Last Night A Rolex Saved My Life?

I don't really like contrived business acronyms. But the suggestion that successful businesses need to display the LATTE factor by being Local, Authentic, Traceable, Trusted and Ethical seems reasonable.

Especially when compared to the outlandish claim that, after attempting suicide,

the quality of a Rolex watch helped Owen (Wilson) realize and appreciate the quality of his own life.

More warped causality here.

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Marketing Budget Cuts of 15% for First Half 2009

Within the technology marketing sector, I predict budget cuts of 15% or so for the first half of 2009. And within the typical marketing mix, the events budget and traditional-media advertising will bear a dis-proportionate share of those cuts. Given the trend of accelerating spending on digital advertising, it is more likely then ever before that traditional media spend lost in the downturn of 2008-2009 will not - ever - be replaced.

In the tech industry we are now, over the past couple of months, just acknowledging the impact of the recessionary cycle; even while the macroeconomists are now saying we have been in an overall recession for a year. My sense of the marketing budget cuts in tech is that at the beginning of an acknowledged recessionary cycle (i.e. now), there is an over-reaction that brings budget cuts that go too deep on the first pass. It's the nature of management which is so often short-sighted. I have believed that good marketing investment policy has elements of a large inertial flywheel: let it stop spinning and the fuel to get it going again costs a lot more than if steady increments had been consistently applied. Vendors should have the wherewithal and courage to keep their investments basically steady.

Other guidance for senior marketers:

• Use the downturn to permanently eliminate or re-shape entrenched silos of program costs: 1) Example: Isolated events not part of a broader campaign or important new launch; 2) Let the downturn play the role of "bad cop"; 3) Be most rigorous/suspicious of heavily guarded budgets
• Given the forecasted short duration of the downturn: 1) limit staff reductions . . . Marketing headcount turnover has already exceeded 9% annually for the past two years; 2) Use the downturn to mandate/effect more aggressive Content Audits
• Identify and create shared services: 1) Target is duplicate discretionary costs (e.g. across your 3 product lines, PM’s have purchased 3 separate on-line community platforms); 2) Target is duplicate activities executed within fixed costs (e.g. you oversee 3 product lines and each group spends 4 days per month on separate dashboard performance reporting compliance, which you are unable to normalize)
  
  By Rich Vancil, VP, IDC's Executive Advisory Group (rvancil@idc.com)

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Phil Collins And Unintended Consequences.

CDs were promoted in terms of sound quality and digital compression. They were also smaller. But marketing expert, Phil Collins made the interesting point that it's also the first time music was one-sided. While this means that you don't have to turn it over, it also means that you don't need to be encouraged to turn it over.

Prior to this, albums were created so that the first and last track on each side were particularly strong. They focussed on keeping the listener excited/empassioned and wanting to turn over. On CDs, it's alleged that the first three or four tracks are the strong ones and the rest are filler because the assumption is that people will relisten to those and not go too deep into the album.

Whether or not that's true, it's clear how people would react. They would realise what was going on and, once the technology arrived, they would opt to download only those tracks they wanted and completely undermine an industry.

That's what happens if you don't bother to enthuse your users. They may not have to turn over anymore, but they will always have the option to turn off.

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Now That's What I Call Differentiation.

With Sainsbury's offering anodised saucepans that are Twice As Stronger As Stainless Steel, it's clear that 2009 has started well.

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The Year Of Thinking Dangerously.

And so we end the year as we started it, amazed that stuff like this gets made. Huge amounts of money spent on two of my pet hates - name changes and celebrity endorsement - tactics that pander to the egos of executives and agencies alike while doing little for genuine differentiation.

Worse still, this is happening in insurance, that most commodified of industries that has focussed on price competition, that suffers from many complaints and that could still be something very different. It's a service that makes a huge impact at a time of high emotion and peril.

What more could a business want in the way of attentive users and what better chance to make them passionate about you by acknowledging that insurance is, at heart, in the emergency service business? None of that will follow from unified group names or irrelevant celebrities and, as the You Tube comments show, people don't like the huge amount of money they're throwing at it in a time of economic downturn.

It's lazy, standard thinking and lazy thinking has got so many sectors in trouble in 2008. Lazy thinking is not going to work in 2009. 2009 has to be the year of thinking dangerously.

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Pick N Mix Is Not A Strategy.

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people nostalgically bemoaned the passing of an institution and recalled making personally important purchases there decades ago (usually records or pick n mix).

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, a lot of people realised that they hadn't been there for years and recalled that they didn't really know what they sold.

When Woolworths finally went bankrupt, quite a lot of people who did shop there recalled how they sold the best value children's clothing on the high street. But who knew that? Could Woolworths' salvation have lain in becoming the best children's clothes store in town? We'll never know.

Because Woolworths used to stand for something in people's minds, but increasingly tried to stand for everything by selling a wide variety of unremarkable products and, inevitably, customers drifted away.

Ultimately, it didn't stand for anything and ultimately it no longer exists. Here endeth the lesson.

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Online Advertising Needs A Rationale.

..one of the main reasons for this is that advertisers and publishers are not always using the right measures to analyze advertising effectiveness. With average click rates on display ads falling under 0.1%, the correct metric to use is clearly NOT the click.

The click may well not be the correct metric to use. But the fact that click rates have fallen so low is not the justification for such a statement. The online advertising business really has to get its act together.

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