Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and people across the world are focusing on this momentous day. Last week I was in Berlin and spent an afternoon looking at remnants of the Berlin Wall and its defining place in German history. As the German chancellor from the time (Helmut Kohl) said, "we [Germans] don't have many reasons in our history to be proud, but as chancellor I have nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."
Seeking to see if an experience I had written about some time ago still existed, on a free afternoon in Berlin I headed to a place called Checkpoint Charlie, a highlight among the tourist destinations that commemorate (and commercialize) the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the war there were 300 of these "checkpoints" spread out across the perimeter of the wall. They were manned by soldiers whose job was to make sure that people did not try to cross the wall - often using deadly force to carry out their duties. Estimates range in the hundreds (or thousands, depending on whom you talk to) for the number of people who were killed by this checkpoint squad during the 28 years the wall was up. As is often the case with some of humanities worst moments, today the three remaining checkpoints are all tourist destinations.
At Checkpoint Charlie, the most frequently visited of these checkpoints, outside of the main museum on the street is a guy who will put a stamp in your passport celebrating the former separation of Germany. You usually carry your passport with you for ten years, and through that time you collect stamps from countries you visit, visas from exotic places, and a living record of where you have been and what you have seen. Most international travellers use their passports as the ultimate travel keepsake. For those travellers, getting a unique stamp from a now defunct destination is an appealing idea. For some, it may even be their sole reason for visiting.
Which leads to my marketing observation, that even in the midst of historic celebration of something as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall ... people are always looking for a way to capture their experiences and share them with others. This is true of travel, or any other type of experience. When you travel internationally, your passport becomes your record of the places you have been and moments you have had. Stamps in that passport are usually official, and always significant. Sometimes the most important thing you can sell to someone is a memory they were there.
Note: If you recognized this post, it's because I wrote about Checkpoint Charlie two years ago. This post has lots more pictures and is based on a real experience (and today is the 20th anniversary!), so I thought it worthwhile to share a revised version of it again today. If you liked this idea, you'll probably enjoy my post on philatelic marketing too. And I promise tomorrow will an all-new non-recycled post!
Adrian Moore is the best concierge in the world. At least, according to British travel magazine Monacle, he is. He works at the Four Seasons in Paris, knows all the best spots and restaurants, is intimately aware of any festivals or special events in his city and is, by any account, an authority on all things about Paris. As a business traveller, I appreciate a concierge like this. Unfortunately, the majority of hotels never have anyone like Adrian. Instead, they staff their "concierge" desk with someone who was checking people in at the front desk just the week before.
In those empty cases, the so-called concierge is no better than an Internet enabled computer with access to city resources, a few travel blogs and Yelp (or another restaurant review site). The most interesting thing about Adrian Moore that I didn't mention, however, is that he also happens to be a blogger. And his blog allows him to explore his city and publish his thoughts about it. Which leads me to an interesting question - what if all concierges were bloggers?
Or, put another way to broaden this question beyond the hotel industry, what if the person who was most directly responsible for interacting with your customers used social media more often? This idea works out well for the Four Seasons in Paris with Adrian, but also has worked well for Comcast with Frank Eliason using Twitter as his tool of choice to actively and proactively help customers. Social media can help amplify the voice of any individual to help them bring a personality to a business. The concierge is a term recognized for hotels, but it is a role that many businesses could use in some way. If you had to point to someone within your organization who could be your "concierge" - who would it be?
Once you answer this, you can also answer one the biggest questions that many companies ask before starting to actively use social media -- who is the person (or people) within our organization that should start blogging, tweeting, conversing and responding on our behalf online?
It's the concierge, and if you don't have one ... go find one.
Deconstruction is a powerful idea. All it means is taking an experience or something real and breaking it down into its individual components. Deconstructing helps you to understand something. Deconstructing tells a story. I remember the first time I saw the movie Amadeus, the Oscar winning dramatization of the life of Mozart, there was one scene that stayed with me. It was the composer Salieri describing (and deconstructing) the music of Mozart:
It helped me to understand classical music in a way I had never thought about. This weekend, as I watched the memorial documentary of Michael Jackson's planned concert tour, This Is It, I thought about that same feeling. The moment of watching something that was deconstructing a vision and a story that I hadn't quite realized the significance of until that moment. This Is It has been getting rave reviews since coming out last week and has already crossed the $100 million mark. Some are already anticipating that it is Oscar-worthy. Here's the preview, in case you haven't seen or heard about it:
What made the film most powerful for me was one moment when Michael was working with his band and rehearsing the length of a pause in a song - encouraging them to "let it simmer." Then the music was brought together with the filmed visuals that were done on a green screen and you saw how the pieces interacted. The film deconstructed the concert that never was, and gave you a vision of what it would have been.
It would be easy to write a marketing post about how this movie has been promoted and perhaps even criticize how it is turning Michael Jackson's death into a venue for moneymaking. The most powerful marketing idea I will take away from the film and experience, however, is the real power of deconstructing an experience to give people an inside look and emotional attachment to it. Deconstruction helped me understand the power of classical music, and the genius of Michael Jackson. The same concept could work equally well for deconstructing a cause such as the fight against Pneumonia and World Pneumonia Day, or sharing the vision behind an inspired marketing campaign. How could deconstruction help your marketing?
There is no denying that Twitter has had a huge impact on how marketers are thinking about using social media tools for marketing. One thing that is most interesting about it, however, is how the site has managed to avoid overcomplicating itself with more features. Twitter is simple, and it just works. Of course the one overused word that has been used recently to describe Twitter is that it is a "firehose" of information, shooting out at a speed and volume that has threatened to make it unusable for many people. So when I had a chance to try out Twitter's new Lists feature (which I had been looking forward to seeing for some time), I was not only surprised, but also excited about what this will mean for all of us who use the site. Here are just a few reasons why I think lists may revolutionize how you use Twitter.
You can segment your firehose. The #1 criticism of Twitter is that if you follow thousands of people and see all their tweets appearing in one interface, it's tough to manage. Searches in third party tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck have made this more manageable, but those usually only work based on keywords, which is inefficient. What if I wanted to just see all the tweets from my colleagues at Ogilvy? That was tough to do. Now with lists, I can create my own group of colleagues and just reference that.
Offers a more meaningful metric of influence. You'll notice if you have a Twitter account that in the spot where it used to just list the number of tweets you have done, it now shows how frequently you are "listed." This is a new metric of influence that sits somewhere between followers and retweets - but one that indicates how frequently other Twitter users who are creating their own lists are including you on their list. In short order, I imagine that number (along with retweets) will become more influential than having hundreds of thousands of robot followers when it comes to measuring influence on Twitter.
Allows you to easily follow a trusted group of individuals. One of the biggest issues I have had in the past with Twitter is that it is difficult to follow a group of users all at once. Of course, you used to be able to use services like Tweepml to do this, but that was incomplete and the lists were often anonymously posted and so the data may not be as trustworthy. Now with Twitter Lists, you can create a list of all the attendees at a particular conference, for example, and with one click anyone can follow them.
Lets any user of Twitter segment who they actually read. Up until now, the greatest compliment you could give someone who you follow and read on Twitter was to retweet something they posted. Now with Twitter Lists, you can add them to a list and not only make your own experience of reading content on Twitter better (see #1 on this list), but you can also send a subtle reminder to the person you are following that unlike the other thousands of accounts you might follow, their's is one you actually pay attention to.
Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Many brands have multiple accounts - for example hotel brands that have a master account and then separate accounts for separate regional properties. This phenomenon was becoming more widespread, but now with Twitter Lists, brands can aggregate all their accounts together in a list - and best of all, if each Twitter account does this, the lists will show up on the sidebar linking anyone who sees one branded account to all the others.
Clearly, I'm excited about what Twitter Lists has to offer for marketers. What do you think - is this a big deal for marketers or for anyone else?
If you have watched any television or been inside a retail store at any point this month in the US, it would have likely been hard to miss the omnipresence of pink where it wasn't before. From pink clothes, to laptops, to banners to shoes and gloves on your favourite NFL players, the marketing blitz of pink has just about taken over the retail landscape. The color and ribbon are the symbols of the fight against breast cancer, and may easily represent one of the most widespread cause marketing campaigns in terms of partners since the RED campaign offered custom branded products to support finding a cure for AIDS.
Here is a presentation that takes an inside look not only at some of the best marketing lessons that this massive cause related effort offers, but also a caution against what is commonly being called "pinkwashing" (corporations using "pink" inauthentically simply to jump on the bandwagon without any real contribution to the cause). Check out the lessons, let me know if you have any others to add to the list, and most important ... don't be a pinkwasher:
For years in the automotive industry, marketers have known that getting someone to actually purchase a car depends on much more than the features and latest gadgetry. No one buys a car solely for the face detection alert software - though certainly something like that can influence the decision. What really sells those cars, though, is a person's prior experience with a brand and the opinion of others that they trust when it comes to experiences with the car or brand. Word of mouth and prior experience, those are at the top of the list.
Unfortunately, we don't often see automotive advertising and marketing focused on these two things. It's tough when each new campaign is for a different car, and time is limited to make the sale. With Honda's new campaign, however, they are squarely targeting consumers with perhaps their most formidable asset ... their reputation. The new campaign has a tagline presumably inspired by overhearing consumers talk about Hondas: "everyone knows someone who loves a Honda."
At the end of the ad, they direct you to a Facebook fan page instead of a campaign landing page and invite people to help "connect the world through Honda love." To date, over 133,000 people have accepted the challenge.
Honda isn't the only automotive brand that could have done this. People love many different types of cars - the problem is that so often it is easy to focus on the car itself and not the affinity customers have with the underlying brand. With this effort, Honda manages to remind us that by getting people to declare their love for a brand you are not only reminding them of what they love about your products, you'll also get them to raise their hands among their social network as an advocate who could influence their connections as well.
There was an interesting story recently in the Wall Street Journal talking about how computer manufacturers are heavily pushing into rural parts of China to convince more customers outside of major metropolitan areas to buy and start using computers. One particular campaign from Lenovo* uses a slogan featured in the WSJ piece of "Buy A Lenovo PC, Be A Happy Bride." As one of the regional marketing managers from Lenovo notes:
"They [people in rural China] like to give desktop PCs because the boxes are large. They deliver the computers to brides' families on trucks, which everyone can see. In these cases, the bigger the box, the better."
If you were marketing PCs to an audience like this, you might be tempted to talk about product features, such as power management built in so that the computer won't get fried by variable currents and electricity spikes (a common occurrence in most rural areas around the world). You could focus on special software for trade industry groups such as farmers that could increase efficiency of what they are already doing. You might even focus on the packaging in terms of how it brings the brand to life and potentially creates an emotional response for a buyer.
What would it take, however, for you to focus on size? When it comes to the rural market - size is important for two big reasons:
Size can be equated with importance. As the PC and wedding gift example shows, the size of the packaging and overal gift is what will be viewed by the recipient (and those watching) as important. With this, it becomes critical to make sure your packaging carries through on the experience you are trying to create.
Micropackaging makes consumable goods affordable. When it comes to those rural and low-income customers, one of the challenges for them is to continually afford some of the more basic consumable goods necessities such as toothpaste and shampoo. More and more large retailers such as Unilever and P&G are offering their products in "single serving" style packaging where customers can just buy a week's (or even a day's) worth of products at a more affordable price.
The most interesting thing about these points, however, is that they don't just apply to rural audiences. Soft drinks are now sold in half cans to avoid wastage. Bulk shopping stores like Costco and Sam's Club take the opposite approach to micropackaging by packaging huge quantities of everything from food to toilet paper together. The lesson this all points towards is that sometimes the most important thing you can do is to focus not just on what you are selling, but also the packaging that you are selling it in.
*Full Disclosure: Lenovo is a past and current client of Ogilvy PR and I have worked on projects for them in the past - but have had no involvement in the campaign mentioned in this post or in their marketing activities to rural China.
Today is Blog Action Day, a global movement of bloggers to all discuss a single issue on one day around the world. I have been a fan of this concept since the first one back in 2007 when my contribution was a post about "7 tips on eating differently to impact climate change." This year again the topic is an environmental one - specifically about climate change. In reading and researching for this post, one of the things that was apparent was the growing sophistication of social change campaigns online when it comes to climate change. There are a lot of really smart people passionate about this cause and willing to pour their time, energy and creativity into making a difference.
As an individual, I believe in the mission and purpose behind these and that they are important to help promote. Perhaps equally importantly for readers of this blog, however, is that I believe there are some great marketing lessons in some of the best efforts out there right now and below is a presentation highlighting 10 of the best campaigns that I highly recommend checking out and supporting:
Useful links (including those) mentioned in this presentation:
This post is part of Blog Action Day 2009, a worldwide initiative started by Envato founders Collis and Cyan Ta'eed, now being run by Change.org.
Blog Action Day exists to change the conversation on the web for one
day by uniting thousands of bloggers around one important issue - this
year, Climate Change. It's not too late to register your blog and participate.
About six months ago, I created an ebook based on a surprising truth that I had uncovered in the year since my book had come out. Over that time, I received emails from many people talking about how they had found Personality Not Included to be useful in solving their own marketing challenges. Within them I noticed a trend ... that the majority seemed to be coming from women. Clearly, I thought, the idea of using personality to stand out in business is an idea that somehow women entrepreneurs not only understand, but were also actively using intuitively.
Wanting to explore this a bit deeper - I invited 20 visionary women to each contribute a few paragraphs sharing how personality has helped them to achieve their personal success and what advice they might offer to up and coming female entrepreneurs about achieving similar success. That turned into the first edition of The Personality Project: Women of Personality, a free eBook which was released in April of 2009. Today, I'm proud to share the second edition of that ebook, with another 20 contributors bringing the total stories to 40. It's still free and available for download at www.thepersonalityproject.com/wop2.
I am also embedding it below and if you follow the links to see it on Slideshare, you can get a downloadable PDF version:
I'm really proud of this effort and though I realize it is self serving in that it promotes the idea of personality in business that I wrote a book about - but the eBook is free and the ideas and stories in it are still very inspiring. If you enjoyed this ebook, please share the link to either this post or link to download it from the online page. I'll also be compiling a list of links and mentions from the contributors and others below - so if you do happen to write about this or share it, please use the tag "wop2" or "wop" so I can easily find your post and include it here!
When it comes to social media, it sometimes seems the only thing more plentiful than free advice is bad advice. Anyone with a newly minted blog and a Twitter account with a couple thousand followers seems ready to self-describe themselves as "social media guru" (which I feel like I should find offensive both as a social media pro AND an Indian). But the point is, there is no shortage of people that are willing to charge you for half baked advice.
Several weeks ago I spoke with the team at Bulldog Reporter about putting together a webinar that would stand out. One that would share real insightful tips that people haven't heard before. I'm happy to share that I will be conducting that webinar THIS FRIDAY AT 1PM EST focused on the 9 "fatal flaws" of doing PR with social media and real advice on how to really put together a social media plan that will stand out, get results, and make you look GREAT to your boss and rest of your company in the process.
In this session, you'll learn why giving up control is a bad idea, why only amateurs allow comments on YouTube videos and a new idea for using Twitter as part of your pitch process without resorting to fitting every pitch into 140 characters or less. More importantly, unlike many of my other sessions - I have agreed with the organizers to not post the lessons and content from this one online, so the only place you'll be able to get this is through signing up for this webinar. Here's how to get a much more detailed description:
Finally, as a special offer - the first 50 groups to register for this webinar will receive a FREE signed copy of Personality Not Included. Visit Bulldog Reporter online to register ...
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
