Influential Marketing Blog

The Best & Worst Marketing From BlackFriday + CyberMonday

The fact that most retailers use the term "doorbuster" to describe their best deals from this weekend should tell you everything you need to know about the frenzied few days of retail activity that traditionally follows Thanksgiving day in America. Despite futile protests from lots of unfortunate retail workers who had to give up parts of their holiday, stores opened earlier on Thursday night for "Black Friday" and tried hard to capitalize on the extended hours to sell more stuff at deeply discounted prices.

Today the weekend is extended into the invented "Cyber Monday" where shoppers retreat into their homes or offices for another day of deal seeking. Amidst the excitement, some brands found great ways to stand out while others focused on the meaningless or insulting to try and capture attention. Here are just a few that stood out to me as a consumer and marketer watching the frenzy unfold:

BEST - Best Buy And The $199 TV

In terms of pre-buzz, Best Buy had the lion's share thanks to their hottest deal - a Sharp 42 inch HDTV for only $199. People waited all night to pick up one, and before you immediately criticize them - think of it in financial terms. If you have to wait for 12 hours to buy a TV that you can save about $600 on, you're effectively getting "paid" $50 an hour. It's strange reasoning, but certainly enough to keep someone in line to get a high value item - and enough to get lots of attention for Best Buy.

BEST - Virgin America and GiltCity.com Let You Name A Plane

It is wonderfully ironic that one of the best and most talked about deals of CyberMonday was for an offer that almost no one would ever actually buy. Virgin America partnered with Gilt City to offer up a plane for a charter flight for "you and 146 of your closest friends" for the small fee of $60,000. As a side benefit, you would get to name the flight as well. Seems like the perfect ready made publicity stunt for a small or medium sized business that could afford the fee to go after.

BEST - Dyson Special Deals

If you own a Dyson (which I do), you are usually part of a cult of believers ready to talk about the superiority of Dyson vacuums to anyone who will listen. You probably also know that they rarely come on sale, so when Dyson launched their special Cyber Monday deals, everything about it seems limited. There is an hourly countdown on their landing page. All of it is geared towards offering a sense of urgency. The promotional message and strategy is clear and simple: buy that new Dyson you have had your eye on TODAY (and in the next eleven hours) or you'll miss your shot.

WORST - Kohl's Rebecca

It may not be the greatest marketing strategy to remake a song that most people already thought was super annoying into a TV spot ... but it wasn't the song that made this spot stand out as much as the attitude it promotes. The lead actor does a great job portraying the kind of person you would hate to be in the same room with - she pushes an old lady out of the way to get into the store, grabs merchandise out of a fellow shopper's cart and seems only concerned about herself. You only hope their consumers were actually more well behaved on Black Friday night.

WORST - Motorola Droid Razr

Running almost nonstop during NFL games for the past several weeks, Motorola has created a brilliantly meaningless campaign for the new Droid Razr. Promising that "thin is no longer frail" and sharing that this phone is "too powerful to fall into the wrong hands" - the entire ad focuses on what some research must have shown would be the only things people care about in phones: that they are thin and light. While other phones promote the interface or what you can do with it, the Droid Razr is super thin and powerful in some indescribable way. I'm sure it would be great if you are in a Tron-style boomerang battle with a bad guy, but slightly confusing as a killer feature for a phone. I only hope Lex Luthor doesn't get his hands on this phone. I'm pretty sure those would be the "wrong hands."

WORST - Crazy Target Lady

The underlying message from the series of spots showing an overly excited crazy lady "training" for Black Friday at Target as if it were a marathon seems clear: you have to be sad, lonely and slightly crazy to be super excited about Black Friday. I have never been a fan of this sort of talking down to your customer or turning them into a parody. There are plenty of people who did stay up late and go into Target at midnight because they wanted to get some great deals and love the store. Does Target really need to make fun of them or turn them into crazy caricatures in a national TV spot? People usually have a hard time appreciating humor when it comes at their expense.

Clearly the list for best and worst could go on and on. What other retailers created memorable campaigns for better or worse? Let me know in a comment or tweet about them with the hashtag #cybermondaymarketing or #blackfridaymarketing.

The Anchoring Principle

On Black Friday, think about the most expensive product that you sell.  If you followed the advice of one particular behavioural economist named William Poundstone – you should triple it.  Last year Poundstone published a book called Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How To Take Advantage Of It) where he shared a core principle that many others in the behavioural economics field have written about as well. 

It is called “anchoring” and it refers to the practice of using one high priced product or service option (an anchor) to make everything else that you sell seem cheaper by comparison. It is a simple idea, but one that is repeated over and over by large businesses as they focus on the psychology of selling.  It is also a principle that can help your small business.

In practice, it might seem a bit dishonest to use a trick like this. The truth that Poundstone argues in his book is that in reality people are clueless about what goods should be worth and what they would be willing to pay. How do you know that a mango should cost a dollar, or a DVD should be $24.99? These are arbitrary prices set based on what we are conditioned to expect in the market. The negative side of this is that when we expect to pay a certain amount for something, we may be ready to overpay.

This principle of anchoring is one that can be used to describe all kinds of situations we might see in real life, from the rationale behind why lawyers in personal injury cases often demand completely unreasonable amounts of money for compensation (eg - $20 million for the woman who spilled hot McDonald’s coffee on herself and sued them because the coffee was “too hot”).  When you ask for that much, settling for $2 million seems like a great deal.

Street vendors use this principle often, as you may head to any country in the world and the first price you get from a street vendor may be exorbitantly high – but fairly quickly they are eager to drop the price by 50% or more.

Pricing is always a tricky question as you try to determine what the true value is for what you have to offer.  Anchoring can be one way to help you get the most for all that you do, simply by giving your consumers an option that most will never take.  The side benefit of this is that you might even sell your high priced service or product to a few customers as well.

Human Sizing: Why Offering Less Is A Great Business Strategy

One of the truths of many American chain restaurants is that they all offer a portion size that no normal person could possibly finish. In theory, this is meant to ensure that you always have some food to take home – though critics will often point to this lack of portion control as a major factor in the obesity epidemic in America and its growth in many other countries around the world. Indeed, in the US, we seem to love celebrating the oversized – believe it or not there is even a Major League of Eating.

We have come to expect that portion sizes for everything from restaurant dinner entrees to movie popcorn will be huge.  Several months ago, my wife was attending a premiere of a new Bollywood film and sitting behind a famous and well known Indian actor. As someone brought him a “regular” size popcorn and coke to enjoy at the movie, he handed back the tub and asked for a “human sized” portion. 

Finding anything human sized is tougher and tougher these days – and the effect is going far beyond food.  Have you ever used the most of the special features on your phone?  How many of the hundreds of cable TV channels that you pay for every month do you actually ever watch? In a culture where excess is expected, your small business is constantly under pressure to offer more for less. Unfortunately, the cost of goods or services is a real cost which doesn’t scale.

How might you get around this without your customers feeling like you are skimping or just offering less value than your competition?  One trend in your favor is that there are plenty of consumers who would gladly pay the same amount (and perhaps sometimes even more) if they could find a “human sized” option. We don’t automatically want more or bigger stuff, we just want more value and offering less can be a type of value.

Small sized packages of snacks proudly declare they are “100 calorie servings” now. Apple is a brand that has become famous mainly for producing a VERY small number of products. Small is the new big – and that means simplicity can lead to a very profitable business strategy.

How many of us wake up and ask ourselves how we can offer LESS than our competition?  Probably no one – yet that may be the most important question you can ask yourself about your small business. Slapping more food on a plate, or more features into a list is not the same thing as offering more value.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is offer less.

Why Sitting On The Sidelines May Be More Useful Than You Think

Yesterday evening the Green Bay Packers won their ninth game of the NFL football season after winning the Super Bowl last year. They are the only undefeated team in the NFL and their quarterback, Aaron Rodgers managed a near perfect rating on the scale used to rate quarterback performance. It was the ninth straight game where he managed a rating above 100.0 - a recordmaking performance by football standards and took another step towards securing his place among the great NFL quarterbacks in history.

The man he succeeded, Brett Favre, was also on that list ... bringing back memories of a similar feat more than a decade ago where a quarterback named Steve Young took over from legendary San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana and led the 49ers to similar success. They are both great stories for football fans, but the bigger question anyone might wonder is what made both of these guys so good that they could overcome the considerable shadows of their immediate predecessors?

According to a recent article published in Pyschology Today, it might have something to do with a factor known as "mental practice." In a study with medical students, researchers found that students who had 30 minutes of guided physical practice on a new procedure followed by either 30 minutes more practice independently, or 30 minutes of "mental practice" performed equally well on tasks. In fact, one researcher even noted that "mental rehearsal can be even better than physical practice because it activates more abstract neural representations of physical skills (with less specific detail about the muscles used)."

Both Steve Young and Aaron Rodgers spent time on the sidelines watching two of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. They worked with them and learned from them. Most importantly, when their respective chances came to perform, they seized them. Of course if this were a perfect explanation, then any quarterback who plays backup to a legend would emerge as well - but they usually don't. Still, the idea of the importance of mental practice is one that can apply far beyond football.

Some of the greatest public speakers actively despise actual rehearsals. Instead they would rather "practice" in their minds. Champions of mental games such as professional poker, or spelling bees, or even TV game shows like Jeopardy seem to use a similar type of technique. The point is, when we think of practicing or rehearsing, we generally think of real life work. And that work is still important. Sometimes, though, the most important thing to improve performance might be more mental practice instead. In other words, there may be value in sitting on the sidelines even though it doesn't seem like it.

Ashton Kutcher And The Social Media Scalability Problem

As many media outlets have reported over the weekend, yesterday Ashton Kutcher (the actor and first celebrity to hit 1 million followers on Twitter), walked past a television and saw that the longtime coach of the football team from Penn State University had been fired. As an alum of a rival school, he immediately tweeted about the firing:

The only problem with his rapid response was that it was only in reaction to a part of the story. As Kutcher later learned, the coach (Joe Paterno) had actually been fired over a scandal with one of his coaching assistants and child abuse. He quickly shut down his Twitter account, and then restarted it and apologized for his misinformed tweet ... but the damage had already been done. He had unintentionally blasted out to his 8 million followers a mistake that demonstrated his disconnection from all the overblown media attention that the scandal had been receiving over the past week.

Should actors be required to keep up with current events? Probably not, and there are plenty of people in America who remain equally uninformed about what is going on in the world - but from a marketing perspective, his reaction to the whole situation in a lengthy blog post was the most interesting aspect of this whole situation:

“While I feel that running this feed myself gives me a closer relationship to my friends and fans I've come to realize that it has grown into more than a fun tool to communicate with people. While I will continue to express myself through @Aplusk, I'm going to turn the management of the feed over to my team at Katalyst as a secondary editorial measure, to ensure the quality of its content.”

Could it be that the real problem with something like Twitter comes from the fact that you have an individually controlled media platform that (in theory) could reach more than 8 million followers, without any editorial filter? As Ashton notes in his post, when an audience grows to that size, it may just become too much for a single person to handle.

Ultimately, his experience perfectly illustrates the exact same problem facing any brand which is actively using social media to communicate with their customers. At some point it becomes too much for one person to handle and you need to scale your team. I had an interesting thought about this exact problem this weekend as I went to see the new Harold and Kumar movie. There was a little girl cast in the movie, and the end credits showed that her character was played by a set of triplets. Using twins or triplets in kids roles for movies is nothing new, and it makes a lot of sense. One kid gets tired, you can just swap another one in since they all look the same.

What if we thought about scaling social media along the same lines? Not to create a group of robots who can't think for themselves, but to have a team of people who all work so seamlessly together that the customers can't tell the difference. The trick to doing this well, of course, is to not suck all the personality from your people in an effort to make them appear outwardly the same. It can be done through a combination of great training and empowering your people - but it is still rare to see.

In the meantime, desperate for an easier option, Ashton Kutcher promises to do the same thing that brands are doing ... outsourcing the management of his voice and hoping for a better result.

How To Benefit From A Corporate Master Brand

The romantic way to think about an entrepreneur and a small business owner is as someone who has no real rules they need to follow. As opposed to the worker chained to a corporate job, many small business owners have indeed chosen their path specifically because they wanted to control their own destiny and escape the world of having a boss.

The truth is, there are many way to have your own small business and control your own destiny without necessarily having a complete autonomy over everything you do.  Franchising, for example, is a well known mixture of having your own business while still maintaining some connection to a larger brand. Real estate agent, gas station owners, insurance agents, automotive dealers, accountants – these are all professions where small business owners might still report into some sort of a corporate structure and benefit from their association with a national brand for marketing and credibility.

In these worlds, small business owners recognize that they walk a line between complete independence and adhering to some sort of corporate structure. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing – as long as you maintain your ability to stay independent while using the benefit of the corporate structure while avoiding the potential down sides.  Here are a few ideas on how to do it:

1. Take the credit. You and your fellow business owners understand the difference between the business you are running and your corporate team, but the average customer probably doesn’t think about it much. As far as they know, the print ad they saw in Vogue was your ad. The TV spot was done with your business in mind.  Most won’t think you paid for it, of course, but don’t shy away from that investment – be open to taking some credit for it.
2. Know when to zag.  There is no reason when you are running a small business that you should feel accountable to answer for the sins of your father or your brother. When there is a master brand crisis, or a situation with another small business owner in another region – there will always be a way to deal with it that relates specifically to your market and your business. You don’t need to solve the issue for the overall brand … there is hopefully a team already working on that.  You need to manage the risk to your business in whatever way you can.
3. Look to the superstars outside your brand.  Outside of your brand, there are other small business owners who are making masterful use of their corporate brands while standing out in their regions. Those can be great examples of what you may want to try in your industry and in your brand.

Survive The Modern Believability Crisis: Be Meaningful

Last year when I spoke at a TEDx conference on reinventing marketing, I asked what I thought at the time was a relatively innocent question: "how many people in the audience feel that marketing is adding something positive to the world around them?" Of the few hands that went up, the majority came from people in marketing ... underscoring a gulf that has exponentially multipled in the 16 months since that talk. Today people around the world are launching full occupying demonstrations against big corporate brands and new research points to the US as the only country to see trust in all institutions decline from 2010 to 2011.  The bottom line is we are fully into a modern believability crisis.

And it is not just a crisis for marketing people either. When we live in a world where people become skeptical of everything around them and wary of any type of manipulation, we all lose. Society itself becomes a tougher place to interact with others and survive in. People only consume news they agree with, compromise is seen as surrender and the bickering of politicians becomes just a precursor to a similar toxic dissent which may start to invade the rest of our lives and interactions. 

If this seems like a doomsday scenario, the good news is that this week signs of hope emerged from some very unexpected places:

Though certainly colored by politics, Bill Clinton's new book Back To Work was profiled in yesterday's New York Times. In the review, reporter Michiko Kakutani says that Clinton "serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem."

Also this week, communications agency Havas Media released a global study which showed that "only 20% of brands have a notable positive impact on our sense of wellbeing and quality of life." In the research which polled 50,000 people in 14 countries, they found that "most people would not care if 70% of brands ceased to exist (and in the US alone this number goes up to 82%)."

In a related point, they found that "nearly 85% of consumers worldwide expect companies to become actively involved in solving these issues (an increase of 15% from 2010)." The underlying message of the research is that companies must find a way to stand for more than just the products they make.  The impact they have on the world around them is becoming increasingly important to increasing customer loyalty.

Today I am speaking and participating in BrandsConf, a conference all about how brands can rediscover their humanity. More than two dozen speakers will share their thoughts in short bursts of 5 or 10 minutes each on how to add more humanity to the way that large organizations communicate. It could not have come at a better time. This idea of more human brands is closely related to why companies matter more to people.  Yes, a big part of it is how you choose to do business in the world and whether it is sustainable and responsible.  The other important piece, however, is the people who represent your brand and the human connection they can offer.

The real battle today isn't one of perception ... but one of meaning. In a sense, this is the big problem I am writing a book about how to solve (Likeonomics) - and one that the many speakers today will likely cover. Ultimately solving it will require a new level of organizational vulnerability and commitment for them to be more human and more honest. Honesty creates trust, and trust leads to us changing the culture of business and our culture itself.

I saw this first hand last week at the Opportunity Nation Summit as well, where business, religious, political and media leaders came together to talk about the importance for all of us to create a nation of opportunity for everyone. For too long, as the summit shared, the zip code you are born in determines our future. That shouldn't be the case.  Business has an important role to play in this revolution ... and it isn't to sit back and let the attacks fly.

In a skeptical world where honesty has become the most unexpected thing of all ... making your brand meaningful to your consumer's life comes first from finding a way to tell the truth when you answer the question of whether you are offering anything positive to the world. Being meaningful is the new secret to creating long term brand value.

5 Tips For Getting More Press Coverage

One question that many small business owners often wonder is how to get more media attention for their small business. Just because you are a modest sized business, though, doesn’t mean that you should only aim for small localized coverage.  There is nothing wrong with branching out beyond your immediate market and aiming bigger as well.

The truth is that while there is no real substitute for getting a smart and dedicated PR professional to focus on helping you to promote your small business – you can still do a remarkable amount on your own by starting with a few simple techniques that the pros use:

1. Watch the editorial calendars.  Larger publications and those with a longer lead time (like magazines) are typically put together weeks or even months in advance. Most of them will publish what is called an editorial calendar, that shares what they will be writing about in upcoming issues. Think of it as a sneak peek into what stories will get published … and also a way for you to position your business as a potential part of one or more of those upcoming stories.
2. Create an influencer/reporter watch list. Reporters are assigned “beats” to cover, which generally refers to which topics they will write about.  Try to create a short list of 5-10 journalists who often write about topics that are relevant to your business or your region if the majority of your customers are local to a particular area.  A good place to start is a website called www.muckrack.com which lists all the journalists who are using social media tools actively – offering an easy way to watch what they write about an eventually reach out to them as well.
3. Build personal connections.  In the world of media, the old cliché of “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” really applies. The more personal connections you can have with journalists, either through meeting in person if you happen to be at the same events, or virtually if you are able to connect over email or social media … the more likely you are to be considered as a source for an upcoming story.
4. Pitch with headlines and impact.  When it comes to “the pitch,” as an email or phone call to a journalist trying to convince them to talk about your small business is often called, think in terms of headlines.  What is the macro trend or story that you are trying to be a part of?  Ideally, it is bigger than just your business and something new and relevant.  This is the one step where you can get the most benefit from professional help (along with hiring someone with the right media connections, of course).
5. Make your own coverage.  Getting mentioned in a piece that a journalist writes can be great media exposure, but we also live in a world where you can make your own coverage. This means starting to use tools like blogs and Twitter to share a strong point of view and expertise. If social media isn’t your cup of tea, consider penning a guest article or opinion piece to be published in a relevant media source.  All of these can be excellent ways of getting the message about your business out without relying on a journalist to include you in a story.