Maneuver Marketing Communique

BearingPoint's Paul Dunay Announces The End Of Command And Control Branding

I disagree with Paul's post. Circa 2008, marketers need more command... read the entire post at Citizen Strategist.

Chrysler Banishes Corporate Communications To Human Resources

Ouch. Signaling a less than appreciative vote for new marketing techniques, Chrysler's Bob Nardelli cans Jason Vines and banishes the whole corporate communications staff to human resources:

A former stand-up comedian with a flare for showmanship, Mr. Vines clashed with a more tight-lipped approach to media relations advocated by Mr. Nardelli and Cerberus, according to people familiar with the matter. He had been pushing Mr. Nardelli and Vice Chairman Jim Press, who was recruited from Toyota Motor Corp., to speak to the media about Chrysler's turnaround efforts, but Mr. Nardelli opposed him, they said.

At the urging of Mr. Nardelli, Chrysler had brought in a public-relations consultant, Robert Marston & Associates Inc., to work with Mr. Vines. The agency had previously worked with Mr. Nardelli when he was CEO of Home Depot Inc.

Under Mr. Vines, Chrysler was known in Detroit as one of the more media-friendly companies in the auto industry. Cerberus, by contrast, typically shuns media attention... Executives within Chrysler's corporate-communications department will now report to human-resources Senior Vice President Nancy Rae, the Auburn Hills, Mich., company said yesterday.

Read the article here.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Oprah's Obama Endorsement Alienates Some Of Her Fans

Oprah, NBC, Chevy, JetBlue all seem to be taken by surprise when their fans or customers react negatively to their political tastes. I'm baffled by this. Are the marketers behind these folks truly clueless? Or is it simply marketers hijacking public platforms to push their political agendas? On the other hand I have no problem with enterprises openly adopting political agendas as part of their branding. But the key is authentic. Not pandering and not covering up ones true intentions. NBC is a text book example of how not to do it.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Should Chevy Trucks Use John Cougar Mellencamp In Their Branding Efforts?

I've written at length about marketers using polarizing or controversial spokesmen, platforms or sponsorships for their  branding efforts. Bottom line is that if you want your brand to appeal to a targeted niche who identify with the polarizing issue, then certainly the strategy makes sense. But if not, if you run the risk of alienating a significant portion of your customer base - then don't do it.

Enter Chevy Trucks and John Cougar Mellencamp. Chevy has been using Mellencamp's "Our Country" sound track to promote it's truck line for quite a while now. I used to be a fan of John's, but his politics of late make him difficult to appreciate. Looks like I'm not the only one. Mellencamp brought presidential candidate John Edwards on stage last night at his concert, and the audience proceeded to boo Edwards off the stage. Seems like the fans did not appreciate his brand of politics - some even demanding a refund.

What's fascinating about Chevy choosing Mellencamp is that the Chevy folks feel that Mellencamp's brand of politics are patriotic and do appeal to America's truck buying demographics. Help me here - Mellencamp has long been a visible John Edwards supporter, and I'm guessing that the intersection of Chevy truck owners and Edwards supporters is pretty small - so why use Mellencamp?

Here's a note to all CEO's. If your CMO, agency or consultant tells you to use a polarizing figure or cause in your branding efforts, and the majority of your current customers and targeted prospects do not identify with this figure or cause - fire 'em. Fire the CMO, the agency and consultant. So what should Chevy do with Mellencamp? From what I can see Chevy trucks aren't exactly selling like hotcakes.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Is The NFL "Hummerizing" The NFL Brand?

I think most brands are better off in the long run staying close to home. "Sticking to their knitting" as a once esteemed business consultant said many years ago. Hummer is a good example. The Hummer brand started off appealing to a small, hard core niche of alpha males. It grew slowly, primarily by word of mouth, and was coveted by a small but fanatical band of enthusiasts willing to pony up $100k to drive the vehicle. Enter GM who acquired the Hummer rights from AM General and then proceeded to position the vehicle as a fashion accessory for women. Hummer had a few good years of growth in between but today is an orphan brand  - nobody wants it. Had AM General/GM kept the focus on their original small but fiercely loyal audience the brand would likely continue to resonate today.

It looks as if the NFL is trying to embark on the same trajectory. I read a creative brief by one of the NFL/NBC agencies who is attempting to position the Sunday Night NFL broadcast as an "academy award" event for couples. This from the agency's co-founder:

"We realized that watching sports on a weekend night is a social and interactive activity for TV viewers," said McCarley. "Think of Sunday Night Football like the Academy Awards show, where friends gather to eat and talk, root for their favorites and comment about the action on the screen--except this event comes every week," noted Dev Patnaik, Jump co-founder. "Our research showed NBC that the game's real content is the people in the room. The people watching are part of the show. Sunday night is not the time for the attitude 'Shut up or leave the room so I can watch the game,'" he said.

Now, without benefit of focus group or research study, I'm going to make a guess that most of the current LOYAL fans of the NFL do not identify with Academy Awards events. And the more the NFL attempts to shape itself to appeal to this scenario, the more fans they will begin to alienate. So if you combine this move with other recent NFL moves like the game in London and the NBC's "green week" debacle on last week's Sunday Night game, it's not hard to see the NFL brand extending itself to the point of irrelevance. They're violating Smock's number one rule of branding - keep it small, keep it sharp, and keep it scarce.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Note To The NFL: NBC Is Destroying Your Fan Base

I'm watching NBC's coverage of Sunday Night football. Philly vs. Dallas. All NBC's logos have been colored green as part of "green week" and NBC's efforts to raise global warming awareness. Matt Lauer is lecturing us live from the North Pole about global warming. All lights in the studio have been turned off to conserve energy - they're literally doing the broadcast in the dark. A promo for Al Gore on NBC's sitcom 30 Rock was played and Matt Lauer portrayed Gore as one of the brightest minds he's ever interview about global warming. All this before the end of half-time. Anybody at the NFL concerned about NBC alienating their fan base? NBC did motivate me to make my own contribution to reducing global warming - I turned off the TV. 

Does The SaveDarfur.org Attack On Fidelity Do More Harm Than Good?

The SaveDarfur.org group is running a chilling TV spot attacking Fidelity for their supposed investments in organizations that are directly or indirectly tied to genocide in Darfur. Do these kinds of attacks work? Depends who the targets are.

Special interest groups have become highly skilled in the manipulation of marketing managers - who are generally the gatekeepers when it comes to enterprise reputation. Most marketers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to fold at the slightest provocation - whether it be for fear of alienating customers, or the marketer personally being sympathetic to the cause and crafting a supportive enterprise response. So if their targets are marketing folks at Fidelity then yea, maybe, the campaign might be effective in pressuring Fidelity to divest.

But if the targets are Fidelity investors, who could also be or become SaveDarfur.org supporters and donors, then I think the ads may create a backlash. Instead of isolating and attempting to shame Fidelity investors they should be reaching out to recruit more support and to generate more positive awareness. But most importantly, I think the rhetoric on issues like Darfur, global warming, etc., has become so poisoned and biased, that efforts like this will be embraced by the true believers, and ignored or resented by the "undecideds" who are really the ones that need to be convinced.

So will the Fidelity attacks work? Probably not.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Is This Really The "Age Of Conversation"?

An admirable effort led by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged marketing bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, "brought together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication". The sales of which are donated to The Variety Group.

But two months after publication and promotion by 100 marketers, the book has sold a little more than 1200 copies. Or about 12 per marketer. Which begs a prickly question - is this the best one can expect from the so called "age of conversation"? Maybe there are ancillary benefits each marketer gains from this effort, like access to potential new clients - but if I was a client considering "conversation" or "word of mouth" tactics I would be underwhelmed by the empirical results of this effort.

Perhaps a few of the authors might clue us in on their results and benefits they've gained.

On the same topic of "conversation" Joseph Jaffe's word-of-mouth marketing group appears to be under some duress. This from Jonah Bloom at Ad Age:

Joseph Jaffe's Crayon is up to something. Our best guess is that it's called cutting your staff in half while making a play for whatever budgets marketers have assigned to word-of-mouth marketing. But why don't you see if you can do better at deciphering his explanation on crayonville.com.

Joseph Jaffe offers the following:

Over the past year, we’ve made some mistakes. We’ve underestimated how hard it is to run a remote and virtual company (although we will persevere) and miscalculated how long a lag there can be between pitching, winning an assignment, and getting the first payment in. On the other hand, we’ve overestimated the enormous leap between intent and commitment when it comes to change.

Jaffe chalks up their results to marketers unwillingness to change. I'm not sure that's it. I think most marketers have a healthy level of skepticism brought on by too much new marketing hype and not enough new marketing success stories. Marketers will change as soon as somebody can demonstrate effective, accountable and sustainable results using "conversation" or "word-of-mouth" marketing.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

Pecha Kucha - Highlighting the Struggle of Style Over Substance In Marketing Communications

I am officially on the fence with Pecha Kucha. On the one hand the creative/competitive side of me sees this as something fun and potentially effective, while the analytical/objective side of me envisions armies of marketing managers wasting hours of time finding the right photos and words while generating an effort high in style but low in substance.

Wired describes Pecha Kucha as a simple set of rules applied to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate clich into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

Here's an ugly truth. When it comes to business meetings and presentations they're boring. The information that needs to be imparted is both complex and dry as a bone, and the presenters of this information tend not to be natural entertainers. So it takes somebody with a modicum of self-discipline and motivation to sit through and assimilate the information presented.

Assimilating business information is no different than memorizing multiplication tables, reading Crime and Punishment, running 21 suicides, or going on a 20 mile march in the rain in full battle gear. It's something you gotta get through in order to get to the good stuff. A whole industry has sprung up over the past several years dedicated to trying to make this task (more) fun for the participants and entertainers and artists out of the presenters. Which has triggered a conflict of style over substance.

My preference has always been to keep presentations real and simple. By simple I don't mean dumbed down, I mean helvetica type, black and white slides, just the facts please. If you're on my team and I find you agonizing over photos, clip art, colors or typefaces for your presentation I will bench you in favor of somebody who can deal with the substance without sugarcoating. There is a time and place for creativity, entertainment and fun in marketing communications. But anytime I see style winning out over substance I'll rule in favor of substance.

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competition.

USA Today's Unique Visitors Drop 29% After Implementing Social Media Platform

TechCrunch is reporting that USA Today's experiment with social media may not be paying off. According to TechCrunch, Compete.com data is showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors. I'm wondering if the zealous few who do participate in social media are scaring off the many who just want to consume?

Download vSente's Free Campaign Planner to learn more about how we help marketing managers battle larger competitors.