Brand Central Station

Here’s a great piece on how the major broadcast news anchors are closing ranks following “Rathergate” and the self-righteous buzz surrounding Dan Rather’s relatively sloppy pursuit of a story on George W. Bush’s days in the Texas Air National Guard.

Kudo’s to the WOLves blog. Excellent stuff.

WOLves: Big3 Circling the Wagons

Here’s a new twist on experiential marketing … a must read for members of the EMF (Experiential Marketing Forum) and IXMA (International Experiential Marketing Association).

Thanks, Diva!

Diva Marketing: Mood Management Marketing

I know I’m not the only one who feels like the “shine” has come off the reputation our country once enjoyed. We were supposed to have won the Cold War and with it forged a new world order built on peace, prosperity and freedom.

Right?

Unfortunately, with the US Presidential elections just around the corner, things in America don’t look much better today than they did four years ago when George W. Bush’s election officially ended the panacea of peace ushered in by Ronald Reagan – a realization of the world’s fragile situation which had slowly deteriorated under presidents Bush (the elder) and Clinton.

This is not a blog containing political screeds – or, for that matter, a political perspective that is neccessarily conservative or liberal (in the American political sense). Instead, this blog is a running conversation (held, at times, out loud) on the status of American prestige in the world and its significance to US businesses trying to build markets abroad and at home.

The name of this blog is: Marketing America – which is the title of a book I’m working on and from which much of this material is derived.

I would appreciate your comments, thoughts and observations as I continue to post material to this weblog. By reading (and, hopefully participating), you’ll be on the “inside” as I conduct research and form/test theories. I’ll report back on interviews with business people from around the world, discussions with journalists and other thought leaders – and I’ll even include my personal insights from the various consulting projects on which I work throughout the year.

Thanks again for your interest. This should be an interesting place to be.

Mike Bawden

President

Brand Central Station

Measurement and ROI are all the rave – here’s an honest attempt to get to the real facts about e-commerce.

… and for an HBS (Harvard Business School) piece, it’s fairly concise.

HBS Working Knowledge: Strategy: Start to Measure Your E-commerce Success

We’ve known for a while that a significant number of “major purchases” (items like cars, homes, vacations, etc.) involved a great deal of online consumer research. Here’s one more study that seems to bear out this fact on all retail spending.

Better update those websites for Christmas, folks.

15 Percent of Retail Spend Influenced by Sites, Despite Offline Purchases � MarketingVOX

Just because bloggers love to blog about blogging is no reason not to buy ads targeting bloggers. (Huh?)

It just all seems so self-indulgent.

Strategic Public Relations: Blog Ads Gain Momentum

Well, we promised to let you know when Richard Edelman followed up his daily blog with another post and here it is …

But all kidding aside, I for one am glad to see his apparent intention to provide interesting information and insights rather than typical blog-blather. This article, Richard’s observations on how different sources view the teen market, is worth perusing if for no other reason than to realize that this market is as diverse and fractured as every other market that has preceeded it.

Maybe what’s really needed is a completely different way of looking at demographic markets? Check out the Brand Central Station blog and I’ll share a few of my thoughts with you there.

6 A.M.: Teens

I ran across this post as I was working on my Much Ado About Marketing blog (a daily summary of interesting blog bits concerning marketing, branding, corporate leadership and other things of interest — at least to me).

This post, by Edelman’s CEO, Richard Edelman, discusses how different “experts” on the teen market view the potential, attitudes and future of today’s youth.

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Each expert has a different opinion. And, as a father of four, I can tell you that they’re all right.

Maybe the problem is not who’s right or wrong but rather the idea of lumping an entire generation into a category and making sweeping generalizations about them is not all that accurate a method in the first place.

Well, maybe that isn’t entirely fair.

I could certainly make the case that generational labels and profiles have been useful marketing conventions for the past few generations. But I see that more as a result of our own history, cultural development and available technology than as some sort of scientifically-provable premise on which to rest an entire profession like marketing.

Here’s why:

● Over the past two to three hundred years, America has been populated by ethnic groups that have arrived in “waves” to our shores. The motivating factors behind these mass immigrations have varied from generation to generation – but inside each generation, the motivation to come to America was fairly consistent. In the 17th century, Europeans fled religious persecution. In the 18th century, war in Europe drove people to our shores. The 19th and 20th centuries saw people come to this country in search of new opportunities or to avoid famine or political persecution.

● At the same time, political and social culture was continuing to evolve but, for the most part, generalizations about race, ethnicity and culture were the accepted norm. Ethnic stereotypes were a kind of social short-hand and mixing of cultures through inter-marriage was considered improbable (at best) and problematic (at worst). It was easy to say a certain ethnic group would identify with a certain product because those ties were strong – in many cases stronger than that group’s American identity, but that would change over time.

● While ethnic ties to the “old country” started to weaken in succeeding generations and an American identity was forming based on our own short history, information and communications technology continued to develop. Over the last thirty years we’ve seen technology break through the conventional bonds of community (ethnic, age, geography) and draw divergent groups together in new and exciting ways.

What’s the result of all this?

The result is a much richer and diverse social landscape with people of various ages sharing similar views and insights rendering the old method of slapping a label on a certain age demographic more and more useless.

This “two-dimensional” demographic map of our country is becoming less and less accurate. And while marketers can sense that something isn’t quite right, no one seems to be finding a solution to this problem.

At some point, someone will.

I suppose a new market model will evolve that will still consider age as a factor – but from more of a scientific standpoint with regard to cognitive ability and from a social standpoint with regard to legal rights, responsibilities, etc. Attitudes and cultural influences should probably be evaluated and measured without respect to age (first) and then shaded appropriately based on the role age plays in physical maturity and social responsibilities.

What we will probably find is entirely new demographic clusters that span a number of years that are built around common interests and needs. Each cluster will probably be arranged in a hierarchy that has some dependency on age but not solely reliant on it.

Who can build such a model? Not me. I’m just one guy. But when it comes to one guy with the resources, maybe Richard Edelman has an idea? He certainly has the rolodex file that can do the trick.

Later.

This information is (c) 2004, Brand Central Station, all rights reserved. If you are interested in receiving news and analysis directly from BCS, please log onto our website.

Here’s an interesting article found on the CommLog blog by Matt Madsen. The article goes into some detail on VOIP, a technology that could significantly change the communications infrastructure we all use today.

A “must read” for those who are so inclined to stay current on technology.

CommLog: Hold the Phone

In the world of tourism promotion, there is not a single, more important document prepared each year than your “Visitor’s Guide.” So now comes a report from Oklahoma that the official state tourism guide features pictures of a cow pie throwing contest and a Confederate battle reenactment.

“We discovered the material in the event guide was culturally insensitive and contained errors,” said state tourism director Rob Gray. “Images are powerful. They have to be selected with caution.”

Boy, no kidding. Talk about the shit hitting the proverbial fan.

The point here is not to poke fun at Oklahoma (as tempting as it might be for someone who went to college in Texas), but rather to talk about the selection of images and the impact those images can have on your brand. It may be obvious to some, but it deserves re-statement: “What you say and the way you say it – in pictures and in words – tells people how they should perceive your brand.”

After all, who knows more about your brand than you?

When a business or, in this case a state agency, is careless with the images and messages it presents to the public, it’s sending another message: “We don’t care about ourselves enough to care what you might think about us.” And that can be a perceived attitude that spells trouble for your brand.

We see it happen all the time in the business world. A company that’s a bit careless with how it presents its logo or uses its corporate colors are guilty of this carelessness. Think about it for a minute … how much credence do you put into product claims made by a company that can’t seem to keep its own “identity” in order?

If your company is guilty of this brand neglect, what should be done about it? Take a page from the Oklahoma state department of tourism – you eat a little humble pie and start pulling the literature and other material that is inconsistent (at best) or inappropriate (at worst) back in-house. Do a little damage control and then move on.

Next, it’s vital to nail down a communications platform from which to work. Identify the key messages that support your brand’s position and move your company further along on your mission. Along with those key messages, you have to set some kind of guidelines for the graphic elements that support your communication: colors, pictures, icons, etc. Believe it or not, there is a way to craft a communications strategy that covers these graphic elements. Spend a little time online (or reading future Brand Central Station blogs) and you’re bound to find advice and instruction on how this can be done.

Finally, make sure you have some method in place to constantly review and re-evaluate the communications materials you produce on a regular basis. Remember, brands are elastic and the messages used to communicate their value need to be constantly updated and kept relevant.

And what is the result of all this work?

If it’s done right, you’ll find customers, employees and all of the other people who matter most to your brand to be more engaged and understanding of what your brand represents. You’ll be forming relationships between your brand that can mean a lot to you and your business in the future.

So it’s no longer just watching what you say, it’s carefully determining the best way to say it that makes a difference. By paying attention to these details, your reputation can improve, profit margins increase and brand value continue to improve.

Let’s hope the guys in Oklahoma figure this out.

Later.

CNN.com – Oklahoma recalls tourist brochures featuring cow manure tossing – Oct 6, 2004

SEO = Search Engine Optimization

And Blog Business World’s Wayne Hurlbert has shared some interesting thoughts on how the Internet is getting “over optimized” (my words, not his). To wit:

“…there are literally billions of sites on the internet. About four billion of them are blogs. By the way, those four million blogs are better optimized than 98% of the traditional websites.”



Cool, huh? Check out his blog and learn more.

Blog Business World

After one entry, Richard Edelman has fallen into the same trap most of us bloggers fall into, infrequent posting. I’m sure it’s not that he doesn’t have enough to say…

We’ll check back every now and then to see if the situation has changed.

Speak Up