Lessons from the Keyser

Q: what do you do when your product, in this case detergent, cleans so well that all dirt is washed out and you still need to grow your business?

A: You inform the public about microbes. Invsible organisms that infiltrate and get your clothes and skin dirty. They require multiple cleanings, as you never know when they are truly clean. 

But you can beat them, if you clean your clothes (even better to use new products) more often.

While it is good practise to demonstrate value of your product or service, sometimes it is better to point at gains that one is in danger of losing if no action is taken. 

The hard part is to find a balance between a fear that motivates and a fear that paralyzes. 

In our minds our dreams are real

District Major of Amsterdam Zeeburg, Fatima Elatik, compared the right wing politician Geert Wilders to Hilter. Of course she meant it differently and she had a more nuanced thought in mind. When given the chance to explain her statement, she does.

I found nuanced statements after googling a "hand me down" soundbite. The soundbite I overheard, some people tell each other, was "she called all PVV supporters nazi's".  Nowhere near the original tweet or the explanation given. Yet typing those words into Google let me a story about the incident, meaning other people interpreted the story the same way or were given a similair account.

What we mean or say, and what other people hear (and more importantly) retell, often will change as it passes from one group to another. Though we can't control how people interpret our statement and actions, we should be aware of the fact that meaning is assigned to us that we may or may not want to be associated with. Sometimes this leads to unexpected customers and fans, othertimes not so.

Either way, fact is that if we believe something to be true, sooner or later it will become part of our reality and govern our behaviour towards others. 

Looking for the bright side of business and life

*This post is inspired by me taking my own medicine, ha! 

A nursing home in Germany built an exact replica of a bus stop in front of the facility to stop Alzheimer patients, who walk out the the home. The only difference is that buses never stop there. “It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. 

Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place. 

“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later today and invite them in to the home for a coffee,” said Mr Neureither. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.” 

This ia a good example of a bit of creative thinking by focusing not on what is wrong, but on

a) what is there;

b) what is working within behaviour shown;

c) amplifying the positive instead of stopping a negative.

Which can be a quite usefull way of working, especially when trying to get client buy-in.

There is this form of therapy, called Solution Focused Brief Therapy. It is a form of family and personal trauma therapy. The big difference being: it refuses to discuss the problem you are experiencing. Quit bluntly, one of it foundational premises is that: the solution and problem are not in direct relation to each other. 

It asks the following questions:

what is wanted (vs what is wrong)

what is working (vs why is it wrong)

what are the strengths (vs what are the weaknesses)

what small steps along the lines of what is working can we amplify (vs what overarching strategies can we develop)

So from a business p.o.v. instead of doing research to become an expert at the clients problem, what if you focus time on getting the client to discribe the solution (say a margin growth of 8% by next year) and specify the ways this perfect solution could be noticed ? (read # of items sold, downing of cost by x amount etc...)? 

The second thing SFBT does is asks on a scale of 0 to 10 as to how close you are to your dream solution. If it is a 3, then you identify the things that make it a 3 and try to build on that. Most companies will not be a " 0", so there is always something positive to work with that enables you to achieve initial succes and momentum.

When you know what success looks like and what already is contribution towards it, you now start to focus on identifiying the ways to amplify this. 

Because again, the solution may not have any connection to the problem. But by starting from a "perfect solution" and working back to present day situations, time is used in a postive and constructive way. Even more so, because most people will have a harder time talking about their problems than about nice things.

See..like the Alzheimer patients mentioned earlier, sometimes trying to change hardwired bad behaviour can be to much trouble and in the end not bring you or the client the results both of you wish. 

But by working with what is there (and accepting that there is a negative and positive in every situation) and seeing how you can enhance the positive, you just might end up in a place where you, your client and your competitors did not expect to end up. And get there quicker, with a stronger bond between you and your client.

skills to pay the bills

I dumb down for my audience
And double my dollars
They criticize me for it
Yet they all yell "Holla"
If skills sold
Truth be told
I'd probably be
Lyricly
Talib Kweli
Truthfully
I wanna rhyme like Common Sense
(But i did five Mil)
I ain't been rhymin like Common since
When your sense got that much in common
And you been hustlin since
Your inception
Fuck perception
Go with what makes sense

Jay-Z "Moment of Clarity"

the above lyrics show the difference between a mainstream star and a profitable one.

Talib Kweli makes a good living of his personal brand of highly intelligent, mature rap. Jay-Z on the other hand makes loads more build on a foundation of his rap skills, but less and less dependent on those  rap skills.

In order to become a mainstream star, compromise around content will creep in
and stuff with no relation to your core business will become important.

And even then there is no way to be certain all this will make you a star.
As we know from work of Mark Earls, a major part of that is not in our hands.

Becoming a profitable brand on the other hand is very much within our hands.
It involves a distinct proposition that solves a problem in the lives of prospective consumers, whose value is clearly and uniquely communicated 

and backed up by a product and service that lives up to the communication.

Making sure we have healthy margins and focussing not on the mainstream,
but the people who buy our product, keeping them happy and growing that foundation.

Most people make most decisions about most products not out of loyalty towards most brands. They are open to try something new if given a compelling reason.

So next time you meet clients, ask them straight up what they really want, the fame or the fortune? One may follow the other, but it helps to know what to focus on first.

That will save both parties a lot of time and make for clear strategy, goals and accountability.

Advertising and Awareness

There is this story Gordon Livingstone tells in his book about Vietnam. As a young luitanant in the 82d Airborne he tried to determine the position of his platoon. His platoon sargeant walked up and asked if he knew where they were.

Livingstone answered: "according to this map, there should be a hill around here. Yet I don't see it." To which the sargeant said: "If the map doesn't agree with the the ground, the map doesn't work".

Our minds work quite the same way. They do not make sense of reality. 

They create reality. They create patterns out of incidents and give weight to events that just "are".

Because humans are irrational. We know this. And as marketers we try to exploit this. Only in order for that to work, we have to be able to step back and as Chuck D said: "Dont believe the hype".

Bob Hoffman once pointed out something about car commercials. We know that the buyers of cars are older. Yet the ads are created for an different audience. Because the map we (as irrational humans) have hinders us from agreeing with the ground.

Now having a wrong map is not always the problem. Daniel Kanheman tells the story of people who were lost in the Alps.

There is a group of Swiss soldiers who set out on a long navigation exercise in the Alps. The weather was severe and they got lost. After several days, with their desperation mounting, one of the men suddenly realized he had a map of the region. They followed the map and managed to reach a town.

When they returned to base and their commanding officer asked how they had made their way back. They replied, "We suddenly found a map." The officer looked at the map and said, "You found a map all right, but it's not of the Alps, it's of the Pyrenees."

The map, however wrong, gave them confidence to seek out a path down the mountains. In many ways this is what entrepreneurs and marketerts do. 

They seek out new ways of doing stuff. But much like the soldiers coming down the Alps (and mind you, these are people trained to make good decisions under pressure) if we look at how many campaings and products fail, it seems the time it does work has more to do with luck then skill.

The singles most important, and I would argue most difficult, skill is being able to see what is there. To just observe and notice, without starting to make assumptions. Without connecting or to letting your mind create reality.

It is something Zen Buddishm calles shoshin, beginners mind. But it would be more than just having no preconceptions or judgments. Being able to see what is there requires you to be able to focus and to be aware.

Whether it is the Account Manager talking to the client, without his mind wondering. Planners and Creatives needing to be able to look at what is actually being done and lived by consumers and not only to follow the brief or rely on research.

Focus, awareness and absense of judgement are the starting points to doing work that is, unexpected, capturing and effective.

Rob talked about investing in stressmamangement to help employees become better at their work. 

What I would suggest as a supplement is that, especially adland, industries that need imagination to thrive; we also invest in training our people to see past the personal frames, blockades and point of views. Having a resident psychologist to train with staff should be standard practice for an industry that uses them and other social scientists to see what other people are doing.

To actively start training the mind, not to learn, but to be able to shut down the constant stream of thought it generates. 

To become aware of wondering thoughts, lazy thinking and the kicking in of heuristics and mental models.

In order to capture the imagination of others we have to become masters of reality again, not of rationale.

how human nature can change consumption habits

The above commercial shows us a bias that can help producers and consumers change their habits to more eco friendly ways without less consumption.

It is called the Diderot effect

If you buy a bigger washingmachine, you of course need a better detergent to help with the bigger loads.

So if we want to change habits on a macro scale , look outside the category and see what social and cultural cohesion the item provides. Link to it and get the consumer to be consious of the link.

Want to sell more items as a retailer, well if you sell clothes, get your local hairsalon and shoeshop to have a sale to. New haircut leads to new manicure and pedicure leads to new shoes, new bag, new clothes, new person (well untill next season that is).

At the beginning I stated that it can be used to change habits to more eco friendly ways, but it can be, and has been, used for any number of goals. That depends on the intentions you have.

Show, don't tell

Above three pictures taken in the Rotterdam subway this morning.

1) Advertising space in the wagon I was sitting in.

2) An ad announcing the sale of seasontickets for local Premiership Football club Sparta. 

For the season 2008-2009

3) The media company that sells the space, trying to convince potential advertisers for this medium.

If you are going to tell somebody, that doing business with you is a good idea, it might help to show it with more than words alone.

social norms, people and marketers

A couple of things caught my attention last week. And both got me thinking about social norms and biases.

First of, several people around caught a light bout of flu. Nothing serious or Mexican, just a bit of a temperture and some chills and coughing. However after asking them how seriously they were treating this (given the context), I was surprised to find out that they in fact did not see it as something serious. 

Reason being, they said that they most likely got it from a colleague or family member and that "it was doing the rounds". So they were not worried about it. It would pass.

The second thing is the ad you see at the top there. It is an ad for a Dutch electricity company. On it you see Maurice de Hond, a well known opinion poller in Holland. 

The tag line reads:"94% of Dutch Households pay to much". Which struck me as something odd to communicate. 

From research conducted by dr Robert Cialdini and by the work of Mark Earls we know that people copy behaviour of other people and that when told of a social norm, people tend to adher to it.

So saying that 94% pays to much, seems to me to generate the same effect as those I asked about their flu: "everybody is doing/having it, so I am not really worried or going to change my behaviour".

Now of course making people aware of the dangers of having a serious, and hugely viral strain of flu is important, as is letting people know that they are paying to much for utilities. 

I have no data to doubt the success of the ad campaign, but I am left wondering if, pointing out the possible fact that your neighbour is most likely the only one on the block not losing money by paying to much, could have a bigger impact on converting sales. 

As would getting one or two people to wear flu-masks could do more for awereness of the possible pandemic and get people to take it more serious.

The way we allow people to absorb and proces our information, is at least as important as the information itself, if we hope to inlfuence any change and action in human beings out in the real world. 

Perhaps common sense, but well worth remembering.  

what we can learn from pick up artists

Seeing as I am based in Holland, I thought it time to write a bit in Dutch, and for a Dutch blog.

As of today I will be blogging for Molblog, one of Holland's most read blogs about marketing.

My first piece of writing is here, but since some of you may not be fluent in Dutch, below is a translation.

What we can learn from pick up artists

There is a crisis. Not that economic one. No. There is crisis in the world of pick-up gurus. Yes, pick-up gurus. Men who can get every woman an teach followers how they can get laid as well.

It all started with a book several years ago. Called "The Game". It describes journalist Neil Strauss, on his quest to become PUA, Pick Up Artist. The book was a bestseller. But also ensured that women got insight into the workings of these PUA's. 

Because, despite all the shits and giggles, these gentlemen had a process. Their practices were secretly shared on forums and message boards. 

From opening sentences, to routines and field reports, PUA's were constantly trying to improve efficiency and speed up the scoring. 

Yet suddenly opening phrases were known, routines (a fixed linguistic pattern to achieve a positive result, think AIDA, but in the pub) were spotted and PUA's were ridiculed. This led to a number of the gurus proclaiming that they found a new way.

Method vs. Natural 
This new group was a response to the way it had been up till now. Until now, PU's were a series of steps and mechanics. First there was the opening, then the routine, then increasing the tension and finally .. action. Hence the name Method. 

But by now the audience knew how it worked, the effect became less strong. This led to even crazier openings, increasingly complex routines. But this did not lead to improvement in outcome. Only more noise and ridicule.

Group two said that a pick-up (PU) was a spontaneous, natural thing, and that you as a PUA attracted women by being yourself. The best self you can be, but still yourself. 

No script, no story,just a spontaneous interaction that had an open ending. If there is no script, then you could get caught, and if they liked you because of you, you do not need to worry about fullfilling the image what you portraying with your routines (self-insured and cocky, etc. 

For followers and gurus, this is a more difficult path. It requires self-improvement of personality, appearance and self-confidence before you proceed to chase. But if we believe the feedback the Natural way is beating Method. 

Not in the least because the practitioners are at least feeling better about themselves and are no longer stressed out memorizing routines. 

Action speaks louder than words

Yeah ... .. so what you're think. This is a marketing blog. Correct. And from a marketing standpoint there are some interesting observations. 

Google, Hyves, Facebook, HBO, Skype, show us that many of the strongest brands over the last 10 years were built by attracting customers through a disproportionate focus on product and service innovation. Not product and service communications (which still plays a role, but a lesser one). 

Research of the University of South London shows us the same. In a study of purchases over time, researcher Charles Graham discovered that despite large amounts of money brands spend, market shares remaines stable. He saw that the market shares of most brands in the study increased or decreased by 3 percent, but always within that margin. 

Only six brands increased their market shares by more than 6%. These changes were "not achieved by changes in promotional mix" but by "exceptional, strategic and structural innovation." 

So ... 
Like PU gurus we are in a crisis. Consumers are more aware of our practices, trust the advice their friends more than our commercials and many businessowners and CFO's can't get a good answer to the question of "what that budget is contributing to the bottom line".

But therein lies the opportunity for our industry to show our value. Not by better creation of campaigns, but by challenging our customers and clients to learn, innovate and be of real value to the lives of consumers in those moments when they need us. 

Only we will have to look at ourselves first. For an industry that brags about innovation and creation, we have only played a modest role in the creation of the above mentioned brands or the many other innovations that we know. 

Not that there is no place for advertising agencies, but decades ago an agency developed the idea of the soapseries, now we fill the few minutes between content blocks. 

For just as women do not mind a talking to fun, spontaneous guy who, in addition to humor and self-confidence, actually has something to say, consumers have nothing against seduction by advertising, products and services, or spending money. 

Only the umpteenth variation on "Don't I know you from somewhere ..." will not get us of the list of "things which can be cut", just as it won't help PUA's get dates...

the power of culture and social norms

Ovens "big enough for a Christmas turkey". 

Freezers "with enough room so you always have food for unexpected guests".

Just two examples of clever marketing, using extreme events (once a year Christmas and let's say twice a year unexpected dinner guests) with latent cultural and social stigma's that still work on the (post)modern human beings decision making proces.

In each case they were used to sell us more. But the principle can also be used to change behaviour towards sustainability.

So ask yourself: what extreme situations with cultural resonance, and the possibility for social failure do you have within your particular business? 

These types of situations and this type of approach will allow you to change behaviour by make the unlikely (yet when it happens very socialy uncomfortable) become a focus point, thus making acceptance of the new behaviour seem obvious.

Perhaps a bit evil, but given the fact it worked the first time around, I am betting it would work again. 

the era of High Concept returns

"High concept often has themes based on an existing area of popular fascination—such as sharks, dinosaurs, flying saucers, the Titanic, and so on— thus having a ready-built foundation of subsidiary issues and ever-ramifying facts that can feed the machine, on levels ranging from the superficial to the intellectually or factually exhaustive".wikipedia

Better go and read this. Now that (at breakneck speed) technology enables us to belong to, and interact with likeminded people from around the world, the art of doing stuff that is: 

"easy (flows naturaly with needs and wants, instead of creating them artificialy) to sell (cash is king again) to a wide audience(facebook being an example: more and more oldies instead of just kids) because it delivers upon an easy to grasp idea that is original, interesting, colorful and sometimes humorous (pull people together and give them something to do)", is a skill marketers need to get reacquainted with.

don't care about being original, care about being great

4 p's of my marketing thinking

• Predictive

• Propagative

• Personalized

• Participatory

presentation P&O Cruises

P&O: Staying ahead means thinking ahead

View more presentations from nikoherzeg. (tags: strategy marketing)

note to self: the art of storytelling

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Ernest Hemingway

more reflections on agencies: the client agency relationship

Terry: You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.

Charlie: Oh I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

Terry: You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.

tnx: george@cynic.com

brand lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

The world belongs to the energetic.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

show me and I will make up my mind, guide me to understand and I will teach others

"Let's compare technology to works of art. Even masterpieces appear somehow lacking until people appreciate them. That's when they become truly complete. Beyond the works themselves, it's how people interpret or receive them that matters. And it's the same for technology. What matters is deciding how people will want to embrace new technology or features."

Kenya Hara

note to self: sender is nothing without receiver

If you are a planner, remember the consumer, if you are a creative remember the consumer, if you are a client remember the consumer. Sure it helps if you can throw it 50 yards, or do a behind the back no look bounce pass between the legs. But...

If it ain't caught, you don't score

Strawberries in January pt 3: the way forward: enhancing relationships, not creating totaly new ones

I realized there was no need to create new forms; all I had to do was design the relationship between a human, an object, and what is around the two. That realization gave me a big relief.

For example, if a client asked me “Please design a chair” while sitting in a good chair, I might go so far as to say, “Why? You’re already sitting in a nice one!” That’s almost it. People think that design is about making new things, creating new stimulations. But what about the good relationships that already exist? Why abandon all that and make things all over again? If there is already a relationship with a chair that is 95 percent good, then all that has to be done is to adjust the remaining 5 percent to suit the current needs. The client might persist and say “No, no, I want you to design it, Mr. Fukasawa.” But what I’m trying to say is that the important thing is how much design you can do with the remaining 5 percent of what has been 95 percent completed, how you can make the best out of the design that has already been developed and improved, and make your design along with what’s already there, instead of just throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Of course, to design that 5 percent is not as easy as it sounds because you have to further improve what’s already a great design.

Naoto Fukasawa