P&G, in moving into services, can learn lessons from Disney

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I read with interest the recent HBR Editors' Blog posting speculating on the difficulties Procter & Gamble might run into in its effort to create a chain of car wash franchises, called Mr. Clean Performance Car Wash.

When I read the post, written by marketing professors Neeli Bendapudi, Randle D. Raggio and Tassu Shervani, we were in the midst of a vacation in Orlando, Florida, at the various Disney parks. So, the connection between what P&G is trying to do now and what Walt Disney kicked off some fifty years ago came to me instantly.

The upshot of the HBR post is that product and services businesses are dramatically different, in particular the need for a service business to deliver an experience over and over again, consistently and of high quality, despite the innate variability of people, locations and customers.

With this in mind I monitored my Disney experience for the rest of the week for lessons that could help P&G.

1. Brand gets people to try your service; blocking and tackling gets them to return. The Disney properties flaunt the characters, movies and TV shows at every turn. Yet after an hour at the park, you notice that trash cans are always close by, so that if you have an empty cup or candy wrapper, you don't end up holding it for more than a few seconds before finding a place to discard it. As a result, the park is exceptionally clean for a place holding tens of thousands of guests.


2. No detail is too small. Kids are royalty at Disney (a significant differentiator compared to most places where they are seen as messy, noisy attention-seekers--which, of course, they are). The bag checkers, waitresses, salespeople--in short, every "cast member" we encountered--took special care of our kids.


3. Consistency reduces stress. Each of the four Disney parks we visited had a similar parking scheme, shuttle bus protocal, and entry design. Which meant there was very little standing around head-scratching and wondering which gate to go through or which bus to board.


4. Customer recognition builds loyalty. Everywhere in the parks I saw guests wearing buttons saying "My First Time!" or "It's My Birthday Today!" These simple gestures to recognize guests made their experiences special, built warm memories, and encouraged them to return.

I'm rooting for P&G in their Mr. Clean car wash project. The above lessons are like much good advice--easy to understand, hard to implement. Whether P&G can execute, and the marketplace and the economy cooperate, only time will tell.

Customers are talking - Tropicana hears feedback, brings back old carton

Sometimes the roar of customer feedback can force a multi-million dollar capitulation. Today, the New York Times reported that Tropicana, a unit of PepsiCo, was responding to a wave of negative customer feedback to its recent change in packaging. The Times writes:

Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice.

The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.

Some online reaction to the new Tropicana package is here and here. (And, to be sure we stay fair and balanced, here is a rave review of the new package.)

One wonders what kind of testing process Tropicana used for the new packaging. I would hope that they used the approach that online services use today--which is to roll out new looks to a limited audience and listen carefully to the feedback before rolling things out across their base. But if so, they would have gotten this feedback far faster and before it became a national news item.

Packaged-goods companies tend to be secretive with their makeovers, often keeping details hidden until a widely publicized, nationwide rollout. The result of this strategy, though, is not hearing feedback, positive or negative, until a great deal of investment has been committed. Meaning a rollback, like Tropicana's doing, is terribly expensive (and highly-publicized).

I wonder how Tropicana will handle their next packaging change?

Ten Bucks

When I was a teenager, the stores in our town stayed open late on Thursday nights between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In 1978 I worked at one of the local hardware stores and I was on duty one of those Thursdays. I had earlier that day cashed my paycheck. Around seven or so, business was slow and I asked the manager if I could take 15 minutes and walk up to The Gramophone Shop. I went in and bought a record I had had my eyes on for a number of weeks: Dire Straits' first album. It cost, by my recollection, $8.98 plus tax.

Was that album worth ten bucks? It's a stupid question. That album was part of the soundtrack of my late high school years. It was probably worth $100 to me.

Now it seems that people who spend ten bucks on music are stupid. Free mp3's are everywhere, legitimately or otherwise. Subscription services and internet radio stations offer everything at the touch of a browser button. There's a sea of music out there, just waiting for a listen.

But paying ten bucks for an album caused you to make a decision. (Not that those decisions always worked out. For example: the Knack's second album.) You had to hear enough songs to get a good assurance that the album was decent, or take a risk that the one great song you heard was a pattern for the rest of the album. (Also not foolproof; see Sniff 'n' the Tears.)

Carrie Brownstein's recent post on NPR Monitor Mix brought this to mind. Carrie lamented the decline of the record label, in this case the decision by Touch & Go Records to stop distributing the work of smaller labels. Wrote Carrie:

We are careening toward a paucity of experience and a paucity of means with which to evaluate music. I mean, can we really engage with art on a Web site and in a vacuum, without ever bothering to contextualize it or make it coherent with our lives or form a community around the work? If we never move beyond the ephemeral and facile nature of music Web sites -- and let's not lie to ourselves, that's where it ends for a lot of us these days -- then that makes us worse than blind consumers; it makes us dabblers. We have become musical tourists. And tourism is the laziest form of experience, because it is spoonfed and sold to us. Tourism cannot and should not replace the physical energy, the critical thinking and the tiresome but ultimately edifying road of adventure, and thus also of life.

To me, the process of getting recommendations, listening to a friend's record, hearing something great on the radio (or a podcast), then making the decision to plunk down real money is, in Carrie's words, an adventure--and one of the great pleasures in enjoying music. If everything's at your fingertips, undifferentiated, you can sample, skip and flit around. You're, as Carrie said, a tourist.

And to me that's a bad thing. Free music isn't only bad for musicians, it seems. It's also bad for the audience.

Guest post by Denise Lee Yohn - The Economy Made Us Do It

I'm delighted to present today a guest post by Denise Lee Yohn. This is the first time we've done a guest post. I'm curious about people's thoughts on this--if you have an opinion, leave it in the comments. regards, John

It seems today's tough economic climate has become the ultimate scapegoat for pretty much everything.

This past week's New York Times Sunday Styles section included a piece describing the cleverness with which people have used the economy to get out of social obligations. From firing the nanny to avoiding a dreaded family reunion, the recession, it seems, provides a convenient excuse for folks who can't bring themselves to deliver an honest, yet unpleasant message.

And Business Week just ran an article about how companies are trying to get out of contracts by arguing that the economic crisis should void legal obligations. Although the troubled economy isn't technically addressed by force majeure clauses, companies in tight situations aren't letting technicalities stop them from trying to pull one over their creditors and business partners.

Such behavior seemed somewhat comical to me until I found myself on the receiving end of a similar excuse yesterday. It came from a service rep who relayed a change in the company's policy by saying, “We've been hit hard by the economy so we had to cut some of our services and that was one of them.” The momentary sympathy I felt for the company was quickly replaced by indignation against it for trying to excuse the change by blaming the recession. And my questioning of the wisdom of such a tack soon followed.

Now, I understand that economic pressures have forced companies to change the way they do business. They're cutting back and by definition that involves tough decisions. I get that. What I find curious is executing the changes in a way that smacks of a“victim mentality.” Why would any business want to give the impression they’re helpless and desperate?! Companies weaken their brand perceptions with a thoughtless --sorry, it's the economy -- excuse.

If companies want to retain any measure of respect and trust with their customers (respect and trust being key drivers of brand equity), they should assume responsibility for the decisions they make and use these tough economic times as an opportunity to reinforce their relationships with customers. A message along the lines of the following would be a good first step in taking a proactive, brand-building stance: “Please accept our sincere apologies for making a change that we know adversely affects you. We are diligently working on ways to improve and will resume the suspended service as soon as possible.”

Communicating this type of message -- and delivering a customer experience consistent with it -- has the power to transform brand perceptions. Instead of being perceived as a weak player that’s relinquished control of its destiny, the business is portrayed as a brand with the integrity and customer commitment to come out of this economic storm even stronger.

With excuses to be found everywhere these days, I certainly hope we're not seeing the beginning of a trend that makes adopting an excuse culture”-- an acceptable way companies do business --– but I fear it may be. After all there's an excuse, it seems, for everything from criminal acts to indiscretions by politicians. But business leaders should realize excuses erode brand credibility and equity.

Simply put, excuses are bad for business.

Denise Lee Yohn is an independent brand as business^TM consulting partner who inspires and teaches companies how to operationalize their brands to grow their businesses. World-class brands including Sony, Frito-Lay, Burger King, and Nautica have called on Denise to maximize brand impact. She can be reached through her blog, brand as business bites^TM.

Frontiers of innovation - Netflix demolishes own business model

We've been Netflix customers for several years, and generally like the service. But we're like a lot of their busy customers. We don't turn DVDs over fast enough and end up having months go by with the same two movies sitting on the television.

But last week we bought the Roku box and now use it to view Netflix movies streaming over the web on our flat-screen TV. It's cool, easy, the quality is good and it's a great antidote for our laziness with the movies. Plus, you don't have to wait for the DVD to arrive in the post.

It's not perfect--there aren't enough titles yet. But it's a product that will only get better and more useful. And put Netflix in place as a contender to lead the integration of TV and the internet.

[Aside: I drove through Cerritos, California, today. In 1987 GTE, my former employer, trialed interactive television in Cerritos. Needless to say, they were too early--bandwidth issues, lack of content, and, frankly, the lack of a powerful vision of sharing and openness a la Tim Berners-Lee, doomed the project.]

What's so impressive to me about this is that Netflix is investing in technology and partnerships expressly designed to make their old business model obsolete. When I think about how much they have spent, in dollars and time and thought, on the sending-videos-through the mail model, I wonder how they were able to make the leap to say, "We have this process optimized, but it's not the future. Time to build a new model"--meaning internet streaming.

There's a word for this kind of behavior, and it's not a nice word: cannibalization.

One of the most repugnant terms in the language--referring to one of the greatest human taboos--is used when a company's new products take sales away from its older products. Perhaps this helps explain why companies go to such great lengths--even imperiling their long-term success--to avoid it.

The problem is, the marketplace is a bit like the jungle. If you don't eat your own, someone will eat them for you. And this has happened again and again. One example: GM's abandonment of the EV1 electric car just a few years before Toyota introduced the Prius. To survive, companies will have to get rid of that taboo against cannibalization and act more like Netflix.

[Another aside. I keep wondering if the Kindle is a similar eating-your-own innovation. But something tells me Bezos always knew he was going to get deep into distribution of electronic content, even back when he was just selling books.]

I have a suggestion for marketers. If you want to get approval to introduce a better product, instead of referring to "cannibalization," call it "upselling."

(Photo: crushed EV1s courtesy of EcoBlog)

A Business Owner's Novel Response to the Financial Crisis

A local entrepreneur who's in the physical therapy/rehabilitation business told me about his approach to dealing with the financial crisis:

First, he gave up his lease on a large office and moved into a smaller one, cutting his overhead substantially. That's a tactic that would be at the top of anyone's list.

Then, he did something unexpected... he raised his prices. As a result, he lost some clients. But because of the lower overhead, and the higher contribution margin of the remaining customers, he's making more money.

As he said, "Basically, people who weren't valuing the service don't come anymore. The clients who are left really care about their health and are willing to invest in it. For them, the price is reasonable."

Anyone can cut costs. But cutting costs and raising prices? That's an innovative prescription.

Related post:
If you can raise prices, don't hesitate

3rd Annual Top 5 HBR Breakthrough ideas

... in which we winnow down Harvard Business Review's yearly list of 20 breakthrough ideas to a manageable 5.

1. The Business of Biomimicry, by Janine M. Benyus and Gunter A.M. Pauli. Many of the most important new innovations we'll see in 2009 and beyond will involve borrowing and inspiration from nature's processes.

2. Institutional Memory Goes Digital, by Gurdeep Singh Pall and Rita Gunther McGrath. What will happen when every word, gesture, etc., of business interactions are recorded and stored? [I'm most interested in the subset of this involving intentionally captured and signified narrative information for knowledge sharing. The Mistake Bank is an early stab at this idea.]

3. How Social Networks Work Best, by Alex Pentland. New research shows that collaborations work best when social networks are used differently for discovery and integration activities.

4. The Ikea Factor, by Michael I. Norton. Having a hand in building a product leads to a stronger emotional connection with it. [Does this say anything about self-service gas stations and supermarkets?]

5. Forget Citibank, Borrow From Bob, by John Sviokla, and Consumer Safety For Consumer Credit, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi. It's inevitable that the fallout of our financial crisis will be a radical restructuring and reinvention of the financial industry. And it's about time.


Related posts:
2008 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas
2007 Top 5 Breakthrough Ideas

Customers are talking: using reverse logistics to improve products

As part of our regular Tuesday series on finding and acting on customer use stories, let's talk about reverse logistics. This is the process by which retailers and manufacturers deal with customer returns.

This article (hat tip Colin Shaw) discusses how companies can examine and make changes to their reverse logistics procedures to reduce costs and streamline the process. This is good advice as far as it goes.

But like many "customers are talking" topics, companies need to take an additional step in order to really utilize the reverse logistics process to its utmost.

Each customer return is a story. Capturing and collecting those stories, and regularly examining them for patterns, can yield important information about how the product is designed, communicated and supported. For example, consumer electronics are notorious for their returns frequency, and the reason for these returns often is that the product is difficult to use or its documentation is poorly written or inadequate (multi-language manuals introduce another set of obstacles for customers).

A company can work with its retailers, as part of the overall design of the reverse logistics process, to capture important information about why the product was returned. Ideally, the verbatim customer story is captured--which is easy to do with online returns.

The collection, of course, is the simple part of the equation. The more complex task is the sensemaking of the numerous narratives captured. This sensemaking, more of a collaborative thinking process than an analytical one, can be accomplished with training and skilled mentoring.

The potential payoff is large: marketing managers who are made of aware of why returns happen can make (often simple) changes to packaging, design, channel strategy or documentation to improve initial customer satisfaction. Not only does this reduce returns, it also increases the likelihood that more people buy the product in the first place.

A friend owns a company that manages reverse logistics for name-brand consumer electronics manufacturers. I asked him if he knew why a certain product was often returned and he said, "Yes, always." I asked him if he had a way of letting the marketing folks at his client know these reasons. And he shook his head.

Given that many companies are outsourcing their reverse logistics operations to third parties, they need to take care that they keep the channel of communication open to learn why items are returned, and what can be changed about the product, its support documentation or its point of sale in order to make more initial purchases successful ones.

Studying what customers do, and acting on it: marketing as an "art form"

There's a great op-ed piece by Judith Flanders in today's New York Times, covering the recent bankruptcy filing of Waterford Wedgwood and recounting how the company has lost its way, especially in comparison to the marketing genius of its 18th centry founder, Josiah Wedgwood.

According to the article, two innovations catapulted the pottery company from humble origins to leadership. One was a technological breakthrough, "creamware," a process that created high-quality earthenware nearly indistinguishable from porcelain.

The other was marketing acumen that would impress Steve Jobs. I love this quote, discussing Josiah's focus on learning from buyers and leveraging that knowledge to improve his product and its marketing:

In a letter to his business partner, he marveled at “how rapidly the use of [creamware] has spread” and “how universally it is liked,” and tried to balance how much this had to do with its royal “introduction” versus “its utility and beauty.”

That is the true Wedgwood. It wasn’t pleasure at past achievement, but instead determination to understand why success had come about, so he could build on it. Selling was an intellectual pleasure, an art form.

What a refreshing viewpoint, during these days when selling and marketing are portrayed (often by people in those professions) as a grind, perhaps even dishonorable.

Is 2009 "the end of analytic science"?

Getting my head around the ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is more difficult even than spelling his name correctly, but I think that this statement has real ramifications for the work I and others are doing in applying mass customer narrative to marketing and business issues (from edge.org via TEDBlog):

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi predicts:

The End of Analytic Science: The idea that will change the game of knowledge is the realization that it is more important to understand events, objects, and processes in their relationship with each other than in their singular structure. Western science has achieved wonders with its analytic focus, but it is now time to take synthesis seriously.

Stop reacting, and start listening, to customer online feedback

I generally like this post from Matt Rhodes, my fellow Futurelabber ("How to react if somebody writes about your brand online"), but I have a bone to pick with the premise.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers are making in social media now is focusing on reacting. They are taking lessons learned from political campaigns and applying them to their relationships to the public. It's a misfit. Political campaigns are adversarial. If your relationship with the public is that way, you have bigger problems than what people say about you on Twitter.

Reacting as strategy is a last, desperate attempt to deploy the marketer's favorite tool, "messaging," into a connected marketplace. As Doc Searls wrote, "There is no market for your messages."

Rather than a futile tit-for-tat, your post to my counterpost competition to establish the preeminence of a company's message in the networked marketplace, how about listening to what customers are saying, and taking it to heart? Thinking about it, perhaps? And, if warranted, a respectful, measured contribution to the dialogue? It can be done. Ask Comcast, and Dell, for starters.

Why you should listen to customers even if they're wrong

Even companies who believe "the customer is always right," if there are very many of them left, don't mean it literally. They mean something like, "We try to accomodate the customer, even when they are wrong." But beyond addressing the immediate symptom (the heart of "the customer is always right" philosophy), there are valid reasons why you shouldn't dismiss (or disregard) customer stories that you don't consider accurate:

1. There is truth in their perceptions, even if the facts don't add up. Customer outcry is emotional, not logical, in nature. If they complain, they are feeling pain, and even if they can't articulate the reasons to your satisfaction, the root issue is very likely significant to you.

2. Customers have more credibility than companies. Recently, in my town, there's been a conflict between the private water provider and the town government over a proposal to raise water pressure and whether that might be causing an increase in water main breaks. In an "open letter" to customers, the regional president of the utility tried to dismiss criticism of the program. Who was more credible to town residents: the elected town representatives, or a water company regional president?

3. Being factually correct is overrated. In marketing, perception is reality. Brand is an accumulation of perceptions. Jochum Stienstra discussed in a recent post how those perceptions create a profound, cognitive reality for customers. So, in focusing on the data and dismissing the perceptions, you may be missing the point.

4. They may, in fact, be right :)

Still thinking about the music business

2008 was the year that I finally realized what was happening to the music business. Whether it was talking to Fran Ten about how his emerging band West Indian Girl was trying to succeed in spite of the business climate, or asking why it was necessary that e-content be free (the most-read post of the year--thanks David Pogue), or reading the comments to that post, many of which said, in effect, "Why the hell should we pay for music?"

I like music a lot, and I'd like to see people who make great music be able to make a living at it. I'm trying to think of a model that may work. Two articles caught my eye this weekend on that point.

One is the WSJ article on New Year's Resolutions (never did I think I would mine that for TWO blog posts)--specifically Duncan Sheik's resolution ("To create a recording studio/rehearsal space close to New York City, where my coterie of musician friends and collaborators can work on their projects irrespective of financial considerations").

The other was Jon Pareles' lament in the New York Times on the influence of music licensing for commercials.

I'm working through some ideas that I'll write about next week. Please pass on any thoughts you have, especially if you don't feel you should pay for recorded music. Where does the musician's income come from in that case?

John Quelch on Obama's marketing triumph

Harvard's John Quelch knows a thing or two about marketing and politics, having co-written the recent book Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy, a detailed examination of the similarities and differences between commercial marketing and political marketing.

In this post, he efficiently and clearly dissects the many ways in which Obama's marketing superiority contributed to his victory (while acknowledging the stacked deck McCain competed against). It's a terrific, timely analysis.

Related posts:
On "Greater Good"
Podcast with John Quelch on Marketing and Democracy

Tags:
marketing, democracy, politics

HBR adds to business failure learning library with "7 Ways to Fail Big"

This article in the September 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, by Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll, discusses seven corporate worst practices and relates business stories that demonstrate them. The practices are:

1. The Synergy Mirage - companies justify acquisitions by touting synergies that just aren't there, or aren't there in enough volume to make the price worthwhile. (Quaker buys Snapple, Unum and Provident merge.)

2. Faulty Financial Engineering - companies borrowing from the future to make today's revenue look better. Enron, anyone? How about Green Tree Financial?

3. Stubbornly Staying The Course - Kodak, slow to react to digitization of photography, and Pillowtex, which failed to see the trend in outsourcing textile manufacture.

4. Pseudo-Adjacencies - the authors point to Oglebay, a company that thought it could deploy its expertise in shipping limestone to actually quarrying it. Result? Chapter 11.

5. Bets on the Wrong Technology - for example, FedEx ZapMail.

6. Rushing to Consolidate - too often mergers focus on the top-line increases but neglect "increased complexities [that] may lead to diseconomies of scale."

7. Roll-ups of Almost Any Kind - As with Loewen Group, a funeral-home aggregator, roll-ups can't withstand downturns and usually provide a short-term revenue bump at the expense of the long term (see #2).

Leaders, you have been warned. Avoid these at all costs!

Related Posts:
NASA learns to avoid its worst practices in safety
Worst practice learning means our favorite business bestsellers are all wrong

Tags:
worst practice, strategy, learning, mistakes, Harvard Business Review

The deep attraction of the locally-produced

While reading a review of Rob Walker's "Buying In," in today's New York Times Book Review, I got to thinking about why I buy a certain type of beer.

The review points out Walker's description of the rebirth of Pabst, which after decades of decline began to grow again, led by young people seeking an unpretentious and less heavily-advertised beer to drink. Picking up on the weak signals, Pabst marketing shrewdly capitalized on the image by embarking on a low-profile campaign focusing on small-scale sponsorships of happenings favored by their market segment.

Yesterday, I took the kids and some friends and went on a tour of the Troegs Brewery across the river in Harrisburg.

I only drink local beers--Troegs, Stoudt's, Lancaster Brewing. And reading the book review made me ponder why this was so. Local beer is fresh, sure. Brewed in small batches. It has more taste than the mass-produced beers. But this didn't explain it all to me. To me, the local aspect is predominant.

Was there a "deep metaphor" at work here? With apologies to the Zaltmans, authors of "Marketing Metaphoria" and coiners of the phrase "deep metaphor," I think so. Something deep in my psyche makes me yearn for Troegs Sunshine Pils and revolt at the thought of Miller Genuine Draft.

Similarly, we get our vegetables much of the year from Spiral Path Farm, a CSA farm located about an hour from here, which we've visited.

At any rate, if this is so, it perhaps explains another phenomenon--when a big national bank buys a local bank, within two years a new local one springs up to take its place. Or does that only happen in my town?

Related Post:
"Marketing Metaphoria": Deep yearnings about the products we buy

Tags:

metaphor, marketing, viral marketing, psychology, reading list

iPhone data price complaints off base

Now I'm not a fan of megalithic wireless operators. But the criticism of AT&T's pricing plan for the new iPhone 3G, especially the monthly cost for unlimited data, is missing the point.

The complaint, lodged by Walt Mossberg and others, goes something like this: "Yes, the new iPhone costs $200 less, but the unlimited data package costs $10 more per month. So after a contract of two years, you'll be out $40 compared to the first iPhone."

But the point is this. We are talking about the iPhone 3G. Its data rates are about three times faster than the old 2.5G EDGE technology on the first iPhone, according to Mossberg's tests.

Which means, minute-by-minute, you'll be getting more data (and thereby more value) from the iPhone 3G.

But there's more. When available bandwidth jumps, people use far more of the service. New applications become possible. Video, for example, is much more reasonable at 400kbps than at 56kps.

So perhaps the comment should be, "For pretty much the same total cost as the old phone, you get a new phone with three times the power and 10-15 times the application utility. Why not stop by an Apple store and pick one up?"

marketing, pricing, iPhone 3G, wireless, mobile, devices, apple, iPhone

Minipodcast with John Quelch: why is marketing seen as an unseemly profession?

During our earlier podcast with Harvard Business School Professor John Quelch, co-author with Katherine Jocz of "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes For Better Democracy" (Harvard Business Press, 2008), we went took a brief aside to talk about how the profession of marketing is viewed by others, and by marketers themselves.

John's answer was fascinating, and can be found here (4:35) (right-click to download).

You can learn more about John Quelch's research and thinking on his blog.

Other resources:
Interview with John Quelch from Personal Branding Blog
My review of "Greater Good"

(Theme music: "Up the Coast," from West Indian Girl's latest album 4th and Wall.)

Tags:
marketing, esteem, podcast, ethics

"Marketing Metaphoria"--the deep yearnings behind the products we buy

Father-and-son team Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of "Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers," assert that beneath our purchasing decisions lie deep, unconscious frames of how the world works. Companies who can understand these frames and connect their products with them can own key positions in their marketplace and build tremendous brand power.

Did you ever wonder why nearly every Budweiser campaign centers around guys drinking together? According to the Zaltmans, it is because they are reinforcing the brand's association to connection, one of the seven heavyweight "deep metaphors" that account for more than 70% of the metaphor usage found in their research. The other "giants" are:

• Balance
• Transformation
• Journey
• Container (keeping things in or out)
  
• Connection
• Resource
• Control
  

An example of deep metaphor usage is the Michelin advertising image of a baby sitting in the tire. The deep metaphor of container is at work here--high-quality, well-designed tires provide a safe cocoon for the occupants of the car. And by extension Michelin owns the safety position with tires. Other brands must find other metaphors to occupy within our brains (say, journey or control).

As a way of showing how understanding deep metaphors can help companies create innovative products, the authors describe how the hearing-aid company Oticon redefined its product category. Oticon interviewed hearing-aid wearers about why they frequently didn't wear their devices. They learned that typical hearing aids were gawky-looking and prominent, thereby stoking users' deep fears of being broken, ugly containers. The company then created a new product that was smaller and sleeker, resembling a high-tech cellphone device more than an old-fashioned hearing aid, and combined it with an advertising campaign reinforcing the "escape" metaphor.

The authors urge readers to use this type of "workable wondering" to reimagine their innovation approaches, not just to find new ways to package or promote the same old products. I agree. When marketers use psychology to understand customers deeply, and respond to those unspoken needs, they're doing a service. (If they're just trying to get into my brain to sell me more peanut butter, well, that's just creepy.)

"Marketing Metaphoria" is a fascinating, fresh look at understanding how humans react to products beyond their functional attributes--a topic as old as advertising itself. But in connecting itself with the entire innovation process, it's more than just a book about communication.

A video interview with co-author Gerald Zaltman, where he elaborates on deep metaphors and how they can be discovered, can be found here.

Tags:
metaphor, marketing, market research, psychology, reading list

Mini-podcast: Listrak's Ross Kramer on not investing in sales and marketing

An audio story from The Mistake Bank.

When Ross Kramer started his first technology business, he focused on the technical side to the exclusion of sales and marketing. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

You can download the story here.

Biography:
Ross Kramer started his first company, a web hosting firm named Vertex Internet, in his Penn State dorm room in 1997. He quickly noticed the struggles his customers were having in communicating with their customers efficiently and effectively, so he started Listrak to help with their email marketing needs. Under Ross’ direction, both companies have grown into technologically-advanced companies that are leaders in their industries.

Listrak services clients such as Daimler Chrysler, Motorola, L’Oreal and the Islands of the Bahamas from its Lititz, PA headquarters. Listrak is a two-time winner of the Central Penn Business Journal’s Top Fifty Fastest Growing Companies and the 2005 Growth Company of the Year by the Technology Council of Central PA.

Tags:
learning, Mistake Bank, sales, marketing, technology, podcast, investment