Hail Of A Day

This is a clever article in the New York Times about hits and misses in advertising gimmicks.  I was particularly drawn to this ad in which Chevy made a billboard of pennies.  They say that it was picked clean in 30 minutes.  At first, I thought, What a bunch of cheapskates that would pick pennies off a billboard!  But then I thought, It’s gotta be people that are planted by Chevy.  Their campaign worked, because it got in the New York Times.

Advertising - Summer Silliness Brings a Pizza Field and a Giant Oreo - NYTimes.com

I heard about this company called Little Miss Matched from Seth Godin’s blog. What a cool and innovative idea. Mismatching clothes, on purpose. The clothes like socks, for instance, come in a three pack and they are they are usually either complimentary colors or patterns, but neither sock is identical.

Apparently, teenage girls are going nuts over this, so you’re about to start seeing their stuff popping up all over the place as it’s an emerging trend that big retailers don’t want to get left behind on.

Knowing this, I wish that I had jumped on this trend in college when I was poor and fashion-brilliant.  I wore mismatching clothes all the time.  In fact, I could have started a company that sold underwear with holes in them.  Hole-y Underwear.  I certainly had enough inventory to get started.

LittleMissMatched - Creative Fashion - Nothing Matches but Anything Goes!

Branding in this day and age is quite difficult. You can see the evolution of media dating back to the days when families would gather around the family radio and listen to their shows. Often there were only one or more stations to choose from. Then came tv, still you had only a handful of stations, but now you had tv and radio. The original sponsors of tv and radio got the deluxe commercial pitch. They unabashedly promoted the sponsor and people bought into it. As the choices increased and the show sponsorship was fractioned, it became an issue of buying massive amounts of air time and print for a couple to successfully launch an d sustain a brand.

Then, the internet enters the picture. By this point in society, we are so bombarded with messages and choices, we are not allowed the luxury of having a brand emblazoned into our subconscious unless it is in every form of media and cleverly done. We have to be handed units of software for free and treated like we’re greek gods or we won’t acknowledge a company’s existence. The age of the consumer has arrived.

It’s two different worlds: simplified, but monopolized corporations or chaotic, overwhelming array of small/medium size businesses and large companies split into smaller brands. Both have their pros and cons, but like everything in life, I’m sure a balance is probably the best. Here’s a blog entry from Seth Godin talking about this subject…

From Seth Grodin’s Blog:

Magically delicious

This is absolutely brilliant. Weezer once again knocks the ball out of the park with this video that ingeniously features tons of the last couple years’ viral internet stars.

I was just talking about this with my colleague… the trends of business communication. Bad news for large companies, agencies and service industries, but good news for the small business owner and the customer.  The individual has more power with all of the tools at his/her disposal.

From Chris Brogan’s Blog:

Jumping Over a Mountain

I believe this with all my heart: the way these new tools make the web work for us will (is!) dramatically impact the how/why/when of business communications and collaboration of all kinds. In ways, this impact is not too far afield from what Thomas Friedman talked about in THE WORLD IS FLAT. In this book, we learned how to move things that added value to our organization closer to the core of what we do, and how to disaggregate those things that aren’t as important and push those out to the fringe. It’s never safe to predict the future, but I want you to think about this, and see if it resonates. Disagree with me in the comments. We’ll talk about it.

I believe we’re going to shift back to thinking customer service and community management are the core and not the fringe. I believe we’re going to move our communications practices back in-house for lots of what is currently pushed out to agencies and organizations. I believe that integrity, reputation, skills, and personality are going to trump some of our previous measures of professional ability. I believe the web and our devices will continue to move into tighter friendships, and that we will continue to train our devices to interpret more of the world around us on our behalf.

I believe working remotely will become the rule, not the exception, and that we’ll replace some portion of office-meeting time with video now that it’s free-to-cheap. I believe that our business practices, processes, and output will modularize the way widgets have changed web design.

And not unlike Guy Kawasaki’s example of the ice blocks, to ice houses, to refrigerators analogy, I believe that the difference between how you perceive your role in all this and what will really make the difference is far apart.

It might be time to start thinking about jumping over a mountain. Because linear thinking won’t bring about what comes next. It will take a jet pack’s difference in your thinking.

What’s your prediction? How far off am I? What are you doing to get ready to jump over that mountain?

Tags: GuyKawasaki, Chris Brogan, community

From Seth Godin:

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
• In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
• Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
• You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
• Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.