Bloghound

Knowing how to frame ideas into the right context seems to be a
common stumbling block in marketing and communications. I don't know
whether it's because understanding context is diffcult or putting
things in context is difficult.

Here are two examples I came across last week that may help you think about context.

Wind power.

On Friday two architecture professors, Charlie Cannon of Rhode Island School of Design and Leftheri Pavlides of Roger Williams University, walked me through a presentation about why wind turbines are good for
communities. The deck, written eight months ago before energy prices
went bonkers and Exxon Mobil declared a $9 billion net quarterly
profit, was packed with economic, environmental and health data and
benefits.

“So, what do you think,” they asked. “Is it persuasive and convincing?”

Not
quite. My advice was that they talk about wind in the context of the
out-of-control energy prices, and the impact of those prices on poor
and working class folks who are just trying to make it. (Flash back to
images of Hurricane Katrina and the poor and working class with no
safety net.)

Of course, the environmental and health benefits
are solid, but what moves people in the current context is that wind is
something we can approve locally to help local people. I can’t do
anything about the big oil companies or utilities. But I can approve
wind turbines for my local community, which will help some people who
are on the brink of financial disaster. Wind is a simple thing we can
do that can have a profound effect.

A Long Way Down.

Another example of context comes from Nick Hornby’s new novel, A Long Way Down
about four really different people who meet by chance on a rooftop on
New Year's Eve with the intent of committing suicide. (Almost but not
quite as good as High Fidelity and About A Boy.)

This
excerpt is from JJ, one of the loser characters who is on vacation in
the Canary Islands with his new New Year's Eve friends, and is going
out to “jumpstart my libido.”

“I went back to the room to get
dressed. I’m not a bare-chested kind of guy. I’m like a hundred and
thirty pounds, skinny as f**k, white as a ghost, and you can’t walk
around next to guys with tans and six-packs when you look like that.
Even if you found a chick who dug the skinny ghost look, she wouldn’t
remember that she dug you in this context, right? If
you were into Dolly Parton and they played a blast of her album during
a hip-hop show, she just wouldn’t sound good. In fact, you wouldn’t
even be able to f******g hear her. So putting on my faded black jeans
and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the
right people.”

JJ dressed for the context and did indeed
jumpstart his libido. I'd like to share more about the other characters
and bigger context ideas but that might ruin the book for you. It's
worth the read.

My head is still spinning (in a good way) from the stories from 25
business, entertainment, education, arts and government leaders at this
week’s Business Innovation Factory
Summit in Providence, RI. Hosted by Richard Saul Wurman of TED fame and
Xerox PARC’s former chief scientist John Seely Brown, the conference
challenged the way most of us think about innovation.

After
digesting the stories, lessons and advice of some remarkably diverse
and successful people, here are some patterns I took away:

Have a dream. Reframe.

These game changers had an idea – a vision – that turned them and their
people on to do what many might have thought was impossible. The
“dream” was almost always a bigger purpose than anything financial.
Stuart Moore, co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient,
told the story of three stone masons. They first one said he was
cutting rocks. The second said he was working to feed his family. The
third said he was building the world’s biggest cathedral. They were all
doing the same work, but the third one loved his work because it
connected to a bigger vision, an important piece of work.

The conversations around creating a higher purpose and dream reminded me of this illustration from Hugh MacLeod.

5x Ask "why" and "why not."

Innovators ask why, and then they ask why again, and again and again, and again.
Ask “why” 5 times and you’ll begin to get into possibilities and
obstacles. John Seely Brown suggested that we also asked “Why Not?”
five times as we explore possibilities.

Dennis Littkey, founder of the Met School, recipient of multiple Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grants,
fundamentally changed the success of largely high-risk inner city high
school kids, by asking the question, “Why is school so boring for kids?
What’s really best for kids? How do they want to learn?’ Rather than
looking at how to change schools, he looked at what the kids wanted,
and then designed education around that. The graduation rates are in
the high 90% while graduation rates from conventional inner city
schools is around 50%.

Get out of your world.

Larry Huston of Procter and Gamble talked
about how tapping into the world of 1.5 million “experts” for new
product ideas – vs. relying on an internal 7,500 person R&D team –
has helped this consumer packaged goods company add $3billion in
revenue a year. Rather than a typical “research & development”
approach P&G now uses a “connect & develop” approach, with more
than 30% of new product ideas coming from outside the company; the goal
is to get to 50 percent.

Work has to be fun and engage people on intellectual, emotional and visceral levels.

“Innovating and change isn’t “hard” work; if it’s framed within a
context of the “dream” and an exciting purpose, work takes on a new
meaning. Jim Lavoie, CEO of RiteSolutions,
and Stuart Moore, dissed the idea that change is hard. “Today’s
knowledge workers want to have fun. If it’s not fun, why get out of bed
in the morning?”

Innovation comes from the opposite of expectation.

The future his here, ripe with possibilities. We need to be more
intellectual curious, inquisitive, brave, see – truly see – what’s
going on, shun accepted “wisdom,” challenge the norm, and explore
radical alternatives.

Sounds like fun to me.

One particualry interesting piece of research about what makes
people evangelists and advocates for an organization, comes from the
University of Queensland, and was presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com
at last week's International Word-of-Mouth Marketing Conference.

The
overriding reason people advocate for an organization or product is
that they identify with the organization or share a sense of community
with other people who support/buy from the organization. (62%)

I was truly surprised to hear that satisfaction and experience accounted for just 21%, and trust for 9% in comparison.

Here are the standardised “path estimates” for the model.

Advocacy à Loyalty (.88)
Identification à Advocacy (.62)
Satisfaction à Advocacy (.21)
Trust à Advocacy (.09)

Last week two conferences about the future of marketing were held — the giant annual Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference in Phoenix, and the first International Word of Mouth Conference in Hamburg, Germany, which I attended and spoke at.

While
the ANA conference sounded the alarms for new ways to connect with
consumers amid an increasingly fragmented world, the WOM conference
showed how to do just this.Here are some highlights from the WOM conference.

WOM is a discipline with proven ways to research, plan, target, test and measure. Fergus Hampton of Millward Brown laid
out the most cogent strategic approach to moving brands from “talk at
me brands” to “talked about” brands. I especially liked Fergus’ example
of religion as word-of-mouth at its most effective.

Content:
WOM is about engaging the customer, and this can be done through
experiences, ideas, and beliefs. “What starts WOM are ideas,” said
Steven Erich from Crispin Porter.
“Ideas also need to be killed to make room for new ideas. “ Jaap Favier
of Forrester, noted that we remember 10% of what we read, 15% of what
we hear, and 80% of what we experience.

Style:
WOM must be authentic, truthful, provide value, and use a human voice.
One of my presentations talked about the need to make meaning, not
buzz, and that meaning making requires context, relevancy and honest
emotion. Meaning making, done right, builds trust.

Influencers drive WOM: Alex Macris of The Themis Group,
who presented with game producer Scott Foe of Nokia, explained the
secrets to marketing to influencers, who he calls “superconductors”:
respect their power, build relationships, accelerate their experience,
and offer them status. Inus Hwang of Azooma Marketing Lab in South
Korea showed how effectively engaging a community 200 women has
accelerated the national adoption of new products at a fraction of the
cost of TV advertising. (1/13th the cost in one of her cases.)

Internal WOM:
Euan Semple of the BBC talked about the value of using blogs internally
to more openly share ideas, problems and opinions. “When you get people
talking internally you’re less likely to make mistakes and more likely
to create better things,” he said. Added Hugh MacLeod,
“How you talk internally affects how people talk externally.” Hugh
thinks that you need to create an environment where internal people can
have more open, frank real conversations before you can have genuine
external conversations. He pointed to the example of how Robert Skoble of Microsoft has changed the internal conversations within the company and affected the company’s culture.

New Research: Several academics presented new research on WOM.

Today, just 3.4% of WOM conversations are stimulated by a company’s marketing efforts; and a whopping 77% is through face-to- face conversations. Walter Carl, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies, Northeastern University.

Netnography,
with its ethnographic roots, can provide valuable insights in how to
communicate with and influence consumers, and glean message themes,
according to Kristine De Valck of HEC University in Paris.

Visualization of data can pinpoint influencers
in WOM communities, according to Suresh Sood, University of Technology
in Sydney. He presented a project where he was able to identify 25
influencers among 65,000 people through visualization of mobile phone
calling patterns.

The value of positive and negative online consumer reviews differ
based on the product type, said Shahana Sen of Farleigh Dickinson
University. Her research shows that 61% people rate negative reviews as
useful for utilitarian products. But for hedonic products (books. CD’s,
etc.) just 28% rated negative reviews as useful

How do you establish consumer advocacy?
A University of Queensland study presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com
showed that customer identification is the most important antecedent to
consumer advocacy, more than consumer satisfaction or trust.

My favorite takeaway from the conference were two remarks by Hugh MacLeod:

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

“To control the conversation, improve the conversation."

Now there’s something for marketers to talk about as they plan next year's strategy.

Dove’s new advertising campaign is a great example of how powerful it
can be to stir up the market conversation with a new point of view.

The
campaign features confident, happy women of all sizes and shapes,
dressed only in underwear. They’re not the super-skinny fashion models,
but real women with real curves. In other words, the campaign
challenges the media image that you must be thin to be attractive.

The campaign has generated enormous press around the world, including a People magazine cover article, an editorial in the The New York Times, and appearances on the "Today" show.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine
article, “Social Lubricant: How a Marketing Campaign Became the
Catalyst for a Societal Debate,” Rob Walker hit on just how effective a
debate-stirring marketing campaign can be.

“Maybe it is somehow
inevitable that marketing, which caused much of the underlying anxiety
in the first place, can offer up a point of view that blithely tries to
resolve that anxiety.

“Moreover, as the entertainment side of
the media fragments, marketing becomes the one form of communication
that permeates everywhere – and is just as effective whether you’ve
actually seen the campaign or you simply have an opinion about it based
on what you’ve heard,” he wrote.

How refreshing to not only to see real women and real beauty, but to see a marketer stir up conversations – and brand interest.

For more about the campaign, see http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/.

PS –Happiness and kindness are the top attributes that make a woman beautiful, according to a Dove global study.

All year long I look forward to a 20-year, late-August tradition:
hunkering down on our family’s Cape Cod beach and devouring the four
inch thick September fashion magazines.

I’ve driven miles to find newsstands selling Vogue, and then Harper’s Bazaar.
Lugging my magazines and beach chair to the edge of the water and
shutting out the world while I turn each glossy page has always been a
sort of bliss.

But while the beach weather is spectacular and Vogue is as thick as ever, I’m feeling a little melancholy.

Vogue
seems to have lost its appeal. The 17-year-old anorexic models wearing
$10,000 designer outfits that no real woman would ever wear seem boring
and out-of-touch. The magazine no longer seems glamorous and alluring;
instead it seems self-absorbed and written by and for some small inner
circle of jet-setting fashionistas. My once devout loyalty to this
magazine is ending.

Some of the newer magazines seem much more appealing. Lucky, In-Style, and Oprah’s “O”
are appealing in ways that my former favorites are not. Their formats
are much different from the traditional fashion magazines. The mix of
features is broader, the fashion advice more realistic, and the clothes
and make-up are things that I might actually buy.

I suppose this
is the struggle for all marketers: how to stay relevant, fresh, and
connected in some emotional way with your consumers.

This is
especially challenging when revenues are chugging along fine, thank you
very much. Why bother changing something that seems to be working?

Because
upstarts know that even the biggest brands can get stuck in
once-winning formulas and that there’s always an opening for something
new that connects with consumers in new ways. (Hello Lucky.)

Just
as many of us annually purge our closets, maybe brands need to more
regularly step back and toss away what worked for years and do a
makeover, maybe even an extreme makeover. At a minimum, set up the
right consumer panels, and then pay attention to emerging patterns.

Good-bye Vogue. It was great for a lot of years. Time for a swim.

While technology is becoming the heart of marketing and communications, conversations are the soul.
And some of the most engaging conversations are around talking about
ideas, beliefs, opinions, and points of view. Not products.

This
week I came across two examples of companies whose points of view
instantly engaged me and helped me understand what makes their
companies unique and different.

“What we maybe had
to relearn as a company is that we’re not in the transportation
business, we’re in the arts and entertainment business,” explained GM
vice chairman Bob Lutz to shareholders at a recent meeting.

GM
in the arts and entertainment business? Now, that’s interesting. I
immediately understood that Lutz is trying to take GM to a very
different place. It somewhat reassured me as a shareholder, and I’m
toying with putting my car buying plans on hold to see what GM might
come out with next year.

My favorite point-of-view this week was
from Dietsche & Dietsche Architects. While I often hear
professional services firms talk about how difficult it is to market
themselves, Chuck Dietsche’s positioning is clear and compelling,
expressed through this point-of-view:

“The first house is a dictionary. The second is a poem,” he says.

Chuck
talks about how our primary homes are about accommodation – “Where do I
park, where do I sleep?” While the second home idealizes our lives and
helps us express that to the world.

Wow, that’s interesting and compelling marketing.

I’m
off to my second home, which is more of a haiku, for summer vacation.
Some friends are thinking about building in the area. I’m going to talk
to them about Chuck Dietsche because he’s made it so easy for me to do
so.

What’s your company’s point of view?

This week’s AMA “Strategic Marketing Conference” in
Chicago brought together 300+ marketing executives to explore some big
ideas in marketing strategy, planning, execution and measurement. The
big takeaway for me was that traditional marketing is dead and we need
to quickly create new approaches and euthanize many others.

I
spoke on Wed. about the need to for all marketers – regardless of
company size or type – to create conversation themes that make it easy
for people to talk about the company or product. After all, we live in
a world of conversations. Not static messages. Not traditional written
copy. I talked about the 6 most common obstacles to creating
conversations and the 3 ways to get started:

1. Ear-to-the-ground communications research.
2. Developing a point-of-view that gets people saying, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”
3. Straight talk. Genuine. Clear. No jargon.

Click here if you want a copy of the presentation, “Mind the Gap: Making Brand Conversations Real, Relevant & Repeatable”

Highlights from some of the other presenters:

• Brand management needs to be reinvented, with the focus on building customer equity vs. brand equity. Dr. Roland Rust, University of Maryland and author of “Driving Customer Equity.”

• Market
  generalists and market niche players need very different strategies to
  prosper— and maybe even survive. (Note: any market category only has 3
  big players no matter how large the market.) Dr. Rajendra Sisodia, professor of marketing Bentley College and author of “The Rule of Three How Competition Shapes Markets.”

• Consumers
  are trading up to luxury goods. 96% of consumers have at least one
  category for which they will pay more to get better products. Michael Silverstein, CEO, Boston Consulting Group.

• The big consumer trends to watch: innovation and experimentation, simplicity, word-of-mouth marketing. Ed Keller, CEO of NOP World Consumer and author of “The Influentials.”

• One
  of the biggest problems in pricing is communicating the value of the
  product or service to customers – why it’s fair relative to the value
  created, relative to competitor value/price, and relative to the cost
  to develop product. John Hogan, vice president of the Strategic Pricing Group.

• Using
  concept and product engineering is an incredibly powerful way to build
  better – and more profitable — products and stores, taking the
  guesswork out of marketing planning. Dunkin’ Donuts used this approach
  to analyze 16,000 data points, and come up with new directions for
  national expansion. Dr. Regina Lewis, direction of consumer and brand insight sat Dunkin’ Brands.

• We need video to tell a story regardless of the medium. But we’re likely to see more video spots on the Internet than TV. Andrew Jaffe, advertising analyst and former editor of “Adweek."

• Digital
  advertising is becoming more prevalent, more effective, and easier to
  measure. Deep search marketing is particularly compelling. Sarah Fay, president, Carat Interactive.

• You
  can succeed even in dying categories by creating innovative marketing
  approaches that help you carve out greater market share. Chuck Feltz, president, Deluxe Financial Services and Direct Checks Unlimited.

Customer targeting, positioning and differentiation unequivocally remain the most important elements of successful marketing. Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus and author of “Countintuitive Marketing.”

The business world is starting to swarm around the huge opportunities
for marketing to Baby Boomers, a market segment that has annual
discretionary spending of $750 billion and controls more than 77% if
the U.S. financial assets. Over the next ten years 78 million Baby
Boomers will turn 50 years old. In less than two generations, there
will be 2 billion people over 60 and the elderly will outnumber
children for the first time.

The question among many marketers
is, “what marketing approaches and messages will appeal to Baby
Boomers?” Based on Foghound’s Boomer Market Watch, which daily monitors
30 key Boomer issues, we’re seeing three powerful themes:

1. Usefulness
2. Fear
3. Optimism

Usefulness

As we age, career quests and acquiring new things lose some of their
satisfaction. Instead, people seek to lead useful lives. Benjamin
Franklin once wrote, “I would rather have it said, ‘he lived usefully’
than ‘he died rich.’ Or, as a character in Marilynne Robinson’s new
book Gilead says, “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever
hoped for themselves; to be aimless was their worst fear.”

We
believe this message of usefulness will be extremely relevant to
Boomers. Here are just a few of the things we’ve begun to see that
support the appeal of the usefulness.

• For assisted living
  communities: market how your properties allow residents to continue to
  live useful lives. At a new type of assisted housing called the Green
  House Project, “residents take pride in doing things they hadn’t been
  able to do for years in their former nursing homes,” according to Newsweek International.
  “One resident actually cried when she was able to bake corn bread
  again, recalls project director Hude Rabig. “They really grab onto the
  fabric of life again.”
• For real estate developers: tap into
  the emerging trend of Boomers getting together in small groups to
  create postmodern elder families, eschewing the assisted living concept.
• Travel: market trips and destinations that allow grandparents to share
  new experiences – particularly cultural and educational — with their
  grandchildren. “After the gold watch, what you need to do is get work
  out of your vocabulary and pay attention to your fourth grade
  grandchildren. They have self-esteem without contributing to the GNP,”
  advises George Valiant, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who
  studies aging.
• VCs and technology and product designers: think
  cool canes, walkers with computers to identify obstacles, kitchen
  products for those with arthritis, new car designs that are hip yet
  taking into account physical realities. Keep an eye on what’s happening
  at MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

Fear

The
second motivating message is fear. Here are some of the boomers’
greatest fears – all of which have opportunities for marketers:

• Becoming isolated and lonely. Losing friends. (Attention real estate
  developers, non-profits seeking volunteers, and employers looking for
  part-time workers.)
• Not having enough money and ending up in
  nursing homes. “Residents who leave assisted living usually do so not
  because they die but because they run out of money, and go to nursing
  homes,” according to a recent New York Times article. “There
  the impoverished, including middle-class men and women who have
  outlived their savings, are covered by Medicaid as they are not (except
  for a small percentage) in assisted living.” (Attention financial
  services companies, and long term insurance providers)
• Getting sick and needing extensive (and expensive) rehab and care
  giving services, yet not having adequate health insurance. (Attention
  health care insurers, guardians of Medicare, gyms, food manufacturers,
  physical therapists.)
• Not having adequate health insurance.
  (Attention employers.) Older workers want and need to continue working
  for health insurance and because they need the money. Others want to
  continue working for the intellectual challenges and camaraderie.
  Advice to employers: don’t be scared off by ageism; recent research
  shows that older workers can learn new technologies and are less absent
  than younger employees.

Optimism

And
yet despite these looming fears, Boomers are inherently optimists,
understanding that Americans have the power to change what is and
create new possibilities. The oldest of the boomers, who will begin
turning 65 in 2011, were raised on John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to
action. It’s a generation of activists who know how to organize and
lobby.

A recent study released by the Harvard School of Public
Health says Boomers can become an unprecedented resource if they are
mobilized across the nation as community volunteers.

''There's a
major opportunity on the near horizon to recruit large numbers of older
boomers to help strengthen community life in America,'' says Jay
Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health. Winsten is director of
the Harvard-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic
Engagement. But he says non-profit organizations that could use those
volunteers need to create meaningful jobs for them. Boomers, he says,
won't be satisfied stuffing envelopes. ''Boomers have expectations as
to the kind of useful roles they can play in helping organizations.''

If your company is looking at growth market, think Boomers. And think UFO marketing messages.

During the holiday party season I asked a simple question that
surprisingly took many business executives by surprise: “What are your
biggest opportunities for next year?”

“Good question. I hadn’t really thought about business in that way,” almost all replied. Then they got quite animated.You
see, most of us get bogged down in the “how to run” our business, our
organization, our projects. How to increase customer loyalty 2
percentage points. How to generate more sales leads. How to improve
order pace.. How to increase efficiencies. How to implement new
systems. How to measure performance.Too much “how” and not
enough “what” is a recipe for slow growth, both professionally and for
business. Plus, let’s be honest, too much focus on “how” without enough
“what” can be exhausting and demoralizing. It’s far more energizing and
strategic to ask questions like, “What are the opportunities? What are
the biggest obstacles? What’s most relevant to our prospects? What new
partnerships might help us grow more quickly?”

Peter Drucker has
long advised business executives to look outside the company – and
their industries — to observe new patterns and connections. By doing
so, we’re then able to see opportunities and focus more on “what.”“For strategy, we need organized information about the environment,” he wrote in Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management.
“Strategy has to be based on information about markets, customers and
non customers; about technology in one’s own industry and others; about
the changing world economy. Major changes start outside an
organization.”

Yet research geeks, take note. Drucker warns
about going too deep. He learns enough to see patterns and important
connections but not enough to lose his point of view.Gary
Hamel, another of my favorite business thinkers, says that “a fresh way
of seeing is often more valuable than sheer brainpower.“One of
the reasons many people fail to fully appreciate what’s changing is
because they’re down at the ground level, lost in a thicket of
confusing, conflicting data. You have to make time to step back and ask
yourself, ‘What’s the nig story that cuts across all these little
facts.’”

Look outside in 2005. You might just see how to be different in ways that can make a real difference.