Branding Blog

Advertising vs. Being Remarkable

"Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable."
-Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens

There are STILL plenty of very smart people in the world who have not begun to realize the power of the web. For some, it's a fear of technology. Others have been too busy engaged in successful business. Still others just have their heads in the sand.

I was having a conversation with a group of very successful brick and mortar jewelers a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about my blogging class and they asked if I knew of any jewelers who have had any measure of success with blogging. I pointed them to Ice.com and their use of a blog strategy to tie their name to celebrities and provide lots of in-bound links to products.

Then, they asked me if I could name a business that has achieved any kind of success with YouTube?

Low Rent Strategy

We're always telling our clients that rent money and advertising dollars are interchangeable. Our partners down under offer proof!

3 months ago, a local NSW coastal business owner made a decision to relocate his surf clothing store after staring down the barrel of a 34% increase in rent.  The original location was on the esplanade of a high tourist area… lots of restaurants, lots of shops, lots of apartments, lots of feet.  The move took him just one street away... just one street… but thousands of feet from his original location because nobody wanders behind the resorts on the Esplanade.

What happened next?  Sales plummeted by $115,000… and are still going down.

YIKES! Have you calculated your ad budget lately?

Art as a Marketing Tool

Sonja Howle has been studying art as a strategic tool for marketing for over a year now and has been busy posting her observations and case studies on her American Visionaries blog. Our Wizardly Customer Experience partner, Mike Dandridge picked up on her latest story about The Palm restaurant in NYC.

By sheer coincidence a book landed in my lap 2 nights ago that chronicles the story of an iconic Austin restaurant called Fonda San Miguel. The restaurant is owned by a native of my little hometown in Nebraska, so I'm familiar with it and I've dined there. It was great, but my focus wasn't on the experience as much as it had been if I had "discovered" it myself.

Now the book has allowed me to re-discover what the owners have been able to create over the past 30 years and how they have woven authentic Mexican cuisine (not the enchilada plate #2) along with art and architecture into a truly experiential dinner.

I sent this link to Sonja and suggested that a group of us head to Fonda San Miguel next week when we're back in Austin. It will be good to catch up with Tom Gilliland and take a look at the place with a different eye.

Pimp my Blind

One of the strategies we use for our clients is called business topology mapping. It involves taking a totally unrelated business model and finding a way to apply their tactics in your own business.

Here's an example and a free idea for my friends at Cabela's.  Pimp My Ride is a cool show on MTV right now.  MTV finds some poor kid with a crappy car and sends out rap artist Xzibit to pimp their ride. Basically, they take the junker and turn it into a customized dream car for the owner.  Cabela's could find some poor hunter with a lousy goose pit and award him a total makeover.  Call the show "Pimp my Blind." 

Maybe instead of a rap artist, you could get Ted Nugent to host the show. I can see the pimped out blind:  Satellite TV dish inside of a decoy...plasma TV monitors for each hunter connected both to the football games AND to horizon-scanning cameras to keep a look out for the birds.  Full underground kitchen, the works.

Why let MTV have all the fun?

What the world needs now, is Psychopaths, sweet Psychopaths

I've often suspected this. In fact, I think I could name a few.

But the corporate world's dirty little secret may well be that psychopaths thrive because companies actively seek them out: The focus on short-term results in today's "quarterly capitalism" requires ruthless leaders not afraid to take hard quick decisions without looking back.

Yahoo! News - Is your boss a 'snake in a suit' or just an ordinary psycho?

Fast Company Now

Good advice from Fast Company. Everyone is in the PR/Marketing department. Everyone.

Fast Company Now

Make everyone an evangelist for your company's product & services. The secretary, the account manager, the programmer, the accountant - all should be well versed in the mission of the company, the brand. Share with your associates an elevator pitch that they can keep at the ready.

Bridging the Marketing-Sales Divide

Great stuff from Hunter Hastings on the Reveries site about the challenge of integrating the Marketer's strategic plan with the Salesforce's tactics.

Marketers see themselves as developers of strategic business plans and solutions. They also believe that they pass these strategic tools to the salesforce for the latter to deploy in building high quality and high profit customer relationships. But they believe that the salesforce is unable to maintain the quality and intent of the strategy and unable, consequently, to achieve the results of revenue and profit growth the strategy was designed to deliver.

The interaction of cause and effect in this situation is subtle and complex. No survey of the type we conducted could ever make it clear whether the fault lies in the strategic content that doesn't stand up to the realities of the marketplace, or whether the problem is that salespeople are not sufficiently trained, or supported, or capable to execute the strategies. We do know, however, that the Marketing-Sales Divide is a chasm over which strategic intent can't jump -- at least not in our respondents' experience to date.

The solution to the problem is seen to lie not in some magic bullet but in collaborative process and organizational change. Brandowners focus on process rather than tools to address the challenge of the Marketing-Sales Divide.

href="http://www.reveries.com/reverb/essays/cmomemo/">reveries - hunter hastings - bridging the marketing-sales divide