Tag Archives: marketing

Marketing Diseases

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It’s October, and that means football players everywhere are wearing pink. Some in token gestures, others with shocking neon forearm and shin wraps. It’s part of an effort to end breast cancer.

Now, I’m all for that. Breasts should not get cancer. People with breasts should not get cancer. For the record, I’m against cancer. But, like General Motors, cancer sells under many names. Breast cancer is a killer, but lung cancer kills more women yet. Lung cancer also kills non-women. Lung cancer bites hard.

Maybe lung cancer doesn’t get the same attention because it’s perceived as a consequence of the afflicted’s choices. Hey, you chose to smoke, don’t ask me to feel bad for you. That’s tough to hear if you’re a non-smoker with lung cancer, but statistics are a bitch.

Because of the smoking connection, lung cancer is a tough sell. As a bunch we don’t pony up so well for diseases like that. Breast cancer is much more marketable, what with innocent women being brought down merely for having boobs. Most folks, myself included, are in favor of boobs, and are against women dying for having them.

But truly kicking one cancer’s ass will likely yield the keys to kicking the rest of them. Mad Cell Disease must have some common roots between manifestations. There are eleventy-bajillion different sorts of cancer, and it’s up to our generation to kick twelvety-bajillion tiny cancer nuts, and send them home to cry to their mommas. And then kick their mommas’ tiny cancer nuts.

We can fix this cancer thing, with the proper resolve. So forget about politics and don that pink ribbon with pride and vigor! Better yet, pony up a buck or two. It’s like voting, but your opinion actually matters. That lymph gland you save may be your own.

Thanks!

Marketing — A Huge Fail and an Interesting Idea

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I’m hardly an expert on the subject of marketing, but sometimes you don’t have to be one to notice when someone does a terrible job. In addition, I came across an interesting marketing idea that I may well end up using.

Let’s start with the bad. When I first saw the trailers for Cabin in the Woods, it looked like a fairly standard horror/slasher type of flick, and not a terribly interesting one at that. Perhaps there were hints that there was something deeper going on, but nothing that came anywhere close to telling what the movie was about. Nothing to hint that there is a lot of humor inside that scary package.

Had the preview shown the guy in the white shirt and tie shouting “We have a winner! Redneck zombie torture family!” I would have given the flick more than a second glance. Bare-bones slasher movies don’t do much for me — even the ones friends and family helped make — but Cabin is much more.

Note: There are redneck zombies, and there is blood. A lot of blood. You can’t dissect the genre without dissecting a few people. If you’re OK with that, and, like me, weren’t excited by the trailers to Cabin in the Woods, go back and give it a second look. One of the worst-marketed films I’ve ever been aware of deserves a bump.

While we’re talking about marketing, I read the first two chapters of a novel today that I had no intention of reading. How did the writer accomplish this trick? With cleverness! You see, I have one of those electronic reading devices you’ve heard so much about. I’ve been catching up on my classics, because I should and because they’re free. Recently I downloaded H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and cracked it open the other day on the bus to work.

Before the beginning of the public-domain text was a brief foreword by one Félix J. Palma, saying (roughly) “This is one of my favorite stories ever, and I hope you enjoy it. I have included the first chapters of my novel at the end; if you feel so inclined I would be delighted if you would give them a read.”

At the end of Wells’ classic Mr. Palma returns, saying how much he loved The Time Machine when he was a kid, but how it failed to delight as thoroughly when he read it as an adult (an experience that echoes my own). Without denigrating the master, he talked about his time-travel story for a couple of paragraphs. With a turn of the next ePage, we come to the title page of Palma’s work, which proclaims beneath the title The Map of Time, and after some Victorian-era histrionics:

YOUR EMOTION AND ASTONISHMENT ARE GUARANTEED.

To which I said, “Hell, yeah, Félix.” Chances are, I’m buying the book. The first two chapters haven’t blown me away, but they’re solid and have a distinctive style. I have one more free chapter to go, and there’s a collision coming. He gets that right and I’m in. And heck, it’s guaranteed.

So now I’m wondering: What public-domain work would most attract readers who would enjoy Munchies?

Thanks!

You Say that like it’s a Good Thing

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I think I might have mentioned this before, but it’s just getting worse. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to buy a new car again.

“Look at all the shit we’ve packed in!” the marketers brag. “Techno-gizmos out the ass!”

I work for a techno-gizmo company, and I’m not against techno-gizmos. In fact, I’ve got a gizmo in my pocket that would make Spok weep. It works in my car, so I’m already set, techno-gizmo-wise.

I don’t need:

  • A backup camera
  • Someone to unlock my door from far away
  • Electric windows
  • voice-activated command center
  • phone
  • electric locks
  • ass-cushion airbags
  • dvd player
  • heated seats
  • automatic parallel parking
  • Multi-zone climate control
  • gps
  • etc

To me, all those things add cost, weight, and new points of failure. They do not improve the actual car, or its ability to move me between the proverbial points A and B. They are things I have to pay for that later I will have to pay to fix. (I have a feeling in my gut that a GPS failure will somehow cause my tires to deflate, or the turn signal will go out and I’ll have to pay a thousand bucks for some hoobajoob module.)

Ironically, the only cars I know of without all that crap are high-performance supercars. I can’t afford a car without the accessories. I think that is a reflection of their actual value.

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Marketing the Fundraiser

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Many people who read this blog have contributed to the Muddled Fundraiser for Locks of Love, an outfit that provides a semblance of normalcy for kids undergoing cancer treatment. In a nutshell, it boils down to this: when the donation threshold is met, I’m donating my hair. I have a lot of hair.

While you guys have been great, my efforts to drum up support in my workplace have not been as successful. It’s a different medium, and by the time I realized that the poster I put up outside my cube failed to emphasize the fundraiserness of the endeavor, it was too late. People had learned not to see the sign.

But I work at a technology company, by jing, and technology can help. Starting Monday I will have my iPad hanging outside my cube, with the following sequence of images running in a continuous loop, using the ‘picture frame’ feature. (That way I can let the pictures run without unlocking the iPad itself.)

I’m not putting the images up here at full size, and I may go back and change the font and the size of the text, but I thought I’d share my handiwork to date.

[photofade time=’10000′]

A couple of notes: Yes, I’ve fixed the error with the chopped-off line of text. I’ve got the cycle time set at ten seconds per picture here; I may lengthen the time for each image in the actual presentation. And finally, this thing looks great on an iPad screen.

If you haven’t donated yet, well, it’s not too late!

Thanks!

Do Not Attempt

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One of the best things about modern advertising is the fine print. This is the craven cover-your-ass verbiage that expensive lawyers advise their clients to put under an ad to limit the advertiser’s liability. Here is a list of things I’ve been advised not to do:

  • Drive down a ski slope and do a barrel roll on a big jump.
  • Erect an enormous structure with a narrow track and drive through flamethrowers high above the desert floor.
  • Eat while lying on my back.
  • Pull a trailer.
  • Drive on Highway 1 at a reasonable speed on a sunny day.
  • Drive in an empty warehouse.
  • Drive on a city street at night.

Some of those things would be pretty stupid (and expensive) to attempt. Yet if I were to take all the automotive admonitions seriously, I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, ever. The sum of the auto warnings is, “Don’t use our product.”

Last night an ad reminded me not to drive very fast in a straight line on an unused runway, but oddly neglected to admonish me not to release a wild cheetah without taking measures to protect myself.

The ski slope barrel roll warning was actually phrased playfully, with the implied “yeah, we know this is ridiculous, but we’re going to do it anyway.”

People will blame our litigious culture for these silly admonitions, but except for a few well-publicized (and usually misrepresented) cases, I don’t think someone sliding a pickup truck down a ski slope has much hope of suing Toyota, warning or not. I think there’s a culture of fear that makes boardrooms timid, just as parents drive their kids to school despite ample evidence that the kids are better off walking. It’s all about worst-case thinking.

Who benefits from that fear? Some guy on retainer to Mazda who gets paid five thousand bucks to look at the latest ad and say, “Put ‘Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt.’ at the bottom.” Based on Mazda’s lawyer not altering the text to mention angry carnivores, I wonder if he even watched the ad before submitting his careful analysis. What does Mazda get in return? The VP of marketing can tell the board “we asked a lawyer” if someone gets upset.

My strongest argument for why this is corporate cowardice rather than a reflection of our litigious society lies in Hollywood. There are no disclaimers in movies. Stupid people have died replicating stunts in movies. There was a movie where people lay on the double-yellow in the middle of a road. When a kid died replicating that stunt, the studio was not sued out of existence.

In the face of ample evidence that disclaimers are unnecessary and not even that useful when things do go wrong, advertisers still tell me not to operate my car in any circumstances. Hollywood is simply braver than Madison Avenue, as hard as that is to believe.

Thanks!

Opportunity Lost

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The other day I opened the cabinet to grab some cold cereal. I wasn’t sure which specific cereal I was going to have, I just knew that a bowl full of yummy not-too-sweet flakes with some almond milk splashed over them would be tasty. Probably I’d slice a banana over the cereal.

So, surveying the candidates with an open mind, I was confronted with… anonymous boxes. Black-and-white panels of nutrition information. I selected a cereal and resolved to put it away with the other edge showing, so my poor tired eyes could identify that box better the next time.

It turns out the other side was no better, and I realized that all the cereal boxes in the cabinet used the side panels as junk space.

Big mistake, I say. In the case of cereal, all the marketing is on the front of the box, with stuff on the back of the box to keep the kids without TV in the kitchen occupied. The packaging designers are missing an important opportunity.

There are two phases to marketing a box of cereal; first you get it off the store shelf and into the shopping cart. That’s what the front panel does. But the marketing isn’t over then; cereals are still competing to get from the box to the bowl. The winner of that contest empties the box faster. It’s about selling the next box.

That competition is all about the side panels. If I were king of a cereal company, the boring stuff would be on the back, and the side panels would be devoted exclusively to “Hey! Look at me! I’m yummy!”

Thanks!

Do Not Attempt

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The Title of this episode commonly appears as fine print in television commercials, where the advertiser wants to make sure no one holds them responsible for someone else being stupid.

I may add to this post, but here’s the one that forced me (yes, forced) to write this little episode:

  • Do not attempt an automobile collision while someone is hanging from the side of one of the vehicles, on the side of the collision.
  • Do not jump out of an airplane while holding a sphere of electricity and then hurl said sphere into a cloud that you are falling toward, filling it with lightning.

I know you were going to.

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The Illusion of Helping

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Recently I vowed to cut off my considerable hair for charity. Thanks tons to the people who have stepped up to help. You guys are awesome! We made 5% of the goal in the first day. Hooray!…? Now we’re at 6% (the widget in the sidebar is bad at math) and it looks like my hair will reach the ground before the target is reached.

Marketing is a big factor, of course, and I have some observations about that below. First I’d like to share some thoughts about the culture of Facebook as it relates to fundraising. In a nutshell, Facebook has created a culture that allows people to feel like they’ve helped out when in fact they’ve done pretty much nothing. I don’t really think this is bad (pretty much nothing is better than nothing), but it exposes a way that Facebook could change the economics of fundraising for the better.

When I set up Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, I went through a site that makes fundraising easier, and that site allows you to automatically pimp out your fundraiser on Facebook. Naturally I used this option.

I don’t have a huge circle on Facebook, but right away people responded. They ‘liked’ the post. They passed on the link. Strangers liked it. With two exceptions (who would have donated anyway), the post-likers and link-passers didn’t donate, yet I’m sure those folks felt like they had helped. “I won’t donate, but if I pass this on, maybe someone else will.”

Of course, calling attention to a cause you think is worthy is a good thing to do. Certainly better than nothing. Alas, in the Facebook universe, it’s only a tiny bit better than nothing. Almost not measurably better than nothing. About a dollar less in value than donating a buck.

I don’t think it’s cheapness that creates these not-so-helpful helpers. If it were as easy to donate a buck as it is to ‘like’ a post, I bet 5% of the likers would make that gesture. As it stands, you have to click a link and fill out a form. If you’re planning on making a large donation, the hassle is pretty insignificant, but it’s a lot to go through when your beneficiary is only going to get a small amount.

If it was as easy to make a small donation as it is to like a post, and there was a “54 people have tossed in a buck” message, with a list of the buck-tossers, fundraising might be fundamentally altered.

In the meantime, when you pass on a link to a cause you believe in, how about starting with “I tossed in five bucks! How ’bout you?” If it’s worth passing on, it’s worth taking a little of your own time to back it up.

I have now promoted my fundraiser in three different ways (the fourth will launch Monday), and I’ve learned a few things.

  1. The most effective marketing method by far has been direct email. Spam makes a little more sense to me now.
  2. Facebook and this blog are terrible marketing tools.
  3. Some folks I thought would have a strong opinion about my aging-hippie look (pro or con) haven’t weighed in. Perhaps I misjudged the Q Score of my Fabio-crushing man-mane.

The next leg of the campaign will be called “Match this, Tim!” The new Apple CEO has announced a pretty generous charity matching program, and I’ll be twisting arms around the office. I don’t think Tim’s going to be able to match my flowing tresses, however.

But seriously, tresses aside, if you haven’t already, pitch in to make a young chemo patient’s life a little less awful. It’s worth doing, and it’s not an illusion.

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I’m Sure it’s a Coincidence

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As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.

No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.

You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.

So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.

But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.

The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)

Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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New Album Out!

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I haven’t seen the cover for the Foo Fighters’ new album, but if the song I heard today is any indication, it’s pretty easy to imagine what it looks like. Here is my humble rendition:

The cover to the newest Foo Fighters album

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Submitted a Freakin’ Story

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Just finished rebuilding the ending to a story and getting it off to a publisher. It has been, I think, six months since I submitted anything, let alone to a pro market. I really like this story but the ending has never been as strong as it is now. I hope.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be getting another story out to an anthology. It’s a story I wasn’t sure would ever find a home, but this might just be its chance.

There’s another very short story I might send over to Piker Press, so they don’t forget me completely, and because it’s fun to share.

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Now with Extra Extras!

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I’ve seen a few car advertisements lately, and one thing’s for sure: they’re sure putting a lot of gizmos into cars these days. But where some people see “cool feature”, I see “distraction” and “point of failure”. Electric windows were bad enough, now it seems I’d be hard-pressed to find an automobile that doesn’t tie my shoes for me and tell me how devilishly handsome I am.

If I were king of an auto company, every new proposed feature my marketing whiz kids threw at me would have to answer these questions:

  1. Does it add weight to the vehicle?
  2. Does it divide the driver’s attention?
  3. does it require an instruction manual?
  4. Does it increase maintenance costs?
  5. How many different ways can it break?
  6. When it breaks, how will that affect the owner of the car? (Crash? can’t roll up the windows? Can’t unlock the door?)

I don’t know if there exists a new car (within reason) that I would prefer over my ten-year-old, already-too-fancy car.

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Thanks!

Note to Chrysler Marketing: Dictionary.com is Free

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I was waiting at a traffic light today, thinking about the name of the car in front of me. Thinking about it more, perhaps, than the Chrysler marketing department did.

The car is a modern, sporty car, with aggressive and unique styling. It looks fun to drive. The name: Chrysler Crossfire.

Crossfire. As in: “If you get caught in the crossfire, you could be killed.” Crossfire. Military planning is filled with ways to get your enemy in crossfire.

Though maybe it’s a good name. Maybe the Chrysler Crossfire is a car that’s pretty exciting — unless you’re in it.

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Hey! Wait a Minute…

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This morning I got an entreaty from c|net (though apparently now they’re just cnet) to remain an active participant in their community. I haven’t been on the site in a long time, and perhaps they’re paring down their spam lists. As an incentive for me to opt back into their site, they offer the chance to win an Amazon Kindle.

Since I’m interested in owning one of those electronic book thingies, I checked the fine print to see how many they were giving away. The answer: one. I don’t like my chances there.

But wait! While looking for the list of prizes I noticed the following (sloppy formatting theirs, emphasis mine):

3. Promotion Period. The Promotion begins on January 24, 2011 at 12:00:00 PM ET and ends at 11:59:59 PM ET on January 31, 2011(the “Promotion Period”).

4. Entering:

To enter this Sweepstakes, go to your email inbox. Find the email from CNET Membership and open it. Look for the red button that says “Keep me connected.” By clicking this during the Promotion Period, you will receive an entry into this Sweepstakes.

(The sloppy formatting was also why I had a hard time finding the prize list – a list of one.) The flashy email copy above the fine print is dated February 3, 2011, and it was actually sent on the 6th. A week after the contest was over.

Chances are this mix-up is due to incompetence rather than malice, but CBS Interactive Inc. won’t be hearing from me.

Thanks!

The What Now?

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Range Rover has introduced a new version of their suburban assault vehicle, a massive beast that will get the kids to soccer practice on time at the cost of $100 per quickly-depleted tankful: the Range Rover Sport. I’m pretty sure they didn’t intend irony when they gave it that moniker, but I have to believe the marketing team that blessed one of the least-sporty vehicles on the road today with that appellation must have had a good laugh when all was said and done.

And… it will work.

Thanks!