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Winner:

The banks having been getting a lot of abuse –and for the most part they deserve it. The foreclosure mess is only the latest in a long line of outrages and awful marketing missteps.

But one major bank, at least, seems to be getting its brand back on track.

I’m talking about Bank of America’s announcement that it will be hiring 1,000 new staff to focus entirely on small business.

That’s more like it.

Over two years ago, I argued that the big banks had lost their way and that it was critical for them to return their brands to banking fundamentals.

Bottom line, banks must be seen to care about Main Street not just Wall Street. They have to show that they understand that they serve an important role in building our economy and making life better for all of us.

Given that the backbone of the American economy is small business, Bank of America’s decision shows that they are starting to get it. This is part two of Bank of America’s recent moves to help small business. A few weeks ago they announced that they would fund grants of 3 plus million dollars from a community development institution.

My advice to them: do even more things like this. It will do wonders for your brand.

Loser:

In the ancient world, it was considered a grave crime to mistreat your guests if you were the host.

But this is exactly what Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg did when Bill O’Reilly came to their proverbial house and stormed out on him.

Let’s face it, O’Reilly is a fighter and fighter’s say things that get people riled up. That’s his brand! But Behar and Goldberg are professionals and they should have acted that way.

Sure, from a Target Market perspective the two women probably endeared themselves to their diehard fans who think the same way that they do, but The View has a much broader audience –that’s why there are multiple hosts not just those two— and my guess is that they have done real damage to The View brand and even to themselves by alienating those audience members who were on the borderline.

This was an opportunity for both Goldberg and Behar to establish their brands as professionals who can respectfully disagree with what they believe are obnoxious opinions.

This is what hosts must do when one’s guests say things that you and your other guests may not agree with. For me it comes down to something that my late Aunt Anna taught me: always show class and aplomb even when you are boiling inside.

Where has all the civility gone? Let’s hope this isn’t the new America where confrontation is the norm and etiquette a part of a bygone era!

Fact is, in the end they proved O’Reilly’s general point by showing that they couldn’t really engage in a debate. Hats off, by the way, to Barbara Walters who earned more points for her brand by taking the high road and immediately condemning the walk off.

And, remember, things are always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.

TODAY’S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY:
When in doubt, always focus on what made your brand strong to begin with.

John Tantillo is an AMA member and president of the Marketing Department of America, a New York-based marketing firm.
http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/

The opinions expressed in this post are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Marketing Association.

Posted by Elisabeth at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know that commercial that you just can’t get out of your head? The one whose jingle or spokesman is so annoying that it makes you want to throw your TV out the window? With those spots in mind, The Consumerist, a website published by Consumer Reports’ parent company Consumer Media that covers all things consumer-focused, held its first-annual Worst Ad in America contest. About 100,000 Consumerist.com readers submitted nominations for their least favorite national ads that ran in 2010 and Staples’ “Wow! That’s a Low Price” spot was given the dubious distinction of Worst Ad in America. Winners (or perhaps they should be called losers) in other categories included the McDonald’s “Not Until I’ve Had My Coffee” guy for Most Grating Performance by a Human Being; General Insurance’s the General for Most Annoying Animated Spokesthing; J.G. Wentworth’s opera-singing bus riders for Duo or Group That Most Needs to Be Broken Up; Jimmy Johnson for ExtenZe for Celebrity Who Must Have Lost the Most Money in the Housing Crash; and Liberator Medical’s “No More Used Catheters” ad for Creepiest Commercial (see videos below). For the most part, voters’ negative opinions of the ads didn’t cast a pall over the brands or companies themselves. “Maybe one out of 200 people would say, ‘That commercial made me stop using that product.’ For the most part, it was: ‘I hate the person in that commercial. I hate the jingle.’ People weren’t voting for Mr. Opportunity because they hated Honda; they were voting because they hated Mr. Opportunity,” says Chris Morran, senior editor at Consumerist.com. “You have to really find out what impact [the ad] has on the people who are or might be prospects, or might be customers. That’s the critical issue. It’s not what the advertising pundits think; it’s what the people who are involved in these brands and companies and organizations think,” says Don Schultz, professor (emeritus-in-service) of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University and a Marketing News columnist. “The critical thing is, if the advertiser sees [the ad] is not working, they’ll change it.” Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer at Landor Associates, a brand consulting and design firm in New York, says that regardless of their ability to grate on consumers’ nerves, so-called “annoying” ads actually can be effective. “A lot of these commercials may be annoying, but when they sell a key point over and over again, they are quite effective. As long as that point is on-message and on-brand for the product, and is familiar enough that people immediately get what it’s about, that often equates to great advertising—even though it may not win the kind of awards that creative directors would like to have on their wall.” Some ads still fall flat in consumers’ eyes regardless of the companies’ sizable ad budgets. “A lot of these ads were done by top agencies, but they were still annoying. I don’t know if it’s the blame of the agencies or the executives who approved the ads,” Consumerist.com’s Morran says. However, research can go a long way in preventing unwise ad spending. “It should be a very rare thing that a company goes out with a message that’s totally flat. You can do in-market tests to see whether it’s advancing the message you’re trying to communicate. Before investing a huge amount of money in a campaign, most smart marketers do that already,” Landor’s Roth says. This article originally appeared in our e-newsletter, Marketing News Exclusives.

Posted by Christine Birkner at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Winner:

Now that Tiger is divorced, there is absolutely nothing to stand in his way of becoming the best the game has ever known.

I’m not anti-marriage or anti-morals, but the fact is from the perspective of Tiger’s great sports performance brand, his sexual exploits and his rocky marriage were only distractions away from his golfing destiny.

From the beginning of the Tiger Woods meltdown –which was more a media meltdown than a sports meltdown for Tiger— I’ve argued that reports of the golfer’s athletic future were grossly exaggerated.

Bottom line, as long as Tiger Woods performs on the golf course, his brand will soon be stronger than ever and it will stay strong for a very long time. Some great support for this comes from Tiger’s new swing coach, Sean Foley (here are some quotes via The New York Times) and his prediction that Tiger will break Jack Nicklaus’ records:

It’s not a function of if he will break Jack’s records, it’s a matter of when. Tiger is only 34. He’s got basically 12 more years and that’s 48 more majors to win four. I don’t know how many majors he will win, but it’s definitely more than 18. I’ll go with 22 or 23.

I find it amazing how quickly Tiger went from almost a messiah in the golf world to someone who people say is finished or done. I know as a teacher I’m only teaching him things he’s already done before. It’s like working with Amadeus. We’re talking about a straight-up genius…You don’t teach him, you just stand there and answer his questions and make some adjustments.

My conclusion? Even if sex scandals explode again, Tiger has now gained an inoculation against too much further damage. In the meantime, his game will keep powering ahead and so will his brand. Stay tuned.

Loser:

Giving money to education is always a good thing, but what drives me crazy is when the public relations geniuses think they can deny the obvious. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation is related to the bad press of the movie –how can it not be? Even if it isn’t, it still is because no one who has a working brain cell will actually believe that the bad publicity from the movie wasn’t somehow related to the decision to give away the money so publicly.

Going on Oprah was a good move. It should have been enough for Zuckerberg to show that he wasn’t some kind of monster. After all, Zuckerberg might not be a completely likeable character –but driven entrepreneurs who change the world rarely are! The public doesn’t necessarily need its great achievers to be warm and fuzzy.

If you really care about your long-term personal brand (i.e., how the world thinks about you, etc.), then you need to take a long-term approach. Fact is, it takes people a long time to reverse their opinions if they like a public figure and even longer if they don’t. Zuckerberg has a long way to go and the gift of $100 million would have gone a lot further if it hadn’t been announced on Oprah but been done later on or even discovered to have been done independently by the media at some later date.

Why? Because announcing on Oprah immediately makes everyone cynical. This wasn’t helped by Zuckerberg himself looking like he wanted to have his cake and eat it too when he suggested that he had considered doing the gift anonymously. This is like telling your girlfriend or your wife that you thought about sending her flowers but decided it against it in the end.

If Zuckerberg, only 26 years of age, really is another Bill Gates, a modern tycoon turned philanthropist, then he has a lot of time to cultivate that reputation. Public relations folks often make the mistake of forgetting the personal brand they are representing. They apply a one-size fits all approach that is often driven by the fear that their client will never again be the subject of media attention.

The problem with this is that it makes the PR people try to squeeze too much message into too little space. Brands build slowly in the public consciousness. Think Warren Buffett. It took him years to become the revered figure that he is now. He did this by being true to himself and letting his reputation grow organically. That gave him credibility. You simply can’t force credibility. You know what Eddie Cantor said: “It takes 20 years to achieve overnight success.”

Zuckerberg could have spoken about his philanthropic ideals to Oprah, then let evidence of his passion to help people accumulate over time (months, years, etc.).

The irony here might be that in the end the movie is forgotten, but the money giveaway is remembered as a publicity stunt.

And the runner-up loser? Basically, the FDA censured Listerine and others for making unproven claims about their mouthwashes… This is the kind of thing that gives marketing a bad name.

And, remember, things are always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.

TODAY’S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY:
A brand is always a long-term proposition.

John Tantillo is an AMA member and president of the Marketing Department of America, a New York-based marketing firm.
http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/

The opinions expressed in this post are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Marketing Association.

Posted by Elisabeth at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hundreds of market researchers from across the country gathered in Atlanta this week for the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Research Conference, to heed guidance from research leaders at Coca-Cola, HP, General Mills, comScore and other companies. A general lesson time and time again: researchers need to be more concerned with looking forward so they’ll better serve their companies, and the industry, as change agents.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with looking back and in doing so highlighting some insightful ideas presented at the conference. Here are five standout statistics presented at this year’s Marketing Research Conference and the lessons behind the numbers.
• 0.1% - That’s the approximate average click-through rate for display banner ads (excluding search), Gian Fulgoni, CEO of comScore, said at the conference. And 64% of the 240 agency executives surveyed by comScore said they rely on click through rates as a metric of campaign success. “Clicks don’t reflect the cumulative or latent impact of advertising. Clicks don’t tell you anything about brand-building effects,” he said. Instead, researchers should develop behavioral tracking techniques to capture effect over time as a more reliable measure of display ad effectiveness, he said.
• 68% of the approximately 350 “blue chip” managers surveyed by Maritz said they had mixed results or were struggling with integrating data from the voice of the customer research sources. D. Randall Brandt, vice president of customer experience and loyalty at Maritz, advised developing a uniform set of customer experience categories and applying them consistently to the data. Some systems may have to be simplified so you can get apples to apples, he acknowledged, but you’ll at least have some progress.
• 20 million – That’s the approximate number of tweets mentioning brands or products that are pushed out every day, according to Ken Sickles, global product director at Dow Jones and Company. Researchers should keep an eye on online chatter, particularly from industry experts and influencers who champion their respective brands. Listorious and TweetDeck can give you some guidance, Sickles said.
• 88% of the approximately 1,500 CEOs surveyed by IBM said getting close to the customers was their number one priority over the next five years, Clare Hart, president and CEO at Infogroup, said during her presentation. “This is big for people in this room,” Hart said, as it’s the information cultivated by market researchers that CEOs want to achieve their top goal. Within this context “marketing research, whether its primary or secondary, is critical to every business decision,” she added. But researchers have to propose clear actions from their insights so their CEOs will see the value of their findings.
• 12% - According to findings from an ESPN study gauging audience reaction to advertising across TV, mobile, radio, magazine and online during this summer's World Cup, viewers who watched the World Cup outside their home on TV (such as at a sports bar) had a 12% greater favorability toward advertisers compared with people who watched the World Cup at home on TV. Other findings from this study, presented at the conference by Julie Propper, director of advertising analytics for ESPN Research+Analytics division, will be detailed in an article appearing in the Oct. 7 issue of Marketing News’ e-newsletter Marketing News Exclusives.

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