Polinchock's Ponderings

Friday Quote - Samuel Johnson

I've been using this quote for probably 10 years, because it's an excellent way to reframe our conversations about advertising today. We like to think that our "advertising everywhere" world is a new phenomenon, but it really isn't. In fact, it's a great example of what I say often -- "Those that don't know history are destined to think everything is new."

If you don't know who Samuel Johnson is (and many people don't!), he was an 18th century writer and I've tracked this quote to about 1751. So, 260 years ago, he was complaining that there were too many ads in the world and that brands were using grand claims to get people to pay attention to them.

So how do you get people to pay attention? What would Samuel Johnson say about your claims today? Breaking through the clutter today is the same as it was back then. You still need to create compelling, authentic and relevant brand experiences that engage your audience.

2011 Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference

Excited to be back for the upcoming Retail Advertising and Marketing Association Innovate conference to present the Kaleidoscope experience on the future of retail. What I've liked about this session (this is the 3rd time we're doing it), is that the bulk of the session involves the audience actually working together to finish the presentation. You can see some of the visuals from one of our first Kaleidoscope sessions last fall in the image below.

At Innovate, Alan Treadgold, from Leo Burnett, will share original research direct from the customer’s point of view and I will give an experience overview. After that, the audience works asking this initial question:

If we didn’t have physical retail before today, what would retail look like? How would we create “oneline” retail experiences that incorporate all of the new, digital tools available today, but create a different and unique value proposition of the physical space.

During Innovate, we'll explore:

1) All About Me – the Cloud / Personalization: This idea focuses on the premise that our preferences/information (all about me) will travel with us wherever we shop. Just like a cloud above our heads. So retailers will know just what we want, have purchased in the past and what we like. How will personalization affect the physical store in the future?

2) Convenience & Experiential Shopping: This idea was formed with a physical store in mind. Possibly round in shape and on the outside would be all the convenience items that consumers could easily order online and drive into the outer circle of the store and have their items sent to them on a conveyer belt of sorts – easy and convenient! Then, they would have the opportunity to drive into the middle of the building, valet park and shop - try on clothes and make it more of a leisurely experience. How far can this idea be pushed to better serve the consumer?

Plenty of exciting topics including:

• Opening Keynote speaker Kevin Kelly on Better Than Free
• Closing Keynote speaker Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation
• The Future of Retail: The VC Perspective
• 20/20 Vision: Clear Customer Insights Reveal Your Future
• Social Commerce Strategy
• Fact or Fiction - Is the Digital Ecosystem the Future of Retail?
• And, of course, the 2011 RACIE awards for best retail advertising

You can click on the link below for additional information and to see the full schedule. Let me know if you're coming and be sure to stop by and experience our Kaleidoscope presentation!

Think of the retail world as a Kaleidoscope where the lens often shifts, sometimes to reveal sharp clear beautiful pictures and other times to show something a bit murkier. During this full experience, attendees will learn new ways of thinking from colleagues as they build the future of retail together.

A two-part session, The Kaleidoscope Experience features intensive audience interaction as attendees collaborate on specific retail concepts to form a basis for retail’s path ahead. Location Based Branding’s David Polinchock will set the stage for the Kaleidoscope Experience, while Leo Burnett’s Alan Treadgold follows to share original research direct from the customer’s point of view. The content from these two speakers will be later employed in Part 2 of the Kaleidoscope Experience by audience teams putting the concepts and framework to work immediately.

2011 Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference.

Friday Quote

I thought that I would post a different quote each Friday and these seemed like 2 good ones to start. I hope that they'll inspire you to think a little differently.

Lots of companies start out ahead of the curve and then let everyone pass them by as innovation becomes stagnation.

I've used this quote for years and what I like about it is that some 3,000 years ago, Confucius was talking about the need to involve people in what you're doing. Are you telling, showing or involving?

BRITE '11 Conference | Center on Global Brand Leadership

The BRITE Conference is back at Columbia on March 2nd & 3rd. As I've done in the past, I will be blogging & Tweeting from the event and as always, they have a great program lined up. It's one of my favorite events to attend each year and I'm confident that you'll enjoy it as well.

The conference has extended a 25% discount to readers of my blog, when you register, use code briteblog25. Early bird rate runs through the 21st, so sign up now to get a great rate on a great program.

Holler if you're going to be there too.

BRITE '11 will bring together big thinkers from business, technology, media, and marketing to discuss emerging trends in marketing, innovation, technology, society, and culture and how these trends can transform the ways that companies build and sustain great brands.

BRITE offers a different blend of thinkers and doers, both onstage and off, than you will find at any other event. Participants come to think differently about the changing landscape of media and technology, and to connect with a unique group of innovators, marketers, entrepreneurs, and champions of social enterprise.

Speakers already confirmed include:

• Antonio Lucio, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Visa Inc.
• Russell Weiner, Chief Marketing Officer, Domino's Pizza
• Frank Eliason, Senior Vice President, Social Media, Citi
• Sheena Iyengar, Prof., Columbia Business School; author, The Art of Choosing
• Neve Savage, Vice President, Consumer Marketing, Netflix
• Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital
• Abbey Klaasen, Executive Editor, Advertising Age
• Josh Millrod, Sr. Digital Strategist (on Nike, ESPN & Old Spice), Wieden+Kennedy
• Luke Williams, Fellow at Frog Design; author, Disrupt
• Marissa Evans, Founder/CEO, GoTryItOn
• Bill Chasen, Co-founder/CEO, Stickybits
• Bernd Schmitt, Prof., Columbia Business School; author, Big Think Strategy
• David Rogers, BRITE host; author, The Network Is Your Customer

Topics include:

• Empowering the Organization – making social media work in the networked organization
• The Future of Digital Marketing – the blurring of online and offline relationships and interactions
• TV's Next Revolution – streaming video, web TV, and media convergence
• Consumers and Choice – how can brands most effectively help consumers in a hyper-messaged world
• Ideas That Stick – brands and stories that connect with customers and change lives
• Using Health for Competitive Advantage – how business and policymakers can promote healthy eating

BRITE '11 will once again host a large audience for: keynotes and panels featuring leading companies and case studies; new research; and demos of emerging technologies. The conference's second day will focus on interactive discussions, break-outs, and peer networking. Live blogging, videocasts, and Twitter feeds will extend the discussion at BRITE to an even broader audience worldwide. 

The aim of BRITE is to stimulate interactive conversations, it is not just a series of lectures. Come to the event to talk with fellow big thinkers, hear stories of what is working and what isn't, and see the newest technologies in person.

BRITE '11 Conference | Center on Global Brand Leadership.

Artsfest '85 Shows Off Melting Pot Around Us - Orlando Sentinel

I was doing some searching on earlier projects from my life and was happy to re-read this article about my first, big event. Way back in the early 80's, I was hired by the Art Council of Central Florida to help produce the events that they did. I was working at Disney at the time and also running the World Disney World Youth Theater Club, so I was a little sad to leave Disney at the time.

Within a few months of being at the Arts Council, I came up with the idea of an international performing arts festival that would take over the streets of Orlando. Each street would focus on a specific ethnic group from Central Florida, with food, crafts and entertainment.

So we kicked off the first event and worked our butts off. Over 250,000 people attended the initial festival and we were pretty excited about how everything came together. As we were striking the festival and cleaning the streets, the Orlando Sentinel was being delivered and the teaser above the headline was "Rob Morse on the Orlando International Artsfest."

We were all a little worried since Rob didn't always have good things to say about events, but we were very pleasantly surprised to read his piece and I was particularly excited to see him call the festival the Real EPCOT Center.

Although no longer going on, the festival did help kick off a renaissance of the arts in Orlando and some of the groups that were started back then are still around today. It was fun to be able to look back and see the mark that we left with ArtsFest. Thanks for letting me go down memory lane!

Although I expected very little of Artsfest '85, I am happy to report that it was a real street festival, a great street festival -- for my money, right up there with the best. In some ways, it was better than the big-city ethnic festivals.

This was my city, my region. These were the people of virtually every ethnic group and community in Central Florida, turning out to strut their stuff, cook their foods and have a good time. This was the real Epcot Center. It is easy to forget that Central Florida is a melting pot, or salad bowl, of people of different nationalities and races. This is not the land of Beaver Cleaver it sometimes seems. Funny, we go to Epcot to see representations and misrepresentations of different cultures, when those cultures and more are right here, all around us, among us and within us.

In many ways, Artsfest '85 emulated the Epcot model. The presentation of each culture was abbreviated and perhaps a bit stereotyped, at least to the casual observer. But there was more.

Artsfest '85 was a cultural festival, but more than that it was a festival of acculturation. You'll never see a more American street festival.

Artsfest '85 Shows Off Melting Pot Around Us - Orlando Sentinel.

Are All Your Employees Brand Ambassadors?

A few years ago, I was doing an interview for a new book about experiential marketing and I was asked about the importance brand ambassadors. My response was that while they were certainly very important when you were doing marketing events, the truth is that there shouldn't be a select group of brand ambassadors. Every employee that you hire should be a brand ambassador. I've written about the importance of retail in the past:

Retail Grows in Importance: Retail spaces will become even more important as a connection point between the consumer and the brand. And the people you hire to run your retail is becoming even more important today. Do you hire to save money or to find the best people possible to represent your brand? The consumer will know the difference.

So think about that the next time you're getting ready to hire someone. Would they be a great brand ambassador or are they simply a warm body that you can get on the cheap. Yea, I know money's tight, but give your employees something other then money to motivate them. Give them a passionate place to work. Give them the tools they need and let them make decisions. And don't be pissed off when you're employees don't care about the company when you cut their salaries/benefits while announcing that upper management made tens of millions in bonuses for saving the company money. If you're not going to treat them like they're important, they won't act like the company is important. I'll remind you again of something I wrote back in 2003 for Event Marketer magazine. These rules are even more important today then when I wrote more then 8 years ago. So read them and learn them. Your survival depends on knowing them!

1. Make it compelling. Is there a narrative story that the audience understands? Is there a narrative at all? What is the story that you tell to your customers every day? Could you define it? More importantly, can your audience? Make the product experience as good as the marketing experience. Ursula LeGuin describes a story this way -- What makes a story is - you want to 'find out what happens next' - this bit of the story leads you to the next one. When people interact with your brand, are they really interested in finding out more?
2. Deliver on your message and don’t use slogans to deliver an empty promise. Do you say that you’re committed to total customer satisfaction and then create rules of engagement that are of benefit to you and not your customers? Do you train your customer service staff to only say yes to a request after the customer has asked a certain number of times? Are you prepared to live your slogan in everything you do, and not just the easy things?
3. Make it a movement. Jim Ward, vp-marketing at Lucas Films, said mny years ago that the next generation of brand marketing is creating a movement. Would people camp out in front of anything for up to three weeks for your product? Many companies have created movements — just listen to any Mac user talk about PCs. Is your brand a movement or simply a product? Are people passionate about your brand, your products, and your services? Do they sincerely want to share their stories of your brand with other people? Are you telling the same story with all of your employees? Are they telling the same story to your customers?
4. Be authentic. If you need more answers, talk to consumers. Be who you are and leverage what your company stands for. I recently had the opportunity to work on a product for a Fortune 100 company, helping to position them to a specific target audience. They wanted to talk about speed, but as anyone who has worked with large companies knows, speed is not one of their authentic story lines. They had many other authentic stories to tell, but it took a while for them to understand that and work with different language. Note that stories must be organic and can’t be rushed.

Download Are You Just Hunting.pdf

Report: Facebook Ad Performance Is Abysmal

A few years ago, I made the observation that just because a lot of people go there, doesn't mean it's a good place to advertise. For example, almost everyone visits funeral homes, but that doesn't mean they're a good place to provide advertisements.

So now Webtrends is out with a new report that shows that maybe, just maybe, advertising on Facebook isn't really driving that much, at least as it relates to click-throughs. As they say in the article, many brands use Facebook for more then just their click-through rates, so maybe this isn't a deal breaker.

Still, putting your ads in front of people because they're there, doesn't seem to be driving business. Content without context is just noise.

UPDATE: You can go here to see more details about the report.

Facebook’s advertising business is soaring. Yet the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal.

At least that’s according to a new report issued by the analytics firm Webtrends that recently examined 11,000 different Facebook ad campaigns which totaled 4.5 billion impressions. Webtrends found that in 2009 the average click-through rate on Facebook was 0.063 percent. That figure slipped to 0.051 percent in 2010.

Because of that decline, CPMs on Facebook have crept upward, going from 17 cents in 2009 to 25 cents last year.

The only ad categories that were able to crack 0.1 percent click-through rates were "tabloids and blogs" (0.165 percent) and "media and entertainment" (0.154 percent). The worst performing ad category on Facebook, per Webtrends, was healthcare, which generated 0.011 percent click-through rates and an average cost-per-click of $1.27.

However, Facebook’s CPMs are still relatively low in the grand scheme of things (consider that video ads on Hulu can sometimes fetch $50 CPMs). And while many advertisers turn to Facebook to drive traffic or sell products, many traditional brands use the site for its social value, not its propensity to drive clicks.

Yet even "social ads"—at least as defined by Webtrends—are only effective for so long. “Out of the ads we measured, we found that interest-targeted ads began to burn out after three to five days,” reads the report. “Eventually the rotting CTR leads to Facebook deactivating the ad, and it’s back to the drawing board.”

Regardless, advertisers continue to flock to Facebook. According to eMarketer, ad spending on Facebook will reach $2.19 billion in the U.S. in 2011 and close to $4 billion worldwide.

Report: Facebook Ad Performance Is Abysmal.

AdScam/The Horror! : shit you need to know!.

Challenging Conventional Thinking - Polinchock's Ponderings.

Social Networks + Advertising = Amway - Polinchock's Ponderings.

If Everyone Else Jumped Off a Bridge...

Remember when you were a kid and you asked your Mom if you could do something? She would initially say no and you would respond "But everyone else is doing it!" And Mom's around the world respond the same way. "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?"

Are you doing things today because they're the right thing to do for your audience or because everyone else is doing them? Are there people in your company constantly saying "Everyone else is doing (fill in the blank) and if we don't do it, we'll be left out!"

For example, when I wrote about Foursquare marketing here, I said:

Most marketers, if not all marketers, should use the tools that best engage their audience, whatever those tools are. They need to stop listening to the many reports out there and start listening to their guts and their customers.

All too often we're doing things just because they're popular. But everyone's there you hear people say. You know, there's a lot of people visiting funeral homes, but that doesn't mean they're a good place to advertise.

For 2011, how about resolving to what's right, not what's popular. It's harder to do the right thing then it is to do the popular thing, but in the end, the right thing will get you further. Of course, what's right may also be what's popular, but prove it's the right thing first. Make sure it creates a compelling, authentic and relevant brand experience for your audience.

You Need to Captivate, Not Capture, Your Audience.

MediaPost Publications Agencies: Demand For Digital Media Services Wanes For First Time, Mobile Fails To Live Up To Hype 01/19/2011.

Reports From the National Retail Federation Show 2011

Had a chance to sit down with Bob Phibbs and Marge Laney during the NRF Big Show to talk about what I saw happening at retail. During this session, one of the things I talk about is:

• Commodity shopping. This is shopping almost strictly on price. This could be items like socks, underwear, milk, etc. Those items that we buy frequently and sometimes we're not even aware of the brands we're buying. We're really starting to see this move into categories like consumer electronics, where people may be focusing more on price then the specific brand or technology.
• Experience shopping. These are the items that we pay more for based on the experience we get. This is why we pay more for Apple products or why we use one dry cleaner over another. It's why there are many restaurants of all different price points. Sometimes a dollar burger does the trick, sometimes we want the $20 version.

During one of the presentations that the FIT students made last week, they showed the results of research they did asking both consumers and retail marketing what were the driving purchase decisions. At the top of the list for consumers was value. Price was further down the list.

So while there are times that we shop just based on price, most times we shop based on value. Maybe instead of looking to just make your price lower, you should look at creating better value for your customers.

I did two videos with Bob & Marge and will get that one up as soon as it's ready.

Shouldn't We Make Place Special?

Last week, during the NRF Big Show, there was a lot of talk about how to change retail to be successful in today's world. I spent a lot of time with Bob Phibbs and Marge Laney walking the floor and talking about what we were seeing throughout the show.

Dozens of companies were showing mobile apps (to be truthful, they were trying to show mobile apps. Thanks to the incredibly crappy cell service at the Javits, they frequently didn't work.) and it was the hot topic of numerous presentations throughout the program. The emphasis was on putting information into the hands of the people.

And, mobile shopping tools certainly seemed to be a big part of the 2010 holiday season as well. Anecdotally, it seems that the use of cell phone based price-checking tools was on the rise this holiday shopping season. Best Buy reported lower sales and speculation was that people were looking at the items at Best Buy, but buying somewhere else. I know lots of people who do that. Yes, I do it too.

Look at some findings by a recent survey by Motorola:

A majority of retail associates (55%) said that 2010 holiday shoppers, driven by increasing availability of online shopping tools and mobile phone applications, were better connected to consumer information than in-store associates, according to a survey by Motorola Solutions.

The survey found that retailers that aren't investing in technology to stay ahead of increasingly tech-savvy shoppers are hurting their own bottom line. Nearly three in 10 (28%) store visits ended with an average of $132 unspent due to abandoned purchases driven by deal-habituated behavior, out-of-stocks, limited store associate assistance and long check-out processes.

As the Motorola survey confirms, a lot of the conversations and presentations was about how since consumers couldn't get help from the sales people on the floor, just give them the information they need on their cell phone.

There was also a great deal of conversations about making the physical retail store work and act like an online store.

Now, I'm a big of creating Oneline™ brand experiences and have also been speaking for many years about the need to e-tail your retail. So, I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't give your shoppers more information or deliver it through tools like mobile, QR codes, etc.

But, based on many conversations I've been having lately, I'm also starting to think that we're missing a big opportunity to emphasize just what makes place special. As I've said in the past, I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space. And the more we try to use the space for our purposes rather then our guests, the more they'll stay away.

Can you afford to have hundreds of thousands (or millions) of square feet of retail space and all of the expenses that go with it, and just have it act like windows for people to do online shopping? And they may not even shop online at your store! Can you continue to support online social media efforts while creating physical spaces that are almost anti-social? Sure, open up your info so that I can get it on my cell phone. But shouldn't you also hire better people and do more to train them? And create better physical spaces?

I think that retailers with physical stores need to spend a little more time looking at what makes place special. Stop trying to compete with the online world by making your places more online-like and start competing by your rules. Use place to your advantage.

Every time I go to an Apple or Lululemon store, I wonder why more retailers don't copy their model. They work. They generate great loyalty from their consumers. And they generate great return for their investors. There are plenty of other examples of retailers, big & small, that use place as an integral part of their business success.

If you're putting more effort into turning your stores into a web site, rather then capitalizing on what makes place unique, you might want to start looking for a great real estate broker to help you sell off your stores.

Motorola Survey: Shoppers better connected to information than store associates | Chain Store Age.

Download Sticky Soul - Some Thoughts from a Retail Walkabout

Riddle Me This...

More Thoughts on the Value of Place.

Polinchock's Ponderings: Customer Experience.

Polinchock's Ponderings: Retail News.