Punk Marketing (review and takeaways)

There’s a revolution brewing

The relationship that consumers have with brands has gone through a seismic shift over the past few years, and a new approach to marketing is long overdue.

The assumptions that established marketing methods are based on have been proven invalid, and while many marketers instinctively feel things aren’t quite right, no new approach to doing things differently has emerged... Smart marketers and all of us businesspeople who rely on marketing realized with a jolt that all was not right in this ever-branded world we paid mightily to live in. The thinking and methods that once worked so effectively to influence the behavior of consumers were simply not cutting it anymore.

Changing Brandscape: It’s difficult to exaggerate how much has changed in terms of consumers’ relationships with brands in the last few years... from how brands are viewed, to the mechanisms through which we find out about them.

Marketers and their advisors are largely still thinking and working in the same way that they always have: buying media and creating messages that interrupt, rather than connect with, consumers.

Intense media fragmentation has made it difficult to reach the target consumer in any number; consumers find it convenient and desirable to avoid marketing messages and are paralyzed by too many similar choices and too little time to choose.

Never has the need been greater for a cohesive new approach to marketing based on some radically revised assumptions on the way consumers interact with brands.

1995
it took a commercial just
3 measly times
to reach 80% of
eighteen to forty-nine-year-old-ladies.


2000
it took a commercial
97 times
to reach the
same demographic.

“The consumer is not a moron: she is your wife.”
— David Ogilvy

Maybe the biggest assumption this revolution needs to destroy is that consumers are happy being bombarded with ill-conceived marketing messages that treat them as idiots.

Marketing has reached a point at which a groundswell from the consumer is engulfing the established industry thinking.

This is a revolution.

A fundamental shift in power from big to small: from top-down to bottom-up.

The days when dull marketing could be pushed at passive consumers are gone.

Consumers have been slapped out of their obedient stupor and, now dazed but enthused, are armed to the tits and ready with remote controls, TiVos, self-made blogs, and Googley sites in which to choose what to consumer and to play a godlike part in its creation.

“Web 2.0 is a new generation of Internet software tecnologies that... Plug together, much like Lego blocks, in new and unexpected ways.”
— John Markoff, NYT July 2006

Now is the time of Collusion among three worlds that up till now have stuck to traditional roles and respected self-appointed boundaries: those of Commerce, Content, and Consumers.

1 Commerce has till now been the world of business that makes products and sells them to Consumers through marketing; this often relies upon attaching itself to
2 Content is all the news and entertainment created by media companies Consumers seek out and into which Commerce has been piggybacking itself to reach them.
3 Consumers are the people—all of us—who hold purse strings but who have until recently been treated less like individuals and more like a giant mass.
Note that these roles are no longer so clear-cut—or even that interesting.

In all revolutions—risk is a necessity for anyone who wishes to come out from behind the barricades as the winner.

So what’s a calculated risk in these days of careful conglomeration? Not necessarily one checked out with consumers... But one that has properly been thought through and discussed with those people involved with actually creating the thing. This is where sharing among the risk-taking stakeholders group is most needed.

Anything you assume is usually a half-truth or a generalization that once served a useful purpose but now hinders truly creative solutions.

Take a Strong Stand
Trying to be all things to everyone inevitably results in meaning little to anybody.

Deciding what you want your brand to stand for must come from a firm set of well-thought-out beliefs you are prepared to defend on any battleground.

So what if not everyone likes you?

Most people don’t like you anyway... Make those who do your loyal friends forever, and if you still need to be loved by newcomers, go out and start a new brand with equally strong but different positioning for those other wannabe lovers.

Don’t Pander
Customers are important but they are not necessarily right.

The really good news about being resolute is that people respect you for it even if they don’t admit it. Respect for those who buy things is tough to get. Let us tell you a little secret: consumers like to be told what to do.

What they don’t like is being asked what they want—because they don’t know!

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have told me, ‘a faster horse.’”
—Henry Ford

Of course people like to be given choices, but that’s different from coming off as being desperate to please everyone... Distress marketing makes consumers think there’s something wrong, pure and simple. Avoid it and folks will respect you again.

Any marketer needs to make its message as enjoyable as the content it funds and consumers will choose rather than just endure it.

Expose Yourself

A relationship of trust between brand and consumer, like that between two people, is built upon honesty... Honesty, once a way to stand out, is now the point of entry!.. Marketer[s] can earn the trust of cynical consumers and show you are open to feedback from them.

It may seem counterintuitive but having an enemy is a good thing for a brand.

Leaving Them Wanting More

Avoid temptation to reveal all of your assets at once... The temptation is for marketers to shout out all the brand’s strengths rather than let consumers discover them over time. This always foresakes one of the most powerful marketing tools... The tease!.. Reveal bits and pieces of who you are over time and leave some to the imagination.

Outthink the Competition

Having a huge budget to play with merely tempts marketers to do two things they shouldn’t: take only tried and tested (and, truthfully, dull) approaches; and treat consumers as a mass rather than a collection of individuals with tough-to-attend-to tastes.

Don’t Be Seduced by Technology

The media is not the message anymore. The message is the message is the message.

Technology is the catylist for the shift of power from commerce and content providers to consumers... The content is always most important and not the medium by which it is delivered.

The power of a blog is only as strong as the credibility of its content and the intake of its participants. If content is created by a marketer, for instance, it is no more believable than a pathetic ad. Just because the format is new doesn’t mean the cynicism is withheld.

Know Who You Are

If you don’t understand what it is you are good at, you might be tempted to try to be something you are plainly not.

No More Marketing Bullsh*t

Get to the point. Express it clearly and simply.

“Things should be as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”
—Albert Einstein

Our duty to consumers (and to our makers) is to cut through and make sense of an increasingly complex world before choice paralysis sets in.

PUNK An attitude of rebellion against tradition
MARKETING the practice of encouraging consumers to buy products.
PUNK MARKETING a new form of marketing that rejects the status quo and recognizes the shift in power from corporations to consumers.
PRODUCT something a marketer is trying to sell.
BRAND something a consumer buys into. In other words, the brand is how consumers perceive the product.
CONVERGENCE increasing the blurring of the lines among commerce, content, and consumers.
STAKEHOLDER those who should share the marketing problem and its inherent solution.
CREATIVITY part of marketing mistakenly reserved for the end of a process but that is better used from the very start.

Don’t Let Others Set the Standards

Sorry to tell you this, but good no longer means anything, while mediocre does more harm than doing nothing.

Use the Tools of the Revolution

Punk is...

• Introducing some managed chaos into the workplace to unshackle people’s thinking.
• Taking a day out of the office (with the CrackBerry off please!) to do something completely different but stimulating—an art gallery, a movie, a hike—and let your mind make creative connections to go at problems in a new way.

As is often the case, companies find after a crisis that rather than pretend that negative opinions expressed in blogs do not exist, they are better used as tools for learning what consumers think...

Of course, consumer content is not necessarily good content. If it doesn’t engage others and translate into sales, the consumer-driven content will evaporate. It’s a process of elimination; only the best will remain on the island.

If what teenagers are doing is any indication of where the media are headed, then online social networks are going to be the Viacoms and Time Warners of the future.

Here in cyber-village, real brands—the ones you can actually buy—exist alongside human selections.

Smart marketing means giving consumers whatever they want to make loud voices heard rather than simply placing ads in a jar with existing content.

Social Networks grant younger consumers online social identities or, better put, their own individual brands. Marketers that share these same values without lying about it (hire a kid) will reach them through highly-focused campaigns.

Cut the middleperson out and save your ass. They are not as valuable as the need to get your customers to love the new flexible you.

Punk is...

• Bringing in an expert from a completely different field—a cabinetmaker, a tree surgeon, or a sushi chef—to talk to your team and learn from the experience.
• Hiring people not just based on the amount of relevant experience they have in your industry but on how some unique skills they have will help the organization to grow.

Start with the bad: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the white noise of me-too products and the incessant marketing that appears as something new. The good stuff is that the rewards for being among those few that make it through all that clutter are huge and worthwhile.

Marketing that takes a step backward from all the fuss and gives our consumer something to entice them in, works.

“There’s an effort to turn every square inch of this country into a billboard. When you have so much cognitive pollution,m it’s hard for people to get some peace and quiet... What’s wrong with taking every opportunity to, uh, inform consumers about the one thing they might not even know they want until they cannot help themselves and just have to have a new one?”
— Gary Ruskin (Exec Dir of Commercial Alert)

Design is the new black... Design works in even mundane categories to develop product must-haves.

“Back then we were saying, ‘Here’s the features and the technology,’ then put a wrapper around it. Now the starting point is ‘What does the consumer want?’ and then apply the technology to that.”
—Jim Wicks, Sony Corporation

Dull product categories are often overlooked in design standards. Yet Eric Ryan, co-founder of Method Home, the San Francisco maker of home-cleaning products, proclaims with pride, “There is no such thing as dull product categories, only dull brands."

Breaking away from the clutter of too many products and too much marketing does not mean you have to use dated stealth-marketing tactics to catch consumers in places where they were least expecting you. What this clearly demands is finding ways to make the brand stand out.

Excellent design will add an emotional appeal and, when combined with fantastic functionality, can make a product in even the most boring market desirable.

Marketers must take risks and make a few damning errors when attempting to create something distinctive to chuck into the marketplace. Bombing is only a true failure if we don’t gain from it.

stealth marketing is also known as undercover marketing. This is when consumers do not know they are being marketed to. We call it underhanded marketing.

A true capitalist will tell you the definition of business is someone out there waiting to steal your customers.

A punk marketer learns to keep looking over his shoulder for the competitor who wants to eat his meal and is constantly seeking ways to do things better, so the customer’s eventual choice is his brand over the monster’s.

Regardless of whether a company is gigantic or puny, it pays to act small while continuing to think in the biggest possible way... Consumers want to feel the company they buy from has their, and only their absolute best interests at heart; so for them that means being treated respectfully as sole human beings and not unites in some amorphous lump.

In the past, mass production was appealing to consumers because they knew the product they bought was identical to all others from a factory. A brand name represented consistency and predictable quality assurance.

Consumers no longer choose based on qualifications—they assume that competing products will perform flawlessly and they’re right; they expect swift action if somehow a manufacturer or a distributor screws up. Mass production has lost its competitive edge and being big for big’s sake got tossed away.

When it comes to food and beverage brands, consumers often want the same experience wherever they go around the world, and in a networked age where we carry our load with us, this counts for a lot.

But Big has a bad connotation that most companies should wish to run from. Big means “big business.” Big Business is bad because it is faceless. Big business is in it to make money at any cost, even sickness or in some cases death to the consumer.

Small companies... Turn profits by keeping up strong appeal for their products from what is really a small group of loyal consumers... A brand may grow beyond a core of local buyers. Once reaching beyond first movers, a company loses its distinctive positioning as it attempts to appeal to a group that is far outside its original company values.

MOBILE Sell-Phone

It’s not surprising that an annual MIT study found the mobile is the device we hate most but cannot live without.
(2004 – 30% of those polled chose this response)

Businesses across different industries are hungrily eying the mobile device as the conduit to our other portable companion, our wallet.
(Wireless Networks: Exploring New Brand Connections (2005, BBDO and Proximity) - revealed 26% of those polled would go home to fetch a forgotten cellphone than for forgotten wallets.)

We need to feel connected with others in stressful situations or ones where we feel alone or anonymous... Any smarty knows it’s less a need to be in touch and more fear of having silence anywhere.

More than with TV or the PC, the relationship we have with the Third Screen makes it a potentially powerful means for marketers to get to us, as anybody born after 1990 knows. Oh, but it is frought with danger. Annoy the cell phone user with unwanted advertising messages, and you’ve ruined a beautiful relationship with your brand before it begins.

Use this portal into personal space with great caution.

Americans learn from others... South Koreans because their government badly wants the country to become a world leader in all forms of connectivity.

Texting throught the Short Messaging System (SMS) has been a big deal in most European countries since the early part of this decade, for it is a communication method of choice for teens and young adults.

Key to mobile marketing campaigns is—as in anything decent—to make them permission-based. Text-message spam has been a problem fir years in Europe (and soon to be the U.S.), where 80% of cell phone users polled said they had received it.

Time will tell if GPS-located messages to consumers’ mobiles will be a terrific panacea for marketers or just piss everyone off, making us feel hounded more as usual.

We all know a tiny screen, no matter how brilliant the image or sound quality, will not be able to compete with a fifty-inch plasma when it comes to viewing Spider-Man 7, nor a Bose system for tune appeal, nor an Xbox 360 for game playing, no matter how much the manufacturers might hype the newest version on the street... As we spend our lives as pseudo-road-warriors, sheer convenience is what we seek.

The plan is that before too long people will be able to buy the things they see on their tiny screens by paying for them there and then. Stores? Who needs them?

How long before ad-skipping devices for mobiles?

The cell phone or mobile phone is something consumers rely on not just for commuication but as a means of staying connected with the rest of the world, thus meeting deep psychological needs unfulfilled since the crib. It offers a world of possibilities for marketers, and more than any other medium represents a massive risk: consumers rejecting unwelcome marketing, and the brands they are associated with, forever more.

Campaigns that use texting to engage consumers and reward them with prizes or offers are effective only if strictly permission-based. Give the participants something relevant to them that attaches them to the brand completely.

Despite that new handsets host endless new features, people just don’t care. Consumers mostly want fewer dropped calls and clearer voice communication.

Before long cell phones with RFID reading abilities will enable consumers to find out a ton of new information about the products by scanning codes or print ads and downloading short videos onto their phones, giving new opportunities to engages consumers through compelling content.

Marketing should not stop when a consumer has taken out his wallet. That should be the beginning of one hell of a friendship. A business needs to ensure that its customers never want to leave and have a strong emotional attachment towards the brand and the brand’s attributes! As marketers we will never have as much opportunity to connect with people.

Sales growth looks good but masks the growing dissatisfaction most customers feel about the way they are treated by providers.

All businesses have costs of acquiring... A new customer.

If buyers do not like one’s offering once they’ve tried it, don’t they have a G-d-given right to go elsewhere? It is the duty of any concern to make a customer want to—not feel obligated to—stay.

An inordinate number of businesses make a mistake of saying to themselves that what they offer is so appealing that they—people who pay their salaries by buying from them—wouldn’t dare go elsewhere.

Punk is...

• Saying something in a meeting at work that jars groupthink away from the safe, tried-and-trusted routes—need we say more?
• Putting yourself in others’ shoes to see in a more objective way if what you’re doing makes sense to the outside world or whether you’re just talking to yourself.

“Every brand has a story to tell.”
—Tom Cotton (co-founder of LA agency Conductor)

Campaigns that map out the many twists and turns that may/can/will unfold draw consumers into them in a way no one will forget, not the least of which is the marketer, and represent a refreshing antidote to dull, old linear marketing.

A story doesn’t have to demo a product front and center so long as its meaning and its principles are conveyed to a target audience.

Narratives with many layers create buzz with those first-at-bat and leverage money spent on paid media with gobs of earned free media.

Take liberally from other industries. Use their techniques to create impact-filled marketing campaigns that make you feel good about the job you do daily.

Only do stories you believe in.

Punk is...

• Being a greedy consumer of knowledge from every single source on earth and discovering ways to apply that info to your own business at times when you least expect it to come through.
• Finding ways to be happy in your work, knowing that happiness is good for creativity and creativity is good for more creativity, which is good for business, which makes you happy, which gets you more sex.

Consumers are hit over the head with so many choices they end up with a quizzical look on their faces. Not a happy look.

Welcome to the wonderful world of consumerism in which unlimited choice is available and spending power means freedom to having to pick just one.

The average U.S. Consumer is bombarded by three thousand marketing messages a day, representing over $2,000 spent to attract the attention of each man, woman, and child a year... Have you asked for your money back?

Sixty one percent of Americans feel the amount of marketing and advertising they are subjected to is out of control, and 65 percent say they are constantly bombarded. They want a divorce.

Most people haven’t got time to stand at the supermarket shelves staring at hundreds of different choices, undecided what to sacrifice, and certainly don’t have the will to seek out the information on a corporate site (and if they do, we want to avoid them at a party). We would personally rather use twigs to clean our teeth and spend the time saved rearranging the sock drawer.

It’s a dilemma begun by giant-making committees inside conglomerates where the proclamation was made at one of 3 billion meetings: “As G-d as my whiteness, er, witness, we at [company name] had better have covered every single base, or darn it, we will lose them.” Then they debate who this “them” are that will no doubt win.

We have other research that says too much of a good thing is killing consumers’ desire to shop! Once shopping was the only therapy that could cure a blue day; now it’s producing anxiety.

Too much choice anesthetizes or paralyzes the consumer. In the case of over-choice, we’re standing there with our thumb up our ass when, if we could find our favorite brand in its natural state, we would be home in our pj’s already.

“Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but by a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be the victims of that peculiar super-industrial dilemma: over-choice.”
— Alvin Toffler, “Future Choice”

“The ideology of consumption and consumer choice have washed across the globe. In today’s developed economies there is an ever-increasing amount of buying, amidst an ever-increasing amount of purchase options, amidst an ever-increasing amount of stress, amidst and ever-decreasing amount of discretionary time.”
— Mick, Broniarczyk, and Haidt “Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose, Choose: Emerging and Prospective Research on the Deleterious Effects of Living in Consumer Hyperchoice”

“It’s a widely-held belief that unless you constantly introduce new products, you cannot stay in the game.”
— Michaela Draganska, Stanford Graduate School of Business

You make more money with fewer offerings. Many of us are learning this now.

The average consumer, exposed to three thousand or more marketing messages per day, makes no connection to anything, and the consumer is left bereft of your message.

The assumption by marketers is that as long as you break through a consumer’s consciousness, you’ve won the battle. But to be made aware of something—whether a new or existing product or an ad or a shouting toilet—is not enough anymore. In fact, when humans are bombarded with competing possibilities for our limited attention, time, and money, we feel overwhelmed and do nothing.

“As an industry, our prime goal is to discover ever more annoying, repetitive, and unwelcome ways to immerse our unfortunate target segment and the rest of the population on the brand. Our response to clutter is more clutter.”
— Mark Ritson, London Business School

Some brilliant businesses have recognized the consumers’ need to simplify by removing clutter and obstacles so they can make choices that are undoubtedly good for them.

Technologies to make fine use of data aggregated from numbers of us to guide individual choice. Collaborative filtering was begun by those dot-com deadbeats in the nineties and now waltzes into our inbox regularly through Amazon and everybody else.

Online social hangouts... Use this principle of connecting folks through what turns them on... As it has become pertinent for marketers to find these groups of like-minded individuals... These types of massively joined networks are the only choice.

Marketers, simplify a consumer’s life!

Consumers are looking to us to help simplify their lives so we will do our utmost to help them get simple.

Consumers have a right to expect a clear education about products being offered to enable them to make informed choices. That is our duty. Labeling should make it easy for consumers to quickly grasp what the product does and what it contains.

Me-too products that copy competitor items without trying to offer a distinct point of differentiation represent lazy thinking.

We need to use our marketing prowess responsibly and only when we have something meaningful to say.

Less than a quarter of consumers think companies tell the truth when they market.

Ten percent think advertising practicioners are honest.

“Research shows that younger people are more likely to believe a stranger in an internet chat room than a TV advertisement.”
— Roisin Donnelly (Dir of Mktg for P&G UK/Ireland)

“The notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors.”

“The Customer may be king and the employees may be the corporation’s greatest asset. But the CEO’s only real responsibility is to serve the interests of shareholders.”
— 1997 Business Roundtable Discussion

Consumers are cynical; no wonder. They have experienced firsthand a focus on profit at the expense of everything including the death of customer service... Consumers have wised up to the way corporations behave and increasingly use trust, or lack of it, as a guide to purchasing choices.

A focus on profit at the expense of all else has left employees feeling disloyal and consumers cynical.

Punk is...

• Making creativity a part of everyone’s jobs, not just the domain of the department named after it.

As always, irrefutable research forces change, even though gut instinct and common sense told us how to solve this long ago.

Punk is...

• Questioning colleagues on assumptions—to their faces.
• Setting yourself impossibly high goals and thinking of crazy ways to get there. This will free your mind to bigger possibiities.

One’s media planning better be totally in sync with the creative that is put forth. A media plan can’t be developed in isolation of ideas; one must feed seamlessly into the other, and in an era when planning and buying agencies are so often separated—usually at birth—this is not a simple matter.

Notions that are strong and gorgeous are developed using a different process from what the traditional—dinosaur—ad firms are wont to use.

Collaborative processes are in direct opposition to competitive processes where ideas are thought up and subsequently killed by a committee. Yet it is the best way to work, according to research.

Over the years, creativity has been assigned a limited role in business in general and marketing in particular.

Big corporations aren’t organized so that people with ideas are respected for them. Recommendation is to bring in outsiders, whose businesses revolve around being an Idea Factory.