Addition by Subtraction

It has been almost two years since this blog was updated. The last post before this one went up in July 2014. Absolutely no new content was added in 2015. This is noteworthy because, despite going completely dark, views on the blog increased 33% in 2015 over the previous year. September of 2015, more than one year after the last post was added, was our highest traffic month ever. There appears to be an inverse relationship between the success of this endeavor and my level of direct involvement with it. (Some might say this is a persistent pattern in my life.)

The numbers don’t lie: laziness and inaction lead to dramatic growth.

I found the growth surprising, but what really shocked me about it was that the gains were driven almost entirely by the popularity of a single post — a look back at the “Coffee Achievers” ad campaign from the 1980s. Each month since it was posted, the Coffee Achievers post has significantly outdrawn every other post on the blog. That’s probably because not a lot has been written about the campaign, so somebody searching for information about it online will find a link to the post fairly high in their Google search results. Of course, the fact that such searches are even taking place leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that I’m not the only person in the world weird enough to care about a thirty-year old ad campaign that shows Ken Anderson and Cicely Tyson sipping coffee.

That conclusion in turn leads me to believe that perhaps there is more of an appetite for arcane marketing-related weirdness, nostalgia and snark than I thought possible when I first started the blog. With that in mind, I am encouraged to dust off the keyboard and start posting again. That decision might kill all the momentum created by me being away for 20 months, but so be it.  The Marketing Smart Aleck blog is once again open for business.

 

80/20 Market Research

Many years ago in graduate school, I took a seminar in advertising. The professor was a distinguished British gentleman who was a veteran of many years at the highest levels of the industry. This professor made it a point from the first day of class on to impress upon the students that advertising was a “weak force” that couldn’t do much more than nudge somebody to buy something they were already inclined to buy in the first place. Furthermore, he told us the people most likely to pay attention to a brand’s advertising were those who were already users of that brand.

Those sorts of proclamations from the professor took a little bit of the air out of my tires. As a child of ’70s and ’80s television, I had grown up believing that advertising was a powerful force that changed people’s minds on a dime and could persuade people to switch brands with just a little clever wordplay or a well-executed design. That was the whole reason I was in grad school studying it! I didn’t want to believe my professor’s arguments about advertising’s limitations. But ultimately, he convinced me by virtue of the fact that, like most Americans, I automatically accept any information delivered to me in a British accent as being authoritative.

Since then, I have seen for myself over the course of my career that the professor’s assertions were true, both about advertising and marketing as a whole. It is profoundly difficult to change people’s minds or behavior, even if your message can fight its way through all of the clutter of competing marketing that the target audience is doing its best to ignore. Word-of-mouth is much more likely to influence a consumer than anything the marketer can do or say.

I bring all this up because it provides some context for my appreciation for a piece by Ray Poynter that was recently featured on the GreenBook Blog. Poynter argues that, in most cases, a marketer should focus 80% of its market research on its customers. This is in contrast to the way much research was done in the past, which tended to focus on the whole market. A major underlying assumption of the whole market approach is that it’s important to understand a lot about non-users of a brand in order to figure out ways to convert them. In other words, it assumes that marketing is a powerful force, fairly capable of overcoming the consumer’s skepticism, previous habits or apathy.

Focusing a large majority of the research on existing customers is more of a nod to the factors that my grad school professor was talking about – essentially that marketing works best when it is applied to consumers already positively inclined toward the brand. Or, as Poynter says in the piece, “In many cases, perhaps most cases, the best way to grow a brand is to increase the number of customers who ‘love’ it, because these people will recommend it, use it ostentatiously, and offer it in group settings. In most cases, a new line, a new campaign, a new service will only succeed if existing customers respond positively to it.”

It’s a very sensible approach, yet I suspect that a lot of marketers who should be following this 80/20 recommendation are devoting less than 80% of their research efforts on existing customers. It can be hard sometimes for even experienced marketing veterans to admit how much more powerful the consumer’s own inclinations and social peers are than our best-laid marketing plans. And if you don’t have an advertising professor with a persuasive British accent on hand, reading Mr. Poynter’s article in its entirety is the next best thing to remind you otherwise.

Happy Father’s Day From the Marketing Smart Aleck!

RetroAnalysis: The Coffee Achievers

If I told you that there was a publicity event in the 1980s that brought together musical acts like David Bowie, the Electric Light Orchestra and Heart, you’d probably assume that I was talking about Live Aid or USA for Africa, but that’s not the answer. Throw author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., actress Cicely Tyson, SNL Weekend Update anchor Jane Curtin, and middling NFL quarterback Ken Anderson in with those musicians and the common denominator between them becomes even harder to guess at…unless you’re old enough to remember that those people, and a few others, represented an elite cadre known as The Coffee Achievers.

Intrigued? Baffled? This video should begin to explain things.

As you can surmise from the video, The Coffee Achievers was an early ’80s advertising campaign from the National Coffee Association designed to make coffee seem more hip to a younger generation. There was concern during the 1980s and early ’90s that young adults weren’t adopting the coffee habit, and a belief that it was seen as an old person’s drink. In response, the NCA dipped into the MTV roster and put together some montages of youngish celebrities (save for Vonnegut, who was about 60 at the time, but enjoyed some cachet with the younger crowd) doing things that seemed exciting — mixing a record, acting,  preparing to lose Super Bowl XVI to the 49ers…

Okay, the Super Bowl crack was a little harsh, but let’s face it — to the extent that Ken Anderson is remembered at all outside of Cincinnati, it’s for coming up a little short in the Super Bowl that launched the 49ers dynasty. And The Marketing Smart Aleck is convinced that the only reason Anderson wound up in these commercials is because Joe Montana wanted too much money. But we digress.

The Coffee Achievers campaign represented a reasonable underlying strategy, even if the execution now seems a little hokey and dated. Of course even back in the 1980s, social observers as varied as Weird Al Yankovic and the comic strip “Bloom County”  were making fun of the spots and their “movers and shakers” rhetoric. It was as hard then as it is now to listen with a straight face to copy like:

“Coffee lets you calm yourself down, and it picks you up! Coffee gives you the serenity to dream it and the vitality to do it!”

So, basically, NCA was trying to sell caffeine as a mind-altering, performance-enhancing drug that combined all the most popular effects of marijuana, amphetamines, peyote and cocaine. An interesting approach indeed from the same decade that regularly implored us to “Just say no!”

Ultimately, the campaign faded away in the mid-’80s and didn’t seem to accomplish its objectives. A decade later, the coffee industry was still trying to figure out ways to convert young adults into java drinkers. Those efforts led to, among other things, an  intriguing failed venture by Starbucks and Pepsi to produce a carbonated coffee soda. Blech!  

Then a funny thing happened. At some point in the ’90s, Generation X, in their twenties at that time, finally started drinking coffee. In fact, coffee became cool. Maybe it was the cultural influence from Seattle during the Grunge Era. Perhaps it was because the hit TV sitcom and generational touchstone Friends was set in a coffee shop. It probably had something to do with a wider variety of gourmet flavors and coffee formats like espresso and cappuccino becoming mainstream during that period. But maybe, just maybe, the seed had been planted in those commercials back in the ’80s, and took a while to germinate. After all, one does not attain the lofty rank of Coffee Achiever overnight.

 

Intercept Interviewing | Mickey Mouse Style

Where does the Marketing Smart Aleck go on vacation? Why, to the The Most Marketing-est Place On Earth, of course! This post from the RMS Research Bunker Blog recounts the market research lessons from my recent trip to Walt Disney World.

The Research Bunker

I’m always thinking about market research, even when I’m on vacation. During my most recent vacation, I wound up thinking about it a lot. Last week, my family and I visited the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida.  During our stay, I noticed that the Disney Research team had a very strong contingent of intercept survey interviewers out in all of the various parks as well as in the Downtown Disney shopping area. My wife and I were each approached by interviewers several times and there were perhaps half a dozen occasions when I passed by interviewers surveying other people.

Disney conducting intercept surveys at their parks did not surprise me, but the sheer volume of activity naturally caught my attention. And of course, I jumped at the opportunity to participate in the research because I was curious to see how a huge, global organization approached something that is…

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Odd Product Hall of Fame: The Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

To honor Star Wars Day 2014, the Odd Product Hall of Fame resolved to recognize a piece of Star Wars merchandise. Since the Star Wars movie franchise burst onto the scene in 1977, there have been untold numbers of merchandising tie-ins, many of which can certainly be described as odd products. Just a few examples include Kellogg’s C-3PO’s Cereal, the Darth Vader Toaster and Lightsaber Chopsticks. So, the challenge for the selection committee was not to find a suitably odd choice, but rather to select just one from the scads of potential honorees.

After poking around on Google for about 15 minutes a careful review of many such worthy candidates, we determined that the odd Star Wars product that stood head and shoulders above the others was ThinkGeek’s Tauntaun Sleeping Bag.

A few factors swayed the decision in favor of this sleeping bag. To our knowledge, this is the only product on the market that allows people to re-enact a movie scene that involves cutting open an animal and sleeping inside its stench-ridden carcass. So there’s that. We also like that this actually started out as an April Fool’s gag on the ThinkGeek website, which ultimately generated such public demand that it became a real product. That makes it the rare case where we know for sure that the producers of an odd product understood how weird their idea was from the very outset. Mostly, we voted for the sleeping bag because it’s just flat-out funny.

Be proud, Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. With almost forty years worth of merchandise to choose from, we selected you over all  your Star Wars-inspired brethren to be enshrined in the Odd Product Hall of Fame. Congratulations. And May the Fourth be with you.

Higher Education Trends: The Cost of Not Going to College

This is a post I wrote for the RMS Research Bunker Blog about a recent study that quantified the economic differences between graduates and non-graduates. Even as someone who has been involved in higher education market research for more than a decade, and as someone employed at a university, I was a little surprised at the level of disparity. The situation faced by much of the American workforce is, frankly, worrying and in my personal opinion, calls for a solution beyond simply “college for everyone.” That said, this research serves as a powerful counter-argument against those who believe that the payoff of a college education no longer exists.

The Research Bunker

Over the past few years, there has been a growing concern that high education costs combined with uncertain employment prospects for recent graduates have created a situation where a college degree is no longer worth the cost. The Research Bunker Blog addressed this topic in a post last year about fiscal challenges in higher education. Our main observation at the time was while the ROI for a degree might not be what it once was, there was still undeniably a need for a college educated workforce. Findings from a recent study by the Pew Research Center have reinforced that idea, and suggest that although the cost of going to college is considerable, the cost of not going is increasingly severe.

The study examined the differences between “Millennial” (age 25 to 32) college graduates and their peers with less educational attainment. It also incorporated an analysis that tracked the results of how…

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‘Mad Men’ Reaction: Episode 703

Disclaimer: Read no further if you want to avoid potential spoilers of Mad Men, Episode 703!

This week’s Mad Men was about whether the head honchos at Sterling Cooper & Partners would accept Don Draper back into the fold after his forced leave of absence. That was the official storyline, anyway. Lurking just below the surface, and in many ways linked to Don’s fate, was a story about SC&P deciding what kind of an ad agency it wanted to be.

From the very beginning, the show has portrayed Don as a creative genius. Presumably, the creative wizardry from Don, and later Peggy and Ginsberg, has been the main selling point to clients over the years. This season, the show has gone out of its way to suggest that the creative spark has left SC&P. Don’s replacement, Lou Avery, is a hack who embraces mediocrity, on top of being arguably the worst manager in a company brimming with awful bosses.

Lou Avery leaves a lot to be desired as a creative director, but you have to like his spiffy Mr. Rogers cardigans.

But agencies do not survive solely on creative prowess. In truth, although the creative product is what most people see from an ad agency, it isn’t the only service that agencies provide their clients. Some would say it isn’t even the most important one. Another major agency responsibility is media planning and buying — in other words, figuring out the best place to run the ads the agency creates and negotiating with media outlets like TV networks, magazines, newspapers, etc. to get the best rates for the time and space. While thoroughly unglamorous, the media planning function took center stage in the side plot of Episode 703 wherein a client puts SC&P media department head Harry Crane (who has evolved from an ordinary putz in 1960, to a putz who embraces every laughable late-’60s men’s fashion choice like it’s his mission in life) on the spot to explain how the agency’s computer compares to the one at Grey Advertising that had recently been featured in the New York Times.

Yes kids, this is what computers looked like in 1969.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Grey Advertising, a real-life agency that’s still around, got name-checked in that scene. For many years, Grey had a reputation, fairly or unfairly, as an agency that produced lackluster creative but built its success on the more mundane aspects of the advertising business. In other words, Grey represents the kind of agency that SC&P might morph into without Don Draper. Of course that would be a rough transition since, despite the grandiose lies he tells the client, Harry eventually reveals that SC&P doesn’t even have its own computer and isn’t close to matching Grey in that area. (Did we mention that Harry is a putz?)

So, the decision about whether to bring Don back becomes a long-range strategic vision choice among the partners over what kind of business they want to run: a place with a reputation for ideas versus a place with a reputation for being efficient. It’s a choice of genius versus stability, man versus computer. Or it least it could have been that type of decision. Ultimately, they bring Don back after they collectively realize that buying him out of his partnership would involve too much of a financial hit. In the end, the short-term bottom line trumps any kind of philosophical considerations. Just another reason why Mad Men is the most realistic workplace drama on television.

RetroAnalyslis: Bathroom Intruders

Paranoia is a persistent theme of 21st Century American life. We worry that cybercriminals, corporations, and our own government are spying on us via our computers, our phones, even our video games. By comparison, the 1970s seem like a simpler, more carefree time. Yet a review of some prominent ad campaigns of that decade suggest that personal privacy was under assault back then as well. That assault was happening in the nation’s bathrooms.

There were strange goings-on in the john four decades ago. Visitors from Madison Avenue kept showing up in the loo. Some of them were benevolent, like the mustachioed Dow scrubbing bubbles, who worked hard at cleaning tubs while the homeowner took it easy.

But even some ostensibly friendly bathroom helpers were undeniably creepy. For example, the miniature sailor living in the toilet, hawking Ty-D-Bol…

Could the presence of this uniformed man in the toilet tank have been what drove John Lennon, in 1980, to pen the curious lyric, “There’s Nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs”? If not, perhaps Lennon was reacting to the Big Brother-ish scenario in the series of Right Guard deodorant commercials in which men in adjoining apartments share a medicine cabinet, and thus a daily window into each others’ personal space.

In reviewing those last two spots, their tone is oddly lighthearted given the unsettling context of encountering uninvited interlopers in one’s bathroom. In that sense, it seems that the commercials weren’t actually reflections of paranoia on the part of consumers, but rather of a brazen disregard for personal boundaries on the part of marketers at the time.The 1970s were famously an era when many social taboos were thrown by the wayside and when, in the opinions of many, bad taste reigned. In 1957, the makers of an episode of Leave it to Beaver had to tread carefully around network censors when featuring in a scene where the boys in the show put a baby alligator in the toilet, reportedly not being allowed to even show the bowl. Less than two decades after that episode, standards had evolved to the point where Archie Bunker was routinely flushing the commode for laughs on All in the Family. For better or worse, bathrooms became fair game as TV settings in the ‘70s.

At the same time, the decade was a period when American big business  had developed a reputation for arrogance, complacency, and tone-deafness toward changing consumer tastes (exemplified by U.S. automakers failing to make the stylistic and fuel efficiency adjustments needed to keep pace with Japanese imports). Some corporations seemed to be operating under the belief that they could use the brute force of  the TV-Industrial Complex to make the public buy anything they had to sell, and that their messages need not be thoughtful or even persuasive, so long as they were relentless. In fact, the advertising of the time appeared to go out of its way to present intrusive scenarios.

It may very well be that these commercial bathroom intrusions were the result of TV finally being allowed to peer into the bathroom at precisely the moment when marketers were least sensitive to the notion that consumers might bristle at the idea of receiving a sales pitch during their most private moments. Or perhaps we are overthinking it and the commercials are nothing more than vintage 1970s pop-cultural loopiness. Either way, we agree with Mr. Lennon’s lyrical assessment of the era: Strange days indeed.

Atari Archaeology

During my years in the newspaper industry, an embarrassing typo or omission in the paper would sometimes lead coworkers to invoke an old adage: “Doctors bury their mistakes. Newspapers print theirs.” I was reminded of that saying after reading in the news about the confirmation of the oft-repeated rumor that thousands of unsold “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” Atari video game cartridges had been dumped in a desert landfill. A documentary film crew has apparently unearthed several hundred of the cartridges. The E.T. game was widely considered one of the worst of all time and its failure is blamed for helping to kill Atari and seriously damaging the video game industry until Nintendo came along and rescued it a few years later. With that reputation, it’s no wonder someone was eager to literally bury that mistake.

This story begs two questions:

1. If the cartridges had remained buried for hundreds or even thousands of years and were unearthed by a future civilization, would the future archaeologists infer, based on the sheer number of units, that the E.T. game was highly popular and culturally important to 20th Century Americans? That seems likely, and makes one wonder if the artifacts we have collected from the ancient world are really just so much unwanted merchandise that Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, et. al. merchants weren’t able to unload on the consumers of their time.
2. Is there a similar landfill out there containing all of the unused AOL Free Trial CDs from the 1990s? If so, the landfill would of course need to be many times larger than the entire state of New Mexico to hold them all.

The next big landfill discovery?

As a final personal aside, it should be noted that I owned an Atari 2600 back in the day and spent untold hours playing it. I never tried the E.T. game, but if it really was worse than other Atari games that were out at the time (e.g., Video Checkers, Tic Tac Toe, any number of ridiculously simplistic sports games) then the game designers deserved to have been buried along with the cartridges.