The Quisenblog

The name George Kingsley Zipf is one you probably aren’t familiar with. Yet his observations more than a half-century ago proved prophetic in the world of marketing.

Zipf (1902-1950) was a philologist and professor at Harvard. He noted that the most popular word in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most-used word, 100 times more than the 100th most-used word, 1,000 time more than the 1,000th most-used word, etc.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Turns out the algorithm he discovered for the popularity of words is pretty much universal in all categories. What’s true with words is also true for consumer products and services. The #1 automobile model/hair gel/soft drink brand sells 10 times more than the 10th most popular, 100 times more than the 100th, etc. This phenomenon has come to be known as Zipf’s Law.

These findings, when combined with the realization that consumers really only have room in their conscious brain for 2 or 3 products per category, shows how perilous it is to settle for being number 10 in a category (or number four or even number three). Consider the category of online search. Chances are if I ask you to name a search engine, you’ll say Google. If I ask you for others, you may say Yahoo or MSN. If I ask you to name more, you’ll probably be stumped by the time you get to #5. The reason is, you have no reason to know five search engines.

With that in mind, what can you do to get in the top of the heap in your prospects’ minds? It is doubtful you’ll be able to get there by being “incrementally better” than the category leader. You have to offer a true difference. A meaningful, demonstrable difference. A game-changer. Something that is obvious, yet has somehow been overlooked by every other competitor in the category.

An example of this that comes to mind is Reef sandals (http://www.reef.com). Reef set out to make the “ultimate surfer sandal.” One of the things they did to make their sandals radically unique was to put a bottle opener right into the sole of the sandal. Brilliant! How many times have you been on the beach and had no way of opening that ice-cold bottle of Corona? Simple. Elegant. Obvious. And totally, radically unique. There is no other sandal like Reef. The company succeeded in changing the “sandal paradigm” of hard core surfers, and broke away from the pack. They gave their audience a reason to “move them up the ladder.”

I guarantee that if you spend as much time and effort thinking up ways to make your offerings “radically unique” as you now do to improve them incrementally, you’ll have way more to show for it.

Posted by Mickey

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admin Ramblings advertising, George Zipf, marketing, radically unique, Reef Sandals, Spokane

If I hand you a brick and ask, “How many uses can you think of for this?,” you’ll probably come back with a dozen or so uses, all of the functional, yeah-I-sort-of-expected-that variety. You may use it to build a wall. Or pave a patio. Build a house. Or even use it as a paperweight.

If, however, I asked you, “What 40 ways can you think of to use this?,” I’m likely to get a whole different kind of list. After exhausting the obvious uses above, you’ll find yourself uncomfortably searching for other unthought-of uses. Some will be totally silly, or non-sequitar. But before long (probably around number 25 or 30), you’ll actually hit on something truly original (paint it gold and hand it out as a Fort Knox souvenir…). It is here, at this uncomfortable point when you think you’ve exhausted all practical uses for the brick, where true creativity lives. It’s where you start to find new connections between the object at hand and the world around you. You start thinking beyond the obvious solutions. Your ego stops judging every passing thought in the name of quantity.

Creativity can be defined as the process through which the mind finds heretofore unrecognized relationships between two entities, perceptions or ideas. It is something that allows our audience to see something in a different way.

Creativity is hard. It is a trip into uncharted territory. It is bumping into ideas that quite frankly you don’t know how to judge or evaluate.

It is taking the obvious and making it interesting.

Knowing how our mind’s creativity works is the reason few creatives settle on the first idea (or handful of ideas for that matter) they find. The thinking being, if it was that obvious to me, it must be obvious to everyone, therefore there’s nothing new or exciting about it. Truly creative solutions are a bit unnerving, not because they are provocative or irrelevant, but because you’ve never seen something quite like this, and your mind doesn’t know how to evaluate it.

So next time you’re presented with an idea or concept that makes you a little uneasy, avoid the reaction of rejecting it out of hand because it is “different.” Deconstruct it to see how that idea was developed. See if it answers the needs spelled out in the creative brief. Live with it for a time. Then form your conclusion.

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One of the things we continually preach to our clients is to discover the inner meaning of your product or service. This has little to do with its functionality or serviceability. It is more about the emotional need you answer for your customer.

The AMC television series Mad Men gave us a perfect example of this during its season one finale. Part of the story arc involves the ad agency’s new business pitch to Kodak. The client has just introduced a new technology that will revolutionize the age-old slide projector. And the client, who is predictably seduced by this new technology, wants to lead with it, and explain to the consumer how this new system will make showing slides so much easier and convenient for them.

Don Draper, the agency’s creative director, has a different take on how to sell the product. You can see it here in this clip:

Technologies change. Features are added. Product lines evolve. Competition changes. But the core reason for doing business with you—the emotional need you are satisfying—need never change. Honda came out with a campaign in the early 70’s (via Chiat/Day) around practicality. The tag line was “We keep it simple.” While Hondas have changed quite a bit over the last 35+ years (you probably wouldn’t even recognize a ’76 Civic), if you ask, “Quick, name a car that stands for practicality,” Honda will likely be one of the first few responses from most people.

Customers do business with people (and companies) that “get” them. And there’s no better way to demonstrate that than to understand and answer that deeper psychological need.

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Mickey Uncategorized advertising, AMC, customer service, customer value, Don Draper, Honda, Kodak, Mad Men, marketing, product package, Spokane, technology

Black Friday—which earned its name because that is the date on the calendar that moves many retailers’ balance sheets from red to black—has come to take on a darker meaning to the folks in one Long Island, New York village.

As you may have heard, this past Friday, a security guard at a Long Island Walmart was trampled to death by as many as 1,000 “early bird shoppers” hoping to be one of the few to score a cut-rate TV, gaming console or talking Elmo. As tragic as it is that no customers stopped to help the doomed man (or the injured pregnant woman who was also knocked down), one has to wonder whether Walmart store management, corporate management, or even the retail industry as a whole deserves a share of the blame.

We talk often about how marketers train their customers to behave. Major retailers have created the monster of the 4 a.m. “door-buster sale” on the Friday after Thanksgiving. To entice shoppers, they drop the price of a selection of high-demand products, offering staggering savings, BUT (yes, there’s always a “but”) with the understanding that supplies of those $499 40” TVs or the $10 DVD players is limited to one or two per store. So for those of you not quick enough to get to the electronics aisle before everyone else, tough luck. You would have done better sleeping off the tryptophan.

Suddenly you understand the mindset of those early-hour shoppers. They were “trained” in a sense to exhibit this “every man (or woman) for himself” behavior. Mad dashes down the aisles without concern for employees and other shoppers are not only condoned, they are in a sense rewarded. Little old ladies are just speed bumps. Christmas shopping suddenly resembles festival seating at a Who concert.

The sad thing is, even if retailers were to agree that the whole notion of Black Friday has gotten out of control, there’s not much they can do about it. Die-hard customers have been trained to scour ad circulars on Thanksgiving Day and come up with an hour-by-hour battle plan for Friday morning. And if, as a retailer, you opt out of this game, your potential customers will just move on to some other retailer that’s in.

My hope is that retailers will recognize that customer experience is the most important thing to focus on. Providing blockbuster pricing is part of the experience, but can it be done in a way that treats all customers fairly and provides a safe and sane shopping experience that will generate “good stories” afterwards? How about a free gift card to everyone in line at 6 a.m. to be spent in the store as they please, with no urgency to be the first one to the electronics aisle? Or letting them order special merchandise for limited hours that morning on their PDAs or laptops?

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admin Ramblings advertising, Black Friday, Christmas, marketing, retail, Spokane

You can usually tell what kind of year it has been by looking at the new terms and words it generates. The year 2008 has been rich with neologisms that support the New Frugality, the rediscovered zeitgeist of cutting back on consumption. My favorite new term might be “frugalista,” defined by The New Oxford American Dictionary as “a person who leads a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing own produce, etc.”

But the year’s winning word according to The NOAD is the verb “hypermile,” which means “to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and driving techniques.” Hypermilers (the noun form) keep their tires properly inflated, remove roof racks from their vehicles, and turn engines off rather than letting them idle at stoplights. The word even has it’s own website that’s filled with tips that’ll make you feel like a hot-rodding lead foot (”slowly accelerate after stops” and “always know your gas mileage after trips to the pump”). Here in the West, “hypermiling” is sometimes called “EcoDriving.”

A somewhat related term is “staycation,” which is a day trip or vacation taken at or near one’s home.

Other jargon from 2008? How about “moofer” (rhymes with “goofer”), a Mobile Out-Of-Office worker who is basically Dilbert with a blackberry instead of a cubicle. Works as a noun, but I’m not so sure about the verb form (“My employer just moofed me!”).

Then there’s “tweet,” a short message sent via Twitter using a cell phone or other mobile device.

Another newbie is the “topless meeting,” which, while it may conjure up staff meetings at the Playboy Mansion, actually refers to meetings in which electronic devices like laptops, blackberries and mobile phones are verboten.

Thanks to the 2008 Presidential campaign, we now have “hockey mom,” which used to be the winter equivalent of a soccer mom, but now has been conflated with pit bulls, lipstick and Neiman-Marcus shopping sprees.

And of course there’s “toxic debt,” the poorly secured bank loans that were randomly bundled and regifted like a holiday fruitcake. “Toxic debt” is the pre-bailout term. Post-bailout (or, euphemistically, “Post Rescue Package”), we refer to it as “troubled assets.”

Do you have any favorite “new words” from the past year you’d like to share?

Just a little fodder for all you moofing frugalistas out there to tweet to your circle while hypermiling to your staycation.

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admin Ramblings advertising, Frugalista, marketing, Spokane, staycation, Twitter, words

There is a famous story about President John F. Kennedy’s first visit to NASA’s headquarters back in 1961. While touring the facility, the President’s entourage came upon a man who was mopping the floor in one of the hallways. The President stopped to chat with the man and asked him what he did at NASA. The janitor addressed the young President by saying, “Sir, I’m helping to put a man on the moon!”

This story illustrates the idea that everyone at NASA, regardless of his or her position, was contributing toward the ultimate mission of the organization. Is the same true in your company or organization?

Rather than treating team members or departments as “cogs in a bigger machine,” allow them to share in the mission of the company (what we refer to as its “Brand Vision”). The first step in building this camaraderie and getting buy-in from everyone in the organization is to share how your Brand Vision was arrived at, what it means to your customer, and why it is meaningful, unique and true. Then, turn your employees and departments loose in determining how they can contribute to the expression of the Brand Vision, and ultimately, how they can surprise and delight customers through fulfillment of the Brand Vision.

Is knowing the mission of the organization is to put a man on the moon going to affect how a janitor mops a floor? Who knows? But just the fact that he felt a part of that mission surely paid benefits to NASA in some form, probably in a way that NASA management couldn’t have imagined.

The same can be true for just about any forward-thinking organization. Allowing employees and departments to determine for themselves how they can meaningfully bring the organization’s Brand Vision to life in their day-to-day dealings will unleash a collective creativity that will be inspiring to witness. Rewarding ideas and initiatives developed by staff, and sharing successes with all in your organization, are excellent ways management can perpetuate the growth and consistency of the Brand Vision.

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Got a few minutes? If so, here’s a video I’d like you to take a look at. It is an 18-second video of two three-person teams, each passing a basketball to team members. What I’d like you to do is count the number of times the WHITE TEAM passes the ball. Click here to view the video. (Visual Cognition Lab) Once you’ve viewed it, check back here to see if you were correct.

So how many times was the White Ball passed? Was it 12? 13? 14?

If you said 14, congratulations. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Now, what about the gorilla? What gorilla, you ask? Play the video again, and this time instead of focusing on the basketballs, look for the gorilla.

Don’t be surprised if you missed the gorilla the first time. This video was part of an experiment done by University of Illinois cognitive psychologist Daniel J. Simons to demonstrate how our conscious minds work. Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that every moment of every day sorts through the overwhelming amount of stimuli we’re hit with and instantaneously determines where our conscious attention needs to be focused. If our subconscious filter determines something to be of no relevance to the task at hand, then even though we may see it, we won’t really see it.

That’s how we missed the gorilla.

Now imagine the same scenario playing out in living rooms all across America. Only instead of counting basketball passes, folks are involved in American Idol or NFL football or Iron Chef. And when the commercial break comes (the gorilla), they often won’t even see it because they’re not looking for it.

This selective perception is a challenge we face everyday in what Seth Godin refers to as “interruption marketing.” We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. We have to use every tool of subterfuge at our disposal to hammer our way into our customers’ consciousness. And the most effective tools we have are those that draw on the emotions.

Conscious thought rarely has the reins of emotion. So if we can successfully tug at a heart string/make someone laugh/help someone feel better about him/herself, we’ve gotten past the conscious gatekeeper and found a way into our customers’ psyches.

So in these days when every dollar counts and we need our advertising to “work harder,” and the tendency is to forego entertaining or “soft” commercials in favor of nuts-and-bolts hard sell, remember the gorilla.

After all, if he’d been pink, you probably would have picked him out right away.

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How is it that while many things in our lives have been improved, made easier or more comfortable, that the act of casting a vote seems like something straight from the Third World (or third grade)?

Despite states spending millions on voting machines, poll worker training and the like, we still see 4-hour long lines in the rain to vote. Clearly the “voting touch point” in many states could use some work. Hey, here’s an idea. Why not take the voting experience out of the hands of stressed out bureaucrats and turn it over to someone who excels at providing an exceptional customer experience. Nordstrom, for example.

Wow, folks might actually look forward to casting their ballots. You can image stepping into a well-lit, comfortable Pottery Barn-esque voting “boutique” with ample parking (valet, for older or disabled voters) equipped with row after row of voting machines that are easy to use, intuitive, and above all, accurate (no “Butterfly ballots” here). Not to mention the legion of helpful “poll associates” whose job is to ensure you have a pleasant experience. And once you’re done casting your ballot, you could relax in the adjacent Voter Lounge where you could enjoy a latte or a sandwich or quiche while relaxing in comfortable, overstuffed chairs, talking politics with your neighbors while watching the latest election news and returns on one of the many big screen TVs. Want to commemorate your voting experience? Stop into the on-site gift shop, where you can pick up a limited edition Obama polo shirt or a McCain rugby jersey.

And the ultimate reason to have Nordstrom run the election? If we ever get disillusioned with our choice, we could always return it.

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The book “Samurai Selling: The Ancient Art of Service in Sales,” by Chuck Laughlin, Karen Sage and Marc Bockmon, defines the ancient samurai this way: “The samurai was not a maniac with a sword; he was a man with a mission that could be summed up by the question, ‘How can I best serve my client?’”

Of particular interest are the lessons of the book’s fourth chapter: “Keep a Beginner’s Mind.” Here, the authors lay out some direction that’s perfect for marketers. The reminder is that with new technologies, metrics and ever-shifting competitive landscapes, we will only remain successful by continuing to evolve ourselves. By keeping a “beginner’s mind” that is always ready to learn, willing to challenge convention and eager to try new approaches.

A few of the lessons of the Samarai marketer are:

1. Keep an empty cup. “A beginner’s mind keeps you open to creative solutions.” This chapter’s lesson from the samurai is to keep our “cup” empty — with the cup as a metaphor for the mind. The full cup is a symbol for the mind of one who thinks he/she already knows everything — there’s no room for new knowledge.

2. Don’t get locked into technique. “If you become attached to one selling technique, you are an aging warrior…Great artists master technique then transcend it; mediocre artists master technique and then become slaves to it!” Don’t fear trying a new approach or looking at your marketing challenges from a new, broader perspective. The inclination in most categories is to fall in line with the rest of your category, and to try to solve marketing problems the same way as your competitors. Challenge yourself to “zig” when others historically would “zag.” Even if you end up going back to “business as usual,” you’ll discover something valuable about your customer and your company.

3. Be the Prospect. “See what he sees. Feel what he feels…. As you do this, you will begin to get ideas about how to serve him.” Look at the transaction and experience from your customer’s point of view. Not just by considering the physical touch points, but by asking the broader questions of “Why do customers do business with us in the first place?” and “What is the emotional need we are fulfilling with the customer?” Once you understand your customers’ motives and expectations, you’ll have a better understanding of how to “surprise and delight” them.

The “Samurai” authors pose a relevant question: “Would you feel comfortable going to a doctor who graduated from medical school at the top of her class forty years ago, but who was too lazy to keep up with new advances in medicine?” No way, right? In marketing, it’s imperative to stay relevant to the customer. By “keeping a beginner’s mind” we open ourselves to exciting, relevant engagements that can build customer loyalty and evangelism.

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What d’ya say we jump in the old DeLorean and set the Flux Capacitor to take us back to when the Internet was half the age it is today—back to 2001.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago, right? But in “Interactive years,” it might as well be the middle ages. For one thing, that was the year Google was born, and think about how that one event changed your life.

So what would you find in a Google’s search back in 2001?

A MediaPost article I came across recently said that if you would have typed “myspace” into Google’s query box back in 2001, you would have been led to a data storage site called freediskspace.com. “Facebook” brought up makeup manufacturers and a few odd links from Harvard and Princeton. And “youtube” had zero matches. There was no sign of “Wikipedia.” “Hulu” referred to a San Francisco-based Hawaiian dance company.

Okay, so the way we use the web has changed mightily. But what about the technologies that have come to mean so much to our lives? Well, “iPod” meant the Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System. Whatever that is. “TiVo” took you to an investment banker (the company’s IPO was back in 1999). “Android” didn’t refer to mobile phones, but there was at least one reference to mobile robots.

In 2001, “Barack Obama” took you to the voting record of the Illinois state legislature and “John McCain” took you to listings relating to his first incarnation of the “Straight Talk Express” after falling short in the 2000 primaries. As for the veep candidates, “Joe Biden” had upwards of 700 results, while “Sarah Palin” would get you a goose egg (make of that what you will).

What about your favorite TV shows? “Heroes” brought up a page on Greek mythology, and “Entourage” brought up a site about a Microsoft e-mail manager.

There is one constant, though. Even back in 2001, there were Starbucks detractors. Back then, there was Starbucked.com.

So what was getting the hits back then? One of the subjects with the most result listings was “The Y2K bug” (remember that?).

Is there some sort of lesson in this look back? If so, it could be that consumers aren’t as static and non-movable as we sometimes make them out to be. They adapt to change easily and quickly. They are open to new ideas and platforms, so long as they will improve their lives. And brand devotion can be built (and spread) in a veritable heartbeat.

Oh, yeah. And what if you Googled “Quisenberry” in ’01? You’d get the lifetime statistics of a former major league pitcher…

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