Learning from Yesterday's News

Cat litter is a commodity. At least, that’s what it seemed when my advertising agency team was asked to introduce a new product in a market already “littered” with options.

But our client, an entrepreneur with great passion and tremendous flair, had a secret weapon. All the litters then on the market were made from clay or alfalfa. His was made from recycled newspaper.

The products on the market were relatively dust-free, absorbent and acceptable. That’s pretty much what the focus respondents told us. But I’m getting ahead of myself here (and this may all sound familiar if you have already read “Just When You Think You’re Perfect”) ...

The creative team, and all of our friends and relatives and everyone on the planet who was intrigued by the idea of working on a cat litter account, came up with a dozen or so concepts. The products that were on the market positioned what amounts to cat toilet paper very delicately, with pretty product names and photos of cute cats on their packaging. We did some of those. We also had “Mess Kit,” which had a military theme, and a couple of other concepts with unprintable names (think: “S*&@!y Kitty”) that we showed the client as a joke.

And then, of course, we had the kicker.

Our creative director, the fantastically talented Ray Clark, suggested that the value proposition of the cat litter needed to be front and center. He suggested that the best way to attract customers to a new product was to explain why and how it was different. He and the art director, the fantastically talented Bill Stone, came up with a package that looked like a newspaper. It had cat photos, but it also told the story of the product and its ingredients; that newspaper was potentially more absorbent, etc.

They called their concept “Yesterday’s News.” (I don't have an image but am trying to locate one.)

Our client liked the concept, but was adamant that the secret ingredient remain secret (although, as everyone agreed, a scientist in a lab could have figured it out in an hour. It seems to me now that the packaging ingredients would also have told the tale, but this is a long time ago and I don’t know what the disclosure requirements were then). Nevertheless, he agreed to allow us to test “Yesterday’s News” along with the other, more traditional brand and packaging concepts.

So in came the cat owners to the focus groups, an extremely committed and enthusiastic (and entertaining) group who took their job quite seriously. As noted, they found their existing cat litter options perfectly acceptable. And they liked the other options we showed them as well. It was all very pleasant, but not very definitive.

But then, of course, there was “Yesterday’s News.” It was clearly and obviously different from the outset. The cat owners said that the design would stand out on the shelf, and that they would at least look at the bag. They liked that the packaging told a story. If they had never used newspaper with their cat, most had an intuitive sense that it might work. They were willing to try it.

Our client immediately recognized, and accepted, that his secret was actually his hook.

Yes, “Yesterday’s News” is still on the market. It is now a Purina offering in the “alternative cat litter” segment. The branding is very green, and the bag is one of the first recyclable cat litter bags on the market. The ingredients are stated up front. “Yesterday’s News” is now part of a movement!

The principle endures. Finding the unique value in a product or service isn’t always straightforward, and not every company or organization is willing to do something unique. In addition, not everyone has the luxury of doing extensive research to help validate their concepts.

But here are a few things that anyone can keep in mind:

1. Always respect consumers. Give them the data that they need to understand your value. The more simply your messages are conveyed, the better.

2. Again, not everyone can do a big market research project (or at least not every time) to get external feedback and validation. But anyone can pick up the phone and make a couple of calls. Develop relationships and ask for advice. If you are concerned about appearing vulnerable, get help in learning how to present your ideas and concepts.

3. As you cultivate trusted advisors, they will be increasingly motivated to help you. But this is not a one-way street. Make yourself available, too. Know what you have to offer, and offer it freely.

4. Take risks. It worked for “Yesterday’s News.”

Better Still, or The Future of Marketing: Notes from FutureM

This week I am attending FutureM, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX)-sponsored conference that brings together marketers and technologists to consider and discuss the “future” of marketing. The conference is essentially an exploration of the ways in which marketing and technology are integrating and fusing (my term). Over all, it’s a great opportunity to learn from some very interesting people.

When I received the registration materials I was disconcerted by the session titles, most of which asserted that the “Future of Marketing is X (generally something digital or social).” I am not entirely certain that I could say with conviction that this is the case, but it turned out that many of the speakers were just playing off the conference title. So, phew: I’m not as backward as I had thought.

The truth is that earlier this week I wrote a version of this post as a rant against the confident assertions incorporated into those titles. Among other things I wrote, respectfully but critically, about a very distinguished and credentialed presenter who created an entire session around the idea that you have to “bake” social media into your product in order to survive. He showed some elegant applications, including a game whose virtue he extolled at length (and I will admit: it was pretty cool.)

However, the demise of the very same game designer was reported on the front page of the Business section of The Boston Globe the following day.

Whoa. This is not my definition of survival.

But then later in the week I was inspired to start over. I attended two sessions having to do with new research and trends in the behavioral aspects of marketing. In both sessions the presenters talked about the theories of Daniel Kahneman, 2002 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The presenters commended his recent (October 2011) book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” in which Kahneman describes a framework for decision-making that apparently challenges the idea that “rational” thought and judgment are dominant. (I don’t want to embarrass myself by talking about this in detail without having read the book, which I intend to pick up this weekend. If I find that I can understand it I’ll write about it in the future!)

And then, toward the end of his presentation, one of the speakers made this declaration:

“The future of marketing can be found today in the behavioral science literature.”

He went on to explain various disciplines of behavioral science—Neuroscience, Cultural Anthropology, Psychology, Behavioral Economics, and Sociology—and how they map to purchasing decisions.

It wasn’t difficult to understand this, even the parts that were unfamiliar (like the particulars of how neurons work), because it was deeply resonant with what I know and believe to be true about marketing. Really good marketing contributes to the design and production of goods and services that people will value. (I’m not entirely naïve and idealistic, of course. There’s plenty of superfluous junk out there too, and shameless marketing that hawks it. But I am nevertheless convinced that good marketing tries to contribute to the common good.) Good marketing then finds ways to reach the consumers most likely to have interest, so that they can consider and partake of those goods and services. And, good marketing tries to accomplish all of this at the lowest possible cost.

To do so, marketers use techniques that, as it turns out, are from … the behavioral sciences. They try to understand wants and needs, and how people make decisions. And they choose tools that support their objectives. These tools are generally media vehicles. They are important, but they are only tools.

So there we have it. It turns out that the future of marketing isn’t “digital,” or “social,” any more than it is “print advertising.” Nope. No need to panic!

Because the future of marketing is still people, with all their quirks and inconsistencies. And, thanks to the wonders of modern science and research, fascinating insights that will increasingly make us better at what we do.

Staying on Strategy, Evolving on Execution

My colleagues at The Bridgespan Group have launched the next generation of bridgespan.org. It’s a very robust site, clean and easy to navigate.

And there is one big change: the Content and Job Board Formerly Known as Bridgestar have been fully integrated into this site and are now branded Bridgespan.

A few weeks ago I wrote about making branding changes and some of the pros and cons. Bridgestar was branded as the talent-matching work of Bridgespan very early on, and was originally conceived as an online talent market (i.e., primarily an electronic job board). Of course, everything evolves as one learns from market feedback and experiments with new ideas. Bridgestar’s monthly newsletter circulation grew, as did the number of posted executive and senior management jobs. The Bridgestar team created online portals of content about key nonprofit sector roles to complement the executive recruiting work being done. Learning groups and online collaborations were created. Over time, the boundaries between the Bridgespan and Bridgestar work began to blur, and executive recruiting became a Bridgespan offering (with very careful attention paid to potential conflicts of interest, of course). A new leadership-related service was more recently developed and launched as part of Bridgespan.

And so it now makes sense that Bridgespan would merge all of its important assets together into a seamless solution; as they call it, “a comprehensive resource for all of your nonprofit resource needs.”

This is a great example of how a strategy can remain constant while the execution evolves. The Bridgespan Group believes that talent is a key driver of nonprofit results, and created ways to connect for- and nonprofit executives with results-driven organizations. These activities led to new insights and new responses.

The outputs don’t look the same as they did eight years ago; the Bridgestar brand is no longer active, and the URL bridgestar.org is redirected to the new bridgespan.org. But the goals are the same, and the outcomes will undoubtedly be at least constant. Or, hopefully, stronger still.

The Social Media Challenge: Managing Expectations

If you are old enough to remember the late 1990s, you surely remember the overwhelming pressure felt by businesses and others to get to the World Wide Web. A colleague in an Internet consulting firm told me the story of a FORTUNE®100 marketing executive who literally burst into the reception room of the firm and demanded to be “accepted” as a client!  Those were the days!

The first wave of websites primarily delivered static information. As web application development progressed, those sites were dismissed as “brochure ware.” Everyone demanded commerce, then collaboration. Online content aggregation (bringing together content from multiple sources, as do sites like amazon.com, ebay.com and weddingchannel.com) became an industry.

[I’m going to footnote here that this exciting new option brought with it tremendous complexity. Integrating channels, meaning having the ability to track, sell and deliver goods from multiple media (online, stores, resellers, etc.) required expertise and investment. Security became, and is, an ongoing concern. These are not today’s subject, so I’m going to leave it at that; they're important, however. Maybe another time.]

Of course, not every solution fit every problem. Companies got in over their heads. They took sites that were designed for one purpose and jury-rigged what they had to serve another (for example, brochure ware sites got commerce engines tacked on with very mixed results.) Performance and user experience issues stymied and angered customers.

I am admittedly a broken record on this topic, and will always be one. The bottom line is, you have to know what problem you’re trying to solve.

And so it is with social media. We all “had” to have the World Wide Web, and now we “have” to have social media. In fact, we really do. Because just like websites, if we are realistic in what we expect of social media, it can be (or become) a very powerful tool.

For business, and especially services—and certainly for job-hunting and recruiting—most agree that LinkedIn is the killer social media app. The targeting tools of LinkedIn are nothing short of genius. Their utility is highly dependent on the participation of users (the targets), and LinkedIn has ably convinced users of its value proposition. Hence, in June 2012 LinkedIn reported 175 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories.

Most of us can understand and appreciate its value pretty readily, if not easily. But what about Facebook and Twitter for business? Or even blogs, which are technically a social media application? What about all this talk about being “closer” to the customer? What are the upsides and downsides of creating these new kinds of relationships? Are they really relationships? And are they really new?

Always one to try to debunk myths, I have admittedly struggled with these questions. Today I read a description of how blogs are being used in-house at companies to help people connect and share information. Geez, it sounded pretty familiar to me. In fact, the description sounded a lot like the language that’s been used to describe collaboration platforms since the 1990s (for example, Lotus Notes)! Could it be that these social media solutions simply represent the next generation of collaboration platforms?

If that is the case, then allow me to share what I learned from my experience as a passionate advocate for and user of Lotus Notes: participation is the Holy Grail. The more people participate in the proposed collaboration, the more robust and useful the collaboration.

But robust collaboration takes a lot of time and effort, and both equal money. Therefore, one has to be clear about what one expects from the investment, in order to decide how much to invest.

Here are some reasonable goals for neophyte social media experiments.

Awareness. Pure and simple, being in the game. Giving consumers the opportunity to find you and explore what your organization is and has to say. This is roughly the equivalent of brochure ware, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Don’t forget: the first wave of websites didn’t benefit from the extremely sophisticated search engines (and search engine optimization tools) that are readily available and widely used now.

Page views, friends and followers are some of the outputs to measure against this goal.

Education. Taking opportunities to share your expertise in ways that are valuable to consumers. A more advanced version of awareness, taking a much greater degree of work and attention to be done well. Appreciation of your ideas accrues back to you.

Again, page views, friends and followers are good outputs to measure. Unique visitors and content- sharing up the ante.

Identification. As consumers find ways to connect to your content, you have multiple opportunities, through the interactions and especially through analytics, to meet and learn about them. Add to the above the quality of content shared back to you in order to discover how well you’re doing. And noticing what resonates (e.g., “likes”) yields gems of insight, if you’re paying attention. That said, interaction is demanding. It requires constant monitoring and thoughtful responses to questions and comments. For some businesses it’s essential; for others, Awareness or Education are adequate.

BOTTOM LINE: What’s important to you?

Part II, soon: Social Media and the Sphere of Influence
Part III, following that: What is Good Social Media Content?

Enough Strategy, Already!

The stunning words “we are done with strategy” were said to me by a nonprofit executive in a recent conversation. From everything I knew about her organization I believed that they were far from done with strategy. So I got to thinking about what would make her say such a thing. And, of course, the uberquestion: can you ever be done with strategy?

Given that I am a strategist, you might assume that my answer would be a resounding “no.” In fact, the words “we are done with strategy” could mean a lot of different things. She could have meant that the organization had completed a plan and was implementing it. Or that they had completed a plan and were entering an implementation phase. Or that the organization had been burned by a strategy exercise (or implementation gone sour), and had washed their hands of strategy. Or that they hated consultants and wanted to put an end to our conversation. Or something else, who knows?

In an interview for The Bridgespan Group’s 2004 Annual Report (full disclosure: conducted and written by me), a nonprofit leader reflects on the development of his organization’s vision and strategy. It’s a very powerful interview, and I have quoted it dozens of times. The leader says:

“Truthfully, the process was harder and more time-consuming than I’d expected … if they’d told me what it would take, there’s no way I would have agreed to be involved.

“But we came out with a blueprint for change and growth: a strong business plan. We follow it religiously. The details allow us to take our goals and turn them into concrete actions …

“Most executive directors are caught between the desire to plan for the future, and the things we have to do right now, to survive. Almost always, we shortchange tomorrow for today. Time spent up front on planning is time not given to what look like urgent needs, but it’s priceless … Business planning is the way you get answers to the questions that are critical if you want to grow.”

In order for strategy to be this powerful, to inform every decision that is made from the time of its development (and from the process of developing it), the strategy has to be deeply internalized. The second organization clearly has committed to its strategy as a way to understand and navigate its future. And to be fair, “done with strategy” may be careless talk that describes what the executive in the interview also describes.

But in this language is an important lesson.

Strategy is meant to describe a way of doing and being. It is not an experience to be had and completed. A strategic plan is not an event, but a roadmap. If it’s a good strategy, there is a clear and agreed-upon sense of direction. And it’s actionable. And it is acted upon.

When acted upon (and understand: we are talking about the kind of implementation that the second executive speaks of), the strategy will surely be tested. As in nature, challenges can be used to improve the chances of survival. Along the way, the organization has to be prepared to endure the tests, learn from them, and move on.  That is, not give up.

To the extent that this is done, the strategy’s roots will take hold. And the stronger and deeper the roots that develop, the more the strategy can help the organization.

So: can you ever be done with strategy?

Can you have too many roots?

Two Simple Guidelines for Re-branding

So much has been written about the pros and cons of name changes, I hardly think there is much to add about how and when to do it. So, today’s topic is when not to make a name change.

Assuming that these are the primary reasons for doing so,

1. You have a legacy name that doesn’t describe what the organization actually does (but look at International Business Machines … it still doesn’t always make sense, as we will discover below);

2. There is a significant financial event, like a merger or acquisition (think: Price Waterhouse + Coopers and Lybrand = PriceWaterhousecoopers, more recently shortened to PWC) where the parties agree that there is advantage in keeping a profile for both names, or in starting from scratch, see 3 below (again, if the parties agree; it’s not always the right choice);

3. The creation of a single, umbrella name for a group of allied companies would greatly improve efficiency and those improvements will drop to the bottom line (think: Granite State Electric + Massachusetts Electric + Nantucket Electric + Narragansett Electric + Niagara Mohawk = National Grid);

4. Brand confusion, when your name is too similar to that of another organization;

5. A catastrophic event that leads to the complete decimation of a brand [but let me be on record to say that it still isn’t necessarily a good idea. Tylenol and ob Tampons (Johnson + Johnson) both recovered beautifully from crises];

then these are the primary reasons not to do so:

You are a market force in your category, and you want to remain so. Are you the “Kleenex®” of your industry? If there is equity in your name—it’s easily recognizable and/or easily understood by your market—then think twice about changing it. Many organizations believe that they need a name change to signal a change in their strategy, particularly if they are looking to offer a broader product or service set. When I have talked to clients and others about this, their reasons and aspirations have struck me as being largely internal, and probably would not make the least bit of difference to their customers and prospects. Sometimes organizations “solve” this problem by reverting to initials (Kentucky Fried Chicken = KFC), but even then they frequently discover that they have squandered their time, money and reputation (awareness), three invaluable assets.

(I am happy to give you real-life examples, but I won’t do it publicly out of respect for well-intentioned people who, I think, have been poorly advised.)

Important note: the flip side of this is my own former employer, the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston, more  commonly known as the JCC. We created a new logo, Boston JCC, and changed the website URL from jccgb.org to bostonjcc.org, in order to stand out more in the first case, and to be more intuitive in the second. But we did not change the legal name of the organization.

You have no intention of following through on the changes you intend to signal. Making a name change to follow through on changes you’ve already put into motion may be a reasonable move. However, a name change for its own sake will fix nothing. Worse, you will have spent time and money while risking your reputation if and when customers discover the lack of substance behind the change.

Be honest with yourself!

An article I like on this topic, by my friend Michele Levy: “Nail Down Your Strategy Before a Name Change.”