Make Marketing History

Great Ideas

2025-09-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

Great ideas are painkillers not vitamins. Tony Fadell.

Inaction Speaks Louder Than Words.

2023-07-11T04:56:00.001-07:00

It has been simultaneously fascinating and frustrating to watch a new management team taking over the running of a local business facility. They work for a huge logistics company. Top-down process has taken precedence over reactive customer focus and the results have not been pretty.

For me, the most heinous failure has been not to listen to or seek advice from the existing customer base. Those customers have used the facility, know its idiosyncracies and have lived through the successes and the failed initiatives of previous management teams.

A free repository of operational insight has been ignored because corporate knows best. Potential pitfalls that were highlighted by customers have inevitably come to pass and satisfaction levels have plummeted While investments have been made in some parts of the business, the cost-cutting in other areas overshadows any goodwill that was generated.

I'm amazed that I have to keep saying this, but an alienated customer is kryptonite especially in a growth phase. Start-ups know this. Established businesses shouldn't need to be told it.

On the upside, the automated response from the customer service email account promises they will get back to you within TEN working days.

Make Marketing Unexploitative.

2022-06-10T13:05:00.010-07:00

These are Maite Rodriguez's green high-top Converse. The ones she customized with a heart drawn on the toe. The ones she was wearing when she was murdered in the Uvalde school shooting. And, most shockingly of all, the ones that were the only way her ten-year-old body could be identified.

Subsequently there has been a surge in demand for the shoes. People are sending them to their political representatives. People are wearing them to protest. People are also noticing that Converse will be making a lot of money from this demand and are suggesting that they donate some or all of the profits to victim support or to gun control causes (perhaps not realising that their parent company has provided funding to NRA-supporting politicians in the past). People are suggesting that they be renamed after Maite and that they be produced with a heart on the toe.

Converse are faced with an opportunity. And a dilemma. What do they do? Do they act and risk being accused of commercial exploitation of a tragedy? Or do they wait and risk being accused of indifference?

Maybe the best they can do is to avoid looking exploitative while not remaining indifferent. Acknowledging the increased demand and guaranteeing they will meet it as quickly as possible seems to me to be the obvious starting point. As does announcing they will be giving the profits to an appropriate charity to be agreed with Maite's parents when they are willing and able to contemplate such decisions.

It's very easy for the people to say what Converse should do as if it's obvious. It's not. This is not a product recall. It's so much more than that.

Delusional Marketing.

2019-04-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, various supermarkets began to install automated check-out tills. There were grumbles about lack of service and concerns about machines replacing humans. Time passed and people got used to them. Some of us preferred the speed

A couple of weeks ago, the tills at Marks & Spencer suddenly started yelling at users. The first time I encountered this, I actually stepped back in surprise. A human voice screamed out at me in a manner some marketing whizz no doubt thought would enthuse me and make me excited by the interaction.

I did not recognise the voice (or what it was saying), but over the following days there were media reports about general customer dissatisfaction. The idiocy of trying to humanise an interaction that I'd chosen over the possibility of going to a human till was daft enough, but I was astonished to learn that they'd paid substantial sums to celebrities to animate the machines.

Tonight, I was heading home and dropped into their mini-store at a railway station. I scanned my carton of milk and was assailed by Ant & Dec in hideous unison. I swore at them and a nearby staff member jumped in and hit a mute button that I'd not previously noticed.

I thanked him, then decided to do some research and asked him if he had to do that often. I learned that over 80% of customers complain. Over 80% - surely A/B testing would have picked that up? If they'd done any.

Sherry Crammond, their director of food marketing put a positive slant on the promotion,

"It was supposed to be fun and engaging and supposed to get customers talking"

"Our customers are enjoying the check-out takeover and are loving being told what to do at the till by their favourite celebrities."

"We're expecting the voiceovers to be heard over 1 million times and would love to know who is proving the most popular with our customers!"

There's a lot of things I'd love to know about this whole thing, but that is most certainly not one of them.

Make Marketing Human (B2B version).

2019-03-31T14:35:00.002-07:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a small marketing seminar and listened to a series of presentations by Les Binet, Peter Field and Mark Ritson. The host introduced them as contrarians, but I think that says more about the mainstream than it does about them.

Binet and Field were making their first presentation of their findings of effectiveness studies in the B2B sector and revealed that these tend to mirror their B2C findings. That might come as a surprise to the mainstream who traditionally view B2B as being very different from B2C, but it shouldn't because whether you're selling to a business or to a consumer, the purchase decision is made by a human.

We're always selling to humans.

Individualism.

2019-02-14T08:02:00.002-08:00

"I was surrounded by people who for some reason found my very presence a threat. And had I not been able to stand up to them on their terms, I' would be somewhere back on the east coast, my tail between my legs. But it was more than that. For many outback people, the effect of almost total isolation coupled with that all-encompassing battle with the earth is so great that, when the prizes are won, they feel the need to build a psychological fortress around the knowledge and possessions they have broken their backs to obtain. That fiercely independent individualism was something akin to what I was feeling now - the inability to incorporate new people who hadn't shared the same experience. I understood a facet of Alice Springs, and softened towards it, at that moment."

Loneliness.

2019-01-30T04:37:00.001-08:00

"Before that moment, I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than someting to be feared. Alone, in my castle, I could see more clearly what loneliness was. For the first time it flashed on me that the way I had conducted my life was to allow myself that remoteness, always protect that high, clear place that could not be shared without risking its destruction. I had paid for this over and over with periods of neurotic despair, but it had been worth it. I had somehow always countered my desire for a knight in shining armour by forming bonds with men I didn't like, or with men who were so off the air there was no hope of a permanent relationship. I could not deny this. It lay, crystal clear, beneath the feelings of inadequacy and defeat, the clever self-directed plan that had been working towards this realization for years. I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up."

Make Marketing Less Glib.

2018-12-31T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's not just offensive, it's an offence. They think they're being clever, but they're not. There is nothing wrong with being offensive, that way lies freedom of speech. There is everything wrong with committing an offence, that way lies the breaking of societal laws.

Conflating the two is problematic because it allows the offenders falsely to justify their behaviour on the grounds of free speech. Marketers deal in communication and they, more than most, need to choose their words carefully.

Beware Marketers Bearing fMRIs.

2018-09-27T15:55:00.001-07:00

Magnetic resonance imaging scanners belong in hospitals where they can help medical pratitioners with their diagnoses. They do not belong in marketing publications where they only serve to delude gullible marketers.

If a neuroscientist is explaining what an fMRI means, then I'll listen because I know I might learn something. If a marketer has been using the machine then I'm immediately sceptical and quite often rude.

Thus it was that I got into a bit of a Twitter spat this week. The assertion at hand was that people don't want to have a relationship with brands. It's an assertion with which I completely agree. But I cannot agree with the suggestion that an academic marketer putting a bunch of people in a scanner and showing them images of people and of brands proves anything.

The fact that different parts of the brain (correction: different parts of an fMRI image) "light up" during this experiment does not prove that the brain thinks of people as people and thinks of brands as objects. It proves that different parts of the image light up and indicates increased blood-flow in those areas.

But let's be clear. No one has the slightest clue what it means for one part of a brain to light up in response to X while lighting up differently in response to Y, beyond the fact that we've found a difference maker. That's it, it's a difference maker. What that difference means, no one has any idea.

The findings can be real, as in robustly repeatable, but without having the faintest idea of how brains work, without having even a theory of how brains work, the meaning of the finding will be forever obscure. No matter how much a neuromarketer might want you to believe otherwise.

The Difference Between Sales And Marketing.

2018-07-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

No it's not - because I can read your sign perfectly well and your call to action isn't prompting a reason to act.

Now if you'd printed it in a blurry font, thereby demonstrating the job to be done and engaging me on an emotional level, then maybe I'd have responded differently.

Advertising By Committee.

2018-06-07T04:13:00.001-07:00

It's as if you were in the banking security focus group yourself. Somebody made a "joke" about being asked for their dog's maiden name. Some people nodded. And it ended up in the creative brief.

And now it ends up on a big poster. A poster that is as amusing as the original "joke", as irrelevant as could be imagined and which tells us nothing about how this enhances the security they're advertising as a differentiator.

But that doesn't matter because when it comes to security, we all value simplicity above effectiveness. Don't we?

Beware Marketers Bearing Neuroscience.

2018-05-31T01:36:00.001-07:00

I like to learn about new things. It helps keep my brain active, it's interesting in and of itself and, most importantly, it gives me a better chance of knowing when other people are bluffing.

To that end, I have been trying to get my head around machine learning, support vector machines and "AI" for a number of years. I have done so not by reading presss articles but by meeting the practitioners and scratching the surface of practical courses. Consequently, I know how complicated and mathematically advanced it is and how ignorant I am. This stuff is hard. Really hard.

But today somebody, somewhere will mention AI or consciousness or neuromarketing to you and when they do, I'd like you to remember this guest post that I found on data scientist and activist Cathy O.Neill's blog a few years ago. It's very sweary (as the best things often are) but if you're squeamish about that sort of thing, here's an extract that gets to the heart of the issue.

So, the next time you see a pretty 3D picture of many neurons being simulated, think “cargo cult brain”. That simulation isn’t gonna think any more than the cargo cult planes are gonna fly. The reason is the same in both cases: We have no clue about what principles allow the real machine to operate. We can only create pretty things that are superficially similar in the ways that we currently understand, which an enlightened being (who has some vague idea how the thing actually works) would just laugh at.

.

Crisis Marketing Isn't Crisis Management.

2018-03-05T11:52:00.002-08:00

Everybody (well everybody in the marketing world) got very excited by KFC's apology for running out of chicken at 900 of their stores last month.

Even Mark Ritson wrote about "KFC marketers turning a chicken crisis into a brand triumph". Whatever that is.

I disagree. The one thing that made it stand out was that it employed KFC's brand tone rather than the bland tone legalese that these things usually employ. Though there is quite a lot of that in there if you bother to read it and I bet FCK has been sitting in someone's drawer for as long as French Connection's FCUK had been winning awards.

The real issue is how did it make their customers feel? Has it mended their view of KFC's distribution incompetence? Is sorry enough? Shouldn't they have offered some sort of coupon compensation to disappointed customers?

My immediate reaction was that they better be absolutely sure they had got to the bottom of their problems before they did this. And what has now happened - well this month they've apparently run out of gravy. Are they going to run another ad to apologise for that?

When Tylenol were hit by extortionists claiming to have poisoned some of their products in 1982, they didn't offer apologies, they acted decisively and removed every one of their products from the shelves of every store in the United States.

That's how you offer customer reassurance. By deeds not words. Because if your product fails, you have a product problem not an advertising one.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

2017-11-29T14:46:00.002-08:00

It happens repeatedly. Twitter competitons and naming polls are hijacked, appeals to praise a brand yield the opposite result and city bike schemes suffer theft and vandalism.

And it's all all totally predictable.

This is not with the benefit of hindsight. This happens simply because marketers and executives rarely ask the obvious question. What could possibly go wrong? No doubt because it's seen as providing problems not solutions or some similarly glib inanity.

But it's not negative thinking, It's damage limitation. There's no cost in terms of product dilution and there's everything to gain in avoiding bad publicity that is genuinely bad.

In other realms, this is caused stress-testing. So don't ask how fabulous potential customers are going to find your latest initiative. Ask what could possibly go wrong. Because the last thing you need is more stress.

Make Marketing Legible.

2017-10-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

Iceland have a claim worth promoting.

Although perceived as a low-end purveyor of frozen goods, they apparently produce the best mince pies in the mass market. So I have no problem with the claim, but in the West we read from left to right and horizontally. Not vertically.

What you see first is a list of their competittors. No comparison, just their names. I take Selfridges away from this ad as much as I do Iceland.

If you look longer you might eventually discern the Iceland name, but why make it so difficult? They spent a lot of time coming up with the word puzzle, but didn't think to flip the diagram. That would leave the competitors' names written vertically and Iceland highlighted as a horizontal name.

It would be easier to read and you'd have Iceland riding high at the top of the image. Why didn't anyone pick this up? What goes on in creative sign-offs? Given the recent Dove debacles, it's increasingly hard to comprehend.

Infinite Marketing.

2017-09-04T08:11:00.004-07:00

You can picture the scene. The creatives have been briefed to promote unlimited streaming but think that unlimited has been over used. So they opt for infinite. Because that's unlimited right?

Putting aside the mathematical issue of whether doing something infinitely has any meaning, it will be interesting to see if any customer complains that this promise should mean that they only ever have to pay for one month of data. Because it can't be used up and there's no ass-covering asterisk.

Jargon is bad enough, but if you're going to use regular words, you really should understand what they mean and what they convey. And the rule of the game is under-promise and over-deliver - not the other way round.

Make Economics Marketable.

2017-07-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

Differentiation Is Different From Difference.

2017-06-27T16:27:00.001-07:00

Back in 1967, Fab and Zoom were popular ice lollies. Bizarrely, Fab was originlly aimed at girls and Zoom at boys, but both were marketed in conjunction with popular TV show Thunderbirds to exploit the products' shapes and to exude the idea of play.

Fifty years on, a big push has been made to celebrate the anniversary and below you can see one of the outdoor ads that has been created. They're different. I saw one creative director tweet that they were the best outdoor ads he'd seen in years.

To which I'd respond with some pithy questioning of the state of outdoor advertising creativity.

No doubt there will be effectiveness papers claiming these did something for Fab - but that will have to be discounted by consideration of the heatwave and the fact that this was a huge increase in marketing expenditure.

Russell Davies has often written about winning the Honda business by pointing out that every car ad looked the same and being different was the way to create clear blue water between Honda and the rest. But this wasn't difference for the sake of it - it was difference that drew attention to a real differentiation.

You have to conclude that "Where There's Fab, There's Fun" doesn't really challenge Honda's "Isn't It Good When Something Just Works?" and fun certainly isn't illustrated in the ad. It's an ad which is designed to appeal to a sense of irony rather than a sense of play. An ad that the industry might like, but that customers will ignore.

Make Marketing Stress-Tested.

2017-05-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of Boaty McBoatface , Tay and the rest comes the latest marketing fiasco.

Joining the rush to involve their customers in their marketing, Walker's Crisps encouraged them to upload photos to appear online with their brand spokesman. A few complied, but many more uploaded images of serial killers and others who didn't really fit the brand guidelines. And, of course, there were live billboard feeds of the Twitterstream.

It happens again and again. After all this time, it's still amazing how little digital marketers seem to understand about the web.

The answer is simple. You need to stress-test all your marketing. You need to look at it with scepticism and wrack your brains for the worst case scenarios of how it might mis-fire. This doesn't happen for the simple reason that it's viewed as negativity. But unthinking team-players are still unthinking and bad ideas are still bad.

Keep Calm And Monetise.

2017-04-11T07:42:00.002-07:00

Marketing is all about creating a sense of scarcity through functional differentiation or pricing. That gets harder in the world of abundance that characterises free or freemium business models. It gets harder still in the world of phone apps.

Calm.com had a problem. They were an early entrant into the mindfulness space. They were run by seasoned entrepreneurs. They provided their users with daily meditation guides. Daily meditation guides that too many of their users downloaded to their devices and didn't use.

Because signing up to a mindfulness app doesn't make you a practioner. And if you're not an active practitioner you're not much use as a prospect for upgrading to profitable, premium offerings.

Their solution is an elegant product hack. By making the downloads last only 24 hours, they created genuine scarcity. You no longer have a phone full of unused meditation guides, you now have one meditation guide that will disappear if you don't get serious about this mindfulness thing.

If you're not serious about meditation, this might irritate you a little, but that's presumably your default state so no problem there. But, if you're serious or want to be, it is exactly the kind of prompt that might nudge you to make the effort to practice daily. It's not a restriction, it's an encouragment.

Soon enough, you appreciate that Calm.com are actually helping you towards your goal. By doing so, they're also helping you towards their goal. Which is one reason why they're already profitable and have multi million dollar revenues.

Marketing is about changing behaviour; changing behaviour is about creating habits; and creating habits is about interaction. And this is a simple reminder that product is the first P of marketing.

Where's The Beef?

2017-03-30T06:57:00.003-07:00

Your poster has my attention. You seem to be establishing a hierarchy of beef and suggesting that Scotch Beef sits at its pinnacle.

But you don't tell me why. You don't even give me a hint. You just assume I will be willing to devote some more of my attention to your website.

You lost my attention.

Make Marketing Credible.

2017-02-02T08:18:00.000-08:00

This is the work of advertising craft that greeted me on a train a couple of days ago. It immediately felt wrong. Can you see what they've done there?

The first thing that struck me was the cueing action of the woman preparing to strike the white ball. It looks to me as if there's a real possibility that she's not even going to hit it but, even if she does, what shot is she playing? I was baffled. But then I realised that it didn't matter because the game is already over. There are just four red balls on the table and nothing else. And yet her compatriots are ridiculously over-excited by the non-situation. No wonder her cueing action has fallen apart.

By now, I was more engaged with the ad than expected and my attention switched from the art director's craft to that of the copywriter. Added extras could be accused of superfluity but "More FREE added extras" really is laying it on thick even for Villa Plus. That said, I note that punctuation is not one of the aforementioned extras.

There are a three sentences on this ad. One of them ends with a full-stop/period, the other two don't. And the one that does, hyphenates air-conditioning but doesn't hyphenate table-tennis (when to do so would arguably improve the blocking of the text) and thinks a comma between the much and much is too much - probably becase they've eschewed the Oxford comma after air-conditioning.

Pedantry? Perhaps. But let's get back to the art director. What's going on with the sun here? Was the logo incorporated into it at the top left or was that just the best place to put the logo and was the sun originally at top right? It's really hard to tell because the various shadows tell contrasting stories. Those around the pergola and those on the pool point to it having been top right. Many of the others look like attempts to make it top left while that one on the pool table suggests the sun is directly overhead.

Oh and while I'm at it, don't those sun-loungers appear to be on a slope while the pool table manages to maintain the horizontal? Maybe all this visual cognitive dissonance is a sneaky device designed to maintain my interest in the vista, but my two minutes were up and all I was left wondering was how on earth this sort of shoddiness got through a creative review at a major business and a substantial agency? Baffling Plus.

The 4 Ws Of Messaging.

2017-01-05T09:57:00.005-08:00

The 4Ws of messaging are what you say, where you say it, when you say it and to whom you say it. I invented them in reaction to seeing this poster the other day.

For non-UK readers, the Northern Line is one of the lines of the London tube/subway system and one that has recently been synonymous with torrid travel. So, what is being said is clear enough. Not award-winning, but clear.

Unfortunately, I did not see this poster in London. Rather, it was on the back of a bus stop in a side-street in a commuter town. So, not the optimal where - especially as the side-street was nowhere near the town's station. And that means that commuters who might have a knowledge of the Northern Line were unlikely to see it.

So, not the optimal who either.

None of this is necessarily the fault of the non award-winning copywriter and art director (unless the brief was to create a nationally relevant campaign) even if it does suffer from metropolitan centricism. But it does serve as a reminder that media buyers should focus on the message they're placing as well as the audience in front of whom they're being asked to place it.

Narrative Fallacies.

2017-01-03T07:45:00.001-08:00

The new year brings an invitation to a story-telling webinar.

An article about it asserts that "In the past, before tech came and muddled everything, a brand's objective was simple: create engaging stories to capture the public's imagination and endear them to the brand"

No, no, no. Marketing is not about stories. Stories are made up. Stories are contrived. Stories are disbelieved.

No. Great marketing is about uncovering and communicating truths. Not truths that please the CMO or support the Board's delusions aboutthe nature of their customers. But truths that resonate with the lives of real people and make them more inclined to buy your product or service.

And, yes, suggesting that your product or service wil make the user feel like a superhuman is a legitimate story, even if we and they both know that they won't actually become superhuman. Because that's not the truth.

Make Marketing Contextual.

2016-12-06T08:48:00.002-08:00

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but the first time I saw this bus I found myself completely confused by the bland Jingle and Tonic and my primary identification was with Tanqueray Gin. I don't know if some brand manager insisted on the brand name being the first word, but swapping the 12 Twists of Christmas and the Schweppes logo seems to me to produce a far more comprehensible whole.

You decide to run a campaign on the side of a bus. You know that people read from left to right. You presumably understand that buses are mobile and that people will often have a very limited time to absorb your message. And still you choose to put what is effectively the header that contextualises the message on the far right of the image? The headline at the bottom of the page.

If this were online, people would be all over the user experience of the communication. Offline, it's maybe even more important.