Lairig Marketing

Heineken Good, Guinness Bad. No Taste Test Required.

Not sure what took so long, but after success in Europe and Asia, Heineken just opened its first branded “lounge” in a U.S. airport. God knows Newark’s Terminal C could use a distraction or two to keep passengers from realizing how small they are. The Heineken Lounge will feature free Wifi and, reportedly, “private cabanas.” Say what?

Continuing our earlier theme of experiential marketing, this is a smart marketing move by Heineken.

The Target
Yes, the brewer caught the travel industry at a bad time, but it is well documented that everyone who travels drinks. Even pilots have been known to imbibe just prior to boarding.

The Place
The only setting less uplifting than an airport terminal is a dentist’s waiting room. Heineken could have simply placed two fake palm trees around two kegs in a broom closet and improved on the sterile environment that is today’s “modern” airline terminal. Kudos to Delaware North, the company that helped Heineken pull this off.

The Customer Life Stage
OK, so this isn’t like going from marriage to retirement, but sometimes you feel as if you have passed through a life stage or two waiting and waiting and waiting for your plane. The airport experience stinks on ice, and there’s nothing better than a cold brew to mark the occasion(s). The lounge opens at 9 AM daily. QED.

The Verdict
If just 1% of the passengers who visit the lounge catch themselves the next time they’re about to order at the hometown bar and say, “wait, let me have a Heineken draft instead,” then Heineken should be doing cartwheels.

Guinness, Schmuinness
On the other hand, Guinness wins the “Tin Ear Asshat Award” for its current TV spot showing young revelers going back to work after a night at the pub and playing with the lights across the top-four floors of their office tower. Here we are in the middle of “Green” and an energy crisis, and Guinness thinks it cool to flick lights on and off.

Which goes to show ya…a funny drunk is always drunk, but not always funny.

How Would You Save Sprint?

Strange to think a company with 50-million-plus customers and a lock on the #3 position in an industry needs saving, but wireless carrier Sprint is unique. Whether through bad luck or design, it is unable to build any momentum - every step forward seems to be paired with at least one (if not more) backward. For each month this continues, Sprint increases its risk of being hunted from below.

The Nextel merger produced a near-bottomless pit of pricing and customer care issues. Pivot, Clearwire, iPCS, iDEN…the list of distractions seems endless. Each quarterly report yields more bad news than the one before. In 2008’s third quarter, Sprint lost another million wireless consumers, putting it down nearly 10% from last year.

Device & Other Partnerships
The cellular industry is confusing to a sizable portion of consumers who don’t really know (or care?) about the differences between Motorola and Verizon, for example. The hype over iPhones and BlackBerries and Androids makes it ever more difficult for Sprint to grab mindshare. Who is going to be Sprint’s Apple? Is Samsung the ticket? Any more NFL-like tricks up the sleeve?

Database Marketing
It’s been reported that Sprint is intentionally jettisoning “bad” customers. If it is that good at value modeling, then Sprint should be able to implement a more targeted marketing strategy by creating a nice list of high-value “look-alikes,” millions of prospects it could pursue with some hard-working direct marketing (and, hopefully it would not churn them days later).

Hesse’s TV Tour of NYC
OK, Dan, you’ve hit all the top spots - from the Meatpacking District to the Empire Diner. But the gray hue and your drab nature create zero emotional resonance. Dave Thomas did a better job building excitement around 99-cent baked potatoes. You are a highly capable CEO, and no doubt a nice man, but it’s time to step away from the camera and let the professionals craft the story of how Sprint is the future of cellular communications - massive amounts of data delivered to your hand.

Focus. Quality (not quantity) channel partnerships, a compelling campaign about the “data future,“ and less spray-and-pray marketing.

The closing of 11 customer service centers this year might be a positive sign. But shareholders shall not rest until real results are apparent.

Sprint is definitely in a sprint now.

Everybody’s Getting Their Geek (Squad) On

Back in the day, I ragged on Best Buy for its push into the services side of the consumer electronics space. Even though I later had a satisfying experience with its in-store Geek Squad, I still feel Best Buy is chasing an opportunity that has limited upside with its “off-site” version - i.e., where the Geeks come to your home and attempt servicing of your computer or stereo gear.

And that opportunity gets more limited every day.

In March of this year, Office Depot launched its own Geek Squad, and gave it a groovy brand name - "Tech Depot Services."

Recently, that unconglomerated reconglomerated conglomerate AT&T launched its own Geek Squad, and gave it a groovy brand name - “ConnecTech.”

Here are some of the three companies’ messaging points:

“Let our experts get your PC to operate at peak performance.”

“Technology service for you and your home.”

“We can take care of your stuff no matter where you bought it.”

Doesn’t matter which message belongs to which company does it? All are pitifully devoid of any differentiation or reason to believe, two main requirements of compelling messaging.

But at least one of them is obvious about the near-zero IQ level it is targeting:
“We’re here to help you and your friend, the computer, with any problems you encounter.” Awwwww, me an’ my wittle fwiend the cumpoooter.

The barrier to entry for anyone entering this industry is pretty low - what an old maintenance-manager colleague of mine used to refer to as “nothing but elbows and as*holes.” You still need demand, however, and my guess is that once we are past the holiday season, there might be some hard decisions for at least one of Best Buy, AT&T and Office Depot.

So if you were thinking of carving out a little share of this “multibillion-dollar market,” you better hurry.

Burger King - A Whopper of a Brand Extension

Just like its creepy mascot, Burger King has been sneaking all around you. If you haven’t seen any or all of its recent brand initiatives yet, you will soon. You can almost see the King’s stupid smile on the corporate brand‘s face.

Potato Chips?
Fries-shaped potato crisps, with the ketchup already “built in.” Plus flame broiled regular-shaped chips.

A Whopper Bar?
Smaller-than-standard restaurants featuring open kitchens, circular chrome countertops, and plasma TVs looping open flames, for strip malls, food courts and casinos.

“The King” Greeting Cards?
Not Elvis, but rather a collection of six cards featuring the lurking, deviant, lecherous Burger King King himself. No word on whether the recycled paper used for the cards is from Burger King’s trash bins.

T-Shirts? Sleepwear?
At the beginning of this month, the company seized this brand-extension-madness momentum and announced the launch of Burger King-branded T-shirts and an “exclusive” (huh?) collection of men's sleepwear and loungewear. After the Motrin fiasco, looks like Burger King was wise to stay away from mom’s wear, at least.

Instant Lottery Tickets? Lottery Merchandise?
Do you want some fries with that losing ticket? And what the hell is lottery merchandise - a scratcher-offer device in the shape of the King?

There are brand extensions for the sake of taking new markets and customer segments. This is not one of them (with perhaps the exception of the Whopper Bar). Burger King has been clear what all this is about:

“Through our licensees, Burger King-branded apparel and snack products, provide our customers with new ways to interact and connect with the brand.”

We are at the point where brands can embark on this sort of branding strategy easily. (1) Technology has made marginal costs very affordable. (2) Consumers have the attention span of a gnat.

It doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t a little crack in the path ahead that leads to a deep crevice into which a brand can fall, having overexposed itself.

Like most falls of this type, Burger King won’t have any advance warning.

The Search Engine No One Wants To Talk About: Ask.com

Remember the good ol’ days? Dot-com mania, and a butler for a mascot? Remember Ask Jeeves, 1996?

The poor guy has been put through a number of makeovers. Yet Ask.com still holds its place as the perennial fourth- or fifth-ranked search engine, regardless of how good or bad the “next great idea” was. Here are some of Ask.com’s major business or marketing strategy initiatives over the past few years:

• Acquired by Barry Diller’s IAC
• Fired the butler, became simply “Ask”
• Launched major TV ad campaign
• Launched major revisions to page layout (since done away with)
• Missed out on the opportunity to be spun from IAC
• Declared it was becoming a “women’s search engine”
• Days later, undeclared women’s search engine idea
• Added in Dictionary.com
• Rolled out the 11th version of the site

Through all these travails, up and down, back and forth, Ask.com somehow hangs on to 4.5% of the search audience, according to comScore and other sources. Not bad, considering Google’s dominant share continues to increase every quarter, seemingly at the expense of Yahoo.

There’s a pony in there somewhere, obviously, most likely technology based. Ask.com was early with innovations we now recognize as natural language search and universal results display, for example. Barry Diller seems happy with the pace of progress, and his market share…even while pundits have been writing off Ask.com for at least the past 3 years.

Nothing lasts forever, of course. That 4.5% share can only go in one direction (unless Ask.com pulls another technology trick out of its bag).

So why aren’t any of these being discussed?

• Barry Diller buys Yahoo?
• Yahoo buys Ask.com?
• Barry Diller buys AOL?
• Steve Ballmer buys Ask.com?

WWBD. What Would (Will) Barry Do?

What Would the Butler Do?

Book Reviews Without Reading - "The Brand Bubble"

With all the certain talk about the near death of TV, newspapers, and magazines, why can’t business books join the list? I save myself hundreds of pages of torture by reading reviews and associated blogs. Based on such research, today here’s my take on The Brand Bubble, a popular business book I have not read.

Summary
World finance is at risk because Wall Street has overstated brand contribution to companies’ overall value.

The Logic of History
True bubbles are few, and tend to cycle between two issues - drunk-ass speculation and liquidity/solvency disasters. If their prediction comes true, the authors will have correctly called something that has one-in-gazillions probability.

Wall Street Valuation
The authors claim brand value accounts for 30% of market cap, and that this is up 80% over 30 years. Yet average P/E ratios, the fundamental basis of share-price valuation, bounce up and down over this timeframe, as in “reversion to the mean.” So how could the brand portion have trended up linearly and significantly? How could any of this be true for stocks that today are priced where they were five years ago?

Data & Causality
The book is based on one of the best brand assessment tools ever created, the Brand Asset Valuator. The authors reveal declines over 13 years of BAV surveying in brand…

Awareness: - 20%
Quality perception: - 24%
Trust: -50%

Awful trends to be sure, but they don’t map to anything that has happened on Wall Street over the same time period.

Consumer CENTiment
How to avoid the bubble? Get consumers to see your brand as “energized,” defined in a speech by one of the authors as the consumer perception of motion, creativity and direction in a brand. On that basis, who has more “energy” than Apple? People have been buying iPods and iPhones left and right. So explain the share price now versus one year ago?

Tactical Relief
As most books do, this one gives anecdotal examples from various brands. Some are about as far from “energy” as you can think. Smirnoff? Vanguard? Predictable and boring - just the types of brands the authors say customers are running from. (No one is running from Vanguard, by the way.)

Better Title
"Brand Energy - Understand It, Measure It, and Raise It."

In the meantime, I’m thinking of writing “The Business Book Bubble.”

Maybe McCain Will Get This Job

The other day I came across a discussion forum post from an employee of Hewlett-Packard who was looking for feedback on a marketing idea. I didn’t like it much, and went to HP’s website to gather evidence to support my argument that her idea was “off brand.”

Ooops. The HP site doesn’t have any corporate branding. For a minute I had fooled myself into thinking the company had a higher-level message spanning its hundreds of sundry technology products.

Lo and behold, a week later I see a job posting for “Director, Brand Strategy, HP.” It gave me that weird feeling like when a streetlight goes out when you walk by it at night.

Here are some job description highlights:

“The Director, Brand Strategy, will…[build] a vibrant, differentiated and relevant global brand idea that resonates across HPs diverse customer and business segments…
The Director will also create and implement a clear brand architecture including a naming strategy that cohesively embodies all of HPs sub-brands and business units…
We invent, engineer and deliver technology solutions that drive business value, create social value and improve the lives of our customers.”

My two cents…Here’s hoping HP stays away from a single-word “big idea” and avoids that tired moniker “solutions.” This is really a technology company at heart (even with the EDS acquisition), so maybe HP can re-embrace/re-energize/refresh that word, a la “Technology that leads” or “Technology that’s always one step ahead” or “Advancing technology, every day.” Either way, don’t overreach.

Interestingly, the job description also listed some attributes the candidate should have:
“Inspiring, confident, magnetic presence.”

OK, that counts out McCain. And ex-CEO Carly Fiorina too (quickly glimpsed, stone-faced, during the concession speech…sweet.). But doggone if it doesn’t make me think of someone else from that ticket, by golly. *big wink*

Senator Stevens & That Viking Grill

Say what you will about his guilt, or lack thereof, but Senator Stevens has no appreciation for great brands. He testified, in so many words, that he neither wanted nor requested the Viking gas grill the contractor dropped of at Stevens’ ski chalet.

At least the contractor had good taste. Maybe a Viking 53-inch, $7900 jobbie. Sitting there now, like a piece of outdoor furniture. What a waste.

At prices like that, Viking isn’t much of a middle-class purchase item. It rarely enters the consideration set for that matter, not with competition at one-tenth the cost.

Yet everyone wants one. Check this out: half of nearly 1000 people who answered a recent poll on the website of leading New York City-based real estate firm Corcoran claimed they preferred Viking appliances. To my knowledge Viking does not have anywhere near 50% market share.

Viking is what is known as an “aspirational” brand. Others you might be more familiar with, because they have a little more sex appeal than an oven, would be in the luxury automotive sector. But sexy or not, Viking has become the appliance brand of choice for that moment we all know is just around the corner - when we get that big raise. Or hit the lottery.

If you know the Viking story, you know it began with aspiration. Owner Fred Carl wanted a commercial kitchen in his home, and damn if he didn’t decide to just build it himself. The rest is history (only since 1987, believe it or not).

Fred is a smart cookie. He extended the brand as broad and as deep across the kitchen as possible. So now you can at least buy his knife set, as an everyday reminder of how much you’ll eventually enjoy his oven (once you hit the lottery, of course).

Reality bites, even for Viking though. Remember my little diatribe on the difference between want and need? Except for Ted Stevens (oops, I mean his contractor), not even the rich need a Viking in the current economic environment. How do I know? This past Monday, Viking laid off 21 factory employees.

And keep this other data point in mind for the next business cycle. Viking laid off 48 workers in April. As in six months ago.

Aspirational brands can be a pretty decent recession tell.

How Would You Save Alcatel-Lucent?

Look at this picture. The top two executives of Alcatel-Lucent during the company’s end-of-July presentation of second-quarter results in Paris. One guy fumbling his papers. One gal fumbling her ear piece.

Not a good sign for a communications company is it?

Both executives knew at the time they were done. Talk about a fumble - here is the company’s NYSE stock chart for the two years following the merger of Alcatel and Lucent.

More than a handful of Wall Street and industry analysts were skeptical when this merger of equals took place in 2006. Now the chicken has come home to roost, minus two very expensive executive eggs.

- The combined company has managed to lower its revenue base by 15%.
- Profits? Nope. $7 billion in losses since the merger.
- Failed to make the inroads in the U.S. market it hoped Lucent would bring.
- Successful at trimming jobs, however - 9,000 given the pink slip since end of 2006.

A worthy candidate, indeed, for this month’s “Save.”

The Name
Drop Lucent. Although it looks more French and would sound nicer (Loo-SAHN), it adds nothing. Create Alcatel USA to cover the old Lucent division.

The Portfolio
Sell off the carrier and enterprise groups to the highest bidder. Plenty of existing and emerging competitors out there (read: China) with deep pockets you can sell to and fix the balance sheet.

The Positioning
With a new focus as a purely services-oriented company, build a strong value proposition as the premier end-to-end service provider across all hardware and software configurations and platforms. Then drop the corporate-speak and interchangeable words in your current messaging. Telecoms is becoming the lifeblood of business, so sex it up.

The Communications
Four or five press releases per day IS A LITTLE MUCH. Take that energy and spend it online.

Then, in 12 to 18 months, after Mark Hurd has finished digesting EDS, give him a call and ask him to take this off your hands.

Alcatel Network Services, a Hewlett-Packard company. Sounds nice, n’est pas?
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YEP, THEY SAID IT…UBS analyst David Palmer on the growth in cereal consumption: "When you lose your job, it not only determines how you feel and how much money you have, it's also determines where you are. Where are you rushing to?"…WHAT A D-BAG!

MicroSeinGates & The Marketing Cycle

As if the world needs one more post about the current Microsoft TV ad campaign…comments ranging from “what a waste of money” to “I didn’t think it was funny.” Even the world’s #1 marketing blogger used it as a way to press his mantra that companies should stop all traditional marketing (to wit: advertising can’t fix what’s wrong with Microsoft).

Here are two things I haven’t seen discussed at all.

The Agency

If you were familiar with Microsoft’s advertising agency for this campaign, you would know this sort of “what the F?” thing is par for the course. Crispin Porter & Bogusky takes the position that a company must first grab attention, even if the attention it gets is confusion or anger or discomfort.

The CPB strategy has worked magic for Burger King (see Subservient Chicken, among other things). On the other hand, the idea to bring Orville Redenbacher back from the dead cost Crispin that account.

You might say “wow what a lot of money to spend to get attention” for the part of the campaign now underway (“I’m a PC”). Divide it by $60 billion in annual revenues, and you’ll see it is not.

The Marketing Cycle
I’ve posted this before, but I’ll say it again: no awareness, no sale. Think about the beer you drank while lounging on the couch watching the Yankees or the Buccaneers yesterday. You made a choice about the beer. And the couch. And the television. What car did you drive to work this morning? Where did you stop for coffee? Choices you made.

All day long we make choices, some conscious some not. A company must make you aware it exists before it can hope to get your money. That’s part of marketing. You can skip it if you want - you can also kiss your ass goodbye at the same time.

Everyone, of course, is aware that Microsoft exists. The hard work now, with Crispin Porter’s help, is telling you what it stands for. And, by the way, it isn’t going for “cool.”

Microsoft proved that by squandering six months of its business life chasing Yahoo.
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YEP, THEY SAID IT…"The nature of the Web allows us to deliver topical social currency in real-time," said Brian Citron, senior brand director for Heineken Premium Light…DOOD, SPEAK ENGLISH!!!