Lairig Marketing

Reader To Reporter: “Please Raise The Bar“

The marketing trade press is mostly a conduit for warmed over press releases with no fact checking nor follow-up reporting. Lairig Marketing flags as many of the dubious items we can, and exposes them to our tiny but hot spotlight.

Why we are the only ones to do so is a mystery.

And why the ones that border on pure fiction are never called out is a mysterious enigmatic riddle.

Case in point #1: In April, Fast Company pumped (pimped?) an announcement by Barclaycard that its new “Ring” MasterCard was "the first social [sic] credit card to be designed and built through the power of community crowdsourcing."

Then the writer-at-large added his own words: “That sounds unlike any other credit card ever heard of.”

A little research, and he would have said this: “That sounds just like the new Priority Club Select Visa Card that Lairig Marketing told its readers about two full years ago. So, that means Barclaycard’s claim of being the first is fictional.”

You can get the truth from our story here (scroll to bottom of article), and straight from the horse’s mouth in much more detail here.

Case in point #2: eMarketer says 1 out of every 4 people ON THE PLANET will be “socializing on online networks” by 2014. It gets there by extrapolating from the number of current Internet users who claim to visit a social network AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH.

Fiction based on fiction. Fiction squared.

How does going on Facebook (or claiming to) just once over the course of a full 30 days qualify as being “social” ? This is like going to the gym once a month and calling that being “healthy.” It just might be the lowest bar for human interaction ever set.

Yet people eat this fiction up buffet style. Too distracted to see how low the bar on truth has been set.

The Business Revolution Will Not Be Digitized

Reading marketing blogs (other than Lairig Marketing, of course) would lead a person to think every communications process and means of distribution had been fully digitized. The recent “Minding Your Digital Business” report from McKinsey will bring such people back to reality.

One of the many questions for McKinsey’s study group of nearly 1500 global “C-level” execs was how big a priority “Big Data” is (a faux phenomenon we covered in depth here). Only 25% put it in the top three (which sounds to us to be twice what you’d expect).

That means we’ll see another million “Big Data” articles over the next two years until the C-suite gets the memo.

Oddly, only 39% said they were using Big Data for “Budgeting, Forecasting & Planning.” More oddly, budgeting was the only one of nine survey options that showed a lower number for ideal usage. Translation: execs believe they are currently using TOO MUCH data for setting budgets!!!

Metaphorically, we presume, a finger in the wind counts as “digital.”

Half of the execs said they would be investing less than 2% of their company‘s total COST base on digital initiatives. (Perhaps the percentage spent would be higher if they used Big Data for budgeting, but we digress). A mere 25% will spend more than 3%.

Yet, unbelievably, a full 35% expect they will realize better than 10% improvement in operating income as a direct result of their digital programs. That’s an ROI of more than 300%, folks.

When McKinsey asked what the biggest hurdles to digital success are, for the millionth time in a row 50% of the surveyed execs said “lack of quality data” and “poor IT infrastructure and systems.” Still and forever, stuck in the proverbial digital first gear.

Back to the future.

Fast Follow-up Friday #9 – The Way It Looks

[Special note to daily subscribers – we are way ahead of everyone again, so we’ll resume posting next Thursday AM]

Only one of our four lookbacks this week is a positive story. The headline is your hint. Post your answer to Pinterest (hah!).

Private Label Goes Stable
We were the only blog to dare to say that private label sales would peak, even during a sh&tty economy. Now the news is becoming less “private.”

“For the first time since 2008, consumers polled by NPD said they did not plan to increase their purchases of store-brand products in the coming year.”

NPD produced a full report titled, “Does Brand Name Really Matter?” Again, we say, it’s about price – not name – for private label’s future. The narrower the gap these greedy "private" pigs make it between their prices and those of brand names, the worse it will get.

Mens Wearhouse – A New Look To Like
We beat on these guys pretty good for a new (bad) advertising look back in the day.

Mens Wearhouse got back on track soon after, and coincidentally or not, its share price has doubled since we “got together.” And P.S. The new CMO at the time of the 2010 ad campaign has been sent back to ad agency land.

It keeps the momentum going with a new campaign geared toward a younger, “hipper” man. This one is a beauty, as it shows how you can go after a new target segment WITHOUT losing your brand voice, essence, or credibility.

To wit: the George-Zimmerman-delivered, age-old tagline is still there.

We like the way this looks.

About.com Takes About A Half-Step
The sad state of The New York Times’s About.com “information portal” that we pointed out earlier gets even sadder.

Recent quarterly results show a 23% drop in revenue and 50% collapse in profit year over year.

To get these amazing results, About.com went through the motions of reskinning its home page. Duh. The rest of the site continues to be the ad-littered scrap heap it always was.

HP Soon To Be Sold On eBay
New CEO Meg Whitman, still angry at spending $160 million of her own money to lose the race for California governor, this week announced the lopping off of 27,000 heads at Hewlett-Packard.

One of the places she found fat to cut was a business unit we tipped you off to in 2008, when then-CEO Mark Hurd (before he got caught with his pants and receipts down) purchased EDS.

We said at the time this would end up as a “cut some heads” scenario.

Megala was only too happy to bring the hammer down.

The CMO Contrarian Index

We’ll get back to our discussion on the economy, our five-part series from back in March. For now though, loyal Lairig Marketing readers will not be surprised to know that everything we predicted then has come true.

Over the years, we have also been tracking the (in)ability of CEOs and economists to (mis)forecast where the economy is going.

We have now found a third group’s forecasting "acumen" to examine.

Something called “The CMO Survey.org” periodically surveys, um, CMOs, on various topics. Since February 2009, it has been tracking their outlook on the economy every six months, a la “As a CMO, are you more or less optimistic about the U.S. economy?”

The most recent results came with this headline: “Top Marketers See U.S. Economy On The Rebound.” Say whaaaaat? We just had to take a look.

We examined the results back to February 2009, side-by-side with GDP numbers, to see the relation between the CMO outlook and the economy’s actual performance.

Turns out that CMOs are no better at this than a momentum trader on Wall Street. When things have been bad GDP-wise for the past couple of quarters, the CMO outlook tends to be negative. So they miss what then becomes a slight improvement.

Worse is when the GDP improves for a couple of quarters in a row. CMOs tend to go wildly positive on their economic outlook at that time, and get crushed over the next several months.

For example, CMOs went deeply negative in February 2009, missing the tremendous swing from negative to positive GDP over the next two quarters.

And, for example, CMOs went crazy positive in February 2011. The economy slowed to a crawl right after that.

As of February 2012, The CMO Survey found the CMOs’ outlook at its highest positive sentiment to date. Based on the short history of data correlation, this means a continuously stinky economy going forward is virtually a lock.

To defeat the “CMO Contrarian Index,” we need some contrarian CMOs.

Unlikely, since as of now they line up – pretty much one right after the other.

Skechers – No Agency, No Ethics

Another story we sat on for a few days doing some extra digging.

First the facts: Middle of last week, Skechers settled with the FTC, agreeing to pay $40 million so it wouldn’t have to go through the public embarrassment of trying to prove its bogus claims over the past couple of years that its “Shape-up” sneakers help you lose weight, grow muscles, reverse baldness and eliminate world hunger.

Lairig Marketing wanted to know: What professional advertising/marketing agency would sink low enough to be a part of such behavior? To sit there during customer research reviews and creative briefings, and not say “This is bullsh&t.”

No way any agency would do this.

We were right. It took us a while to determine that Skechers did this work on its own.

It puts this interview excerpt from Ad Age last year with then-CMO Leonard Armato into a new perspective:

Ad Age: Skechers has yet to hire a formal agency of record. Why…?
Mr. Armato: “…because we are intimately familiar with the Skechers brand and all the unique value propositions associated with products that we develop.”

We now know that “intimately familiar” and “unique value propositions” are synonyms for “hoodwinking.”

But give Armato credit. Consumers bought Skecher’s Shape-ups and Tone-ups by the closet-load, nearly a billion dollars, proving once again our theory that most consumers will believe anything.

Two interesting post-scripts. First, Armato left just two weeks before the Skechers sh*t hit the FTC’s fan, to become the chairman of a sports marketing agency. Pretty sneakery.

Second, for whatever reason, Skechers decided to work with a real, external ad agency for its 2012 Super Bowl spot featuring its six-month-old GOrun shoe. Coincidentally or not, this year’s ad was voted third best, beating last year’s in-house Kim Kardisaster spot by 45 places.

Skecher’s GoRUN agency, Los Angeles-based Siltanen & Partners, is “blue chip” all the way.

We have a feeling the Siltanen team will ensure what the public will see and hear about GOrun will be “shaped up,” not “made up.”