Experiential Marketing : Profiles In leadership Section Launched

http://www.experientialforum.com/content/view/179

It is with great pride that I introduce the newest section of The Experiential Marketing Forum: EMF Profiles in Leadership.

The idea for it arose after I began connecting recently with a bunch of EMF community members who wanted to chat about the economic changes and what was going on with the industry.  Everyone seemed to be asking like-minded questions re: what was going to happen next and how we would all be affected.

By now, everyone kind of knows my style :) - In typical Erik fashion I spent many hours on the phone just talking to people.  The most important part of the conversations wasn’t the part when I was talking - it was the part when I was listening to what the community had to say.

It occurred to me that we could create a new tool on the EMF that would offer the community keen insights about our industry and other relevant subject matter from the best minds working with, and around, us all. 

In reality the idea flows back to what my mom told me when I was a kid.  She said,” If you find things in life that you like then associate yourself with them - if you can’t find these things - create them.”  This forum is built on the vision of those words  -- and  I still hear her in my head each day.  From a personal perspective, at the time I created the EMF I was looking to create order in the chaos I felt during one of my liminal phases of my career.   I needed an outlet where people spoke the same language and understood that a rising tide lifts all ships. The goal was to build a place where people would come to learn - a place where there would be interactions and give and take  -  even among competitors - for the greater good of the industry. 

This new section is just another branch growing off of that logic tree.

It’s called EMF Profiles In Leadership because it involves forward thinking practitioners and theorists.

I figured that I’d throw out some questions to industry heavyweights and it could be a great learning tool for everyone to see what others are doing to make it through these tough times.  Most importantly, I thought in addition to my own conversations, it would start to help answer some of the questions that the community was posing to me, and in general. 

I really look forward to having some distinguished people answer some simple questions that can help the community grow their businesses, perform better at their current jobs or even help someone decide which major to select in college.  Having said al of that - away we go!

Files..

There is a reason that United Airlines doesn’t let the passengers fly the planes. There’s also a pretty good reason that the hospital doesn’t allow its patients to perform emergency surgeries. Simply put – the majority of folks don’t have the skill set to do it.

I would like to think that I have a fairly good understanding of the marketplace. There are products and services that are created for consumption, and there are advertising professionals that are asked to help expedite this process, and to help make their client’s product or service outsell the competition. I’ve really enjoyed the American Idol age of advertising, but I’m convinced you will be seeing a lot less of it soon. The rush to allow customers to create everything will trend down, and in many respects, the old world order will re-assert itself. I am certainly not saying that customer generated content (CGC) will disappear completely, but like everything else in business it has a natural lifecycle and the cream will rise to the top – great creatives will once again be the driving force in marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a trip down recent memory lane – shall we? Remember the first blogs? Blogging quickly asserted itself as an extremely powerful tool. Many people with intelligent points of view now had a platform to be heard, and there was a thirst from the public to hear real individuals and non-professionals speaking up as an alternative to the established media power structure.

The amazing blog phenomenon helped create a new world order and dynamically shifted the way information was being consumed by the general public. Bloggers were now on the same playing field and had the same reach and opportunity to be heard as the most well respected journalists. The world of media had become flat with no hierarchy - amazing.

What do blogs and CGC have in common? They have both reached the stage where hyper-saturation and hyper-fragmentation are setting in. Blogs may never die, but they will slowly fade into the distance and lose the intense allure and attraction of something new. Which kinda’ brings me to my point. There is a good reason why web-site traffic at established news resources is rapidly growing more than, dare I say it, less credible web properties. People are starting to raise the red flag, and want to feel confident the information that they are getting is based on fact or objective truth, not just personal opinion, and in some cases, paid for personal opinion. I’m not saying that established media outlets never slant a story, but they are much farther along the credibility chain than Joe Schmo’s blog. They have checks and balances.

What’s causing this accelerated lifecycle? History is a good indicator that squeaky wheels are the ones that often get to be heard. The Internet, the most powerful tool for dissemination of information in the world, has given complainers a moment in the spotlight, a brief 15 minutes of fame for them to be indexed right next to Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric. It’s also given aspiring creative directors a chance to produce national advertising campaigns without lots of experience or layers in between them and the customer. For a brief moment all is equal – but just for a moment. As the internet as an information source continues to grow and evolve, and we watch the results of CGC in terms of sales and metrics, it’s becoming clear there is a very good reason that regulated news mediums and ad agencies exist. A pro is a pro.

The Internet has grown out of its terrible twos/Wild West days, and has begun to mature, and the CGC fad is slipping. No longer does even the average Internet user weigh all things equally – in essence, order is reasserting itself.

For some reason people will always feel that creating successful advertising is as easy as 1-2-3. Just like the hundreds of thousands of American Idol hopefuls are convinced they are the world’s best undiscovered singer. Is it so? No! Great singers don’t come along every day, and great creative directors are just as rare. The sound of everyone shouting to be heard is becoming white noise, and the voice of tried-and-true will be the one that rises above the roar. The Internet is definitely the doorway to the world, but most people are still discriminating about who they ultimately invite home.

from the files...

It seems like everyone’s thoughts on marketing are being copyrighted these days (is that because of the advent of customer-generated content and wanting to separate the pros from the nonpros?), and many have attempted to turn their catchphrases into actual marketing strategies. Some of the strategies are seemingly quite complex.

I have a strong affinity for trademarks too. My trademarks, however, are usually relegated to the field of clever T-shirt catchphrases. If we took all the catchy phrases about the marketing strategies folks are putting on their book covers and ran them through a specially made BS incinerator, would anything be left? Would there be any universal truth that could resist the BS Test?

One certainly comes to mind. The one essential truth that shines through every strategy is that for a product or service to be successful it must start with a good or pleasant experience at the first customer touch point. That experience can be with the actual product or service, or it can be a great experience with the marketing initiatives themselves. The experiences can be external, or something can be designed to trigger a positive internal experience. Either way, it’s the initial interaction/experience with a brand that helps the customers begin to define it as they see it and to bond with it or not.

So is it really that easy? Brands simply have to deliver a pleasant experience?

Why is it a surprise that a good or pleasant interaction, all by itself, gets people talking? We’ve always known that if we have a good experience with anything we tell our circle of friends and family. It comes from our basic human desire to share. We want those close to us to have the same great experiences that we’ve had, and we want to talk about them. Outside the close circle, we also want to share what we know with those we meet as a way of helping or of showing our expertise or knowledge.

This is what most people refer to as word of mouth (WOM). But WOM is not the strategy being used. I really don’t even see WOM as a strategy. I apologize in advance if the idea offends anyone professionally.

The strategy that is actually being used in that situation is the experience strategy. Deliver a great experience, and people will talk. When people talk about WOM as a strategy or a method, they are really talking about an experience marketing strategy.

Without the initial great experience the conversation never starts --or if it does, it's the opposite of what you want. It becomes a conversation that damages the brand, because a bad experience will spread even faster than positive interactions customers have with a company and its products or services.

So in terms of marketing, put all trademarks, catchphrases, and copyrights aside for the moment, and let’s agree. It all begins and ends with experience--yours, mine, and ours--and what we talk about and share with the world around us.

My body clock is almost getting back on US time, but with all the work that I’m still doing overseas I’m starting to ask myself - why bother?

Boy - traveling today has really become something else. It’s as if the airlines have adopted a policy that humans equal cargo and therefore should be treated as such. I have never felt so dehumanized in my life as of late.   I have had some of the worst flying experiences of my life in just the last month alone. Flights have been oversold by up to 40 people, customer service has become a complete misnomer and I wish they’d turn the air filters back on during the darn flight so that I can breathe!

So, having all of these recent experiences, it made me not look forward to taking the world’s longest commercial flight - 18 and a half hours!

I’ve got to be completely honest when I say that I was dreading the thought of having to spend 18:30 hours on a single plane. So, at the time, I found myself with a bad attitude, a horrible frame of references and the longest flight ever waiting at the gate - this wasn’t going to turn out well.

Well, I couldn’t have been any farther from the truth. I was so wrong that It’s sick.  Ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce to you Singapore Airlines. Without question - THE single best airline that I have ever taken in my life. Not only was the flight great - this flight was EPIC. Every last detail was perfect! They treated each customer like they were the most important thing in the world. It was amazing.

I learned my lesson - I’m scarred, but smarter.

Erik

A Note from the Good Professor . . .
Dr. Neal Burns

Recently I was asked to define success – what does SUCCESS really mean to advertising and marketing firms? It’s a great question and perhaps some members of the EMF Nation want to come forward and offer their definition.  I’m not sure what the right or best answer is (an unforgivable moment of honesty on my part) – but here are a few thoughts that the question stimulated.

Success – for either advertising or marketing firms is clearly a term with many definitions and in the advertising business it has several manifestations – really cool offices, shelves dripping with awards, a client roster of the world’s best known brands, etc - but in any serious discussion between the agency and their client (as well as with investors) return on investment – ROI - clearly plays an important role. I think that achievement may be part or even at the center of the definition of success as well. If we are successful the spend we have encouraged our clients to make on creative, research, team building will result in ads, experiences and messaging strategies that maintain our client’s price point, build their brands, support sales growth and increase their ability to take share.  Showing that the spend generated an outstanding ROI is often the key to a successful relationship and keeps the agency as part of the client’s roster mix.

Success – in another context - for experiential firms as well for many agencies is the ability to retain one’s customers – year after year.  A successful agency business needs to establish a client core that can be counted upon so that our projected back log and sales forecast is more than a wish list.  Clients, who have consistently enjoyed good results from the money they spent with us and repeatedly buy, season after season, are showing respect for our creative strategies, our abilities to execute and with that history the agency moves from “vendor” to “partner”.  It’s a good move!

And then there is the business plan of the agency itself – its founders and investors- and the exit plan they all envisioned.  Although we are clearly in a different place than the era of the ‘80’s in terms of agency acquisition, several shops and many start-ups in this business consider long term success to be an affiliation with a larger organization, the promise of the chance to work on major brands and a global perspective. and perhaps because of an acquisition leaping forward as an operating unit of an existing national digital network.  And, of course hopefully, a chance to ”cash out”.

Finally, in the area of corporate social responsibility, more and more of us hope that our agency’s success will be defined by our ability and the contribution our work makes in improving the world, in fighting disease, poverty and environmental issues.  Success is doing good for humankind.

Your thoughts?

It’s funny - what’s that you say? The notion of exploring what exactly makes the inner workings of a relationship. I often like to speak about this subject because it plays such a strong role in what we all do for a living - like it or not!

Let me first say that I love to explore human behavior. For me, it’s the key to driving purchase. Getting a keen understanding of your intended audiences lifestyle and behavior, in my opinion, should dictate the tactical strategy of any successful marketing campaign. It provides us the opportunity to determine when to deliver a very positive and correct mode of experience when the audience will most be receptive to it. It allows us to open up the possibility for them to partake in what we are sending out into the ethos in a way that they choose.

But don’t be fooled. We aren’t in control of this media consumption equation. Our intended audiences now have the ability to consume media where and when they want - essentially on their terms. As marketers, all that we can do, is try to nail the opportunity and get them to want to participate in what we our offering.

The question then becomes how do we raise the our likeliness to succeed metric? How can we confidently walk into a client’s office and say that this is it? While there are no certainties in life, but there are certainly great attempts and anemic ones - I’m sure you’ll agree. So, how do we do this?

We do it by, first of all, quit referencing our intended audiences as targets and begin to try to form the bonds of friendship that will bring them to try our client’s brand. Essentially, welcoming them into our community by building the bonds of friendship. See, here’s the kicker. As humans we have one notion of what a relationship is. We apply this across the myriad of relationships that exist in our life. I know that I am an intense, sometimes reserved but always passionate person. This is reflected in the types of relationships that I have across the board.

If we begin to look at brands through the lens of friendship some interesting things begin to emerge. How do you select your friends? What do you look for in a friend? What allows you to keep a friend around for a lifetime? Are you beginning to smell what I am cooking?

Simply replace the word friend with brand. We like to surround ourselves with friends that we get along with, that share the same core values and that are around when we really need them. In essence, if we can deconstruct the core elements of friendship we can then understand how to strategically build the perfect brand.

Nobody likes to have friends surrounding them that aren’t who they say they are - people that are posers and that simply hop on the latest trends are simply annoying. We/They want to surround ourselves with genuine, authentic people that we/they can connect with. We, as marketers, do the same things with brands. Granted, this is not a static thing. Our internal measuring stick continually moves based our own selfish needs. Therefore, this process of being the perfect friend or the perfect brand for someone is a very dynamic process and requires constant monitoring.

Let me give you a few examples to help further contextualize this. I am not a big fan of running seasonal efforts and then going dark. What happens when you begin to have communications with a friend and they simply disappear? You get upset, confused and go look for someone that is more reliable. Let’s use a completely hypothetical example. Let’s say Jackson Hewitt and H&R Block were vying for the right to do your taxes. If Jackson Hewitt was talking to you all year and then simply increased their frequency around tax time you’d be much more likely to go there as opposed to “Johnny come lately” H&R Block which would only come around in a selfish manner when they simply want something from you - your money. How many of us like our selfish friends?

What would you do is you were dating someone for 6 months and then he/she disappeared completely? Then, showed back up 6 months later and acted like nothing had happened? You’d have moved on - correct?

Now, lets look at another common mistake that brands make - trying to make fast friends. UGH! How may of us like the person that shows up on the scene and then won’t quit calling, e-mailing and texting us? We generally run in the other direction.

What do we think of our friends that chase trends in an attempt to be cool? We think that they need to find out who they truly are and that they should really quit trying to impress everybody. We usually feel that we could be much better friends with them if they had a better sense of self and felt more genuine and authentic. That would allow us to have a more “real” relationship with them.

Well………..The good news is that you can be friends - great friends! There are simply no short-cuts or tricks to brand success just like their are no short-cuts or tricks to eternal friendships. In the end, if we do this correctly, our clients are their best friends because we are constantly evaluating and monitoring their needs and meeting their needs. We will be the best friends EVER, and they will always want our client’s brands around!

Whew..sorry..got a little carried away….:)

It takes a fair amount of self proclaimed experts and authors to get me to this point, but I’m here. Feel free to duck because here it comes – edited down for all of your virgin ears. Sorry in advance for my non-linear writing on this one – I have a little steam coming out of my ears.

Social Media – If I have to see one more “expert” tell me how to use it or why I should use them to use it I may come out of my chair. These people may perhaps have one to two projects under their belts that may have been successful, but regardless managed to get a little trade press because they were a little ahead of the pack. When pressed for numbers they hide behind the client confidentiality. The reality is that successful corporate social media programs are a rare spotted owl on a percentage basis.

Personally, I’ve had a magnificent time and experience in social media and built an on-line community that still gets hundreds of thousands of new folks stopping by. It was a program that we set sail on in 2004. Many of you know it as Wells Fargo’s Stagecoach Island. Not only does this program still exist, but it has evolved into one of the most amazing projects that I have ever a part of. This is a large effort, and it has become adopted by the mainstream and school districts as a way of getting kids to experientially learn about real world finances. The team at Wells Fargo, led by Tim Collins, has done a superb job of managing the growth and most importantly maintaining the quality of this initiative. It hasn’t gone unnoticed either. They are still winning banking awards for their efforts. Like I said, I was honored to be a part of that. The key here was all about building a community that had a real sense of purpose and then delivered on the promise of teaching kids about finances.

I was personally open early to these types of new forms of social, on-line interactions and communities because I had created my own on-line community (minus the virtual world components) in April of 2004. It’s an effort called the (EMF) Experiential Marketing Forum http://www.experientialforum.com. It’s a business, social environment. While much smaller than the Wells Fargo Initiative, it has community members from all over the world and is translated into 11 languages. I learn experientially on a daily basis as issues that arise aren’t commonplace and therefore require unique solutions. There are now have turnkey community software solutions. That’s great, but the real key is putting into action their key learnings. This is where most people fall short. They haven’t endured an extremely long effort. Actually, the Coke initiatives that they’ve done over the years have done a magnificent job of maintaining their relevance and continually reinventing themselves over the years. Again, they are the rare spotted owl.

The most important learning along the way is that we have one ego, one super ID, one everything. The same personality/ego that we carry around in the physical space is the same one that we bring on-line. In essence, we act the same on-line that we do off-line. This is, of course, with the big caveat of virtual reality and the things that follow the same sort of logic.

In any case – here’s the bottom line. How many people, from a behavioral standpoint go to social events to get marketed to? How many of you would be offended if a large corporation rolled into your party unannounced that you were at and started with their “Hey we’re cool, come do business with us.”. Most of you – I’m sure!

Look at your behavior when you go the facebook “social space”. Do you find yourselves participating in any of the advertising campaigns or even clicking on the banners? Your intention when you go to these social environments is to be social with your existing group of friends. It’s no different. Unfortunately, people are becoming blinded by the large number of users so they don’t even consider the fact that the program they just built won’t effectively engage them. Will programs like this ever exist? I’m sure they will. But it will be a seismic shift from what is currently going on, and it will take the participation of both Facebook and the brands so that the brands are able to seamless integrate themselves into the Facebook theory and to not be intrusive.

Make sure your brand comes across as an invited guest – Then and only then will people want to socialize with you!

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It's a Conversational Marketplace : Choose the Right place To Make Your Introduction

It's everywhere these days as if it's a novel concept. Gone are the days of monologue marketing and we have now entered into era of the dialogue. This, of course, is true and is actually something that strong agencies and brands have been doing for years.

The interesting new wrinkle is that there are so many medias to engage your intended audience. The question is which is the best one? People seem to be a little bit paralyzed by this hyper-saturation of media. However, the answer to selecting the proper media is a surprisingly simple one. We simply need to do a wee bit of consumer anthropology to understand our intended audiences' media consumption habits. Once we know where and how the audience is consuming their media - we know how to get to work. What do we do?

We spend our clients' money where their audiences spends their time, and build multi-mediated programs that use the acquisition through experience model and build positive brand experiences regardless of the media where the first touch is. Don't discount TV, radio and print. And certainly don't discount the power of using the rest of the world as a canvas. Just make sure that your message is relevant, and that you introduce yourself to your audience in a way that they will want to further the dialogue.

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I was recently reading an article in the Harvard Business Review that addressed the upside of regret. Regret in terms of the sense that that things could have turned out differently if you had made a different decision. You know the feeling. When you sometimes wonder if you should have taken left hand turn, but instead you took a right when making some important life decisions. In any case, it spoke about the intensity of regret and how it actually enhances our ability to learn.

This got me thinking. Neuroscience, for years, has suggested that we retain knowledge longer when it is accompanied by an emotional component. In essence, neuroscience is telling us that experiential marketing methodology has a greater propensity to aid in longer term brand recall as opposed to traditional marketing methodologies. It’s the experiential, customer-centric marketing that is built around harnessing the power of the intended audiences’ emotional rolodex.

Great marketing on any form of media has always been experiential. Of course different forms of media allow us different ways to connect with our intended audiences.

If you put a little thought into it. It’s the ads that we all still remember from when we were a kid. It’s the ads that struck a chord with us which is the reason why we still remember the ad. It connected with us beyond our rational selves and connected with us emotionally in some way. I often joke about making the emotional connection. It’s not as if we, as marketers, expect to create such a strong connection that a brand will be walking down the aisle with a consumer to get married anytime soon. However, evoking any kind of emotional response is going to build a stronger connection – science tells us so.

Let’s go check the brain scans………Until we meet again!