Influential Marketing Blog

What Paulo Coelho Can Teach You About Storytelling & Writing

Sitting in a hotel room tonight putting the finishing touches on a presentation I am giving today on storytelling, I got an irresistable update to a new blog post over on Tim Ferriss' blog featuring a podcast interview with one of my longtime inspirations as a writer - Paolo Coelho.  His book The Alchemist is a life changing experience for anyone I know who has read it (including me). So when Tim published his interview, I immediately listened to the whole thing. I highly recommend it. 

In the midst of finishing my presentation and also putting the last edits together on my second book, the timing was perfect for the interview ... which perhaps explains why I've spent the last hour procrastinating on finishing my presentation and writing this post instead. But if you aspire to write anything from a book to a great blog post, I guarantee that some of Coelho's tips below will help. Here are his frequently "tweetworthy" quotes that I wrote down from his audio podcast:

On Inspiration: "I procrastinate, check some emails ... then I start. I write my books very quickly because I cannot stop."

On Confidence: "You cannot sell your next book by underrating your book that was just published. Be proud of what you have."

On Simplicity: "What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple."
On Trust: "Trust your reader. Don't try to describe things. Give a hint and they will fulfill this hint with their own imagination."

On Writing: "I write the book that wants to be written. Behind the first sentence is a thread that takes you to the last." 

On Expertise: "You cannot take something out of nothing. When you write a book, you use your experience."

On Critics: "Writers want to please their peers. They want to be recognized. Forget about this. Who cares? You should care to share your soul and not to please other writers who will write a review that nobody is going to read."

On Overcoming Stagnation: "If I don't feel inspired, I need to move forward. You need to have be disciplined."

On Research: "If you overload your book with a lot of research, you are going to be very boring to yourself and to your reader.  Books are not there to show how intelligent you are. Books are there to show your soul."

On Notetaking: "I use notes to take them out of my head. I will never use them the next day - they will be useless."

On Story Arcs: "There are only four types of stories: lovestory between 2 people, lovestory between 3 people, a struggle for power, and a journey."

On Style: "Don't try to innovate storytelling. Tell a good story and it is magical. I see people trying to work so much in style, finding different ways to tell the same thing. It is like fashion. Style is the dress, but the dress does not dictate what is inside the dress. What counts is the person."

On Notetaking: "If you want to capture ideas, you are lost. You are going to be detached from emotions and forget to live your life. You will be an observer and not a human being living his or her life. Forget notetaking. What is important remains, what is not important goes away."

On The Alchemist: "I wanted to write a story about my life. But I don't know why I chose a shepard. I've never been a shepard. When you write a book in one act, it is not such an effort to write it."

Thanks to Tim for offering up access to the mind of one of the most prolific and inspirational modern fiction writers - and to Paolo Coelho himself for taking the time to sit down and take all of us behind the scenes on how the magic really happens. 

Honda Masters The Art of Marketing Timing

Every year at the start of the new year there is something that most of us do without realizing it. It is related to making new year's resolutions, but it is more about sequencing your long term goals into the order in which you want to achieve them. One example might be saying to yourself, "I want to be married and then have a kid before I turn 35." Life is full of these little promises. So full, in fact, that often we make them to ourselves without even thinking. It raises an interesting marketing question as well.

What would it take to get a customer to reevaluate the life sequence they have already set for themselves?

It becomes a particularly important question when you consider a brand selling a product that is all about fitting into the right stage in life. A product, for example, like a car. When you consider when people buy new cars, it is very much about life's stages. Graduating from college, landing a new job, getting married or having a kid. Each of these life changes can often be triggers to consider buying a new car.

Honda's new campaign for the CRV may have found one way to solve that challenge. With their Honda LeapList campaign, they encourage consumers to go online and make their own lists of what they want to accomplish before they turn 30, or what they want to do before they get married. It is a brilliant way not only to encourage people to dream and perhaps even act on their longstanding dream to travel the world, but also to encourage them to think about how getting a new car might fit into that sequence. The underlying message is a perfect one for their consumers: why wait? You can do all the things you want to do, and you can do them on your own time. But maybe you should just think about buying that car right now instead of waiting.

Sure it's clearly a marketing message - but what they perfectly prove is something that any marketers would do well to remember. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to sell your product is help your customers to imagine exactly when they should buy it.

I Like You, But Not That Way: How Retailers Lose & Win Back Customers

"3D Catalog" is a phrase you will see in a few articles about the retail industry these days. Unfortunately, it's not a cool new interactive augmented reality thing. This is a term that describes the fears of many real life retailers who are afraid of becoming a place where consumers just go to touch and feel products that they will eventually buy from Amazon or another discounted online store. There are plenty of reasons why this is an understandable fear.

Right now the most viewed and popular blog post on Forbes.com is titled "Why Best Buy Is Going Out Of Business, Gradually." In it, author Larry Downes argues that Best Buy is managing to deliver on none of the things like knowledgeable staff or better showrooms which could make them a destination worth visiting. Instead, he argues, it is a retailer of last resort or a place where you just go to see products that you will eventually buy elsewhere.

Borders Books went into bankruptcy over the past year, and one of the contributing factors was they had more browsers than buyers walking through their stores. This past Black Friday retail season, online sales were a higher overall percentage of consumer spending than ever before - and this has been the trend for the last several years.

The whole situation might remind you of a mismatched relationship, where one person just wants to be friends while the other wants more than that.  Those situations never end well. Best Buy wants to marry your wallet, but instead they are getting dumped after a one night stand. It is a sad story, with some fairly clear reasons for why it happens over and over:

1. There is better interactive product information online - with all of the online product demos, 3D product shots and direct information from manufacturers - you can often get the best information about particular products and the ability to comparison shop online.
2. Online reviews are highly influential - there is a reason that more than 80% of all consumers read online reviews before making purchase decisions. We trust in the opinions of others, even if we don't know them personally - and these online reviews are a huge factor in closing a sale, or losing a customer.
3. Retailers can't match lower prices available online - the most logical and common argument is that you can just get any product for cheaper online because the online retailers have much lower overhead to cover because of not having a physical store.

So how can retailers survive this pressure and avoid becoming nothing more than a real life catalogs fueling the sales of their online rivals? It comes down to understanding the three areas where a real life presence still matters, and trying to sit at the intersection of all three. When I think about the real life stores that I have gone to in order to buy a product that I could have purchased online, it was for one of three reasons:

1. Ease - the store was close to me, or the product was large (like a snow blower) and therefore the online channel was too risky or inconvenient and I went to my local store instead.
2. Relationship - I had a personal relationship with a person at my local store and therefore had built up trust in them and the experience that they offered me.  As a result, I continued to go there despite having other options to purchase online.
3. Expertise - In some cases, you just need to speak to someone who knows what they are talking about. Earlier this year when I went to buy a new tent and sleeping bag for a camping trip with my son, I went into the local store to speak to someone who knew our area and could provide useful advice on what to get.

Until retailers are able to find the right way to focus on combining these three together into an experience worth having and sharing, they will continue to lose out to the speedier and always available retailers online.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

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.

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.

Audubon Society Promotes Happy Bird Watching, Not Angry Bird Tossing

Imagine you're the marketing team at the Audubon Society, a group that has been around for nearly a century and your mission for that time has been to promote better man-bird relations -- how would you respond to a internationally addictive game which has been downloaded more than 400 million times that portrays your heroes as "angry" and encourages people to toss them into stuff for prizes?

The question probably isn't a fair one, as I imagine the Audubon Society probably hasn't lost much sleep over how the wildly popular Angry Birds mobile game has portrayed birds ... but it does bring birds and the pasttime of "birding" some long overdue attention.

Birding, as I once learned from one of my professors of English who was addicted to the activity, usually involves heading out to the forest and looking through binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses for different types of birds. Once seen, a bird is typically logged into a birding journal or documented via a photograph, and birders spend their time collecting long lists of exotic or rare birds that they have seen (the rarest of which are called "life birds") and compare lists with one another. 

Earlier this month, The Audubon Society launched what is quickly becoming another addictive bird-focused game online called "Birding The Net." Tying into the upcoming Hollywood movie release of The Big Year - an upcoming Hollywood film featuring Steve Martin and Jack Black where characters compete to see the most North American birds in one year - the game is built on Facebook and offers a virtual version of bird watching where participants are challenged to find birds spread across the Internet and collect the most in order to win prizes.  

As David Yarnold, President and CEO of Audubon describes, “birds are the best possible ambassadors for the environment, and this will help people see them in a whole new way. This is about fun – but it’s also about getting more people involved in taking action to protect birds and the planet we share with them. And with this unprecedented use of social media and the web, we’re also making it clear that this is not your grandmother’s Audubon.”

The game, which you can get a taste of on this blog for a week by clicking one of the birds above, will run through November 7th and I predict it will succeed brilliantly as a marketing strategy for Audubon Society. Spending some time looking, it offers at least five good lessons for marketers:

1. Timing/Hollywood Tie-in - With the link to the upcoming Hollywood film, the Audubon Society will get infinitely more eyeballs to this campaign and lots more funding and support. Chances are the beautiful visual design of this campaign was due in no small part to 20th Century Fox’s ability to fund the agency (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) behind this.
2. Recreates A Real Life Experience - The act of surfing online to various sites and hoping to see birds perfectly recreates what the experience of birding in real life is. You never know what you'll see, you are sometimes disappointed, but you get that flash of excitement when you do see a bird and it's one you haven't seen before.
3. Uses Behavioural Economics - When you first register, you have a clean slate of grayed out cards ... which you immediately want to start collecting. "Earning" the first several are easy - you get one just for starting and there are another 3 or 4 easily available on obvious sites like www.audubonguides.com, but then it gets tougher. Once you have started, though, you can't help wanting to collect more.
4. Engagement Through Design - Though this would be hard to prove, my bet is that they will get much higher engagement with this effort as a result of a very strong creative execution. Put simply, the app and individual bird cards are beautifully designed. Looking at them online, you almost wish they would produce them in print too just so you could hold them in your hands. 
5. Built-in Shareability - There is lots of great shareability built into this campaign, from the ability to embed your own birdhouse on your blog or website to leaderboards and sharing through Facebook. The campaign has a strong understanding of why and how people share at its heart and makes it easy to do so. 
6. Bird Personality - A visit to the Twitter account for one of the birds, the Rufous Hummingbird (@RufHummingbird) yields this bio: "Tireless traveler and flower enthusiast on a mission of nectar discovery." All the other bird Twitter accounts feature similar personality and a bit of good natured rivalry between them. It makes it fun to engage with the birds and adds an important element of, well, humanity to the campaign.
7. Curiosity and Discovery - Perhaps the most important element that makes this fun is the fact that you need to make new discoveries of where the birds are, and they have engaged your curiosity to see where they turn up next. It is an essential element of gaming, and one that Angry Birds (coincidentally) makes excellent use of. 

Ultimately, Birding The Net stands is one of the most original uses of social media and gaming I've seen lately to achieve the dual purpose of promoting an upcoming movie as well as reminding people that a pasttime which has been around for centuries can still offer a thrill not only in the virtual world ... but if you shut off the technology and head out into the real world as well. 

Video Introduction To Birding The Net: