Posted 05.15.12 by Becky Lang
Facebook is going public, and many business publications are skeptical. How much can Facebook really be worth? Its main revenue is advertising, and it cares way more about its users than the marketers paying it. But what these people are really saying is, “This is scary because it’s different. Companies are getting rich and famous in a slower way, that’s not about the bottom line but about how important they are to culture. We don’t know how to measure that. That makes us nervous. Beyond that, advertising on the Internet is hard and strange, and we’re mad about that.”
To everyone who doesn’t work in advertising, these articles say one thing: Facebook still cares about its integrity. Look what happened when MySpace (My_____) pandered to advertisers. It died. Here is why the current conversations about Facebook are missing the point:
1. The conversation shouldn’t just be about click through rates
Marketers are mad because Facebook doesn’t seem to have designed a way for them to get higher click-through rates on their ads. Is this really the biggest deal here? Getting high click through rates, whether through takeover ads, pop-up ads, ads that freeze your browsing experience until you look, has been a fairly sad pursuit that has resulted in little more than interruptive ads that make people hate how advertising works online. Why should this be the main objective of Facebook?
2. Facebook provides brands with something much more valuable than a space to advertise
Facebook allows brands to create conversations with their customers, to provide better customer service and to build a community of people loyal to their brand. Beyond that, it changes the way customers interact with brands and evaluate how much they care about them. It has raised the standards for how brand messaging works. That is valuable, but scary to brands that don’t want to make a change, or don’t how to make valuable content on Facebook. Instead of worrying about click through rate, make your page better. People will come.
3. Facebook might find other ways to make money.
Facebook isn’t just an advertising platform. It’s a destination where people spend hours and hours of their day, one that was built on a technological innovation. With all the out-of-the-box thinkers and talent they’ve hired, it’s likely that they’ll find other ways to make money providing services, not just advertisements.
Mark Zuckerberg has shown a lot of reserve, patience and self-guidance in the way he’s run Facebook. He waited much longer than he was advised to put ads on the site, wanting to establish its social cachet first and foremost. He’s shown a lot of leadership, although in a non-traditional way. Let’s not use their public offering as a time to pressure the site to follow the will of advertisers alone.
-Becky Lang
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Posted 05.08.12 by Becky Lang
One of the first things we do at Zeus Jones is work with brands to nail down and articulate their core purpose. This helps their business become about more than just the products they make, but about a vision for their brand, and the impact they want to have on society. For example, Patagonia isn’t just about making coats, its mission is to “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, [and] use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Working outward from this mission, they’ve raised the bar on their whole category, challenging their competitors to do better by the environment, and give back more.
It would seem that the formula for helping a brand find its core purpose is simple. You just dedicate yourself to the type of person who uses it, or make it about the broader lifestyle it’s a part of – and boom, there you are. A mop is all about helping busy moms be better, or a sexy car is all about inspiring people to take daring chances every day. But do those really sound convincing? Is that really what mops and cars are for? There is such a thing as having too broad and wide of a core purpose. Actions that come from these mission statements tend to feel like abstract campaigns rather than something that evidences the relevance of a business.
Look at Patagonia’s purpose. It dedicates itself to nature, which is connected to the lifestyle of its customers, but it expresses that through its environmental processes and transparency. It’s pretty evident why their purpose and actions are related to their business.
In the short time I’ve worked in marketing, I’ve noticed that communications that force customers to make a logical leap to connect them with their brand are less effective. People shouldn’t have to think, “Um, I guess I kinda see how Dr. Pepper is about declaring your individuality.” Because it’s not. It’s soda.
Here are two simple guidelines for creating a core purpose that leads to actions, communications and experiences that people will buy (figuratively).
1. It should have a clear implication on the way you do business.
Look at a brand like Warby Parker. Their mission is to create lenses at a revolutionary price point, and to act on their belief that everyone has the right to see. This is clearly evidenced to customers through their price point and the massive amounts of giving that they do. This makes it feel credible. Dr. Pepper may value individuality in their campaign messaging, but what are they really doing to promote this in the world? It would be hard to find evidence of that because it is so generally vague. Which leads to my next point …
2. It should be easily connected to your product or service.
The more abstract you get with your core purpose, the more people are going to have a hard time grasping it. For example, I recently wrote about how bizarre Honda’s Pinterest campaign seemed to me. I got that it celebrated adventurous people, but I couldn’t figure out why it was supposed to make me want a Honda, other than out of the vague argument that Honda stands for adventure. Should a car company stand for just … adventure? Shouldn’t it stand for something more car-related?
Customers don’t expect brands to be poets. First and foremost – they want them to make an excellent product, educate them on why that product is so excellent, and do business in a way that empowers people and gives back to the world. If your core purpose leaves these elements behind, then people aren’t going to work hard to figure out why it makes sense.
-Becky Lang
image from Warby Parker
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Posted 05.07.12 by Nien Liu
In the not so distant past, a performance review at Zeus Jones was a beer and a conversation, if you had one at all. That tends to work for a small, closely knit company, but we’ve doubled in size within the last two years. And while we’re only a 28 person shop, it’s just enough to start putting some pressure on some of our internal processes to grow up.
Performance reviews are one of greatest necessary evils in the modern business world. Despite the fact that 4 out of 5 US workers are dissatisfied with performance reviews and experts calling for the end of the practice, we still fumble our way through them every year.
We had our own reservations about performance reviews based on our past experiences with them. The biggest problem was that the things we measure are too tightly defined and would lead people to behave in ways that were counter productive for the agency and their coworkers.
The general approach also doesn’t jive well with our culture:
- We’re very collaborative, to the point where you can’t attribute any idea to one specific person.
- We found that everyone at the company is contributing in different ways (contributing to culture, developing IP, doing outreach, recruiting, etc.) that might not be measurable with the standard approach.
- We don’t have much of a hierarchy at the office. We have the partners and everyone else. We’re making a conscientious effort to further decentralize the structure so that we aren’t completely dependent on the partners.
If you Google “performance reviews,” you’ll find thousands of articles complaining about them and only a few that talk about entirely new approaches. We realized very quickly that we needed a process that was tailor made to the way we work and the things we value. We looked at a few companies to see how they’ve tailored the process fit with their culture.
Our biggest takeaways from observing those companies were:
- The high touch examples tend to give people the biggest sense of security. The challenge is how to do we implement this without overextending the partners?
- Having a goal or a vision for the company helps align people’s efforts and gives managers an objective lens to evaluate someone’s impact on the agency. In other words it does half the work for the managers.
- Gamefication can be used to show people where they stand in the organization without creating a hierarchy. It’s a delicate balance, but it can be addressed with the things you keep track of.
With those notes in mind, we were able to develop a process:
Some notes behind the decisions we’ve made:
- We designed the process to delegate the feedback responsibilities across the entire company, thereby reducing the partner’s commitments and putting the onus on the individual to get what they need.
- The purpose of publicizing your goals to the company is to give everyone the proper context for delivering feedback and also open up opportunities for peer-teaching.
- The partner’s role in the process is to apply their vision of the company and the intimate knowledge of the company’s needs to direct the personal goals that are set by individual.
- The ongoing feedback part of the process ties into processes that are currently being developed for how we run projects. Some of the ideas we are considering are: making team leaders responsible for feedback and post mortem reports.
It should be mentioned that this process is still in beta. A few of us are piloting the program and will be publishing our individual goals soon.
Last year at the 4A’s, a study from Havas’ Arnold Worldwide concluded that “Agencies aren’t doing a good job of training, motivating or retaining employees.” We’re not saying that this process will fix all that, but we hope there are bits and pieces that can contribute to a bigger solution. Stay tuned as we evolve this process.
Posted 04.25.12 by Becky Lang
This was me, Becky, when I had just gotten hired after my creative internship with Zeus Jones. It was a happy time.
I was the first benefactor of ZJ’s first ever internship program, and that was 2 whole years ago. It’s time to do it again.
When I was an intern, I did have a little time to twiddle my thumbs, but I doubt our next intern will have that problem. Since I’ve been here, we’ve more than doubled as an agency, moving from our tiny space lingering above Tum Rup Thai and into a space next to the Soo Visual Arts center, which we are doubling at this moment. By the time the next intern rolls in, the saw sounds should be long gone and we should have lots of extra room for you. This growth has also meant earning some serious and astounding responsibilities with some of the world’s largest brands. Sometimes I can’t believe the impact of the projects I get to work on.
And that’s after only 2 years of being in this industry. While experience and knowledge of branding pay off at Zeus, they’re not the bottom line of what we’re looking for. Above all, we want a certain type of person – someone analytical, collaborative, quick at learning, creative and humble. An applicant could be at the top of their class, but if they have no humility, they won’t fit in here.
You might be wondering what exactly a creative does. It is a loose job description, but around here it means someone who can produce creative work, but also do more high level concepting and strategic thinking. For example, I am a copywriter and do a lot of content strategy, but I also like to do research, brainstorming, and all kinds of other things. The key is to be flexible in what you can do, but grounded in one strong talent that will help us make awesome work.
The end of college is a scary time, especially in this economy. I was grateful that Zeus Jones took me and my all-over-the-place portfolio of college work in, paid me for my internship and never made me bring anyone coffee. This isn’t the kind of internship that you have to pull a bunch of stunts to win – it’s the kind that will treat you with respect, and do the best job possible of getting you in the door of a fun, creative and challenging field.
Good luck!
-Becky Lang
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Posted 04.23.12 by Becky Lang
Today I caught wind of Honda’s new Pinterest campaign, which encouraged 6 people identified to be heavy Pinterest users to take a day away from the site to actually do some of the stuff they’ve been pinning about. It’s clear they believe that Pinterest is a place for people who don’t act on their desires, a distraction that keeps people from the real world. They believe people should instead go out and do things, preferably in their CR-V. Oh, and they should share their adventure … on Pinterest.
As Adfreak pointed out, “The campaign is nicely designed and executed, but somewhat frustrating. If the only way your brand can relate to Pinterest is by dissing it, isn’t it disingenuous to build a whole campaign around it?”
Seeing this was a bit of a mindwarp for me. First of all, I’ve always wanted a Honda. I grew up thinking that they were good cars. Second of all, I think often about how brands could use Pinterest in interesting ways. But seeing this, a campaign that is, in it’s own way, guided by a philosophy (do something in the real world!) took me far away from how I’m used to thinking about cars and dropped me into a really uncomfortable place. In some ways, it seemed kind of sexist. Pinterest is notably used by a majority of female users, and their assumption that it’s a frivolous place but still worth using to spread a marketing message is insulting.
The point is, sometimes forcing your brand onto Pinterest can backfire. Pinterest is a place for creativity and idealism, not necessarily for all products everywhere. Here are a couple questions to ask yourself before going there with your marketing.
1. Does your product fit with the mood of Pinterest?
What succeeds on Pinterest? Cute clothes. Recipes. Household items. This makes it perfect for retailers and many brands that work in consumer packaged goods and have lots of recipes at their disposal. Products that have a connection to the world of design, emotion, inspiration – those might have a chance. Products like, say – Aspirin, are going to feel out of place unless you get real creative.
2. Do you respect Pinterest and its users?
If you don’t, like Honda, don’t compound the annoyingess of condescending them by also clogging up their platform with your advertising messages.
3. Do you create media that might otherwise end up on Pinterest?
Maybe your product isn’t necessarily pin-worthy, but your brand has a connection with the design world, whether it’s through partnerships or empowering a creative consumer base. Look at Pantone – buckets of paint aren’t that sexy, but they are empowering people to create all kinds of media around something simple – colors. Whether it’s Pantone recipes or their dyed Easter eggs, they’re conquering Pinterest.
4. Is this just another house for your TV campaign?
If your TV campaign is all about adventure, you can extend that theme onto Pinterest. But it’s going to be more compelling if you use Pinterest in a way that doesn’t make your campaign the star, but your creative consumers. This means doing something more timeless and interactive, not something that needs a bunch of cultural context to make any sense.
A good rule is – if there’s no natural way for your brand to get on Pinterest, don’t worry about it. Happy pinning.
-Becky Lang
Posted 04.19.12 by Becky Lang
Recently, I was talking to someone who works in the field of child literacy. She’s constantly worried that her school’s program, where teachers work one-on-one with kids who are behind on reading, will get cut.
When you think about it, child literacy is one of the most important things in the world. It’s one of those ungreased wheels that allows generations held back by class, linguistic differences and poverty to grow up missing educational opportunities to escape those problems. If we dramatically improve children’s literacy, we could start to significantly reduce racial and class disparity in future generations. Yet programs to address this issue are constantly under threat of getting cut.
“So what do you think would help your program avoid getting cut?” I asked her.
“We would need to make them actually understand what we do and why*. And that’s impossible.”
This problem is one common for almost every industry. Physics. Legislature. Charity. Marketing. Something takes a lot of effort to understand, so people simply don’t try. But we need to stop waiting for them to try – we need to bring that information to life for them in new ways.
We live in a society where millions of complex systems run by highly-specialized people work together in unison every day. And we make big decisions about these systems without understanding them, because a) the outside world doesn’t bother to and b) people aren’t sure how to translate what they actually do to the outside world.
If we could all become better translators, the world would get better. And we are learning new ways to do this. While infographics are affectionally disdained, they have shown that we can get people to want to learn by making statistics more visually digestible. And digital culture is helping us share more information every day.
For marketers, translation should be at the center of helping good businesses gain the reputations they deserve. At the heart of every business is a product or service that is carefully designed and created. If businesses could find ways to translate all the thinking that goes into that product, whether it’s the physics that go into a car motor or the agriculture processes that go into orange juice, they could start to gain public trust.
Historically, brands haven’t talked much about any of that, other than just a euphemistic glaze in a commercial. But the Internet gives us a chance to really educate the public with the knowledge that businesses hold. And some are already doing this, like G.E.’s Ecomagination project.
Translating these complex processes isn’t just about helping a brand sell more product, it’s about being a responsible brand. Businesses can help the world get better if they give consumers the tools they need to make better choices. If we all step back and understand how big words like sustainability, education and innovation work on a specific, technical level, we can encourage systems that work and fight myths that prevent progress from moving forward.
-Becky Lang
* Like many industries, the forces at work in child literacy programs are not the ones you would expect.
The people controlling the budgets tend to blame schools for illiteracy, but according to this teacher, these programs are bandaging problems that started much sooner. In her opinion, the biggest reason kids get behind is because their parents didn’t read to them often as a child, usually because they’re working too many jobs to keep their family afloat. Without this experience, many kids don’t understand how a storybook works. How are the words on the page different from what’s in real life? How are they supposed to react to these words?
Beyond that, the kids also lose out on the emotional comfort most kids develop toward books when they are used to confronting them with their parents. The parent reading makes them feel safe and guided through the process, and only with a one-on-one teacher can they get a similar feeling of trust and comfort toward the written word. But explaining these problems opens up many discussions that go beyond reading. It’s complicated, but it’s worth understanding.
Posted 03.30.12 by jskuefler
A few of us here at Mount Olympus were chatting this morning about the need for agencies like us to rethink the way we support or engage with the colleges, universities and educational institutions in our neighborhoods.
Yes, we do the occasional speaking engagement. Yes, we invite a class or two in from time to time to walk them through what we’re scheming. But we think there has to be something that fills the gap between these one-off interactions and the larger events hosted by the AIGA and others.
Sometimes we feel a little like dead beat dads…Here from time to time but mostly checked out. I guess this is me saying, “Sorry World (read: Minnesota). *cue John Williams score* We’re trying to be better. We’re just not sure how.”
So…What can an agency like us do to be better or more helpful? How can the industry that shapes the next generation of creative thinkers work more fluidly with the industry that shapes the next generation of creative marketing?
Let’s chat. @josephkuefler or @zeusjones
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Posted 03.12.12 by Becky Lang
Modern brands are expected to be ethically oriented, and the first answer to that is to donate to charity. Whether it’s a quiet handing off of a check, a participatory drive or a 1:1 sale/donation ratio like Tom’s shoes, most of our brand heroes became heroes by showing that they give back.
Beyond just doing good for society, our tax system makes giving beneficial for the company as well. From a distance – this system ensures that everybody wins. Non-profits receive funds and businesses and individuals receive tax cuts.
But there’s definitely a lot that could be improved in this system. This first occurred to me when I was an arts editor and a book called Design for the Other 90% showed up at my desk about 3 years ago.
Basically, the book argued that much of design goes into suiting the needs of people who want a cuter yoga mat, or a new flavor of soda. Companies go after the monied demographics, without realizing that what the rest of the world lacks in money, it makes up for in numbers. In other words, efforts to help the 3rd world don’t necessarily have to come from charity alone – they can also come from people who want to make money, armed with designers, who bother to work in new ways.
Many of the projects it talked about were dramatically different from what I had formerly conceived of as “helping those in need.” Instead of donating T-shirts to Africa (like Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts for Africa campaign), it argued that efforts like using affordable materials to build irrigation systems in small communities would actually empower people without say, putting all local shirt makers out of business.
Reading that book was the first time I had ever encountered the idea of “design thinking” to solve problems. Now that I have entered into the world of marketing, wherein brands are very conscious of the worldwide, large-scale impact they make every day, I have started to think about the long-entrenched systems around charity, and how they could benefit from the structures of iteration and sustainable design that brands are now beginning to use in their marketing and processes.
How could we start to redesign charity to be less transactional and more innovative? I think brands are in an excellent position to move this idea forward. Maybe it begins by designing an affordable and useful product for lower income people using the technology designed to serve the first world. Maybe it begins by helping to build infrastructures rather than just writing checks. But if we are to motivate a new way of thinking around charity, it’s worth thinking about how the government incentivizes this. How can we reward businesses for helping in ways other than just writing a check?
Modern branding means helping businesses become digitally and ethically oriented. Isn’t it time that what is considered ethical is challenged to move forward?
-Becky Lang
Posted 03.08.12 by Nien Liu
A few months ago, we had the opportunity to host some advertising students from MCAD. In addition to the usual Q+A, we gave them a quick rundown on how we’re thinking about strategy at the moment.
Lately we’ve been so busy that a lot of our high-level strategic conversations and thoughts tend to happen in passing, so there were bits and pieces of insights floating around. This deck was an opportunity to string them together into something coherent so that we can actually react to it with an informed opinion.
We’re sharing this with friends of the agency and curious onlookers as a peek into what’s on our minds at the moment. Take a look and feel free to let us know what you think.
Posted 03.06.12 by Becky Lang
NOTE: WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING INQUIRIES. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO WROTE IN.
Who’s it for?
A low-cost, nutritionally complete pet food built around a simple belief about happiness.
What do we want from you?
We’re looking for creative types – people who doodle, sketch, sculpt, sew, carve, glue, bedazzle, animate, sing, draw, paint, bake, dance, act, blog, write, press, wrap, design, illustrate, mosaic, letter, paste, trace or print. We want to find people who’ll use their creativity to help our brand spread happiness.
We want you to use our assets (logos, illustrations and such), and the spirit of our philosophy to create something great and allow us to share it with our community. It could be anything, from a simple concert poster to a stop motion video adventure. Things that can be easily expressed digitally are best, but anything creative could work.
What do you get out of it?
If you create something that we share with our community, we’ll give you $500. We’ll also give you credit and link to your web page, Etsy shop, design business, art gallery or wherever you might be promoting your other creative work. Money, happiness, exposure – it’s a pretty sweet deal.
What’s next?
We need to get an idea of who’s interested and what they might be interested in doing. Once we’ve got everyones info we’ll decide who’s the best fit. For now, tell us a little about you – nothing too personal – we just want to get a sense of who you are. Include a link to something you’ve made, what you think you might make and your basic contact info.
When does this all happen?
We’re looking to get everyones info by the end of day Monday, March 12th. We’ll take the a few days and get back to everyone by Friday, March 16th with a yea or nay and some next steps. One other note, we’re on a short timeline, so whatever you decide to create would have to be ready to go in 2 to 3 weeks.
Send your info and any questions to dan.horan@zeusjones.com.
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Posted 02.28.12 by Becky Lang
I’ve been writing a lot about the relationship between brands, publications, digital and print lately, and I think this is an important part of making the ecosystem work.
The truth in the publishing world is that new publications have it a lot easier than older ones – if they understand these two facts:
1. We are in a recession and the print industry is dying changing. This means it’s a time to experiment with spending as little money as possible. Luckily, the Internet makes publishing for almost nothing a reality.
2. When building your site, avoiding complicated modules and development costs and just using pre-existing services can make your publication cheaper and more dexterous.
So basically, I mean lightweight in two ways: Frugal with money, and simple with the infrastructure of your site. Obviously this kind of strategy is almost impossible for older publications, who have a huge staff with unions that keep their salaries in the same range as when print journalism was thriving, office space that is increasingly full of empty rooms after rounds of layoffs, and websites built by their own web department that cannot keep up with web design trends. This is increasingly tough when you consider that a bunch of college kids can literally start a WordPress site for $12/month and create their own publication working from home.
Let me show how following the first two guidelines can help a new publication:
People starting a publication these days know that they can just get a few people together and work from home, using WordPress and hosting their own site. They don’t need any large investments for development or office space, just a little bit of CSS knowledge. This scenario does mean writers are working for free, but so are many bloggers hired by national publications. The truth is, in an age where everyone can be a journalist, competition is high and many writers are prepared to write out of passion, not as their main career. The publication can choose to monetize and use banner ads to pay people, or they can experiment with other ways to reward staff as the publication grows its audience. But that’s key – err on the side of not spending money until you know you have a large audience, otherwise you’re going to be screwed.
Because WordPress blogs are built to be easily reskinned visually, use a simple system of tags and categories to avoid complicated infrastructure and have plug-and-unpluggable widgets, it is simple for these sites to change over time to accommodate new visual and functional trends in web design. One of the most common complaints I hear from my friends at publications is that their website is so complex and customized that a redesign is impossible.
Part of the reason that older publications are increasingly closing their doors is because they’re not built to compete in this system of writers working for little money, on publications that cost next to nothing and are forced to rapidly change. This doesn’t necessarily mean Doomsday – would Gawker have so many stories to skin in snark if The New York Times didn’t exist? Probably not. But not every publication is as essential as the NYT, and without streamlining their processes to compete, they’re going to have to deal with a harsh reality.
The good news is that for the average college kid wanting to start a publication, they’re in the right place at the right time – as long as they don’t expect to make much – if any – money.
-Becky Lang
Posted 02.22.12 by Becky Lang
I’ve been entranced by the Nike Fuelband ever since I found out about it. Not necessarily because I’m a runner and psyched to track my “fuel” (I wish), but because it is one of the first examples of a health-centric feedback loop that is actually cool.
Awhile back I wrote about feedback loops, which are automatic data streams that can alert people about anything from how fast they’re driving to how dry their plants are to how many calories they are burning. These have a powerful potential to change human behavior by making us deal with realities we otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, if you had a constant reminder that you were eating 500 extra calories every day, you’d probably can it. While you could know this with a manual entry program like Livestrong’s My Plate, a feedback loop would remove the necessity for you to enter info, making it automatic.
The Nike Fuelband calculates your “Nike Fuel,” which according to Gizmodo is done by turning information about oxygen into data, along with using an accelerometer, which has proven to be at least somewhat useful in measuring calories burned. Basically, it’s scientifically impressive and mysterious, while locked into the Nike culture that makes something a lot cooler to be seen in than your standard body monitoring device.
This could be the first mainstream adaption of the power of feedback loops, which could actually help a large number of people become healthier. Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity should definitely take note.
While I can imagine that Fuelband 3.0 might be a bit more unassuming and sleek in design, I’m still impressed by where Nike is at right now. Considering that people are suddenly clamoring to buy these (they’re sold out right now) and the brand today announced its new knit shoes, I’m starting to wonder if Nike isn’t the next Apple in terms of innovation.
Check out the Fuelband here.
-Becky Lang
Posted 02.15.12 by Becky Lang
I come from a media background, where arguments about “the future of newspapers” were frequent, and often led to spats about how to measure the effectiveness of banner ads. What a depressing avenue of conversation. Luckily, after working at Zeus Jones for a couple years, I’ve started to think about the relationship between the digital world, the physical world and monetization in a whole new way.
Here’s what I’ve observed in as clean a sentence as I can conjure: The media companies that are succeeding are relying on physical merchandise and the brands that are considered most innovative are relying on digital media.
First, let’s talk about publications.
People are very cynical when it comes to how newspapers, blogs and magazines are supposed to make money online. “Yes, I will deal with pop-up ads, floating ‘Take Our Survey!’ widgets and constant prods to ‘Subscribe to the Print Edition, Dammit!’ if it means that I can help keep a publication alive,” people implicitly think. But that’s not the future – that’s narrow thinking.
Basically, publications have something very valuable – a reputation. The New York Times, Vice, [cool blog] – all of those have social cachet, which is invaluable and highly coveted by brands. What many don’t realize is that they can use their reputation and “coolness” to help sell physical products, whether that’s cheesy mugs and shirts (College Humor), books (McSweeney’s) or hand-selected objects sold in a shop (Monocle).
The companies that are leading the way right now are the ones who are leveraging their brand and acting like your average Disney movie by selling as much merchandise as possible. This frees them from relying on the less-than-profitable, unexciting world of online advertisements, which actually destroy a company’s reputation if used too egregiously.
Now, let’s talk about brands
This Fortune Magazine article points out something interesting – Nike is becoming more profitable and more socially relevant than ever, and they’ve had an interesting strategy. Instead of blowing tons of money on TV commercials featuring [famous sports guy of right now], they’re creating useful online platforms and technologies that help them connect to their customers.
Nike+ is the main example, but if you look at their mobile efforts, you’ll find lots of useful stuff. Their Nike Training App is something I personally love – it’s a pocket-sized personal trainer that is far less annoying than -ahem- some class leaders at your local gym.
The brand has figured out that the digital space is not only valuable but necessary, and what goes there isn’t just more content related to your TV/print campaign, but actually useful media and services.
Similarly, many retail sites have started hiring ex-editors from major publications, and becoming magazines online. People don’t just want to shop, they want to be entertained, and that can lead them to spend even more.
The Moral of the Story – Digital is a Place to Build Reputation
What I’m saying is that struggling ventures, whether publications or businesses, don’t need to give up hope – they just need to learn from one another. Brands need to learn from the way publications use editorial to gain a following, and publications need to learn from the way brands constantly invent creative merchandise, and come up with interesting ways to sell it. What that starts with is throwing out the idea that you should be using the digital space as a primary way to make money. Instead, it’s where you build your reputation, and it’s in finding new ways to create physical objects that you can make a profit.
By using digital as a place to provide (free) engaging content and services for customers, it can be a more powerful tool than ever at selling a product, even if that product is a publication.
-Becky Lang
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Posted 02.14.12 by Becky Lang
A lot of brands have figured out that they should have blogs. What they did with those blogs – well, it varied. For some, they’re houses for interesting editorial content, a peek into their company culture and fun news. For others, they became a place to stash press releases. But aside from the “what” of blogs, the real problem was the “where.” Most blogs were housed right on the brand website, under blog.brand.com or brand.com/blog. This strategy is missing a huge opportunity.
Basically, when connecting with consumers on the Internet, you need to go where they are, not expect them to come to you. And according to the numbers, consumers are on Tumblr and Pinterest.
I’ve written before that brands need to get on Tumblr. Here’s all brands need to do.
1. Sign up for Tumblr.
2. Make a custom theme if you want, but keep in mind that most people read in the dashboard and don’t necessarily see your theme.
3. Simply post everything you are posting on your blog on your Tumblr as well.
4. Measure popularity of different types of posts by how many likes and reblogs they get.
5. Learn from those interactions.
Now that I said my Tumblr bit, it’s time to talk about Pinterest. Pinterest is about to change online shopping as we know it. Here’s why.
On Pinterest, people create a sort of “moodboard” of who they are by “pinning” images that they like. This is a powerful means of self-expression, giving people a new incentive to look for items on other websites that they can add to their pinboard. This means that some people who were not incentivized to visit retail sites online now have a reason to.
Since starting Pinterest myself, I’ve found myself looking for sites that have random, curated assortments of things, textual context not necessary, so I can sort through them and decide what to add to my pinboards. For example, Wanelo, is perfect for this.
If you can create a portal where people can easily sort through images of your product, they’re more likely to end up on Pinterest, where they can be completed with a price tag ribbon and linked right back to your website.
Here’s what brands should do to interact with customers on Pinterest.
1. If you’re a brand that makes things that are generally pretty and self-expressive, start your own Pinterest. Feature your own products, but also images that inspire your products. For example, Puma will share pictures of animals and colors palettes.
2. Outside of Pinterest, present curated collections of your products that update frequently, so customers will turn to you to find new things to add to their pinboards.
If your brand is religiously updating your site’s blog and not getting the interaction that you want, it’s because young people are starting to think of blogs as more and more social. Tumblr and Pinterest are their RSS feeds of what matters with the people and brands they care about, and if you’re not bringing your content there, you’re missing out.
Just remember – don’t just drop into a social network and post your TV/print campaign content. Instead, spend some time on it, see what its functions are, what regular people are sharing, and find a human approach to connecting.
-Becky Lang
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Posted 02.08.12 by Becky Lang
As Stephen Colbert and John Stewart have very clearly pointed out, this election is all about money. Their parody of Super PAC-funded negative commercials as a primary campaign strategy makes it evident that the focus is definitely on quantity of contributions, rather than the quality of what comes out of them.
For example, Barack Obama has been trying hard to organize a grassroots donation effort, stating that we need to “neutralize the avalanche of special-interest spending to defeat” him. But is it really about matching Republican contributions? Should it be?
Fun fact: In Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, which has fewer than 200 contributors, the average contribution for his main engine is roughly $150,000. Barack Obama’s average contribution is $50.
The way that the election campaigning is happening right now reminds me of brand marketing in the 90′s. It’s all about throwing down as much money as possible, getting on the airwaves and getting your message out there. For example, 96% of Mitt Romney’s Super PAC spending has been on attack ads.
In other words, they’re stuck in an era when marketing was all bout saying the other guy’s burger is 50% smaller. And those are politicians – many brands have long moved away from that game. With the rise of modern branding, brands have realized that messaging-only approaches just don’t work anymore. No matter what your TV commercials say, if your company has bad customer service, you need to fix the customer service, or else customers empowered by the Internet will destroy your reputation. Instead of relying on empty promises in commercials, brands are restructuring their processes so that they can do things better, and do more for their customers. By spending less on telling the story, they are challenging themselves to be creative about using social media, viral marketing and other techniques to get the word out.
So why is the election still all about TV spending? Instead of trying to rival the scope of Republican attack ads, Obama supporters should think of more creative – and less spendy – ways to make an impact. What if instead of asking for money for campaign materials, they used some of what they have to finance small projects or startups, and then publicized their successes? By pumping that money back into efforts that will help the people whose lives they want to improve, they could send a much larger message than any you might find in a commercial.
Look at Pepsi’s Refresh Project – they managed to create their own version of Kickstarter, just using their Superbowl funding.
Beyond how they spend their money, the viral – and free – territory of social media should actually be making funded marketing less important than ever for campaigns. Reputation spreads faster than ever, which is probably why no amount of campaign money can stop Mitt Romney from getting torched by The Onion.
The bottom line is, if our favorite brands have rethought their spending on messaging, isn’t it time for politicians to do so too?
-Becky Lang