Do tweets go better with Coke?

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With social media the it thing, it’s no surprise that Coke and Pepsi have spent huge amounts in trying to “create a conversation” about their flagship brands. So far, it appears they’ve bombed. In the latest issue of the popular Dim Bulb marketing blog, the always readable Jonathan Salem Baskin describes how both Coke and Pepsi have little if anything to show for their expensive forays into social media.

But should that really surprise us?  What is there, really, to say about yesterday’s iconic sodas?  As Baskin points out, both brands are essentially generic, but for what decades of skillful marketing has made us think about them.  The advertising and promotion on which these brands have been built is one-way communication.  When we open things up to dialogue, what exactly is it that the twitterati have to forward to their flocks?

Without anything of interest for people to share in the social media space, brands with slipping relevance, like Coke and Pepsi, risk looking like old folks dancing at a wedding.  Yes, they may have mastered the steps and you may admire their pluck, but they look somewhere between quirky and quaint.

These giants of Marketing Yore would be better served creating something meaningful that people can’t wait to share.  Digging into both their brand essence and their deep pockets, they have the stature to create and fund imaginative and relevant programs that help real people–perhaps tomorrow’s customers.  Certainly that’s better than fueling expanding waistlines and empty brand blather.

Miles of aisles before I sleep

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A routine shopping trip can be overwhelming these days, with the onslaught of products clamoring for our attention.  In my last e-newsletter I shared a Robert Frost parody, “Stopping to Buy Goods on a Snowy Evening” and reprise it here.  Though written several years (and many thousands of SKUs ago), it still resonates.

Stopping to Buy Goods on a Snowy Evening

by Tracy Carlson (with apologies to Robert Frost)

Whose goods these are I do not care.
The shelves are brimming, set with flair.
I’d rather not be shopping here,
But stomach’s empty, cupboard’s bare.

The marketers must think it queer
To shop without a preference clear
For brands they labor to invent
From bargain buy to niche premier.

With all the marketers have spent
They wonder why I’m not content.
Their labels beckon, logos leap:
I grab and go, indifferent.

The goods are lovely, prices cheap,
But endless choices make me weep.
With aisles to go before I sleep–
With miles of aisles before I sleep.

© 2001 Tracy Carlson.  All rights reserved.

Several years ago, when I had the good fortune to meet with the Commentary editor at NPR’s Marketplace at the time, Elizabeth Tucker, she liked my Frost parody and walked me down to the fabled Frank Stanton Studios to record it on the spot.  (It never aired, but it was still a thrill.)

The relentlessness of shelves at retail strikes an instant chord.  Yet we marketers crank out the SKUs, piling on features and flavors, sizes and varieties.  As if we were adding genuine value, while we hide behind the assertion that more of this is exactly what consumers want.

What about fewer options and more tranquility?  How much of shoppers’ defection to Costco is about simplicity of product selection?  Or to Trader Joe’s because their array of products is both limited and genuinely interesting?

Brand people want “new products” on their resumes.  Senior managers live and die by sales at the margin.  Retailers profit from slotting fees.  Who will have the courage to stop?  Before you plan your next product, consider:
•    Whom will this delight?
•    How will it enhance people’s experience of shopping your category?
•    How could equivalent (or fewer) resources be used more creatively to enliven your current lineup?  (Don’t forget to count all those person-days/years spent on the new thing!)

I welcome your thoughts on product proliferation, how it affects you, and/or what you think marketers should be doing differently, so please leave a comment below.  And if you like parodies, songs and doggerel, these generally debut in the e-newsletter, so please sign up!

Introducing: Brandstanding

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We’ve all seen it–and some of us have done it.  Created marketing or advertising that gratifies our sense of Our Brand (or perhaps our own value), but it has no value to the people we serve, namely our customers.  In other words, brandstanding.

grandstanding: conducting oneself or performing showily or ostentatiously in an attempt to impress onlookers. –Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Edition

brandstanding: engaging in ego-driven marketing that is of no real value to your customers or prospects.  –Tracy Carlson, Founder, Right-Brain Brands

I’ll be calling out examples of egregious brandstanding from time to time.  Here’s a sample, for starters: what it was, and what it could have been.

A tantalizing surprise?

Catching up on a stack of magazines recently, I flipped through the September issue (okay, it’s been awhile) of More magazine and went through my ritual, ripping out all the inserts.  It’s usually standard fare: a mix of perfume samples, coupons and tipped-in subscription cards.

This time there was something mysterious: an extra-thick turquoise insert from Vanity Fair lingerie.  Tiffany blue–and intriguing!  Delicacy was required to remove it from its backing and pull open the paper tab.  Once open, it was still mysterious.

Finally I figured it out: It was a complex pop-up photo diorama of women in lingerie from different decades.  The tagline: Elegance evolves.

Um, now what?

Hmm…What exactly am I supposed to do with this little diorama besides toss it and its turquoise debris into recycling?

Oh right, I forgot.  I’m supposed to marvel at the Vanity Fair brand and how It’s Been There Over Time, creating elegance.  Elegance that has Evolved!

Brandstanding strikes again

Thunk.  Can’t you just hear the discussions between all the players: the client, agency and ad rep?  Lofty talk about brand image and how to bring the tagline to life…

I’m sure they had good intentions.  Vanity Fair is a perfectly decent, ordinary brand of lingerie sold in perfectly decent, ordinary stores.  It can feel tough to create much meaning or excitement with those ingredients.  But in their efforts to do something for the brand, they got caught up in their own little Brandland bubble.  Lost in a world of abstractions, they forgot completely about the folk who buy mainstream bras, slips and panties.  (Need I add: the people who pay their salaries?)

The impact…

How much did this little effort cost?  Based on the rate card in the media kit, it was probably well over $150K, just for this one magazine alone.  All to create a brief experience among More subscribers across the land—mostly of annoyance.

Beyond the environmental cost (and the risk of irritating those who hate waste, surely a growing number), there’s also the opportunity cost.  What else could they have done with that money?

The alternatives

For starters, they could have thought more imaginatively.   With the theme of Elegance Evolves, why not sponsor a series of tie-ins around historic fashions?  Imagine what a handful of local museums or historical societies could do with a generous donation and some marketing support.  Imagine the the potential for local visibility with a well-crafted program: involving retailers and local media, and learning for possible scaling later.

Or here’s another idea: a contest with family photos of women in their finery across generations, getting all that good social media stuff working.  In short, plenty of options besides a one-shot ho-hum, at best.

I’m not anti-insert.  In fact, I admire ones done with imagination.  The same magazine had a terrific multi-page insert for Target’s Merona brand.  It was fun and interactive: with the same model in a different outfit on each page, it was perforated across the middle, so you could mix and match tops and bottoms from different pages.  It was clever, fun, with a $5 coupon to boot.  Smart marketing for sure.

Brandstanding Hall of Shame?

I welcome your submissions for future brandstanding spotlights!  Sadly, I suspect we’ll never run out of examples, but let’s have some fun along the way.

Stand and fight, or take the money and run?

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Today, Reuters reports: “Taco Bell Corp. has urged a court to throw out an ‘enormously disparaging’ lawsuit that claims its “seasoned beef” taco and burrito filling has too little beef to be labeled as such.”

I admit I find Taco Bell’s actions in this drama awfully amusing.

In recent ads and on YouTube, Taco Bell’s President, Greg Creed (also CEO and Chief Concept Officer), has insisted on the virtue of his company’s products.  In his charming Australian accent, Creed maintains that the filling in question is 88% beef!  Not 35%, as alleged in the lawsuit.

(Full disclosure: Greg Creed and I clashed personally over ethical issues many years ago when he was still at Lever Brothers, so I may not be entirely objective on the subject of his integrity.)

With full-page newspaper ads and a $3 million ad campaign, Taco Bell has come out swinging.  But it’s an interesting question: should Taco Bell stand and fight, or let it blow over?

Left-brain-wise, it’s logical to fight fact with fact: if the filling is indeed 88% beef, let the labs duke it out on data, and may the best data win.  And certainly if the lawsuit is frivolous, cruising for a settlement to make them go away, they should be called on it.  Left-brain circuitry, primed for control, dominance, details, analysis, and hierarchy screams to trounce the pipsqueaks who brought the suit.

A right-brain view is more holistic, more likely to acknowledge that Taco Bell is seen as cheap belly filler and/or guilty pleasure, even by its greatest fans.  Would anyone really be shocked to learn that its “seasoned beef” (what the company’s own suppliers call “taco meat filling”) is a little low on beef?

From a right-brain perspective, focused on big-picture, simultaneous, emotion-rich, receptive processing, continued public attention to Taco Bell’s ingredients and processes will do more harm than good.  We may fully accept mystery meat in our fast food, but would rather not  know the particulars. Reminders of other TBell scandals within recent memory (the 2006 e coli scare, and 2007 rat videos in NYC), won’t help either, and they’re sure to surface with continued media attention.

By aggressively combating the where’s-the-beef lawsuit with typical corporate pomposity, Taco Bell has made itself ripe for a spotlight it can’t control, as captured brilliantly by Steven Colbert.

Taco Bell generated $6.7 billion in revenue in 2009 (QSR Magazine), and Greg Creed enjoyed a total compensation of $3.36 million that year (Forbes).  It wouldn’t be a half-brained idea to take the money and run.

Humanity shines (Part 2): Super Bowl ads a week later

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In my last post, I asked what, if anything we care about a week after the Super Bowl ads and  discussed the first of two remarkable ads (VW’s Mini-Darth).  The second, Chrysler’s Imported from Detroit, is one of the most powerful and compelling ads I have seen in decades.  While it may work better at rebranding Detroit and the US auto industry than Chrysler per se, it is an extraordinary achievement on many levels.  Here’s why:

Chrysler ad: Mature brilliance

Transcending duality: Grit and Grace

Central to the artistic, emotional, and symbolic success of the Chrysler ad is the skillful use of opposites: white and black, factory and theater, rap and gospel, ugliness and beauty, new and old.  Eminem, too, embodies opposites wrapped in a single package: the white star in a black genre, the tough guy with a core of deep affection and tenderness.

The ingenious tagline “Imported from Detroit” also contains a duality, first by acknowledging the ubiquity and prestige of imports and facing it head-on.  On a deeper level, it unflinchingly addresses the idea that many see Detroit as a foreign country, even a third world country.  But Detroit knows better.

This is an extraordinarily mature vision, especially when expressed through the skillful use of archetype.

The Orphan’s Heroic Journey

Imported from Detroit brilliantly illuminates the archetypal story of the Orphan.  Archetypes, symbolic figures/ideas encompassing stories we instantly know and recognize, have been used to extraordinary effect with brands: Harley-Davidson as the Rebel, for example.

But the Orphan archetype is a tricky one, and not instantly attractive.  In full form it is about falling from innocence, grace and/or comfort into pain and suffering.  This experience triggers a journey that ultimately results in greater strength and resilience, and a sense of solidarity with others.

Too often, the Orphan story stops short: the suffering is never overcome, and the narrative is a Done Us Wrong tale of victimhood and grievance, resulting at best in an us-against-them pride and toughness.  We all know people (and groups and perhaps entire cultures) who live this stunted story.  Their own responsibility is never examined, their weaknesses never transformed into strengths because they hide behind their badge of woundedness and blame.

Here, importantly, the backstory to the Chrysler ad is left silent.  The real history of loud, stuck victimhood by all parties in the US auto industry is absent here.  In Imported from Detroit, the “town that’s been to hell and back” points no fingers.  Instead, it spotlights the gifts of acceptance and maturity: the steel hardened by the hottest fires, and the force uniting people who’ve been through it all together.

The subtle nod of the uniformed doorman is the salute of one soldier to another, the brotherhood of survivors.

Anthem of identity

The Chrysler ad reaches beautifully into the past to tap the values (hardwork and conviction) and skills (“the knowhow that runs generations deep in every last one of us”) that will enable Detroit to create a brighter future.  There is a solid sense of identity without apology or explanation:

“That’s who we are, that’s our story”
“We’re from America, but we’re not from New York City (or the Windy City…)”
“This is the Motor City, and this is what we do.”

A New Patriotism:

A few Boomers and others may recall these lines from poetry learned in grade school:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
(from Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel)

In Imported from Detroit, Wieden & Kennedy and Chrysler give us a new model for patriotism: a grown-up alternative to simplistic chest-thumping boosterism.  We should be grateful to them for such a sophisticated and compelling addition to our cultural repertoire alone.

Will Chrysler succeed?  Advertising is only part of the story.  The cars must deliver.  But if they do, if Detroit, if the American auto industry rises from embers, America succeeds.   Is this an ad for Chrysler?  Only in part.  But by conveying such a large, deep, layered and redemptive vision, Chrysler is exhibiting the courage and generosity of a true leader.