difficult decisions

I call them the four hard yards, because if they were easy everyone would be doing them.

What’s your reply?

“I can’t believe they got that job. We are so much better than them”. We’ve all heard that. Some of us have said it. Here’s the question. Then, why did they get it?

If it was price, what did they do to their cost structures to make their price possible?

If it was networks, what are they doing or who do they know that you don’t?

If it was credibility, what makes them a more comfortable choice than you?

So many companies respond to a competitor’s wins with excuses. The companies I like are the ones that use every loss as an opportunity to re-evaluate if and how they themselves need to change.

Sometimes, decisions are a bit like email. It’s not the message you get that counts. It’s the way you choose to reply.

The real recipe for Coke’s success

So someone’s supposedly discovered the recipe for Coca Cola. What does that mean for the world’s most popular drink? Very little I would have thought. Because the world’s most closely guarded beverage trade secret has already done its job – it has helped build perhaps the most consistently powerful brand in the world. Beyond that, its value as a formula today is questionable.

Even if someone did replicate the taste, so what? They still wouldn’t be Coke. Great brands grow beyond the products they marque. They actually come to embody ideas – such as happiness in the case of Coca Cola – that the product reports to, and not the other way round.

The New Coke debacle might suggest otherwise to some, but to me that was much more about changing a product that consumers held dear rather than a taste issue. Consumers expressed their apprehension by citing taste, but taste, in my reading of this particular case, was the identifier to the wider fear. What they were really saying is – don’t touch.

So often brands think that their product recipe is the greatest thing they have to offer. They trademark their products or their designs and think the business and the brand is future-proofed. Not so. IP protection is important, don’t get me wrong, but it must form part of the wider, on-going telling of a compelling and relevant brand story.

In today’s environment, where no secret is safe (even the secrets of diplomats) and all products get to a point of being pretty much on par technically, I think you have to assume that a trade secret alone will not be enough. Coke recognised that a very long time ago and used its “secret” recipe to build its brand. Same with the KFC Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices. A food scientist could probably break those down in an instant. Fine, it’s done its job.

However, there is another side to this. Talking with Alex today, she made the very good point that releasing the recipe does demystify the Coke brand just a little, and, more to the point, if there was anything in the recipe that consumers hadn’t known about then that could indeed have jeopardised Coke’s brand equity.

That doesn’t seem to have been an issue in this case – beyond the widely known inclusion of coca – but, as Alex so wickedly asked, what if it had? Wow.

Ten minutes of Gaga

If I was a Lady Gaga fan, how would I feel about her claim to have written her latest single in 10 minutes? Would I see that as a sign of her huge creativity? Or would I, on reflection, consider that the return for minutes invested, assuming this is another big hit, is going to make most Wall Street bonuses look relatively modest?

A cynic might say if it just took 10 minutes then she didn’t do a lot to make a lot.

It didn’t take 10 minutes of course. It took all the experience that Gaga brought up to that moment, and all the subsequent time it took, both hers and for everyone else involved – to get the ideas in the song expressed, captured, edited, packaged, marketed and distributed; time probably better expressed in at least months. So the key value metric here is misleading; it’s not actually time to create (the idea), it’s time to market (the final result). By drawing attention to the 10 minutes, Gaga has framed the product in the shortest terms, for reasons that she perhaps believes celebrate her artistry.

But audiences aren’t buying what she created in 10 minutes. They’re buying the end results of endless days by named and unnamed people to bring that idea alive. Critical distinction.

And in drawing attention to the 10 minutes she took, Gaga has, unwittingly or otherwise, devalued all of their time and contributions. I think they’ve been short-changed.

Gaga’s not alone of course in framing the value of what she does in this way. So many organisations want to explain what they offer in terms of the time it took, or didn’t take them – speed, somehow, being associated in the creative industries with genius or inspiration. But actually, for almost all of us, there is a massive difference between the creating minutes and the time we bring to a project through our past experience, and another chasm again, on the other side, between the formation of the concept and its cumulative delivery to market.

If you’re going to, or feel you have to, talk about time at all in conjunction with what you do, it’s that amount of time – the time it took to go from idea to shelf, and the time you had already invested before you had the idea in the first place – that you should be framing in your stories, because that amount of time feels careful and prudent and determined and produced.

10 minutes feels like what it is. A cup of tea.

The power of occasions

Habits are powerful, but occasions may be even more so. I think they engage us so effectively because they combine time and focus. And because of that, they provide permission – it’s OK to behave this way or that. It’s OK to do something you wouldn’t do on any ordinary day.

If you’re a smart brand, you’ll find a way to hook into that; to link what you’re about to what people are thinking about on specific occasions. You’ll give them a reason and a way to excel at the emotion of the moment.

On Valentine’s Day it seems appropriate to look at a brand that used the occasion of declaring love to forge one of the most powerful marketing campaigns of all time.

De Beers have turned a diamond into the embodiment of eternity with their sublime catch-phrase ‘A diamond is forever’. They’ve linked the optimism and romance of occasions like engagements and weddings with the promise to stay together ‘till death do us part’. They have encapsulated all that in a single symbol that is desirable, exceptional, immediately recognisable and intended to be presented on a specific occasion of peak emotion and worn from that moment on.

Then they charge the earth for it. Just to make it even more special.

Genius.

The value of market valuations

Now it’s Twitter’s turn to be valued like a phone number, and it seems I’m not the only one thinking this is just a little OTT. Google’s Eric Schmidt says there are clear signs of a bubble. Great. Then he adds: “But valuations are what they are. People believe that these companies will achieve huge sales in the future.”

Isn’t that the point of bubbles? They’re based on valuations, and hopes, which people say are beliefs, and for some reason we accord these valuations the status of quasi-science. They are of course nothing of the sort. They are today’s guess, this minute’s emotional response, a numeric whim – surely that was the point of the GFC.

Let me apply another quote from my friend Gren. Twitter worth $10 billion, with the potential to grow into a $100 billion company? “That’s dumber than a box of hammers.” Or maybe not. At least with a hammer you can nail something down.

Groupon humour. Save us please.

So everyday discounters Groupon chose the most expensive ad day of the year to draw attention to themselves, and somehow came out the other side looking cheaper than their specials.

Is that funny? Does it even make sense? Could they be more glib?

Here’s their justification.

Sorry but this wasn’t clever advertising. Or smart, edgy or provocative advertising. To me, this was just outright dumb ego-drumming dressed up to be “dangerous”. I’d have fired agency Crispin Porter Bogusky just for presenting that work … (Shame. They were a great agency once.)

So why did Groupon do it? Fame, laughs, traffic …?

Attention is a very dangerous metric when it becomes an end in itself. In the bid to cut through the clutter of the most intense ad-space, the temptation is to throw out all the rules just to get the looks. But if you raise awareness and compromise or confuse the integrity of your brand, was that moment’s notice really worth it?

And if you just did it to get people talking about you, does that change the fact that you were prepared to trivialise the plight of a culture just to get attention? Was this just another Kenneth Cole?

From a reputation point of view, what does this spot say about Groupon’s sincerity as a brand? About as much as the CEO’s apology I would have thought.

If I was a Groupon investor, I would really, really have my doubts – not just about the way my money was being used, but about the judgment of those charged with using that money responsibly. Perhaps the next time Groupon came looking for backing I would do exactly what they suggest – save the money.

Huff or puff?

What to read into AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post for 32 times earnings? Another sign of a social media bubble? A bid for respectability by the corporate that, for many, has defined the unsuccessful merger?

Just as importantly, I’m struggling to get my head around the brand compatibility. Huffington Post – smart, sassy, informed. AOL – huge (though nowhere near as big as it was), dial up, looking to get back some high ground. Seems like Huff is looking for scale here, while AOL is looking for the quality they believe will drive advertising sales. I hope this doesn’t turn into a bun-fight between resources and returns. I’d also hate to see Huff Post’s integrity and feisty character compromised by the juggernaut.

And while Arianna Huffington herself may have done this partly because she’s worried that the Post is erring towards “the innovator’s dilemma” of sticking too closely to its strategy, I’m sure I don’t need to remind her that corporate history is littered with the wrecks of brands who tried to be too clever, forgot their core business or diversified/expanded their way into oblivion.