the massooleh commblog

The ethics of marketing can sometimes be a bit awry, and some may argue that a marketer’s sole job is to convince people to buy things they don’t need. In Hovy Qui’s blog post, he points out the extreme effect on price that marketing has on products like DeBeer’s diamonds to the point of making it a luxury item. Is it ethical to use the symbolic association of love, even marriage, to drain the pockets of brainwashed consumers? It’s debatable.

But try and imagine a world without marketing: a word without any brands. A world without the swoosh, the half eaten apple, or the the golden arches. We may not realize it, but over the years, brands have become an integral part of our world. They make up the majority of the images we see in our day, and have a special place in modern culture. To a certain extent, advertising has a strong control over us because we want it to, and because it makes us happy.

It has often been argued that the popular image of Santa Claus, a jolly white bearded man in a big red suit, was first popularized by CocaCola in the 60s. Could you imagine living in a world without Santa Claus?

The client side-agency side disconnect is a famous one in the world of marketing. While ad agency creatives strive to create new, smart, and bold ideas, they often find it difficult to convince their clients to follow through with their vision. After all, these clients can sometimes have brand images worth millions of dollars, so naturally, they are concerned about altering it, but in doing so can play things too safe, and suck all the creative energy out of a campaign idea.

In his blog, Luke Sullivan, a well renown advertising executive, recounts a “horror story,” where it took a creative team 68 meetings to fully please their clients (who were evidently a big fortune 500 company) and settle on the right storyboard for a commercial. It took so long in fact, that the 40-story office outside their building was completed before the commercial was.

While this may be a drastic example, it represents a very real problem in the marketing world, especially now, during the new age of transparency and consumer interactivity in advertising. It takes a lot for a company like McDonald’s to sign off on an idea like this, because once you lift the curtain on your company and let people in, it’s impossible to go back, and your brand changes forever.

In Mcdonald’s case, the campaign ended up working exactly as planned, raising the brand perception significantly from where it was before, but there are many companies that don’t have to guts to do what they did, which may turn out to be a riskier move in the long run; companies that fail to take notice of rising trends and go deliberately against them can go bust overnight [see Blackberry].

Thomas Campbell recently offered his views on a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about SnapChat’s peculiar decision to reject Facebook’s $3 Billion acquisition deal, pointing out that the company has no real revenue stream at all.

It’s important to look at the acquisition from Facebook’s perspective, and try to understand why they would offer such a high price.

It is readily apparent that Facebook’s largest revenue stream comes from advertisement, a service that is very dependant on how the company stores information from its users’ profiles: friends, likes, location. The more information Facebook has on its users, the better the functionality of its advertising service.

Startups like SnapChat pose a threat to Facebook, because their main value proposition is in doing the exact opposite: destroying all content posted in an aim to offer its users a platform without risk; mainly, your parents, employers and friends won’t see the embarrassing SnapChat that was taken of you at that party that one night.

A platform like this, and one gaining popularity at such an intense pace, poses an integral threat to Facebook’s business model, which would perhaps explain why Facebook is so intent on buying them out.

It might also explain why SnapChat is so intent on declining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBgKJ5TuILo

I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop by Lance Saunders, the Executive VP Marketing Director for DDB Canada, during a recent office tour offered to Sauder students.

He started off the workshop with an intimidating statement, claiming that the advertising industry had changed more in the past 7 years than it had in the past 30.

Up until very recently, great advertising has been largely about creating a great story, message, and brand through billboards, prints, and television, that resonate with the consumer enough with the consumer that they would remember it when they are out shopping, and have to decide which product to purchase. While the content may have changed, the channels which these stories were presented did not change. These channels all had a defining characteristic: the consumer could not interact with them.

Yet, this model has slowly been breaking down; old channels are no longer as effective as they used to be. Consumers are spending more time on the internet and on their phones than ever before, and more importantly, nobody really believes advertising anymore.

When a company like McDonald’s has a negative health conception with their brand, releasing an advertisement that says otherwise no longer works, because no one will believe it.

One of DDB’s most successful campaigns (also, see video) ushers in a new era of advertising, digitally interacting directly with consumers honestly, lifting the curtain on questions like “How come big macs look so beautiful in commercials and posters but not as beautiful when you get them from the store?”

Telling a great story no longer works; instead, you have to create a great story, but leave a hole in it for the consumer to fill themselves.

http://youtu.be/o9gLqh8tmPA

I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop by Lance Saunders, the Executive VP Marketing Director for DDB Canada, during a recent office tour offered to Sauder students.

During the workshop, he outlined what he believed to be the key differentiators between successful brands, and unsuccessful ones. He argued that successful campaigns understand the human truth behind their products, and use these truths to appeal to consumers.

As put best by Luke Sullivan in his classic book on advertising, Hey Whipple Squeeze This: 

“Hair coloring isn’t about looking younger. It’s about self-esteem. Cameras aren’t about pictures. They’re about stopping time and holding life as the sands run out.”

I thought I might as well write about this.

My COMM101 group pitched the following idea during our entrepreneurship focused class:

Do you look good? Do those jeans make your butt look big? Will you ever get an honest answer? No. Probably not from yourself, and probably not from anybody else in the room, because they wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.

Check-Mate, a new app, proposes a solution. Take a picture of yourself in the mirror on your smartphone, and it’ll be sent out to another random app user, who will see your photo and rate it on a simple binary scale: yes/no. It’s simple, it’s quick, and most importantly, it’s completely honest, because this person doesn’t know you, you don’t know them, and it will probably stay that way forever, so the other person has no reason not to tell the truth. Yeah, those jeans do make your butt look big … but it’s not personal.

The app would follow a similar interface as Rando, where every person who sends a photo would be required to rate someone else’s as well. There would be many exciting possibilities for monetization through sponsorship; the app is centred around clothing: like how these jeans look on your “check-mate”? You can pick a pair up at your local H&M.

Of course, like any idea, there are certain issues that would arise. One of the app’s main proposed advantages is in its quickness, something that would be largely dependant on the number of active users the app has; one of the app’s major challenges would be gathering a substantial initial user base.

So, who wants in?

Vancouver based fashion company Herschel Supply Co., has quickly been growing since they started out in 2009. From 2010-2011, sales grew 900%, and another 350% last year. They frequently collaborate with big name fashion designers like Mark Mcnairy, and form partnerships with companies like Apple.

Yet, this rapid expansion could stand to hurt the company. One of Herschel’s key points of differentiation comes from the brand’s unique style: leather straps instead of zippers, heavy cotton canvas instead of cheap plastic; a Herschel bag stands out in a crowd of regular ones. But can the brand remain unique if everyone owns it?

The popularity of their style threatens to discredit their brand image, especially if a unique look is one of their main points of difference. Other companies like Vans and Urban Outfitters have started to copy Herschel’s styles as well for a cheaper price, further adding to the market saturation. Restricting production would put a cap on their growth, or force them into a highly established luxury market that would be difficult to compete with (ex. Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.)

Herschel’s strengths come from their dedication to quality and and fine details, as well as its brand position in consumers’ minds as the first to develop their unique style. In order to continue its rapid growth in its current market position, the company needs to move away from advertising its fading uniqueness, and to emphasizing these points instead.

One of the main risks investors have recognized in Twitter since the company’s recent IPO filing is the quality of its users’ posts.

A large part of Twitter’s business model depends on co-creation: the amount of traffic on Twitter is largely dependant on content; however, this content isn’t generated by Twitter; it’s created by Twitter’s users. The lower the quality and the frequency of user content, the less people will return to the website, which means less people will click on ads, and less revenue is generated.

While a car manufacturing company has control of every factor of production from the moment the materials enter their factories, Twitter, in a sense, can only provide a factory and hope everything inside goes according to plan. The only thing Twitter can aim to perfect are the factory conditions, or the means by which they allow users to create and receive content. Currently, its 140 character limit, unique trends, like hashtags, and live blogging capabilities are very attuned to user tastes, but consumer tastes are extremely volatile, and creating a service so highly sensitive to them makes your business model highly volatile as well.

All social networking websites operate on this basis, and many of them, like Friendster and MySpace, get the short end of the stick.

Facebook is currently under fire from the F.T.C. for their privacy policy, and Google is being sued from multiple parties for “wiretapping”: scanning content in emails and matching them to appropriate ads.

When organizations like Facebook and Twitter release IPOs, one of the first questions stockholders ask is how they can generate revenue from advertising. The truth is that based on the nature of the services these companies provide, they have unprecedented means of targeting and advertising to consumers; in fact, the databases of consumer behaviour information owned by companies like Google and Facebook are so vast that they have intimidated two of the largest international advertising companies in the world into a merger, just to keep up. Privacy regulations are the only thing holding them back from their true potential.

Companies usually argue that the regulation laws are stuck in the past and need to adapt to the rapidly changing internet culture, and to a certain extent, they have a point. There is a certain level of shared cultural understanding that anything you post online, no matter what your personal privacy settings, is fairly visible and accessible. Why shouldn’t companies have the same amount of access to your account that a complete stranger would? Personally tailored ads would not only largely benefit firms, but consumers as well.

Apple and Google have surpassed Coca-Cola In the 2013 Best Global Brands Report, released recently from Interbrand. This marks the first time Coca-Cola has not been ranked first since Interbrand started its rankings back in 2000.

According to Interbrand’s methodology report, brands are judged based on 3 factors: financial analysis, role of brand, and brand strength, of which the last two strongly contribute to the rise of the technology sector, both on this list and in our everyday lives.

The mark of a good brand is one that we can easily identify, but a mark of a great brand is one that we identify ourselves with. Technology products have become such an integral part of our lives that it has become impossible not to do so. Terms like “Facebook me” and “Google it” have become part of our everyday vocabulary, while the ownership of a iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy represents a personal statement. A day spent without using a phone, a search engine, or a social network, would be unthinkable to the average person. Technology companies have discovered a way to integrate themselves into our lives on a personal level that is nearly impossible for a company like Coca Cola to achieve.